Karina Holmer

Case background and investigation

Karina Holmer was a 20-year-old Swedish au pair who arrived in the United States in the spring of 1996 and went to work as a nanny for photographer Frank Rapp and his wife, Susan Nichter, in the affluent Boston suburb of Dover, Massachusetts. Like many young Europeans on au pair placements, she balanced her childcare duties with weekend outings into the city, where she made friends and frequented the nightclubs of Boston's Theater District. Friends later said the outgoing young woman had grown homesick and unhappy in the months before her death and had spoken of returning to Sweden that August. In a letter to a friend she wrote that something terrible had happened that she could not yet explain.

On the night of Friday, June 21, 1996, Holmer went dancing with friends at Zanzibar, a popular club at Boylston Place, an alley off Boylston Street known as 'The Alley,' near Boston Common. She was last seen alone in the early morning hours of June 22, around 3 a.m., near the corner of Boylston Place and Tremont Street. She never made it back to Dover. Roughly a day and a half later, on the afternoon of Sunday, June 23, a man searching a dumpster for cans behind an apartment building at 1091 Boylston Street, in the Fenway neighborhood, discovered the upper half of a human body. It was Karina Holmer.

The condition of the remains shocked even veteran investigators. Holmer had been strangled and her body severed at the waist, apparently with a power saw. Only the upper portion was recovered; despite extensive searching, her lower half was never found. Investigators were never able to determine where she was killed or dismembered, and the crime scene has never been located, making any forensic reconstruction of her final hours extraordinarily difficult. A partial fingerprint recovered during the investigation offered a slim thread of physical evidence, but it was never matched to a suspect, and no murder weapon was ever recovered.

Over the years, Boston police pursued numerous leads and questioned several people, but no one has ever been charged. The Suffolk County District Attorney's office and the Boston Police Department's cold-case homicide unit have repeatedly stated that the investigation remains active and ongoing. On the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the killing, detectives renewed public appeals for information, expressing hope that someone who knew something in 1996 might finally come forward. Superintendent Paul McLaughlin acknowledged the central mystery that has dogged the case from the start: no one knows where Holmer was murdered. Three decades later, the killing of the young Swedish au pair remains one of Boston's most haunting unsolved homicides, and her family in Sweden has never learned who killed her or why.