Thomas Quick (3 page)

On 12 November 1993 Gubb Jan Stigson revealed that the police investigation regarding the Säter Man had been widened to include five murders. In addition to Johan Asplund in 1980 and Thomas Blomgren in 1964 he was under suspicion for the murders of fifteen-year-old Alvar Larsson from Sirkön, who disappeared in 1967, forty-eight-year-old Ingemar Nylund, who was murdered in Uppsala in 1977, and eighteen-year-old Olle Högbom, who disappeared without trace in Sundsvall in 1983.

According to Stigson, the Säter Man had confessed to all five murders. Increasing numbers of journalists were claiming that Quick was Sweden’s first real serial killer.

‘He is telling the truth about the boy murders’,
Expressen
’s
full-page article announced on 17 June 1994. The Säter Man had confessed to yet another murder and this time the investigators had finally had a breakthrough. It concerned fifteen-year-old Charles Zelmanovits, who had disappeared after a school disco in Piteå in 1976.

The Säter Man had confessed that he and an older friend had driven from Falun to Piteå in search of a young boy to assault. They came across Charles and lured him into the car. In a nearby wooded area the Säter Man had strangled the boy and cut up the body, taking some of the body parts with him.

According to the investigators, Quick had not only provided the sort of information that had enabled them to find the various body parts, but also specified which body parts he had taken home with him.

For the first time, van der Kwast had the sort of evidence the police hadn’t managed to obtain in their other investigations: a confession involving actual body parts and a statement demonstrating that the Säter Man had information that could only possibly be known by the perpetrator.

‘The 43 year-old is a sex killer’,
Expressen
declared in an article on 17 June.

‘We know he is telling the truth about two of the murders,’ van der Kwast confirmed.

IN THE HEADLINES

WHEN THE SÄTER
Man’s therapist, Birgitta Ståhle, went on holiday in July 1994 there was widespread concern about how he would manage without the constant therapeutic support that had become increasingly important to him. On Monday, 4 July his team of carers had planned a lunch at the golf club restaurant in Säter. The Säter Man was accompanied on the outing by a young psychiatry student who was standing in for Ståhle.

She and her patient left Ward 36 at a quarter to twelve and strolled in the direction of the golf course, when he suddenly told her that he urgently needed to relieve himself. He went behind a derelict building that had once served as Säter’s security ward. As soon as he was out of sight, he ran along a path through the woods to a road known as Smedjebacksvägen, where, according to plan, an old Volvo 745 was waiting with its motor running. In the driver’s seat sat a young woman and, beside her, a man of about twenty who was on trial release from Säter Hospital. The Säter Man jumped into the back seat and the driver pulled off with a wheel-spin.

The car’s occupants laughed excitedly: the escape had gone according to plan. The man in the front seat handed over a little plastic bag, which the Säter Man opened and expertly, with a moist fingertip, emptied of every last grain of the white powder inside. He put his finger in his mouth and, using his tongue, fixed the bitter load to the top of his palate, then leaned back and closed his eyes.

‘Damn, that’s good,’ he mumbled as he worked the amphetamine
paste in his mouth. Amphetamine was his favourite drug and, unusually, he actually liked the taste.

His young friend in the front seat passed a razor, some shaving foam, a blue baseball cap and a T-shirt to the escapee in the back, then gave him a shove.

‘Come on, we don’t have time to mess around.’

As the Volvo swung onto the S-70 trunk road towards Hedemora, the assisting psychiatrist was standing by the club house wondering if she should be worried. She called out but there was no answer, and before long she realised that he was neither behind the wall nor anywhere else. It was inconceivable that her sincere and amiable patient should let her down in this way, but after a few moments of fruitless searching, she had to go back to Ward 36 to report that the patient had absconded.

By this time the fugitive was clean-shaven and wearing his disguise. He relished the freedom and the amphetamine rush while their aimless journey continued northwards on Highway 270.

