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The Murder of Olof Palme
54 Plays5 years ago
Attempting once again to get the podcast back on track to a mere thirty minutes, Josh and M discuss the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and the various conspiracy theories as to why it has never been solved.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Podcast Anniversary Celebration
00:00:00
Speaker
Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday, dear podcast. Happy birthday to us. We are now five
When Should Kids Start School?
00:00:15
Speaker
years old. It's time for us to start school. Well, not necessarily. You don't have to start school in this country until the age of six. And as someone who is a trained primary school teacher, I endorse that particular practice.
00:00:28
Speaker
Okay, well, we still should be thinking about what sort of school to send our podcast to, something sort of a state school? Well,
Diversifying Podcast Content
00:00:35
Speaker
obviously, we don't want to raise a libertarian podcast. Yeah, some more sort of inner city. Well, we do want the podcast to mingle with a diverse set of other podcasts. Yes, we want our podcast to have friends. Just like us. Well, like we used to. So alone. So lonely. I need a hug. Me too. Me too.
Format Changes: Less News
00:01:07
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting next to me, Dr. M.R. Extenteth. Five years. Five glorious years. Technically, it was five years, like two weeks ago, when we had the pre-recorded news article episodes going, which was just an unfortunate coincidence. To quote Douglas Adams, time is an illusion. Podcast time double SS. Something like that, yes.
00:01:45
Speaker
Now, I'd like to say it's because of our five-year anniversary that we are considering a new format for the podcast. But that is completely... It's absolutely live. Just happened to think of it at the same time. Nevertheless, we are thinking of a slight mix-up to the formatting here. We are. We are going to change the way the news works. Here's a new news paradigm for a new podcast of the year.
Shorter Episode Strategy
00:02:10
Speaker
So the idea is we are only going to be doing news updates now once a month.
00:02:15
Speaker
So you're going to get three weeks of content and then a laid-back discussion of the news. Going to mix things up a bit. Yes. So if you don't like the news bits and always skip through them to get to the main body of the episode, then you'll like three episodes out of four a month and you can just skip the news one. And if you really like the news ones, then maybe you can skip the other three and just get your news fix once a month.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well of course, patrons are going to find out about the news more frequently because we will still be talking about news items and recent events to our patrons every week. So they either suffer or get the glory of news on a weekly basis. Lucky slash poor them.
00:02:58
Speaker
So with that in mind, of course, one of the implications of that is that episodes are probably going to be a bit shorter, which I think is a good thing. Yeah, I think so. There seems to be the way of podcasts. Lengths just creep up and up and up. We've tried pretty much to try to get this to be a half hour podcast. It worked for a while. I think our very first episodes came in under half an hour.
00:03:19
Speaker
And then about in year three, we managed to a bit of half hour episode in for a while. And in parts, because we have absolutely no timing devices, we are modern people with a lot of technological support, and yet we've never actually set up a kind of timer to work out how long the podcast is running. It would be really, really easy to do, but we're very lazy. It's very, very lazy.
00:03:44
Speaker
Nevertheless, so that means that today's topic, which is a fine and interesting topic, I think you'll agree, is all that we're going to be talking about this week. So maybe we should get into that right now. Indeed, let's not go to the news.
00:04:03
Speaker
So this episode, we take you through time, back to the year 1980, checks Notes 6. And to
Olof Palme's Assassination Mystery
00:04:10
Speaker
the exotic locale of Stockholm, Sweden. Sweden. Yes, because this week we're going to be talking about the murder of the Swedish president, Ulif Palma. I hadn't actually heard of this before.
00:04:23
Speaker
So I know the story from the Fourteen Times, so there's a scholar who writes for the Fourteen Times, Jan Bodenstern, although it may be Bodenstern, and he's written quite a lot on the assassination or murder, depending on how you want to pass this, of Uluf Parma.
00:04:43
Speaker
And so I've kind of always been aware of the kind of conspiracy theories that circle around the death of a Swedish Prime Minister. An unsolved case. Possibly...
