Thomas Quick (51 page)

Christer van der Kwast gave the photo a cursory glance.

‘And?’

‘Thomas Quick and his twin sister were confirmed on that day. You actually interviewed the sister about this, so I’m wondering where that information is. Where is the interrogation report?’

‘I’ll have to ask Seppo about that. I can’t remember. I’d be extremely surprised if such a simple fact had been overlooked. I’m not going to sit here and defend this, but I won’t accept anything until I have it in black and white right under my nose.’

Christer van der Kwast knew he couldn’t pass any of the blame
on to Seppo Penttinen or anyone else. As the head of the investigation he had approved the interviews that were held and bore ultimate responsibility for the impartiality of the inquiry. Material that weighed in against his prosecution could absolutely not be withheld. For this reason he assured me that he had conducted the investigation to the very best of his abilities.

‘I’m quite open – if something comes up that’s wrong – then I’ll say, “This is wrong, we’ve taken a wrong turn there, this is all over the place, we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes.” But before anyone can say that something is fundamentally wrong it really has to hold water. In all these years I’ve never met anyone who’s come up with something convincing. Not for any of the cases.’

It was now time for me to reveal the secret I had been incubating for more than two months.

‘You see, the thing is, Sture Bergwall has taken back his confessions,’ I said as calmly as I could.

‘Well, he can do that if he wants to,’ said van der Kwast with a shrug of the shoulder. ‘I worked on the premise that even if he did this, the court judgments would still hold firm.’

He thought about it.

‘So that is the opening of your programme? On film, is it?’

‘Yes. Everyone will have the opportunity to say their own piece,’ was all I could think of saying in my dazed condition.

‘Ha, ha, ha! Well, that’s certainly interesting news for me. He retracted his confessions, did he? To you? Just like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘So he never did anything?’

‘No.’

‘The thing is, there’s no guarantee that what he’s saying now is true and what he said before was false. In that case he has to explain how it was possible. I’d be surprised if he claimed he’d been fed the information which led to his convictions.’

‘One thing we know for certain is that he’s been fed with medications,’ I said.

‘Yes, absolutely . . . I’m not disputing that he was given medications of various kinds, but I’m not in a position to know their effects.’

‘Some doctors have said that this goes far beyond drug abuse. I mean, you can even hear in your reconstructions the way he says, “I have to have more Xanax. I don’t care if I overdose.”‘

‘I’m sure he did. He was in such bad shape that he had to seek help. That’s how it was perceived, rightly or wrongly . . .’

While we were on the subject of hospital care and medications, I asked van der Kwast what he thought of the fact that Quick had not had any memories of his childhood or the murders – that all the memories had been repressed and then reawakened. And what was his opinion of object relations theory and Birgitta Ståhle’s therapy?

‘I’m extremely sceptical of all that! I’ve not bought into those models, I’ve only acted on hard facts. Those were just working methods to get the job done. Using various techniques like cognitive interviewing was worth a try.’

‘You’re familiar with the Simon illusion?’

‘Yes, and the whole dilemma. I mean, some people are Freudians and they’re engaged in all sorts of ideas. I’d say it’s more up to her to answer professionally for her approach. It never had the slightest importance for me in my role as prosecutor.’

‘But it had importance in terms of Quick talking about what happened.’

‘Yes, it made it possible to . . . I don’t know how the people on the therapy side have worked together. I couldn’t have insight into that.’

‘But you did have insight!’

‘Yes, I understood more or less. But I maintain that it did not have any significance. What was important was what came out of it.’

Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast had taken memories extracted in therapy and used them as a foundation for murder prosecutions, yet now he claimed to be ‘extremely sceptical’ about the notion of repressed memories reawakened in therapy. Clearly, he was anxious to disassociate himself from anything that might be interpreted as psychological hocus-pocus.

‘I maintain that the courts made their decisions based on hard
facts. And I reject the idea – and also feel it is disrespectful to come here and claim that we were so bewildered that we believed Quick’s stories based on some general psychological theories. Or that we would have intentionally manipulated situations so we could get evidence. I mean, that’s rubbish!’

