#murder

Knutby: The Swedish Pentecostal Cult and the Nanny Made to Kill

Knutby is a small village in the countryside of Uppland, north of Stockholm, the kind of quiet Swedish place where little is expected to happen. But within it, over the late 1990s and early 2000s, a small Pentecostal free-church congregation, the Knutby Filadelfia, had turned inward and grown strange. Its members had come to believe that one of their own leaders, a woman named Åsa Waldau, was the 'Bride of Christ' — a divine figure destined to marry Jesus at his return — and the congregation had developed the isolating, all-controlling dynamics of a cult, in which spiritual authority and personal power were dangerously fused. At the center of the drama was a charismatic and manipulative pastor, Helge Fossmo, who exercised profound influence over the community and, in particular, over a vulnerable young woman named Sara Svensson, who worked as a nanny for his family and whom he had drawn into a secret relationship. In January 2004, that machinery of manipulation produced murder. Sara Svensson, acting on the direction of Fossmo — who had manipulated her, in part through anonymous text messages purporting to carry divine authority — shot and killed Fossmo's wife, Alexandra, and gravely wounded a neighbor, the husband of another woman with whom Fossmo was involved. The crime, when it was unraveled, revealed not the act of a lone disturbed woman but the terrible product of a coercive religious community and a pastor who had turned a follower into a weapon. This is the story of Knutby, of the murder it produced, and of how a closed congregation became a machine for making an ordinary person kill.