‘I wonder what you’d think of me if you found out that I’d done something really serious.’
Therese gave Sture a searching look.
‘What do you mean, “serious”?’
‘Well, something really, really serious. You understand. How would that change the way you saw me?’
‘I don’t get what you’re saying at all! Really, really serious! Why don’t you just say what you mean.’
‘I’ll give you a clue.’
‘OK.’
Sture thought about it in silence for a few moments, before spelling out, ‘M-U.’
‘M-U?’
Therese gave him a troubled smile.
‘Sture, I’m not getting any of this.’
She felt that the entire gist of the conversation was odd, maybe also a touch unpleasant, although she kept this to herself. It was hardly difficult imagining what ‘something really serious’ could mean for a patient who had been sectioned at a secure psychiatric clinic and who had already committed aggravated robbery, sexual assaults on children and grievous bodily harm. She managed to steer him off the subject, but once she got back to the ward she reported what Sture had said.
Göran Fransson and Kjell Persson were jointly responsible for Sture Bergwall: Persson was in charge of the therapy, while Fransson was responsible for his overall care. When Fransson walked into the ward the following day he was given a report on what had been said on the beach. He immediately requested that Sture should come and see him in the music room. As soon as Sture came in, Fransson closed the door behind them.
‘Sture, I am very, very concerned about what I was told in the ward this morning. What you asked Therese on the beach yesterday,’ he clarified. ‘M-U . . .’
Sture lowered his eyes.
‘We offered you full clearance because we thought you were stable. We thought we knew where we stood with each other. Do you remember we spoke about this during rounds yesterday?’
Sture hummed his agreement but had nothing else to add.
‘Surely you understand you’ve got us worried! Something really serious? What does that mean? And the clue, those letters M-U?’
Sture looked at the floor.
‘Do you even know what those letters M-U stand for?’
‘Yes, I do. Of course . . . But I can’t explain it. Not now.’
‘But why did you say this? There must be some reason for it?’
Sture hummed, while Fransson held his tongue.
‘All this,’ Sture explained with some hesitation. ‘It’s just my usual way of pushing away people who appreciate me.’
‘You weren’t pushing anyone away! Therese reported what you said just as she had to do. You have to understand that this poses a problem for all of us. Your leave today . . . Do you see how unsettling that is for us?’
‘I could just not go out. I could,’ whispered Sture by way of an answer.
‘I’m cancelling your full clearance from here on. No free movement until we understand what this means.’
Sture stood silent and immobile with his head down.
‘We get very wary when you start saying mysterious things like that, Sture.’
What Sture had been alluding to on the beach outing – that he had done ‘something really serious’ – played right into the suspicions Fransson had first brought up when he made his short psychiatric assessment and speculated about Sture having very likely committed more violent crimes between the assaults on the boys and the bank robbery in 1990.
‘That means I daren’t express my feelings any more,’ said Sture in a muted voice. ‘I can’t tell the staff what I am feeling.’
Fransson skewered him with his eyes.
‘I promise you, Sture. There’s no problem at all about that as long as you don’t speak in riddles. Now we have to think about what’s happened. And then we’ll talk about it later. OK?’
And with this, Göran Fransson walked out of the music room.
Ten days later Sture had once again regained his right to full clearance. The anxieties of the bathing trip seemed to have been forgotten. The hospital authorities were in the midst of discharging him from psychiatric care. Sture Bergwall made an application to the National Registrar’s Office to change his name to Thomas Quick, which was approved. He wanted to be free of his past and start a new life with an untarnished name. He had signed a lease on a small flat, a studio room with a kitchen at Nygatan 6B in Hedemora from 15 August, and was ‘feeling very well at the moment’. The one cloud on the horizon was where he would get the money to furnish his new home. The only other notes over the summer are about reductions in his intake of medications, running practice and how well he handled his leave to places such as Hedemora, Avesta and Stockholm.
The move into the flat was delayed. In September Sture realised that he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent for his flat and he had to give up the lease. He stayed on at Säter and from November he was placed in holding accommodation for patients waiting to be released.
But while the supervisors at the hospital were preparing for Thomas Quick’s release, dramatic events were unfolding in secret.
THE GAME TURNS SERIOUS
IN HIS CONTINUED therapy with Kjell Persson, Thomas Quick remembered that he had travelled to Sundsvall, where he had murdered Johan Asplund. As it happened, Johan’s disappearance had been one of the most widely publicised criminal cases of the 1980s and Quick wasn’t absolutely certain that the memory was authentic. Persson determined that they would go to Sundsvall together on 26 October 1992 to see if his recollections became clearer.
