Authors: Hannes Råstam
So what happened to the transcripts of the interviews with the Bergwall siblings?
They weren’t archived at the police authority in Sundsvall, and were clearly kept from the general public, the media, lawyers and law courts that sentenced Thomas Quick.
As far as I can tell they were never evaluated, nor even read except by those who had conducted the interviews, and of course by Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast.
A MISSING HOUR
ON SUNDAY, 9 JULY
1995
a ten-seater private jet belonging to the dance band the Vikings landed at Gällivare Airport. But instead of Christer Sjögren and his fellow band members, Thomas Quick disembarked with Birgitta Ståhle, four care assistants and a number of police officers.
After staying the night at the psychiatric clinic in Gällivare Hospital, the group set off down the E45, heading south towards Porjus in a Toyota Hiace.
The memory expert Sven Åke Christianson had gained a great deal of influence over the investigation, not least in the methods they used in staging the reconstructions. Quick hadn’t wasted any time in getting to grips with these new ideas. For instance, when the minibus was about to turn off towards Appojaure, he insisted that they first had to drive to Porjus and then turn round, as this was the route he had taken with Johnny Farebrink when they drove to the murder scene.
In this way the journey was supposed to correspond with the events of 12 July 1984.
It was 14.15 by the time the white Toyota turned onto Vägen Västerut (the Westerly Road) towards Stora Sjöfallet and Appojaure. Quick’s anxiety attacks grew more and more frequent and he claimed that he recognised their whereabouts. They had to stop the minibus so he could get out and throw up.
‘It mustn’t be true, it can’t be true,’ he moaned.
The small turn-off to the picnic spot by Appojaure was impossible to miss, as the police had cordoned off the area and posted sentries.
‘On arrival, Quick had to take medication, Xanax,’ wrote Penttinen in the reconstruction report.
Quick stepped out of the vehicle, wearing a blue baseball cap, a green anorak, black jeans and black trainers. Walking with Seppo Penttinen, he familiarised himself with their surroundings and waited for the forensic technicians to prepare the last few details before the reconstruction could begin.
Every time he’d been asked about it during questioning, Quick had placed the car and the tent incorrectly, while also positioning the man and the woman on the opposite sides to where they had actually been. Yet when they arrived at Appojaure the technicians had arranged everything exactly as it was at the time of the murders.
The police had even specially ordered a tent from the Netherlands and got hold of a green car from the mid-1970s which resembled those belonging to the murder victims.
All this was exactly in line with Sven Åke Christianson’s ‘cognitive interrogation techniques’. By re-creating the environment in detail, Quick was supposed to gain easier access to his repressed memories. Penttinen started asking the sorts of questions that Christianson had taught him: Do you remember how you were feeling? What can you hear? Can you remember any smells? All this to help Quick bring back memories from the traumatic event.
‘If you keep your eyes closed and try to reach back in your thoughts, till you’re in 1984,’ said Penttinen.
The experienced investigators Ture Nässén and Jan Olsson watched this unfolding spectacle with grim faces. Later, Olsson commented to me: ‘It’s the suspect who’s supposed to place everything as he remembers it. But everything here had been arranged exactly right; the doubles were positioned exactly like the victims. Quick arrived and found his bed already made. It was nothing like how a reconstruction should really be.’
Jan Olsson also found it irritating that Christianson was ordering people around on the crime scene.
‘Christianson was pacing about with firm steps and a serious look on his face. He had a lot of influence. “You have to move out of the way so you’re out of sight,” Christianson told me and other
police officers. We were basically pushed away and as a result we couldn’t hear much of what Quick and Seppo were saying.’
The figure representing Johnny Farebrink joined Quick. The two murderers, while exchanging whispers, tiptoed up to the little brown tent, each of them holding an implement representing a knife. When Quick reached the tent he made a furious assault on the side of the canvas that was facing the lake. After a few lunges he handed his knife to ‘Farebrink’, who started stabbing at the tent canvas with two knives at the same time. Quick took his knife back and charged into the opening.
