Four countries share a map and, to a degree, a legal tradition, and the cases that have defined the subject in each of them look nothing alike. A Swedish foster mother sentenced to death in 1917 and a Danish one sentenced to death four years later. A Norwegian nursing home manager who confessed to dozens of killings and then spent forty years denying them. A Swedish psychiatric patient whose eight murder convictions were taken apart one at a time. A Finnish practical nurse serving a life sentence that her country’s courts keep declining to shorten.
The word "serial" sits uneasily on several of these. Nordic courts try counts, not patterns. A Danish encyclopedia entry on serial killing (seriedrab) lists the Overbye case, yet the court that tried her dealt in nine separate killings and a death sentence that was never carried out. What the region does offer is an unusually well-documented record of what happens after the verdict: maximum terms set by statute, preventive detention, forensic psychiatric care with its own discharge review, and in Finland a Court of Appeal that decides whether a life prisoner goes free. The story of how each system answered the same kind of question is, in the end, the story of these cases.
Hilda Nilsson was sentenced to death in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, on June 13, 1917, for killing eight small children she had taken in as foster children. The city’s own encyclopedia, Helsingborgs stadslexikon, describes her as the last person in Sweden convicted as an änglamakerska, the Swedish term usually rendered in English as "angel maker." The sentence was never carried out. While her appeal was pending she was held in the women’s prison at the citadel in Landskrona, and there she took her own life.
She was born in 1876 in Tirup, in what is now Svalöv Municipality in Skåne, into a large and poor family, according to an account compiled by Helsingborgs stadsarkiv, the city archive, for Domstolenshistoria.se, a court history site linked to Helsingborg District Court. She did well at the folk school and went first into service as a maid. Her early adult life was marked by loss. The archive’s account says a son of hers died shortly after birth; later, left by the father of another child, she gave birth to a daughter alone, and the daughter also died soon after birth.
Children born outside marriage carried a heavy stigma in Sweden in the early 1900s, and a market in foster care grew up to meet the need. A mother could pay a single lump sum, known as "allt i ett," that was meant to cover the child until the age of 15. Many foster children were neglected or mistreated, and when a child died the foster home kept the money. Nyheter24, a Swedish news site, adds that a 1911 law had banned the spread of information about contraception and that abortion was strictly prohibited, so that mothers, some of them from middle class or wealthier families, turned to newspaper advertisements to find a foster home.
Over a few years, 13 children passed through Nilsson’s care, the archive’s account says. Some were placed elsewhere or adopted out. Eight were killed. Nyheter24 dates the first to 1915, when she took in a girl of ten months, and reports seven more after that. The money paid for them, the archive says, was soon spent. The children’s names have not been published, and, with one exception, nothing is known of their mothers.
The exception ended it. Nyheter24 reports that one mother had paid extra so that she could keep in contact with her son, and that she was given an explanation for his absence that did not hold. She asked questions of a parish priest in the far north of Sweden, learned that no child of that name had been recorded there, and went to the police. Their inquiry led to Nilsson’s arrest in Helsingborg. By late December 1916 the case was public.
On June 13, 1917, Nilsson was sentenced to death, the date given both by the stadslexikon and by the city archive. The court, the judges, the prosecutor and the defense counsel have not been named. The archive’s account says she was calm and composed during the trial. It also says that her case file gives no real answer to why she did what she did: several examinations found no mental illness.
Accounts differ on what followed and on what the judgment held. Nyheter24 describes it as seven murders and one manslaughter; the stadslexikon and the archive speak of a death sentence for killing eight children. Nyheter24 says her sentence was converted to life imprisonment on the day she died, August 10, 1917, without her knowing it, and calls her the last person sentenced to death in Sweden without the possibility of a pardon. The archive and the stadslexikon do not mention a commutation. They say the appeal was still undecided and the sentence never carried out, and the archive calls her the last woman in Sweden sentenced to death. The stadslexikon describes the Landskrona institution as a compulsory labor prison for women.
More than a century later her case is still a point of argument in Helsingborg. In 2017 the city archive showed material from the case in an Archives Day exhibition, and in 2019 SVT reported strong reactions on social media after a local project, Kvinnokarta Helsingborg, put her on its map of women who mattered to the city’s history.