Kjell Persson had checked the address, yet they lost their way on their first attempt. Many years later, Persson testified in the trial for the murder of Johan Asplund, admitting that it was ‘possibly on his initiative that they turned off towards the neighbourhood of Bosvedjan’.
In fact it is a good deal more than possible. Both Kjell Persson’s own report and the information he gave in the first police interview on the matter indicate that when they came to a junction on the right signposted ‘Bosvedjan’, Persson suggested that they should turn into it. Quick didn’t object, but wasn’t able to say whether it was the right way or not.
At one point, Quick had such a severe panic attack that Persson had to interrupt his private reconnaissance. Quick’s reaction was interpreted as a sign implicating him in the murder.
After a short visit to Bosvedjan they drove around the environs of Sundsvall aimlessly until they came to an area known as Norra Stadsberget, where Quick was again overwhelmed by intense anxiety. When it had passed, he suggested that this was where the actual killing had taken place.
After their return to Säter, Persson did not make a note in the file about what had taken place. Their conversations about the murder of Johan continued in secret, three times a week. Neither the police nor the hospital management were informed, despite the fact that Persson was convinced his patient had committed a murder.
If chief physician Kjell Persson hadn’t gone on holiday in February 1993 it would likely have taken a good while longer before Quick’s accounts of murders became generally known.
But now that he had left the clinic, Quick, who had grown accustomed to his bizarre conversations three times a week, turned to Birgitta Ståhle, a thirty-nine-year-old psychologist and devoted follower of object relations theory.
‘Our communication will function as a safety “valve” for Sture, because the therapeutic process he’s going through is bringing up so much material for him that he needs fixed points of reference in terms of meeting someone,’ Ståhle wrote in the file.
But Birgitta Ståhle did not become the safety ‘valve’ she had imagined. To use her own metaphor, one might say that the pressure cooker exploded at their first communication. She was so aghast at what Quick told her she immediately contacted Göran Fransson, who was responsible for Quick’s care.
‘Sture has told me that he’s murdered two people, two boys,’ Ståhle told him.
&nb
sp; Göran Fransson didn’t want to admit that his colleague Kjell Persson had been keeping him informed about developments in Quick’s psychotherapy. It wouldn’t have looked good if he, as the person responsible for Quick’s care, was aware of Quick’s murder confessions without passing them on.
With Birgitta Ståhle entering into the equation, the bubble of secrecy surrounding Thomas Quick had burst. Göran Fransson ruminated on the matter for eleven days without doing anything. Then on 26 February he sat down to write in Quick’s file:
The patient’s therapist is currently on holiday. In the meantime the patient has turned to a few key people on the ward, as well as to the psychologist Birgitta Ståhle, to say that he has committed two murders, one when he was sixteen years old and another about ten years ago. The information relates to two boys, who are thought to have disappeared without their bodies ever being found. I explained to him that this obviously has legal ramifications and he must take this to the police if he is to have any likelihood of reconciling himself with what he has done. He is aware of this but obviously very frightened.
The note gives the impression that Thomas Quick had suddenly confessed to two murders that were previously unknown at Säter. In actual fact he had been talking about one of the murders – Johan Asplund’s – since October 1992. His own doctor had made further investigations into the matter. Now that the secret was coming out into the open, Fransson was clearly aware that it might be seen as inappropriate for a psychiatric clinic to start looking into a patient’s murder confession without reporting it to the police.
The situation startled Quick. Everything had been exciting, simple and safe while he was talking only to Kjell Persson. He had seen their conversations as a stimulating, intellectual game. Now all of a sudden Göran Fransson was talking about making a police report, bringing a prosecution and going to trial. As a consequence of Sture’s glibness with Birgitta Ståhle, Pandora’s box had been flung open and his own words were flying round, threatening and frightening, completely out of control. It was impossible to turn the clock back, to reseal the words in the enclosed space of the therapy room.
Back from his holiday, Kjell Persson resumed therapy with Quick and later noted in the file:
What have further emerged are extreme episodes of terror during the patient’s childhood, when he clearly came close to being killed by his mother. The most serious of these was an attempted drowning in Lake Runn. The most traumatic events for the patient seem to have taken place when he was 3–5 years old, although the sexual molestation seems to have continued after this period, but it was somewhat less frequent.
