Thomas Quick (47 page)

Larje looked over her report from 1998: ‘Apparently there were 39 units, 39 bags of soil to go through. And most of the contents were wood, charcoal, resinous bark and pebbles – all naturally occurring in a wooded area.’

Rita Larje wrote a report to the effect that there were no bone fragments or anything else of interest. At this point Seppo Penttinen must apparently have snapped. He would not accept the negative result of the last excavations; instead he despatched all the material to Oslo, to Per Holck, who had found Therese’s bone fragments in Ørje Forest. Penttinen wanted a ‘second opinion’. After a few weeks, Holck’s answer came back: ‘No bone remains have been found in the material.’

It was the first time Rita Larje had seen all the documentation together: location searches, excavations, thousands of tests for phosphate levels in the soil in the hunt for body parts, and her own investigations.

She shook her head and said, ‘It leaves you speechless when you see how much work has been put into this. Nothing is ever found and still they go on believing it will be found in the next place right until the very end. And still they find nothing!’

To my great joy, Larje was willing to discuss the Norwegian bone finds with me. I shared all of my material with her and she examined the documentation and the statements made by the professors.

Having read everything, Larje wasn’t willing to make a statement on what the burnt pieces might consist of, but she was highly critical of the opinions expressed by professors Holck and Helmer. She believed they had reached conclusions which the material didn’t support. According to Larje, Holck and Helmer hadn’t identified the bone pieces. In their statements they didn’t specify from what bone or from what part of a bone the largest fragment came.

‘If you can’t say where in the skeleton a piece of bone is from, then you can’t determine what kind of bone it is either.’

Rita Larje asserted that the professors’ statements included a number of conclusions that were not supported by scientific literature and were in part based on absolutely incorrect reasoning.

‘The conclusion that this bone came from a young person was based on very shaky foundations,’ said Larje.

She wouldn’t go any further than this without having access to the bone fragments. However, she was willing to go to Drammen with another osteologist to analyse the fragments.

I contacted Christer van der Kwast, who, according to the Norwegians, had to give his permission for such an examination. He was not wholly dismissive, so I contacted Therese Johannesen’s mother, who also supported a second analysis of the bone fragments.

But no further word was heard and we started running out of time.

After a good deal of chasing, van der Kwast’s answer came back: no independent osteologists were permitted to look at the bones.

THE CRACKED CODE

THE TWO VERDICTS
that remained for me to scrutinise were the most unlikely of all.

When it came to both the disappearance of both Johan Asplund and the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik, the legal cases presupposed that Thomas Quick had driven very long distances on his own before he was even capable of driving a vehicle. The courts confirmed that there was no technical evidence and that the final verdicts for both were therefore entirely based on Quick’s own accounts. In these cases previous murder convictions were given as one reason among very few others to regard Quick as the perpetrator, an argument that was curious even if you ignored the fact that the earlier court cases were hogwash: according to Swedish law, every alleged crime must be judged without reference to any other criminal activity.

So how could the court arrive at a judgment based only on Quick’s own story?

The trial for Thomas Quick’s sixth and seventh murders opened in Falu District Court on 18 May 2000 but for security reasons was transferred to the high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court. Wearing a light grey summer blazer, Quick was brought into the courtroom from a side entrance and took his seat next to Claes Borgström and Birgitta Ståhle. Everything followed the usual routine. The players of the drama were so confident in their roles that on this occasion they seem to have lowered their guard somewhat and taken slightly bigger risks than before.

Prosecutor van der Kwast stated his case and read out the first point of the prosecution.

‘On 21 August 1981 in an area by Svartskog [Black Forest], in the municipality of Oppegård in Norway, Thomas Quick took Trine Jensen’s life by subjecting her to blows to the head and strangulation.’

After declaring his guilt, Quick was supposed to describe the events, but he was interrupted by van der Kwast, who first wanted to play a video recording from the reconstruction, as well as describe what Quick had stated during questioning. Only after Quick had listened to Kwast’s repetition of the whole story was he allowed to give his own account.

