The Fritz Moen Wrongful Convictions

Two students killed in Trondheim

In the autumns of 1976 and 1977, two young women who were studying at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim were murdered. Sigrid Heggheim, 20, came from Jølster in western Norway. She was found dead on 11 September 1976 in a field near Nardo. Torunn Finstad, also 20, came from Kongsberg. She disappeared on 4 October 1977 and was found dead two days later near Stavne bridge. For almost three decades the official record said the killer of both women had been found. That record was wrong.

The man who was blamed

Fritz Moen was arrested on 7 October 1977, the day after Torunn Finstad was found. He was deaf, partly paralysed and had a severe speech impediment. People who later reviewed his case described him as a man of normal intelligence with a good memory. Communication with police and courts depended on interpreters, and that difficulty shaped the whole case. Statements he gave were treated as admissions of guilt. The review commission later concluded that his disability may have led others to misread what he was saying. When he was later questioned again on film, the recording showed that he was describing the killer, not admitting the crimes himself.

Two convictions, in reverse order

The convictions did not follow the order of the killings. Moen was first tried for the later case. On 29 May 1978 Frostating Court of Appeal convicted him of murdering Torunn Finstad. It sentenced him to 20 years in prison plus up to ten years of preventive detention. In September 1978 the Supreme Court cut the prison term to 16 years but kept the detention order. In December 1981 the same appeal court convicted him of killing Sigrid Heggheim. That verdict added five years to his sentence. In January 1982 the Supreme Court's appeals committee refused to hear his appeal. In the Heggheim case, the blood type found in biological traces, type A, pointed away from Moen. He spent more than 18 years in prison and other institutions.

The long road to acquittal

Tore Sandberg began working on Moen's cases in 1997–98. In January 2000 the lawyer John Christian Elden asked for both cases to be reopened. Hålogaland Court of Appeal refused in February 2002. On 14 October 2003 the Supreme Court's appeals committee allowed the Heggheim case to be retried but refused to reopen the Finstad case. On 7 October 2004 Borgarting Court of Appeal acquitted Moen of murdering Sigrid Heggheim. He then asked again for a retrial in the Finstad case. He died on 28 March 2005 before that request was decided, so he was still formally guilty of one murder. In 2005 it also became clear that hair samples from the Finstad case had been destroyed, as the biological traces from the Heggheim case had been earlier.

A deathbed confession and a second acquittal

In December 2005, about nine months after Moen died, a man named in Norwegian reporting as Tor Hepsø told three hospital staff in Namsos that he had killed both women. The next day he repeated the statement to two local police officers and a church provost. He died on 20 December 2005. He was never charged or tried, and his account was never tested in court. The Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission reopened the Finstad case on 15 June 2006, mainly because of this confession. On 24 August 2006 Borgarting Court of Appeal acquitted Moen of that murder too, without a full hearing. Nobody has been convicted of either killing.

Inquiry and accountability

On 8 September 2006 the government appointed a committee led by Professor Henry John Mæland to examine how the wrongful convictions came about. Its report, NOU 2007:7, was delivered on 25 June 2007. It found that police and prosecutors had not followed the duty of objectivity. The court, the defence and senior prosecutors had not been given a complete and balanced picture of the evidence. Expert witnesses had not been thorough or impartial enough, and the principle that doubt should benefit the accused had not been applied. Sandberg also reported three Supreme Court justices from the 2003 decision to the Storting. On 8 May 2008 a majority of the parliamentary control committee advised that there were no grounds for impeachment. According to Science Norway, the state later paid Moen's estate about NOK 20 million in compensation. Moen had left everything to Signo Conrad Svendsen Centre, an Oslo institution for deaf and deafblind people where he lived after prison. The money was used to fund research on legal safeguards for people with disabilities.

Why the case matters in Norway

The Moen case is described as Europe's only known double miscarriage of justice in murder cases. It came alongside the Liland case, which led to a new independent body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, created on 1 January 2004. The Moen case showed why such a body was needed, because the Finstad conviction was overturned only after the commission took it up. The inquiry recommended that evidence in serious criminal cases should not be destroyed, so that it remains available if a case is reopened. Afterwards prosecutors were told to record interviews with especially vulnerable suspects. Researchers have since warned that more needs to change. They say disabled people still risk being misunderstood by investigators and courts.