Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  Seven hours later, when the reconstruction was over, both the investigators and the prosecutor expressed their satisfaction with the outcome. Van der Kwast was quoted in Expressen on 12 July saying, ‘It’s gone very, very well.’ He now held the view that Thomas Quick had convincingly shown in the reconstruction that he really had murdered the Dutch couple: ‘He was both willing and able to show in great detail how the murders happened.’

  An increasing number of real and self-proclaimed experts set out to explain the experiences and circumstances that had turned the boy, Sture Bergwall, into the sadistic serial killer known as Thomas Quick. Kerstin Vinterhed, a highly respected journalist who wrote for Dagens Nyheter, described his childhood home as a place ‘entirely silent and cut off from the outside world. It was a home where no one visited, where no children were ever seen playing nearby.’

  Again, Quick’s childhood was covered – including his father’s rapes, his mother’s cruelty and the two murder attempts against him. His transformation into a murderer was thought to have happened after his father’s last assault, which took place in the forest when Thomas Quick was thirteen. Thomas wanted to kill his father, but changed his mind when he saw how pathetic he looked with his trousers around his ankles.

  ‘And then I ran away. And it’s like a single, giant step from that moment to the murder I committed in Växjö six months later when I was fourteen,’ Quick explained.

  ‘So it was as if you were killing yourself, was it?’ Kerstin Vinterhed wondered.

  ‘Yes, I was killing myself,’ Quick confirmed.

  There was a belief that during this murder, just as with all the others, Thomas Quick was both the assailant and the victim. The murders were in actual fact a sort of re-enactment of the assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood. This was the theoretical model used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Quick and was also a method approved by the investigators.

  Thomas Quick’s siblings, nephews and nieces responded with powerless shame to the horrifying accounts in the media of the parents’ dreadful cruelty. The Bergwall family no longer talked about Sture. If necessary, he was referred to as ‘TQ’. Sture Bergwall did not exist.

  They maintained their silence for a long time. But in 1995 the oldest son, Sten-Ove Bergwall, stepped forward as the family’s spokesman. In the book Min bror Thomas Quick (‘My Brother, Thomas Quick’) he gave his version of what it was like to grow up in their family home. He spoke for the whole family when he called into question his brother’s traumatic childhood memories.

  ‘I don’t doubt that it seems true to him. It’s a known tendency for people to be encouraged to produce false memories in therapy,’ he said to Expressen, with firm assurances that his parents could not have been guilty of what Thomas Quick was alleging.

  Sten-Ove explained that his purpose in writing the book was not to make money, but rather to reclaim the childhood that Thomas Quick had taken from him by the statements he had made. He also wanted to clear the names of his late parents, as they weren’t able to defend themselves against Quick’s accusations.

  ‘I’m not suggesting that we grew up in a perfect family, but none of us siblings have memories that back up his story. We were not a bunch of people living in isolation, we were not rejected and mysterious. We socialised with people, we travelled a lot and visited relatives at weekends, at Christmas and on birthdays.’

  However, when it came to the murders that Thomas Quick had confessed to, Sten-Ove had no doubts: ‘When I heard that a man had confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.’

  The trial for the Appojaure murders began in January 1996 at Gällivare District Court. At the trial in Piteå, Thomas Quick had insisted on closed doors while he was being cross-examined, but in Gällivare he conducted himself with great confidence in the courtroom. In front of an audience he accounted for the murder of the Dutch couple in a convincing manner. He described how he had taken a train to Jokkmokk, wanting to find a teenage boy, and there he met a group of German youths and selected one of the boys as his victim.

  On a stolen women’s bicycle he had cycled to Domus supermarket, where he met Johnny Farebrink, a ‘gruesome and deeply depressed knife-lunatic’. After a drinking session they had gone together to Appojaure, where the Stegehuises were camping. According to Quick, their reason for going was that Johnny Farebrink had ‘aversions’ to the Dutch couple, while Quick was keen to target the German boy he had met in Jokkmokk, and got the impression that the boy was the Dutch couple’s son.

  ‘When I asked her directly, the woman denied her own son. I was furious,’ Quick told the court.

  The murder of the couple, which had earlier seemed inexplicable, was now revealing a certain underlying logic, though a crazily contorted one.

  ‘I tried to lift her up so her face was right in front of mine. I wanted to see her fear before she died,’ Quick went on. ‘But I didn’t really have the strength, so I just stabbed and stabbed.’

  Counsel Claes Borgström asked Quick what had turned him against the woman.

  ‘Because of her denial, I identified her with M, and there was also a physical resemblance,’ answered Quick.

  M was Quick’s name for his mother. The murder was thus a murder of his own mother.

  A relative of the Stegehuises, with whom the couple stayed in the first few days of their holiday, had come to Gällivare in order to try and understand why Janny and Marinus had been killed. After listening to Quick’s account of the double murder, the relative made a statement to Expressen: ‘Quick is a pig, he doesn’t deserve to live.’

