Clark Olofsson, Notorious Criminal Who Helped Inspire the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ Phrase, Dies at 78

Clark Olofsson, the notorious Swedish criminal who partly inspired the phrase “Stockholm syndrome,” has died. He was 78.

Olofsson died after a prolonged illness at Sweden’s Arvika Hospital on June 24, according to his family, per Swedish news outlet Dagens ETC.

Olofsson rose to worldwide infamy in 1973 when he helped fellow criminal Jan-Erik Olsson hold four people hostage in a bank in Stockholm for six days. Olsson initiated the robbery and kidnappings alone, but then demanded that police bring him his friend Olofsson, who at the time was imprisoned for an unrelated crime. 

Olofsson later maintained that authorities had told him he would receive a reduced sentence if he helped keep the hostages safe — a promise he said was ultimately not honored, per the BBC. 

Over the course of the week, the hostages seemingly began to sympathize with their captors and even defended their actions to authorities, according to the outlet.

One of the hostages, 23-year-old Kristin Enmark, spoke to the Swedish prime minister during hostage negotiations and asked that she be allowed to leave the bank in a getaway car with the bank robbers. “I fully trust Clark and the robber … They haven’t done a thing to us,” she said during the call, per the BBC. “On the contrary, they have been very nice … Believe it or not, but we’ve had a really nice time here.”

When police stormed the bank with tear gas, the hostages refused to leave Olofsson and Olsson for fear that authorities would shoot them, per the BBC.

Years later, Enmark criticized the Stockholm syndrome theory — which was coined by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot — saying that she was merely trying to survive. 

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“It’s a way of blaming the victim. I did what I could to survive,” she said on the BBC’s Sideways podcast in 2021. 

Olofsson was raised by a single mother in Gothenburg, Sweden, per ETC. He began working on a cargo ship at age 15. By 19, he was involved in a police shooting after escaping prison.

He was convicted of numerous crimes over his lifetime, including drug trafficking and a high-profile art heist, per the outlet.

Several projects have been made about Olofsson’s life, including a 2022 Netflix series — titled Clark — starring the actor Bill Skarsgård.