Terror in Stockholm

The assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in February 1986 sent the Nordic country into shock, grief and pain. For Western Europe, the murder was indeed a ‘John F. Kennedy moment.’ The crime was never solved. In June 2020, lead prosecutor Krister Petersson closed the cold case – and gave only one clue to the most plausible perpetrator: Stig Engström, the infamous ‘Skandia man’. Over the course of more than three decades, new teams of investigators failed to apply standard investigative techniques, damaging the reputation of the police and prosecutors in Sweden. The investigators’ incompetence soon triggered a political crisis: An increasingly poisoned public debate about responsibility for these failures gave way to conspiracy theories. We use the epic crime as a showcase to illustrate what analytical tools could have contributed to a resolution of the case. The methods we use include timelines and chronologies, starmapping, profiling, competing hypothesis analysis and multiple hypothesis generation, cognitive bias testing, and actor analysis.