He killed a prison officer during an escape, executed a gang leader on contract, and spent almost his entire adult life behind bars — then walked out on leave again. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Stig Millehaugen: the Tveita gang years, the 1992 Sarpsborg shooting, the 2009 Young Guns murder, the escapes, and the 2026 death in a Kongsvinger cell. Listener discretion advised.

In a Norwegian village of two thousand people, four neighbours were murdered within a few hundred metres of their own front doors.

In 1991, elderly siblings Aase Helene and Arne Odvar Nordby were stabbed and robbed in the home they had shared for decades. A year later, pensioner Per Rød vanished — until children looking for a football found his hand in a compost heap. On Little Christmas Eve, shopkeeper Karl Johan Hagevik was shot in the neck in his Volvo, a bag of the day’s takings beside him. Between the killings, a shotgun robber hit a bank just down the road and spoke Swedish into the microphone.

For eighteen months, Tistedal lived with the fear that the killer was still among them. He was. Roger Herbert Haglund was a local father of five with debts he could not hide and a reputation the village never quite forgot. Host Alexander Lawson tells how police interviewed hundreds, charged the wrong people, missed the body in the garden — and finally closed in on the neighbour who needed the money.

This episode of A True Crime Podcast covers the Tistedal murders of 1991–92, the Låby bank robbery, the trial that branded Haglund an ice-cold psychopath, and the unanswered question of a 1990 double murder in Sweden.

Contains descriptions of violent crime.

In a Norwegian nursing home, the man in charge was supposed to keep people safe. Instead, a court said he used a theatre drug to stop their breathing — twenty-two times. He confessed. Then he took it all back. And he denied every killing until the day he died.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Arnfinn Nesset: the orders that didn’t belong, the rooms he left, the trial that made him Norway’s most infamous serial killer… and the case some now call the country’s largest miscarriage of justice.

Listener discretion advised. Contains discussion of murder, elder abuse, and death in care.

Reykjavík, 13 February 2021. A man parks outside his home. His wife and children are inside. From a garage, someone is waiting. Nine shots. A silenced pistol. Less than a minute.

Iceland almost never sees an execution on a residential street. Then Angjelin Sterkaj killed fellow Albanian Armando Beqirai in Rauðagerði — a case that became one of the largest investigations in Icelandic history, bounced through three courts, and ended with a 16-year sentence… and, five years later, parole, deportation, and a lifetime ban from Schengen.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the murder, the alleged threats that Sterkaj said drove him, the co-defendants whose fate flipped from acquittal to prison and back down again, and the overcrowded-prison law that sent a convicted killer home to Albania.

A True Crime Podcast.

On a Sunday morning in August 2010, Hannes Þór Helgason was stabbed to death in his home in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. The man who killed him was a childhood friend of Hannes’s girlfriend — a 23-year-old who had already declared his love for her on YouTube, driven her home that night, and later sent condolences on Facebook.

I’m Alexander Lawson. This episode of a true crime podcast follows the murder of Hannes Þór Helgason, the obsessive attachment that prosecutors said drove it, the Adidas shoeprint that tied Gunnar Rúnar Sigurþórsson to the scene, and the fight that went all the way to Iceland’s Supreme Court: was this madness, or a plan?

Content warning: homicide, stabbing, mention of a parent’s suicide.

On 8 November 2000, 27-year-old Einar Örn Birgisson vanished from Reykjavík. He had just opened a GAP store. Volunteers flooded the search — including his business partner, former Iceland international footballer and lawyer Atli Helgason, who stood with the family and told the press Einar would never simply disappear.

A week later, Atli confessed. He had beaten Einar to death with a hammer on Öskjuhlíð, hidden the body in lava near Grindavík, then joined the hunt.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of one of modern Iceland’s most infamous murders: the lie about a lunch meeting, the blood in the boot, the four blows the court counted, the 16-year sentence, and what happened after Atli walked free — restored honour, a fight to practise law again, and a family that says they never heard remorse.

A True Crime Podcast.

In January 2017, 20-year-old Birna Brjánsdóttir left a Reykjavík nightclub and stepped into a red rental Kia. Eight days later her body washed ashore. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Greenlandic fisherman Thomas Møller Olsen, the trawler Polar Nanoq, the blood in the car, the hash in the cabin, and the 19-year sentence that became one of Iceland’s heaviest in a generation. A case that broke the myth of a country where this wasn’t supposed to happen.

Iceland almost never produces a murderer. In four centuries it has produced only one serial killer.

Björn Pétursson — Axlar-Björn, the farmer at Öxl — lived on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in the late 1500s. Travellers and farmhands came looking for work. They did not leave. He confessed to nine killings. The ground gave up more. Some accounts say eighteen.

Alexander Lawson tells the case as the record allows it: the axe and the pond, the boy in the dung heap, the wife forced to watch the wheel, and the folklore that grew because Iceland could not let its only monster stay small.

A True Crime Podcast.

In the spring of 1986, London’s elderly started dying in their beds.

A pensioner under the covers. A tidy room. A death that looked natural — until the television was missing, and the post-mortem said otherwise. Then it happened again. Men and women in their seventies, eighties and nineties, killed alone in the one place they were supposed to be safe.

The press called him the Stockwell Strangler. His name was Kenneth Erskine. He was twenty-three: a burglar, a drifter, and the man police tied to seven murders in four months.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the hunt, the trial, the later finding of diminished responsibility — and the victims who were more than a nickname.

A True Crime Podcast.

Three honeymoons. Three bathtubs. Three widows who never lived long enough to be widows.

In Edwardian England, George Joseph Smith married under false names, emptied bank accounts, and left a trail of wives behind him. Most survived. Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Lofty did not. Each was found drowned in the bath, soap still in hand, while their husband was out for eggs or tomatoes.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the bigamist, con man, and serial killer whose crimes shocked Britain, helped change the law, and gave forensic science one of its most infamous reconstructions.

A True Crime Podcast.