In 1921 a jury in Copenhagen convicted Dagmar Overbye of killing infants who had been handed to her by their mothers. She was a working woman of about thirty with a record of thefts, and the mothers, most of them unmarried and poor, paid her a single sum and left believing their children would be placed with a good family. In the case the court heard, the children died the same day or soon after.
Østre Landsret, the Eastern High Court, sentenced her to death. She did not appeal. About a month later she was pardoned, on condition that she was never released and never given any relaxation of the prison rules, a recommendation that came from a meeting of the Council of State. She died in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen on May 6, 1929. Danish reference works call the trial one of the most discussed in Danish history. The public argument it set off, about what Denmark owed women who had children outside marriage and the children themselves, led directly to the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children of 1923.
Danish reference works spell her surname Overby; Overbye is the spelling in most English-language writing. She was born on April 23, 1887, at Assendrup in Jutland. At twelve she was sent away, and three years later she returned to her parents, who by then lived in Aarhus. She worked as a domestic servant, and, as the biographical dictionary puts it, things went wrong again. She served her first prison sentence for theft in 1909. Den Store Danske describes her as someone in conflict with the law since childhood, with several convictions for theft.
The children who died in her care were not taken from anyone. Their mothers brought them to her. "To have a child outside marriage at this time was connected with great shame and dishonor," Frederik Strand, head of the Police Museum in Copenhagen, told TV 2 Kosmopol after going through the case files. It also brought money problems, he said, and no childcare when single mothers had to go to work. The historian Agnete Birger Madsen, who wrote a book on infanticide in Denmark from 1900 to 1950, told the newspaper Information that between 16 and 17 women a year were convicted at that time of killing infants or of gross neglect of them, nearly always women at the bottom of the social order, maids or factory workers with almost no help. Overbye was a different matter. "The Dagmar Overby case is a completely different story; she is very atypical," Madsen said. She had come across no other woman who advertised for children in order to kill them.
Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon describes the arrangement as the same each time: Overbye agreed to "adopt" a child for one payment in cash, and the child was dead on the day it changed hands. The Copenhagen Post, drawing on the retired police officer and lecturer Poul Fjeldgård, said the mothers typically paid around 200 kroner, for many of the live-in servants among them roughly a year’s wages. Avisen.dk reported that Overbye told mothers it was best to avoid further contact, and afterward wrote letters about how their children were doing when they were already dead.
Denmark had in fact legislated on paid foster children as early as April 20, 1888, requiring anyone who took in a child under fourteen for payment to have the permission of the municipal council, but that law by its own terms ran only until April 1, 1895. The reference works on Overbye’s case treat the 1923 act as the measure that brought all children born outside marriage under public supervision.
The first killing that the Danish reference works and TV 2 Kosmopol describe dates from 1916, when she answered an advertisement from an unmarried mother who had just had her second child. Asked at her trial why she had done it, Overbye said she did not know. One child lived: while she served another sentence for theft in 1918 and 1919, a small child in her keeping was taken under the guardianship council, the local child welfare authority. Den Store Danske gives that sentence as a year and a quarter, for stealing four hens, a lamb and some milk.
It ended in 1920 with a mother’s second thoughts. Karoline Aagesen had given up her daughter and three days later came back and asked for her. Overbye told her it could not be done and said the child had been sent out of town to be cared for elsewhere, according to TV 2 Kosmopol; the Copenhagen Post says she claimed to have forgotten the family’s address. "And that of course makes Karoline Aagesen very, very nervous," Strand said. Aagesen went to the police, and the police arrested Overbye in Copenhagen that year. TV 2 Kosmopol calls the physical evidence the police gathered the decisive material at the trial.
Once she began to confess, the case grew. In the city court (byret), where it was first examined, she admitted to as many as 16 killings of children, according to both Den Store Danske entries and the Copenhagen Post. The encyclopedia entry on englemageri, written by the lawyer Beth Grothe Nielsen, gives the same figures: 16 confessed in the city court, nine proven in the High Court. Her explanations and her attitude changed as the investigation went on, Information reported, and her motive never became clear. Later writers have put the true number at 20 to 25 or more. No court tested those estimates.
