Thomas Quick (33 page)

Margit Norell read Birgitta Ståhle’s jottings on the telephone call and was delighted that Ellington had taken shape outside the therapy room. She analysed the significance of this curious incident in the unpublished manuscript on Thomas Quick:

When Ellington takes form and tries, and fails, to regain power through his disdain for Sture and his weakness, two things occur. Firstly: Sture achieves ‘object constancy’ for the first time in his life. P and Ellington are the same person. It was highly understandable that Sture wanted to believe that his father needed him, that he meant something to P, and that P was occasionally capable of protecting Sture against the even more dangerous M – after all it was P who pulled Sture out of the hole in the ice. In relation to P there was also, up until the murder of Simon, some sort of predictable framework, as described by Sture himself – from experience Sture came to recognise the sequence of events and could therefore predict when P would ejaculate and the pain would stop and P would become kind again – weeping
a few sentimental tears, patting Sture on the stomach, telling him how much he liked his lad Sture, going into the kitchen and giving Sture lingonberries and milk or something. As a consequence of the murder – as would later be shown – and the cutting up of the foetus Simon, this framework of predictability was broken and Sture experienced the absolutely unbearable terror of P being capable of doing the same thing to him, Sture. Clearly Sture must have seen it like this when M made him directly responsible for the death of the foetus: ‘Just see what you have done!’ However, what also happens when Ellington takes full form is that his power is broken. He has written down Birgitta’s telephone number, Sture’s therapist. He calls her and after a few moments of conversation with Ellington, Birgitta establishes contact with Sture and takes his side against Ellington. [. . .] Shortly after, M – Nana – also takes form. This is even more terrifying, as ever since infancy in Sture’s experience she has represented anger and, later on, death. The only time when it was not like this seems to have been his gestation in the womb, which was also the only time that Sture was not alone but had a twin.

THE LAST DAM BUILDER

ON 18 MARCH
1995 Thomas Quick was sitting in his room at Säter Hospital when a documentary on the village of Messaure was shown on SVT2.

The place where Thomas Quick had apparently been dropped off after the murder of the Dutch couple is situated some thirty-seven kilometres from Jokkmokk. In 1957 the power company Vattenfall started building a gigantic hydroelectric dam there, on the river known as Stora Luleälv.

The project would keep 1,300 workers in full employment for five years. In the middle of the wilderness a village was built, complete with streets and squares, apartment blocks, shops, a post office, church, school, a community centre, police station, doctor’s surgery, café and everything else required by a thriving community. By the early 1960s the village had 3,000 residents.

The power station in Messaure was inaugurated in 1962 with a speech by the prime minister, Tage Erlander. The settlement was later demolished bit by bit and in the end all that remained of the bustling community was the network of roads in the midst of the Lapp/Sami outback.

The TV documentary was about a resident of Messaure, Rune Nilsson, who had worked as a construction foreman until 1971. Once the dam was finished, Vattenfall and Jokkmokk municipality used increasingly strong-arm tactics to get the residents of the village to move away, which most accepted on voluntary terms.

‘Vattenfall tried to get me out by hook or crook, but . . . I
suppose I’m a bit of a stubborn sort, so I just said “I’m not going anywhere”,’ Rune Nilsson said.

It turned into a drawn-out battle, with Jokkmokk municipality turning off his water in an attempt to make him move. Ignoring their pleas and threats, he stayed on. After ten years the municipality gave up and let him stay on as Messaure’s only inhabitant.

Thomas Quick watched the documentary with amazement and realised what a bad idea the railbus had been. But at least now he knew who Rune Nilsson was and what it looked like where he lived.

This was bad luck for Rune Nilsson, who seemed a peaceful, friendly man.

THE MISSING SIBLINGS

THOMAS QUICK’S SIX
siblings had been keeping up with what their crazy brother was saying – with disgust. They were burdened by the Quick story and before long they began to avoid any further information about their serial-killer brother, breaking off all contact with him and staying away from the subject of Sture Bergwall or Thomas Quick altogether. He ceased to exist for them.

