Varg Vikernes was convicted in Norway on May 16, 1994, of the premeditated murder (overlagt drap) of Øystein Aarseth, who died in Oslo on August 10, 1993. The same judgment convicted him of burglary, of several thefts and of setting fire to three churches: Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo, Skjold Church in Rogaland and Åsane Church in Bergen. The case was tried before the Eidsivating Court of Appeal, which sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the longest ordinary term Norwegian law then allowed. He was 21 years old. On a further count, the 1992 fire at Fantoft Stave Church outside Bergen, he was acquitted.
He served almost 16 years. Fourteen months were added after he failed to return from a prison leave in October 2003, and he was released on parole in the spring of 2009. Within a year he had left Norway for France. There, in July 2013, he was held for two days on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism and released without charge, and in July 2014 a criminal court in Paris found him guilty of incitement to racial hatred over writing posted on a blog, a conviction he said he would appeal.
He was born Kristian Vikernes in Bergen on February 11, 1973. He later used the first name Varg, and by 2013 the Norwegian population register listed him under a new legal name, Louis Cachet.
The fires that would bring him before a court came in a single year. Fantoft Stave Church, on the edge of Bergen, burned on June 6, 1992. The building dated in its first form to about 1150 and was privately owned.
Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo burned on the night of August 23 to 24, 1992. The first police inquiry concluded that the fire had not been set and had started in a fault in the chapel's electrical system, a finding that was later overturned: by December 1994 the fire was recorded as arson. Skjold Church, a 105-year-old building in the municipality of Vindafjord in Ryfylke, burned on September 13, 1992. It was the fifth church in Norway lost to fire in less than a year, and the first investigation put the cause down to lightning. Åsane Church outside Bergen, a building from the 1600s, burned on the night before Christmas Eve, December 24, 1992. This time police suggested from the start that the fire might have been set.
Holmenkollen, Skjold and Åsane are the three churches named in his conviction. Two of the three had at first not been treated as crimes at all.
The fires alarmed the country. Local police struggled to solve the cases, and the Director of Public Prosecutions ordered a special unit to examine the fires together. It became known as the church fire group. A police inspector who headed the violent and property crime section of the Oslo police district was put in charge, and he drew in experienced officers from across the force.
The group questioned young men in the circles it suspected. Every one of them denied any part in the fires. The break came on January 20, 1993, when a Bergen newspaper published an interview with an unnamed young man, his face partly hidden, who claimed on behalf of a supposed underground group the eight church fires that had taken place in Norway up to that point.
Investigators identified the man as Vikernes and moved against him soon afterward. By then his account had changed. He denied having anything to do with the fires and said the interview had been a stunt to promote a recording he had just released. He was held in custody for several weeks, but the police lacked the evidence to charge him and had to let him go. The church fire group then set up a working base at a hotel in Bergen, where its officers worked late and early through a slow and demanding inquiry.
The victim died in Oslo in the early hours of Tuesday, August 10, 1993. He and Vikernes knew each other, and by the summer of 1993 the relationship between them had broken down. The dead man was already known to the church fire investigators, who had looked closely at the people around him, and his death turned what had been an inquiry into criminal damage into a murder case.
The head of the church fire group was called out early that morning and took charge. Officers spent the following days going door to door taking statements from neighbors, then turned to the people in the dead man's circle, many of whose names the investigators already knew, and tried to piece together his movements in the period before his death.
The inquiry divided in two. Detectives in Oslo worked the scene and the city, while the church fire group carried the Bergen side of the case. News coverage swelled and the pressure to solve both sets of crimes grew with it. Over the next days young men came one after another to the police station to be questioned. Several pointed toward Sweden, and investigators spent time following that line before it turned out to be a dead end.
Attention then settled on Vikernes. Questioned, he said he had spent the night in Bergen with two friends and could not possibly have reached Oslo in the time. The team gathered at its Bergen hotel and tested every part of that account. Its timings did not hold: investigators concluded that the journey from Bergen to Oslo could have been made in time. Evidence gathered in Oslo then tied Vikernes directly to the death.
