Nothing about the holdup of a Stockholm bank in 1973 followed any expected story line.
Firing shots into the ceiling and shouting in English, “The party starts!,” an ex-convict named Jan-Erik Olsson seized three bank employees, all women, as hostages. The police swarmed in and the media descended, broadcasting the standoff live.
Olsson hadn’t come just to rob the bank; he was demanding that a former cellmate of his, Clark Olofsson, be sprung from prison and brought to join him. Sweden’s minister of justice went along.
Even more unexpected, over six days of captivity, the hostages — the women were joined by a man found hiding in the bank’s vault — began defending their captors and turning hostile toward their would-be police rescuers.
One hostage, Kristin Enmark, 23, speaking by phone to Sweden’s prime minister, Olof Palme, begged to be allowed to leave the bank in a getaway car with her abductors.
“I fully trust Clark and the robber,” she told Palme. “They haven’t done a thing to us.”
She added, “Believe it or not, but we’ve had a really nice time here.”
The police finally broke through the roof and subdued the robbers with tear gas. At trial, the hostages refused to testify against their captors.
Their ordeal gave rise to a new term in pop psychology, Stockholm syndrome, to explain how victims supposedly identify and empathize with their captors rather than the authorities trying to help them.
Olofsson, who in Swedish media and in popular culture was portrayed as a charismatic figure, and whose lifetime of escapades on the wrong side of the law made him one of his country’s most famous criminals, died June 24 at 78.
His death, at a hospital in Arvika, Sweden, west of Stockholm, was not widely reported at the time. The Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC reported that Olofsson’s family confirmed the death without specifying the cause, saying only that he had been treated for “a long illness.”
He had spent more than half his life behind bars for robberies, prison breaks and drug smuggling. He was set free for the final time in 2018.
Whether Stockholm syndrome is a veritable psychological phenomenon has been debated since its namesake drama, which took place at Kreditbanken in Stockholm’s Norrmalmstorg Square in August 1973. (It was first called Norrmalmstorg syndrome.)
The term was coined by a Swedish police psychologist, Nils Bejerot, after he was asked to assess the hostages’ curious behavior during the robbery. But Stockholm syndrome has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook of mental illness in the United States.
Some psychologists have explained the behavior as a coping mechanism, seen in victims of kidnappings and among hostages seized by Middle East terrorists, and in victims of domestic abuse. The captives, psychologists say, find a way to self-preservation by siding with their all-powerful captors.
The term gained popular currency after the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by radical leftists in 1974, when Hearst, after months in captivity, denounced her rich family and participated in a bank robbery with her abductors, self-styled revolutionaries calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.
(A year later, the phenomenon was highlighted in Sidney Lumet’s movie “Dog Day Afternoon,” starring Al Pacino, in which hostages during a bank holdup develop a bond with their captors — an event inspired by a real-life attempted heist in Brooklyn.)
Enmark, the Stockholm hostage, spent years denying that she had ever empathized with Olsson and Olofsson. She accused the police who laid siege to the bank of incompetency. She called Stockholm syndrome a myth, saying she had done what was necessary to stay alive.
“It’s a way of blaming the victim,” she told a BBC podcast in 2021. “I did what I could to survive.”
Clark Oderth Olofsson was born Feb. 1, 1947, in Trollhattan, Sweden. His parents had a chaotic relationship, and he was placed in foster care at 8 years old, according to accounts in the Swedish media. He grew up to became a repeat offender. At the time of the 1973 hostage drama, he was serving a sentence on robbery and weapons charges.
Convicted of his role in the botched robbery of Kreditbanken, Olofsson was handed another sentence of 6 1/2 years, but the conviction was overturned on appeal: Olofsson had argued that he had acted to protect the hostages.
In 1975, while serving out his prior sentence, he escaped from prison in Norrkoping, Sweden. During a year on the lam, he sailed the Mediterranean Sea, met a teenager on a train whom he would later marry, and robbed a bank in Gothenburg, Sweden, before being caught the same day. The 930,000 kronor (about $230,000) reportedly stolen was never recovered, and it set off a treasure hunt by both the police and civilian
Sentenced to nine years for that robbery, Olofsson studied journalism behind bars and was released in 1983. The next year, he was convicted on drug charges and sent back to prison until 1991. He cycled in and out of prisons in Sweden and Denmark on drug smuggling convictions for decades, with many of his cases covered in the tabloid media.
He married the young woman he had met on the train, Marijke Demuynck, in 1976 and had three sons with her. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.