The Lrenskog Disappearance is a made-up crime drama series that starts in Anne Elisabeth Hagen’s own home and tells the story of how she was taken away.
The official summary of the limited series says, “When the wife of a billionaire goes missing, Norwegian police have to deal with a crazy press and dishonest informants to find out what happened. Based on true stories.”
It was made by Nikolaj Frobenius and Stephen Uhlander, and Gjyljeta Berisha and Erik Skjoldbjaerg were in charge of the direction. There are 5 episodes, and about 52 minutes are spent on each one. Starring Yngvild Støen Grotmol, Henrik Rafaelsen, Christian Rubeck, Victoria Ose, Kidane Gjølme Dalva, Terje Strømdahl, Hermann Sabado, Glenn André Kaada, Roar Kjølv Jenssen, Kjersti Dalseide and Helene Bjørneby.
What is Anne Elisabeth Hagen? Who took her away?
Anne-Elisabeth Falkevik Hagen is 69 years old and married to Tom Hagen, who made a lot of money in real estate and energy. She left their home in Lorenskog, east of Oslo, on October 31, 2018, and hasn’t been seen since. Tom Hagen found a threatening letter on a chair in the hallway when he got home from work.
The sender said that Anne Hagen had been taken hostage and that her family could only get her back if they paid a ransom of 9 million euros through Monero (cryptocurrency). After he found the letter, he called the police and told them what had happened. He tried to call his wife several times, but she didn’t answer. When he got home, she wasn’t there.
In the letter, the person who took Anne said that if the police or media found out about the case, they would kill Anne instead. Anne’s life was in danger, so the police tried to work in secret. But there was no sign that the house had been broken into. The only sign of a fight was in the hallway, where Anne may have tried to get away from the people who took her.
Even after 10 weeks of looking for clues and trying to reach the kidnappers through bitcoin and figure out where they were, there wasn’t much to go on. So, they had no choice but to go public and tell the media about it. As soon as the details were made public, true crime fans came up with theories, speculations, and rumors about who did it.
The investigation showed that the letter about the kidnapping was written by a Norwegian speaker who tried to make it look like it was written by someone who didn’t speak Norwegian. But it didn’t tell us anything. The bitcoin account was linked to a 30-year-old man named Ole Henrik Golf, but his identity had been bought on the dark web and he didn’t know it.
As no one seemed to be a suspect, the relationship between Tom Hagen and Anne became a suspect. The police also found a pre-nuptial agreement from 1987 that said Anne Hagen could only get 15,000 euros of his 156 million euro fortune, along with a piece of land and a Citroen car, if the couple got a divorce.
They also found out that Anne was looking up divorce on the internet and might be unhappy in her marriage. But the prenuptial agreement might not have held up in court. Lawyers said the agreement was so unfair that it might have been torn apart. Tom may have planned to kill his own wife because he knew that if they got a divorce, he would lose half of his assets.
In the last episode of the series, police informants came out of the woodwork to say that Anne-husband Elisabeth’s was linked to international gangs, drug cartels, and prostitution rings. The police thought that Tom might have hired a Kirap family gang to do the kidnapping, so they arrested him on other grounds.
Tom Hagen was arrested in April 2020, but he was freed 11 days later and has not been charged with any crimes. Even though divorce papers signed by Anne were found in the house, he still says he’s not guilty and that he and his wife are happy.
Even though Anne-Elisabeth Hagen has been missing for almost four years, the case has not been solved, and the investigation is still going on. The media and police have a lot of doubts about Tom’s involvement in this case, but they haven’t found any solid proof. They also don’t know where Anne is or if she’s still alive or dead.
After The Staircase and then, well, The Staircase, the documentary-turned-semi-fictionalized drama seems to be the current directors’ cut of choice.
It’s where the new Scandi-noir Netflix show, The Lrenskog Disappearance, takes place. It first aired in Norway in 2021, but the rest of the world can now watch it. At first glance, this mystery about a missing millionaire’s wife, bungled police work, and the dark web looks like it could have been written by Jed Mercurio. However, it actually happened in Norway in 2018, when the wife of a billionaire estate agent mogul went missing.
Who is Anne-Elisabeth Hagen?
Anne-Elisabeth Hagen was married to Tom Hagen, and the two of them lived in a mansion in Lrenskog, a suburb of Oslo. The 69-year-old went missing in October 2018 under strange circumstances. Because Tom Hagen was a well-known businessman, the police didn’t make the case public. When he told them there was a ransom letter demanding $10 million in the cryptocurrency Monero for her release, he was told to keep quiet for 10 weeks while they investigated.
It was hard to figure out what happened because there was no sign of forced entry (even though Hagen rarely locked doors), the only sign of a struggle was where Anne-Elisabeth Hagen may have hidden from the kidnappers, and there wasn’t much forensic evidence. The Daily Beast said that the ransom note was made with WordPad for Windows and the default settings. It was painted on Clas Ohlson copy paper, which was made in Portugal but sold widely in Norway. This makes it likely that it was bought in Norway. They even know that the letter was printed with HP302 or HP304 cartridges on a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer.” The note was written by someone who knew Norwegian well but tried to make it look like it was written by someone who didn’t know the language well.
