Sweden

Nineteen eighty-six is not so long ago, especially when you've crested the hill and are almost two years into being a septuagenarian. Many things happened in 1986, one of which was the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, as he and his wife left a movie theater in Stockholm one cold, February evening.

Someone came up behind him, shot him, and left him for dead on the sidewalk. The assassination of any head of state is big news, no matter what country it was in. Apparently in Sweden—at least at he time—there was no attending Secret Service-like detail that accompanied the prime minister.

The shooter was never really caught. He has however been identified, and is believed to be Stig Engstrom, a 52-year-old man at the time who disliked the prime minister and his policies, and who himself committed suicide in 2000 at 66.

You don't need the assassination of a head of state to hatch conspiracy theories, and in Sweden they grew as each year passed with no suspect identified and caught.

A reporter, Thomas Pettersson, spent 13 years investigating the death, and eventually traced the gun that was used to a weapons collector, who himself was not a suspect. The reporter in turn concentrated on a suspect he identified as Mr. Engstrom who worked in a building near the assassination, was a gun club member, had political and private motives for killing the prime minister, fit the profile of a man who would likely be an assassin, and who in general, was a frustrated man who was not happy with this lot in life.

If an old rule in typesetting was to mind your p's and q's, when you read a story filled with Swedish surnames you need to mind your t's and s's

Mr. Pettersson, the reporter, turned his exhaustive findings over to a prosecutor, Krister Petersson  (one t) who set off on his own inquiry and who agreed with Mr. Pettersson's findings and concluded that Mr. Stig Engstrom was the assassin, but that only a court could formally come to that conclusion. And since Mr. Engstrom was now dead, there would be no trial. Thus, they were not going to try a dead guy, even if the dead guy did it. The unassailable Swedes.

For his part, Olof Palme certainly had his admirers as well plenty of detractors who were offended by his socialist idealism that lead him to fight against injustice around the world. Mr. Palme was a staunch foe of apartheid in South Africa and was against the Vietnam War. You can't hold the office he held and not make enemies.

The mystery of his assassination went through six investigations and three commissions. And even now, after 34 years, there is only "reasonable evidence" that points to Stig Engstrom as the killer.

The conspiracy theorists are still out there I'm sure. After all, what's more fun to believe, that the assassination was linked to a shadowy arms deal with India; an Italian Masonic lodge and Chilean fascists who sought revenge for his stance against General Augusto Pinochet's government; or best of all, that because of Sweden's longtime stance against apartheid and their financial support for the foes of apartheid that a "white former security officer, Col. Eugene de Kock alleged that an agent of the apartheid government murdered Mr. Palme."

And as if to tell us that all the convoluted conspiracy theories go somewhere to die, the NYT journalists who put the story together, Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson, report that in the end the Swedish judiciary says "it was all the work of one man, Mr. Engstrom." The investigative journalist Mr. Pettersson says it plainly: "His motive? He wanted attention."

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