The trial in 1921 lasted three days. Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon cites the reports in Social-Demokraten for March 2, 3 and 4, 1921, and the official law report, Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen. The prosecutor, Poul Gammeltoft, asked for a verdict of premeditated killing. Her defense lawyer, Gottlieb Jacobsen, argued that she had been a tool of a deficient society and of indifferent mothers, and denied premeditation. Experts told the court she had probably been under the influence of naphtha and ether at the time but was not insane, and described her as untruthful and highly strung. Through the three days her manner ranged from cold indifference to despair to forced cheerfulness. The man she lived with had taken money from her and, the court heard, strongly disliked children; his part was never made clear, and no charge against him is reported.
The jury convicted her on all nine counts. Both Den Store Danske entries give that figure, while other Danish outlets, TV 2 Kosmopol among them, speak of eight infants. The death sentence is the detail that sets the case apart in the Nordic record. The pardon, with its condition that the prison door never open, produced in effect a sentence of life without release, years before the region’s later systems of preventive detention and discharge review existed.
In March 1983 a jury in Trondheim convicted Arnfinn Nesset, the former manager of a nursing and old people’s home in Orkdal, of murdering 22 of its elderly residents and of trying to kill another. He was 46, a trained nurse with a quiet manner, and before the case came to light he had been a respected family man in the district. The prosecution said he had killed them in the nursing home where he was manager. United Press International called it Scandinavia’s biggest peacetime mass murder case.
The deaths for which he was tried took place between May 1977 and November 1980, and the victims ranged in age from 67 to 95, UPI reported. Their names did not appear in the news reports of the verdict. Nesset had been hired as manager of Orkdal sjuke- og aldersheim in 1976. According to Adresseavisen, staff began in 1977 to talk among themselves about a run of sudden and unexpected deaths and whether their manager might be behind them. The paper said there were few clear signs and that the suspicion hung over the institution for about three more years, with no one in authority looking into the rumors. In late autumn 1980 it emerged that he had altered a pharmacy prescription and had ordered the drug in large quantities several times. The county physician and the police were told. He was arrested in January 1981.
The verdict rested mainly on his own words. During the investigation he confessed, to police and in the interrogation court, to killing many more patients than he was convicted of killing. The number differs by report: NRK has given it as 27, UPI in 1983 and NTB in 2025 as 30, and the title of a 2025 book by the journalist Simen Sætre, as NTB, Altinget and Journalisten reported it, refers to 31. Police considered having the dead tested for the drug, NRK reported, but did not, because he had confessed. UPI, writing at the time of the verdict, said that no tests were possible.
The trial began at Frostating lagmannsrett, the regional court of appeal, sitting in Trondheim, on October 18, 1982. Olaf Jakhelln was the public prosecutor; Alf Nordhus, whom NTB later called a legendary defense lawyer, was among those defending. It lasted five months, and the court heard 128 witnesses, among them Nesset, his family and friends, colleagues, investigators and psychiatrists. Four psychiatrists examined him and judged him sane, UPI reported. There was no technical evidence. NRK said the prosecution case rested on what witnesses had seen and experienced and on the record of the police interrogations; UPI listed three pillars, his confession, the existence of the drug, and witness testimony.
Shortly before the trial began, Nesset withdrew every confession. He told the court he had confessed only to get away from hard police questioning, and he pleaded not guilty to every count. Jakhelln asked the jury to convict, calling him, in UPI’s quotation, a "bestial killer."
The jury of six women and four men deliberated for three days. On a Friday in March 1983, UPI reported from Trondheim on March 11, it convicted him in the deaths of 22 patients. Adresseavisen reported the full verdict: 22 murders and one attempted murder, with acquittals on two further murder counts. UPI added that he was held to have taken about $1,800 from patients.
The sentence shows how Norwegian law then worked. Norway had no death penalty. He received 21 years in prison, the maximum, and 10 years of preventive detention, known as sikring. NRK reported that the court saw no remorse and no mitigating circumstances. Motive was left unsettled: NRK reported that the court weighed mercy as a possible motive, and that the presiding judge said Nesset had wanted to help the patients "over the last hill"; UPI wrote that no clear motive emerged. "After 128 witnesses," Finn Åldstedt wrote in Adresseavisen in 2002, "Arnfinn Nesset was as incomprehensible as the killings he was convicted of." No appeal against the verdict is reported.
