Assassination of Olof Palme - Leads From The Crime Scene

Leads From The Crime Scene

The only forensic leads left by the assassin were two bullets of the type Winchester-Western .357 Magnum. Both bullets corresponded to the lead fragments found in the clothing of Olof and Lisbet Palme. The singularly most used weapon for this type of ammunition is the Smith & Wesson .357, which is why great efforts have been made to try to locate the murder weapon. Due to the weapon being a revolver (which doesn't eject spent casings) there were no cases to recover for ballistic examination - only the two bullets recovered from the victims' bodies.

Throughout the investigation, Swedish police have test-fired approximately 500 Magnum revolvers. The investigation has placed particular emphasis on tracking down the ten Magnum revolvers reported stolen at the time of the murder. Out of these all have been located except the Sucksdorff revolver, a weapon stolen from the Stockholm home of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff in 1977. The person who stole the weapon was a friend of drug dealer Sigge Cedergren, who claimed on his deathbed that he had lent a gun of the same type to Christer Pettersson two months prior to the assassination.

Another weapon that has figured prominently in the investigation is the so called Mockfjärd gun. This weapon, a revolver of the type Smith & Wesson Model 28 ("Highway Patrolman") with .357 Magnum caliber, was first purchased legally by a civilian in the northern Swedish city of Luleå. The gun along with 91 metal piercing bullets was stolen in a burglary in Haparanda in 1983 and is believed to have been used in the robbery of a post office in Mockfjärd, Dalarna that same year. A lead isotope analysis of a bullet fired during the robbery confirmed it to have the same isotopic composition as the bullets retrieved from the assassination crime scene, verifying that the bullets were manufactured at the same time. In the autumn of 2006, Swedish police acting on a tip communicated to the Expressen newspaper retrieved a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver from a lake in Dalarna. The gun was determined to be the same one used in the post office robbery in Mockfjärd, confirmed by the gun's serial number. The gun was transferred to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science in Linköping for further analysis. However, the laboratory concluded in May 2007 that tests on the gun could not confirm that it was used in the Palme assassination, as it was too rusty.