Thomas Quick (7 page)

If the Assistant Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast believes that Quick is credible, how can it be that this named person who is known to the police (also to Kwast) is not brought in by the court for questioning?

Acting as an accessory to murder and gross sexual assaults on children are crimes that fall under general prosecution. Asplund therefore believed that van der Kwast had failed to fulfil his duty to prosecute and as a consequence should be tried for misconduct.

Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had followed the trials closely from the very beginning and they were both convinced that Quick’s confessions were false. They fought hard to ‘separate Quick from Johan’.

Other media channels threw themselves into the debate and more critics signed up, including the barrister Kerstin Koorti. In SVT’s (Swedish Television) news programme
Aktuellt
, she declared that she didn’t believe Thomas Quick was guilty of a single murder. She described the Quick trials as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the twentieth century’.

Criticism of an even more serious nature was published in the debate section of
Svenska Dagbladet
on 12 June 1998. Under the headline ‘The Quick Case – a Defeat for our System of Justice’, the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson criticised the team of prosecutor, police and psychiatrist who had ‘single-mindedly focused on looking for anything that implicated Quick in the murders’.

Astrid Holgersson had reviewed interrogation reports from several of the murder investigations and she gave tangible examples of how Christer van der Kwast had prompted Quick to come up with ‘the right answers’ during questioning. It was generally known that Quick, in the early stages of the investigations, had made a number of incorrect statements. However, no systematic analysis of his witness testimony had ever been made, Holgersson said. Instead, the courts had been persuaded to accept unscientific psychological explanations for Quick’s errors. She gave an example from the verdict for the murder of Yenon Levi:

The court noted that ‘the final version has emerged after a number of interviews’ but did not attempt any critical analysis of how it emerged. There was acceptance of psychological speculation on the reasons for this, namely that ‘Quick had problems in confronting some of the details’.

Sven Åke Christianson was in the direct line of fire of Astrid Holgersson’s criticisms. His contribution to the investigation was described as unethical and unscientific. ‘With suggestion and manipulative methods’, he had tried to help Quick to cobble together an account that didn’t contradict the facts of the crime. Holgersson also pointed out that Christianson was performing a secondary professional role on the side of the prosecution while at the same time serving the district courts ‘as an expert capable of assessing the value of his own findings in the investigation’. Accepting both of these roles, according to Holgersson, was plainly ‘unethical’.

Astrid Holgersson further maintained that Christianson had ‘impacted on public opinion in a biased fashion – in direct conflict with the role of professional psychiatrists at court hearings – by
spreading his subjective views on the question of guilt in various lectures that he gave on the “serial killer” Quick’.

In the anthology
Recovered Memories and False Memories
(Oxford University Press, 1997), Christianson had published an article in which he stated that Quick was a serial killer, which presumably should have been the very issue for the courts to determine. Holgersson quoted from Christianson’s article about Quick’s repressed memories which were recovered in therapy:

The memories of the murders caused overwhelming anxiety as these were re-creations of the sexual and sadistic assaults to which the serial killer had himself been subjected as a child.

Astrid Holgersson commented:

As mentioned before, there is no actual evidence for the supposition that Quick is a serial killer, that he was subjected to sexual abuse as a child or that this should be considered a distinguishing feature of serial killers.

The members of what Holgersson denoted ‘Team Quick’ – prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen, therapist Birgitta Ståhle and memory expert Sven Åke Christianson – kept their heads down and remained silent throughout the exchange. The one person who did come forward as a defender of the investigation was Claes Borgström. He had already taken a few hard knocks, as a number of critics had remarked on his passivity during the investigation and trial.

Borgström’s response to Holgersson’s critique in
Svenska Dagbladet
under the headline ‘An Unusually Nasty Conspiracy Theory’ was laced with sarcasm and irony:

One must really thank Astrid Holgersson for her scientifically well-founded judgements on these horrific crimes that won’t leave those affected by them any peace for the rest of their lives. All she has to do is go through a few papers and have a look
at a few video clips. She will find the truth lying there, ready and waiting.

