When two young girls vanish while out for an evening swim in May 2000, police in a southern Norwegian city scramble to find them. As the truth behind what happened to them begins to surface, one man’s story is pitted against the other's.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-girls Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Chapter 1: What happened to the two young girls in May 2000?
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to share with you today is one that's filled with a lot of twists and turns, perhaps as many ups and downs as the hilly landscape it took place in. As a mother to a young child, it's one of those stories that genuinely broke my heart and is still a case I find myself thinking about in quiet moments.
It happened in Norway's Banaheja Recreation Area in the city of Kristiansand 25 years ago. According to VisitNorway.com, this area is a space that's easily accessible from nearby residential neighborhoods and known for being a great place to swim, fish, and walk trails. Banahaya consists of a three-mile loop that AllTrails.com estimates takes the average person a little over an hour to finish.
I'll go ahead and tell you up front, there are a lot of Norwegian names and pronunciations in this episode that I've tried my very best to deliver correctly. But I'm a native English speaker, so there may be some names or locations I don't say perfectly. That's just the reality of taking on a case in a nation that's foreign to me.
So,
Around 7.30 p.m. on Friday, May 19, 2000, Jostein Søstrenund was sitting at his home in the grim borough of Kristiansand, Norway, watching the clock. With each passing minute, he was growing more and more worried. His 8-year-old daughter, Stina Sofia, and her friend, 10-year-old Lena Paulsen, were overdue from an evening swim in Banahaya Recreation Area.
About an hour earlier, around 6.30 p.m., the girls had left the house together to go to Lake No. 3 in the park, which was only a few minutes away from Grimm. And Eustine thought it was unusual for them to have taken so long to get to the lake, swim, and then return. So, unsure what was going on, he did what I imagine most dads would do in this situation.
He got on his bicycle and rode the trail the girls could have taken to get into Banahaya. He cycled all the way to the jetty at lake number three, which is where his daughter and her friend had asked to go. But when he arrived, the area was empty. No one was around, and he definitely didn't see the girl swimming in the lake. But he didn't go into full-blown panic mode right away.
He figured maybe Stina, Sofia, and Lena had just taken another route home, which is why he hadn't come across them on his way into the park. As he biked back to Grimm, he hoped that they might have taken another route home. But once again, he didn't find them.
When he returned to his neighborhood, he continued to ride around looking for them and even went over to another neighboring park called Ravnadalen. But he was met with the same results. The girls were nowhere to be found. At that point, it was 10.10 p.m. and the sun had already set. So Eustine decided enough was enough. And he alerted the Christianson police about what was going on.
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Chapter 2: What details are known about the search for the missing girls?
Not long after that, officials in charge of the search sent Stein Borgeson and his team to secure the spot where the stuff had been found. Christensen police requested additional police dogs to come to the area to investigate further. But unfortunately, the animals weren't available at the moment. So Stein and his team basically just had to sit and wait it out.
But it didn't take very long before Stein got bored of that and decided to walk around the site and do his own sweep for clues. As he walked around, he noticed that some of the vegetation near the spot seemed to be unnaturally broken. He observed a snap twig on a large pine tree that felt off to him.
What I gathered from reading and watching the source material is that to Stein, the twig just looked like it had been intentionally broken, not as if it had been snapped in a natural way. So I guess him being the woodland expert he was, he just had a gut feeling that the broken twig seemed out of place. So he followed that hunch and continued to look around for more clues.
A short distance away from the snap twig, he saw what he believed was an unusual area of elevation on the ground covered in vegetation. To him, the disturbed earth appeared to be man-made, and when he approached it and lifted up some branches, he discovered a gruesome sight that confirmed his worst suspicions. There, underneath all the debris, were the dead bodies of Lena and Stina Sophia.
A few hours after the discovery of the girls' bodies, the Christian Sun Police held a press conference and delivered the heartbreaking news to the media. The investigators' missing persons case had officially become a homicide investigation.
Back at the crime scene, detectives called in a specialized forensic unit from the National Criminal Investigation Service, also known as NCIS, to help process the scene and remove the girls' bodies. But there was a bit of a snag. That special forensic team wouldn't be able to get to Banahaya until the following morning, Monday, May 22nd.
So while everyone waited, Stein Borgersen, the outdoorsman who'd found the bodies, ordered 70 of his team members to keep watch over the burial site overnight to make sure no one disturbed the bodies or contaminated the crime scene. When Monday morning came around, teams were finally able to remove Lena and Stina Sofia's bodies from the park, and they transported them for autopsies.
While investigators waited for those examinations to conclude, they got to work trying to understand the crime scene itself. But once again, they ran into some logistical challenges. You see, Sunday night into Monday morning, rainy weather had moved into the area.
