On the evening of August 12, 1963, the Stockholm murder squad was called to Vitabergsparken on Södermalm, where six-year-old Berit Margareta Glesing had been found dead at the foot of a rock face; some later reference works date the killing to August 6. At the hospital doctors confirmed she had been sexually assaulted. The park was known as a haunt of vagrants and men who exposed themselves, and witness statements soon persuaded the police that the killer belonged to that crowd. From the tips that poured in they put together a description of a man in a brown suit, and the papers called the man they were hunting the man in brown. The search was one of the largest any Swedish murder case had seen: the police checked and questioned everyone they could find in what the Svenska Dagbladet yearbook called the asocial milieu where the killer was to be sought, and more than two hundred suspects were questioned. Per Olof Ahl, the founder of the KappAhl clothing chain, offered a reward of 25,000 kronor, and the press condemned it as advertising built on a child's death. In spite of good witness statements, nobody found the man in brown.
One of the men questioned after Berit's murder and then released was a garden worker named John Ingvar Löfgren, as the papers then spelled it. At the time he was already under prosecution for indecency. The manager of the old people's home in Gröndal where he lived with his grandmother had reported him, because on the night of the murder he had behaved even more strangely than usual and come home with a sprained wrist. Other tips about him came in as well, and none of them was followed up.
Three weeks later, on September 2, 1963, the killer struck again. Two boys raised the alarm that a man had lured four-year-old Ann-Kristin Svensson away from a playground on Blommensbergsvägen in Aspudden and into the woods to pick blueberries. A woman, Solveig Larsson, found her there unconscious and bleeding badly. She had been beaten and raped, and she died of her injuries in the hospital. This time the arrest came quickly, by most accounts the next day, September 3. A detective, Ingvar Johansson, and his wife had passed the killer as he fled; Johansson recognized him and arrested him himself. By later accounts children who had been playing with Ann-Kristin also picked him out, and as he ran he had thrown away her clothes, leaving a trail that led back to his own neighborhood. In the police car he broke down, then gave a clear account of both killings and admitted them.
Stockholm's governor, Hagander, praised the police for clearing up the two murders. The parliamentary ombudsman, the justitieombudsman, saw it differently. Critics said Ann-Kristin would never have died if the criminal police had done their work properly on Berit's case, and the ombudsman asked the Stockholm police chief, Nils Lüning, to answer the criticism. Lüning asked for an impartial inquiry, and the ombudsman's office assigned its head of chancery, Gösta Lidberg, to carry it out from the police files.
What it found was, in the yearbook's words, a series of extremely strange circumstances. The most important tip about Löfgren, which had come from his own relatives, had gone astray and was never worked on; the murder squad first saw it after he had been arrested for the second killing. By then every document about Löfgren had disappeared, and the papers turned up only after an intensive search. Of five reports made against him, only one had been registered, and he had never even been classified as a suspect. In three of ten sharply worded questions sent to the Stockholm governor's office, the ombudsman spoke of negligence in the handling of reports against him.
He had been born in Norrköping on October 22, 1930. Both his parents died when he was very small, and he grew up in foster homes. As an adult he drank himself senseless and was convicted several times of exposing himself to women, and after he was charged with exhibitionism in 1953 he spent most of the next eight years in mental hospitals before he was discharged in 1961. The police described him as childish and feeble-minded, probably mildly intellectually disabled, and the press of 1963 used the clinical word of the day, imbecile. From 1961 he lived with his grandmother at the home in Gröndal.
After his arrest he confessed to two killings of grown women. Greta Löfgren, sixty-two, had been raped and murdered in her home on Kungsholmen in November 1962. Agneta Nyholm, twenty-six, had been murdered on the night of June 27, 1958, in Fruängen; she was found strangled in a basement corridor of an apartment building there, the building where she lived by most accounts. Nearly five months later, in November 1958, with her killing still unsolved, the police released a reconstructed picture of her.
He was convicted of the murders of Greta Löfgren, Berit Glesing and Ann-Kristin Svensson. Because his mental state made him a danger to others, he was sentenced to closed forensic psychiatric care rather than prison and held for decades at Salberga. The Nyholm killing was never prosecuted. Despite his confession and other evidence against him, no charge was brought, and the case passed the statute of limitations in 1973. It remains officially unsolved, while the police have treated it as cleared, with him as the killer.
Late in life he took the name John Ingvar Andersson. He developed cancer and was discharged because of his very poor health, and he died on February 9, 2002, at seventy-one; accounts place his death in Stockholm, in Sala and at Salberga itself. He was buried on April 9, 2002, at the new cemetery in Sala.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö drew on the case for their 1967 novel The Man on the Balcony, in which the Stockholm police hunt a man who kills small girls in the city's parks. A Swedish television documentary on the case, Flickmördaren, was broadcast in the series Brottsplats: Sverige in 1995.