00:04:55
Speaker
the biggest police investigation in all human history. Quite possibly. And that the Swedes actually changed their law to remove the statute of limitations around this particular case so they can continue investigating it to this present day. As of 2016, they had produced 700,000 pages of investigative notes
00:05:21
Speaker
And the cost of the investigation currently is about 350 Swedish krona, which is something like 61 million US dollars or something of that type. It's a vast investigation that's been going on for a while and they still don't know who killed their Prime Minister.
00:05:42
Speaker
Now, yeah, I mean, my wife asked me, so what are you going to be talking about this week? And I said, oh, the Swedish prime minister was assassinated in 1984, apparently. And she's like, oh, right. They never found the guy, did they? So she's less ignorant than I am. And it does seem strange they hadn't heard of this because it is the assassination of a head of state.
00:06:03
Speaker
It's the European JFK, basically. Yeah, basically. Uluf Palma was a very popular, if you were on the left, and very unpopular if you're on the right, prime minister. He was, you know, very... inspired strong feelings either way.
00:06:20
Speaker
So, I mean, the facts of it are that he was walking home from the movies late at night in February of 1986 on the streets of Stockholm, Sweden. Somebody walked up behind him, shot him at point blank range, fired a shot at his wife, Lesbit Palma, but missed her, I believe, and then ran and was never seen again.
00:06:40
Speaker
And over the years there have been numerous theories about who it was and why and how and what have you. And numerous investigations as well. Numerous investigations and yet, as of today, nobody actually knows who did it. They do not. No. Probably
Early Investigations and Scandals
00:06:57
Speaker
should have should have waited until you'd finished. You're full of... No, all you should shock me as I spat through the hour. Actually, I should have said something a bit more surprising. And I know who killed him. Bum, bum, bum.
00:07:08
Speaker
But yes, so unlike the JFK case where they came up with a culprit fairly quickly, whether or not you agree with the official theory, and life moved on, this is sort of an obsession to this very day. And while there have been numerous police investigations, of course, there have also been numerous amateur, civilian, I suppose you'd say, investigations, which have led to a number of theories.
00:07:30
Speaker
and also political scandals. But we'll get into that in just a minute. Let's talk about the person who was initially arrested for the murder. This would be Victor Gunnison. That's the one. Victor Gunnison. There are so many. So yeah, straight away, actually, it was him and then it was the PPK.
00:07:53
Speaker
investigation wasn't it? Yeah. So Victor Gunnison, he was arrested for the murder basically because of who he had ties to and I'm not aware of there being any... Well he was basically a usual suspect so he was an extreme right-winger with professed... profeshed?
00:08:16
Speaker
professed antipathy towards Olof Palmer. When they recited him they found a lot of pamphlets against the social democrats and Palmer in his flat and so he was basically the most likely suspect because he was the most notable hater of the prime minister at the time.
00:08:37
Speaker
Yes, now, because we should, as I said, Uluf Palm, very sort of polarizing figure. He had led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 until he died in 86. He'd been Prime Minister from 69 to 72. And then when the Social Democratic Party got back in in 82, he was the Prime Minister from then until his death. He was very outspoken on all the issues of the day, from a very left wing perspective. And also a bit of a TV celebrity as well.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, he was kind of Sweden's first political celebrity. He was there, Jacinda, I guess. He was there, JFK, really, right down to the assassination. So because of his fairly outspoken stance as he was anti-Vietnam War, very strong anti-apartheid, we'll see more of that later. So all the polarizing issues of the day, he was very firmly on the left side of them, which meant people on the right, lots of people on the right, really, really didn't like him. No, they didn't.
00:09:34
Speaker
So it's not surprising that you could find one person with very strong anti-palma views. I'm sure you probably could have found quite a few. They picked up Victor Gunnison for being one of the usual suspects, but nothing became of that because there was basically no evidence at all. Yes, I mean it was all circumstantial. You don't like the Prime Minister, do you? No, I do not. The Prime Minister is dead.
