On a Mistaken Murder

There’s no doubt that Christer Pettersson lived a difficult life filled with the results of mental issues. Born to a middle class Swedish family in a suburb of Stockholm in 1947, Christer had a fairly average childhood. He wanted to be an actor, so he attended a high school that emphasized the performance arts. Unfortunately, and for reasons we still aren’t quite sure about, Christer suffered a head injury. To fast-forward to the end of his sad life, Christer died from a brain injury he suffered as a result of a seizure in 2004. The question is: Did a seizure cause the original brain trauma or did it result from it? We don’t know. What we do know is that this once-promising acting student completely changed personalities after the first head injury. He became sullen, withdrawn, and began taking hard drugs. His family had to separate themselves from him because of his sudden outbursts of anger and sometimes, violence.

Those outbursts became more frequent the older Christer became. In 1970, he stabbed to death another drug user, a man who, like Christer, had taken to living on the streets of the Swedish capital city. The part of the city where these men lived was an area where several film and stage theaters were located. The authorities knew that the area wasn’t safe and that most of the homeless population suffered (and still suffer) from emotional and mental challenges. As a result of his mental issues, Christer received a manslaughter charge and was forced to undergo psychiatric care as a result of the killing. Two years after his conviction, Christer was released. He returned to the theater district and to living on the street. He began a life of petty crimes and burglaries to finance his drug use. The violent episodes continued, and he was in and out of police custody.

Then in 1986, Christer later said he had a dispute with a drug dealer who had cheated him in a drug deal. He vowed revenge and told the man to watch his back. Now, we don’t know if this was the case or not. Christer often imagined that people had wronged him when they didn’t. However, given that the man was a drug dealer and that Christer was a drug user, the likelihood that something bad one way or another had indeed occurred between the two is high. And Christer made good on his promise to get the guy who had wronged him.

He saw the drug dealer and a woman walking on the street at the corner not too far from a movie theater late one night. The couple was holding hands as they walked, and, to hear Christer tell it, this angered him even more for some reason. Taking a gun he had gotten illegally and kept on him for protection on the streets, Christer quickly walked up behind the pair and shot twice. He hit the man in the upper back and only grazed the woman. Christer then jogged off ahead of the couple while bystanders ran to help the victims. Within 30 minutes of the shooting, the man was declared dead. The woman’s injuries were superficial and she made a quick recovery. From some general eyewitness accounts, Christer Pettersson was taken into custody as the prime suspect. However, by that time, there was no gun found on him.

Yet, despite the lack of physical evidence tying him to the murder of the man, Christer was picked out of a ten person lineup by the woman who was also shot. He was convicted of the murder of the man largely based on her testimony. However, upon appeal, the lack of a murder weapon and any physical evidence weighed heavily. Besides, the woman’s ID of Christer in the lineup had been somewhat tainted because the other nine men in the lineup were well-dressed and clean, while Christer was presented as he was picked up from the street–dirty, messy, unshaven, an still a little bit high from having gotten some drugs the night before. As a result, his conviction was reversed on appeal, and he was released.

And, as we saw, Christer died from head trauma suffered when he fell after having a seizure in 2004. Many people still think he was the one who killed that man on the street corner that late night in 1986. We still don’t know for sure, despite some talk that he had confessed to some others that he did the shooting. But it turns out that Christer also said that he was so high that he mistook the man for the drug dealer he had his disagreement with. That means, of course, that the man Christer shot wasn’t the drug dealer at all.

No, the man who was murdered on that street corner that night–maybe by Christer Pettersson–was Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden.

On a Noble Inventor

Immanuel still holds several patents for his inventions despite the fact that he died about 150 years ago. The Swede took his rather large family and moved to St. Petersburg Russia in the late 1830s and found success there working on ideas that still comprise parts of various modern industries. For example, Immanuel created the first rotary lathe that made possible the creation of modern plywood.