He served at Ila, the national prison and security institution, as prisoner number 284, NRK reported. He called his cell a "lugar," the word for a ship’s cabin; it measured about 10 square meters, and he kept an embroidered tablecloth, flowers and a guitar in it. On May 4, 1984, the NRK journalist Ingebjørg Sæbu interviewed him on condition, set by his lawyer, that she ask nothing about the charges. She later recalled that shaking his hand felt like holding a bunch of parsley. In the interview Nesset said his confession to the police had been wrong, that he had been so worn down he confessed to escape the situation. Of the patients he said, "They loved me. And I loved them."
After 12 years, with a spotless record, he moved in 1993 to fri sikring, a supervised form of release, NTB reported; Advokatbladet reported that he was released in 2004. He took another name and lived at an address kept secret. By 2024 he had served his sentence in full.
That year, at 87, he spoke to the press for the first time, in an NRK podcast series, and said he was innocent and wanted the case examined again. In autumn 2025 Sætre published a book arguing that several of the confessions were probably false. Nesset died in a nursing home in December 2025, aged 89, and his lawyer confirmed it on December 3. No court had reopened the case. In August 2026 Sætre was awarded a legal-security prize for his work on it, Altinget and Rett24 reported.
For most of the 1990s Sture Bergwall, a patient at a secure psychiatric hospital in central Sweden who had renamed himself Thomas Quick, was presented to the Swedish public as a multiple murderer. In therapy sessions and police interviews he claimed responsibility for dozens of deaths in Sweden, Norway and Finland, and between 1994 and 2001 six Swedish district courts convicted him of eight murders. Much of the evidence consisted of his own statements. No court now holds him responsible for any killing. Every one of those convictions was set aside, and what the case shows is a failure of police, prosecutors, therapists, experts and courts.
In 2008 he withdrew every confession. Over the following five years courts granted retrials in all eight cases, prosecutors dropped every charge, and the district courts entered acquittals. The last became final on November 26, 2013. A government commission led by Daniel Tarschys, reporting in 2015, identified serious failures by the investigators, the prosecutor, the courts and the hospital that treated him, and a Norwegian review published by the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2017 reached similar conclusions about Norway’s part.
Bergwall was born in Falun on April 26, 1950. His youth was marked by crime. TT reported in 2013 that he had been convicted in 1970 of offenses against boys, while the Store norske leksikon dates the conviction to 1969 and records later convictions for violence and hostage-taking. The case that brought him to Säter was a robbery. The Bergwall Commission records that in 1991 he was sentenced for theft, aggravated theft and aggravated robbery to closed forensic psychiatric care, held from then at Säters sjukhus in Dalarna. Each of his later sentences in the eight cases was likewise to forensic psychiatric care with a special discharge review, not to a fixed term.
In the early 1990s he took the name Thomas Quick, the first name, he said, from Thomas Blomgren, whose 1964 death he claimed as his first killing. The press called him Sätermannen, the Säter Man. A police compilation presented at one of his trials listed 29 killings in Sweden, Norway and Finland, between 1964 and 1993, that he had claimed. Some were time-barred, some were dropped when he stopped cooperating, and some lacked the detail to investigate. Other counts range from more than 20 (TT and AFP) and more than 30 (the Associated Press) to 39 (Store norske leksikon and TT in 2016). David Lindén noted in The Local in 2013 that on the date of the Blomgren death Bergwall was reported to have been attending his own church confirmation.
The Bergwall Commission described how the cases were built. When he gave incomplete or wrong answers, investigators accepted the explanation that he struggled to recall the killings or was deliberately departing from the truth, and the explanation was not questioned. The interview method promoted by the advising psychologist was not adapted to keep investigative findings from him, so that what he learned shaped what he said. Reconstructions, which followed a 1994 National Police Board report, were carried out in ways that gave him guidance. The memory researcher Sven Å. Christianson, a psychology professor hired by police, later gave expert evidence at the trials. He has said he never testified about repressed memories and that the convictions did not rest on psychological explanations. The journalist Dan Josefsson argued the opposite in his book Mannen som slutade ljuga: that the theory of repressed memories was central, and that the psychotherapist Margit Norell, who had supervised Christianson, held great influence over the case.
The eight convictions fell in the order that the weakest gave way first.
Charles Zelmanovits, 15, of Piteå in Norrbotten, died in 1976. Piteå District Court convicted Bergwall of his murder in 1994, the first of the eight. The Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland granted a retrial in February 2013, and on July 31, 2013, chief prosecutor Håkan Nyman dropped the charge. He said the conviction had rested mainly on Bergwall’s confession and his wish to be convicted, that there was no technical evidence, and that no one knew whether Charles had been killed at all. The acquittal at Luleå District Court became final on November 26, 2013.
