In the suburbs of Oslo, on the corner of Bjerk veien, a butcher shop had been in business for 16 years.
It had a narrow display window, a bell above the door, and a handwritten sign that read, “Helga’s special, 89 kroner per kilo.
Open Tuesday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m.
to 4:00 p.m.
” The owner’s name was Helga Anderson.
She was in her 50s, and she stood behind the counter wearing the same gray apron with an embroidered H.
Over the course of those 16 years, she had been married six times.
All six husbands had disappeared.
Whenever someone asked where the latest one had gone, Helga would reply, without taking her eyes off the scales, “It didn’t work out.
He left.
” People from all over the neighborhood bought sausage from her shop.
Mrs.
Lion from the next street bought a kilo and a half every Saturday for Sunday dinner and for her son-in-law to take with him.
Muien, a schoolteacher, ordered whole bundles for Christmas.
The flavor was rich, slightly sweet, with a hint of spicy bitterness that no one could quite pinpoint.
And when asked about it, Helga always gave the same answer.
It was her grandmother’s recipe.
The key ingredients were aging and juniper.
On Saturdays, the line at the counter stretched all the way to the door.
The health department inspected the shop twice, in ’91 and ’98.
Both times, the inspector gave it the highest rating.
The cold chain was in order, the floors were clean, and the delivery log was kept in neat, rounded handwriting.
The supplier listed in the log was a wholesale warehouse in Alnabru, slips from there were indeed in a folder filed by date.
It was just that Helga bought significantly less from the warehouse than she sold from her storefront, but no one ever paid attention to that.
>> >> There was also one man who got lucky.
An elderly widower from Lørenskog who had responded to her ad in ’94 went out to dinner with Helga once and then stopped replying to her letters.
He told a friend that she was a good hostess, but that she looked right past you as if she were sizing you up.
Many years later, he would read the newspapers and be unable to sleep.
Her past, about which the neighbors knew almost nothing, also came to light at the trial.
Helga grew up in the north in Finnmark, and as a teenager went to work at a fish and meat processing plant where they cut up carcasses and stuffed sausages.
She’d known the trade since she was 15.
Her hands remembered the knife, the casing, and the proportions of salt and saltpeter.
In her youth, she’d had a husband long ago, even before Oslo.
He too had left one day, and at the time no one paid any attention to it because there was no one to pay attention.
She moved to the suburbs outside the capital as a grown woman with a trade under her belt, a small amount of money of unclear origin, and a habit of not letting anyone get too close to the counter.
Her first husband’s name was Bjørn Halvorsen.
They were married in February 1987.
He was 63, a widower, and a former railroad foreman.
They met at the prayer house on Storgata.
Bjørn moved in with her with two suitcases and a canary in a cage.
The neighbors continued to see the canary in the shop window for a long time afterward.
It outlived all six of her husbands.
Bjørn himself was gone by fall.
As late as summer, he’d water the geraniums on the windowsill every morning and greet the mailman, but by November, he was simply gone.
Helga said her husband had gone north to visit his sister in Tromsø, that they’d had a falling out and he didn’t want to come back.
Bjørn didn’t have a sister in Tromsø, but that wouldn’t come to light for another 16 years.
And back then, no one checked.
An elderly man had gone to visit relatives, a common enough occurrence, and the geraniums on the windowsill continued to bloom as if nothing had happened.
The second was a sailor, Lars Moe.
Helga found him through an ad in the personal section of the Aftenposten newspaper.
She generally looked for husbands through such ads, carefully cutting them out with nail scissors and storing them in a tin cookie box.
Lars was the kind of person you could go months without missing.
No children, no wife, and his only brother had long since settled near Alicante and called once a year on Catholic Christmas.
Lars lived on Bjørk Valley for less than a year.
When her brother finally got through from Spain, Helga told him that Lars had set sail again on a dry cargo ship and hadn’t left an address.
His brother grumbled about sailors’ bad tempers, wished her all the best, and hung up.
He never called Norway again.
The third, Gunnar Strand, was a retired accountant, quiet and frugal, and he was the one who stayed the longest, almost a year and a half.
Before the wedding, Gunnar sold his apartment in Drammen for 480,000 kroner.
Two weeks after the money was deposited into his account, it was transferred to Helga’s account.
At the bank, she explained that the couple was buying a cottage together by the fjord and presented a document bearing her husband’s signature.
The signature was forged.
This would later be proven by comparing it to Gunnar’s actual handwriting on old tax returns.
By that time, Gunnar himself had already been visiting his cousin in Sweden for 2 months.
The investigation would later track down that cousin near Gothenburg, and she would be surprised.
She hadn’t been expecting Gunnar, hadn’t invited him, and hadn’t even seen him in 20 years.
The fourth, Ole Broten, was remembered better than the others because he drank, and due to the thin walls of the house, the neighbors sometimes heard them arguing.
One winter, the shouting stopped and Ole was never seen again.
His drinking buddy from the pub on Storgata was more worried than the others, and in February of ’96, he went to the police station to report that Ole was missing.
They took his report, opened a case file, and went to Bjørk Valley once.
Helga showed them a note, a few lines in Ole’s handwriting saying that he was leaving and wouldn’t return, and said that he had left her for his drinking buddies and a bottle.
The note was filed with the case, and 6 months later, the case was closed with the notation departed voluntarily.
In 2004, a graphologist determined that the handwriting on that note was a forgery imitating Ole’s.
The fifth, Henrik Dale came from Lillehammer.
He wore a hearing aid and was always showing a photo of his son who had left to work in Canada to everyone in the shop.
Henrik sold his garage in Lillehammer and transferred two savings accounts to his wife.
His son in Canada didn’t even know his father had come to stay with Helge and when his father stopped writing, he assumed the old man had taken offense at something.
There was no one to look for him.
All the while, the shop carried on as if nothing had happened.
A month before the denouement, Mrs.
Lien, as she always did on Saturdays, picked up her 1 and 1/2 kilos, praised the sausage for being especially good this time, and asked if her husband had gone away again.
She hadn’t seen him in quite a while.
Helga nodded, wrapped the purchase in wax paper, tied it with twine, and said, “Yes, he’s gone.
” The line behind Fraulein stretched all the way to the door.
The sixth person in the year 2003 was Erik Solheim, a 51-year-old electrician.
Erik stood out from the rest.
He was livelier, more talkative, and most importantly, he had a younger brother Paul in Bergen and the brothers spoke on the phone every Sunday after lunch without fail.
That habit was what decided everything.
For the first few months, Erik was happy and cheerful during these calls.
Then he started complaining.
He said he was exhausted all the time, that after dinner he felt so sleepy he’d fall asleep right in his chair, that his hands would shake when he held a screwdriver, and that in the mornings he’d have a taste in his mouth as if he’d licked a coin.
At first he blamed it on his age and the workload, but then he began to notice that he felt worst right after the meals Helga cooked and she always cooked for him herself and made sure he finished everything.
There was another conversation that Paul would recall later and for which he would blame himself for years to come.
One Sunday, Erik mentioned that he’d gone down to the basement to get an extension cord.
Helga kept the door locked with a padlock and carried the key in her apron pocket, but that day she’d gone to church and left it hanging on a hook.
>> [clears throat] >> Downstairs, in a drawer of the workbench among the tools, Eric found a men’s wristwatch and a pair of glasses in a case, not his own.
That evening, he asked whose they were.
Helga, without turning away from the stove, replied that they were left behind by the previous tenant and told him not to rummage around where it was dirty.
Eric just shrugged.
And in early November, when he was alone in the house, he called his brother and said quietly, as if afraid someone might hear him, “Paul, I think she’s putting something in my food.
” Paul told him not to make things up.
A week later, Eric didn’t call, and the week after that, he didn’t call, either.
Paul drove down from Bergen himself.
Helga met him at the shop’s doorway wearing a gray apron, offered him coffee, and said that Eric had left.
He’d packed a bag and driven off, apparently to some woman’s place, and thank God, good riddance.
Paul was standing on the sidewalk on Bjørk Veien when he suddenly remembered that Sunday.
He remembered the taste of the coin in his brother’s mouth.
He remembered the stranger’s watch in the basement box.
And he remembered that Eric had once let slip that he wasn’t this woman’s first husband, and that all her previous husbands had also left for some reason.
Paul went to the police station and didn’t leave until a real person sat down to talk to him.
The officer on duty, a young man named Doll, explained to him kindly but wearily, a grown man had left his wife.
This wasn’t a missing person’s case, and to wait.
He’d show up eventually.
Paul wouldn’t leave.
He laid Eric’s notebook on the counter, where his brother had written down the dates of their weddings in his own handwriting, >> >> and began listing his ex-husbands aloud, the sailor, the accountant, the one with the hearing aid.
He kept repeating this until the shift supervisor came out and ordered them to send a patrol to Bjørk Veien after all, if only to get rid of the persistent man from Bergen who refused to leave.
Two police officers arrived at Bjørkvain on a typical weekday toward evening.
Helga remained composed, answered politely, and repeated what she had told her brother.
And it was that even tone of voice, rehearsed down to the last comma, that put them on their guard.
And then there was the smell.
Heavy and slightly sweet, it lingered in the back room and seemed to be rising from somewhere below, from under the floor.
One of the police officers asked what was in the basement.
Helga replied, “A refrigerator and supplies for the shop.
” And after a brief pause, she allowed them to go down.
It would have been stranger to refuse than to agree.
There were two police officers, Tormod Berg, the older one, and the very young Christian for whom this was his third shift.
Berg went down first, shining a flashlight ahead of him because the light switch downstairs wasn’t working.
The steps were concrete, freshly washed, and smelled of bleach overlaid on that sweet scent that no amount of bleach could mask.
Christian stayed upstairs by the door and watched Helga’s back.
She stood in the doorway, her arms folded, and said nothing.
In the basement stood a freezer, an industrial meat grinder plugged into a separate outlet, a band saw for cutting through bone, a vacuum sealer, and cans of caustic soda lined up along the wall.
Everything was clean and wiped down, with gloves and aprons laid out in their designated places.
Empty meat casings hung from hooks under the ceiling.
On the shelf were spools of natural casings and a box of juniper berries.
In the freezer lay neat vacuum-sealed bags, labeled in her handwriting with a blue marker and dated.
>> >> And in the corner, under the workbench, stood that very same tin cookie box.
Only now it didn’t contain newspaper clippings.
Inside were six wedding rings with initials and wedding dates engraved on the inside, a wristwatch, a Tissot, a Seiko, and a simple Pobeda on a worn strap, two pairs of reading glasses in cases, a denture wrapped in a handkerchief, Henrik’s hearing aid, and five wallets containing documents, driver’s licenses, pension cards, a fishing license in the name of Lars Moo.
Berg stood in the middle of the basement, then climbed the concrete steps, went out into the courtyard, and used his radio to call not for backup, but for the criminal investigation unit and the forensic team.
The case was taken on by Criminal Investigation Division Investigator Espen Vollan, and under his supervision, the forensic team searched the house for 11 days.
While the team was working in the basement below, officers were interviewing people on the street above, and neighbors who previously had nothing to say suddenly began to recall details.
A woman from the house across the street said that Helga would sometimes carry heavy black bags into the basement late at night after closing time, and that in the winter, steam would always rise from the basement vent.
A taxi driver from a nearby stand recalled how he’d driven her a couple of times to the wholesale market in Altona Bridge and back, almost empty-handed.
And at the distribution center itself, they checked the ledgers and confirmed what had long been obvious.
Helga bought far less meat than she sold.
She made up the difference from the basement.
Her ledgers were also seized from the shop, neatly kept with rounded handwriting, listing the names of regular customers and holiday orders placed in advance.
Investigators had to go through this list house by house, and for many of those listed there, that conversation on their doorstep became the hardest of their lives.
They were told exactly what they had been taking from the corner shop for years, wrapped in waxed paper and tied with twine.
The siphon under the sink in the basement tested positive for human blood.
A molar with a filling was stuck in the drain’s elbow.
On the shelf above the workbench, they found a hand-ruled cardboard card, that very grandmother’s recipe: salt, saltpeter, black pepper, juniper, garlic, a portion of fat, and the curing time in grams and hours.
The card said nothing about the meat.
Swabs from the meat grinder and band saw, scrapings from the cutting table, the contents of labeled bags from the chest, and samples of finished products from the shop window.
Everything was sent for analysis.
The freshest bags in the freezer were labeled October 2003.
The mitochondrial DNA from them matched the blood of Paul Solheim, Erik’s biological brother, the very one who had come from Bergen.
Erik, whom Helga had accused at the doorstep of running off with another woman, had been lying in the basement beneath her feet all this time.
That molar from the plum was traced through dental records and identified.
It belonged to Henrik Dale.
His dentist in Lillestrøm still had a chart with an identical filling.
Erik’s work van, bearing the logo of his electrical company, had been parked two blocks from the house the whole time with coils of cable and a thermos in the back.
Patrol officers had noticed it even before the search, but hadn’t connected it to the case at the time.
A forensic anthropologist was brought in to analyze the evidence.
Caustic soda and years of cleaning had destroyed almost everything, but they hadn’t managed to destroy the mitochondrial DNA, which lasts longer than anything else.
The remaining samples were compared with relatives of the missing men, Lars’s brother in Alicante, Henrik’s son in Canada, and Gunnar’s cousin.
Matches confirmed the remains of at least three men in addition to Erik.
Some of the remains remained unidentified.
There were simply no relatives available for comparison.
And there was no trace of Bjørn Halvorsen, the first husband, anywhere.
Not among the items in the box, not in any of the bags, and not in any of the samples.
A ring with his initials was in the box.
Bjørn himself was not there.
The toxicologist also explained the metallic taste that Erik had been complaining about to his brother in recent weeks.
Traces of a sleeping pill were found in his tissues, the same one that, according to the prosecution, Helga had slipped into his dinner so that her husband would be too exhausted to stand by evening.
The others most likely met the same fate.
A hearty meal, a deep sleep in an armchair, and the person ceased to be a problem even before becoming raw material.
On that first night, Helga was taken away in handcuffs, and during her initial interrogation, she remained just as composed as ever.
She didn’t scream, cry, or call for a lawyer.
She asked investigator Wallin only two questions, whether they’d turned off the freezer in the stores so the goods wouldn’t spoil, and whether someone would feed her canary.
Not a word about her husbands.
When Wallin placed a photograph of a tin box with six rings on the table in front of her, she looked at the picture, then at him, and said that she didn’t understand what they wanted from her, and that it was time for her to go home and feed her bird.
The trial began in 2004 and ended with a verdict in 2005.
>> >> The courtroom was packed every day.
Newspaper reporters were stationed at the entrance, and one juror was escorted out of the courtroom during the first week while the basement inspection report was being read aloud.
Helga Anderson did not admit to anything.
“The husbands left on their own,” she said in an even voice.
“Men leave all the time.
Money, gifts, voluntary ones from people who love me.
The equipment in the basement? For the shop.
She’s been running the shop for 16 years.
Anyone can check her license.
” When the prosecutor asked why her own husband had ended up in her freezer, she replied that she didn’t understand what he was talking about and asked for some water.
The prosecution was piecing the case together bit by bit.
A financial expert calculated that over 16 years, more than 1.
2 million kroner had passed through Helga’s accounts, and every large sum came from yet another husband weeks before he left.
The cabin by the fjord that Gunnar was supposedly saving up for never existed.
Worse still, the pensions and benefits of the two missing men continued to trickle into their accounts for years after their disappearance, and Helga dutifully withdrew this money, submitting statements to the authorities claiming
that her husband was ill and unable to appear in person.
The state paid for people she had long since ground down, and the money went straight into her pocket.
The graphologist examined Gunnar’s forged signature on the contract for the sale of the Drammen apartment, and Uls forged note from the old case in ’96.
Witnesses took turns at the witness stand.
The health inspector, who had twice given the shop the highest rating, said looking down that everything had been perfectly clean.
He still couldn’t forget it.
Police officer Turmod Berg described how he opened the lid of the freezer, and the judge asked him twice to speak louder.
>> >> The taxi driver talked about his trips to Alnabru with empty hands.
Lars’ brother flew in from Alicante and identified the fishing license from a photograph.
Henrik’s son, who had flown in from Canada, recognized his father’s hearing aid, but couldn’t finish his sentence.
Mrs.
Lien, the very same woman who had bought 1 and 1/2 kg every Saturday for 16 years, was testifying when she fell silent mid-sentence, pressing her hand to her mouth.
Paul Sulheim sat in the courtroom throughout all the hearings and did not say a word to the press.
When the sentence, life imprisonment, was handed down, Helga neither cried nor screamed.
According to those present in the courtroom, she adjusted her collar, folded her hands in her lap, and gazed somewhere beyond the judge with the same steady, homely calm with which she had once weighed Mrs.
Lien’s 1 and 1/2 kg on Saturdays.
There was, in fact, almost nothing to bury.
The families were given the few remains that had been recovered and identified.
And in Lillestrøm, about 10 people gathered around Henrik’s tiny coffin, including his son, who had flown in from Canada and had last seen his father alive at the train station many years ago.
Lars’ brother took the urn to Alicante.
Gunnar had almost no relatives left, and only one cousin paid her respects.
As for Bjorn Halvorsen, there was no memorial service at all because there was nothing and no one to bury.
Not a single bone of his was found.
The newspapers dubbed her the sausage maker.
Verdens Gang and Dagbladet kept the story on the front page for weeks.
People were admitted to the courtroom in shifts, and the evening editions showed her being led to the van under a gray raincoat thrown over her head.
Throughout eastern Oslo, sales at meat counters plummeted.
Two neighboring independent sausage shops closed that same year because for a while people steered clear of homemade sausage, no matter where it was made.
For months afterward, men and women from all over Norway wrote and called the police station, each with a missing relative who had once left and never returned, hoping it was their loved one.
There was nothing to say in response to most of the letters.
Helga Anderson is serving her sentence in a women’s prison near Oslo.
They said that in the first few months she asked to be assigned to the kitchen, familiar work.
Her hands still remembered how, and that her request was denied without explanation.
Her behavior causes no trouble.
She is quiet, neat, and diligent, always with the same calm composure as she sits with her hands folded in her lap.
No one has ever heard a word of remorse from her.
By the time of her arrest, almost everything that had come out of the basement on Bjerkveien over the past 16 years had long since been bought, taken home, cooked for dinner, and eaten throughout the neighborhood by hundreds of families who still don’t like being reminded of that surname.
The shop was sealed, then boarded up, and the kids would race each other to touch the door with its faded Helga Special sign.
The house stood empty for 4 years until it was torn down.
Now there’s a parking lot and a soda machine on the corner of Bjerkveien.
After the trial, Mrs.
Lyon never ate sausage again, not a single one.
A woman from the prayer house took Bjorn’s canary in, and it lived with her for a long time afterward.
As for Bjorn Halvorsen himself, the first husband who started it all, no one knows to this day what became of him.
He had no sisters in Tromsø.
They didn’t find him in the basement, nor in the bags from the chest.
His name didn’t come up even once in 11 days of searching.
Only a ring in a tin box with his initials and the wedding date inside.
As for where Bjørn himself was, Helga never said.
>>>> In fact, she said only one thing about him back then in ’87, standing behind the counter in a gray apron.
It didn’t work out.
He left.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
