Thomas Quick (31 page)

Penttinen knew that the murderer had stolen a bag and a transistor radio from the tent, so he asked, ‘Were you in any need of anything from that place, which caused you to remove something from the scene?’

‘No.’

‘You cast your eyes down when I asked about that,’ Penttinen probed, without managing to get Quick to admit that he had stolen something from the tent.

In terms of the number of wounds, Quick is not only vague but also far from correct in his answer. The Stegehuises were murdered with some fifty stab wounds, several of which would have been enough to kill in their own right.

Throughout the interview, Penttinen had been stewing over what Christer van der Kwast had told him to ask Quick. The question came up completely out of the blue after a summary of what Quick had told him in the session.

Quick was caught off guard by the question. He realised there must be some circumstance which he was unaware of relating to the Appojaure murder.

‘It’s not an unfamiliar name,’ Quick answered, vaguely.

‘It’s a double-barrelled name, Johnny Larsson-Auna.’

‘Mm.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘I’m relating to a certain person but I think it could be the wrong person.’

‘His name might be Farebrink as well.’

Quick sighed deeply, but however much he pondered on it, he could not discern the role of this Johnny in the story.

Penttinen asked again, ‘Do you know who he is?’

‘No,’ said Quick.

On Saturday, 9 December 1994 Thomas Quick sat at his desk in the evening trying to work out what sort of person Johnny was and what his role had been at Appojaure. Quick often noted down
memories or stories which he passed to Birgitta Ståhle and Seppo Penttinen, so that they could be brought up again in the therapy or police interviews. Now he wrote:

9/12 1994

More words.

I was in Norrbotten. A dark man took part in the tent murder, a man from Norrbotten county, 15–20 cm taller than me and with obvious alcohol problems. I was sober, he was drunk. We had met earlier, I can’t remember when, where or how.

I felt he was gravely paranoid. He could have been about ten years older than me. Had a bit of a ‘worse-for-wear’ appearance.

The tent was small, low. If I remember right, there was a smallish car close to the tent – a little Renault or Peugeot – the car was small, anyway. I seem to remember that my companion had some sort of dispute with the Dutchman earlier, as for me I didn’t say a word to them.

After the killing was over my companion urged me to drink – but I abstained.

When Quick had gone to bed he turned out the light and fell asleep. But his rest was brief.

‘Mikael, Mikael.’

The noise coming from Thomas Quick’s room made the care assistant, Mikael, leave his armchair in the day room. Quick was sitting up in bed with a plastic bag over his head. He was hanging by a strap round his neck.

Mikael hurried forward, loosened the strap and ripped off the plastic bag.

Quick slid down and slumped limply on the edge of the bed, running his hands over his aching throat and neck.

‘Why, Thomas?’ Mikael said. ‘Why did you want to kill yourself?’

Mikael tried to make eye contact with Quick, but he got no response. Finally he managed to get his patient to get dressed by proposing a cigarette in the smoking room.

After one and a half cigarettes Quick said in a whisper, ‘I’d made
my mind up. I was going to try and force material out of myself. Material both for the investigation and for the therapy . . .’

He continued smoking with closed eyes, thinking for a long time before continuing: ‘I did it, I managed. But now I’ve realised that it won’t work. I can’t do it.’

They had been sitting together in the smoking room for a long time when Mikael went to call Ståhle. Quick spoke to her for an hour. After the telephone call he was able to return to his room, where he was examined by a doctor for possible injuries before going back to bed.

On the following day Quick didn’t get out of bed at all, and he was kept under suicide watch.

Mikael made a note in the file:

This forcing has stirred up material relating to the investigation, which is such hard work for him that he can’t quite cope with it. The only way out he saw to avoid the confrontation with these feelings and thoughts was to commit suicide. Right now he is psychotic.

However, the police investigation proceeded as usual and two days later Seppo Penttinen was back for more questioning.

When Seppo Penttinen held the second round of questioning about Appojaure on 12 December, Thomas Quick gave an entirely different account. The long bicycle trip from Jokkmokk to Appojaure had not happened. And now he knew that Johnny Larsson-Auna had taken part in the murder and they had travelled from Jokkmokk to Appojaure in his Volkswagen pickup.

The surprising thing was that Quick, despite the wealth of specific information he was coming up with, was not absolutely sure whether he was actually involved in the murder. Penttinen seemed to share his doubts.

That Thomas Quick had murdered a woman was undoubtedly a deviation from his profile as a murderer of boys. But the fact was there had been a woman inside the tent and, however dubious he was about it, Quick continued describing his memories from Appojaure.

At an early stage of the attack the woman had tried to crawl out of the tent, Quick said. He saw her coming out, her upper body was naked, and he described her long dark hair.

Again Quick’s story was about as wrong as it could be. Janny’s hair was grey and five centimetres long, she was fully clothed and at no point did she venture outside the tent.

