On Thursday, August 31, contrary to habit Bäckström had been dutifully active the whole day, because there were big things going on. Not bicycles, waste drums, or worn-out office furniture. Likely this was a matter of future Swedish crime history that for once had ended up in the right hands and not with one of his more or less retarded fellow officers. For once it was also so expedient that he had access to all the information he needed in his own computer. Even the police lost-and-found warehouse had been mobilized in the hunt for the revolver used to shoot the prime minister. A hunt that had gone on for as long as the hunt for the murderer himself. Which had required tens of thousands of man-hours over the years and still with no results.
As early as Sunday, two days after the murder, the leader of the investigation at the time, Hans Holmér, held his first press conference, and the murder weapon had been the media headliner. The large conference hall at police headquarters, hundreds of journalists, packed to the rafters with people, TV cameras from all over the world, and a police chief who was positively quivering with desire to meet his audience. He leaned on his elbows, his upper body swaying like a boxer as he sat at a table on the high podium, silenced the audience with a hand gesture, and nodded seriously but nonetheless smiling toward the hall of attentive listeners.
After a well-considered stage pause, he held up two revolvers in front of him while he was met by a veritable cascade of flashbulbs, wave after wave of lights that streamed toward him, and personally he had never felt as strong as right then.
From that day on the investigation leadership had also decided that this “in all probability concerned a U.S.-manufactured revolver of the brand Smith & Wesson with a long barrel.” Partly because this was possibly true, but mostly because this was not a time for provisos and reservations.
How could he be so sure of that? Bäckström thought, who knew better because he had been there from the beginning and was a real police officer in contrast to Holmér and all the other legal fairies who barely knew where the trigger was.
That it concerned a revolver and not a pistol seemed highly probable. The half a dozen witnesses who had seen it in the perpetrator’s right hand described it exactly that way. Like a “typical revolver,” “one of those Western pieces with a long barrel,” or even like “the real Buffalo Bill thing.”
Their observations had also been supported by the few technical clues that had been secured—or not secured—at the crime scene. No bullet casings had been found, and because pistols in contrast to revolvers eject the casing when fired, this argued for a revolver. The caliber of the two bullets found at the crime scene was .357 Magnum, and almost all guns in that caliber were revolvers. There were exceptions, such as the Israeli army’s Desert Eagle service pistol, but these were uncommon and did not tally with the bullets that were found. The bullets at the crime scene were somewhat special and manufactured only for revolvers.
The first one had been found early in the morning after the murder. It was on the sidewalk on the other side of Sveavägen, about fifty yards from the crime scene. The second one was found a day later at lunchtime and was in the line of fire less than six yards from the place where the prime minister had been shot.
It had been possible to trace the bullets to the manufacturer. The make was Winchester Western .357 Magnum, metal piercing. Lead bullets supplied with an especially hard mantle consisting of a layer of copper and zinc, which therefore could also break through metal. The reason for manufacturing them was that the American highway patrol expressed a desire for a bullet that was sufficiently hard and resistant so that for example it could be shot through the engine block of a car.
How many had then been used was uncertain. At the same time this was of minor importance because the metal piercing bullets quickly became popular among regular Magnum shooters and especially among those engaged in so-called combat shooting, a practice in which a certain type of adult male runs around shooting at most everything from paper figures to empty gas cans.
Otherwise these facts were hardly instructive. Revolvers of the relevant caliber had been on the market for over thirty years before the Swedish prime minister was shot. Millions of specimens had been manufactured and sold over the years, and their owners had fired hundreds of millions of shots using the same caliber bullets. How many of these had been metal piercing was uncertain, but the largest manufacturer, Winchester Western, had sold millions of them in any event.
On top of all this, from the start there had been serious doubt about the two bullets that had been found because it wasn’t the police who had found them but two members of that great group of detectives, the general public, who moreover were kind enough to immediately turn them over to the police. Among many journalists and ordinary citizens it was therefore suspected that these bullets were actually false leads planted at the crime scene to deceive the investigators.
