Lotta Stenback's daughter Stina was murdered in Sundsvall in 2015. Stina at that time became a journalist and was attacked in a park by a mentally ill man when she was on her way to school. Stina died from her injuries, 25 years old, and the perpetrator was sentenced to forensic psychiatric care.

- The assassin made it all into some kind of entertainment. Those who listen get a dick experience that becomes more tickling by the knowledge that it happened for real. But they have no idea what that reality is about for those involved, Lotta Stenback tells Culture News.

In the Murderpodden section on the event, Stina's last day in life goes through in detail. Among other things, the podcasters read Stina's Facebook chats with friends, her text messages with her husband and account for the whole process of how she dies. Stina's family was not asked.

Got no answer

The murder pod is Sweden's second largest podcast on murder cases, and unlike the other pod podcasts in the Cultural News review, it is made by trained journalists. The podiatrists Amanda Karlsson and Linnéa Bohlin first sent a letter to Lotta informing them that they would make a section on Stina's death.

But they did not ask for permission, and also wrote in the letter that Lotta did not need to contact them. When, despite this, Lotta Stenback tried to get hold of Mordpodden to establish a dialogue, she received no response.

- I wrote to the girls behind the pod, and I think I called first. I wanted to ask questions about the pod and make sure everything was right, because I knew it couldn't stop them. But I didn't get any feedback at all, says Lotta Stenback.

Instead, the section on Stina went out to the Murderpodden's 114,000 listeners, without dialogue and against Lotta's will.

- What I ask myself is what they want to achieve, apart from making money. That listeners should feel sorry for us? It does not create any debate about why this could happen, it becomes a "kiosk cover" of it all.

Didn't know the criticism

Murderpodden does not want to put up an interview with the Culture News, but replies in an email that they did not know that Lotta Stenback tried to contact them:

"We usually do not answer unknown numbers, but if we had received a text message where we were told the sender we would of course have called," writes Amanda Karlsson and Linnéa Bohlin.

The podiatrists confirm that they received an email from Lotta, but that the content is not visible when they now return to it.

“We honestly cannot answer what happened to the original message, but I can say with absolute certainty that we never read Lotta's e-mail. We have never ignored a relative and never will ”.

Will remove the section

The murder pod says that they send letters to relatives before their paragraphs, if they believe there is a need for it. In the majority of cases, they receive no response, but also say that they have held a dialogue several times and have relatives listen to the programs before broadcast. The podcasters, on the other hand, cannot say before how many sections they have held a dialogue with relatives.

“We have on a couple of occasions chosen not to raise a case when the family has been against it. We have also done sections for relatives to ask us to do so. For us, it is extremely important to convey these events respectfully ”.

What do you think presciently about reading private chat logs and text messages without talking to relatives about it?

“It's about what they contain. In this case, we made the decision to read certain parts that we did not think would be considered sensitive information. We have not made contact with the people who wrote them, however we have changed their name ”.

After hearing Lotta Stenback's criticism, Amanda Karlsson and Linnéa Bohlin announce that they will remove the section about Stina.

“Even if we do our best, it sometimes gets wrong. Then of course we want to apologize. Our idea with the pod has never been to hurt anyone, ”they conclude.