UNSOLVED FOR 28 YEARS

Karina was 20 years old when she took her lottery winnings and came to the US from Sweden in the spring of 1996. Through a placement agency, she began working as an au pair. That lead to a job with a family in the affluent town of  Dover, Massachusetts, 25 miles south of Boston. Turns out that the responsibility of caring for someone else's children with the added job of cooking and cleaning wasn't what she wanted to do. She told friends she planned to return to her family in Sweden in the fall, adding an ominous message that something had happened but no one knows what that meant.

A perk that came with the nannying gig was Karina could stay at her host family's (photographer Frank Rapp and painter Susan Nichter) studio loft in South Boston on weekends where she and her au pair friends would frequent the local clubs like Zanzibar in the area known as "the alley" in the Theater District. That is where Karina was last seen, near Boylston Place and Tremont Street, in the early morning hours of June 22, 1996. Where she went after that, no one knows for sure. Well, someone does. The person or persons involved in her brutal murder know. A crime so grizzly can't remain a secret.  

Did she walk up Tremont toward the subway station? Had she gotten in a car? What we do know is that on the afternoon of Sunday, June 23, less than 12 hours since she was reportedly last seen, her partial remains were found by a man digging for cans in a dumpster behind an apartment building on the corner of Boylston and Ipswich streets in the Fenway neighborhood. She had been severed in two and washed but only the top of her body was found wrapped in black trash bags. A partial fingerprint was lifted. Investigators worked to find a crime scene which, judging by the condition of her remains, would be gruesome and require a great deal of cleanup. Her body had been separated with precision.

After her identity was released to the media, she was referred to as "The Swedish Nanny" and "The Body In The Dumpster" in the press; terms that dehumanized her. She didn't exist as a human being, not anymore. The investigation languished. Her remains were not found. Her family returned to Sweden with only part of their daughter. No crime scene, no arrests. Several people were questioned including club staff, patrons of Zanzibar, and men seen with her in the area that night. Many theories arose about what happened to Karina - it was the mob, the cops did it, and so on. Much misinformation has been shared over the years. What happened to Karina?