Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  On the very first day the police deployed huge resources – helicopter surveillance, thermal cameras and search parties – without finding any sign of the boy.

  Johan’s case became one of the great mysteries in Swedish criminal history. The parents took part in endless interviews, documentaries and debates. Again and again they described what it was like to lose their only child, not knowing what had happened to him and having no grave to visit. But to no avail.

  Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had separated when Johan was three years old, but they had a good relationship and supported each other on their long hard road after Johan’s disappearance, helping each other through the hopeless encounters with journalists and the legal establishment.

  From the beginning they were both convinced that Johan had been abducted by the man Anna-Clara used to live with. Unrequited love and uncontrollable jealousy were said to be the motives. He had gone off the rails.

  The ex-partner said he had been at home on that fateful morning, sleeping in till nine. But eyewitnesses had seen him leaving the house at a quarter past seven. Others had seen his car outside the Asplunds’ house at about eight. His friends and colleagues reported his strange behaviour after Johan’s disappearance. Even his best friend went to the police and told them he was convinced that Anna-Clara’s exboyfriend had snatched Johan.

  In the presence of two witnesses, Björn Asplund said to him, ‘You’re nothing but a murderer. You have murdered my son and you will not get away with this. To everyone I meet from now on I will say it was you who murdered Johan.’

  That the accused man did not protest, or even try to sue Björn Asplund for slander, was seen by the parents as yet another indication of his guilt. There were circumstantial evidence, witnesses and a motive, but no definite proof.

  Four years after Johan’s disappearance, the Asplunds hired a barrister, Pelle Svensson, to bring a private civil case against Anna-Clara’s expartner, an unusual move that also carried with it considerable financial risk if the case was dismissed.

  After a sensational trial, the district court found that the accused had indeed abducted Johan. He was sentenced to two years in prison. It was a unique case and a great victory for Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund.

  However, their success in the district court was overturned after the defence turned to the court of appeal, which ordered the release of the ex-partner one year later. The Asplunds were instructed to pay their opponent’s legal expenses of 600,000 Swedish crowns, a fee the government later dropped for reasons of ‘clemency’.

  Since then, seven years had passed without any sign of Johan. No one was looking for his murderer any more.

  But now Anna-Clara stood immobile in the hall with the telephone receiver in one hand and her front door keys in the other. She tried to grasp what the reporter was saying, that the investigation into her son’s murder had been reopened and that a psychiatric patient had confessed to the crime. So no, she could not think of any suitable comment for the newspaper.

  Anna-Clara Asplund contacted the police in Sundsvall, who confirmed what the reporter had told her. The following day she learned from Expressen that the psychiatric patient was claiming to have strangled Johan and buried the body.

  The reporter had also managed to get hold of Björn Asplund, who took a fairly sceptical view of this new information. He still believed that Johan had been murdered by the man they had taken action against in the district court. But he was keeping an open mind on the matter.

  ‘If it’s shown that a totally different person has taken Johan’s life I’ll just have to swallow my pride,’ he told Expressen. ‘The most important thing is that we know the truth.’

  Expressen continued following the case and a few days later Anna-Clara Asplund was able to read more details of the confession made by the Säter patient.

  ‘I picked up Johan outside the school and lured him into my car,’ the Säter Man – as he was known in the press from that day on – said to Expressen on 15 March. ‘I drove to a wooded area where I sexually assaulted the boy. I never meant to kill Johan. But I panicked and strangled him. Then I buried the body so no one would find it.’

  The forty-two-year-old was clearly a very sick person. As far back as 1969 he had committed sexual assaults against young boys. His most recent crime had been in 1990, when he and a younger accomplice had been arrested for a bank robbery in Grycksbo outside Falun and confined to Säter Hospital. It was here, during a therapy session, that he had confessed to Johan’s murder. According to Expressen he had said, ‘I can’t live with this any more. I want to start clearing things up; I want atonement and forgiveness so I can move on.’