  The outcome of the trial for the murders in Appojaure was hardly a foregone conclusion. There were questions about a number of aspects of Thomas Quick’s story, especially concerning the information about an accomplice. The investigators had not found anything or anyone to back up Quick’s information about Johnny Farebrink: no one had seen them together and the drinking session they allegedly indulged in was denied by everyone who was present. For these reasons he was not a co-defendant in the case.

  A local artist who had been a student at the same high school as Quick in the 1970s did testify that she was almost sure she had seen him at the train station in Gällivare at the time of the murders in Appojaure.

  The district court also believed that Quick’s presence in Jokkmokk on the day before the murder was confirmed by the testimony of the owner of a stolen bicycle. She said that the bicycle’s gears were broken in precisely the way that Quick had described.

  Seppo Penttinen, who had conducted all the interviews with Quick, testified in court as to the reasons why Quick had constantly changed his story over the course of the investigation. It was because Quick ‘had to protect his inner self by inventing something that verged on the truth’. Yet the central aspects of Quick’s memories were clear and distinct, according to Penttinen.

  Sven Åke Christianson explained Quick’s difficulties in remembering his murders and described two contradictory mechanisms in the function of human memory. Remembering what harms us is, on the one hand, an important survival mechanism. On the other hand, we cannot constantly ‘go round remembering all the misery we’ve been through’. It is important to be able to forget, Christianson asserted.

  Thomas Quick’s memory function had been examined by Christianson, who concluded that it was absolutely normal. He claimed that there wasn’t anything to suggest that this might be a case of a false confession.

  A medical examiner and forensic technician gave convincing testimony that Quick had described all the most serious injuries sustained by the Stegehuises during questioning, and that his story had been confirmed by forensic evidence found at the scene.

  The district court was also impressed by Seppo Penttinen’s account of how Quick had been able to describe the murder scene in the very first interviews, and stated in its summing-up: ‘On the basis of what we have seen, the district
court finds beyond any reasonable doubt that Quick is guilty of these crimes. The circumstances of the crimes are such that it must be considered as murder.’

  Thomas Quick had now been found guilty of three murders. But the investigation was still in its very infancy.

  YENON LEVI

  The accepted definition of a serial killer is taken from the FBI and stipulates that he or she must have committed three or more murders on separate occasions. By contrast, multiple murders that lack a ‘cooling-off period’ in between are categorised as ‘spree murders’.

  So far, Thomas Quick had ‘only’ been convicted of three murders on two separate occasions and thus he didn’t meet the formal criteria to be classed as a serial killer. However, during the investigation into the murders in Appojaure the list of confessions to other murders had grown considerably, and Quick was very definitely a serial killer in waiting.

  These confessions were not always initially made to the police. Pelle Tagesson of Expressen was able to reveal in August 1995 that Thomas Quick had confessed during an interview with him to having ‘murdered in Skåne’ and, by inference, was accepting responsibility for the sadistic sex murder of nine-year-old Helén Nilsson of Hörby in 1989. In the same interview, Quick also confessed to the killing of two boys in Norway and two males from ‘central Sweden’.

  Christer van der Kwast was clearly put out by Quick’s bypassing both therapists and investigators to make his confessions directly to the media. ‘I can only hope that he also confesses to me,’ he commented.

  By leaving clues and making suggestive allusions about murders, sometimes to the police and sometimes to therapists or journalists, Quick was playing a game of cat and mouse that irritated more people than just van der Kwast.

  Journalists and the media were assuming an important but unclear role in the investigation. Quick was free to meet any reporters he liked and he always read what had been written about him. Van der Kwast could do little but accept that he had to learn from Expressen that Quick had committed one of his ‘new’ murders in the region of Dalarna, which immediately led the investigation to the notorious murder of the Israeli citizen Yenon Levi on the edge of the village of Rörshyttan on 11 June 1988.

  Yenon Levi was a twenty-four-year-old tourist who was found dead beside a forest track in Dalarna. An extensive police investigation had led to a suspect, but the evidence was not sufficiently conclusive to go to trial.

  The murder in Rörshyttan had been bubbling under the surface of the Quick investigation for quite some time. About a month after the reconstruction in Appojaure, Thomas Quick called the chief interrogator, Seppo Penttinen, at home. Penttinen drafted a memo of the conversation:

  On Wednesday, 19 August at 19.45 the signatory below was telephoned by Quick. Quick said that he was feeling very bad psychologically and that he wished to talk about certain events he was feeling anxious about. With regard to the case of the Israeli man in Dalarna, Quick says that he was helped by another person to carry out the murder.

  Quick stated that they had met Yenon Levi on a side street in Uppsala. His accomplice had spoken English to Levi, who then accompanied them in Quick’s car to Dalarna, where the two men murdered the Israeli.

  Quick held him while the other punched him and struck him with ‘a heavy object from the boot of the car’. The body was left at the scene where the man was attacked, and it was not arranged in any particular way. The body ended up more on its back than on its side and definitely not on its stomach.

  Quick mentioned that he has kept up with what has been written in the press about the case, but he has avoided looking at the photos and he hasn’t read everything written about it.

