Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  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.

  Three months later Thomas Quick took back his original name, Sture Bergwall. The man who had been created less than ten years earlier no longer existed.

  The Thomas Quick era was over.

  The judicial case of Thomas Quick, on the other hand, lived on in the culture pages of the newspapers, where the investigation and the verdicts were challenged by more and more people. Even some of the police detectives involved in the investigations came forward to express their doubts.

  But Sture Bergwall remained at Säter Hospital, in silence, year after year.

  When I visited him on 2 June 2008 his time out had lasted for almost seven years.

  Why had Quick gone silent? Was it really because his credibility had been questioned by Leif G.W. Persson and other sceptics? Or were there other, hidden reasons?

  WHY DID THEY CONFESS?

  I BECAME A journalist rather late in life – when I was thirty-seven years old – but I immediately managed to sell a number of stories to Swedish Television’s (SVT) investigative journalism programme Striptease. I enjoyed the work, I had unlimited energy and I felt everything was going astonishingly well. Before I knew it I was a permanent employee.

  My interest from the very beginning was focused on crime and justice reporting, and within a couple of years, working with the reporter Janne Josefsson, we chanced upon a scoop that I was certain I would never be able to trump. It concerned the drug addict Osmo Vallo, whose time of death happened to coincide with a hundred-kilo police constable stamping on his back while he lay on the ground with his hands cuffed. There was no connection between his death and the police’s treatment of him, according to the medical examiners.

  Our examination of the case forced two new autopsies of Osmo Vallo’s body, resulting in the conclusion that the cause of death was precisely the effect of the policeman stamping on Vallo’s back.

  We were awarded the Swedish Great Journalism Award for our reporting on Osmo Vallo. In my first years as a journalist I received a number of other national and international prizes and honours.

  These successes gave me a great deal of freedom at SVT, where my superiors saw in me a trusty provider of broadcast-quality reportage. After ten years as a researcher, working with the reporters Johan Brånstad and Janne Josefsson, I became a reporter in my own right in 2003. I began with the most politically incorrect and taboo-laden subject one could imagine: ‘The Case of Ulf’. This concerned a man sentenced to eight years in prison, though he denied all charges, for sexually abusing his daughter. Following my report on Uppdrag granskning (Investig
ation Assignment) the accused appealed and, after three years in prison, was able to leave the court a free man.

  Most likely it was this case that led to my home telephone ringing one September evening in 2007. I heard an elderly man’s voice asking me if I was the one who had made television documentaries on old legal cases. I couldn’t deny that I was. He told me about a large number of deliberately started fires, ‘more than fifty’, in and around the town of Falun between 1975 and 1976.

  I thought this was beginning to sound like yet another of those extraordinarily deterring tip-offs I received more or less by the minute.

  ‘A group of youths and children got blamed for it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t thought about it very much over the years, but now as I’m growing older it’s started eating away at me . . . I’m calling so you can help put things in order.’

  ‘OK?’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘You see, the one who started those fires . . . was me.’

  The hairs on my arms stood up. I realised I’d never be able to stop myself trying to find out if what he was saying was true.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m willing to dig out the verdicts and other material on the fires to check what you’ve told me. How do I contact you?’

  ‘You don’t,’ said the anonymous voice. ‘I have children, I live in an area far from Falun and I’m not prepared to reveal my identity.’

  ‘Are you serious? I’m supposed to put in weeks of full-time work “to put things in order” for you, without even knowing who you are?’

  ‘I’ll call you in two weeks. If you do a bit of background research about the fires, you can test my knowledge with a few questions. I promise you’ll be convinced I really am the “Falun Arsonist”.’

  Things worked out exactly as my informer said they would. He called back two weeks later, by which time I had read some of the verdicts and newspaper articles on the case. I asked him several questions about the fires, which he was able to answer convincingly.

  There was only one problem. Of the ten suspects questioned by the police, nine had admitted their guilt. Surely the case was cut and dried? But the anonymous caller stood his ground: these young people were innocent.

  So I tracked them all down and got the same story from each of them – they had had nothing to do with the fires; the arson story had ruined their lives. They had been arrested and subjected to tough police questioning. Their interrogators had denied them both legal representation and the possibility of calling their parents. But if they made full confessions they would be released and could go home. And so they confessed.

  They did it to get out of an unbearable situation. But their confessions were used by the social services to have them put into institutional care and they ended up in children’s homes. As adults, many of them had tried to keep this aspect of their past secret, even to their children and spouses. They were in despair that I had shown up to rake over the ashes. Participating in an investigative programme was out of the question for most of them.

  Gubb Jan Stigson had covered the hunt for the Falun Arsonist in 1975–6 and had written countless articles on the fires. When I stepped into his office at Dala-Demokraten on a bright winter’s day in January 2008, I wasn’t thinking about Thomas Quick at all.

  Stigson sat behind his crowded desk, with his feet on the table – he was wearing clogs – and his hands behind his neck. He didn’t rise to greet me, merely nodded nonchalantly at the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk. Some of the faded piles of paper looked as if they had been there for years.

  I spotted an unframed and yellowing diploma curling up around a lone drawing pin above Stigson’s black tufts of hair. It read: ‘The 1995 Grand Prize of the Publicists’ Club to Gubb Jan Stigson. For his passionate and patient work as a crime reporter for more than 20 years.’

