Clark Olofsson is dead

One of Sweden’s most famous criminals, Clark Olofsson, is dead. 

He died on June 24 after a period of illness, at Arvika Hospital.  

He was 78 years old. 

– I was sitting the other day reading letters that he had sent, says his friend Pia Gadd.  From the archive: Clark Olofsson on the Norrmalmstorg drama: “I was going to leave with money”

Clark Olofsson is one of Sweden’s most talked about and well-known criminals of all time. He died on June 24, aged 78, after a period of illness at Arvika Hospital, writes ETC.

Olofsson is best known for the Norrmalmstorg tragedy of 1973, where several people were held hostage for six days inside the Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, after a failed robbery attempt.

At the time of the robbery, Olofsson was in prison and the bank robber, Janne Olsson, demanded that Olofsson come to the bank.

Olofsson was convicted in the district court but later acquitted in the Svea Court of Appeal. According to him, he had acted to protect the hostages and that the police had tacitly agreed to it.

Pia Gadd has written the book “Never Let Go: The Mechanisms That Make Prisons Self-Sufficient” together with Clark Olofsson. She is a journalist, former employee of Expressen, and has also had a long friendship and close family relationship with Olofsson.

– We have been best friends since the first moment we met and have had a very remarkable friendship.

Despite not having seen each other for a few years, Pia Gadd has had him on her mind, most recently in recent days.

– I was sitting the other day reading letters he sent. Oh, I can’t really gather my thoughts, especially since I was thinking so intensely about him yesterday, she says.

Criminologist Leif GW Persson has a different view of Olofsson’s death.

– I won’t miss him, he says.

Journalist Janne Josefsson tells P4 Gothenburg that he grew up on the same street as Clark Olofsson.

– He was a charming guy. But he was a criminal to the core, Josefsson tells P4.

Spent half his life in prison

In total, Olofsson spent almost half of his adult life in prison and managed to escape several times. During his life, he was convicted of attempted murder, assault and drug possession, among other things.

Clark Olofsson grew up with a single mother and three siblings in Hisingen in Gothenburg. He went to sea when he was 15.

He was released for the last time in 2018, after serving a nine-year prison sentence for a serious drug offense.

He became nationally famous in 1966 when a police officer was shot dead in connection with a burglary of a bicycle shop in Nyköping that Olofsson and a Gunnar Norgren carried out while Olofsson was on the run. Olofsson was sentenced to prison but managed to escape to the Canary Islands a couple of years later and was later arrested in an apartment in Frankfurt.

Another notable crime was the art heist at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1993. The thieves broke in through the roof and stole eight works. Clark Olofsson was an intermediary tasked with finding buyers for the stolen works, whose combined value amounted to half a billion kronor.

In the 1990s, Olofsson became a Belgian citizen and renounced his Swedish citizenship. He was sentenced to life imprisonment from Sweden in 2009. For parts of his adult life, he went by the name Daniel Demuynck. In 2017, he regained his Swedish citizenship.

“I am satisfied”

In 2022, Netflix made a series about him, directed by Jonas Åkerlund. There, Olofsson was played by Bill Skarsgård. The series is based in part on Olofsson’s memoirs.

– I’m happy. They were given free rein and I had to stay away. They didn’t want me involved in the production, Clark Olofsson told Expressen in connection with the premiere in 2022.

However, he had some concerns about the veracity of the series.

– I would never steal jewelry from women I had just slept with, he told Expressen.

Expressen is looking for Clark Olofsson’s family.