In February 1986, the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was assassinated when he was walking home, without an escort, on one of the main streets of central Stockholm after leaving a cinema. He was accompanied by his wife, Lisbet Beck Friis. 34 years later, in 2020, the prosecutor Krister Petersson revealed the identity of the alleged perpetrator of the attack: Stig Engström, known as The Man from Skandia (his company), who had died 20 years earlier. The sober and excellent fiction series deals with the assassination, the long and disastrous police investigation The unlikely killer (Netflix).
It is still curious that reality in this case is far from fiction, in which in all crime series, or in almost all, good triumphs over evil and the murderer is discovered and imprisoned. With the case of Olof Palme so sloppy was the police work that, a few days after Netflix premiered the series on November 5, he was the subject of a defamation lawsuit in Sweden, accused of having introduced elements in his script “completely unfounded ”.
Stig Engström was a frustrated graphic designer for an insurance company whose headquarters were very close to the scene of the crime. His eagerness to appear in the media after having witnessed the crime and his contradictions in the narrative of the events initially stimulated suspicions about his guilt, which, surprisingly, were not investigated. Palme’s murder was a worldwide commotion, and most especially in Sweden. The only archive material used by those responsible for the series are impressive images of the prime minister’s funeral due to the massive attendance at it. A nondescript individual managed to make the world worse.
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