Eva, Sture’s younger sister, was the one who persevered with him for the longest. When I spoke to Eva, she told me about the nightmarish time they had had after Sture’s confession of the murder of Johan Asplund.

‘Every time I thought,
Now it can’t get any worse
But then it did! It just got worse and worse . . .’

In the end, even Eva realised she had to sever her ties with Sture.

So it was surprising when, early in 1995, Sten-Ove Bergwall emerged as the spokesman for the Bergwall siblings and struck an unforgiving tone towards his brother. In a number of interviews he made a categoric request to the psychiatric care system and the courts: ‘Never release Thomas Quick!’

Sten-Ove was ten years older than Sture and had moved away from home when Sture was still a little boy. As adults, the two brothers rekindled their relationship over a shared interest in nature, sighthounds and racing bikes. In June 1982 they took part in ‘Den Store Styrkeprøven’ (The Great Test of Strength) bicycle race between Trondheim and Oslo, and a few months later they took over a kiosk on Koppartorget (Copper Square) in Hälsinggården,
Falun, a business venture that lasted just short of four years.

Nine years later Sten-Ove regarded his brother as a complete stranger. He wrote the book
Min bror Thomas Quick
, in which he questions who his younger brother really was. He warned of the manipulative Thomas Quick who for all those years managed to hide his evil side from his family. Sten-Ove’s conclusion was that his brother had developed a loathsome creature within himself which only his victims had seen.

However, Sten-Ove Bergwall’s main reason for publishing the book was to redress the wrongs done to their parents. He maintained that he and his siblings had bright, loving memories of their parental home.

The six children considered it unthinkable that their father could have raped Sture in front of their mother, and absolutely inconceivable that their beloved mother would have tried to drown Sture in a frozen lake.

‘I don’t doubt that it’s true for him,’ said Sten-Ove to
Expressen
’s Christian Holmén. ‘It’s a known fact that people in therapy are encouraged to come up with false memories.’

After the book had been out for a while, Thomas Quick wanted to announce ‘certain clarifications’ concerning his brother. In a police interview on 10 April 1995 he alleged that Sten-Ove had participated in the murder of Johan Asplund:

Quick says that, while they were travelling to Sundsvall, Sten-Ove Bergwall was quite aware of the fact that they were looking for a boy who would be their victim. Sten-Ove tried to wind Quick up by saying something to the effect of: ‘Show me you have the guts to kill a boy.’

Once they got to the place where they took Johan’s life, Sten-Ove behaved in a superior manner and tried to fire Quick up by the things he said, including, ‘So kill him then!’

At their second meeting, the Quick Commission had decided to arrange interviews with the people who knew Quick, in order to build up a picture of his credibility. The very highest priority would be given to his siblings, who were to be questioned about their
childhood years in the family home. Detectives Jan Olsson and Ture Nässén confirmed to me and Jenny Küttim that the interviews were held in the spring of 1995, in connection with the investigation into the double murder in Appojaure.

The task had been passed to Detective Inspectors Anna Wikström and Ann-Helene Gustafsson, but we did not find a trace of the interviews among the investigation material, not even in the so-called slush. We applied to the district court in Gällivare for copies of the missing documents, but they replied that they didn’t have them. We sent a request to the police authority in Sundsvall and received the same answer. Christer van der Kwast passed us over to Seppo Penttinen, who in turn informed us that he did not ‘recognise our errand’ and so couldn’t comment on it and that ‘the documentation you are asking for is not found in the material I have at my disposal’, both of which were roundabout ways of saying that the interrogation transcripts simply didn’t exist.

At the same time Sture Bergwall’s siblings informed us individually that they had been questioned by Anna Wikström and Ann-Helene Gustafsson. So what had they said in those interviews?

Ever since the first headlines about Thomas Quick, Örjan Bergwall had been trying to avoid every newspaper article, radio or television report on his brother. But he still knew far more than he would have preferred. The two police officers wanted to know about Örjan’s memories of growing up, and he replied that he had recollections of a very secure childhood.