In addition to his inventions, Immanuel also created companies that made explosives and various bombs and mines that caught the keen interest of then Czar Nicholas I of Russia. The Czar, engaged in a war with Britain in the Crimea, made Immanuel a wealthy man for a time. But Nicholas died in 1855, and the incoming Czar, Alexander II, ended the Crimean War and severely cut the nation’s military spending. Immanuel’s company went from boom to bust in a very short time. By 1862, the company was in receivership, and the family returned to Sweden after over two decades abroad.

It wasn’t the first time Immanuel had faced economic ruin. That circumstance faced them before when they had gone to Russia in the first place. Now, coming back to Sweden, it felt to Immanuel and his wife that they were right back where they had been, as if the past twenty plus years had been in vain. Add to their increasing despair the fact that one of Immanuel’s eight children, his son, Emil, had died in an explosion at the family factory. It seems that the company had been experimenting with nitroglycerin. Someone grew careless in handling the dangerous material, and Emil lost his life.

When Immanuel died a decade later, the rest of his family rightly mourned him. Here was a man who tried his best to do what he needed to do to take care of and provide for his wife and children. That’s the noble way he wished to be remembered–not as someone who made (and lost) a fortune in the arms business. That mentality of being keenly aware of what your legacy would be–how people would remember you after you’re gone–would be passed down to his children and his children’s children.

It certainly made a large impact on one of Immanuel’s son, a man named Alfred. Alfred would go on to create over 350 patents for inventions, including the creation of dynamite out of nitroglycerin, thus safely handling the very substance that took the life of his brother. And, like his father, Alfred did not want to be know for his inventions regarding warfare and destruction. He wanted his legacy to be a legacy of the celebration of the achievements of mankind, including the making of peace.

That’s why Alfred Nobel used his fortune to create the Nobel Prize.

On a Gardener

Oscar loved rhododendrons. Over the course of his eight decades of life, he became a recognized international expert on them. But, then, he loved cultivating and gardening pretty much anything. That makes sense, to a degree, because he came from Sweden, a place where the growing season is excruciatingly short but, when it does finally come, the days are long and sunny.

Luckily, his family had money, so he could concentrate on what was, for him, more than simply a hobby. He designed and built extensive gardens for not only his family in Sweden but also for other families in other parts of Europe. For someone who was born in the late 1800s, Oscar developed a rather advanced and modern take on gardening, coming to advocate for sustainable agriculture and forward-thinking methods of composting and pollination. Again, because of his family’s money, Oscar was able to travel and learn about gardening from some of the leading experts of his day. One of those experts was an unexpected and rather unusual mentor for Oscar. He was an American, born in Missouri, who researched and taught at a small college in the American south and had made somewhat of a name for himself in the realm of horticulture. Oscar managed to spend almost a month shadowing this researcher and learning his methods. He absorbed the information like a sponge and brought back new techniques to his gardens in Sweden.

As with us all to some degree or another, not everything in Oscar’s life was roses, so to speak. His first wife, also from a wealthy family, died from an infection after a simple surgery. Her unborn child died with her. The couple had other children before that, however, and these motherless kids comforted him in his grief. At a party a few years later, Oscar met another woman, this time from England, and the pair got married. He considered himself extremely fortunate to have met and married two wonderful women. Yet, his grief was not over. His oldest son and namesake died in an airplane crash shortly after World War 2. And his second wife miscarried a daughter. So, Oscar found solace from his grief in his gardening.

For most of his life, Oscar was able to pursue his passion. However, in 1950, at the age of 68, familial obligations changed how he could spend his time. You see, his father, a man named Gustaf, passed away. And that meant that Oscar…Fredrik Wilhelm Olaf Gustav Adolf became King Gustav Adolf VI of Sweden.

Oh, and that mentor who taught at the small college in the United States? Well, much has been made of the vast differences between Oscar and that researcher, but there is no denying that he and George Washington Carver were united by their love of gardening.