00:09:59
Speaker
Good. Well, episode factor, you must have killed him. And the prosecutors, where there isn't actually enough of a case here, just because someone hates the Prime Minister, doesn't necessarily mean they go around shooting them. No. I mean, sometimes it does, but sometimes it also doesn't. So the first big investigation was done by a man called Hans Holner, who was Chief of the Swedish National Security Service.
00:10:22
Speaker
Or Sappo. Or Sappo, yes, with umlauts over the A. So he went straight for the Kurdistan Workers Party, otherwise known as the PPK. And again, this was kind of a case of a usual suspect sort of thing. As far as I could tell, there was no evidence against them initially.
00:10:43
Speaker
And yet he was convinced they were the ones responsible and spent over a year looking for evidence that they were responsible and never really found any. There were raids, there were arrests and so on, but nothing ever turned up any evidence linking PPK to the assassination.
00:10:58
Speaker
And it seemed that it really was a case that Homer, who was a member of the party, so he was a social democrat, was convinced that the murder had to have been committed by a foreign power rather than it being a case of a domestic act of terror. So he refused to even look into the possibility
00:11:23
Speaker
that it was someone who was Swedish who had committed the murder. He immediately went for Kurdistanis as kind of the other in Stockholm at the time. So he was very politically motivated to avoid any investigation into a Swedish connection because he was convinced it had to come from outside the system.
00:11:47
Speaker
And so after a year and after more than a year and nothing happening, he basically he was he was kind of in disgrace at this point. The papers and everything were against him. I mean, he caused issues. So he claimed that Palmer had been shot with a Smith and Wesson .357 for no particularly good reason, but because he kept on insisting this was the murder weapon that was used, even brandished
00:12:14
Speaker
a replica of the gun at a press conference, this focused police attention on this particular weapon, which then meant that other investigations actually weren't undertaken. So after he was booted off, then there were investigations of
Suspects and Trials
00:12:30
Speaker
his investigation, multiple investigations of his investigation. He would then go on to be involved in other scandals
00:12:38
Speaker
And one which relates to the investigation of the farmer. He put sort of privately on his own steam, continued investigation, investigating the PPK angle and ended up getting done. What was he doing? Was he importing listening devices or placing them? He was
00:12:58
Speaker
one of the two. But yeah, he got involved in what's called the Ebb Karlsson Affair, which was a major scandal in Sweden in the late 80s, where it turned out that Ebb Karlsson, a journalist, publisher and former secretary of the Swedish government, was carrying out an independent and illegal investigation into the assassination of Parma, which was secretly supported by the then Minister for Justice Anna Greta
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, so the whole thing was embarrassing just for the government all round. It sort of showed up a real old boys network kind of thing, and he was there in the middle of it. So Eber Carlson had also concluded that Olof Palmer had been assassinated by the PKK. He thought that the Secret Service, the Sarpaw, could have prevented the murder by tapping their phones.
00:13:56
Speaker
And what did he do, checking the notes, he argued that PKK had been ordered to assassinate Palma by the Iranian government at a meeting at Damascus, so then the Iranians come into it as well. But again, just more trying to make the evidence fit a theory. I mean, at least with the Ibkaelson affair, we kind of had a rationale as to why the assassination may have occurred. If you take it, the murder was a politically motivated assassination.
00:14:21
Speaker
because the claim was that in 1985 Palmer had stopped the Iranians from acquiring a Swedish air defense missile system and thus the Iranians were annoyed so they then employed Kurdistanis to then enact revenge upon the Swedes by killing off their prime minister.
00:14:45
Speaker
And so yeah, Holmer got in trouble for basically breaking the law by trying to set up his own wiretaps and so on during an investigation that was completely unofficial and off the books. Yeah, it was off the books, but being supported by the government in a way which was then embarrassing when it came out. For all concerns. So that was that. Next suspect was a man called Christia Peterson. And he was
00:15:11
Speaker
convicted of the murder after being identified by Lisbet Palma? Yes, so in 1989, so three years later now, this man was convicted of the murder of Ullif Palma. But then his conviction was overturned on appeal. The prosecution didn't really come up with a motive. They didn't have the murder weapon at all, this .357 or whatever it supposedly was.
00:15:38
Speaker
And the whole reliability of him being picked out of a lineup was brought into question. And I think these days, lineups, while they're still used, I believe, are considered to be basically unreliable and a waste of everyone's time. And also we do lineups in a very different way from what we did in the 80s, because in the 80s you took five people, say, who looked completely unlike each other.
00:16:00
Speaker
and then paraded the eyewitness in front of them and kind of gave them nudges to identify the right person. What's now the science of lineups is make everyone look as identical as possible, make sure the eyewitness can't be seen by the suspects, and also randomize it. So in some situations you might do several lineups in a row,
00:16:21
Speaker
And only one of them will have the suspect in order to make sure that the person is really, really sure the person they're pointing at is the person they thought they saw. Peterson went on to be, he was a bit of an interesting character. I mean, again, he was kind of a usual suspect as well. He was a known criminal, he was an alcoholic, he was just a general bad sort.
00:16:46
Speaker
And he sort of fitted nicely for the bit. So if it was going to be a local and not some foreign influence, at least it was a disreputable local as it was a criminal. Not a decent Swede. But no, so his conviction was overturned. He was awarded $50,000 in compensation.
Conspiracy Theories Explored
00:17:07
Speaker
I don't know whether that's 50,000 US or 50,000 Swedish chrono. I'm assuming it must be 50,000 US. So he and he sort of then capitalized on his fame slash notoriety by claiming to have killed Olof Parlour. Yeah, he did make claims that he had done it, but it was usually thought that he was just sort of, you know, trying to get attention, get a bit of money from TV interviews, that sort of thing. I mean, to the point where the police went back to the court and said, we want to prosecute this person again. And Supreme Court went
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, the new evidence isn't particularly compelling. It looks like he's just saying things to get attention. Ooh, so he died in 2004. But on just before or on his deathbed, he contacted the son of Olof Parma, Martin, and claimed he had a big story to tell. And Martin's response was, look, I'm only willing to talk to you if you admit to killing my father. And the meeting did not occur.
00:18:06
Speaker
before Peterson's death. There was a documentary a couple of years later where some of his associates claimed that he had confessed to them, that he had killed the Prime Minister, although it was a case of mistaken identity. He mistook him for a drug dealer who happened to be wearing similar clothing.
00:18:26
Speaker
and walked that particular path at night. And walked that route, yeah. And so the whole thing was just a mistake. And so that, I believe, was the last sort of court case. But since then, as we say, there have been numerous investigations, both official and unofficial, and numerous, numerous theories. Now, I mean, it's one of those cases kind of like the JFK murder where
00:18:52
Speaker
If anyone you can name has been blamed for the murder, basically, you'll be able to find a conspiracy theorist who thinks it was lizard people and masons and UFOs and so on. All at the same time. But some of the more concrete, I suppose, theories are still nevertheless very, very wide ranging. South Africa comes up a bit.
00:19:15
Speaker
Well, it was an exciting time in South Africa, what with apartheid and all. Yes, as we said before, Palma himself was very vocal, very anti-apartheid. Now South Africa apparently had this...
00:19:30
Speaker
Operation Long Reach, which was supposedly a top secret program to neutralise opposition to apartheid around the world, and the claim was that Palmer's assassination was part of this operation, that he was done in by South African
00:19:48
Speaker
Either by South African agents directly or by people set up by South African agents. People funded by operation, long range. And this was the favoured theory of one Stig Lassen. Yeah, so the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in that series of books was investigating, was planning on writing a book about the power of assassination. It was a investigative journalist before he became a novelist.
00:20:12
Speaker
Unfortunately, he died before he could finish that book, but his theory that he was working on was that it was an assassination, which was a collaboration between Operation Longreach and local right-wing extremists in Sweden. So that's one. Again, I don't know what evidence they're basing it on other than allegations from... In 1996, apparently, there was one guy who was a commander
00:20:40
Speaker
of a South African police hit squad who claimed that they were responsible, but that's the only evidence I've read about for being just the word of one person. And of course this is one of the odd things you get with events of this particular type, which is that
00:20:58
Speaker
you can see this a lot with JFK. People often on their deathbed making a shocking revelation they were involved in the assassination of JFK and of course the problem is given the number of shocking revelations about who was involved in this
00:21:15
Speaker
assassination of JFK, either you've got a really over-determined assassination of JFK, where lots and lots of very disparate groups acting independently all got together on one day and accidentally murdered him multiple times, or you have people on their deathbed going, yeah, I've got a theory about something, I'm going to throw a stone on the lake and see what happens. I know when I die, on my deathbed, I'm going to admit to a lot of things I never did.
00:21:44
Speaker
I think you should. You should kill me now so I can make my deathbed assassination. My deathbed assassination is as you kill me, I'll kill you at the same time. Ah, clever. I know, it's very clever. Revelation. Deathbed revelation. We've got the rest of the episode to record though, so maybe save it till later. Maybe that can be the bonus content, just our dying gurgles as we slow down each other. Josh, I do want to point out, you're dying right now. Well, yes we all are.
00:22:11
Speaker
I mean, you're literally dying right now. Yeah, we all are. We are literally dying one second at a time. Sorry for the bleak nihilist existentialism there, but that's the truth. Bye. I actually, in looking around, I saw one YouTube video about the South African theory by an author who claimed that
00:22:32
Speaker
Having published this book, he had a stranger knock on his door at one point and asked to use the bathroom, and then later that day this author suddenly fell violently ill and went to hospital and claimed to have been poisoned, which he reckoned was because he was telling the truth about the South African theory. But the South African theory is not the only theory.
00:22:53
Speaker
No it's not. There's also the theory that he was murdered over a dodgy arms deal between the Swedish arms firm Bofors and the country of India. So the story there goes that he had initially backed the deal but wasn't aware that Bofors had been involved in a bit of dodgy dealing behind the scenes. They'd been paying bribes to someone or other to make the deal happen.
00:23:17
Speaker
and supposedly just that morning he'd been talking with some ambassador or other who revealed to him the dodginess of the deal and so therefore had motive to kill, to now kill this deal which he had previously backed. So again this is like, that's a motive I suppose to have him assassinated but I don't know if the theory goes any further than that. No, as far as I'm aware the deal never went through which meant that even if it was the reason for the murder-slash-assassination
00:23:47
Speaker
didn't actually, it wasn't particularly effective. No, no. Although that being said, conspiracies don't have to be effective for a coup. That's true. That's true. So another theory, he was killed by a Chilean fascist by the name of Roberto Tiam. And this fellow didn't like the fact that Palma gave asylum to leftist Chileans following the coup in 1973. So again, a position that Palma had
00:24:13
Speaker
taken a strong stand on, which made him enemies. But again, motive, not much more than that as far as I can tell. Some people claim the Yugoslavian secret surface killed him for reasons. And then the CIA and propaganda duet, Peter. We talked about them before, when do we talk about them? Was it papal murders?
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah. So they're supposedly involved in papal deaths. Apparently they've been linked to the death of the Swedish Prime Minister. Yes, and the rationale behind this is, it gets a little complicated quite quickly. So apparently, P2's leader, Lucio Galli, sent a telegram to one Philip Garano, who now, I would say, Philip Garano is a former Catholic priest,
00:25:03
Speaker
turned restaurateur in New York, turned Republican. So, Lucio sent a telegram to Philip saying, the Swedish tree will be fouled, and then, Parma died. Coincidence? Quite possibly. I don't know. It's, yeah, another spooky, spooky thing, but because it's Freemasons and- And P2. Wacky P2 stuff, yep.
00:25:31
Speaker
People lapped that up. Now, another interesting one. The claim that he was murdered by right-wing extremist police officers in Sweden themselves. And this sort of gets to the cock-up versus conspiracy thing, because we didn't say initially, but not only was Hans Holmer's investigation, perhaps not up to snuff,
00:25:52
Speaker
In the immediate hours following the murder, the police, the very initial steps, were not done particularly competently. No, they didn't do a particularly good job of containing the crime scene.
00:26:07
Speaker
I think they made it too small, for one thing. Yeah, which meant that salient evidence was found by the public after the fact, including a bullet casing that was found several days later, which they went, oh, that's probably one of the casings from the bullets that shot the Prime Minister. If only we'd made our circle larger.
00:26:26
Speaker
So, yeah, so there was some suggestion that maybe the police investigation wasn't incompetent. But was deliberately designed to make sure the truth wouldn't come out. Yeah, so that was, again,
00:26:42
Speaker
fairly sort of circumstantial. I don't believe this theory comes up with any evidence beyond the fact that, you know, the right-wing elements of the police didn't like him because right-wingers didn't like him and the investigation wasn't conducted well and then just sort of waggling their eyebrows and saying join the dots people. And I mean there is a particular thing which is always interesting with event of this particular type so
00:27:05
Speaker
It's actually fairly uncommon for leaders of sovereign states to be murdered. Yes, what happens doesn't happen often. No. So you have this kind of weird situation where when an event of this particular kind occurs, people panic because it's a major event and people don't really want to carry the can for any disaster, which means it often
00:27:28
Speaker
things go badly as a kind of matter of fact because people are going, no, no, I do not want to be held responsible for this going wrong. So you deal with it, I'll step to one side, which means you end up getting investigations which initially actually might look worse than a standard murder investigation because people are absolutely petrified of making things go afoul.
00:27:53
Speaker
And I believe in 2013 there was a series called Death of a Pilgrim, which I assume is your Scandinoire thriller, one of those. I've seen it, have you? So I was in Norway and it was New Year's and we were looking for things to watch on Norwegian Netflix which had English subtitles because Norway, they speak Norwegian there.
00:28:15
Speaker
It's amazing how many local Scandi drummers have no English subtitles on Norwegian Netflix. So we're flicking through trying to find something which I can watch in a family of people that otherwise speak Norwegian. And so we find this series called Death of a Pilgrim which is a 2013 conspiracy thriller set in Stockholm.
00:28:37
Speaker
where a cold case squad re-investigate the murder of Olaf Palmer and shockingly enough solve the crime.
00:28:49
Speaker
Whilst we were watching it, one of the people's go, but they never did solve that. How were they? In case of, no, this is a fictional solving of a case of a major event in Swedish history in which people are descendants of Olof and Lisbitt Palmer, who are still alive,
00:29:10
Speaker
and they're going on and out it was quite definitely corrupt police officers in the Swedish police force yes so and that uh fictional reenactment they solved the case it hasn't happened yet though yeah it was really weird to watch because you're getting to the final episode going they can't solve the case i mean it's an unsolved murder you can't suddenly fictionalize a
00:29:34
Speaker
No, they're doing it. They've solved the crime. They did an inglorious bastards. Yeah, basically. Just sort of spun off a new history timeline. And so then we come to the last theory in our list, which is quite an interesting one.
Stig Engstrom: The Opportunistic Murderer?
00:29:49
Speaker
This is the claim that he was murdered by a man called Stig Engstrom.
00:29:52
Speaker
Now, Mr. Ingström, he was one of the initial eyewitnesses to the murder. He claims he saw it happen and was first on the scene, tried to resuscitate Prime Minister Palmer and gave statements to the police. But some people think rather than be, he was very much the first on the scene because he was the actual murderer. And then he was there before it was a crime scene.
