Thomas Quick (30 page)

In its verdict of 16 November 1994, the district court wrote:

Quick has admitted to his deed and his confession is backed up by the information he has provided. However, there is no technical evidence to connect Quick to the crime.

The last part was obviously a weakness in the prosecution’s case. Nor had any witnesses seen Quick in Piteå at the time of the murder. But these things, according to the district court, were counteracted by other circumstances:

Quick’s statements on the body parts he removed from the scene conform very well with the evidence, in the sense that these body parts are missing from the crime scene. This fact makes a very strong supporting case for the accuracy of Quick’s information.

The forensic technicians who examined the scene where the remains were found concluded that there were no signs of a crime having been committed and definitely no signs of the body having been cut into pieces. The investigators had noted that Charles’s bones had been dragged in the direction of some fox earths to the south of the remains. The absence of certain bones was therefore not evidence that the body had been cut up.

The views of the forensic technicians were not taken into account. Quite the opposite: the missing leg bones were judged to be ‘very strong supporting evidence’ for Quick’s guilt.

Thomas Quick, who had gone back to Säter after his testimony,
received the court verdict delivered by fax to the hospital reception. Eagerly he rifled through the pages until he reached the important part:

By way of a summarising judgment the district court finds Quick guilty beyond any reasonable doubt of the act for which prosecution has been brought. The circumstances of the crime are such that the crime should be considered as murder.

Because of the lack of technical evidence, the pronouncements of specialists in psychology and psychiatry carried a great deal of weight in the judgment. Professor Lidberg, in an interview in
Aftonbladet
on 15 April 1997, did not hesitate for a moment about his own significance in the outcome of the case.

‘Thomas Quick was convicted on my evidence in Piteå. I am wholly convinced that he was guilty of the charges and that was also the view taken by the court.’

Lidberg’s conclusion that he had single-handedly determined the outcome of the case is certainly an exaggeration of his own importance, but quite clearly the guilty verdict was a great success both for him and for Christianson.

Christer van der Kwast had been concerned about their difficulties in coming up with a single piece of evidence for any of Quick’s confessed murders. He therefore had every reason to be very satisfied.

‘With this guilty verdict I have been given a green light so that an investigation can be conducted as we have done here. A confession, reconnaissance of the crime scene and a profile of the perpetrator are enough for a successful prosecution, despite a lack of traditional technical evidence.’

Future events would soon prove that van der Kwast had made an entirely correct assessment. That ‘traditional’ evidence was no longer required would soon become a matter of concern for many more people, but with the recent verdict in his hands, van der Kwast was full of confidence.

‘I am counting on this having a very positive impact on the on-going investigation,’ he said.

NOCTURNAL DOUBTS

‘I WONDER WHAT
you’d think of me if you found out that I’d done something really serious.’

It was with this comment that it had all begun, during a bathing trip with a young care assistant from Ward 36 in June 1992.

At that time Quick was still called Sture Bergwall and was regarded as so harmless that he was being reintroduced into the community with his own flat in Hedemora.

This cryptic and ominous question had, justifiably so, given rise to concern among the carers at Säter Hospital, and soon Quick had confessed to his first murder and hinted at more.

Confessions by innocent people are not particularly rare – especially among patients in psychiatric clinics – but for a real serial killer who has never been suspected of a single murder to start confessing to a series of murders is, according to researchers, unique. It has never happened before.

Psychological profiling is one of the few tools available for tracking down serial killers. When Quick first started confessing, there was almost no awareness of this technique in the Swedish police force.

But during the hunt for the Laser Man, the psychiatrist Ulf Åsgård, who had a long-established interest in psychological profiling, teamed up with Detective Chief Inspector Jan Olsson, at that time the assistant chief of the forensic division in Stockholm.

Their psychological profile of the Laser Man was the first attempt of its kind in Swedish criminal history. The profile didn’t play an important role in the capture of the Laser Man, which was instead
the result of skilled and patient police work. But Jan Olsson and Ulf Åsgård’s psychological profile was nonetheless seen as a success, because in retrospect it was found to ‘correspond by about 75 per cent’ with John Ausonius. Analytical police work was the theme tune of the time and profiling was here to stay.

