Atlas Vampire CaseOn May 4, 1932, police entered the Stockholm apartment of Lilly Lindeström, located in the Atlas area of the Swedish city. There, they found the body of the 32-year-old sex worker, naked and face-down on her bed. Lindeström had been killed by repeated blows to the head, and her killer had attempted to drink her blood, resulting in the unsolved murder becoming known as the Atlas Vampire murder.
(This case file was originally posted on October 7, 2018)
In northern European countries, particularly Germany and Sweden, April 30th is celebrated as an annual holiday in honor of Saint Walpurga. Known as Walpurgis Night, “walpurgisnacht,” in Germany and “Valborgsmässoafton,” in Sweden, the event is steeped in folklore that stretches back centuries.
The night is associated with pagan beliefs and witches, who are said to hold a sabbat on the Brocken mountain in Germany. In modern societies, people dress up in costumes, gather around large bonfires and make loud noises to scare off evil spirits. Large public events are held during Walpurgis Night, with the people welcoming in the Spring.
On April 30, 1932, Lilly Lindeström and her downstairs neighbour Minnie Jansson were spending the afternoon in Lindeström’s apartment making plans for what they would wear for the Walpurgis night celebrations. They had planned to listen to the special radio program that night before enjoying a night out drinking in town.
Lindeström had also invited her landlords Ruth Jonsson and her husband to join them later that night. The two women worked as sex workers in the city, but instead of working the streets as most prostitutes did, Lindeström accepted gentleman callers at her apartment, which was the only one in the building which had a telephone.
Jansson would later recall how Lindeström received a call at around 6.30pm from a prospective client. From the answers given by her neighbor, she understood the man was calling to enquire about Lindeström’s availability. Because she still had some time before nightfall, she agreed to meet with the man.
Jansson later told police her recollection of the conversation between the two. The man asked: “Is this Miss Lindeström?,” to which Lilly said: “Yes, it is.” Then he said: “Are you home for a visit?,” and Lilly laughed, telling him “Of course I am, as you can hear.”
“Are you able to see me if I come for a while?” The man asked.
Lilly said “Yes, are you far away?,” and the man replied “No, I’m really close. I’ll be right over.” Jansson then left the apartment to give her friend some time to prepare. She told police that Lindeström appeared confused about the identity of the caller, since she only gave her apartment’s telephone number to clients that she knew well and trusted.
As call girls working a dangerous profession, Lindeström and Jansson had worked out a system in order to look out for one another during their liaison. If one was hosting a client, the other would visit their room in the same apartment building, and ask to borrow a condom, with the intention of informing them of their well-being.
Jansson said that as agreed, Lindeström knocked on her door to borrow a condom soon after her client arrived. Jansson complied, however shortly after Lindeström showed up at her door again to borrow another condom. Because she seemed in a particularly good mood, Jansson did not think much of it.
When Lindeström did not emerge from her room, Jansson grew tired of waiting and decided to spend some time in the town before going to Lindeström’s apartment for the radio broadcast. Losing track of time, Jansson did not reach the apartment until almost 10:00pm, and although she knocked several times, she received no answer.
Believing her friend had gone to the bonfire in town with her client, she went looking for them. Jansson could not find Lindeström at any of their usual hangouts, and not knowing what her client looked like, she gave up and decided to continue with her plans alone, assuring herself that her friend was enjoying her time.
When she returned to the apartment later that night, Jansson went to check in on Lindeström again but found that she was still not home. The following morning, she went to check again, but still no-one was home. Assuming that Lindeström had spent the night with her client elsewhere, something she had done in the past, Jansson did not worry about the safety of her friend.
After several days had passed, and still no sign of her friend, Jasson was visited by another of Lindeström’s friends on May 4, 1932. This man had tried to call Lilly Lindeström, but received no answer. In desperation, they reached out to her landlords, the Jonsson’s, who were equally perplexed at her disappearance.
The Jonsson’s told Jansson and Lindeström’s male friend that on the evening of Walpurgis night they had visited her for the radio broadcast but left when they discovered that she was not home. At the time they thought it strange that she would cancel plans without informing them, but did not think to worry at the time.
With several days having passed and still no sign of Lindeström, they suspected that something might have happened. Together, they reached out to Emma Lundgren, another of Lindeström’s friends and neighbor, and she too revealed that the last time she had seen Lindeström was before Walpurgis night.
The group then decided to report Lindeström’s disappearance to police, who made out a report and dispatched Officer Nordström to the apartment. After knocking the door and receiving no answer, the policeman peeped through the mailbox opening in the front door, and saw that the bathroom light was on.