By the time the police in Borlänge put out a call for the Säter Man, forty-two minutes had elapsed and no one had any idea that he was approaching Ockelbo in an old Volvo.

The evening newspapers picked up on the story straight away and immediately extended their print runs.
Expressen
’s headline went in as hard as it could:

POLICE HUNTING

the escaped

SÄTER MAN TONIGHT

‘He is highly dangerous’

Up until this point the newspapers had protected the identity of the Säter Man for ethical reasons, but when the most dangerous man in Sweden goes on the run, public interest demands a name, photograph and biographical information:

The 44-year-old ‘Säter Man’ is now known as Thomas Quick, after changing his name. He has confessed to the murders of five boys, and the police and public prosecutor believe he can be tied
to two of these. The man has told
Expressen
that he would prefer just to live in the woods with his dogs – last night the police conducted a search for him in the forests around Ockelbo.

Once the woman driver realised the nature of the crimes for which Thomas Quick was under investigation, she had second thoughts and pulled over by an abandoned farmhouse to drop off the men. The companions found two unlocked bicycles there and, after getting them into some sort of working order, set off for the nearest town. Cycling along, they saw several police cars and were overtaken by just as many, while police helicopters circled overhead. No one seemed at all suspicious of the odd couple on the rusty bicycles.

A large force of police officers equipped with automatic weapons, bulletproof vests and dog patrols searched for them until midnight without picking up their trail.

After spending the night in a tent, the fugitives parted company in the morning. The amphetamine was finished, they were tired and it was no longer fun to be on the run.

While the police were searching the forest, a man in a baseball cap walked into a Statoil petrol station in the small town of Alfta.

‘Do you have a payphone I can use?’ he asked.

The proprietor did not recognise the man whose image was on the cover of both evening newspapers. Calmly he showed him the telephone. The customer made a brief call to Bollnäs police.

‘I’m handing myself in,’ he said.

‘And who might you be, then?’ asked the duty constable.

‘Quick,’ replied Thomas Quick.

The escape triggered a heated debate about lax security in the country’s psychiatric institutions. Most indignant of all was National Police Commissioner Björn Eriksson.

‘It’s so tiresome that these things happen,’ said Eriksson. ‘There are so few really dangerous people around; it really ought to be possible to guard them. In the police force, we prioritise the safety of the public over rehabilitation.’

The barb of the criticism was directed at Säter Hospital, but on 10 July 1994 an article strongly defending the institution was published in the debate section of
Dagens Nyheter
. It had been written by Thomas Quick himself, who paid effusive tribute to the staff and quality of the care at Säter, while at the same time putting the boot into the press corps:

My name is Thomas Quick. After my escape last Monday (4/7) and the massive uproar that followed in the media, neither my name nor my face are unfamiliar.

I neither want to, nor would I even be able to defend my escape from Säter Hospital, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to highlight some of the good work that has been done and continues to be done at this clinic; this is utterly lost in the general screeching of the journalists in their hunt for sensational stories, and it even overwhelms the good intellectual forces attempting to be heard in this domineering choir of voices.

Many were surprised by his words, which indicated that Quick was an articulate, intelligent person. For the first time, the public gained an insight into the mind of a serial killer. They also learned about the process that had played itself out in all of Thomas Quick’s murder confessions.

‘When I came to the regional psychiatric unit in Säter I had no memory of the first twelve years of my life. Just as effectively repressed were the murders which I have now confessed to and which are being investigated by the police in Sundsvall.’

Thomas Quick heaped praise on the staff who had helped him to recover his repressed memories of the murders, and he described how the therapists had supported him in this painful process: ‘My anxiety, guilt and sorrow over what I have done are so boundless, so heavy, that in real terms they cannot be borne. I am responsible for what I have done and also for what I do henceforth. The misdeeds I am guilty of cannot be remedied in any sense, but today I can at least say what they are. I am prepared to do so in my own time.’

