Leif Axmyr

Leif Bruno Axmyr (11 June 1938 – 11 October 2018) was a Swedish convicted criminal. At the time of his release in 2016, he had been imprisoned longer than any other Swedish inmate who had served a life sentence. In May 1982, Axmyr was on leave from prison when he killed his ex-girlfriend and her male friend. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the double murder and other offences. In 1997, the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet stated that Axmyr was Sweden's longest-serving prisoner in a Swedish prison. Örebro district court commuted his life sentence to 51 years in 2013; he was released on 2 June 2016 after serving 34 years in prison (two-thirds of his sentence).

Early life

In a radio documentary in 2008, Axmyr said that he was an illegitimate child and spent his first seven years in a child care home. First he lived at a child care home called Kustens, then Ekedalen, and, later, Vidkärr. Axmyr stated that conditions were rough in the child care homes—abuse, such as beatings, occurred regularly.

First crimes

He started committing violent offences at an early age; at seventeen he beat up his stepfather and said that he enjoyed it and would have beaten him to death if his friends had not stepped in. Axmyr was first sentenced to prison for robbery in 1958 and spent, with short interruptions, almost fifty years in Swedish prisons. Axmyr considered himself a leader within the prison system and incurred many infractions for violence and unlawful threats. While imprisoned, he received separate mental evaluations in 1963 and 1982; both times doctors concluded that he had a personality disorder and psychopathic personality traits. Doctors also stated that he had an inability to control his anxiety and had impulse control problems.