Inside the tent, Hans Ölvebro and Anna Wikström were in position, and she cried out, ‘No! No! No!’
As soon as Quick ran into the tent it was chaos. He growled and grunted, now fully regressed and transformed into his murderous Ellington identity. He tossed the tent poles out through the open tent flap. Anna Wikström continued yelling, while Penttinen watched the pandemonium from outside. At that moment Birgitta Ståhle came running with the nurses from Säter, who were ready to intervene.
‘Give it up now! Give it up!’ shouted Penttinen to Quick.
He seemed to have calmed down somewhat inside the tent, but his guttural, monotonous growling could still be heard as the video camera was switched off. The time shown on the video footage was 16.09.
When the police video of the reconstruction resumed, Thomas Quick seemed much more collected and determined. He and the other figure stole forward towards the tent, while Quick continuously commented on what was happening.
‘Here we’re sneaking up and checking that it’s all quiet. And from this position you go forward and loosen the stays from the middle and back.’
‘Johnny Farebrink’ loosened the pegs of the outer tent and it folded up. This was an important detail, as a number of slashes from the knife only went through the inner tent and not the outer.
The reconstruction proceeded like a sort of interactive dialogue
between Quick and Penttinen, with the chief interrogator providing continuous feedback. He reminded Quick about information he had given in the interviews, clarified and made suggestions of his own.
In all, some thirty bystanders watched Quick convincingly demonstrate how, twelve years earlier, he had murdered two people in cold blood in this deserted place. Six months later, as we know, Gällivare District Court was also convinced when an edited version of the reconstruction was shown in the courtroom. Seppo Penttinen added some voice-over to the video: ‘While Quick was immersed in the attack there was a technical fault with the tape recorder. The interruption only lasted for a minute.’
Penttinen’s statement about the one-minute interruption was untrue. The camera was restarted at 17.14. What happened in that hour was not recorded on tape, but Jan Olsson remembered.
‘Thomas Quick and Seppo Penttinen went off to one side to talk. Then we heard that a decision had been made to prepare the tent again and have another go at the reconstruction.’
According to several of the policemen on the scene, Quick also spoke in the interval to Christianson. Sture Bergwall himself remembered that Penttinen, during their little chat, put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You do remember telling us that first you loosened the pegs of the outer sheet and folded it up?’
‘That little snippet of information meant I could start with that action and take it from there,’ said Sture Bergwall.
Jan Olsson described how it went on: ‘Thomas Quick seemed very collected, and with imaginary stabbing motions he went through the various sequences exactly according to the analysis we had made.’
But things were going to get considerably worse. Olsson had since been forced to accept that the description he had noted down in his analysis of the sequence of events a year before couldn’t actually be correct. The photos he had access to at the beginning showed a bag of rubbish seen inside the tent through a long tear in the canvas. The bag had started tilting and was leaning against the man’s sleeping bag. A couple of beer cans seemed to have fallen out of the bag and were lying on the floor. Based on that photo it seemed reasonable that the perpetrator had made his way into the tent through the rip.
However, other photographs had later emerged that were taken by the first police patrol to arrive on the scene. In these, the bulging rubbish bag was still upright and perched on top of it was a beer can. According to Jan Olsson, it was inconceivable that the murderer could have entered the tent through the tear without knocking over that rubbish bag. At least the carefully balanced beer can would have fallen off, he reasoned.
When Jan Olsson saw Quick climbing into the tent through the rip in the canvas and attacking the couple with his knife, he was overwhelmed by the realisation that Quick was replicating the action as described in Olsson’s original analysis – not as it must logically have happened. Something was very, very wrong.
Olsson stood at the edge of the trees and watched the reconstruction from a safe distance. He felt extremely uneasy about two important questions that kept coming to mind. Why was Quick acting out a series of events that he in all likelihood had never experienced? And – even more worrying – how had Quick managed to get his hands on the police investigation’s own crime analysis?
The probable answers to these questions were appalling.
Jan Olsson controlled his suspicions by telling himself that he didn’t know everything about the case. He had not read Quick’s interrogation reports and must be unaware of the convincing evidence that already existed.
