Linda, As in the Linda Murder

Epilogue

On Friday 28 May, Lisa Mattei submitted her doctoral thesis at the Institute of Applied Philosophy at Stockholm University. Her dissertation was entitled In Memory of the Victim? and that final question mark was what it was really about. The hidden messages concealed in the media’s coverage of so-called sex killings of women, which the author had chosen to analyse from a gender perspective.

The classic semiotic connection between content and expression, and the remarkable fact that the first names of almost two hundred women had contributed the prefix to the sexual crimes that had ended their lives during the previous fifty years. From the Birgitta murder, the Gerd murder, the Kerstin murder and the Ulla murder, to mention just four nationally notorious and fifty-year-old examples, to the most recent cases of the new millennium: the Kajsa murder, the Petra murder, the Jenny murder... and the Linda murder.

That they had been quite simply transformed from women of flesh and blood into media messages. To symbols, according to conventional semiotic vocabulary. That the very best of the prefixes, from the media’s point of view, could even be reused one last time if the police managed to catch the perpetrator.

From trainee police officer Linda Wallin, 20. To the Linda murder. To the Linda Man, at the end of the judicial sequence of events.

Symbols of what? What was there that united them, other than the manner in which they had been murdered, described in the media and finally dispatched to the relative amnesia of Swedish criminal history? Obviously, it couldn’t be a simple question regardless of gender. After all, men’s names were never used as prefixes to the word ‘murder’, and it made no difference whether the motives were sexual or merely unknown. Being a human being evidently wasn’t enough. You had to be a woman, but simultaneously you couldn’t be just any woman.

You had to be a woman of a certain age. The youngest of them might have been just five years old when she was raped and strangled, but with the exception of a dozen women working as prostitutes none of the others had been older than forty. The perpetrators’ motives and methods provided no exhaustive explanation either. The number of women murdered during the same period because the perpetrators had a sexual motive, or where various things they had done to their victims suggested that was their motivation, was close to five hundred.

Lisa Mattei had asked the obvious follow-up question that would occur to every intelligent human being and female police officer. What was it that led the media to reject sixty per cent of the women who had been murdered for sexual reasons?

Many of them had been far too old. The eldest was actually over ninety when she was raped and beaten to death with the flat side of an ordinary axe. Many of them had lived in social circumstances that had been far too wretched. Had been with men who were far too socially excluded. Many of them had been murdered by perpetrators who had been arrested immediately or shortly after the murder, and their story wasn’t good enough from a purely dramaturgical perspective.

In short, and in summary, they had lacked media value in the simple economic sense of selling more papers. The pictures weren’t attractive enough. The text wasn’t exciting enough. Their stories were too banal. They simply weren’t good enough.

For some reason Lisa Mattei had chosen to dedicate her dissertation to almost two hundred women who were listed in Swedish alphabetical order, from A to Å, by their first name. The first was called Anna, the same Anna as in the Anna murder, and the last was called Åsa, the same Åsa as in the Åsa murder.

But my name is Lisa, Lisa as in Lisa Mattei, Lisa Mattei thought as she typed the last letter on her computer. I am thirty-two years old, I am a woman, a detective inspector, and soon a PhD.