Lennart Håård, the crime correspondent of
Aftonbladet
, was one of many journalists who visited Säter Hospital in the autumn of 1994.

In the middle of the interview he asked a peculiar question: ‘Are you being investigated for a double murder in the Swedish northern mountains?’

He was clearly alluding to the murder of the Stegehuises and Quick kept his answer short: ‘No, we haven’t spoken about that.’

After the trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits there was a great worry that Thomas Quick would stop talking. Birgitta Ståhle emphasised how essential it was that he continued ‘his important work’ and her instructor Margit Norell wrote letters to Quick, pleading with him: ‘Find the strength to go on, Sture!’

The situation was complex.

Quick had confessed to murdering five boys. He had now been found guilty of one murder. Two were statute-barred – those of Thomas Blomgren and Alvar Larsson – and the investigations into the murders of Johan Asplund and Olle Högbom had come to a standstill. So how could he ‘go on’ with his talking?

Lennart Håård’s question about Appojaure resurfaced now in Quick’s mind and on 21 November 1994 he called Seppo Penttinen to tell him about what had come up in the interview.

‘I’ve been thinking about it since then,’ said Quick. ‘I think it would be good if I were confronted with the facts of that murder.’

Penttinen asked why he thought it would be good.

‘Well, because I know I was up there in that region around the time of the murder,’ answered Quick.

But then the interview ground to a halt.

‘I don’t feel like going into it further right now,’ he said.

The idea that Quick, the boy murderer, would attack a couple in
their thirties went against all serial-killer logic. Nonetheless, the next day Penttinen informed Christer van der Kwast, who, just to be on the safe side, notified the National Criminal Investigation Department. Van der Kwast was told that there was already an investigation under way into the Appojaure murders, and a possible suspect – a fifty-one-year-old male by the name of Johnny Farebrink, a native of Jokkmokk. The individual in question was a drug addict with a violent background who was currently serving a ten-year sentence for murder at Hall, a maximum-security prison. The Criminal Investigation Department had not yet found anything to tie him to the murdered couple and hadn’t even had time to question him as yet.

Christer van der Kwast realised that there was a risk of setting up a competing police investigation with a different murder suspect. His thinking on the matter is difficult to understand, but he put forward the bold suggestion that Quick and Farebrink might have murdered the couple together.

A search of the population registry revealed that Johnny was born Johnny Larsson-Auna but nowadays went by the name of Johnny Farebrink. Van der Kwast called Penttinen and told him to ask Thomas Quick if he knew someone called Johnny Larsson-Auna. Or Farebrink.

The following day Seppo Penttinen went to Säter to conduct the first round of questioning about the double murder in Appojaure, in the presence of the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren. Since the successful prosecution in Piteå, Penttinen had been promoted to Detective Inspector, a title that from now on decorated all interrogations and documents where his name appeared, as was required by police procedure. While he was still only a senior police assistant, he and his boss Christer van der Kwast had been less scrupulous in their use of titles – back then Penttinen was usually described as ‘chief interrogator’.

‘So, Thomas, I want you to get straight to the heart of the matter and not linger too long on the periphery. Start where you feel you have some memories of the actual deed,’ he said.

‘Hm,’ said Quick.

‘Can you develop that a bit further?’

The three men sat in silence for a long time in the music room on Ward 36.

‘Yeah . . . it was brutal,’ said Quick.

Then he ran out of steam and couldn’t take the story any further.

‘What was the question?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to influence you,’ explained Penttinen, and asked Quick to tell him what first came to mind.

Again there was a long silence.

‘Well, the knife is the first thing.’

‘What do you remember about it?’

‘Its size.’

‘OK.’

Quick cleared his throat.

‘Try to describe it a bit more.’

They agreed that Quick should try to draw the knife from memory.

