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The thirtieth anniversary of something I don’t remember

palme

Sunday is the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. He was walking home from the movies with his wife when he was approached by a gunman and shot dead.

Sometimes I like to play a game with True Crime books: I shuffle to the picture section and, without reading the captions, try to figure out from their faces who’s the victim, who’s the perp and who’s the policeman. In this case, though, it’s easy — dude on the right is a druggy who was picked up for the murder three years later after Mrs Palme picked him out of a lineup. That’s about all the evidence against him, though, so the case is classed as unsolved. A hundred and thirty people have confessed to the murder and been dismissed.

It’s officially the biggest murder investigation in history — bigger than JFK’s, bigger than Lockerbie. And it’s still active. Sweden even scrapped their 25-year statute of limitations on murder to keep it going (which is fine. There shouldn’t really be a statute of limitations on murder).

He was a hard left anti-Imperialist, pro-Revolutionary, the first Western head of state to visit Cuba and speak in favor of Cambodia’s revolutionaries. So you can imagine the prevailing theories.

The Turks say the Kurds did it, the Kurds say the Turks did it. There was a Yugoslavian, and a LaRouchie. Indian gunrunners. Chilean fascists. The Masons. The CIA. I’m not even kidding. If you like this sort of thing, this is just the sort of thing you’d like.

Not me. I hate the unsolved ones. Good weekend, all!

February 26, 2016 — 9:19 pm
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