https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15379219/Twisted-twin-sisters-M6-suicide-pact-stabbed-chilling-crazy-past.htmlTwisted twin sisters ran into M6 traffic in apparent suicide pact then one stabbed a stranger to death. Now we reveal chilling details about their 'crazy' past and tantalising clues about their lives today
By BETH HALE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Published: 01:09, 13 December 2025 | Updated: 16:19, 13 December 2025
The word madness has come to define the terrifying events that unfolded on the M6 motorway 17 years ago. On a damp spring afternoon, twin sisters Sabina and Ursula Eriksson on their way from Liverpool to London decided to disembark their bus at Keele service station in Staffordshire. A few hours later, police began to receive calls from terrified motorists, reporting seeing two women wandering along the central reservation. What were they doing on one of the busiest motorways in the country?
It's a question people are still asking today. For what happened next became one of the most shocking, and unfathomable, incidents in police and, it turns out, television history. By coincidence, when police rushed to the scene, they were accompanied by a TV crew who were filming scenes for a new series called Motorway Cops. So they were there to capture first-hand the horrifying footage that would go on to attract seven million viewers when it aired later that year, and which was once again propelled into the spotlight this week with the screening of a new two-part documentary on Channel 5 called Twisted Sisters: Madness And Manslaughter. This latest documentary has tried, once again, to piece together not only what happened on that day May 17, 2008 but also in the years that followed. What gives the case a supernatural feel is that the 41-year-old identical twins, originally from Sweden, were said to be suffering from a rare and widely misunderstood psychological phenomenon called folie a deux madness of two said to affect those in a very close relationship, where the delusions of one are somehow transferred to the other. Whatever afflicted them, it made them hurl themselves into the path of fast-moving traffic in an apparent suicide bid, which they miraculously survived only to get up and try again. They were also seen fighting with 'almost superhuman strength' the emergency teams trying to help them, as if possessed. Yet two days later Sabina was deemed fit and sane enough to be released from police custody and was taken in by a Good Samaritan. Shockingly, she then stabbed him to death in his own home. Among the millions still drawn to this harrowing tale, there is surely no one entitled to be more anguished and bewildered than the family of that man, welder Glenn Hollinshead, 54, who had previously been a paramedic in the RAF. As Glenn's younger brother, Garry, told the Daily Mail this week: 'There are so many unanswered questions.'
Astonishingly, Garry, a married businessman and father of two, bears them no ill-will. 'If I had a phone number for Sabina, I would probably tell her, "You weren't responsible". Yes, she was responsible physically. But I think mentally she wasn't responsible. We all saw the girls on the motorway, getting smashed up by vehicles, but days later, Sabina was out walking among the public.'
His ire is focused rather on those who deemed Sabina mentally sound enough to walk free. 'I think they are the ones that need their heads examined,' he says.
For those who haven't seen the footage Garry is referring to, it unfolds something like this. First, roadside CCTV captures a fuzzy but distinct image of two figures walking along the central reservation. Then, unexpectedly, they can be seen climbing over the barrier and throwing themselves into the path of oncoming traffic. One is hit by a car but gets up and they both make it to the opposite side of the road, leaving chaos in their wake. Somehow, the swerving vehicles manage to avoid each other and two lanes of traffic keep moving. It is there, at the side of the motorway, that National Highways officers, shortly followed by police, find the women contrary to all expectation alive. They're talking with them when, in a flash, everything changes. The cameraman is focused on the conversation between police and one of the highways officers, when, just behind, something seems to be happening. Ursula, who has been talking to the second highways officer, suddenly drops her bag and makes a bolt for the road. The officer grabs on to her jacket but she slips out of it and onto the carriageway. They watch aghast as she is struck by a lorry, travelling at an estimated 56mph. Her shoes are flung into the air and land in the carriageway. Seconds later, it happens again. This time Sabina, wearing a red coat, flings herself headlong into the road and, as the assembled emergency response team gasp, is catapulted into the air before falling motionless to the ground. Yet, still the drama wasn't over nor the sisters dead. For Sabina, who was unconscious for 15 minutes, then leapt up to punch a female officer in the face and ran again across the path of oncoming traffic. It took six people to restrain her. One man suffered a cracked rib when he took a foot to the chest. Ursula, meanwhile, whose legs had been crushed, struggled with police and screamed: 'I'm going to f***ing haunt you. B***h a**. I'm gonna haunt you.'
Police wondered if they were high on drugs or alcohol. Apparently, they weren't. Both women were taken to hospital. Ursula spent three months recuperating before she was released, without facing any charges. But it was what happened next to Sabina that delivered the tragic twist in this drama. Days later she, too, was released from hospital, still in a gown, and into police custody. There is camera footage of that, too. It captures the eerily prescient moment when she declares: 'We say in Sweden that an accident rarely comes alone. Usually at least one more follows maybe two.'
