police constable would have picked them up at the station and taken them to the fengsel. But Sohlberg needed to be free from nosy eavesdropping passengers and more important he needed to spend as much time as possible discussing the investigation and the second page of the summary with Constable Wangelin. Sohlberg had to be fully prepared before he interviewed the family and friends of Karl Haugen.
“At least we got out before the rush hour traffic,” said Wangelin.
She put the large Volvo crossover SUV on cruise control at 90 mph as soon as they left the Oslo suburbs behind. They shot down the E-6 highway out of Oslo which runs 352 miles south all the way down south towards the lovely twin cities of Malmo Sweden and Copenhagen Denmark. Less than ten miles separate Halden Prison from the border with Sweden.
Sohlberg sipped his favorite Farris mineral water. He had an entire case in the backseat. “Ever hear about the Smiley Face Killer?”
“Vaguely. . No. Not really Chief Inspector.”
“He was active in the seventies and eighties. . he began killing when he was real young. . in the late sixties. . kept right up until captured in eighty-nine. He was Norway’s worst. Then came the Lommemannen. . the Pocket Man. Heard of him?”
“Oh him? Ja. I’ve heard about the Pocket Man. . molested an estimated four hundred boys. . raped dozens over a thirty year period before his capture in two thousand eight. But the Smiley Face Killer. . he doesn’t sound familiar at all. That was
“Well. . I wasn’t in the force until April of eighty-nine. . the Smiley Face Killer was captured in October of that year. But I still knew about the Smiley Face Killer.”
“Sorry Chief Inspector but that’s ancient history.”
Sohlberg grew depressed over Constable Wangelin’s blank look and comments. He suddenly felt old and tired. He was only 20 years older than Wangelin but she made him feel like an outdated relic of the past. Sohlberg had a hard time being told that his frame of reference belonged to ancient history.
“Are you alright Chief Inspector?”
“Ja. Just thinking. Interesting how time fades the public’s memory as well as that of the police force. . at one time the Smiley Face Killer was big news. . as big as Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer in America or the Butcher of Rostov in Russia.”
“Who?”
“Andrei Chikatilo. . the Smiley Face Killer’s counterpart in Russia from seventy-eight to ninety. . both killers would move their rape-and-kill frenzies to different and faraway locations whenever they sensed that they had stirred up a hornet’s nest of investigators with their spectacular murders. . They both got very good at switching back and forth from local murders to faraway atrocities. Even at the height of the repressive and all-controlling Soviet police state Chikatilo would find clever ways to travel to Moscow and distant Russian Republics on his state factory job to kill dozens of women and children whenever he got the police and public riled up in Rostov over his killing sprees.”
“He was able to move around so freely to kill in a dictatorship like the old communist Russia?”
“Ja. . ”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” said Constable Wangelin while shaking her head.
“Chikatilo raped. . killed. . and cannibalized at least fifty-eight women and children. . and not always in that order. He’d torture them and cut out the women’s uteruses and the boy’s parts and eat them. He always blamed his depraved conduct for what he and his family suffered as ethnic Ukrainians with Stalin and the genocidal communists in the nineteen thirties. I imagine you’ve heard about the famine that Stalin intentionally created in the Ukraine?”
“No. . I’m sorry. . not really.”
“Stalin made sure that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians died like fleas. . many people started taking children off the streets and eating them to survive. Chikatilo was traumatized by his mother’s obsession over the possibility that he’d get kidnaped and then killed and eaten.”
“Unbelievable what men do.”
“Ja. . Constable Wangelin. Men
“True.”
“I mentioned Chikatilo because I’ve always thought that criminals reflect their families and country and society and the times. It’s too bad that they don’t teach more at the Academy about the criminal mind.”
“Ja. It’s all about forensic science nowadays.”
“The Academy doesn’t train officers properly. They just don’t want to invest the time and effort. You see Constable Wangelin. . to know the criminal mind you have to study real-life cases. Only by truly knowing the criminal mind can you be truly effective as an investigator.”
“I believe you.”
“Take the Smiley Face Killer. . Anton Ronning. We had no evidence other than some circumstantial evidence that Ronning was the killer. Of course this is before DNA analysis. Anyway. . it took one man. . Inspector Lars Eliassen. . nine days of interrogation to break the Smiley Face Killer.”
“Nine days?”
“Inspector Eliassen was able to do that because he knew how to get inside the criminal mind thanks to his superb interview and interrogation skills. That and he was a darn good profiler.”
“Chief Inspector. . do you believe in profilers?”
“Yes and no. Sometimes they’re helpful in an investigation if the police are stumped or have little or no creative thinking. Otherwise profilers are best used to help detectives prepare for interrogations that break down the suspect.”
“I’ve not heard that before. . the Academy instructors promised we’d be taught the best and most modern techniques.”
“I guess I’m old-fashioned after all. . I mean. . if the police are not good profilers then they’re incompetent idiots no?. . If you have a violent rape. . do you stop and question the twenty-year old man who’s a violent ex-con?. . Or the ninety-year old woman who’s barely walking with a cane?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Suspect profiling and interrogation techniques are what Inspector Eliassen taught me. . He always said that every good police officer must be a good profiler
“Who’s this Eliassen?”
“A small town police officer. He spent years and years on the trail of Anton Ronning. . who by the way had twice been caught early in his career of crime and named as a prime suspect but released by the incompetent local police in Oslo and Trondheim.”
“Where’s this Inspector Eliassen now?”
“He died a few years ago. I miss him. . he taught me a lot. Anyway he was a genius at interrogating.”
“How did he catch Ronning?”
“For quite some time Eliassen had Anton Ronning on his short list of suspects for sex crimes in Eliassen’s district. Then he got a lucky break. Ronning crashed into a light pole when he hurriedly left the scene of one of his molestation victims. Eliassen seized the opportunity and locked Anton Ronning up on a minor traffic charge for destruction of public property. . Eliassen then just kept interrogating Anton Ronning until he caught him in all these lies and inconsistencies.”
“That’s impressive!”
“Inspector Eliassen was known for solving impossible-to-solve cases just by interrogating and breaking the suspect down without torture or physical pressure. This Eliassen. . he was a master at interrogation. . out of one hundred interrogations he had only three suspects who refused to confess.”
“That’s pretty good. Too bad the Academy doesn’t teach his techniques.”
“Last time I looked at their curriculum I saw that the Academy. . and the force. . are playing around with this silly stuff about community policing. . detectives eating ethnic food at Asian restaurants or listening to rap hip hop music with African teenagers. Seems that policing in Norway is now all about touchy-feely political correctness and feel-good public relations.”
“Perhaps Chief Inspector. But maybe it’s because effective policing is now based on all the advances in DNA
