Thomas Quick (19 page)

‘And how, in what way, did you know Ljungström? Was he a relative? Or an acquaintance?’

‘No, he was an acquaintance. We used to meet down by the Lugnet public pool.’

Quick then told Jörgen Persson how he came, in Ljungström’s Volvo, to a car park in the residential area of Bosvedjan, north of Sundsvall.

‘Can you describe the houses, the colours, what the houses were made of or anything like that?’

‘Well, I should let you know that I went there this autumn with the interview witness here, so I could also be remembering that . . . It could be a bit difficult knowing which memory I’m telling you,’ explained Quick.

‘You’ve been there to look at the place? So you know what the houses look like, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

After hearing this in many ways noteworthy information, the
detective inspector chose not to dig deeper into the matter and instead moved on.

‘So what did you do when you were there in the car park?’

‘I have to be a bit straight to the point here and use the method that’s available to me. I was looking for a boy and I had noticed there was a school nearby. And two boys came walking by, but soon they went separate ways, and I called out once they had separated, so to speak. I don’t know if they were together but they came at the same time anyway. The boy who came towards me, so to speak, had an unzipped jacket and I called out to him, asked him for help and told him I’d run over a cat, and he came to the car and I took him into the car and drove away, and went to . . . Stadsberget in Sundsvall and there I killed him. And this boy, in other words, was Johan Asplund.’

Quick went silent.

Officer Persson did not seem to know how to go on from here. He had just heard a full confession to the most infamous murder in Sundsvall in modern times – that of an eleven-year-old who disappeared on 7 November 1980.

‘I see,’ sighed Jörgen Persson. ‘And you’ve been carrying this inside you for all these years?’

‘I’ve been carrying it for all these years, but not on a conscious level,’ Quick answered cryptically.

The questioning continued with a general probing to establish a description of Johan’s clothes, but Quick could only remember that he wore a dark blue jacket.

It occurred to Persson then that he was questioning a murder suspect who had no legal representation. It was such a serious issue that he had to deal with it in some way. He said, ‘Just so we do things properly here, Sture, I have to tell you that in saying you killed him, you are under suspicion for murder, you do understand that?’

‘Of course,’ answered Quick.

‘And this whole thing about a right to a lawyer, you know about that, you know one has a right to a lawyer in a police investigation?’

Quick said he hadn’t thought about it. Officer Persson explained that he had to stick to the rules and inform him of his rights.

‘Of course,’ said Quick.

‘Right,’ said Jörgen Persson. ‘And how do you see this whole question of legal representation? Can I continue this conversation with you and we’ll discuss your legal advice later, or do you want to have a lawyer? At what point do you want a lawyer involved?’

‘That’s a difficult question,’ Quick stated. ‘We never thought about that.’

‘No,’ confirmed Persson, the interview witness. ‘I can’t answer that.’

‘No, we can’t,’ said Quick.

‘And I’m not a lawyer,’ said Kjell Persson.

‘No,’ Quick agreed. ‘I think, formally speaking, we should be right and proper in that respect, so maybe he should be here right from the start.’

When he had no backing from either his doctor or the police officer, he continued making his point: ‘A lawyer might be good in the sense that he could be the slightly neutral force in all this. I’m thinking that it might be quite good, really.’

But things did not work out this way. Instead, Jörgen Persson turned off the tape recorder and had ‘a little discussion about it’, as he put it in the report afterwards. When the recording resumed, the interview continued without a lawyer being present.

When, fifteen years later, I read out the interrogation transcript to Sture Bergwall and he heard how, with good reason, he argued that he should have a lawyer present from the very beginning, he said, ‘I get so incredibly emotional when I hear how it was done. Upset. And I recognise the situation so well, how much I wanted to please Kjell Persson. If I’d admitted that everything I’d said in therapy was just made up, I’d embarrass Kjell Persson. And I also didn’t want to embarrass myself to Kjell.’

For several months, three times a week, he had been talking about the murder with his doctor, who now suddenly figured as the interview witness – with whom Quick, as a psychiatric patient committed into care, was in an extreme position of dependence.

