#anders eklund

The disappearance, that many wished for to be "just" an abduction or a simple case of the girl getting lost in the woods, got a lot of attention from the Swedish population, and for about a week, people that lived in the area where Engla had gone missing, arranged search parties in attempts to find her.

As it turned out, a person who had happened to be close to the scene where Engla went missing, had been testing his new digital camera at the very same day of the disappearance. Not knowing that his photographs would turn out to be key-evidence in a crime investigation, he snapped a photo of Engla riding her bike and another photo of a red car (a Saab 900) that almost looked to be following the girl.

After the photographer stepped forward, the police managed to get ahold of the car's owner, Anders Eklund, a 42-year old truck driver. Shattering the hopes of finding the girl alive, Eklund confessed that he had killed her and where the police could find her body. The police brought Eklund to the place where Engla was last seen and the man seemed to have no problem to remember where he hid the body.

Eklund talked about how him murdering the little girl had been a mere coincidence. The two had never met before, and when Eklund stepped out of his car to talk to the girl on the day of the murder, she had begun feeling uncomfortable. When Eklund persisted in talking to her, Engla had (allegedly) kicked his leg. When Eklund started walking closer to her, she had begun screaming and, in an attempt to "silence her", Eklund strangled her and dragged her into the woods.

As the interrogations continued, the police came forth with evidence of another murder that had happened in Falun eight years earlier; 31-year old Pernilla Hellgren had been strangled and sexually assaulted, and the DNA-traces found on the crime scene matched Eklund's DNA. He confessed to that murder as well, insisting that his intentions hadn't been to kill the woman.