The fire department were called and firefighters broke down the apartment door. When Nordström and other officers entered the room they saw a gruesome sight. Lying face down on the bed was Lilly Lindeström, who had suffered a vicious head wound leaving the back of her head bloodied.
Police District Physician Dr Ternell was summoned to the scene, and the investigation was placed in the hands of distinguished police Chief, Alvar Zetterquist. The crime scene was examined thoroughly, and several odd circumstances arose. The apartment appeared almost pristine, as though someone had cleaned the entire room, except for a blood-soaked towel found in the kitchen.
There was no sign of a struggle and Lindeström’s clothes were found folded and stacked neatly on a chair. Burglary as a possible motive was ruled out early on in the investigation, when it was determined that all of Lindeström’s valuables, money and personal effects were accounted for.
Police began the investigation by looking into her personal life, as well as her work as a call girl, hoping to rule out if Lindeström had anyone from her past who might wish to do her harm. It was thought that the victim had known her killer, as there was no sign of a break-in at the apartment. Detectives wondered why kind of man could commit such a monstrous crime.
Born Lilly Elisabeth Larsson in Malmö, Sweden in August 1900, to parents Frans and Tilda Larsson, the young Lindeström was known as a happy child who always brought a smile to those around her. At the age of twenty-two, she moved Stockholm, Sweden, after her marriage to a merchant ended in divorce.
She settled into the Atlas area, a central district in Stockholm, Sweden situated just East of the bridge, Sankt Eriksbron that connects the town of Atlas. By the 1920’s the city was a place of opportunity, however a decade later, with the collapse of Wall Street and the start of the Great Depression, a time of rising unemployment and uncertainties began.
Owing to her personable appearance, Lilly Lindeström turned her hand to sex work, and soon gather a number of regular clients. By the time she turned thirty-one, she bought an apartment at the Sankt Eriksplan 11 building. Considering the economic downturn of the time, this was considered a remarkable achievement.
As a sex worker, Lindeström was extremely smart and frugal with her money. She also proved adept at her business, installing a telephone and radio in her room, the latter of which became a source of entertainment for herself, neighbors and clients. The telephone that Lilly owned would subsequently be shared by two other sex workers in the apartment building.
One of those, 35-year-old Mimmi Jansson, would become good friends with Lilly Lindeström, and between the three women, they shared the phone number “Vasa 10422”. As a result of the dangers of their profession, from not only violent clients but also the police, Lindeström became very cautious and selective about what men she hosted at her private apartment.
When police questioned neighbors and nearby residents, a witness came forward with information. A waitress at café Norma’s located on the ground floor of Lilly Lindeström’s apartment told detectives she remembered seeing a man walking into the café at around 9:00pm on Walpurgis Night.
She said the man ordered two portions of steak, and remembered him clearly as he was holding a porcelain container that looked identical to the one that Lindeström owned. Police suspected that Lindeström had known her killer, who was someone she had let into her room willingly.
Jansson told police that Lindeström had a habit of writing her telephone number on piece of paper and taping it to the phone in her apartment. Whenever she was a non-regular client she would remove the note to prevent them from calling her unnecessarily. She would only leave the note in place when she was with a client that she knew she could trust.
When Jansson first saw the telephone in her room, she recalled that the piece of paper with the telephone number was missing. She told police this was strange, given that the man Lindeström hosted on the day of Walpurgis Night already had her number which he used to make contact.
For police, this raised the question of why she would remove it. They then worked on the theory that Lindeström could have been visited by a second man, who arrived after the first man had left. A local newspaper reported an unsettling incident that occurred in the early morning hours after Lindeström’s murder in the apartment next door.
The tenant, who lived alone, told police she heard someone in her apartment trying to break into her storage closet. She screamed but the man quickly grabbed hold of her and attempted to muffle her screams. The woman struggled against her attacker and managed to break free. She fled into the street, screaming for help.
A patrolling policeman heard her screams and came to help. She told him about the man inside her apartment, and together they went to her room, but by the time they arrived, the man was gone. The woman gave a statement, in which she said the man was wearing a suit without a coat or hat, and she believed he had come from within the apartment building.
When officers checked, they could find no signs of forced entry into the neighbors home, and were unsure the entry and exit used by the intruder. It was suspected this man and Lindeström’s killer might be one and the same, however this soon ruled out when it was determined the man had broken into the neighbors home looking for money, however the valuables in Lilly’s apartment were left untouched.
When the autopsy was conducted on Lilly Lindeström, the full horrors of her death were revealed. The coroner’s report concluded that she had been dead for several days, after having received three fatal blows to the back of her head, which caused a significant wound and the likely cause of death.
However, the coroner noted that her body was drained of most of its blood, despite the absence of puncture wounds. Lindeström had engaged in sexual intercourse in the moments before her death, and the report revealed that a condom was found protruding from her anus, leaving the possibility that she had been murdered during the course of a sex act.