  You can’t live with it any more? Anna-Clara thought, and put away the newspaper.

  The public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, was an energetic man of about fifty with very short dark hair and a neat beard. He was renowned for his ability to present his views in a forceful tone and with such conviction that they were accepted as given, by both subordinates and journalists. All in all, he was a man who exuded self-confidence and seemed to relish taking command of his troops, plotting the course by which the whole army should march.

  Van der Kwast called a press conference at the end of May. In front of a crowd of expectant journalists, the prosecutor announced that the Säter Man had identified various places where he had hidden the body parts of Johan Asplund. Police technicians were currently searching for his hands in a location outside Falun. Other parts of the dismembered body had allegedly been hidden in the Sundsvall area, but despite careful searching with a cadaver dog, so far nothing had been found.

  ‘The fact that we have not found anything doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing there,’ the prosecutor commented.

  No other evidence had been found to connect the suspect to Johan Asplund’s disappearance and van der Kwast was forced to concede that there was little basis on which to call a trial. Yet suspicions remained, he pointed out, because although there was insufficient evidence in this case, the Säter patient was still tied to an entirely different murder.

  Van der Kwast told the press that in 1964 the man in question had murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö: fourteen-year-old Thomas Blomgren.

  ‘The details provided by the Säter patient in his account are so comprehensive and well supported by the investigation that under normal circumstances I would not have hesitated to bring charges against the man,’ said van der Kwast.

  His argument was doubly hypothetical, partly because the statute of limitation for the murder – which at that time was twenty-five years – had expired and partly because the Säter Man had been only fourteen years old at the time of the murder and therefore too young to be tried in a criminal court. Nonetheless, the murder of Thomas Blomgren became highly significant in the continuing investigation: that the Säter Man had murdered at the age of fourteen was undoubtedly compromising.

  However, Christer van der Kwast did not reveal how the Säter Man was connected to the murder of Thomas Blomgren, and as there couldn’t be a prosecution in the case, the investigation was never made public. Nevertheless, the Säter Man’s lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, fully agreed with the prosecutor’s views and asserted that his client’s statement was credible.

  Increasingly unpleasant details were emerging in the media coverage of the Säter Man’s background and character. He had committed an ‘attempted sex murder’ of a nine-year-old boy at Falu Hospital, according to Gubb Jan Stigson in the Dala-Demokraten: ‘When the nine-year-old screamed the man tried to strangle him. The forty-three-year-old himself describes how he tightened his grip on the boy’s throat until blood spurted from his mouth.’

  According to Dala-Demokraten, the doctors had been warning since 1970 that the Säter Man was a likely child killer, and the news paper cited a forensic psychiatrist’s statement confirming that he suffered from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as paedophilia cum sadismus’. He was not only a t
hreat but also, under certain circumstances, extremely dangerous to the safety, well-being and lives of others.

  On 12 November 1993 Gubb Jan Stigson revealed that the police investigation regarding the Säter Man had been widened to include five murders. In addition to Johan Asplund in 1980 and Thomas Blomgren in 1964 he was under suspicion for the murders of fifteen-year-old Alvar Larsson from Sirkön, who disappeared in 1967, forty-eight-year-old Ingemar Nylund, who was murdered in Uppsala in 1977, and eighteen-year-old Olle Högbom, who disappeared without trace in Sundsvall in 1983.

  According to Stigson, the Säter Man had confessed to all five murders. Increasing numbers of journalists were claiming that Quick was Sweden’s first real serial killer.

  ‘He is telling the truth about the boy murders’, Expressen’s full-page article announced on 17 June 1994. The Säter Man had confessed to yet another murder and this time the investigators had finally had a breakthrough. It concerned fifteen-year-old Charles Zelmanovits, who had disappeared after a school disco in Piteå in 1976.

  The Säter Man had confessed that he and an older friend had driven from Falun to Piteå in search of a young boy to assault. They came across Charles and lured him into the car. In a nearby wooded area the Säter Man had strangled the boy and cut up the body, taking some of the body parts with him.

