The last dance was playing at Thorild School when the shooting started. It was March 4, 1961, nearly midnight, and the gymnasium was full of teenagers at a Saturday dance in the small Swedish town of Kungalv. A 17-year-old named Ove Conry Andersson walked in, drew a gun, and fired into the crowd. When he fled into the Fontin forest, he left behind seven wounded and one dying. Sweden had experienced its first school shooting, a category of violence the country had never imagined possible.
Per Hakan Altvall was 18 years old. According to eyewitnesses, Andersson shot him first in the leg, then again in the stomach on his way out the door. The other students hid under chairs and behind the gymnasium's piano while bullets struck around them. Six more were wounded before Andersson disappeared into the night. The injured were carried to a classroom, then transported to Kungalv hospital. Altvall died from his wounds. The gymnasium where teenagers had been dancing became a crime scene, and the town that had known nothing like this discovered that nowhere was immune to sudden violence.
Fifty police officers and tracking dogs searched through the night. It was the largest police operation western Sweden had ever seen. Officers followed roads toward Ytterby, expecting the gunman to run. Instead, just before 8 a.m. on March 5, Andersson appeared at the police station, driven there by an older coworker. Within hours, he had told investigators everything. The sequence was banal and terrible: drinks at an earlier party, cognac during a hockey game, a fight with an amateur boxer at the school dance. Andersson left, retrieved his gun, returned, and opened fire. He later told police he wanted to be like the heroes in cowboy movies.
The shooting forced Sweden to confront an uncomfortable question: did American westerns inspire real violence? The popular radio program Tidsspegeln, Mirror of Time, held a debate titled 'Can we blame the Cartwrights?' referencing the television show Bonanza. The government received its first-ever proposal to investigate the effects of media violence on youth. It was a conversation that would repeat across the world in the decades to come, but in 1961, Sweden was among the first to ask whether the images young people consumed shaped what they became capable of doing.
Andersson was found to have been mentally unbalanced at the time of the shooting, partly due to alcohol, and was sentenced to closed psychiatric treatment rather than prison. A 1995 article in Dagens Nyheter reported that he married and had children within four years of the incident. He lived quietly for decades, refusing to comment publicly about that night in Kungalv. On August 12, 2008, Ove Conry Andersson took his own life, forty-seven years after the shooting that defined him.
The most remarkable part of the story belongs to Essie Altvall, Per's mother. Shortly after the shooting, she reached out to Andersson's mother. By the time a journalist interviewed her in 1995, she was 88 years old and confirmed what seemed impossible: she had forgiven her son's killer. Today, Kungalv keeps Per Hakan Altvall's memory alive through an annual stipend awarded to students 'known for good friendship and social support.' The violence of one evening in 1961 is answered, year after year, with recognition of kindness.
Located at 57.87N, 11.97E in Kungalv, a town approximately 15km north of Gothenburg on the Gota River. Thorild School sits in the central part of town. Nearest major airport is Goteborg Landvetter (ESGG) approximately 35km southeast. The town is distinguished by its position at the river junction where Bohus Fortress stands on the opposite bank. From altitude, Kungalv appears as a small urban area along the river, north of the Gothenburg metropolitan sprawl.