How a dream of emigrating ended in disaster

“He’s not that cold-hearted, I can’t imagine that,” says the neighbor. “He was a good husband. “I can’t believe he did that,” says the dead woman’s colleague. “He seemed so calm. “I would never have dreamed that he had anything to do with her disappearance,” says the acquaintance who was still looking after the two children, eight and eleven years old, the weekend after the crime.

Nothing in this story seems to fit together. The idyll of this side valley on the Lysefjord in the mountains of southwest Norway: the backdrop of a pre-planned bloody crime? The pretty wooden house with a children’s swing, rabbit hutch and freshly planted currant bushes in the garden: the scene of a fatal marital crisis? This couple, who seemed so united, in love and confident to everyone: perpetrator and victim in a gruesome murder case?