Thomas Quick (57 page)

‘Bloody hell . . .’ Stigson shook his head.

‘What are you trying to say?’ I asked.

‘Well, bloody hell! You think I’ve been colluding with the police?’

‘Every time Thomas Quick starts talking or suggesting anything it’s immediately leaked to you or other journalists who start publishing photos of the victims, of . . .’

‘Who’s leaking?’

‘Well, clearly someone on the inside of the police investigation. Sometimes van der Kwast, sometimes Seppo Penttinen. Why would anyone do that during an ongoing police investigation?’

‘That’s rubbish. I’ve never had anything like that . . .’

‘Look me in the eye! Is this really just rubbish?’

‘Yes, that I . . . yes, yes! That on a regular basis they were supplying me with something so he’d be able to . . . yes, it’s rubbish. Not in any way!’

‘But you’ve had information from day one!’ I protested.

Stigson started talking about an interview he did with Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, and all the positive things he had said about repressed memories and therapy.

‘You’ve totally lost touch with reality,’ I said.

But Stigson just carried on talking about Svartenbrandt. Monica Saarinen wanted us to start rounding things off, and I asked what – if anything – might make Gubb Jan Stigson change his mind about the case of Thomas Quick. He said that he hadn’t seen ‘anything that explains anything away’.

‘Nothing?’ I wondered.

‘Nothing.’

‘But what could make you . . .’

‘In the end you reach an end point. I’ve reached that point as far as these cases go.’

I was starting to feel faint. So it really was that simple: it was about faith.

Having it or not having it.

The discussion was thrown open to the audience and the first question was familiar: could Swedish courts of law really be so lax that they imposed sentences without any technical evidence?

Stigson put his foot down: ‘Not technical evidence in the sense of fingerprints and DNA. But there’s other technical evidence. Like marks cut into birch trees and things like that. Phosphate mapping. Sniffer dogs.’

‘Yeah, that dog is pretty interesting,’ I said. ‘A privately owned cadaver dog that reacts to human remains in an incredibly large number of places. Archaeological excavations have been carried out in over twenty locations, earth has been put through a sieve, a lake has been emptied, but nothing has been found except for this tiny little fragment weighing half a gram which, it’s now been revealed, is not even bone. Don’t you draw any conclusions from that?’

‘Well, you know . . .’

‘Gubb Jan Stigson, you’re the only one who still believes this.’

‘Yes, I seem to be.’

After the debate had ended I stayed on with a few colleagues up by the stage.

At the same time, Gubb Jan Stigson packed up his things and quickly walked away through the audience.

Before I’d had time to react, he’d left the auditorium. He clearly wasn’t interested in the article I had offered to show him on my computer.

THE LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

ON 20 APRIL 2010
Thomas Olsson and Martin Cullberg handed in Sture Bergwall’s second petition for a new trial, this time regarding the Therese Johannesen case. About a month later, on 27 May, Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné announced her decision in the Yenon Levi case. Although the retrial was accepted, no trial was scheduled. The evidence was so paltry that there was simply no point in holding new proceedings, as would normally happen.

‘After reviewing the case I have come to the conclusion that the evidence does not hold any possibility of corroborating a crime,’ she wrote. ‘Bergwall denies the crime. Certainly over the course of the investigation he has offered some information that tallies with some of the evidence, but his statement is characterised by contradictions and changes to such an extent that a conviction cannot be considered as likely. For these reasons I am dropping all charges against Sture Bergwall.’

Christer van der Kwast was furious.

‘I think it’s rubbish not to seize the opportunity of a full examination out in the open where Quick can explain his earlier confessions. It’s an easy way out of a substantial and difficult new legal process. Quick was convicted on proper grounds and the petition for a retrial has been improperly approved. I believe that media pressure has played a role in this capitulation,’ he commented to TT.

After the summer Björn Ericson announced his decision regarding the Therese retrial. He did not oppose a review.

It was only a matter of time before Sture Bergwall would be freed
of all eight murder convictions. He would go down in history – though in an entirely different way to how Birgitta Ståhle, Sven Åke Christianson, Christer van der Kwast, Seppo Penttinen and other participants in the Quick scandal could possibly have imagined.

On 2 September 2010 Chief Prosecutor Bo Lindgren, appointed by Björn Ericson to review the Trine and Gry verdicts, received the original raw footage behind the edited version of the reconnaissance that had been shown to the Falu District Court at the trial in Stockholm.

They were delivered in two boxes. There were thirteen VHS tapes and eight mini-cassettes, in total some thirty-nine hours of recorded video. The technical division transferred the films to DVDs and, before long, copies were delivered to Thomas Olsson at the Leif Silbersky law firm in Stockholm. There, Jenny Küttim burned her own copies, which she transferred to a server in order for me to download them and burn my own copies right away.

There was something almost ceremonial about the way I fed that first film into my laptop. For me, I felt like I had reached the end of my investigation. I had checked all the information I could check, straightened out all the other question marks – the inspection film from the trial for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik was all that remained.

The films had been shot using two cameras. One showed the road in front of the car in which, among others, Thomas Quick, Seppo Penttinen, Christer van der Kwast and Sven Åke Christianson were travelling. Another filmed Quick’s face during the journey, with Penttinen clearly visible in the seat in front.

I quickly realised that this was the footage that was most interesting.

The films were desperately dull for the most part. They showed the trip from Säter to Oslo, then around and around Oslo and then out of the city again. A few of the films showed the reconstructions at the murder scenes, where Thomas Quick tried to demonstrate how he had murdered the women. Basically he didn’t do anything
at all right, and sure enough none of these scenes were included in the edited version shown to the district court.