Quick explained that he had not escaped in order to commit new
crimes, but rather to kill himself: ‘After I had parted from my companion, I sat for thirteen hours with a sawn-off shotgun pointing at my forehead. But I couldn’t do it. Today I can take responsibility for yesterday, and I think it was this sense of responsibility that stopped me ending my life and made me telephone the police to ask to be arrested. That is what I want to believe.’

CHARLES ZELMANOVITS

ON 18 OCTOBER 1994
Piteå District Court received an application for a summons from the prosecutor Christer van der Kwast with the following brief description of the offence: ‘On the night of 13 November 1976 in a wooded area outside Piteå, Quick took the life of Charles Zelmanovits, born 1961, by strangulation.’

The trial in Piteå was set to begin on 1 November and, in the face of the impending legal inquiry into Quick’s confessions, the media released more and more details on the background of the alleged serial killer. While previously it had mainly been the tabloids that took an interest in Quick’s bizarre stories, now the broadsheets threw themselves into the ring. On 1 November
Svenska Dagbladet
published an article with descriptions of Thomas Quick that from this point were taken as hard facts. The journalist Janne Mattsson wrote:

Thomas Quick was the fifth of seven siblings. His father was a nursing assistant in a home for alcoholics and his mother a caretaker and cleaner at a school that has since closed. Both parents are deceased. [. . .] What lay hidden behind the outer façade remained a well-kept family secret. From the age of four, Thomas Quick claims to have been a victim of his father’s constant sexual predations and was forced to have oral and anal sex with him.

During one of these assaults, something took place that was to shape Quick’s life and morbid sexuality – his mother suddenly appeared and saw what was happening. She was so
shocked that she miscarried. Screaming at four-year-old Thomas, she accused him of having murdered his little brother.

The father echoed these accusations and implied that the boy had seduced him. The mother’s relations with her son were henceforth marked by hatred, after the loss of her unborn child. She put all the blame on her son’s shoulders, and this is a burden which he is incapable of carrying.

On at least one occasion she tried to kill him, Quick alleges.

He also alleges that his mother began sexually assaulting him alongside his father.

Janne Mattsson further stated that Quick had already committed two murders while still a teenager:

By the time he was thirteen, Quick had had enough of his father’s abuse and he fought off one of his attempted rapes. On this occasion Quick reports that he wanted to kill his father, but he didn’t dare.

Instead he took on his father’s perverted urges, but with even greater morbid and sadistic aspects. Six months later, at the age of fourteen, he murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö. [. . .] Three years later, on 16 April 1967, a thirteen-year-old boy fell prey to Thomas Quick’s hand.

Although Quick was not yet officially linked to the murders and had not been successfully prosecuted for or convicted of any of them, the media assumed that he was guilty. The same was true of the accusations against the parents, who had allegedly subjected their son to systematic rape, assault and murder attempts.

The stance of the media during this period can be explained by three factors. First, there were Thomas Quick’s confessions. Second, the public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, had made categorical statements that there was other evidence connecting Quick to several of the crimes. Third, these statements were mixed with information about sexual transgressions demonstrably committed by Thomas Quick against young boys in 1969, as well as
extracts from statements made by forensic psychiatrists on the danger he posed to the public.

In this way, a complete, apparently logical life story was created for the monstrous killer who would now be prosecuted for the first in a series of murders.

Once again, the article in
Svenska Dagbladet
cited the forensic psychiatrist who had examined Quick in 1970, claiming that Quick was suffering from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as
paedophilia cum sadismus
’.

Falu District Court had convicted Quick of the assaults on the boys and he was committed to protective psychiatric care. Four years later, at the age of twenty-three, Quick was judged healthy enough to be released.

‘With hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to release him,’ the article summed up, before closing with the anticipation of a guilty verdict in the approaching trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits: ‘They released a live-wired bomb packed with repressed angst. It was this angst that would eventually bring Quick and a homosexual acquaintance to Piteå in order to desecrate, kill and cut up a fifteen-year-old boy.’