During the reconstruction Thomas Quick repeated his claim that it was Johnny Farebrink’s idea to drive to the picnic spot by Appojaure, where he knew that the Dutch couple were camping. Farebrink wanted to kill them because they had insulted him during an encounter a day or so earlier.
Quick had barely arrived at the picnic spot before he found his own compelling reason for wanting to kill the couple. The day before he had met a German boy on a bicycle, he said, and he believed that the boy was the Dutch couple’s son. In his limited English and German, Quick had explained this to the couple, but they had replied saying they didn’t have a son.
In Thomas Quick’s psychotic mind the couple’s denial of their own son was such a betrayal that they deserved to die. Johnny Farebrink had agreed.
‘Yeah, see what bloody arseholes they are. Let’s sort them out!’
Once Farebrink and Quick had created separate motives, based on their own delusions, for murdering the foreign tourists Quick was left at the picnic spot to keep an eye on the two individuals who had just been given a death sentence, while Johnny drove to Gällivare to borrow a firearm.
By now, Jan Olsson had moved in so close that he could hear what Quick was saying. Olsson took Christer van der Kwast aside and said, ‘No one drives off to borrow a shotgun so they can murder two people! Surely you don’t believe that?’
Olsson’s question was left hanging in the air while Quick continued with his story.
When Farebrink came back to the picnic spot he didn’t have a gun. Instead they used three knives to kill the sleeping couple by repeatedly stabbing them. After the murder, Quick and Farebrink went to the ‘old man’s house’ where they had slept the previous night. They made ‘the old man’ look at the massacred bodies in the tent, to make him understand what could happen to those who did not do what Johnny wanted.
The identity of the old man would not be revealed until the reconnaissance that was scheduled for the following day.
The next morning, Detective Inspector Ture Nässén drove the white Toyota minibus towards Messaure. He had good local knowledge of the area and it bothered him to see Thomas Quick trying to give them directions.
‘It was almost embarrassing, it was so clear he didn’t have a clue where he was or where he was going,’ Nässén told me.
Finally they passed a sign for Messaure. The overgrown roads confirmed the location of the demolished village, but no one in the minibus spoke of what was obvious: the village of Messaure no longer existed.
It was from this place without either houses or people that Thomas Quick claimed he had taken a railbus.
After driving around for a good while, the group finally drew near to the house where Rune Nilsson, the last resident of Messaure, was still living. The minibus stopped and Quick got out, shielding his eyes from the house as if to protect himself from a dreadful sight. With a great deal of drama he dropped to his knees and started weeping in an anxious manner.
When he’d collected himself he said, ‘It’s nothing personal against you, Seppo.’
‘No,’ said Penttinen.
‘But you, all of you, are killing him!’
Quick cried again with such despair that he started doubling up and groaning.
‘It smells musty in there as well.’
‘Does it?’ said Penttinen.
‘And Johnny is really dangerous!’
At the thought of the danger presented by Johnny, Quick started weeping so uncontrollably that he could no longer talk. Finally he managed to speak a few words, while stuttering, ‘“No!” says the old man. And he . . . says . . . it . . . does not . . . affect . . . him . . . so . . . much.’
A care assistant who was in the minibus suddenly took note of the condition Quick was in and came to his aid with more benzodiazepines. Quick took what was offered.
Birgitta Ståhle also joined the group trying to help Quick through his crisis.
‘I can’t handle this,’ said Quick.
‘Is it Johnny who’s being wicked to the old man? What’s he doing to him that’s so wicked?’ asked Ståhle.
Quick explained that Johnny Farebrink had threatened the old man with a knife while he stood powerless, unable to help.
‘I understand,’ said Ståhle. ‘You felt paralysed.’
‘Promise to be nice to him,’ said Quick to Penttinen.
After further discussion outside Rune Nilsson’s house, Quick wanted to leave the scene. But when he tried to make his way back to the
minibus his legs gave way. He was so drugged that he had to be helped by the nurses, who propped him up and dragged him back.