The Quick feud reached its peak in August 1998 with the publication of Dan Larsson’s book
Mytomanen Thomas Quick
(‘Thomas Quick, the Mythomaniac’), which was primarily concerned with the double murder in Appojaure. Larsson believed that those murders were the work of a local bodybuilder who was abusing amphetamines, alcohol and anabolic steroids. Gubb Jan Stigson reviewed the book in the news section in
Dala-Demokraten
under the headline ‘New Book on Quick an Embarrassing Bungled Job’. Even though the newspaper had set aside a full page for the review, Stigson concluded by stating: ‘The failings in Larsson’s background material are so numerous that there simply isn’t enough space for them all here. This examination will therefore continue in tomorrow’s edition of
DD
.’

And sure enough, the ‘review’ did continue the following day. By this stage, the Quick feud had forced all the participants into diametrically opposed positions and had become an irreconcilable battle of personal prestige in which it was no longer possible for any of the parties to retreat a single inch from their stated positions.

TRINE JENSEN AND GRY STORVIK

THOMAS QUICK CONTINUED
making new confessions of murders. By the summer of 1999 he had reached twenty-five, of which he had been convicted of five. The growing pile of unexamined crimes to which he was confessing made
Dagens Nyheter
rank him as ‘one of the worst serial killers in the world’.

But something had changed since the Quick feud. Had it sown the seeds of doubt that were now taking root among crime reporters? Or were they and the general public simply growing tired of Thomas Quick?

At any rate, the press archives speak their own clear language: Thomas Quick no longer generated big headlines. Nor was anyone surprised when ‘the boy killer’ Quick, in the spring of 2000, was prosecuted for two typical heterosexual murders of young women in Norway: seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen, found raped and murdered in August 1981, and twenty-three-year-old Gry Storvik, murdered in June 1985. Both women were natives of Oslo and their bodies were found just outside the city.

Police technicians had found traces of sperm inside Gry Storvik. Thomas Quick admitted that he had had sexual intercourse with her prior to the murder, despite his clear-cut homosexual disposition since the age of about thirteen. These two new murders meant that Quick had made the full journey from a boy killer to an omnivorous serial killer without any preferences, patterns of behaviour or geographical limitations.

DNA analysis revealed that the sperm did not belong to Thomas
Quick, but even this didn’t give rise to any noticeable consternation. The guilty charge against Quick for murders six and seven was only briefly alluded to in
Expressen
. Falu District Court made a statement to the effect that there was a lack of technical evidence connecting Thomas Quick to the crimes. Despite this, the court reached the same verdict as in the other cases:

On a balanced judgement of what has been shown, the district court finds that Thomas Quick’s confessions are supported by the investigation to such a degree that it must be considered beyond all reasonable doubt that he has committed the acts as stated by the prosecutor.

‘There’s no need to speculate about whether he is lying. He has qualified knowledge of the murder’, was Sven Åke Christianson’s comment on the verdict.

‘Yesterday, Thomas Quick was convicted without technical evidence for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik’, Norway’s
Aftenposten
pointedly concluded.

And that was all.

JOHAN ASPLUND

THE STORY OF
Thomas Quick begins and ends with Johan Asplund.

When, during therapy in 1992, Quick started remembering the murder of Johan, he was very unsure whether he had had anything to do with it. It is unlikely that he would have suspected at this point that he would eventually remember committing another thirty murders.

If Thomas Quick had begun by confessing to the murder of Yenon Levi, the matter would have ended up in the Avesta police district rather than with the Sundsvall police. But the murder of Johan came first and the Quick file therefore landed on the desk of prosecutor Christer van der Kwast and the Sundsvall police, where senior officer and narcotics investigator Seppo Penttinen was charged with heading the investigation.