Marinus Stegehuis, 39, and Janny Stegehuis, 34, were Dutch citizens on a camping trip in Lapland in 1984. Gällivare District Court convicted Bergwall of both murders in January 1996. The appeal court ordered a retrial on February 1, 2013, and in May prosecutors announced there was "not sufficient evidence," AFP reported, and dropped both charges.
Yenon Levi, 24, an Israeli visiting relatives, died in Dalarna in June 1988. Bergwall was convicted of the murder in 1997, by Falu District Court according to the commission, though TT reports of 2010 and 2011 name Hedemora. His case was the first test of the retractions. His lawyers petitioned in April 2009, arguing that police had made errors, that the conviction rested on the confession of a "mentally ill and drugged person," that material had been kept from the court, and that witnesses had pointed to another man with links to Levi. Svea Court of Appeal granted the retrial in December 2009. On May 28, 2010, chief prosecutor Eva Finné dropped the charge, and Falu District Court acquitted Bergwall in September 2010. The police resumed the investigation of Levi’s death, and in 2012 said they planned new interviews and new DNA work on old material.
Therese Johannessen was nine and lived in Drammen, Norway; she died in 1988. Norway transferred the case to the Swedish authorities in March 1998, and Hedemora District Court convicted Bergwall of her murder that year. The case turned in part on a small number of burned fragments that two professors had concluded were most likely human. In 2010 the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science concluded that they came from neither a human nor an animal; TT reported later that they were wood and glue. On September 24, 2010, Svea Court of Appeal ordered a retrial, holding that supporting evidence, whether witness testimony or technical, was entirely missing. In March 2011 the prosecutor Olle Sohlberg dropped the charge: "There is no evidence which directly links Bergwall to the crime." The acquittal followed in the summer of 2011. Therese’s death is not time-barred, and SVT reported in 2019 that it was being investigated as a cold case.
Trine Jensen, 17, and Gry Storvik, 23, both of Oslo, died in 1981 and 1985. Norway transferred both cases to Sweden on May 3, 2000, and in June 2000 Falu District Court convicted Bergwall of both. The last conviction, in Sundsvall in June 2001, concerned Johan Asplund, 11, who died in 1980. None of the eight convictions was appealed to a higher court at the time.
Bergwall was moved to open care by the Administrative Court in Falun on March 19, 2014, after 23 years at Säter. Forensic psychiatric care ended in April 2015, and by September 2016 he was living freely in Jämtland. The Chancellor of Justice rejected his claim for damages from the state in June 2018. The relatives of the people named in the eight cases were left with no answers. For the Levi and Asplund families especially, the question of who is responsible has gone back to the beginning.
Antti Olavi Taskinen was convicted of two homicides in Finland, eight years apart. In February 1997 a 30-year-old man, described as his friend, died in Tampere, and Taskinen was convicted of manslaughter (tappo). In November 2005 his registered partner, a 54-year-old former business executive, died in Heinola, and he was convicted of murder (murha). The courts held that he caused both deaths. The Kouvola Court of Appeal ruled that the motive for the Heinola death was money: Taskinen wanted to inherit his partner’s estate, which STT reported to be worth millions of euros.
He was also charged over a third death, that of a 20-year-old student in Tampere in August 1996. The Heinola District Court convicted him of aggravated negligent homicide (törkeä kuolemantuottamus) in 2006, but the Court of Appeal dismissed that charge in 2007, so in law he is not responsible for that death. STT described it as the least serious of the three charges. Taskinen denied every charge and said the men had died by their own actions. The three cases were tried together; the district court sentenced him to life imprisonment, ordered 25,000 euros in damages to his partner’s mother and brother, and ordered him to cover the relatives' legal costs. The Kouvola Court of Appeal upheld the murder and manslaughter convictions and the life sentence on March 8, 2007, and the ruling meant, STT reported, that he lost his right to the inheritance. The men have never been named.
Taskinen was born in 1976. While serving his sentence he changed his name to Anton von Schrowe and studied law at the University of Turku, graduating as a Master of Laws in 2020, Yle reported. He spent a long period in an open institution. His record held one disciplinary penalty, in August 2020, for a narcotics use offense.