She appeared in court on May 19 where she admitted trespassing on the motorway and assaulting a police officer and was sentenced to one day in custody, which she had already served. Incredibly, she was deemed fit to simply walk away. With nowhere to go, she wandered the streets of Fenton, Staffordshire, carrying her belongings in a clear plastic bag, along with £1,000 in cash. Fatefully, she bumped into Glenn Hollinshead, who was walking home from the pub with a friend. Sabina asked if they knew of any B&Bs or hotels. Today Garry can readily imagine how his brother, a self-employed welder, would have been moved to offer the stranger, who was concerned about her sister's whereabouts, a bed for the night. By sheer coincidence another brother, Paul, worked at the nearby hospital and Glenn placed a call, asking if he might help locate Ursula. The next morning, Glenn went to a neighbour and asked to borrow some teabags. When he got back, Sabina stabbed him three times in the chest and once in the throat with his own kitchen knife. He staggered back outside where he uttered his final words: 'She stabbed me, she stabbed me. Here, look after my dog.'
Sabina fled and was seen hitting her own head with a hammer. She then hit another Good Samaritan who tried to intervene before, in a now all too familiar scene, she ran across a roundabout and jumped from a 30ft bridge, landing on the busy A50. Again against all the odds she survived. When she was taken to University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Sabina was arrested again. Psychiatrists agreed that at the time of both incidents, she had been severely mentally ill. She was charged with murder and admitted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility 16 months later. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was released from HMP Bronzefield in 2011. So what more do we know of Sabina and Ursula Eriksson, and what became of them after?
The Daily Mail has spoken to people across the globe, from Scandinavia to Ireland and America, to piece together their extraordinary story. Born among the forests and lakes of Varmland – once home to former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson – the twins grew up in rural Grasmark. Their father, considerably older than their mother, had lost an arm in a blasting accident and is remembered as a heavy drinker who died in 1989; their mother reportedly had some struggles of her own. The twins, who had an older sister and brother, were extremely close, perhaps bound tighter by the facial disfigurement that marked out Ursula as different. There are various reports from Varmland about her disfigurement: it's been suggested she was a conjoined twin or suffered with a cleft palate. What is clear is it required surgery. 'Coming from very poor conditions, they were bullied for being odd and mean rumours were going on about them constantly,' reads one comment in an online Swedish forum.
In their late teens they moved to a suburb of Gothenburg and started a new school; but their time there was just as tough. While Sabina moved around in Sweden then to Norway, where she is thought to have given birth to the first of three children Ursula settled in the US after, the Daily Mail has learned, she fell in love with an American visitor to Sweden named Eugene Renner. Eugene's friend and fellow electrical engineer David Almcrantz, now 65, remembers the 'crazy and wild' young Swede. 'I was at Eugene's wedding to Ursula on March 24, 1996,' he told the Daily Mail. 'It was on the beach at Shoreline Park in Santa Barbara. I remember Ursula wore very sheer white trousers and a loose blouse tied at the front that barely concealed her chest. My wife thought it was very inappropriate but that was Ursula. She was just a party girl. She drank heavily and she'd smoke a joint. She was definitely a little crazy, a little wild. I didn't know her well enough to say if she had any psychological issues, but it doesn't surprise me. Sabina wasn't at the wedding, though I got to meet her a year later when she visited them in Santa Barbara.'
He lost touch with the couple when they moved to Washington state and knew nothing of the M6 incident. Sabina wound up in Mallow, County Cork, where she and her partner, who is believed to be of Ghanaian heritage, had two sons who would be 19 and 23 now. Ursula is said to have arrived in Ireland from the US to visit her sister on March 13, 2008. The twins then took a ferry from Dublin to Liverpool from where they caught the coach to London. In a book, A Madness Shared By Two, about the case, author David McCann muses about all manner of theories about why the twins may have left Ireland. Were they being pursued by a gang? Were drugs involved?
In the wake of the incident, the twins' older brother told a Swedish newspaper they had been forced to flee. 'They would rather take a truck in the face than be gang-raped,' he said.
No wider context for this statement has ever been established. The official account is that they left Mallow on May 16, in the night, without telling Sabina's partner or children they were going. In Liverpool, they went to St Anne Street police station, where, curiously, at around 8.30am they reported concerns that Sabina's children were not safe. Police took this seriously. The local Garda in Cork visited Sabina's home and were told she had disappeared after a row. The children were found to be safe. Then, at 11.30am, they boarded a National Express coach towards London. There are confused reports of how they came to get off at Keele, not a regular stopping point on the route; their behaviour had been remarked on as strange and they clutched their bags tightly. Garry Hollinshead remembers police were called to Keele services because the twins were causing alarm. But after speaking to the women, the officers left. How the women were supposed to continue their journey, with no scheduled buses and no car, is baffling. What happened next is steeped in infamy. Their whereabouts today remain a mystery. The last time Ursula appeared on social media was a decade ago when she was documented in the congregation of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Bellevue, Washington state. Sabina is thought to have returned to Ireland though the townsfolk of Mallow, who remember the case vividly, told the Daily Mail this week they had no recollection of seeing her again. Her sons were talented sportsmen, one playing for a local football team and going to play at a higher level in Norway, where they eventually moved. The youngest has developed a social media following, where he appears to be a follower of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate. He reveals nothing of his mother's history but in one interview on YouTube talks of time spent in the US 'with my aunt'. Contacted by the Daily Mail, he was cryptic. 'There's a lot of things the world doesn't know about a lot of things,' he said.
And so the mystery of the twins and their M6 madness lingers on.
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