So in an attempt to preserve potential evidence, the police used an officer's personal tarp to cover the burial site where Stina Sofia and Lena had been hidden. I'd imagine that when that detail leaked to the press, journalists speculated that the TARP situation might not have been the best call by the police.
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Chapter 3: Who were the key individuals involved in the investigation?
Chapter 4: What evidence was discovered during the search?
Unfortunately, additional searches for it on Monday were unsuccessful because the forest's hilly terrain and numerous lakes made it very challenging for searchers to scour for such a small item. As crews continued to work, news about the murders began to circulate in Christianson. And it didn't take long before the story blew up.
People wanted to know everything about the police's investigation, who any potential suspects were, who the victims were, and so on. One journalist told producers of the Banahaya Killings docuseries that the city as a whole essentially went into a state of emergency because of what had happened.
Parents told reporters that they were watching their children more closely after the crime, and they felt like the murders had completely shattered Christian Son's previous reputation as being a family-friendly place to live. The girls' deaths had a profound effect on other children and people in the city, too, who were friends with or roughly the same age as Lena and Stina Sofia.
Annette, the 17-year-old volunteer who'd first discovered what was believed to be the girls' bloody clothing and belongings, told the docuseries that she was horrified by the crime and became afraid of the dark after it happened. She said that she didn't go back to Banahaya for 20 years afterwards.
The thought that there was some unknown child killer potentially walking amongst the citizens of Christianson scared a lot of people. Authorities were under tremendous pressure to make headway in the case.
But despite what police relayed to the public about their progress to investigate the crime, there were some major errors in the investigation that happened during those first few days that opened them up to a lot of scrutiny.
For example, six days after the murders, Park employees emptying out trash bins in the forest discovered that none of the receptacles had been secured by law enforcement at any point after the crime. While making their rounds, these employees had unknowingly discovered a major piece of evidence just sitting in one of the bins.
It was the plastic grocery bag that Lena and Stina Sophia had taken with them when they went swimming. According to what an investigator and lawyer told producers for the Banahaya killings docuseries, it took another week after the park workers collected the trash bins for the police to actually go through them.
So investigators were way behind the eight ball by the time they got their hands on the plastic grocery bag evidence. And just like the used tarp situation, some members of the press criticized the police for the trash bin mistake. But be that as it may, what's more important in the overall scheme of things is that authorities did eventually secure the grocery bag as evidence.
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Chapter 5: What were the findings of the autopsy reports?
But in his first chat with police, he'd said he was home the entire night. So this deviation from his previous statement made authorities side-eye him. When given the chance to clarify if he'd been in Banahaya at all on May 19th, he told them he hadn't been.
Chapter 6: How did the community react to the tragedy?
Jan Helge's story, the first time he'd been questioned, was that he'd started hanging out with Vigo around 8 o'clock on the evening of the crime. However, during his sit-down interview with police, he said he'd been at the entrance to Banahaya a few hours before going to Vigo's house.
He said he'd been at the park because the Home Guard Youth Division usually met for a training run every Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. However, on Friday, May 19th, none of his buddies had shown up for the scheduled exercise, so he'd done it by himself.
He told investigators that he'd run north in the park, passed some fields and lakes, then returned via the same route and eventually ended at Vigo's house in Egg. Investigators weren't sure if the young men were being 100% honest with them, though. But without anything more incriminating to confront them with, the police once again had to let their suspicions about them lay.
But that didn't last long, because shortly after that, detectives heard from a witness who'd been walking in the park at 6.30 p.m. on the night of the crimes. This witness told investigators that they'd seen a young man emerge from the woods near the football field adjacent to Egg, who seemed to be searching for something.
They told police that the mysterious figure appeared to be between 18 and 20 years old. And after seeing him the first time near the football field, they bumped into him again on the west side of the trail, closer to the swimming lakes. Authorities showed this witness a photo array of 10 young men. And wouldn't you know it, he picked out Jan Helge's picture without hesitation.
So this development all but confirmed for police their growing suspicion that Jan Helge had not been truthful with them the first few times around. The fact that someone had seen him on a trail in the park in the opposite direction of where he told authorities he'd been at 6.30 p.m. was enough of an inconsistency for police to bring him back in for another round of questioning.
At that time, detectives didn't ask Vigo for another interview, though. They were strictly focused on speaking with Jan Helge. During this questioning, I imagine investigators got a bit more direct with him, but he denied being in the west part of the park on the evening of Friday, May 19th. He insisted that he hadn't gone past the entrance gate.
He doubled down about this even when authorities confronted him with the information from the witness, who said they'd bumped into him on the west side of the swimming lakes at 6.30 p.m., But once again, like it or not, the police didn't have enough evidence to hold him for additional questioning or arrest him.
