On the morning of August twenty-third, 1973, in a place called Stockholm, Sweden, Jan-Erik Olsson, an escaped convict, entered the Sveriges Kreditbanken, a bank in Stockholm, and took four bank employees hostage. He carried a loaded submachine gun and fired it into the ceiling, causing a mass panic. Jan-Erik wounded a policeman and demanded more than $700,000 in Swedish and foreign currency, a getaway car, and the release of Clark Olofsson, a convict who was serving time for an armed robbery and as an accessory in the 1966 murder of a police officer. When they were not able to take the hostages with them in order to get away safely, it turned into a six-day hostage drama. This enabled Jan and Clark to form a strong bond with the hostages. All were on a first name basis and the hostages started to fear the police instead of their captors. The hostages were threatened with physical harm, yet they still did not fear them. They even started to like them. Once the police finally captured Jan and Clark, two women yelled to police, “Don’t hurt them— they didn’t harm us.” They were completely immersed in their abductors’ world that they did not want anything done to keep them from seeing Jan and Clark (Klein 1). This concept was named “Stockholm Syndrome” by the media.
