MURDERED: Agenta Westlund

It’s always horrific when a person dies but what makes it worse is when one of their closest loved ones is blamed for their death.

It was a normal day in September 2008 when Agneta Westlund took her dog out for a walk in the woods of Lofthammar, Sweden. When she didn’t return, her husband began to get worried eventually he went out looking for Agneta and their dog. Ingemar would have never been able to predict what he would find. Laid out on the snowy ground, Agneta’s battered body was where Ingemar found her, their dog nowhere in sight.

With a heavy heart, Ingemar ran out of the woods and to the nearest phone, calling the police. Once they arrived, Ingemar followed the path he had travelled to find his wife’s body, leading the police to her. Once there, Ingemar was the prime suspect in the death of his wife, Agneta. The police arrested Ingemar and held him for 10 days whilst they investigated and questioned him for what they believed was a murder.

The punishment didn’t end for Ingemar when he was released from jail. He was ostracised from his village because nobody wanted to be associated with the man who they believed murdered his wife in the woods. Agneta’s family had to attend her funeral with over 300 people believing that her husband was the reason for the funeral.

After six months, the police silently dropped charges on Ingemar, not informing him or the public about their actions. This was because the evidence they recovered from Agneta’s body when she was first found had finally come back from testing. Saliva and fur had been recovered and genetic testing confirmed that it was an elk. After closer inspection of the wounds, it became clear that they matched up with an elk, furthering the fact that Ingemar didn’t kill his wife.

Finally, a police theory was released and it was as simple as an elk that was eating apples, attacking after provocation by the Westlund family dog.

Expect elk are normally shy animals and flee over attacking but that all changes when fermented apples come into the mix. After eating just a few of the fallen apples, elk are known to completely change, mostly documented for terrorising children and crashing parties. Some are known for sexual experiments in people’s back gardens or getting stuck in trees trying to get some more apples.

At the end of it all, Agneta Westlund lost her life just simply walking her dog and crossing paths with a drunk elk.

(originally posted on medium.com/@natasha.leigh)