‘I mean, it was absolutely impossible for me in that position to say that I had lied my way through hundreds of therapy sessions,’ says Sture.

I asked him to explain what he meant when, in the interview in 1993, he said that a lawyer could ‘be the slightly neutral force in all this’.

‘I meant that a lawyer could be a balancing factor to Kjell Persson and me; that he could ask, “Is this really true, Sture?” And explain that we should take it easy.’

When the interview was resumed, Quick was made to describe in detail how he had tricked Johan into coming closer, how he had pulled him into the car and dashed his head against the dashboard until he passed out.

‘Then what happened?’ asked Officer Persson.

‘We left the area, and I still didn’t know, so to speak, where we were going, but in the end we got to Stadsberget in Sundsvall and parked the car there. I brought Johan out of the car with me and we walked a good distance into the woods there. That’s where the actual . . . I mean, I strangled him there.’

A little later in the interview, Officer Persson asked what happened to the body.

‘It’s under a large boulder, under some rocks,’ said Quick.

‘And at what time did the body end up there?’ wondered Jörgen Persson.

‘Well, that same morning.’

‘Mm,’ said Officer Persson. ‘Shall we break for lunch, then?’

In the afternoon the interview picked up where it had left off, on Stadsberget, where Quick said that he had strangled Johan and hidden the body.

‘So how did you do it, when you strangled him?’ asked Officer Persson.

‘Using my hands.’

‘Had anything in particular happened before you strangled him?’

‘No, nothing in particular.’

But when he was asked more questions about his intentions when
he lured Johan into the car, Quick recalled that he subjected Johan to a sexual assault before strangling him.

‘And then, once he was dead, what did you do? I’m thinking, you said he ended up under some rocks, that’s what I’m thinking about.’

At this point the story took a new and unexpected turn.

‘I took off his shoes and leg coverings or whatever the hell I should call them. And I’m sort of a bit unclear here. I think, but I don’t know for sure, that I hid his clothes in, somewhere where we are, I mean. I rolled up the clothes and put them under some stones or whatever they were. And then I went to fetch a blanket from the car and I put him in that. And so in fact I don’t think I hid his body on Stadsberget but I think I drove off with him. And I went by pretty much the same route as when we came and then headed north, so I mean we drove out of Sundsvall again, headed north a distance towards Härnösand. And I mean I think, after that road, I found a smaller road which I turned into and found a place to hide him.’

Quick described a place with ‘a dip in the landscape’ where he found a few boulders he could remove. Once he had done so, he put the body there and then rolled the boulders back. Jörgen Persson listened patiently to all of Quick’s versions of what happened, or may have happened, but he got stuck on details in the account.

‘Let’s put it like this, Sture: you said “I think” when you were talking about the body. Are you sure you loaded the body into the car again and drove off, or are you not quite sure?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘So the body could still be there on Stadsberget somewhere, is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Quick.

By now, Officer Persson had fixed on another detail that was coming up in the interview and he found curious.

‘How did you know you were going to Stadsberget? You knew the actual name of the area, I’m thinking about that.’

Quick turned to Kjell Persson and answered while facing him.

‘I know that from our trip, that it’s called Stadsberget, so to speak. I didn’t know that before, I don’t think.’

‘I suppose you have to say what happened,’ said Kjell Persson.

But Jörgen Persson didn’t let Quick talk about the trip. Instead he turned to the interview witness.

‘So you’ve been up there, have you, to Sundsvall?’

‘We’ve been there, yes. That’s right.’

The questioning did not provide any answers as to what the therapist and Quick were doing on Stadsberget and why they went there.

However, one aspect of the story of great interest from a police perspective was that Quick described how the car had been bloodied inside. He explained in painstaking detail how he had stopped at a petrol station on the way home to clean the car and wash away the traces of blood. At the same time, he took the opportunity to telephone his mother, with whom he was living, to tell her not to worry.

Quick turned to his therapist and said, ‘I know I’m being difficult, Kjell, but can you check if they’ve put on coffee?’

