Netflix’s Newest Cold Case Crime Drama Is Based on a True Story

Editor’s Note: The following contains mild spoilers for The Breakthrough.

Netflix’s The Breakthrough is its newest entry in crime drama, a series about a double homicide in a sleepy Swedish city in 2004 and the 16-year investigation behind it. The names of those involved may be different, but the series is otherwise a faithful recreation. It’s a tale about a dogged pursuit of justice, a case that refuses to go cold, and the forensic breakthrough that finally brought in a killer.

A Double Murder in Linköping Kicks Off a 16-Year Heartache in ‘The Breakthrough’

Early morning, Tuesday, October 19, 2004, in the streets of Linköping, Sweden. There, at the corner of Karl Dahlgrensgatan and Åsgatan, lay the bodies of eight-year-old Mohamad Ammouri (named Adnan in the series, played by Marley Norstad), who died after having his throat cut and 56-year-old Anna-Lena Svenson (named Gunilla, played by Anna Azcárate), a good Samaritan who tried to intervene and was stabbed in the stomach for doing so, dying shortly after in the hospital.

It was a completely random act, per The Local Sweden, the sixth such instance over eighteen months. Disturbingly, witnesses, who described a man in his twenties, approximately 180cm tall, with blond hair and a beige jacket, claimed the killer “did not run but strolled away from the murder scene.” Over a hundred police officers scoured the scene, recovering the butterfly knife the killer used and the bloody cap he was wearing. A detailed description of the killer, including one from Svenson herself before she succumbed to her injuries, a probable psychological disorder, and an abundance of DNA evidence. As lead detective John Sundin (Peter Eggers) promises in the series, catching the killer “will be quick.”

A Killer Goes Uncaught Until ‘The Breakthrough’

As the real-life Sundin, former Olympian and detective inspector Jan Egon Staaf, will attest to, catching the killer would not be quick at all. Despite the abundance of evidence and eyewitness accounts, the killer wasn’t found right away. The killer wasn’t found the next year or even the year after. Even the expertise of the FBI provided little help, per The Guardian, and over the years ,the case file grew to become Sweden’s second-biggest in history. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying: Staaf and his team screened over 6000 men in the age bracket and conducted over 9000 interrogations. Sketches of the suspect were released to the public, once in 2010 and another in 2018. Despite these efforts, the case remained stagnant until 2019, when a notorious serial killer, the Golden State Killer, was captured in the U.S. using Investigative Genetic Genealogy.

IGG uses commercial genealogy websites, like GEDmatch and FamilyTree, to build the suspect’s family tree and, following the breadcrumbs, find the killer. Staaf saw potential there, a possible means of, at last, finding justice for the families of the two victims and giving them closure. In 2019, he put in a request with the higher authorities to use the technique, and later on that year, he was given the go-ahead to use the DNA-based genealogy method. That’s when DNA genealogist Peter Sjolund reached out to Staaf asking if he could help. The pair wouldn’t actually meet face-to-face until their second meeting, where The Breakthrough‘s Per Skogkvist (Mattias Nordkvist) and Sundin first met in person (the name isn’t the only difference, with Sjolund hailing from Harnosand and Skogkvist from Sundsvall).

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Sjolund would trace the DNA back 200 years, constructing a tree that would bring Staaf a name: Daniel Nyqvist. Nyqvist, named David Nilsson (Lucas Grimstedt) in the series, quickly confessed to the murders, claiming voices in his head urged him to commit the unprovoked murders. 16 years after the horrific murders in the quiet city of Linköping, the case had finally been solved, marking the first time in European history that forensic genealogy was used to do so. Even Nyqvist himself, per The Guardian, expected to get arrested, or die, immediately after the killings, saying, “I remember that I didn’t brush my teeth because I was just going to die or get caught that day.” Nyqvist lived in seclusion near Linköping all those years.

A case that remains unsolved as long as the Linköping murders take a deep personal toll on the victim’s families and investigators, and to its credit, The Breakthrough doesn’t shy away from it, keeping the emotional tragedies and triumphs, at the forefront. It also opens up a conversation about the ethics of IGG. Does the end justify what can be seen as an invasion of privacy with a potential for misuse? If you ask Staaf, Sjolund, and the families of Mohamad Ammouri and Anna-Lena Svenson, the answer is a resounding yes.

The Breakthrough is available to stream in the U.S. on Netflix

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