Quick had driven to Oslo to find a boy, but instead it was seventeen-year-old Trine who crossed his path. He asked her to show him the way to the Royal Castle.

‘And unfortunately the girl got into the car,’ said Quick in a cracked voice.

He snivelled and had to take long pauses while he described his ‘grotesque and bizarre behaviour’, which in this case consisted of assaulting, undressing and then strangling Trine with the strap of her handbag.

By this time it was widely known that the investigators’ big problem with Quick’s murder confessions was how to connect him to the crimes.

‘Our checking of his story has been rigorous,’ said van der Kwast, and his assertion was backed up by Claes Borgström.

‘When he was taken for a tour of the area he was able to point out within a thirty-metre margin of error where the body had been left. This was in a big forest in Norway, eighteen years after the event,’ explained Claes Borgström to the journalists covering the trial.

Birgitta Ståhle was there to explain to the court the underlying mechanisms of Quick’s development into the serial killer he was.

‘In his formative years and up to the age of thirteen, Thomas Quick’s father abused him sexually. His father’s ruthlessness and cruelty were frightening and horrendous. Yet his fear of his mother is far stronger.’

Next she described how at the age of four Quick witnessed the
birth of his younger brother Simon, who was then killed by his parents. Afterwards he went with his father into the forest to bury the remains.

‘When Thomas Quick was about four years and ten months old, his mother tried to drown him in a hole in the ice,’ Birgitta said, continuing the apparently endless depiction of misery from Quick’s childhood.

The chief judge of the court, Hans Sjöquist, listened with growing astonishment to the testimony and when it was over he asked, ‘Has it been possible to verify this information?’

‘No. But if something is incorrect it usually emerges in the therapy sooner or later,’ answered Ståhle.

It was undoubtedly difficult to understand why a homosexual paedophile and serial killer had driven twice from Falun to Oslo in order to commit sexually motivated murders of women. The therapist was also able to answer this, in the form of a motive for the murders.

‘Murdering women and girls is a form of revenge, a hatred directed at women who become a representation of the mother. His twin sister has also been mentioned and the aggression in regard to her is based on jealousy,’ explained Ståhle, before going on to conclude her testimony with the following words: ‘It requires moral sense to speak of the ultimate immorality which these murders represent.’

Bengt Eklund – the ward head from Säter Hospital – was also in attendance so that he could assure the court (as described in the reports) that ‘Thomas Quick had very limited access to Norwegian newspapers and could not have got hold of more than the odd newspaper without my knowledge.’

To lend further support to Quick’s credibility, Sven Åke Christianson made a statement on an experiment he had conducted with ten volunteers in the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University. First they were instructed to read a number of Norwegian newspaper articles on both murders. Afterwards they were asked to describe the main details of the crimes from memory. This was compared with both the facts known to the police and those
contained in the newspaper articles. Unsurprisingly, the volunteers’ descriptions contained more or less the same number of correct details, irrespective of what sorts of comparisons were made. However, when Thomas Quick’s statements were subjected to the same test, a clear difference was evident: his story contained more information known to the police than could have been obtained from media sources.

The court was greatly impressed by Christianson’s ingenuity and included a lengthy description of the test in its verdict. The paragraph concluded with the following: ‘The result supports the assertion that Thomas Quick has had access to considerably more factual information than has been published in the newspapers.’

So that the court would not be misled into drawing one of two possible conclusions from this summary – namely that Quick had acquired the information elsewhere, most likely from the investigators and his own therapist – both Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle testified that they had not conveyed factual information to him in any way whatsoever.

All in all, the court was left with an impression that was very far from the truth.

On one of my trips to Norway I met with Kåre Hunstad, the crime reporter who had been the first to supply Thomas Quick with information about Trine Jensen, thereby connecting her murder with the Quick investigation.

We met in a hotel bar in Drammen. Hunstad had written more articles on Thomas Quick than any other Norwegian journalist during the golden ‘Quick era’ between 1996 and 2000. At the time he had closely monitored developments. But his interest in the Swedish serial killer went further back than that.

