Västerbränna, Helgum, 5 December 1948

The Disappearance of Viola Widegren

On a freezing December evening, seventeen-year-old Viola Widegren left her parents' home in Västerbränna after an argument with her father and walked out into the winter dark. She was never seen again. Despite massive search efforts, interrogations and draggings of the Faxälven river and surrounding forests, neither she nor any trace of her was ever found. The case became one of Sweden's most written-about unsolved disappearances; Viola was declared dead in 1970.