  According to the investigators, Quick had not only provided the sort of information that had enabled them to find the various body parts, but also specified which body parts he had taken home with him.

  For the first time, van der Kwast had the sort of evidence the police hadn’t managed to obtain in their other investigations: a confession involving actual body parts and a statement demonstrating that the Säter Man had information that could only possibly be known by the perpetrator.

  ‘The 43 year-old is a sex killer’, Expressen declared in an article on 17 June.

  ‘We know he is telling the truth about two of the murders,’ van der Kwast confirmed.

  IN THE HEADLINES

  WHEN THE SÄTER Man’s therapist, Birgitta Ståhle, went on holiday in July 1994 there was widespread concern about how he would manage without the constant therapeutic support that had become increasingly important to him. On Monday, 4 July his team of carers had planned a lunch at the golf club restaurant in Säter. The Säter Man was accompanied on the outing by a young psychiatry student who was standing in for Ståhle.

  She and her patient left Ward 36 at a quarter to twelve and strolled in the direction of the golf course, when he suddenly told her that he urgently needed to relieve himself. He went behind a derelict building that had once served as Säter’s security ward. As soon as he was out of sight, he ran along a path through the woods to a road known as Smedjebacksvägen, where, according to plan, an old Volvo 745 was waiting with its motor running. In the driver’s seat sat a young woman and, beside her, a man of about twenty who was on trial release from Säter Hospital. The Säter Man jumped into the back seat and the driver pulled off with a wheel-spin.

  The car’s occupants laughed excitedly: the escape had gone according to plan. The man in the front seat handed over a little plastic bag, which the Säter Man opened and expertly, with a moist fingertip, emptied of every last grain of the white powder inside. He put his finger in his mouth and, using his tongue, fixed the bitter load to the top of his palate, then leaned back and closed his eyes.

  ‘Damn, that’s good,’ he mumbled as he worked the amphetamine paste in his mouth. Amphetamine was his favourite drug and, unusually, he actually liked the taste.

  His young friend in the front seat passed a razor, some shaving foam, a blue baseball cap and a T-shirt to the escapee in the back, then gave him a shove.

  ‘Come on, we don’t have time to mess around.’

  As the Volvo swung onto the S-70 trunk road towards Hedemora, the assisting psychiatrist was standing by the club house wondering if she should be worried. She called out but there was no answer, and before long she realised that he was neither behind the wall nor anywhere else. It was inconceivable that her sincere and amiable patient should let her down in this way, but after a few moments of fruitless searching, she had to go back to Ward 36 to report that the patient had absconded.

  By this time the fugitive was clean-shaven and wearing his disguise. He relished the freedom and the amphetamine rush while their aimless journey continued northwards on Highway 270.

  By the time the police in Borlänge put out a call for the Säter Man, forty-two minutes had elapsed and no one had any idea that he was approaching Ockelbo in an old Volvo.

  The evening newspapers picked up on the story straight away and immediately extended their print runs. Expressen’s headline went in as hard as it could:

  POLICE HUNTING

  the escaped

  SÄTER MAN TONIGHT

  ‘He is highly dangerous’

  Up until this point the newspapers had protected the identity of the Säter Man for ethical reasons, but when the most dangerous man in Sweden goes on the run, public interest demands a name, photograph and biographical information:

  The 44-year-old ‘Säter Man’ is now known as Thomas Quick, after changing his name. He has confessed to the murders of five boys, and the police and public prosecutor believe he can be tied to two of these. The man has told Expressen that he would prefer just to live in the woods with his dogs – last night the police conducted a search for him in the forests around Ockelbo.

  Once the woman driver realised the nature of the crimes for which Thomas Quick was under investigation, she had second thoughts and pulled over by an abandoned farmhouse to drop off the men. The companions found two unlocked bicycles there and, after getting them into some sort of working order, set off for the nearest town. Cycling along, they saw several police cars and were overtaken by just as many, while police helicopters circled overhead. No one seemed at all suspicious of the odd couple on the rusty bicycles.

