Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
Some women feel magically drawn to bad boys, even though these men always put their own interests first and rarely turn into tame, cuddly cats. One such bad boy—who killed four people yet still drew women in droves to his prison cell to have sex with him—is Peter Lundin. He was born on February 15, 1972, at Roskilde Sygehus in the Danish city of Roskilde, the son of 37-year-old Dane Ole Bostrøm Lundin and 38-year-old German Anna Schaftner Lundin. His father’s masonry business was doing well until he could no longer work as a craftsman following a heart attack and a blood clot. This was followed by financial ruin and the foreclosure of their home. When Peter was 9 years old, the family moved to Florida, where Peter’s father bought a house and ran a motel. In 1984, they moved to North Carolina. But Peter’s father was no longer happy with Anna and left her. He took his son with him and settled first in Los Angeles, then New York, and later in Boston. Their final stop was Miami, where Peter’s father Ole worked as a bricklayer and found an apartment. Over the years, Anna and Ole grew closer again and gave their marriage a second chance. They chose Florida as their shared home. Even as a teenager, Peter—whom his mother called her star—went off the rails. He dropped out of school, worked as a bricklayer for his father, and when he returned to high school, he sold drugs to his classmates. Despite the fact that his mother adored him and would do anything for him, she died on April 7, 1991, because she wanted to cut off his long hair. Peter first choked her and then snapped her neck. He buried the body together with his father on a beach in North Carolina, over 700 kilometers away. In November 1991, his mother’s body was found, and Peter and his father, who had fled to Canada, were arrested in Toronto on June 6, 1992. For the murder of his mother, Peter Lundin was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Dare County in July 1993. His father was sentenced to two years in prison for complicity. In 1994, Peter Lundin gained widespread notoriety when, while in prison, he gave an interview to Danish television for the program “The American Dream,” in which he painted one half of his face black and the other white, similar to the principle of yin and yang, to represent the two sides slumbering within him: good and evil. Based on this interview, the Swedish psychiatrist Professor Sten Levander declared him a psychopath, as he scored 39 out of a possible 40 points on Robert D. Hare’s psychopathy checklist. Despite this bizarre interview, Peter Lundin was adored by women like a rock star, receiving dozens of love letters. Two years after the interview, Peter Lundin married 33-year-old Danish woman Tina in prison. In light of a prison reform and his marriage, Peter Lundin was released after only 7 years in prison and deported to Denmark. From then on, he lived with his wife and her daughter in Maløv until she kicked him out of their shared apartment due to his violent behavior toward them, and he found shelter at the men’s shelter in Nørrebro. During one of his visits to a brothel, he met 36-year-old Marianne Pedersen, the mother of 12-year-old Brian and 10-year-old Dennis, who lived in the Copenhagen suburb of Rødovre. She became Peter Lundin’s new partner. But this time, too, Peter became violent toward them. On June 16, 2000, an argument escalated so badly that Peter lost his temper and strangled all three of them with his bare hands. He dismembered their bodies with an axe and an angle grinder and packed them into plastic bags, which he placed in the freezer. He then threw the plastic bags into the trash along with his father, which was subsequently taken to the waste incineration plant and destroyed. After Marianne and her two sons were reported missing by her stepson on July 3, 2000, the police searched their home, where they found blood spatter everywhere. They assumed a violent crime had been committed and visited Peter Lundin, where they found an angle grinder and an axe with bloodstains that came from Marianne and her sons. Peter Lundin was arrested, and shortly thereafter, his father as well. Peter Lundin made a full confession on October 19, 2000. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 15, 2001. His father denied any complicity. He claimed he had not known what was inside the plastic bags. Consequently, he was sentenced to only four months in prison for theft, as items belonging to the Pedersens were found in his home. This did not diminish Peter Lundin’s reputation as a womanizer. On September 28, 2008, he married again in prison, this time to a woman named Mariann Poulsen, who filed for divorce after only 11 days. Shortly thereafter, he married again in prison, this time to a woman named Bettina. In November 2011, Peter Lundin first changed his name to Niels Schaftner, then to Bjarne Skounborg, and finally to Thomas Kristian Olesen. To this day, this serial killer uses his notoriety to captivate women who like to play with fire. But those who aren’t careful will quickly get their fingers burned.
