A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

mysterious Dane who was skilled in yoga. In 1929, he claimed, he had been to Copenhagen and
joined an occult group run by the Dane. On his return to Stockholm he had started his own magic
circle, gathering together all kinds of people and making them swear an oath of obedience and
secrecy.
The position of cult-leader seems to have given Thurneman a taste of the kind of power he had
always wanted. He used hypnosis to seduce under-age girls, and then - according to his confession -
disposed of them through the white slave trade. Other gang members were also subjected to
hypnosis and ‘occult training’ (whatever that meant). Thurneman was bisexual, and became closely
involved with another gang member who was a lover as well as a close friend. When this man got
into financial difficulties, Thurneman became worried in case he divulged their relationship -
which, in 1930, was still a criminal offence. He claimed that, by means of hypnotic suggestion over
the course of a week, he induced the man to commit suicide. In 1934, he placed another member of
the gang in a deep trance and injected a dose of fatal poison.
Thurneman’s aim was to make himself a millionaire and then leave for South America. The two
Sala murders - of Axel Kjellberg and Tilda Blomqvist - brought in large sums of money. But the
‘big job’ he was planning was the robbery of a bank housed in the same building as the Stockholm
Central Post Office. The gang had stolen large quantities of dynamite - thirty-six kilos - and the
plan was to blow up the post office with dynamite and rob the bank in the chaos that followed.
Thurneman had also become involved in drug smuggling.
Thurneman was brought to trial in July 1936, together with Hedstrom and three accomplices who
had helped in the killing of Eriksson and Petterson. All five were sentenced to life imprisonment;
but after six months in prison, Thurneman slipped into unmistakable insanity and was transferred to
a criminal mental asylum.
The Thurneman case throws a powerful light into the innermost recesses of the psychology of the
self-esteem killer. He was the kind of criminal that Charles Manson and Ian Brady would have
liked to be. His dominance over his ‘family’ was complete. Men accepted him as their
unquestioned leader; women submitted to him and were discarded into prostitution. His life was a
power-fantasy come true. He was indifferent to all human feeling. When his closest friend became
a potential danger, he was induced to commit suicide; when a gang-member’s loyalty became
suspect, he was killed with an injection like a sick dog. When the gang committed robbery,
witnesses were simply destroyed, to eliminate all possibility of later recognition and identification.
(Thurneman must have reflected with bitter irony that it was Hedstrom’s failure to observe this rule
that led to discovery.) Thurneman had found his own way to the ‘heroic’, to a feeling of
uniqueness; by the age of twenty-eight he had achieved his sense of ‘primary value’.
But why, if he was such a remarkable individual, did he choose crime? No doubt some deep
resentment, some humiliation dating from childhood, played its part. Yet we can discern another
reason. As a means of achieving uniqueness, crime can guarantee success. Thurneman might have
aimed for ‘primacy’ in the medical field; he might have set himself up as a guru, a teacher of occult
philosophy; he might have attempted to find self-expression through writing. But then, each of
these possibilities carries a high risk of failure and demands an exhausting outlay of energy and
time. It is far easier to commit a successful crime than to launch a successful theory or write a
successful book. All this means that the ‘master criminal’ can achieve his sense of uniqueness at a
fairly low cost. Society has refused to recognise his uniqueness; it has insisted on treating him as if
he were just like everybody else. By committing a crime that makes headlines, he is administering a