  A large force of police officers equipped with automatic weapons, bulletproof vests and dog patrols searched for them until midnight without picking up their trail.

  After spending the night in a tent, the fugitives parted company in the morning. The amphetamine was finished, they were tired and it was no longer fun to be on the run.

  While the police were searching the forest, a man in a baseball cap walked into a Statoil petrol station in the small town of Alfta.

  ‘Do you have a payphone I can use?’ he asked.

  The proprietor did not recognise the man whose image was on the cover of both evening newspapers. Calmly he showed him the telephone. The customer made a brief call to Bollnäs police.

  ‘I’m handing myself in,’ he said.

  ‘And who might you be, then?’ asked the duty constable.

  ‘Quick,’ replied Thomas Quick.

  The escape triggered a heated debate about lax security in the country’s psychiatric institutions. Most indignant of all was National Police Commissioner Björn Eriksson.

  ‘It’s so tiresome that these things happen,’ said Eriksson. ‘There are so few really dangerous people around; it really ought to be possible to guard them. In the police force, we prioritise the safety of the public over rehabilitation.’

  The barb of the criticism was directed at Säter Hospital, but on 10 July 1994 an article strongly defending the institution was published in the debate section of Dagens Nyheter. It had been written by Thomas Quick himself, who paid effusive tribute to the staff and quality of the care at Säter, while at the same time putting the boot into the press corps:

  My name is Thomas Quick. After my escape last Monday (4/7) and the massive uproar that followed in the media, neither my name nor my face are unfamiliar.

  I neither want to, nor would I even be able to defend my escape from Säter Hospital, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to highlight some of the good work that has been done and continues to be done at this clinic; this is utterly lost in the general screeching of the journalists in their hunt for sensational s
tories, and it even overwhelms the good intellectual forces attempting to be heard in this domineering choir of voices.

  Many were surprised by his words, which indicated that Quick was an articulate, intelligent person. For the first time, the public gained an insight into the mind of a serial killer. They also learned about the process that had played itself out in all of Thomas Quick’s murder confessions.

  ‘When I came to the regional psychiatric unit in Säter I had no memory of the first twelve years of my life. Just as effectively repressed were the murders which I have now confessed to and which are being investigated by the police in Sundsvall.’

  Thomas Quick heaped praise on the staff who had helped him to recover his repressed memories of the murders, and he described how the therapists had supported him in this painful process: ‘My anxiety, guilt and sorrow over what I have done are so boundless, so heavy, that in real terms they cannot be borne. I am responsible for what I have done and also for what I do henceforth. The misdeeds I am guilty of cannot be remedied in any sense, but today I can at least say what they are. I am prepared to do so in my own time.’

  Quick explained that he had not escaped in order to commit new crimes, but rather to kill himself: ‘After I had parted from my companion, I sat for thirteen hours with a sawn-off shotgun pointing at my forehead. But I couldn’t do it. Today I can take responsibility for yesterday, and I think it was this sense of responsibility that stopped me ending my life and made me telephone the police to ask to be arrested. That is what I want to believe.’

  CHARLES ZELMANOVITS

  ON 18 OCTOBER 1994 Piteå District Court received an application for a summons from the prosecutor Christer van der Kwast with the following brief description of the offence: ‘On the night of 13 November 1976 in a wooded area outside Piteå, Quick took the life of Charles Zelmanovits, born 1961, by strangulation.’

  The trial in Piteå was set to begin on 1 November and, in the face of the impending legal inquiry into Quick’s confessions, the media released more and more details on the background of the alleged serial killer. While previously it had mainly been the tabloids that took an interest in Quick’s bizarre stories, now the broadsheets threw themselves into the ring. On 1 November Svenska Dagbladet published an article with descriptions of Thomas Quick that from this point were taken as hard facts. The journalist Janne Mattsson wrote: