Malmö woman jailed for sending partner letters from imaginary rival

"According to the court, there are strong reasons to view the crime seriously," judge Håkan Olaussen said in his ruling, seen by The Local. 

 

He noted that the woman's false accusations led to her boyfriend's childhood friend being put in custody for six days. He also said the defendant had been "fully conscious of what serious consequences her actions had incurred".

 

The woman filed her first police report back in 2016, claiming that someone had rung her persistently from a hidden number, threatening to take her partner away from her. After that, she filed eight further reports about a series of objects and letters left outside the couple’s apartment.

 

A few months later, the woman accused a childhood friend of her partner’s. The friend had recently got back in contact over Facebook and started an online relationship with the man in the couple, which included the exchange of naked pictures. The police arrested this friend, and held her for six days. 

Prosecutor Hans Harding first had suspicions about the authenticity of the letters when he was transcribing them to make them easier to analyze.

 

"I realized, having rewritten several of these letters, that the writer seemed to know too much about the couple," he told The Local.  "Things that they had said to each other during private discussions at home, things that they had been told by their baby’s doctor." 

 

"The writer criticized the man in the couple, saying that he didn’t pay the woman enough respect and that he didn’t show her enough love, and that was very confusing. It didn’t really add up, I thought." 

He arrested the woman a few days later while she was giving a police statement, and the man's childhood friend was immediately released from custody.

 

"Nobody but one half of that couple could have known all the things that were in the letters, so it came down to two people, and it certainly wasn’t the man," Harding said. 

 

The woman had disguised her handwriting, but when police dictated the contents of the letters to her and the childhood friend, she made the same spelling mistakes as had been found in the letters. 

 

Police investigators also found writing paper in the couple’s apartment which matched that on which some of the threatening letters were written. 

 

In addition, when the woman sent photos of the letters to her partner, saying she had discovered them on coming home, she accidentally included parts of her slipper in one, and in the other had left the front door ajar. 

 

The woman, who denies her guilt, was jailed for one year and two months and ordered to pay 55,000 kronor in damages to the woman she accused. 

 

"I’m quite sure that I’m right and the court was also convinced," Harding said.  "Once we asked her boyfriend about it, he admitted that he too had had that same suspicions. He had even considered putting up some hidden cameras in the house to catch her at it."