The Baneheia murders () was a double rape and murder that occurred in Norway on 19 May 2000. The victims were two girls, 10-year-old Lena Sløgedal Paulsen and 8-year-old Stine Sofie Austegard Sørstrønen. They were found raped and killed in the Baneheia area in Kristiansand. The murders received massive media attention in Norway in the early 2000s.
Two men were convicted (in 2001) for the murders: Jan Helge Andersen (born 1981) and Viggo Kristiansen (born 1979). Andersen was convicted of the murder and rape of Sørstrønen, but acquitted of the murder of Paulsen. The conviction of Andersen was based on a DNA match from the scene and a confession to the killing of Sørstrønen. Kristiansen was convicted of rape and murder of both girls and sentenced to 21 years of containment in 2001 and 2002.
While Andersen confessed killing one of the girls, Kristiansen always claimed he was innocent. In the decades following the initial trials, Kristiansen applied for a retrial many times. His seventh application in 2021 was successful. In February 2021 Kristiansen's case was reopened and he was released from prison.
On 21 October 2022, Attorney General Jørn Maurud announced that the prosecution would submit a request for the acquittal of Viggo Kristiansen in the reopening case, based on the new investigation carried out by the Oslo police district. On 15 December 2022, Kristiansen was acquitted in the Borgarting Court of Appeal. The verdict against Kristiansen is widely considered as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Norway's recent history.
The events on 19 May
On the day of the murders, Stine-Sofie Sørstrønen and Lena Sløgedal Paulsen were visiting with their fathers, who both lived in the same block of flats close to the Baneheia forest. Sørstrønen was visiting from Grimstad and Sløgedal Paulsen from a different neighborhood in Kristiansand. In the evening, they were going swimming together at a small lake called "Stampe 3." in the popular recreation area of Baneheia, which was not very far. They left home at approximately between 18:15 and 18:20. Two college students who also happened to be swimming at the same time as the girls, testified that the girls were still swimming in the water when they left at approximately 18:50.
Search
When the two girls had not returned home by 23:00, the parents reported them missing, and a major search operation was launched. Immediately, police together with canine units began searching the area. By the next morning, over 50 volunteers from the Norwegian Red Cross were participating in the search. This number soon swelled to the hundreds, as Sea King and special police helicopters were called in along with rescue divers and civilian divers who trawled the lakes and ponds in the area. Volunteer mountaineers also climbed the steep cliffs bordering Baneheia, while the fire department surveyed the shorelines. On Saturday night 16 electronic listening posts were set up around the terrain, which could detect extremely low volume noise during the night. This was done in case the girls were lying injured somewhere in the hills, in which case even the most faint crying or sulking would have been easily detected.
Two days after the disappearance, the police expanded the search to include all of the woodlands and lakes adjacent to Kristiansand, collectively known as "Bymarka". Authorities also mobilized the military in the efforts to locate the missing children, with hundreds of troops from the Home guard joining in, canvassing gardens, garages, boats, sheds, hedges and kindergartens. Helicopters applied heat-seeking cameras, all tunnels in connection with road construction in Baneheia were scanned, and all buses, ferries, trains and taxis were checked by armed police, but gave no clue as to the whereabouts of the girls.