The interview continued, swinging between discussions of details and out-and-out rows about interpretations and assessments. In retrospect, Christer van der Kwast describes the experience as being ‘interrogated for four hours’. It is true that the interview went on for that length of time. At the end, we were both tired and crestfallen. Christer van der Kwast repeated that there was no longer a need for him to take a stand on the case. But he raised his finger in a warning gesture, as if to point out the risks I was facing.

‘Just jumping on the bandwagon of one story or another that he chooses to tell for mysterious reasons, I would be very careful about that!’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ I said politely.

‘I mean, he’s an extraordinarily manipulative person,’ explained van der Kwast.

Lars Granstrand packed up the lights, tripods and leads. After he had gone I stayed for another hour and carried on discussing the subject with van der Kwast. I realised that we were both facing a significant risk. By this stage I was absolutely sure that Sture Bergwall was innocent of the eight murders for which he had been found guilty. I felt quite confident about the material I would present on television. Nonetheless it was hard to question six unanimous courts of law, the Office of the Attorney General and the chief prosecutor of the Anti-Corruption Unit. In the end, I would damage either van der Kwast or myself; it wasn’t possible that both of us could emerge with our honour intact.

Christer van der Kwast seemed immersed in a similar train of thought.

‘So what’s the end result of all this, then? Will he be there on camera saying he’s innocent and he just made it all up as he went along?’

I confirmed that this was what Sture Bergwall could be expected to say in the documentaries.

After that, we established that there wasn’t much we agreed on, and on that note said our farewells.

INTERVIEW WITH THE LAWYER

QUICK WAS FOUND
guilty of six murders while being defended by Claes Borgström. Many critics argued that Borgström had not defended Quick, that in fact he had failed in his duty to scrutinise Christer van der Kwast’s evidence.

That Borgström had also sent out invoices to the tune of several million Swedish crowns just to have his client found guilty had also created some bad blood. Maybe this was the reason why Borgström had so feverishly defended the verdicts against Quick and, with more aggression than anyone else, had attacked whoever dared question the investigation.

Just after lunch on Friday, 14 November 2008 I installed myself in a dingy café not far from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) building on Norra Bantorget in Stockholm. I was waiting for the hour to strike two, which was the time we had agreed for my long-standing appointment with Claes Borgström.

I didn’t know if Christer van der Kwast had had time to let Borgström into the secret that Sture Bergwall had retracted all of his murder confessions. To avoid being caught up in small talk with Borgström – and risk giving away the news before the interview – I killed time in the café while Lars Granstrand rigged up the camera and lights. When I came to the office we were supposed to be ready to start on the dot of two.

For months I had studied Claes Borgström’s participation in almost all of the interrogation sessions and reconnaissances in the Quick investigations. In the video recordings I had watched Thomas
Quick being led around in forests, so drugged that he could barely talk or walk without being propped up by his therapist and interrogator. Claes Borgström walked beside them, but he never brought up the fact that his client was high as a kite. On a number of occasions Borgström had also seen Quick confess to murders that had obviously never happened. He had heard facts being distorted or concealed in the courts without intervening. Why?

After all, the lawyer Claes Borgström had always taken a stand against repression, he spoke up for human rights and was a committed type with left-leaning sympathies at heart who had always protected the weaker members of society. The picture of him did not add up. Who was he?

When the Social Democratic government of 2000 offered Borgström the job as Sweden’s first male Equality Ombudsman he resigned as Quick’s defence lawyer just before the trial for the murder of Johan Asplund. After seven years as Equality Ombudsman, Borgström joined forces with Thomas Bodström (the former Minister for Justice) and set up the law firm Borgström & Bodström, with offices at Västmannagatan 4. Borgström’s new venture – with the previous Minister for Justice as his partner, in an imposing building with an upmarket address, with LO’s Stockholm District and Unga Örnar (Young Eagles) as neighbours – could certainly be interpreted as a means to an end.

At a quarter to two, as I was standing up to leave, my mobile rang.