00:30:19
Speaker
Now again, he committed suicide in 2000, so he's not around to be questioned anymore. But the case against him is basically some people who saw the killer running away. I believe where it was, there was like a raised street level or something, so the killer fired off two shots and then immediately shot up, not shots, perhaps the wrong word,
00:30:42
Speaker
ran up a set of stairs to an elevated thing and sort of disappeared from sight of anyone who was down on the low level where the street was. People who saw the fleeing killer reckon that the killer looked a bit like Engstrom. But also noted that they didn't see Engstrom at the scene when he claimed to be there. As in when the police turned up they're going, Engstrom who claims to have been at the scene informing police officers about things, we don't remember seeing him there as if maybe he had
00:31:11
Speaker
fled the scene before the police arrived. So something seems a little... there were claims that his testimony was a little bit dodgy. He apparently owned a gun. He worked just a short distance away from where the Palmas had been walking. That's why he was there at the time.
00:31:33
Speaker
and he was apparently a very right-wing and hated Prime Minister Palma. He also lied about his movements that particular night, which is probably not a wise thing to do during a police investigation of the Swedish Prime Minister. I think what makes this case interesting is that it takes the whole idea away of it being some sort of planned
00:31:55
Speaker
assassination to it being a crime of opportunity. He hated the sky, suddenly happened to see an opportunity to kill him and hopefully get away with it and just jumped at the chance. One thing which some people have made much of is the fact that Palmer and his wife were walking home from going to the movies. That was their movements that evening. They'd gone to a film, they were walking home when the shooting happened. Apparently
00:32:21
Speaker
they had only decided to go to the movie at the very last minute. He, from the sounds of things, he sort of got home from work, whatever, and his family was having a conversation about, hey, should we go out to the movies tonight? And then, you know, they said, oh, yeah, why not? Let's go do that. So it's not like there was any way people could have really known in advance unless they were sort of tailing him and staking him out, and he was under some sort of heavy surveillance.
00:32:49
Speaker
people couldn't have known that that was where he was going to be that night, which seemed to sort of lend a little bit of credence towards it being a crime of opportunity. Yes, I mean, so if it was a premeditated crime, it was a premeditated crime of him being surveilled and looking for an opportunity, as opposed to in this case which would be going, well,
00:33:10
Speaker
actually he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and a person who hated him was there with a gun. So I mean it does seem a fear that you'd have to really hate someone to run out and kill them just because you happen to see the chance. Unless of course he saw them going to the theatre and went well they're going to be there for two and a half hours so I can just go get my gun.
00:33:31
Speaker
Even then, killing a Prime Minister, that's not a small thing for someone to hate the guy that much that he would run out into the street and shoot him and then assume he could just run off and not... Josh, someone today set themselves on fire on the White House lawn. People do strange things. People do strange things. Now I can't point it out, this was investigated at the time by the police and they didn't see any merit to this particular claim that he was the assassin.
00:34:01
Speaker
No, but it's an interesting theory nonetheless. It is. It's interesting to see that among all these theories, you have ideas that maybe, in the Peterson case, maybe it was an accident. He was mistaken for someone else. Maybe it was a crime of opportunity. On the other hand, maybe it was organized assassination carried out by members of a foreign state. There's a whole range of conspiracies there. I guess the only question that remains is, why are we talking about this thing now when it happened 30 years ago?
00:34:31
Speaker
New evidence Joshua, new evidence and this once again speaks to how badly the crime scene was contained at the time because now it turns out a walkie talkie was found in the vicinity of Palmer's murdered body by a member of the public and this has only come to light now and that response is walkie talkie? I mean that that would indicate that if the walkie talkie belonged to the murderer
00:35:01
Speaker
then they were probably getting instructions from someone which really does suggest an organised hit and a conspiracy.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah, but it just seems such a strange thing. How could it be 30 years later someone, this bit of evidence turns up, what had it been doing in the meantime? And 30 years on, how could you even tell with any sort of reliability at all that it was actually fair? You'd be able to, okay, obviously it's a 30-year-old walkie-talkie from the make and the model and the what have you.
00:35:35
Speaker
but I don't see how it could, you know, how you could get anything reliable. They said they're going to be testing it for DNA to see if there's any trace of whoever might have been using it still on it, but then surely there could also be traces of whoever's handled it in the last 30 years. So I don't know. So I mean, it seems like...
