The law passed on Wednesday allows police to again use the DNA family research method that was applied to solve the double murder in Linköping in 2004.
The Linköping murder was solved in 2020, so it has been five years. It feels good that it will finally come to fruition now, says Linda Kvist, the police's first and so far only employed family researcher.
The method has not been allowed to be used since the pilot case in Linköping, when the Integrity Protection Authority ruled that it was illegal. With the new law, it will be permitted again from July 1 this year.
Restrictive
The use of the method will, however, need to be restrictive, according to the law.
What is required is that there is DNA from a suspected perpetrator and it must be either a murder, a serious rape or a rape of a child, says Kvist, who is employed as an investigator in the police region South's cold case group, which handles 160 cases.
The law also requires that all other, less intrusive measures have been exhausted to move forward in the investigation before the method can be used.
One usually says that one should have tried everything before and not come further in one's investigation.
Earlier, it has mainly been discussed how the method can be used to solve cold cases, but according to Kvist, it can just as well be about new crimes.
It doesn't have to be a cold case, but rather a case where one doesn't get further, but where one has a DNA trace from the perpetrator. It can have been 15 years ago or 15 days ago.
Cold Cases
With that said, there are high hopes that the method can contribute to clearing up many older, unsolved cases in Sweden.
One case that has been specifically pointed out is the double murder in Brattås in 2005, where a suspected perpetrator, according to the police, left a DNA trace at the crime scene.
Other cases mentioned in this context are the murder of a 28-year-old woman in Helsingborg in July 2001, where there is a DNA trace from an unknown person, and the murder of a hotel receptionist on Gotland in 1996. In the latter case, it has turned out that the DNA trace was too poor.
We don't have such a clear profile, said prosecutor Susanne Wihlborg to TT last year.
According to Linda Kvist, an inventory is underway in the cold case groups in the country to see which cases can ultimately become relevant for the method. Together, they are responsible for nearly 800 unsolved murders.
But I have no idea how many it can be, she says.
The method of finding criminals using family research comes from the USA and became known when it was used to track down the so-called Golden State killer Joseph James DeAngelo in 2018.
In brief, the method involves entering a DNA profile from a crime scene into a family research database where other family researchers have entered their DNA. The profile is then compared with the others in the database (only people who have consented to comparisons are included). If the profile from the crime scene matches other DNA profiles, it becomes possible to find the one who left the traces through family research.
In Sweden, the police tried the method in a pilot project in the investigation into the double murder in Linköping in 2004 and succeeded in finding the perpetrator with the help of family researcher Peter Sjölund.
The Integrity Protection Authority later ruled that the method was illegal. The matter became a question for a government inquiry that proposed changing the law in 2025, so that the method can be used.