But the most interesting thing was of course to be able at last to see whether Quick, at the inspection in August 1999, eighteen years after the murder of Trine Jensen, was really able to ‘direct the car without any significant difficulty to within a few yards of the place where she was found’, as well as the famous sequence where he spontaneously reacted with powerful anxiety as the convoy of vehicles passed the car park where Gry Storvik’s corpse had been left. In the films shown to the district court there was no doubt about either of these supposed facts.

In the unedited film the cars drove around Oslo for an absolute eternity. Sture sat in the back, high as a kite and with staring eyes. He held up his index finger and slowly wagged it back and forth. Seppo Penttinen was in front, stony-faced.

At long last the police grew tired of driving around aimlessly and decided to go to Kolbotn, which is closer to where the bodies were found. Even here Quick wasn’t able to find his way. Once it was clear that he didn’t have a clue where they were supposed to go, Penttinen took charge.

‘So the suggestion now is that we turn round and go back to the last junction, where we waited for a long time while you were deciding, and then we take the alternative road to the left, because you were looking quite steadily in that direction, and then we’ve covered that possibility as well.’

After this, they turned on to the road leading to the crime scene, but Quick led them the wrong direction.

‘There’s an exit here now onto the E18 again, Thomas,’ Penttinen finally pointed out.

After this, he announced, ‘Christer has an idea that you should stay here, in this area, if you could turn off a bit . . . Yes, stop. I think we should take a short break, if you don’t mind? OK, turn off the sound.’

When sound and image were turned back on the car was travelling along the same road, but heading in the right direction this time. Thomas Quick moved his finger hither and thither. Then
suddenly Seppo Penttinen said that he had pointed to the right and the car turned off at the correct junction. Was he pointing to the right? Maybe. Certainly he was also pointing to the left. And straight ahead. But only when they were at the correct turn-off did Penttinen react and explain where Quick was really pointing. Soon the procedure was repeated, but in the opposite direction, because Quick had once again missed a junction and the vehicle had to turn round – after the interrogator had discreetly asked if it might not be better to turn back.

As they were passing the actual place where Gry’s body had been found, Penttinen said, ‘Should we stop?’

But Thomas Quick didn’t pick up on this; he wanted to carry on.

Before long Penttinen said, ‘What do you say, do you want to turn round?’

Finally Quick realised what was going on. He agreed that they should turn round. Soon he asked them to stop in more or less the place where Penttinen had just suggested it might be good to stop for a while.

To say that Thomas Quick was able to lead the investigators to the scene is to really conjure things out of thin air. It was quite the opposite; they were the ones who led him to the scene, through their hints and helpful interpretations as well as clear instructions and manoeuvres.

Sture Bergwall said to me, ‘There was always information to pick up on. I was reading not just Seppo but also the other police in the minibus, and the driver. If Seppo got a bit strained I knew we were heading in the wrong direction. And if the driver applied the brakes I knew we had to turn off very soon, and then I had time to say so. The whole time I had these small, small signs. With little details they let me know where we were going. But it sounded as if I was telling them.’

And what about that spontaneous reaction to the spot where Gry Storvik had been found?

First of all, Thomas Quick was aware of the basic facts, already given away by Gubb Jan Stigson in
Dala-Demokraten
. Furthermore his fellow travellers – contrary to what they later claimed in the
district court – were long since aware of the similarities between the two cases and how close together the two crime scenes were.

Stigson wrote as follows, ‘The third case concerns 23-year-old Gry Storvik, who disappeared in central Oslo and was found murdered in a small car park in Myrvoll on 25 June 1985. The spot was not far from the place where Trine’s body was found.’

The following exchange from the reconnaissance took place when the vehicle passed a sign for ‘Myrvoll’:

And sure enough, soon they passed the car park in question in Myrvoll, where for some unknown reason the car stopped and remained stationary at a junction. Quick was encouraged to keep showing them the way, but he chose the wrong direction and soon they turned round and went back, this time stopping at the other end of the car park. In the district court film, the video recording was cut there and a voice-over announced, ‘This view of the car park is what Thomas Quick focused our attention on. It’s where Gry Storvik was found.’

Yet the film I was now watching continued with Penttinen sitting there talking to Quick in the car park where they had brought him.

‘There’s something here,’ said Quick.

‘Is there something here?’ said Penttinen.

‘Yes.’

‘Where? You’re indicating the whole area?’

‘No, not the whole area.’

‘So, what then?’

‘That shed . . .’

Thomas Quick pointed to the right from the direction they were facing, while the car park was the other way.

‘What?’ said Seppo Penttinen, sounding quite surprised.

‘. . . behind here, there and here . . .’

Quick didn’t point out the car park with a single word or gesture. On the contrary, he seemed to want to focus the investigators’ attention on a place on the other side of the road.

As for Thomas Quick’s anxious reaction, which the investigators seemed to feel was so enormously significant, it actually occurred on a nearby roundabout as they once again passed a road sign for ‘Myrvoll’. On the film, one can hear Quick explaining that they were ‘close to the Trine place’.

He didn’t mention Gry Storvik at all. Only Seppo brought her up, in a voice-over recording in the edited version of the film.

MEETING WITH THE JOURNALIST

STURE BERGWALL WOKE
at 05.29, one minute before his alarm clock went off. A report on
Ekot
was talking about a member of parliament, Fredrick Federley, whose salad bar had gone bankrupt, and how suppliers and tax payers were affected, which didn’t interest Sture very much.

After washing and getting dressed, he went to the canteen to pick up coffee and buttermilk, which he took in his room. Ten minutes later, at exactly five past six, he rang the bell to be let outside.

It was a nice day. The fresh morning air brought with it a scent of bird cherry as he emerged into the exercise yard. Sture took a deep breath, closed his eyes and held his breath.