‘Claes Borgström called! He hasn’t spoken to Kwast and he doesn’t know anything,’ said an unusually excited Sture Bergwall.

Borgström had told him that he was about to be interviewed by SVT and that he was nervous about the interview.

‘But then he looked at his invoices for three of the cases and it calmed him down. He invoiced for a thousand hours’ work for those three cases you’ll be talking about.’

With a thousand invoiced working hours, Borgström felt safe in the conviction that he had an unbeatable advantage in terms of knowledge of those cases.

‘He was guessing that you had probably put in forty hours of preparation,’ said Sture with a laugh.

I thought to myself that if I had been sending out invoices as a lawyer for my hours I’d be financially independent by this stage.

‘You know what else he told me? He’s become a party member and he’s aiming for a ministerial post after the election. Imagine him telling me something like that! Isn’t it strange?’

‘Really strange,’ I replied, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

I found myself standing at the front entrance of Västmannagatan 4. We finished our call and I walked up the palatial staircase and rang the doorbell of Borgström & Bodström.

Everything had been rigged up and prepared, so when Claes Borgström appeared a few minutes later we got on with it right away. He asked me what my points of reference were for the interview. What was my angle?

I told him quite truthfully that I had not held any firm opinions on the matter at the beginning, but that as time passed I had grown increasingly sceptical about the investigation. He looked at me searchingly with his sharp blue-grey eyes.

‘How much time have you put into this?’ he asked.

‘About seven months,’ I said, and thought of Sture’s telephone call.

‘Seven months? Full-time?’

Borgström gave me a dubious glance while I explained that I worked longer hours than a standard working week.

‘I looked at three of the trials I took part in, Therese, Appojaure and Levi,’ said Borgström. ‘When I checked my remuneration I had a thousand hours logged for all three.’

‘So you’re well prepared,’ I said encouragingly.

‘Yes, it means I have a certain amount of insight.’

I started carefully and asked Borgström to describe how he came to be Quick’s lawyer.

‘He called me during the ongoing investigation into the so-called Appojaure murders and asked if I wanted to represent him. Obviously I agreed that I would. And then I ended up representing him in four trials over a period of several years.’

Borgström talked without needing to be prompted, and before long he brought up the subject of the unique situation of defending a serial killer who was voluntarily talking about his own crimes.

‘As a defence lawyer it isn’t unprecedented. I have defended other people who have confessed to murders.’

‘Even when they weren’t under suspicion?’

‘No, in general there has been suspicion and then a confession has come,’ Borgström admitted.

Claes Borgström particularly emphasised that a confession on its own wasn’t enough; it had to be backed up by other evidence. In Thomas Quick’s case the supporting evidence was that time and time again he had described things that only the perpetrator could have known. Borgström cited the murder of Therese Johannesen as an example.

I answered by showing Borgström a photograph of the concrete suburb of Fjell, which Quick had described as a country hamlet with low-rise family homes. Then I showed him the photograph of Therese, black-haired and with an olive complexion, described by Quick as a blonde girl, and after that a reconstruction of Therese’s clothes at the time of her disappearance.

‘Why was Quick so wrong when he tried to talk about his murders?’ I asked.

‘If you go through the investigation material you’ll find a lot more inaccuracies. Those are just a couple,’ said Borgström.

Quick also said that Therese wore pink velour trousers, patent-leather shoes and had large front teeth. Borgström looked at my photos of Therese from the relevant time: a denim skirt, mocassins and a wide gap where those big front teeth were supposed to be.

‘But he changed his mind, I seem to remember. He said she had dark hair. And he talked about buckles on her sandals. He was convicted on the basis of providing information that when checked proved to be accurate and impossible to explain in any other way than that he was there at the time of the crime being committed.’

Claes Borgström was a man of striking intelligence and I wanted to believe that he was also intellectually honest. In my eagerness to make him understand, I tried to explain how Quick had been provided with information. I told him about the series of articles from the Norwegian newspaper
VG
, where evidently Quick obtained the information he needed to make his first confession.