page_title: Baneheia murders
section_title: Search
hierarchical_section_title: Baneheia murders / Search
caption_attribution_description: English: Search and rescue teams searching baneheia 2000.
context_page_description: The Baneheia murders was a notorious case of 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 Sørstrønen. They were found raped and killed in the Baneheia area in Kristiansand. Two persons were convicted and sentenced for the murders in 2002: Viggo Kristiansen and Jan Helge Andersen. The case received massive media attention in Norway in the early 2000s, and also attracted attention abroad.
  Kristiansen was convicted of both murders and of raping both girls, and sentenced to 21 years of containment, equivalent to a life sentence. Andersen was convicted of the murder of Sørstrønen, but acquitted of the murder of Paulsen. He was also convicted of raping both girls, and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
  The conviction of Viggo Kristiansen was based on indirect circumstantial evidence and a testimony by Jan Helge Andersen. The testimony was extracted with the use of suggestive questioning. Technical evidence from Viggo Kristiansen's phone provides him with a reasonably certain alibi at the time of murder.
context_section_description: 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.
  Two days after the disappearance, police announced the discovery of a human skeleton near the river Otra, outside of Baneheia, but quickly declared it to be a missing German tourist, unrelated to the case. on the evening on the same day, police cordoned off a large area by the lake known as "2. Stampe". Police later that evening declared that both girls had been found murdered at that site. Upon receiving the news, the reaction among the hundreds of search-and-rescue personnel on site was one of enormous grief, many breaking down and weeping inconsolably, others walking around in a state of shock.
  The bodies of the two little girls were found hidden under pine branches in a small slab rock crack a few dozen meters west of the pond, which is one of several ponds that constitutes a much frequented bathing area for the populace in Kristiansand. Traces of blood were also found across the scene along with the girls' clothes and shoes. They had been sexually assaulted, tied-up, strangled and stabbed to death.
caption: Search-and-rescue teams combing the area
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