Penttinen asked Quick to make a drawing of the camping place. He put the tent nearest to the lake and the car at the far end. It should have been the other way round.

At the next interview, Thomas Quick, Birgitta Ståhle and Seppo Penttinen were seated, talking and apparently unaware of the fact that they were being recorded and that their words would be transcribed and included in the interrogation report.

‘I called you up at that point and said that this wasn’t so believable,’ Penttinen said to Quick.

In other words, the chief interrogator had phoned the suspect to spill the beans about some of the information being incorrect. According to Sture Bergwall, this sort of informal contact was very common during the investigation, but this was one of the few occasions when I stumbled upon irrefutable evidence of its importance.

I looked for Seppo Penttinen’s memo in the investigation notes about the same telephone conversation. According to this, Quick had communicated over the telephone that he had made three erroneous statements during the questioning: that the woman’s upper
body had been naked, that there were clothes-lines strung up at the scene and that the tent had been yellow. Penttinen wrote that Quick had given this incorrect information on purpose, in the hope that the investigation into Appojaure would be abandoned. The explanation was ‘on a psychological level’.

The note gives the impression that Penttinen had passively received the information that Quick offered to him – not that the chief interrogator had called Quick to point out the errors.

In the music room at Säter the interviews continued.

Unluckily, Seppo Penttinen had asked first about Johnny Larsson-Auna. Johnny Farebrink had had this surname as a child, but he had changed it to Farebrink as early as 1966. Since then he had never used either Larsson or Auna. Not even Detective Inspector Ture Nässén, who had had many run-ins with Johnny ever since the 1960s, recognised the surname Larsson-Auna.

Thomas Quick’s doubts about his own involvement did not stop him from flying into a rage when Seppo Penttinen didn’t formally place him under suspicion of having murdered the Stegehuises. He called Penttinen on 14 December.

‘I deserve more than being questioned “for the sake of information” about these murders! I’ve told you enough to be considered a suspect for the murders,’ he said.

He also declared that he wouldn’t take any further part in the investigation, then hung up.

But it wasn’t long before he called back to say that he did want to carry on after all. Whether he was jumping on the bandwagon or hopping off, Quick was so tormented by his inner anxiety that it was difficult for him to endure it.

On another occasion during this period, while he was working a night shift, Mikael was sitting in the ward office when he heard a strange sound. At first it was so faint that he wasn’t sure if it was just in his mind. He held his breath and tried to sharpen his senses in the silence. Once again he heard a curious, monotonous growling.

It was just after half past twelve when Mikael left the office. At the end of the corridor he could make out a tall figure growling and mumbling as he turned round and staggered towards the office. Quick was out for a night-time prowl again.

‘Thomas, what are you doing up in the middle of the night?’ said Mikael, without expecting an answer.

Still growling, Quick moved slowly towards him, mumbling, distant and startled at the same time.

Mikael perceived something in the mumbling relating to ‘Ellington’. Quick said that he was about to regress and he was afraid that Ellington would show up again.

This Ellington was an elusive phenomenon: sometimes a euphemism for his father, who had hurt him so grievously, sometimes an alien identity who took over Quick’s body while he was murdering. It wasn’t easy to understand, Mikael thought to himself as he took Quick gently by the arm and led him to the smoking room, where he tried to talk him back down to some sort of reality. When this failed, he fetched a Xanax, which soon calmed Quick down to such an extent that he voluntarily went back to his room.

At about half past two Mikael heard roars of anxiety coming from Quick’s room. It was painful to listen to, but according to Quick’s express wishes the staff shouldn’t come into his room at night when he started screaming.

It wasn’t exactly easy to obey this request, as Mikael had a strong
sense of compassion for this serial killer who seemed to already be going through all manner of hellish suffering in his earthly existence.

On 19 December Seppo Penttinen went to Säter Hospital for more questioning. This time he got straight to the point.

‘So, to begin with, Thomas, I want to ask you if you still stand by your confession to the murders in Appojaure in 1984?’

‘Yes,’ answered Quick.

The serial killer was back. Order had been restored.

UNIQUE INTERROGATION SITUATION

ONCE THOMAS QUICK
decided that he had murdered the Stegehuises with Johnny Farebrink, the investigation gained new momentum.

The very next day Jan Olsson went to Sundsvall to meet with Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast for a run-through of the case. Penttinen outlined his questioning of Quick to date, omitting some of the stranger aspects of his story.

Up until that point, the Quick investigation team had consisted of Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast. Now the two investigations into Appojaure were merged into what was dubbed the ‘Quick Commission’ under the umbrella of the National Criminal Investigation Department.

The head of the investigation, van der Kwast, had virtually unlimited resources in his capacity as the controller of Sweden’s first serial-murder case, and Penttinen was appointed to the Criminal Investigation Department as detective superintendent. An action plan was drawn up, and CID Detective Inspectors Jan Karlsson and Stellan Söderman were put in charge of operational matters.