Because both bullets had quite visible traces of the substances they had passed through, that is Olof Palme’s clothing and body and Lisbeth Palme’s clothing, that issue could have been solved almost immediately, if normal criminological procedures had been followed and these fiber and tissue traces had been secured before the bullets were cleaned to determine their caliber.
This had not been done. Wiijnbladh and his associates at the Stockholm police department’s tech squad had put them in separate little plastic bags and sent them to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science in Linköping for “caliber determination.” This was the only request that had been checked on the form that was enclosed with the plastic bags.
At the crime lab the request had quickly been satisfied. The two bullets were placed in a basin with spirits; cleaned of fibers, body tissue, and blood; and rinsed off under ordinary tap water. Whatever was washed off the bullets and remained in the basin was lost when the liquid was poured off and the bullets’ caliber was measured with a micrometer.
Not until some years later were helpful physicists at the University of Stockholm able to straighten out the question marks that the police had created for themselves. An amiable professor of particle physics made contact with the police and reported that what ordinary people called lead could actually be very different things depending on what was added to it. Lead could have various isotope combinations, and when, for example, bullets were manufactured, lead was almost always mixed with various isotope combinations, resulting in bullets with different combinations of lead isotopes.
The professor therefore ventured to propose a simple scientific investigation: the isotope combination in the two bullets would be compared with the traces of lead it should be possible to secure in the victims’ clothing, to see whether they matched.
This they did, and the technical investigation had taken at least a small leap forward. The two bullets that had been found were with “very high probability” identical to the bullet that killed Olof Palme and the one that grazed his wife, and the constant nagging about planted false leads could finally be set aside. And that was not all. By means of the bullets’ isotope combination, it had also been possible to trace the lead batch from which they originated.
True, the batch included hundreds of thousands of bullets, which the Winchester Western had supplied to a number of countries, but only six thousand of them had ended up with gun dealers in Sweden. The deliveries had been made during the years 1979 and 1980, in good time before the assassination of the prime minister. It was hope-instilling enough as a lead file, but they never got any further than that.
What remained was the weapon that the police had never found, but a number of other experts had put in their two cents’ worth. Far and away the most common weapons in the relevant caliber were Smith & Wesson revolvers in various models and barrel lengths. Hence the first investigation leader’s conclusion that “with the greatest probability” it concerned a Smith & Wesson revolver.
At the same time this was a conclusion that could be challenged on both statistical and forensic grounds. It was true that the traces from the barrel on both bullets did agree well with a Smith & Wesson, but at the same time they also agreed just as well with half a dozen revolvers of different manufacture, and taken together the latter made up a quarter of the world’s combined stock of revolvers of the relevant caliber. The great consolation in this context was that the ballistic traces on the bullets did not correspond with the second most common Magnum revolver, the one manufactured by Colt—the legendary armory that was Smith & Wesson’s foremost competitor on the market for Magnum revolvers.
What made Bäckström happy was that the traces on the bullets also agreed very well with revolvers that came from the third largest American manufacturer, Sturm, Ruger & Co. in Southport, Connecticut. Even the barrel length agreed with the weapons technicians’ conclusions to a fraction of an inch. If the barrel had been shorter than that the bullets should have “mushroomed up” in back, and they had not.
This is going like a fucking dance, thought Bäckström. If he’d only been able to run this from the very start, it would most likely have been settled right off.
One small question remained. How to connect—with sufficiently high probability—the two bullets from the crime scene to the revolver that was used to shoot the prime minister. The technical report that Bäckström found in his computer was from 1997, and the anonymous expert who wrote it was doubtful on that point. Both bullets were “in pretty poor condition.” They could be used for comparisons of various types of weapons and they had been good enough to rule out the hundreds of various weapons that had been test fired over the years. But this was not to say that they could be linked to the murder weapon with certainty in the event it was found.
What a fucking ditchdigger, thought Bäckström. Technology was advancing by giant leaps! He’d seen this with his own eyes, on his own TV, at home on his own couch. The hundreds of miracles that his associates on CSI delivered all the time just by tapping on their computers. If it didn’t work out some other way, it probably wouldn’t involve more than his taking the weapon with him and traveling over to the other real constables, on the other side of the water.
Las Vegas or Miami, thought Bäckström. That’s probably the big question.