The Murder of Birgitte Tengs

A teenager from Karmøy

Birgitte Tengs was a 17-year-old who lived on Karmøy, the island municipality off the coast of Rogaland in western Norway. In the early hours of 6 May 1995 she was killed in an undeveloped area near Kopervik, roughly 400 metres from her family home. Her death shook a close-knit island community and would go on to become one of the most closely followed criminal cases in modern Norwegian history, as much for what happened in the courts afterwards as for the crime itself.

The first investigation and her cousin

The early inquiry produced no quick arrest. In February 1997, almost two years after the killing, police charged one of Birgitte's cousins. After lengthy interrogations he gave a confession, and the police interview methods that produced it were later heavily criticised. In November 1997 the Karmsund district court convicted him and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. In June 1998 the Gulating Court of Appeal acquitted him of the criminal charge, yet in the same proceedings it ordered him to pay compensation to Birgitte's parents. The Supreme Court upheld that compensation order in September 1999. The cousin later left Norway.

Strasbourg and a long shadow

The cousin took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled on 11 February 2003 that Norway had violated his right to be presumed innocent and awarded him damages. Even so, the civil compensation judgment stood for nearly two more decades. Only on 4 November 2022 did the Agder Court of Appeal reopen that civil case and clear him. A police cold-case group had already stated in 2016 that he was not guilty.

Cold-case review and new DNA

The breakthrough attempt came from Kripos, Norway's national criminal investigation service, whose cold-case group took a fresh look at the file from the mid-2010s; a new investigation began in 2017. In March 2019 the renewed work produced a DNA finding on Birgitte's tights that pointed to a local man, Johny Vassbakk, and from then on that result shaped the whole inquiry. He was arrested in September 2021 and formally indicted for murder in October 2022.

Conviction, then acquittal

On 6 February 2023 the Haugaland og Sunnhordland district court unanimously convicted Vassbakk of murder, sentenced him to 17 years in prison and ordered him to pay compensation to Birgitte's parents. He appealed. In December 2023 the Gulating Court of Appeal acquitted him of the murder and of the compensation claim. Five of the seven judges, including both professional judges, found the evidence insufficient; two lay judges would have convicted. The majority held that his DNA could have reached the tights through indirect contact, pointed out that DNA from other, unidentified men and hair from at least five other people had also been found, and accused investigators and prosecutors of falling into a confirmation trap, reading other evidence to fit the DNA hypothesis. On 19 December 2023 the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there were no grounds to appeal to the Supreme Court, making the acquittal final. Vassbakk is therefore legally innocent, and the murder remains officially unsolved.

Aftermath since 2024

The prosecution service said it would evaluate its own handling of the case to identify lessons. In April 2024 a cross-party group of members of the Storting proposed an independent commission to examine how police, prosecutors and courts had handled the Tengs case over almost three decades. In July 2024 Vassbakk's defence lawyer confirmed that a claim for 20 million kroner in compensation had been sent to the Sør-Vest police district. The sources reviewed for this page report no final ruling on that claim and no new charges in the murder.

Why the case matters

In the Tengs case, two different men were each convicted at first instance and then acquitted on appeal for the same killing. It exposed how Norwegian courts could clear someone of a crime while still holding him liable for it in a civil judgment, which the European Court of Human Rights found had violated the cousin's presumption of innocence. The later collapse of the DNA-based prosecution has become a reference point in Norwegian debate about the weight of trace DNA, the risk of tunnel vision in cold-case work and how the justice system should correct its own mistakes. For Birgitte's family, it has meant nearly 30 years without an answer.