Victor Gunnarsson

Victor Gunnarsson (1953, Jämjö – between 3 and 4 December 1993) was a Swedish right-wing extremist, who was a suspect in the 1986 Olof Palme assassination. He was later murdered in 1993 in North Carolina by former police officer Lamont C. Underwood.

Assassination of Olof Palme

Main article: Assassination of Olof Palme § Murder theories

Gunnarsson (labeled in the media 33-åringen, "the 33-year-old") was an early suspect for the assassination of Olof Palme on the late evening of 28 February 1986, in Stockholm, Sweden. He was taken in for questioning a first time on 8 March, but released the same evening, but taken in again on 12 March. On 17 March, he was taken into custody and the prosecutor made a request to the court to have him detained. After evidence against him had weakened, primarily due to less weight being placed on identification near the scene by one eyewitness, he was released on 11 April. However, he continued to be the subject of continued telephone surveillance for some period of time.

Gunnarsson had connections to various extremist groups and was a member of the European Workers Party, the Swedish branch of the LaRouche movement, for a year before being kicked out in 1985. Also, anti-Palme pamphlets from this party, which had Palme as a target of much of their propaganda, were found in his home outside Stockholm.

Death

Gunnarsson's nearly naked body was found in a wooded area called Deep Gap about 86 miles from his apartment in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber firearm. The time of death is placed between 3 and 4 December 1993. Former policeman Lamont C. Underwood, the obsessive ex-fiance of Kay Weden, a woman with whom Gunnarson was romantically involved, was convicted of Gunnarsson's murder in 1997 and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 40 years. In January 2010, a judge sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina ruled that Underwood had suffered from ineffective counsel and ordered that he be granted a new trial or be released from prison in 180 days. That decision was overturned and the new trial denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in January 2011. The appeals court ruled that even if Underwood's lawyers had been ineffective as he claimed, the evidence against him was so overwhelming that his counsels' alleged lack of competence would have been immaterial. Underwood continues to be incarcerated in Marion Correctional Institution in North Carolina.

In the media

Gunnarsson's murder was featured on the Court TV series Forensic Files and the Discovery Channel series The New Detectives.