Lamont Claxton Underwood, 48, of 405 Lake Drive is serving a life sentence in a Pasquotank County prison in northeastern North Carolina. Two years ago a Watauga County jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping.

The N.C. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction last August, and the N.C. Supreme Court has now decided to review the case.

Prosecutors argued that Underwood killed 40-year-old Swedish citizen Viktor Gunnarsson after Gunnarsson began dating Underwood’s ex-fiancée, Sandra Kay Weden.

In 1993, Weden met Underwood at West Rowan High School, where she was a teacher until two years ago. Underwood was a resource officer.

Investigators say Underwood forced Gunnarsson into the trunk of his car sometime that December,, drove to a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway about nine miles east of Boone, marched Gunnarsson into the woods and shot him in the temple and neck, court testimony showed. On Jan. 7, 1994, a state highway surveyor found Gunnarsson’s nude body near a clump of the roots of an overturned tree, partly covered in snow.

Underwood’s defense attorneys argued that Gunnarsson — once accused and later cleared in the 1986 assassination of the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme — was a victim of political revenge, not jealousy.

Paula Townsend, the lead investigator on the case for the Watauga County Sheriff’s Department, said the case broke legal ground. For the first time in North Carolina, prosecutors convicted someone with mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material found outside the nucleus of a cell. Because it can be taken from bone and hair and requires the most minute samples, it can be much easier for investigators to acquire than nuclear DNA.

“We spent four years on that case,” Townsend said. “For a long time we didn’t think we were getting anywhere.”

Townsend and other investigators found 17 hairs they matched with those on Gunnarsson’s head in Underwood’s trunk. They said Underwood had also had his trunk professionally cleaned.

The case was also historic because prosecutors showed evidence that Underwood may also have killed Weden’s mother, Catherine Miller, at her house in the Westcliffe subdivision. Though he was never charged in that killing, the prosecution argued that it was similar and tended to show the same motive for revenge.

Tom Rusher, the district attorney in Boone who prosecuted the case, said the Supreme Court could review the case as soon as September.

“I was not really surprised that the Supreme Court agreed to review the case,” he said. “I’m optimistic that they will not reverse the decision. I feel that what we did was appropriate.”

Tuesday, a camera crew for the Discovery Channel interviewed investigators and visited where Gunnarsson’s body was found, Townsend said. The channel plans to air an hour-long documentary on the case in October as part of a new weekly series called “The New Detective.”

Underwood’s Salisbury attorneys, Thomas King and David Bingham, could not be reached Friday.