Police found bodily fluids, such as saliva, on her neck and her body. However, with the advent of DNA many decades away, such forensic evidence was of little use in determining the identity of the perpetrator. The killer had left behind an abundance of evidence including hair and semen samples, as well as fingerprints that were taken at the scene.
Six weeks after the murder, a discarded soup ladle with dried blood on it was found, and police suspected that it had been used by the perpetrator to drink Lindeström’s blood that was drained from her body. This seemingly disturbing aspect of the crime caused the press to refer to the killer as the Atlas Vampire.
When police narrowed down their list of potential suspects, they were left with nine names, all of whom were regular clients of Lilly Lindeström, and police suspected one of them was the Atlas Vampire. They were able to focus on these nine individuals, in part, because of Lindeström’s meticulous record keeping.
She kept the names and numbers of every client she saw, and this proved invaluable to detectives in identifying those who had intimate contact with the victim. Despite the thorough investigation carried out under the watchful eye of police Chief Zetterquist, the case was never solved.
Of the nine suspects, who were never publicly identified, each one was questioned and later released without charge. These men either provided solid alibi’s for their whereabouts the night of the murder, or there was a lack of physical evidence that connected them to the crime. Swedish police eventually closed the case, a status that has remained ever since.
In the almost 100 years since the crime was committed, a number of theories have been put forward in an effort to solve the infamous Atlas Vampire murder. One of the strongest claims at the time was that the killer was a vampire, a legendary creature of the night who feasts on the blood of its victims.
Despite the many tales and folkloric stories surrounding the myths and legends of vampires, the existence of such creatures remains unproven. It would be more logical for the killer to have believed himself a vampire, much in the same way the German serial killer Peter Kürten carried out his crimes.
Known as the Vampire of Düsseldorf, Kürten killed nine people and attempted to murder a further seven before his capture. He was referred to as a Vampire by the press because of his attempts to drink the blood from his victims’ wounds. In his first murder, Kürten manually strangled a young girl, ejaculating at the sight of blood spouting from her mouth.
During his interrogations, Kürten admitted to both investigators and psychiatrists that the sight of his victim’s blood was, on many occasions, sufficient to bring him to orgasm. Before his execution by guillotine, he asked the prison psychiatrist, “Tell me… after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.”
The acts carried out by Peter Kürten and later by the Atlas Vampire are to be considered a form of Vampirism, while the physical interaction with the victim’s corpse is known as Necrophilia, a paraphilia where a person has sexual intercourse with the recently deceased, and/or performs acts, sexual or otherwise, with the body.
The Atlas Vampire possibly murdered Lilly Lindeström during the act of sexual intercourse, with the condom found protruding from her body, and then attempted to drain her body of blood in order to consume it. This would place the Atlas Vampire killer in a similar category at Peter Kürten.
The Vampire of Düsseldorf was assessed by the German forensic pathologist Karl Berg, who stated his belief that Kürten was not a necrophiliac, but rather a sadist who carried out his crimes to satisfy his own sexual perversions. The Atlas Vampire engaged with the body of Lindeström after her death only in order to drink her blood.
The perpetrator of the Atlas Vampire case was never apprehended, and its appears the crime was a singular event, with no further murders of a similar nature attributed to the same killer. The evidence, taken from Lindeström’s apartment, which could hold the key to the killers identity, is kept in a display case in Stockholm’s Police Museum.
That last piece of evidence has eluded Swedish police. Back in 1930’s Stockholm, residents of the Atlas area whispered that the killer of Lilly Lindeström was a vampire. What is more likely is the killer was a deranged individual, who carried out a crime of opportunity, perpetrating an act of grotesque debauchery, before slipping back into whatever darkened corner they had emerged.
John Brennan Crutchley Dubbed the Vampire Rapist, John Brennan Crutchley was a suspected serial killer who drank the blood of one of his kidnapping victims.
Red Inn Murders The Red Inn Murders were occurred in France during the 19th century, where the proprietors of an inn killed and cannibalised their clientele.
George “G” Williams During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, George “G” Williams carried out a murderous vendetta against Suge Knight and his Death Row Records.
John Brennan Crutchley Dubbed the Vampire Rapist, John Brennan Crutchley was a suspected serial killer who drank the blood of one of his kidnapping victims.
Red Inn Murders The Red Inn Murders were occurred in France during the 19th century, where the proprietors of an inn killed and cannibalised their clientele.
George “G” Williams During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, George “G” Williams carried out a murderous vendetta against Suge Knight and his Death Row Records.
Copyright © 2025 The True Crime Database. All Rights Reserved.
