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circumstantial evidence, witnesses and a motive, but no definite proof.
    Four years after Johan’s disappearance, the Asplunds hired a barrister, Pelle Svensson, to bring a private civil case against Anna-Clara’s expartner,an unusual move that also carried with it considerable financial risk if the case was dismissed.
    After a sensational trial, the district court found that the accused had indeed abducted Johan. He was sentenced to two years in prison. It was a unique case and a great victory for Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund.
    However, their success in the district court was overturned after the defence turned to the court of appeal, which ordered the release of the ex-partner one year later. The Asplunds were instructed to pay their opponent’s legal expenses of 600,000 Swedish crowns, a fee the government later dropped for reasons of ‘clemency’.
    Since then, seven years had passed without any sign of Johan. No one was looking for his murderer any more.
    But now Anna-Clara stood immobile in the hall with the telephone receiver in one hand and her front door keys in the other. She tried to grasp what the reporter was saying, that the investigation into her son’s murder had been reopened and that a psychiatric patient had confessed to the crime. So no, she could not think of any suitable comment for the newspaper.
    Anna-Clara Asplund contacted the police in Sundsvall, who confirmed what the reporter had told her. The following day she learned from Expressen that the psychiatric patient was claiming to have strangled Johan and buried the body.
    The reporter had also managed to get hold of Björn Asplund, who took a fairly sceptical view of this new information. He still believed that Johan had been murdered by the man they had taken action against in the district court. But he was keeping an open mind on the matter.
    ‘If it’s shown that a totally different person has taken Johan’s life I’ll just have to swallow my pride,’ he told Expressen . ‘The most important thing is that we know the truth.’
    Expressen continued following the case and a few days later Anna-Clara Asplund was able to read more details of the confession made by the Säter patient.
    ‘I picked up Johan outside the school and lured him into my car,’ the Säter Man – as he was known in the press from that day on – said to Expressen on 15 March. ‘I drove to a wooded area where I sexuallyassaulted the boy. I never meant to kill Johan. But I panicked and strangled him. Then I buried the body so no one would find it.’
    The forty-two-year-old was clearly a very sick person. As far back as 1969 he had committed sexual assaults against young boys. His most recent crime had been in 1990, when he and a younger accomplice had been arrested for a bank robbery in Grycksbo outside Falun and confined to Säter Hospital. It was here, during a therapy session, that he had confessed to Johan’s murder. According to Expressen he had said, ‘I can’t live with this any more. I want to start clearing things up; I want atonement and forgiveness so I can move on.’
    You can’t live with it any more? Anna-Clara thought, and put away the newspaper.
    The public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, was an energetic man of about fifty with very short dark hair and a neat beard. He was renowned for his ability to present his views in a forceful tone and with such conviction that they were accepted as given, by both subordinates and journalists. All in all, he was a man who exuded self-confidence and seemed to relish taking command of his troops, plotting the course by which the whole army should march.
    Van der Kwast called a press conference at the end of May. In front of a crowd of expectant journalists, the prosecutor announced that the Säter Man had identified various places where he had hidden the body parts of Johan Asplund. Police technicians were currently searching for his hands in a location outside Falun. Other parts of the dismembered body