Solving A Puzzle With Missing Pieces

A mystery haunts Sweden to this day

An unnamed man was walking his dog on July 18th, 1984. The area was quiet; very few people were around. When the puppy began acting erratically, the owner tried to get him under control. It didn’t take long for him to see what upset the canine: two garbage bags sat under a tree.

Curious, the man looked inside the bags. What he discovered made him sick to his stomach. One of the bags held a woman’s torso. The other one contained her legs. He called the police right away.

When the officers arrived, there were many questions. At the top of the list was how the man had discovered the body. He explained that he was walking his dog, and the dog pulled him over to the bags.

The next question that needed to be answered: Who was the corpse? That would prove frustratingly for detectives for months. They had very little to go on. But they asked Sweden’s foremost forensic pathologist, Jovan Rajs, to take a look at the body. He examined the dead woman’s dismembered body in his lab at the Karolinska Institutet in Solna, which is north of Stockholm.

In his initial notes, Rajs notes that an amateur dismembered the body. He reported that the person who committed this crime did not have anatomical knowledge. And that the person seemed to have used household items to carry out the procedure.

But he could not identify the woman. Nobody could.

On August 7, 1984, police found two more trash bags mere yards from the Karolinska Institutet. Once again, the bags contained body parts, presumably from the same woman that police had been investigating for more than a month.

While there was no head or internal organs, the police collected the woman’s fingerprints. After running them through the criminal database, there is a hit. The woman is Catrine da Costa.

In life, da Costa had been a prostitute and heroin addict. The police file on her was thick from her arrests and other run-ins with the law. Some detectives wanted to write this off as an overdose but were stopped as details of the case began to emerge in the press.

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