The serial killer and two unsolved murders

This story contains details some readers may find distressing.

On the warm afternoon of 30 August 1980, 26-year-old Teresa Thorling had one thing on her mind - to make money to buy drugs.

Teresa was young, blonde and pretty. She wouldn’t have described herself as a prostitute but often spent Saturday nights selling sex to fund her own drug habit, and that of her boyfriend as well.

He was 20 years older and they lived together in the southern Swedish city of Malmo. It was her job to find the money for the heroin they shared.

Forty years ago, Malmo, like nearby Copenhagen, was a busy commercial hub with ferries coming in and out of the port of Limhamn on the outskirts of the city.

But unlike its famous neighbour across the Oresund - the stretch of water that separates Denmark from Sweden - it was never home to an established red-light district.

Instead, sex workers would stand in the wide, tree-lined streets of Kungsgatan and Exercisegatan, where there was space for cars to stop and deals to be struck. In the 1970s and 80s, when prostitution was still legal, these street corners attracted custom from all over southern Sweden.

It was here that Teresa headed, catching a bus from her apartment into the city centre. Later, police investigators found a bus ticket in one of her pockets stamped with the time 16.45.

Other sex workers reported seeing Teresa around Exercisegatan in the early evening. One woman saw her walking off with a client, another saw her talking to a man in a car. But no-one remembered seeing her later that night.

Two days later, on Monday afternoon, an old man collecting bottles for cash stumbled across Teresa’s body in the stairwell of a derelict building that was scheduled for demolition. She had been covered by a piece of carpet. Underneath, she was lying on her front, naked. A long, square-cut stick of wood had been forced into her rectum.

A post-mortem showed that Teresa had been killed on Saturday evening and the cause of death was most likely strangulation, though the doctor also noted high-level of narcotics in her blood. Before being killed, the young woman had been hit on the back of the head with a blunt object. She had bruising on the front of her neck that could have been caused by hands, or by a thin object being pressed against her tongue bone, which had been broken. There was no evidence that she had been raped, but there was a substance found on her back that could have been semen.

Teresa’s killing made headlines in the local newspapers, which for days ran stories about the murder in Malmo. This type of sex crime was extremely rare in Sweden and it wasn’t long before detectives in the city connected it to another murder that had taken place in Gothenburg a few weeks earlier.

Like Teresa, 31-year-old Gertie Jensen was also a drug user and part-time sex worker. And like Teresa, she had also been found stripped naked on a demolition site, her head smashed in from behind with a brick.

Malmo police made contact with the Gothenburg police to compare notes about the killings, while continuing its own investigation into Teresa’s murder, interviewing her boyfriend and the sex workers who were the last to see her alive.

There were some promising early leads. One sex worker mentioned a metallic-green Saab 900 that officers tried to trace. Another mentioned an aggressive client who used to hang around Exercisegatan and who seemed to have taken an interest in Teresa. Police found she owed money for drugs. There was speculation that a yellow Mercedes taxi that was seen near the place she was found might be involved.

But none of these inquiries led anywhere and, as the months passed, the press stopped running stories, the police moved on to other crimes and the killing of the two young women faded from view.