00:35:53
Speaker
You know, it's a case that has been an almost national obsession, I suppose, in Sweden. People really, really, really want to have it solved, but every year that goes by, it seems less likely that that's ever going to happen. What with, you know, subjects dying on account of the passage of time. I mean, eventually Sweden will be wiped off the map just by geology. But even then, the investigation will still be open.
00:36:20
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, it's like, it reminds me of like the, I don't know, the Madeleine McCann disappearance, where we keep having headlines here in New Zealand, even all new evidence in the McCann case. And it's like, well, it's a tragedy, sure, but why after all this time are we obsess? I mean, I suppose the Madeleine McCann one, it's just, it is, it sounds callous to say, just one little girl, whereas the Palmer case, it's certainly, it's the prime minister of a country. That is a bigger deal. I mean, there is still the idea of
00:36:50
Speaker
I mean, because we've got this weird thing going on in this country at the moment, which is the reentry into into the pipeline, which was a mining disaster, which is a decade ago now, something quite some time ago, it was a major mine fire, leading to loss of life and the mind being basically interned. And the
00:37:14
Speaker
Spouses and parents of the miners who died in that tragedy have been spending a lot of time and effort asking the government of the day to reopen the mine so they can go into the mine and either find out what happened or bring the bodies out.
00:37:33
Speaker
And it is one of those things where if you're not personally attached to the miners, you end up going, why are we spending so much time and effort on this particular issue? And yet for some people, it's important.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, and the fact that it's almost sort of an election issue. I mean, that was one of the things... The current government and New Zealand first, which is actually part of the government. Coalition. Yeah. So Labour and New Zealand first campaigned on. They would reopen the mine because the previous government, the national government was going, no, it's a health and safety risk. We can't do it.
00:38:12
Speaker
But anyway, it is that sort of thing, but we're not here to talk about Pike River, we're here to talk about the murder of Uluf Palmer, and yet I think we've about finished talking about the murder
Murder or Assassination?
00:38:22
Speaker
of Palmer. We have, I think, finished talking about the murder or assassination. And left, I mean, that's the big thing here. So if it's a murder,
00:38:31
Speaker
then it may not be conspiratorial, though maybe there's a cover-up involved here to try and prevent people from finding out who actually committed the crime, especially if it turned out to be a police officer. If it's an assassination, then it's a conspiracy for the sheer fact that it's an organised hit.
00:38:48
Speaker
And then there's the question as to whether the investigations quite deliberately went off to try and stop people from finding out about these things. So one thing we kind of didn't mention is that one of the criticism of the Hans Holmer investigation into the death of Olof Palmer is the notion that by focusing so squarely on PKK
00:39:11
Speaker
and not looking at a domestic link, maybe that was designed to take the investigation in a particular direction to protect people in the party from being investigated either for the murder
00:39:26
Speaker
or being investigated for other things surrounding the murder at the time. Because, of course, it might not be a cover-up of who did it, but it might be a cover-up of other scandals that might emerge if a proper investigation was ever engaged in. So there you have it, an interesting case. I'm glad I found out about it, actually. It was quite interesting to read up on.
Episode Wrap-up and Teasers
00:39:50
Speaker
And I think that brings us to the end of our new format, slightly more truncated episode.
00:39:55
Speaker
But for patrons, there's more to come because we have an update on the person who assaulted James Shaw, although it's a very, very short update. Actually, I can give the update now, but I can let you hold on. We're going to be talking about whether space aliens are interbreeding with humans. Fingers crossed. And why?
00:40:14
Speaker
We'll probably talk a little bit about the Treasury leak that occurred just a few days ago in our own fair country. And then a little return to a discussion of someone we've talked about in the past, Naomi Wolf. That's a deep cut. It is a very long time since we talked about it. And her issue with the notion of death recorded in British law.
00:40:38
Speaker
So, if you're one of our patrons, A, thank you, B, stick around for that. If you're not one of our patrons, thank you for listening anyway. And we'll see you next week for another shorter episode with no news. But still packed with jam. Oh yes.
00:41:01
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:42:02
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh, December was a night.