Thomas Quick (4 page)

Although a great many shocking details had already been published in the newspaper, the actual encounter with Thomas Quick in Piteå District Court was a disturbing experience for those present. The journalists competed in their declarations of disgust and loathing for the monster on the stand.

‘Is a Human Being Capable of Such Cruelty?’ was the headline run by
Expressen
at the end of the opening day in court. The newspaper’s very own ‘Quick expert’, Pelle Tagesson, went on:

Once you know the terrible truth of what Thomas Quick did to his victims – and once you have heard his deep, bestial roar – only one question remains:

Is he really human?

The scenes that played out yesterday in Piteå District Court must have been the worst ever to take place in a Swedish court of law.

The Säter Man, Thomas Quick, was facing charges for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.

He wept – but no one felt sorry for him.

In
Aftonbladet
, Kerstin Weigl wrote that Thomas Quick was ‘beyond all understanding’. Fortunately the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson was there to explain what normal people couldn’t understand. ‘I don’t think a normal person could ever process what he has done. It’s inconceivable, that’s why we push it away,’ he said, adding that there was a sort of ‘logic’ underlying Quick’s actions. ‘Quick was raped by his father from the age of four. His childhood was stolen from him. He cannot endure his fear, so he attempts to transfer this fear to someone else who can take it on. He has an illusion that he can destroy someone else’s life and thereby re-create his own. But the effects are short-lived. He has to kill again.’

By the end of the first day’s proceedings, any doubt concerning Thomas Quick’s guilt seemed to have vanished: ‘The man is a serial killer, paedophile, necrophile, cannibal and sadist. He is a very, very sick man,’ declared
Aftonbladet
.

A video from the forest in Piteå showed Quick explaining, in tears and with heart-rending moans, how he had murdered and cut up Charles Zelmanovits. No one in the courtroom was left unmoved.

Kerstin Weigl continued:

For my own part, after hearing those sounds, I cannot have the slightest doubt. The words came in bursts, with deep convulsions as if he was vomiting. Yes – this must be a true account.

Seventeen years after the murder, Quick was able to point out the place where the boy’s body parts were found. He sat on the stone where he had desecrated and cut up the body. He explained exactly where he had hidden what.

The trial in Piteå District Court in November 1994 was a walkover for prosecutor Christer van der Kwast. The members of the District Court unanimously found Thomas Quick guilty of the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.

Their confidence massively boosted, the investigators continued to unravel the case. Up until then they had been focusing on Quick’s whereabouts at the times of unsolved murders of young boys, or whenever boys had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Less than a week after the verdict in Piteå, the entire investigation was thrown on its head when Thomas Quick telephoned the home of senior officer Seppo Penttinen at Sundsvall police to say, ‘It would probably be a good thing if I was confronted with information about the double murder in Norrbotten about ten years ago. I know I was up there at some point . . .’

APPOJAURE

MARINUS AND JANNY
Stegehuis from the Netherlands were a childless couple aged thirty-four and thirty-nine respectively. For three years they had been saving up for their dream holiday in the Nordic Alps and in the summer of 1984 it was finally going to happen.

On 28 June they left their home in the town of Almelo at dawn and drove without stopping to Ödeshög in Östergötland, where some relatives of Marinus lived. They were on a tight budget and couldn’t afford overnight stays in hotels. After spending three days in Ödeshög, they continued their journey to Finland, where they had friends whom they knew from a church choir.

When Janny and Marinus left Mustasaari in Österbotten they pointed their Toyota Corolla north, towards the real adventure. They went across Nordkalotten via North Cape and then down through the Swedish Alps, where they planned to live in the wilderness and take each day as it came. They looked forward to fishing, experiencing the wildlife and photographing nature.

The journey was harder than they had anticipated due to a great deal of rain, wind and temperatures close to freezing. They were plagued by mosquitoes. But things were to get even worse. An engine problem outside Vittangi resulted in two tows, a night in a hotel and expensive repairs in a garage.