It would be understandable if Seppo Penttinen had harboured a dream of being the one to solve the murder of Johan Asplund, Sundsvall’s greatest crime mystery. Over the years, the police had invested enormous amounts of manpower and resources with a view to producing some sort of technical evidence as the Quick case progressed.

After the verdicts for the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen, the investigation took a firm new grasp on Johan’s murder inquiry, as it had done so many times before.

‘We’re getting very close now with Johan Asplund,’ said van der Kwast.

‘Again!’ commented Björn Asplund acidly. ‘There’s bound to be another murder in Norway he’d rather talk about . . .’

But this time the investigators were determined to bring Johan’s case to court and reach a verdict. On Valentine’s Day 2001 van der Kwast called Björn Asplund to let him know there was now enough evidence to instigate proceedings against Thomas Quick for the murder of Johan.

Both Björn and Anna-Clara Asplund welcomed the decision and approved the prosecution. ‘We just want an end to this after twenty years,’ they said. ‘But we’ll question every detail during the trial.’

‘The details provided by Quick show that he has been in physical contact with Johan,’ van der Kwast assured everyone at the press conference after the announcement of the trial. ‘Even his descriptions of things in Bosvedjan indicate that he was actually there on that morning.’

But Johan’s parents were dismissive of the prosecutor’s line of reasoning.

‘He did not murder my son,’ said Björn Asplund with absolute confidence, pointing to the fact that there was no technical evidence at all. ‘I don’t believe he is guilty of a single murder.’

The most significant failing in the Quick story, Asplund argued, was that none of Quick’s murder convictions had been tested in a higher court. But that would change now.

‘If against all probability he is found guilty, we’ll take it to the court of appeal. And then the bubble around Thomas Quick will hopefully burst.’

During the trial, the district court believed that Quick had given details about the residential area of Bosvedjan which proved that he had been there on the morning of Johan’s disappearance. He was able to describe a boy who lived in the same house as Johan. The fact that Quick could make a drawing of the boy’s jumper was viewed by the court as significant. He had also given precise information about distinguishing marks on Johan’s body.

Sundsvall District Court reached a unanimous verdict on Quick having committed the offence beyond all reasonable doubt. On 21 June 2001 Quick was convicted of his eighth murder.

Only then were Johan’s parents informed that because they had supported the prosecution they were not entitled to appeal against the verdict.

And with this the murder of Johan Asplund had come to a close.

TIME OUT

THREE SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
took place in November 2001.

On 10 November an article was published in
Dagens Nyheter
, written by the historian Lennart Lundmark. It was entitled ‘Circus Quick, A Travesty of Justice’:

The guilty verdicts against Thomas Quick are an all-time low not only for the Swedish judicial system but also for Swedish crime reporting. There is no doubt that the entire story will be refuted.

A few days later, on 14 November, Leif G.W. Persson, the criminologist and professor of police studies, mocked the entire Quick investigation during the Legal Fair at the Stockholm Exhibition Centre. Levelling his comments at the impaired judgement of the investigators, Persson expressed his doubt that Quick had committed a single one of the murders for which he had been convicted.

The following day, Thomas Quick published his third article in
DN Debatt
, ‘Thomas Quick in the Wake of Accusations of Mythomania: I Will Not Take Part in Further Police Investigations’, in which he stated:

From now on I will take some time out, maybe for the rest of my life, from police investigations into confessions I have made for a number of murders.

Thomas Quick fiercely attacked Leif G.W. Persson, Kerstin Koorti and all the others who had called his confessions into doubt and were now making it impossible for him to continue cooperating with the police investigation.

To be met year after year by entirely unfounded statements from a troika of false prophets claiming that I am a mythomaniac, and to see this little group so uncritically treated by the mass media, is, and will continue to be, far too much of a strain. I resign from any further cooperation with police investigations, also for the sake of the victims’ loved ones who have accepted the evidence just as the courts have done. I do not want them to have to feel unsure about what has happened.