After a year and a half, there were still no leads and no sign of Anne-Elisabeth. But 18 months later, in April 2021, her husband Tom was arrested and charged with killing Anne-Elisabeth or helping to kill her. But he wasn’t the only one who was arrested. Along with him, a 30-year-old man with no name who went by the name Ole Henrik Golf but doesn’t exist because his identity was bought on a dark web site called Cardpass was also arrested.
Cardpass reuses identities, and Golf’s was the second one. The person who used this identity opened several crypto accounts that the authorities thought they could connect to Tom Hagen. Later, it was found out that the kidnappers also used a chat service on a crypto app, that the letter was linked to a text-transfer site called pasted.co, and that crypto services were used to hide the movement of money during the kidnapping.
The Daily Beast says, “Another crypto address was given if he wanted to pay the full ransom, which he had the money to do but didn’t.” Instead, the police helped him pay the equivalent of $1,450,00, and then they stopped talking. By reopening the line of communication for information, police hope to get closer to finding out the real truth about the billionaire and his wife.
Anne-Elisabeth is still missing as of autumn 2022, and no body has ever been found. Inspector Tommy Brske told The Guardian, “We don’t have any proof that the woman is still alive, but we also don’t have any proof that she isn’t.”
What happened to Tom Hagen?
Tom Hagen was arrested in April 2020, but he got out of jail 11 days later and hasn’t been charged with any crimes since then. He says he had nothing to do with his wife going missing.
Norway Today said, “In Norway, there is no time limit on murder charges, so Hagen could be charged with murder for the rest of his life if the police don’t stop looking into the case.”
The human rights convention says that Hagen is innocent until he is proven guilty. But after a year, the police still think they have good reason to think he killed someone or helped someone kill.
Tom Hagen has only ever done one interview with the media. It was with Norwegian Broadcasting, where he denied that marital problems were behind his actions and said, “Lisbeth and I have had a good marriage. But, like everyone else, we’ve had problems along the way. There’s nothing to keep secret.”
Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen’s disappearance was not a normal thing in Norway, especially since the victim vanished without a trace. Anne-Elisabeth Falkevik Hagen, who was married to real estate mogul Tom Hagen, vanished from her home in October 2018. Shortly after that, her husband got a ransom note for a huge amount of cryptocurrency, $10 million. This case turns out to be much more complicated than expected because there isn’t much evidence, there are false leads, and there are suspicions of murder.
Even though the investigation isn’t over yet, the Norwegian TV miniseries The Lrenskog Disappearance will start on September 14, 2022. It will be a detailed look at the case. The show’s plot summary says:
“How did Anne-Elisabeth Hagen die? She isn’t here. Was she taken away by people who launder money, or could it have been her husband?”
Millionaire suspected of killing wife after’staged kidnapping’ | World News – newsatw.com/millionaire-suspected-of-wife’s-murder-after…
One of Norway’s wealthiest people has been taken into custody on suspicion of killing his wife.
Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen, Tom Hagen’s wife, disappeared from their home in Loerensk when she was 69 years old.
Here are five interesting facts about Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen’s case before the show starts.
In Norway, a billionaire named Tom Hagen was arrested because people think he faked the kidnapping of his wife 18 months ago.
Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen went missing from her house on Halloween of 2018. The first step was to scan the house and collect any forensic evidence that could be found. But the police didn’t find much of it, except for signs of a fight where Anne-Elizabeth might have tried to hide from her kidnappers before they took her.
There were no signs of a break-in. People say that Anne-Elizabeth didn’t lock the doors very often.
In 2020, the police arrested Tom Hagen, a very wealthy businessman
After a long investigation, the police said that this whole kidnapping and ransom thing was set up to be a lie. Also, the people who took Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen did not talk to her family often or show any proof that she was still alive.
In 2020, they narrowed their list of suspects down to Tom Hagen, who was then arrested. The head of the investigation, Tommy Broeske, said:
“In this case, there was a clear plan to trick people. As other theories have been shot down, suspicions about Tom Hagen have slowly grown… There was no kidnapping, and there was no real person to negotiate with. There are signs that [investigators] are being tried to get off track.”
In April 2020, the police arrested a 30-year-old man they didn’t know. He was later identified as Ole Henrik Golf. In an unexpected turn of events, it turned out that the man didn’t even exist. A company called CardPass sold his identity on the dark web. It turned out that the identity had been sold to another Norwegian man, who had used it to buy drugs before selling it to the company.
After Anne-Elizabeth Falkevik Hagen went missing, the people who took her wrote a letter to Tom Hagen. This letter was the only thing that helped the police figure out what happened.
At first, the police thought that a non-native speaker had written the letter. But after doing more research, they were able to figure out that the letter was written by a native Norwegian speaker who tried to write it badly on purpose. The language mistakes seemed to be done on purpose to trick people.
A bitcoin trading app has a secret chat feature that the kidnappers used to give new information.
Over the past few years, the people who are thought to have kidnapped the people have used the encrypted chat feature on the bitcoin trading app to send highly untraceable coded messages to the police. They are also said to have asked to hide the money trail by using Dash, a lesser-known cryptocurrency.
Tom Hagen is still being watched by the authorities to this day.