With empty pockets they left Kiruna and headed south. On the evening of 12 July they put up their tent on the tip of a spit at the northern end of Lake Appojaure. Janny wrote in her diary:

Drove to Sjöfallets National Park. Beautiful surroundings. Took some photos. Filmed reindeer and saw a stoat at the roadside. Put up the tent at 16.30 on some wooded land. The mosquitoes continue to torment us. From Kiruna went 150 km in drizzling rain. Then it cleared up. Now it’s raining.

They rigged up their gas stove outside the tent flap so they had some shelter from the rain while preparing a simple meal of sausages and green beans.

Just before midnight on Friday, 13 July, the police in Gällivare received a call from Matti Järvinen, a resident of Gothenburg holidaying in the Swedish mountains, who reported that he had chanced upon a dead person in a tent at a picnic spot next to Lake Appojaure. Detective Inspector Harry Brännström and senior officer Enar Jakobsson set off at once and after driving eighty kilometres through the rain in the bright northern summer night they reached the place the tourist had described. Before long they found a collapsed two-man tent. Carefully they raised the poles at the short end and unzipped the flap. The scene that met their eyes was described in the police report:

By the long wall on the west side lies the corpse of a man. He is estimated to be between 30 and 40 years old. The body is on its back. [. . .] The heaviest bloodstains are on the face and around the neck and on the right shoulder. A dense area of absorbed blood is on the right side of the jumper by the sleeve seam at nipple level. Other visible parts of the jumper are bloodstained. The dead man has stab wounds or slashes to his right upper arm, to the left side of his throat as well as to the right of his breast beside the nipple. There is what looks like a contusion across his mouth. [. . .]

To the right of the man, as viewed from the tent flap, lies the dead body of a woman. Her head, the right cheek resting against the floor of the tent, lies alongside the man’s hip. The body is lying on its right side and is bent to an angle of almost 90 degrees. The left arm is extended and rests at an angle of about
45 degrees from the upper body. The upper parts of the body are wrapped in a patterned duvet cover of the same kind as the one the man lies in. The duvet cover is very heavily bloodstained.

Outside the tent the police found what might have been the murder weapon – a thin-bladed fillet knife made by Falcon, a Swedish manufacturer. The blade had snapped off and was later found between the woman’s arm and body. It had broken when the knife struck bone with great force.

Between the tent’s opening and the lake a grey-green Toyota Corolla with Dutch number plates was parked. The car was locked, the interior was in good order and there was no sign of unlawful entry.

The police were quickly able to identify the victims. The crime scene gave a strong indication that this had been the work of a lunatic, pure and simple.

The following day the bodies were transported to Umeå, where the medical examiner Anders Eriksson made a thorough forensic examination. In two autopsy reports he describes a very large number of stab and slash wounds.

The investigators concluded that the murderer had stabbed the sleeping couple in a frenzied fashion through the fabric of the tent. Both the woman and the man had woken during the attack – they had defensive wounds on their arms – but neither of them had even been able to get out of their sleeping bags. The incident itself must have happened very quickly.

The news of the murder shook the whole country. Perhaps the worst part of it was the cowardice of whoever had sneaked up on an unknown, wholly defenceless couple in their sleep; or perhaps it was the anonymous, faceless nature of the attack, with the knife stabbing through the thin canvas of the tent, making it impossible for the victims to understand what was happening or see who was attacking them; or was it the frenzy revealed by the large number of wounds? All the evidence at the scene pointed to a perpetrator without any kind of motive. The double murder of the Stegehuises was so strange and twisted in every respect, the only explanation was that it must have been committed by someone unfathomably sick.

The brutal crime in the Swedish wilderness also attracted a good deal of attention outside the country. In the police investigation that followed, more than a thousand people were questioned without any progress being made.

When lengthy murder inquiries are solved it is usually found that the perpetrator has made an appearance somewhere in the investigation documents, but in this case there was no trace of the man who confessed to the crime ten years later. Another fact puzzling the investigators was that Thomas Quick – who up until that point had been known as a murderer only of boys – was confessing to the brutal knife killing of a couple in their thirties.