When Kjell Persson left the room to fetch coffee, Officer Persson took the chance to ask Quick what happened when he went to Sundsvall with his therapist. To make the officer aware of the purpose of the trip, Quick had to explain the function of the memory when dealing with traumatic experiences.

‘This event had been completely hidden to me. There were pieces of it in my conscious memory. Then, my therapist and I worked on it for a long time and very intensively. We have been meeting three times a week and slowly the blockages have worked themselves free. I was about 80 per cent sure that I had killed Johan, but I kept the trapdoor open – I mean, as if this weird thing just couldn’t be true. So what did we do? We went to Sundsvall and I didn’t know where we were going and all that. The therapist drove the car and I sat next to him and we arrived in Sundsvall and I didn’t know where we were going.’

‘That sounds about right,’ Kjell Persson interjected. He had just come back into the interview room with the coffee.

‘But eventually I recognised the place,’ said Quick.

‘I should add that I knew where we were going,’ Kjell Persson pointed out.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Quick.

‘But I didn’t want to. I wanted you to show me the way, to lead us. I had found out in advance where Johan lived. That was where I wanted you to lead us, and I let you do that to a certain extent, although I had to help you a little bit,’ added Kjell Persson.

Quick described how he had recognised an Obs! supermarket and was able to give approximate directions from there, although he hadn’t managed to point out the exact junction and Kjell Persson had reminded him.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Quick.

‘I noticed that we’d gone wrong,’ said Persson.

Finally they reached Johan’s house. Quick was keen to give his impression of the moment.

‘Well, that’s when I knew I’d had an opening. This unreal stuff couldn’t be true. But once we were there, then I saw everything and so I knew that it was true.’

‘You had that feeling at this point?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘Are you absolutely sure now that it’s true?’

‘Yes. After the trip. That was the trip that closed, closed . . .’

Officer Persson had been listening to Quick’s interpretations and trying to understand his metaphors about open trapdoors and how apparently the trip to Sundsvall had closed everything. At the same time he seemed aware of the lack of tangible evidence to show that Quick was in Sundsvall and had in fact murdered Johan. He found it odd that the confession should come at this point, twelve and a half years after the crime.

‘Sture, did you ever do anything, try and tell anyone around you that you did this?’ he asked.

‘I never knew it was me,’ answered Quick.

‘You never knew?’

‘That’s the difficult bit.’

Quick went on to explain how he, like everyone else, had read in the newspapers about Johan’s murder and at the time had felt he
might have
been the one who did it. But these feelings were pushed away. He described the long process in therapy, when images from the murder slowly started resurfacing.

‘More like fantasies to begin with,’ Kjell Persson clarified.

‘Yes, precisely,’ Quick agreed.

‘As I’ve understood it, that is apparently how you have experienced things,’ Kjell Persson filled in.

‘Yes, exactly,’ Quick agreed.

‘Hm,’ said Officer Persson. ‘So you haven’t been back there since to change anything, look for clothes, move the body?’

‘No,’ Quick quickly affirmed.

‘You’re quite sure of that? Or is there a possibility that you might have been there?’

‘No, I don’t think there’s any such possibility.’

‘And when we went there, it’s fair to say we stopped when we discovered that Stadsberget was where it happened, and then we left it at that. Then we went home,’ explained Kjell Persson.

‘Precisely,’ Quick confirmed.

‘You couldn’t handle any more than that,’ the chief physician went on.

‘I see,’ said Officer Persson. ‘So at no point did you go into the woods and traipse about in there?’

‘We only went in a very short distance,’ answered Persson.

‘A very short distance, definitely,’ confirmed Quick.

‘You recognised the place and then we went back,’ said Kjell Persson.

In this first police interview Thomas Quick confessed to another murder of a boy which had apparently taken place before 1967, somewhere in the region of Småland, possibly in the town of Alvesta. Quick described how he had been driving around with a man ten years older than himself – we’ll refer to him here as Sixten Eliasson. Sixten was homosexual, but as a member of the Salvation Army he had to hide his sexual orientation behind a matrimonial façade.