But that changed sometime later, on July 11th, when investigators received even more information that made Jan Helge and Vigo look bad. A guy who'd been parking a car near an entrance to the park alongside Egg on the night of the crime came forward and told police that he'd seen a young man ride up to the location on a bicycle around 5.50 p.m., go into the park in the direction of Lake No.
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Chapter 7: What were the major mistakes made by law enforcement?
I mean, even though the criminal offender profile indicated the killer was one person, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that two people could have been involved. During Jan Helge's interview, he corroborated a lot of the same information Vigo had provided.
The two of them had met up around 6 o'clock at the playground near the park entrance by egg so Vigo could get the spare key to his shed, and then by 6.05 p.m. they'd parted ways. Jan Helge said he'd then gone for a run north and Vigo had cycled home. When their interviews with police wrapped up, authorities were more convinced than ever that the young men were hiding something.
So they decided to see if they could search their homes and Vigo's backyard shed and egg to determine if it held any clues that might be related to the murders. The only problem was investigators couldn't physically carry out the search without charging Vigo or Jan Helge with a crime.
Interestingly, the police found a way around that legal hurdle by resurrecting a previous criminal investigation that had involved Vigo. Turns out, about 16 months before Stina Sofia and Lena's murders, Vigo had been suspected of peeping into a woman's windows in his neighborhood. He eventually came clean about that crime and was said to be remorseful for his actions.
But because it was an unresolved criminal case, that allowed the police a way to legally search his shed. And when they did, what they found inside was disturbing. According to the docuseries, The Banahaya Killings, when authorities got a look inside Vigo's backyard shed and egg, they found a trove of pornographic videos, magazines, violent movies, and adult toys.
There was also a toolbox with a couple of knives in it, which I imagine seemed rather ominous to police detectives, considering the fact that Stina Sofia and Lena had both been stabbed and the murder weapon had never been found.
A local journalist who spoke with the producers for the documentary described Vigo's shed as less of a utility shed and more of like an old potato cellar that had been converted into a man cave of sorts. And it was even reported that he lived in it.
What the contents of the shed communicated to members of law enforcement who were eyeing him and Jan Helga for the Banahaya murders was that he was a young man who liked knives and was obsessed with sex.
Unfortunately, even after all the interviews police had done with the young men and the results of the shed search, there still wasn't enough physical evidence for detectives to arrest them for the crime. Now, don't get me wrong, there were definitely some investigators who were chomping at the bit to slap cuffs on Vigo and Jan Helge.
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Chapter 8: Who were the main suspects in the case?
Court documents filed during an appeal in January 2002 stated that forensic psychiatric experts who'd evaluated Vigo shared in court that he had an emotionally unstable personality disorder, was emotionally unstable, and had pedophilic tendencies, which is Norway's 2002 way of saying what is commonly known in the US as borderline personality disorder.
Ultimately, the appeals court denied him relief, but agreed to increase Jan Helge's sentence from 17 years to 19 years. In a statement to TV2, which was later translated into English, Ada, Stina Sofia's mom, said, "...we can never be completely satisfied when the court does not choose to use the law's strictest punishment.
Nevertheless, we are happy that Jan Helge Andersen did not even get less than 19 years." By 2006, though, Norway's government had granted Jan Helge temporary leave from prison one weekend every month, much to the dismay of the girl's family members, particularly Ada. She complained to the Oslo District Court more than once and actually ended up suing the state over the issue.
By 2007, she was able to successfully change the law so that survivors of serious criminal cases could object to a prisoner receiving leave, and so could their relatives. In 2008, while serving his time in prison, Vigo gave his first public interview to reporter Anna Norberg and maintained that he was not responsible for what happened to Stina Sofia and Lena.
He claimed he'd been convicted based on people's feelings, not evidence. He remained as resolved as ever to fight for his exoneration. He wanted a retrial, period. Up until that point, he'd never admitted guilt and there was no physical evidence that proved he was involved. It had always been Jan Helge's word against his.
After fully taking over Viggo's case in 2002, his post-conviction lawyer spent over five years sending half a dozen requests to Norway's Criminal Cases Review Commission, explaining why Viggo should get a new trial. Those documents argued a few things that his defense team felt proved that he could not have committed the crime.
One had to do with his cell phone activity during the timeframe the girls were killed. The defense team had reviewed every text message and phone call he'd made on Friday, May 19, 2000. And they discovered that between 7 p.m.
and 8 p.m., which was the time frame authorities believed the murders happened, Vigo's device had made calls and received and sent text messages in a service area that was close to his home, but well outside the coverage area of the crime scene.
Experts from local phone companies determined without a doubt that the base station his cell phone activity went through could not have received signals from devices anywhere near the crime scene. Oh, and these experts, they had decades of experience working for the various phone companies in Christianson, who owned the telephone signal infrastructure.
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