‘It was in the early 90s and I was the crime correspondent at
Dagbladet.
I used to read
Aftonbladet
and
Expressen
every day.’

During the trial relating to the Appojaure murders, Hunstad had been in attendance in Gällivare, not to report on it but as a spectator.

‘Because I wanted to try and understand Quick,’ he explained.
‘For a hungry reporter it was natural to hope that Thomas Quick had also been in Norway, and maybe one could connect him to unsolved murders there too.’

The hungry reporter’s dream came true soon after he’d returned from Gällivare, when Quick unexpectedly – thanks to the information he had obtained from Hunstad’s Norwegian colleague Svein Arne Haavik – confessed to the murder of Therese Johannesen. It was a significant development.

Hunstad tried to make me understand how enormous the Therese case had been in Norway, and he told me about the unfolding story on which he and his colleagues had reported over the years.

‘Then Quick comes along and confesses to the murder! I already knew a lot about the Swedish cases. The whole story was a proper farce, lacking in evidence and with weak sequences of events stitched together. It didn’t seem credible. It was like a big travelling circus.’

Hunstad had written countless conventional articles simply reporting the latest news on the serial killer Quick, so his sceptical stance surprised me. He was Norway’s foremost reporter on the subject; he was often the one to break new stories on the investigations.

Hunstad wrote about Quick’s inspection of the refugee centre in Norway, from where he claimed to have abducted the two boys. The day after this article, on 24 April 1996, Thomas Quick was able to read for himself in
Dagbladet
about other Norwegian murders that might be attributed to him.

Bearing in mind Quick’s earlier focus on young boys, Hunstad wrote that investigations should be resumed into thirteen-year-old Frode Fahle Ljøen, who had disappeared in July 1974. A police source also stated that the murder of seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen in Oslo in 1981 and the disappearance of seven-year-old Marianne Rugaas Knutsen from Risør that same year would be looked into as soon as possible.

After his return to Säter Hospital, during severe convulsions in a therapy session, Thomas Quick regained the first memory fragments of his alleged murders of Trine, Marianne and Frode – all of which he had read about in
Dagbladet
.

However, Quick was having problems articulating the name of Frode and for the time being he referred to him as ‘Björn’.

The author of the useful article gained the privilege of becoming Thomas Quick’s very good friend – a friendship that would prove mutually beneficial.

‘I had his telephone number and could call whenever I liked. I built up a good relationship with him. We had a great deal of contact and . . . he was a dealer. Every time we met he wanted to get something out of it,’ said Kåre Hunstad.

On one occasion Quick wanted a high-end new computer as payment for an interview. In a fax retained from 20 May 1996, Hunstad wrote that
Dagbladet
had turned down his demand but the radio station P4 was willing to provide it instead. In a letter Quick wrote later on he said, ‘You can have a good interview with me before then, but my conditions are a bit tough. I’ll meet you on the condition that I get 20,000 crowns [about £2,000]. Claes [Borgström] knows about this so you don’t have to run it past him.’

According to Hunstad, it was rarely a case of more than a few thousand crowns, but even so the newspaper found it problematic.

‘I still have a letter he wrote that says if he’s paid he’ll confess to new crimes. That was the payback. He could be like that.’

During one of his visits to Säter, Kåre Hunstad had brought along a video camera so he could film the interview. Quick understood that the most interesting thing for a Norwegian audience was his Norwegian murders. The interview began with Quick describing how he had driven to Norway in 1987 and had caught sight of a boy of about thirteen.

‘I stopped the car and he stopped cycling. It was early autumn, August or September, about seven in the evening. The boy understood there was something strange going on. He tried to dodge me and run away. He was wearing a thin jacket which I grabbed. And then I hit him across the jaw and he fell to the ground and I smashed his head against the asphalt until he passed out or died. Then I took the body and put it alongside the car and arranged the bicycle in a special way. There were apartment blocks around, a crossroads. Then I went back to the car and ran the bicycle over. The car was not noticeably damaged, but the bicycle was really badly damaged.’