The Finnish route out of a life sentence is the clearest contrast with the Norwegian and Swedish ones. According to the Prison and Probation Service and the Ministry of Justice, a life prisoner may seek conditional release after at least 12 years (10 if under 21 at the offense). The decision belongs not to a parole board but to the Helsinki Court of Appeal, and the president can also pardon. The probationary period for a conditionally released life prisoner is always three years.
In 2021 he applied. The Court of Appeal noted that his crimes had called for a sentence clearly longer than the average. A violence risk assessment was prepared and kept confidential; the public part of the decision said a forensic psychiatric evaluation had rated his risk of a new violent offense as moderate. The court saw no evident danger that he would commit one after release. It listed in his favor his work in prison, his determined study, a long and well-run period in an open prison, and authorized leaves that had mostly gone well, and it ordered release after 17.5 years, including six months of supervised probationary freedom. He left prison on July 31, 2023.
As of September 2025 Yle reported that he was in the three-year probationary period and had not been convicted of any new crime. That month he became legal counsel to Milan Jaff, a rapper whom the Finnish Immigration Service had ordered deported, in the administrative court case over the revoked residence permit; Yle reported that von Schrowe did not have permission to act as counsel in the general courts.
Aino Nykopp-Koski was a practical nurse and home care worker in Helsinki. In December 2010 the Helsinki District Court convicted her of murdering five elderly patients and attempting to murder five more between 2004 and 2009, and sentenced her to life imprisonment. The court held that she had given them substances no doctor had prescribed. Yle described the case at the time as the largest murder trial in Finnish legal history, and in 2025 called it the only exposed series of killings set inside the Finnish health care system.
Yle gives her year of birth as 1950. Little was reported of her early life. She appears in court coverage as a perushoitaja, a practical or basic nurse, who over the years in question worked in two Helsinki hospitals, a care facility and home care visits. In April 2025 Yle published an account drawing on the court record that described warning signs years before her arrest. In 2003 and 2004, on a ward of a hospital eye clinic, she came under suspicion for thefts from patients. The hospital district’s head of security learned that patients on her shifts had suffered unexplained, sudden turns for the worse after eye surgery. The matter was not reported to the police.
The five murder victims, by Yle’s account, were: a woman of 80 recovering from routine surgery (2004); a man of 70 with Alzheimer’s disease (2005); a woman of 85 receiving home care (2006); a woman of 90 in home care (2008); and a woman of 77 with a mental illness, in a care facility run by a seniors' foundation (February 2009). The last was the final murder proved. The courts held that the victims' age and illness had left them unable to defend themselves. They were not named in Finnish reporting. The five attempted murders were spread across 2006, 2007 and March 2009, and she was also convicted of aggravated assaults, one against a co-worker.
During the months she worked at the care facility where the fifth murder took place, more than ten elderly residents died within a couple of months, Yle reported. Only one of those deaths could be investigated, because the other residents' deaths could no longer be examined by the time anyone suspected a crime. No charge was brought over them. The Yle crime reporter Tuomas Rimpiläinen quoted the late criminologist Martti Lehti saying that Finland’s otherwise effective system of death investigation had a gap where killings in health care were concerned.
The case came to light through a call she made herself. On March 14, 2009, she rang the Helsinki emergency center to report that an elderly client had collapsed. The woman recovered in hospital, tests showed a substance she had not taken herself, and she told doctors she suspected her carer. It took her until the fourth day to convince a doctor, and the police were then told. The criminal police began their investigation that March, and unexplained deaths at the nurse’s earlier workplaces were examined. She was arrested that month. Yle broadcast a recording of the call in 2025 with the address and the patient’s words removed.
A psychiatric examination was published in late November 2010. The psychiatrists concluded that she had a sociopathic personality disorder but understood the consequences of her actions, and the court held her criminally responsible. Yle’s later accounts describe the diagnosis as antisocial personality disorder with many psychopathic traits, and the examination as Yle summarized it recorded a lack of empathy, a marked tendency to lie, an unusual ability to manipulate people through friendly behavior, and no remorse. No motive was identified. The question the court put was whether she understood her actions, and the answer was yes. Yle reported the life sentence on December 22. She denied all the charges and said she would appeal.