  Quick’s confession to the murder of Yenon Levi was not greeted with enthusiasm by the investigators. Seppo Penttinen told Quick that so much had been written regarding this murder in the newspapers that it would be difficult to say anything about it that wasn’t already generally known.

  Once the preliminary investigation into Appojaure had been completed, further interrogation concerning the Yenon Levi murder was nonetheless carried out. Quick was now suggesting that he had been alone when he caught sight of Levi in Uppsala and convinced the man to accompany him to Falun. Close to Sala they stopped by a holiday cottage, where Quick killed Levi with two blows with a stone to the head. Afterwards, the body was dragged onto the back seat and the journey continued to Rörshyttan, where Quick turned off onto a forest track and dumped it in the woods.

  The investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi was long-drawn-out and difficult for everyone involved. Quick’s account of the murder was constantly changing. Sometimes he claimed there was an accomplice involved, sometimes not. The actual place where the murder took place varied, as did the information about where he had first met Levi. Quick was even more confused about the murder weapon he had used.

  In the early stages of the preliminary investigation, Thomas Quick had claimed that the murder weapon was a stone, which was incorrect. During further questioning, at various times he suggested that the murder weapon was a car jack, a rim wrench, a short-handled camping axe, an iron bar lever, a piece of firewood or a kick or two. All of these proposals were also incorrect.

  Over the course of almost a year, Seppo Penttinen held fourteen interviews with Quick and carried out one reconnaissance of the crime scene and two reconstructions. During the second reconstruction, Quick referred to the murder weapon as ‘a sort of wooden texture’.

  ‘Do you see anything here that corresponds to the length of it?’ asked Penttinen, while at the same time indicating a measure of about a metre between his hands. Quick immediately went and picked up a wooden stick of more or less that length, which conveniently enough was lying nearby.

  Christer van der Kwast did not subscribe to the view that Quick’s constantly changing story was damaging his credibility. ‘The difficulty has been that the memories of the murders have been fragmented and unstructured and that sometimes it has taken a very long time before he can piece together the various fragments into a cohesive whole,’ he explained, sounding very much like Quick’s therapists at Säter Hospital.

  After one and a half years of therapy, police questioning and repeated reconstructions, Thomas Quick had managed to structure his fragmented memories into a more or less cohesive story: Quick and his accomplice had initially forcibly removed Yenon Levi from a train platform at Uppsala station to a car park, where he was bundled into the car. Thereafter the accomplice had kept Levi in check by holding a knife to his throat, while Quick drove them to the murder scene.

  On 10 April 1997 Christer van der Kwast handed in a court application to Hedemora District Court. The crime description was short:

  Thomas Quick took Yenon Levi’s life by blunt violence against Levi’s head and upper body between 5–11 June 1988 in Rörshyttan, in the municipality of Hedemora.

  This was the third murder trial in which Thomas Quick was alleging that he had killed with the help of an accomplice. Also for the third consecutive time, the accomplice had not been called to appear at court. His full name was given in the verdict and his participation in the murder of Yenon Levi described in detail, but as he had denied the charge and there was no evidence against him, no further action could be taken against him. ‘Questioning NN with regard to this case would not be productive for us,’ Christer van der Kwast concluded.

  Hedemora District Court was forced to acknowledge that during the trial ‘no evidence had been presented that directly connected Thomas Quick to the crime’. However, the court believed that Quick’s account of the murder had been coherent and free of serious inconsistencies. He had provided a great deal of accurate information about the murder scene, the victim’s clothes and wounds – details that, according to the court, corresponded very well with facts established by the autopsy and the forensic examination of the scene.

  Quick had also referred to other specific details which seemed to suggest that he really had murdered Yenon Levi: for instance, he
described finding a carved wooden knife in his backpack which the victim had mentioned in a postcard to his mother.

  Seppo Penttinen explained to the court that Quick’s discrepancies weren’t particularly remarkable. The convoluted process of arriving at the correct murder weapon, for example, had always seemed reasonable to Penttinen because he ‘had had the impression that Thomas Quick knew all along that it was a club-like piece of wood, but for reasons of personal distress he had not been able to say so’. Penttinen also gave testimony on the emergence of Quick’s story in questioning and the manner in which the interviews were conducted, which was considered highly important in the sentencing. There was a view that Quick had provided detailed information which only the murderer could possibly have known.

  On 28 May 1997 Thomas Quick was found guilty and convicted of the murder of Yenon Levi:

  In conclusion, the court finds that Thomas Quick’s account has high evidential value. By his confession and the investigation as a whole it is placed beyond all reasonable doubt that Thomas Quick has committed the act for which prosecution has been brought. Thomas Quick shall therefore be held responsible for wilfully taking Yenon Levi’s life.

  Thomas Quick was handed back into continued psychiatric care.

  He had now been found guilty of four murders on three different occasions and could therefore, even by the FBI’s strict definition, call himself a serial killer.

  THERESE JOHANNESEN

  During the investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi, Thomas Quick continued remembering that he had also killed an assortment of other people. One of many new confessions concerned the murder of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen, who on 3 July 1988 disappeared without trace from her home in a residential area known as Fjell, outside Drammen in Norway.