In the first police interview, held on 23 November 1994, Quick described taking a train from Falun to Jokkmokk, a place he was familiar with from his time as a student at the High School in the academic year 1971–2. He stole a bicycle from outside the Sami Museum and rode off without any particular destination in mind. By coincidence he ended up on the road known as Vägen Västerut, which runs from Porjus towards Stora Sjöfallet.

At the picnic spot by Appojaure he caught sight of the Stegehuises, then later that night he attacked them with a hunting knife he had brought with him.

Quick’s account was vague. He even explicitly stated that he wasn’t absolutely certain that he had had anything to do with the murder. What made him doubt it, he said, was the nature of the violence, and also because one of the victims was a woman.

In his second interview Quick changed his story, bringing in a second man whom he had arranged to meet in Jokkmokk. This accomplice was a well-known hardened criminal named Johnny Farebrink, whose name, unlike Quick’s, had already cropped up in the investigation.

Thomas Quick claimed that they had driven in Farebrink’s Volkswagen pickup to Appojaure, where together they stabbed the Stegehuises to death. More interviews followed and Quick’s story grew more detailed. Quick told the police that he had met with a school friend from his old high school and that he and Johnny had visited another person in his home in Porjus.

The news that Thomas Quick had an accomplice in the murder
of the Stegehuises was picked up by the newspapers. At the time, Johnny Farebrink was serving a ten-year sentence for another murder, and when
Expressen
asked him to comment on Quick’s accusation, he responded, ‘This is bloody rubbish! I don’t know this guy. I’ve never met him.’

However, four months into the investigation, prosecutor van der Kwast was convinced. ‘Thomas Quick’s confession corresponds with the facts established by the murder investigation,’ he said in an interview with
Expressen
on 23 April 1995. ‘I can only say that the deeper we dig into this story, the more certain we are that Thomas Quick is not lying or fantasising. Thomas Quick was in the vicinity of Appojaure when the murders took place and he had local knowledge from his time as a student at the folk high school in Jokkmokk.’

Thomas Quick had now confessed to seven murders, which – if he was telling the truth – would make him Sweden’s worst serial killer. Two highly experienced police officers from the Palme Unit, which was investigating the murder of the late prime minister, were transferred to the Quick case, including the chief officer, Hans Ölvebro. The inquiry was now of the very highest priority.

On 9 July a specially chartered private jet took off from Arlanda bound for Gällivare. In luxurious armchairs sat Thomas Quick, his therapist Birgitta Ståhle, the public prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, and a number of other officers and care assistants. The purpose of the trip was to carry out a reconstruction of the murder of the Stegehuises.

Also on the plane was Gunnar Lundgren, Quick’s lawyer. Considering the fact that this was now a high-profile and important criminal investigation, a county barrister like Lundgren no longer seemed appropriate. After conferring with Seppo Penttinen and Christianson, the decision had been made that Quick should switch to Claes Borgström, the celebrity lawyer. Borgström accepted the brief, but he was at the very beginning of a five-week holiday. For this reason Gunnar Lundgren had been reluctantly invited to take his place in one of the plane’s leather seats.

The following day Thomas Quick guided the investigators towards Porjus and Vägen Västerut, eventually turning off the forest path to the picnic spot by Appojaure. Here, police technicians had set up the crime scene to look exactly as it did on the night of 13 July 1984. Hans Ölvebro and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström took part in preparing the scene. The gas stove, sleeping bags and other props were arranged just as they had been found after the murders. A specially ordered tent from the Netherlands, exactly like the one in which the Stegehuises had slept on the night of the murders, had been erected at the edge of the forest. Inside, Ölvebro lay in Marinus Stegehuis’s place on the left and Wikström in Janny Stegehuis’s place on the right.

Armed with a stick as a knife, Thomas Quick sneaked up to the tent. He threw himself at it and stabbed in a frenzied manner at the canvas, before making his way inside through the opening. He grunted and roared while Anna Wikström, genuinely terrified, called for help. Quick was overpowered and the reconstruction was brought to a halt.