John Ausonius

John Wolfgang Alexander Ausonius (born Wolfgang Alexander Zaugg, 12 July 1953), known in the media as Lasermannen ("the Laser Man"), is a Swedish far-right extremist convicted of serial murder and 10 bank robberies.

Barešić was imprisoned for the 1971 murder of Vladimir Rolović, the Yugoslav ambassador to Sweden.

Ausonius developed a hatred for Communists, Social Democrats, and immigrants while craving an ambition of gaining wealth.

He worked a low-paying job as a taxi driver, but later started trading in stocks and bonds.

His talent for the market quickly earned him a fairly large fortune, resulting in him adopting the yuppie lifestyle.

In 1979 Ausonius became a Swedish citizen.

He had a strong hatred for immigrants and foreigners.

These beliefs led him to start looking for immigrant criminals to kill.

Eventually, he was tired of this and decided to simply kill any immigrant.

He hoped that this way, he would scare all immigrants out of Sweden.

By the late 1980s, he owned a luxurious apartment, a Toyota Supra (rather than owning a Porsche, which many other yuppies drove at that time, as he despised the company), and a mobile phone (before the 1990s, such a device was a luxury item usually associated with a jet-set lifestyle).

However, poorly chosen investments depleted his fortune.

This was further aggravated by an addiction to gambling.

As a result of the latter, during a trip to Germany, he found himself in dire economic circumstances.

With funds running out, Ausonius turned to bank robbing to maintain his lifestyle.

He performed more than eighteen robberies, largely in an identical fashion.

Between 1981 and 1982 Ausonius served in the Swedish army and thus learnt how to use weapons.

But his personal weapons were of poor quality, very likely because Ausonius had modified them.

He sawed off the barrel and the stock of his first rifle to make it shorter, and he fitted the Smith & Wesson revolver with a silencer.

This modification may have been the key to his failure in killing most of his victims as it deviated the bullet's trajectory and consequently caused him to miss his victims.

It was amateurishly done and damaged the weapon's performance.

Ausonius took a trip to the United States between the first and second waves of shooting.

He visited Las Vegas to gamble and also journeyed to the Grand Canyon.

He then returned to Sweden.

In 1986, following the Olof Palme assassination, Ausonius, then named John Stannerman, was one of the police's initial suspects.

However, Stannerman could not be linked to the murder as he was incarcerated at the time, serving a sentence for multiple counts of assault.

In prison, he became an acquaintance of Miro Barešić, a member of Croatian National Resistance, a Croatian émigré anti-communist organization created by members of the fascist Ustaše movement.

Between August 1991 to January 1992, he shot eleven people in the Stockholm and Uppsala area, most of whom were immigrants, killing one and seriously injuring the others.

He first used a rifle equipped with a laser sight (hence his nickname), and later switched to a revolver.

He was arrested in June 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1994.

Additionally, in February 2018 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for the 1992 murder of Holocaust survivor Blanka Zmigrod.

Ausonius was born Wolfgang Alexander Zaugg in Lidingö, northeast of Stockholm.

He is the son of a Swiss father and a German mother, both of whom had emigrated to Sweden.

He grew up in Vällingby, a working-class suburb of Stockholm.

According to newspaper reports, he was bullied as a child because of his non-Swedish background, which manifested in him being teased for having very black hair and brown eyes.

As an adult, he bleached his hair blonde, used blue contact lenses and legally changed his name.

Initially, he changed his name to John Wolfgang Alexander Stannerman, and later to John Wolfgang Alexander Ausonius.

He went to the German School in Stockholm, a private school, but dropped out before graduating.

He later completed his secondary school education in an adult education programme.

Ausonius was accepted into the Royal Institute of Technology, but dropped out after a couple of years of unsuccessful study.