On the night of Friday, August 20, 1993, Bergen police moved. In the early hours of Saturday, August 21, officers arrested three men in the center of the city on suspicion of murder, complicity in murder and giving false statements to the police. Vikernes was held on suspicion of murder.
He said nothing in questioning. With him in custody, however, the silence among the people around him began to break. One of the men who had been with him told investigators that he had traveled with Vikernes to Oslo that night. That account became the core of the prosecution's case, and the man became its key witness.
The arrests also opened up the church fire cases. In witness interviews Vikernes's name came up again in connection with several of the fires, as did the names of others. Some of the remaining fires were traced to young people with no direct connection to the group, who had copied what they had heard about.
When the case came to court in the spring of 1994, the indictment against Vikernes listed a long series of serious offenses: the killing in Oslo, a run of church fires with Fantoft among them, and a number of burglaries and thefts. The case was heard by the Eidsivating Court of Appeal.
Vikernes admitted in court that he had caused the death but pleaded self-defense, claiming that the victim had been the one pursuing him after their relationship collapsed. The court heard a different account of the conflict, in which a struggle for control and attention between the two men had ended in the death. The self-defense plea failed.
On May 16, 1994, the court convicted Vikernes of premeditated murder (overlagt drap), of burglary, of several thefts and of setting fire to Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo, Skjold Church in Vindafjord and Åsane Church in Bergen. On the Fantoft Stave Church count the court divided, and he was acquitted. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, with credit for the time he had already spent in custody.
A psychiatric assessment before the court described him as having "mangelfullt utviklede sjelsevner," inadequately developed mental faculties. He was nevertheless not given sikring, the indefinite protective measure that Norwegian law then allowed alongside a fixed term, although he was regarded at the time as an obvious candidate for it. Prosecutors did not ask for it, and the court left the question to be revisited as the end of his term approached. That never became possible. Sikring was replaced a few years later by a new measure, forvaring, and forvaring could only be imposed at the time of conviction. An ordinary prison term was the only sentence left to him.
The case did not end with his conviction. Two other men were tried for their part in the fires on which he had been convicted. In June 1994 a man from Notodden was sentenced to 16 months in prison, without suspension, for complicity in setting fire to Skjold Church. On June 30, 1994, a Bergen man was sentenced to three years in prison for complicity in the burning of Åsane Church on the night before Christmas Eve 1992.
The criminal sentence was not the end of the financial reckoning. In 1997 the City of Oslo and the insurer Gjensidige brought a claim against Vikernes in the Asker and Bærum district court, seeking close to 40 million kroner in damages for the burned churches. The court ordered him to pay 8 million kroner. The original claims came to about 18 million kroner before interest began to run, and with interest the debt grew year after year.
By 2003 Vikernes was held in open conditions at a low-security prison in Vestfold. In October 2003 he left on a day's leave and did not come back at the end of it.
Police caught him near Oslo. He was charged with taking a car and with offenses under the arms law. In 2004 the court added 14 months to his sentence for taking the car and for the arms-law offenses.
He was released on parole in May 2009, after almost 16 years in custody. The terms required him to report to the authorities every 14 days for a year. The term of his Norwegian sentence formally ran until August 2014.
Less than ten months after his release he was registered as having emigrated to France. He settled in the Corrèze department of central France.
On July 1, 2013, French police opened a case against him and his wife. At dawn on Tuesday, July 16, 2013, French intelligence officers arrested them both on suspicion of preparing a large terrorist act. The interior ministry announced the arrest, and the anti-terrorism section of the Paris prosecutor's office led the inquiry. The investigation drew on his writing online, which police said marked him as a potential threat.