They had moved to Korsnäs, outside Falun, in 1956, just in time for Örjan to start school. The family then consisted of seven children and two adults, who all managed to get along in a ninety-eight-square-metre flat with three rooms and a kitchen. Their father, Ove, worked in a factory making boxes and Thyra, their mother, had found a job as a school caretaker.

Örjan recalled Sture as talented, highly creative and dynamic but with some ‘lack of motor skills’ in his movements. He was also markedly independent even as a young boy.

Their father was slightly authoritarian, maybe a touch too strict, but also a very friendly person with a good sense of humour. Their
mother was a stable and dependable person committed to the well-being of all her children. There were never any long-lasting quarrels in the parental home and Örjan did not recall any real unpleasantness during his childhood. The children never received any corporal punishment at the hands of their parents. Sexual molestation? No, Örjan had never noticed anything like that, and he was utterly dumbfounded at the mere suggestion. There were so many siblings that if anything of that nature had taken place, surely someone would have noticed?

Örjan knew that Sture had committed various crimes. Among other things he had sexually assaulted a young boy at the hospital in Falun and, after that, had been in care at various institutions. In the 1970s, Örjan and his parents had visited Sture at Säter and Sidsjön hospitals. According to Örjan, after that Sture had started improving and he became much more stable in the early 1980s.

By the time of the bank robbery in Grycksbo in 1990, their contact had grown more sporadic. Sture mostly just sent letters about how much he missed his family. The last time Örjan spoke to him was at the beginning of his course of therapy with Kjell Persson. Örjan seemed to recall how, on that occasion, Sture had said that he could see ‘a light at the end of the tunnel’ and Örjan, interpreting this in a positive sense, told Sture that he hoped he would start finding positive aspects in his life.

Örjan told me that he would never forget the day he swung into a petrol station to refuel his car and saw his brother staring out from the front pages of both the evening newspapers. That was when the nightmare began and it was still looking unlikely to be over in the near future. But he never spoke about this to the two police officers.

Instead he remembered towards the end of the questioning how they brought up a question that ought to have been of great interest to the investigators: Sture’s driving skills. Örjan mentioned that Sture got his driving licence very late on, at some point in the late 1980s. Sture had driven with him once as a learner driver, and Örjan’s view prior to Sture’s test was that he was essentially unable to drive a car.

*

Torvald Bergwall remembered that he met with Detective Inspectors Anna Wikström and Jan Karlsson in the Mikaeli Church in Västerås, where he was the vicar. They explained that the questioning was part of the investigation into the Appojaure murders, while also touching upon the murders of Johan Asplund and Olle Högbom.

Torvald Bergwall also spoke of an untroubled childhood without any memories of sexual molestation or violence. According to him, the version of events circulating in the press was simply untrue. He had always known Sture had mental problems, but their parents hadn’t spoken of this openly, because in those times such things were shameful. But they had been very loyal to Sture and never abandoned him. They always took care of him and often visited him at Säter after he was sectioned in the 1970s.

Torvald also remembered Sture’s poor coordination while they were growing up – lisping and jumbling his words, which sometimes caused the other children to laugh at him. He mentioned one occasion when the siblings were trying to teach Sture to ride a bicycle but in their eagerness forgot to tell him how to apply the brakes. Sture cycled right into a wall and hurt himself so badly that the children were frightened. This, according to Torvald, was a typical example of their ‘inability to grasp his handicap with his motor skills’.

In addition Torvald mentioned that Sture took his driving test very late and had to try several times before he passed. Torvald never saw Sture driving a car before then and had given a great deal of thought to how he had supposedly made his way to all these places where the murders to which he had confessed took place. According to the vicar, it was simply not feasible that Sture had driven himself.

And so it continued: all of Sture Bergwall’s siblings confirmed that they had been questioned by the Quick Commission, and all had given a picture of their childhood that departed in every possible way from the stories that had emerged from Quick’s therapy at Säter. Some people would say that their unanimous testimony revealed that Thomas Quick had very likely given an untrue description of his childhood and above all had false accused his parents of extremely serious crimes.