The knife in Quick’s drawing is large, with a length of about thirty-five centimetres. The blade is slightly curved like a sabre and the top of the blade is shaped so that the tip forms an upward-curving point.

Quick wrote ‘cutting edge’ on what would normally have been the back of the knife. On the curved side of the blade, the side that would normally have been sharpened, he noted, ‘blunt side’.

Seppo Penttinen said that he couldn’t understand how a knife could be made in that way. Most likely he realised that no such knife had ever been manufactured, and he suggested that Quick should think about what a standard Mora knife looks like. He made his own drawing of a knife and showed the sharpened side of the blade and the blunt edge of the other side.

But it was no good. Quick stood his ground and said that it was precisely its design that had made his knife different from a Mora knife.

Penttinen carried on questioning the construction of the knife. He asked Quick if he could possibly have made a ‘mirror image’.

Eventually Quick agreed that Penttinen could put a question mark beside his note on the drawing about which was the ‘blunt side’ of the knife.

From a forensic perspective, Penttinen knew perfectly well that
the broad-bladed knife that Quick had drawn couldn’t by the slightest stretch of the imagination have inflicted the injuries on the murder victims.

‘You didn’t have any other weapons with you?’

‘No.’

‘Can you describe a bit how it happened?’

‘Well, they were deep stabs. Proper stabs. There was no sort of poking, they were stabs.’

‘You’re showing that you were stabbing down from above.’

‘From above. Hm.’

The interview had been going on for a good while without Penttinen managing to extract any real information about the murder, apart from the unlikely knife.

‘What were the conditions in the place you’re describing, where you are right now?’

‘Lot of mosquitoes.’

‘Mosquitoes?’

‘A lot.’

Quick said that the camping spot was by a pond in the forest.

‘Yes, we both know that it was a tent,’ Penttinen filled in.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve read about that in the newspapers if nothing else.’

‘Yes.’

‘So where are these people when you’re doing this?’

‘Well, they’re inside the tent. Er . . . apart from, er . . . a part of one of them, er . . . one person’s body is outside the tent at first.’

‘Completely?’

‘No. Yes.’

‘You’re indicating the upper body.’

‘Yes.’

According to Quick, the woman tried to flee from the tent, but he stabbed at her with the knife and forced her back inside.

Thomas Quick made a new sketch, this time of the tent. Shown from the opening, Quick placed the woman on the left and the man on the right.

Quick’s description deviated from known facts on every point.
The man had lain on the left, the woman on the right, and the zip of the tent was closed. Janny Stegehuis was still in her sleeping bag and had clearly not ventured outside the tent.

Seppo continued his questioning: ‘So how come you ended up there?’

‘I was up there and . . . I was up there. And I didn’t come by car – that is, to . . . to this . . .’

‘Right. So how did you get there?’

‘On a bicycle, I did . . .’

‘You cycled there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you alone there?’

‘Yes.’

Thomas Quick said that he had travelled by train from Falun to Jokkmokk the day before the murder and then cycled eighty kilometres to Appojaure.

‘It was a stolen bicycle.’

‘OK. What sort of bicycle was it?’

‘Er . . . it was a . . . er . . . a . . . it was a three-gear men’s bicycle, er . . . which . . . and the two top gears worked on it or it jumped out of gear . . .’

Quick had stolen the bicycle outside the Sami Museum in Jokkmokk. First he went to a food shop, where he bought a fizzy drink, before he set off on the journey to Appojaure. He couldn’t come up with any reasons for his cycling off, nor did he have any particular destination in mind.

‘Did you have a bag with you?’

‘Yeah, I had socks and underpants and that kind of change of clothes . . . I did have that.’

Quick had stopped along the way and slept under the open sky on the road to Appojaure.

‘What was the weather like?’ wondered Penttinen.

‘It was nice weather.’

Later in the questioning they came back to the weather, which was described as fair. It was a troublesome piece of information, as it was well known that there had been light rain in the evening which had then turned into a downpour.