He was held in Brive-la-Gaillarde and released on the evening of Thursday, July 18. Police had found no concrete plans or targets, and he was not prosecuted on the terrorism suspicion. The prosecutor's office said, however, that he would stand trial over posts on two blogs under France's law against racism, and that his computer would be examined more closely. He was formally placed under investigation the following month. In September 2013 a commission examining whether he should be expelled from France found no grounds to do so, concluding that he posed no threat to the public.
The case was first set for October 17, 2013, and postponed at the request of the defense, which had received more than 900 pages of police documents shortly before the hearing. It was heard in the criminal court in Paris on Tuesday, June 3, 2014, with the French anti-racism organizations LICRA and SOS Racisme as civil parties. He was charged with public incitement to racial hatred and with defending war crimes, over ten excerpts from blog posts written between March and June 2013, four of which the prosecution singled out as amounting to the defense of war crimes. The offenses carried a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros. The prosecution asked for four to six months and a fine of at least 5,000 euros.
He denied the charges throughout. Vikernes told the court that he could not confirm he had written the posts, that he was not the only person who wrote on the blog, and that someone could have built an identical blog in his name, which he gave as the reason he had changed his name. He said that misunderstandings in police interviews conducted through a Danish interpreter had concerned the terrorism suspicion, not the racism counts. His lawyer argued that the prosecution had to prove the texts were published from his own computer. Counsel for LICRA answered that he had full control of the blog.
On Tuesday, July 8, 2014, the court found him guilty of incitement to racial hatred. It gave him a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 8,000 euros and ordered him to pay 1,500 euros in costs. Neither Vikernes nor his lawyer was present when the verdict was read. Vikernes had said beforehand that he would appeal any conviction.
The Fantoft Stave Church fire remains unproven in law against Vikernes. He was charged with it, and in 1997 police and the church's owners still attributed it to him, but the court divided on the count and he was acquitted.
Vikernes said that he acted in self-defense. The court rejected that plea and convicted him of premeditated murder.
The 2013 terrorism suspicion led to no charge. Police found no concrete plans or targets, and he was released after two days.
He denied writing the blog posts on which he was convicted in Paris in 2014, saying others had posed as him.
February 11, 1973: Kristian Vikernes is born in Bergen.
June 6, 1992: fire at Fantoft Stave Church, outside Bergen.
August 23 to 24, 1992: fire at Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo, at first put down to an electrical fault.
September 13, 1992: fire at Skjold Church in Vindafjord, at first put down to lightning.
December 24, 1992: fire at Åsane Church outside Bergen.
After the 1992 fires: the Director of Public Prosecutions orders a special police unit to investigate the church fires together.
January 20, 1993: a Bergen newspaper publishes an anonymous interview claiming eight church fires; Vikernes is later identified, held for several weeks and released.
August 10, 1993: the killing in Oslo.
August 21, 1993: Bergen police arrest three men; Vikernes is held on suspicion of murder.
May 16, 1994: the Eidsivating Court of Appeal convicts him of premeditated murder, burglary, thefts and three church fires, acquits him on the Fantoft count and sentences him to 21 years.
June 1994: two other men are sentenced for complicity in the Skjold and Åsane fires.
1997: the Asker and Bærum district court orders him to pay 8 million kroner in damages.
October 2003: he leaves a low-security prison in Vestfold on a day's leave and does not return; he is caught near Oslo.
2004: a court adds 14 months to his sentence.
May 2009: he is released on parole after almost 16 years in custody.
2010: he is registered as having emigrated to France.
July 1, 2013: French police open a case against him and his wife.
July 16, 2013: he and his wife are arrested in Corrèze on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act.
July 18, 2013: he is released without charge on the terrorism suspicion.
September 2013: a French commission finds no grounds to expel him.
June 3, 2014: trial in the criminal court in Paris on charges of incitement to racial hatred and defending war crimes.
July 8, 2014: the Paris court finds him guilty of incitement to racial hatred and gives him a six-month suspended sentence and a fine of 8,000 euros.
August 2014: the term of his Norwegian sentence formally ends.