  Once we had got my main errand, relating to the Falun Arsonist, out of the way he fixed his peppercorn eyes on me.

  ‘We should help each other expose the liars spreading false information about Thomas Quick,’ he suggested in the melodious dialect of Dalarna. ‘People who say Quick is innocent don’t know what they are talking about!’

  I wasn’t surprised. Stigson was the most dedicated fact-grubber when it came to Thomas Quick, and he was still pushing his line of argument in the Quick feud, ten years after it first broke out.

  Nor was it the first time I had listened to Stigson’s arguments; he had been trying to convince me for years to take a long, hard look at the case of Thomas Quick, who, he was convinced, was guilty of all eight murders as charged. I had replied that it would not be much of a journalistic feat to reveal that past court judgments had been correct. A handful of critics maintaining Quick’s innocence didn’t change this fact.

  By coincidence, I had discussed the matter only a week earlier with Stigson’s chief enemy, Leif G.W. Persson.

  ‘Thomas Quick is just a pathetic paedophile,’ Persson had told me. ‘By managing to get the bastard convicted, the police, prosecutors and therapists have only helped protect the real murderers. It’s a sad story. I’d even call it the greatest miscarriage of justice we’ve ever seen in this country. Remember, there is not a shred of evidence against Thomas Quick except his confessions.’

  ‘But surely you can’t deny that Quick said quite a lot about the murder victims, the crime scenes and the victims’ injuries?’ I objected. ‘How did he manage that?’

  Persson scratched his beard and muttered in his inimitable way, ‘That’s pure nonsense, criminological tittle-tattle spread by Quick’s coterie of reporters, investigators and the prosecutor. Quick doesn’t actually know very much when he’s first up for questioning.’

  ‘Quick’s coterie of reporters’ was Persson’s reference to Gubb Jan Stigson – the other members of the ‘media coterie’ had stopped writing about Quick years ago. Nothing provoked Stigson more than when the Professor of Police Studies made light of Thomas Quick’s earlier criminal record.

  Take, for instance, the following lines from one of Persson’s columns:

  Thomas Quick was known to the police long before he became a serial killer. Over the years he has been brought to book for various rather pathetic petty crimes that reeked of stupidity.

  Stigson had carefully memorised every such example. Persson was like a red rag waved before the man from Dalarna.

  ‘Leif G.W. Persson describes repeated sexual assaults against children and attempted murder as “pathetic petty crimes”.’

  The subject made Stigson’s voice more strained than usual, rising to falsetto as he launched into his rant, repeating facts he knew inside and out: ‘Thomas Quick was diagnosed early on as a sadistic paedophile – paedophilia cum sadismus – and was judged to be “not only a threat but also, under certain circumstances, extremely dangerous to the safety, well-being and lives of others”. This was written in 1970! And in 1974 in Uppsala he stabbed a man with a knife so badly that he only survived by a miracle. These are the actions that G.W. calls “pathetic petty crimes”! Do you understand how dishonest these people are?’

  Gubb Jan Stigson often quotes forensic psychiatric statements or court verdicts. With his detailed grasp, he can attack his opponents by pointing out factual errors in their comments and articles.

  Besides Leif G.W. Persson, the person Stigson most detested was the writer and journalist Jan Guillou. Demonstratively he waved a couple of A4 sheets in the air: rejected articles on the subject which he had sent to national newspapers.

  ‘In Jan Guillou’s book Häxornas försvarare [The Witches’ Attorney] I’ve counted forty-three factual errors in the chapter on Thomas Quick! For years I’ve been trying to challenge him to a public debate. But he doesn’t have the courage! And the national newspapers won’t take my articles,’ he said.

  It was with a certain relief that I said farewell to Stigson and walked out into an unwelcoming, bitterly cold Falun day to knuckle down to my investigative report on the Falun Arsonist, which was increasingly proving to be about the p
henomenon of false confessions.

  Why will certain people, under police questioning, confess to serious crimes even if they are absolutely innocent? It seems almost inconceivable. Most people would never think they could do something so idiotic. And yet, in Falun, nine young people had confessed to starting a large number of fires. Later they claimed they had had nothing to do with it. In the early stages I found it very difficult to believe them.

  Once I started looking into the research on false confessions I realised just how common they are. Nor could they be described as a recent occurrence. When the baby son of the celebrity Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, was kidnapped in 1932, over two hundred people came forward to make confessions. Almost as many have confessed over the years to the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

  Since its establishment in 1992 the American organisation Innocence Project had managed, by use of DNA technology, to help release 282 people innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. The organisation confirmed that about 25 per cent of these had confessed their guilt entirely, or to some degree, during police investigations. That they later retracted their confessions did not help them in their court cases.

  Children, young people, people with mental illnesses or impairments and drug users are by far the largest group. When subsequently asked why they confessed, the most common answer given is, ‘I just wanted to go home.’

  My research into the phenomenon revealed that some of the most significant legal scandals have come about because of false confessions. In Britain, for instance, there were the draconian sentences handed out to the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. Sweden seemed to be one of the few judicial states in which the problem of false confessions was more or less unknown.

  I went to New York, where I interviewed Professor Saul Kassin, one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject.

  Saul Kassin wasn’t surprised for a second to hear of the young people in Falun who had confessed to the crimes. The most surprising part of the story, in his opinion, was that a thirteen-year-old girl, who had been kept under arrest in isolation while subjected to tough questioning, continued to deny any involvement for three days.