James Schmidt

Who James Schmidt is

James Schmidt is a Danish man convicted of killing three elderly residents of a single apartment building in the Østerbro district of Copenhagen in February and March 2019. According to The Copenhagen Post, he was originally named Lual Lual and came to Denmark from Sudan at the age of seven. He was in his mid-twenties at the time of the killings and 28 when the appeal court delivered its final verdict in March 2021.

Before the Østerbro case he already had a serious criminal record. Danish reporting by TV 2 Kosmopol states that at 17, under his birth name, he was prosecuted for raping a 14-year-old girl and attempting to rape a 30-year-old woman. Prosecutors sought indefinite preventive detention (forvaring), and the lower courts agreed, but Denmark's Supreme Court replaced it with seven years in prison because of his youth. While serving that sentence he was twice convicted of assaulting prison staff. Some English-language reports later described his earlier record as including a murder; the more detailed Danish charge reporting refers to rape and attempted rape. By late 2017 he was out of prison and using the name James Schmidt.

The Østerbro deaths

The three victims lived in a red-brick apartment building on Vangehusvej in Østerbro, where Schmidt's mother also lived. The first was an 83-year-old woman who died in early February 2019; The Copenhagen Post dated her death to 7 February, while the later indictment, as reported by TV 2 Kosmopol, put it at 5 February. Her body had been cremated before police suspected a crime.

The second victim, an 80-year-old man, was killed on 2 March 2019, and the third, 81-year-old Inez Hasselblad, on 7 March. Forensic examinations of the last two confirmed that they had been killed rather than having died naturally.

How the case was uncovered

The breakthrough came from Malene Hasselblad, Inez's daughter. She doubted that her mother's death was natural and discovered that her mother's payment card had been used after she died. She went to the police, and her quick reaction helped investigators secure important evidence. The inquiry soon linked the card activity to Schmidt, who was arrested on 9 March 2019, two days after the third killing.

The charges

Copenhagen Police charged Schmidt with three counts of murder, attempted robbery, aggravated robbery and data fraud. Prosecutors argued that he killed the pensioners to obtain their bank cards. According to the indictment, he managed to use the cards of the first and third victims but could not find the card belonging to the man.

He was also accused of using another person's account details and cards from two banks in January 2019 to take 43,310 Danish kroner. In total the fraud charges covered 138 transactions worth about 186,429 kroner. Schmidt pleaded not guilty to the murders. A forensic psychiatric examination found that he was not insane, which meant an ordinary prison sentence was possible, and the prosecution asked for life imprisonment, or forvaring as an alternative.

Trials and sentence

Copenhagen City Court sentenced Schmidt to life in prison but acquitted him of one of the three murders. The prosecution appealed. On 26 March 2021 the Eastern High Court (Østre Landsret) found him guilty of all three murders and imposed life imprisonment. His defence lawyer had asked for a fixed term of 16 years, arguing that an open-ended sentence would remove any incentive to change.

Malene Hasselblad told TV 2 that the appeal verdict would help her move on after two very hard years, and that the earlier partial acquittal had disappointed her. Before the trial, TV 2 Kosmopol noted that a conviction would make Schmidt the first person convicted of serial murder in Denmark in decades. A search for later developments, including any review or appeal between 2024 and 2026, found no reliable reporting.

Life imprisonment in Denmark

Life imprisonment is the most severe penalty in Danish law and is handed down rarely. It does not automatically mean a prisoner will die in prison. Since a change to the penal code in the late 1990s, every life prisoner's case is reconsidered after 12 years, and TV 2 Kosmopol reports that life prisoners serve around 17 years on average. Release is never guaranteed and depends on an assessment of the risk the person still poses.

Why the case matters

The case raised hard questions in Denmark. It showed how easily the death of an elderly person living alone can be recorded as natural, and how a cremation can remove the chance of later forensic checks. In 2019 critics, including people working with released offenders, questioned whether a young man assessed as dangerous had been adequately followed up after his release; those were opinions rather than official findings. The High Court's conviction on the cremated victim's count also showed that a Danish court may find a killing proved through circumstantial and financial evidence even when no autopsy is possible.