‘The girl that had everything and then lost it all’: The rise and fall of Charlotte Lindstrom

CHARLOTTE Lindstrom had money, fast cars and designer dresses, until she turned on her ecstasy kingpin lover to save herself.

Charlotte Lindstrom after being released from prison.

CHARLOTTE Lindstrom seemingly had it all. A model and socialite, she lived a life of money, waterfront apartments, fast cars and designer dresses.

But her flashy lifestyle, funded by her drug lord fiance, came crashing down when she was convicted of soliciting a Sydney hit-man to murder two crown witnesses.

Eight years after her fall from grace photographs of the Swedish beauty are still being used by the Hilton Hotel in Sydney to advertise its Zeta Bar.

Dressed in fur with a cocktail and a man by her side, it’s a glimpse into a life very different to that which she lives now. The 31-year-old former waitress is out of the limelight back in Sweden after turning on her lover Steven Spaliviero, a man 18 years her senior.

She gave evidence against him at his own trial when he was acquitted for soliciting a hit-man and conspiring to murder witnesses.

Spaliviero was later jailed after pleading guilty to manufacturing a commercial quantity of drugs.

Lindstrom wasn’t granted immunity for her testimony as she’d hoped but received a reduced sentence of three years, which was spent in a high security wing at Sydney’s Long Bay prison.

Pictures of her arriving for court to give evidence at Spaliviero’s trial in 2008, her less-than-40kg frame swamped by a bullet proof vest, appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Australia and Sweden.

Even Lindstrom could see how far she had fallen.

Steven Spaliviero and Charlotte Lindstrom

“You’re right, I can definitely write a book. The girl that had everything and then lost it all,” she wrote in a letter to Spaliviero from jail in July 2007.

He has published her letters in his recently released biography, Pills of God, which is dedicated to her.

In her first letter to him she tells of being in the same room as “homeless lesbians” and heroin addicts, and of her horror that her family in Sweden knew of her arrest.

But Spaliviero was in her thoughts most of all.

“Steven, am so confused [sic]. I love you so much you’re my soulmate but now I don’t know what to do. And you’re not here to pick up my pieces. Because pieces is what is left of me,” she wrote to him, adding that she would “never give up” on him.

In the book, Spaliviero told how he longed for the letters even though reading them caused him so much torment.

“I longed for Charlotte’s letters but they made me feel as though I was being ripped apart by wild animals when I read them,” he writes. “I felt so helpless. All I could do was write to Charlotte telling her how much I loved her and that everything was going to be OK. They were only words but words were all I had to give her.”

In another letter she talks about selling her engagement ring, a 2.8 carat brilliant cut diamond in a white gold Tiffany band, to pay for her lawyers.

“What a beautiful story, ‘they were so happy and in love, and then she had to betray her fiance and sell her ring to get out of prison’,” the letter says.

She even likened herself to American socialite and heiress Paris Hilton, who was simultaneously serving time in jail in the US. “Not that our cases are the same but at least that’s someone I can relate to a little bit more than a junkie on heroin,” she wrote.

She didn’t like jail and her cellmates were not nice girls, only “crazy lesbians hitting on me and junkies screaming”, she told him. In the end the idea of spending five to eight years in prison for something she “did for love” became too much and she provided police with an 89-page statement that Spaliviero said read like an exciting crime novel.

He was stunned when he learned she was talking to the Crime Commission and didn’t believe that she would betray him, especially after getting another letter in which she spoke of her hope that they would have a “fairytale ending”.

“Now we’re both locked in and I didn’t have you with me, and I was spending all my time, breaks, and before and after work, to help you with your case to get you out, but I can’t help you now as I’m in prison, I’m still waiting for my fairytale ending, and you will be in prison, even when I’m getting out and I still won’t be able to get you out of my head, and in some stupid way, I’m still hoping that when all this is over and we are both out and free, we will find a way back to each other. But for now, I just have to try and keep myself out.”

He knew that her speaking to the Crime Commission would not be good thing for him.

By the time the trial was over, he had come out sounding like a monster, he said.

Despite all that, he says he still loves her and dreams of giving her the fairytale she so desperately wanted.