So is that the truth in the Palme murder? The investigations have come as far as they can get, said the chief prosecutor Krister Petersson at a press conference last summer - 34 years after the fatal shooting of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Petersson made it clear that he was only head of the investigative team and not a judge. But spoke of a suspect who “cannot be avoided”: the so-called “Skandia man”. And then, despite some gaps in the evidence, he closed the investigation. The "Skandia man", whose real name is Stig Engström, has been dead since 2000.

The Swedish public, who had hoped to gain new knowledge from the press conference through to the presentation of the murder weapon, reacted disappointed. The chain of circumstantial evidence that Petersson presented, an argument that also included clear criticism of the police work after the attack in 1986, seemed quite plausible to observers such as Palme's son.

But what does that mean without solid evidence?

The mystery of the murder of the social democratic light figure Olof Palme is as big as that of the murder of the American President John F. Kennedy in 1963. And the police seemed to be certain several times.

Shortly after the crime, a right-wing radical, "the thirty-three year old", was arrested and released.

Later, the head of the investigation, Hans Holmér, believed in perpetrators from the ranks of the Kurdish underground organization PKK.

In 1988 a drug addict was targeted;

he was found guilty in court in 1989 and was released in the second instance.

How can he get away with it?

A wide variety of theories have been circulating to this day. For example, the supporters of the "police trail" believe it is possible that Swedish police officers are involved in the murder. The NATO “stay behind” force is also suspected. And the idea that the South African secret service could have got rid of the apartheid critic Palme with the help of radical right-wing Swedes has not lost its appeal.

It should be all the more important for Krister Petersson that Netflix now took on the matter and supports him. The streaming service filmed the 2018 non-fiction book “The improbable murderer” by Thomas Pettersson - with a sensational Robert Gustafsson (“The centenarian who climbed out of the window and disappeared”) as the “Skandia man”. In the very first scene Stig Engström, an employee of the insurance company “Skandia” on Sveavägen, can be seen with the revolver in hand. He killed Palme in the street. The only question left is how he became a murderer - and how can he get away with it.

The story that the five-parter tells is above all that of an amazingly successful idea: the perpetrator pretends to be a witness.

When real witnesses describe him precisely and this description was printed in the newspaper the day after the murder, Engström turned to journalists who took his allegations (“a mix-up”) at face value and turned him into a media figure.