The appeal opened on November 7, 2011, with about 90 witnesses planned. Her lawyer, Heikki Lampela, said she remained certain of her innocence. The prosecutor, Leena Metsäpelto, told the court the defendant had given patients lethal medicines and then called the emergency services, and often the patients' relatives, apparently to keep suspicion away from herself: "She had a pattern that she followed." On March 29, 2012, the Court of Appeal upheld the life sentence for five murders and five attempted murders.
She has since changed her name more than once and by 2025 was known to the courts as Ann Maria Gyllgren. She has been in an open prison since 2020. The Helsinki Court of Appeal refused her release on May 15, 2020, again in 2022 and on May 13, 2025. Her fourth application, filed in June 2026, was pending as of June 24, 2026.
Read side by side, these six cases do not describe a single system. Sweden condemned a foster mother to death in 1917 and held the sentence in suspense until she died; Denmark did the same four years later and converted the sentence by pardon into confinement for life. Norway, with no death penalty, set a statutory ceiling of 21 years and added preventive detention for a man whose release it then granted in stages. Finland’s life sentence ended, for one prisoner, after 17.5 years by order of a court, and has not yet ended for another after more than fifteen. Sweden’s forensic psychiatric care, with its discharge review, held Bergwall at Säter for 23 years, much of it on convictions that were all later set aside.
Two of the cases, Nesset’s and Quick’s, turn on the same weakness: a confession, retracted, with little else behind it. In Quick’s it brought down every conviction; in Nesset’s no court reopened the case before his death. In the Danish and Swedish baby-farming cases the question was never who, but why, and the courts answered it with a psychiatric report or not at all. Care-work cases leave a different gap. The deaths that could not be examined, the staff whispers that no one answered in Orkdal for three years, and the hospital security chief who knew of an unexplained pattern and told no police describe the one thing these cases share across a century: the people who first saw something were not the people who could act.
• 1887, April 23: Dagmar Overbye born at Assendrup, Jutland.
• 1888, April 20: Danish law on supervision of paid foster children passed; it ran to April 1, 1895.
• 1915: According to Nyheter24, the first of Hilda Nilsson’s killings in Helsingborg.
• 1916, December: The Helsingborg foster-child case becomes public.
• 1917, June 13: Nilsson sentenced to death. August 10 (per Nyheter24): she dies in the Landskrona citadel prison.
• 1920: Overbye arrested in Copenhagen after a mother goes to the police.
• 1921: Østre Landsret jury convicts Overbye; she is sentenced to death and pardoned about a month later.
• 1923: Danish Act on the Supervision of Foster Children.
• 1929, May 6: Overbye dies in Vestre Fængsel.
• 1976: Arnfinn Nesset becomes manager of the Orkdal nursing home.
• 1977, May to 1980, November: The deaths for which he was tried.
• 1981, January: Nesset arrested.
• 1982, October 18: His trial opens in Trondheim.
• 1983, March: Nesset convicted of 22 murders and one attempted murder; 21 years plus 10 years of preventive detention.
• 1991: Sture Bergwall sentenced to closed forensic psychiatric care at Säter.
• 1994 to 2001: Bergwall convicted in eight murder cases.
• 1993: Nesset moves to supervised release. 2004: released.
• 1997, February: Taskinen’s Tampere manslaughter. 2005, November: the Heinola murder.
• 2004 to 2009: The deaths and attempts in Helsinki for which Nykopp-Koski was convicted.
• 2006: Heinola District Court sentences Taskinen to life. 2007, March 8: Kouvola Court of Appeal upholds murder and manslaughter convictions, dismisses the third charge.
• 2008: Bergwall withdraws all confessions.
• 2009, March 14: Nykopp-Koski’s emergency call. Arrested that month.
• 2009 to 2013: Retrials granted and charges dropped in all eight Bergwall cases; the last acquittal final November 26, 2013.
• 2010, December: Nykopp-Koski sentenced to life. 2012, March 29: Court of Appeal upholds.
• 2014, March 19: Bergwall moved to open care. 2015: report of the Bergwall Commission; forensic care ends in April.
• 2020, May 15: Nykopp-Koski’s first parole refusal.
• 2023, July 31: Taskinen released.
• 2025, December 3: Nesset’s death confirmed.
• 2026, June 24: Nykopp-Koski’s fourth parole application pending.