What now made Quick the priceless treasure of the clinic was not the sexual assaults in themselves, but rather the connection between these and the violent crimes Sture committed as an adult. According to object relations theory, Sture’s violent crimes were re-creations of the assaults to which he had been subjected as a child, or, as Persson put it in the file:
Alongside the uncovering of these bizarre images from his memory, which from time to time seem crystal clear, his memories of the murder of Johan Asplund have come forth with increasing clarity. Initially his memories of the crime were more like dreamlike fantasies, but gradually during the therapeutic process they turned into increasingly clear, distinct images. While working on these images of the assault and murder of Johan Asplund, they have become interwoven with terrifying images from his childhood, and the crime has appeared as a psychological re-creation of his childhood situation with several angles of possible approach.
One day in February 1993, Göran Fransson knocked on Thomas Quick’s door and stepped into his room. He wanted to hear what Quick’s position was in relation to his own confessions. Quick told him that his feelings were no longer as clear as they had been earlier. He felt indecisive and unsure of the whole thing.
‘I want to give you a chance to go to the police yourself, but if you don’t make a report within two weeks I’ll have to do it myself,’ said Fransson.
Quick understood that the police had to be informed, but he said that he wasn’t certain that he had very much he could tell them about the murder of Johan Asplund.
‘You have to prepare yourself in writing before being questioned,’ said Fransson. ‘And obviously we’ll ensure that you have hospital staff to accompany you during the interview.’
At Fransson’s express request, Quick tried as best he could to talk about the murder of Johan Asplund. He realised that this was not at all the same thing as talking to Kjell in a therapy session. Fransson noted the attempt in the file:
He describes it more or less as fantasies, which he was unclear whether or not actually happened, but that now, as a consequence of the ongoing therapy, he has confirmed to himself. I confronted him at this point by saying that last week he answered evasively on two occasions to direct questions on the possibility of other crimes. Personally, I find it strange that fifteen years should have passed between these crimes. Then he tells me that he has fantasies or visions of another two, named Peter and Mikael respectively. The order is according to a chronological sequence. However, he is unsure whether or not these have fallen victim to him.
Sture told me how he had agonised during the two-week period Göran Fransson had given him. If he said that he had been lying about the whole thing in therapy he might be able to get out of his precarious situation. But would anyone believe him? What would Kjell Persson say? And Fransson?
He thought about every conceivable retreat, but nothing struck him as realistic. Finally, he contacted Göran Fransson and asked him to call the police. He would let things take their course.
Senior officer Jörgen Persson arrived at Säter Hospital at eleven in the morning on 1 March 1993. Half an hour later, he had rigged up his tape recorder in the small, provisional interrogation room and been introduced to the suspect. Kjell Persson was present as the interview witness. Jörgen Persson checked that the tape recorder was rolling as it should, then sat back in the armchair.
‘Well then, Sture, let’s start our little chat. I’m from Borlänge police and really I don’t know anything much, just that you’re here at Säter Hospital and that lately you’ve started talking about certain things you’d like to tell me about. I don’t know anything about old investigations apart from what I’ve read in the newspaper or whatever, so I’m completely unprepared, so to speak.’
They made sluggish progress during the interview, despite a good deal of pressure from Jörgen Persson. Finally he asked the simple question that set Quick into motion: ‘What happened? What do you remember, Sture?’
‘I borrowed a car belonging to an acquaintance,’ said Quick. ‘And made a trip at night and eventually came to Sundsvall. I mean I started when it was dark in Falun and when I got to Sundsvall it was still dark.’
‘Yes,’ said Officer Persson encouragingly. ‘Then what did you do? Where did you head off to?’
‘It was a trip without a goal . . . I mean I didn’t have a fixed destination. But I came to the outskirts of Sundsvall, anyway.’
‘Whose was the car? Who did you borrow it from?’
‘I can’t remember his first name right now. But his surname. Ljungström, he was called.’
‘And how, in what way, did you know Ljungström? Was he a relative? Or an acquaintance?’
‘No, he was an acquaintance. We used to meet down by the Lugnet public pool.’
Quick then told Jörgen Persson how he came, in Ljungström’s Volvo, to a car park in the residential area of Bosvedjan, north of Sundsvall.
‘Can you describe the houses, the colours, what the houses were made of or anything like that?’
‘Well, I should let you know that I went there this autumn with the interview witness here, so I could also be remembering that . . . It could be a bit difficult knowing which memory I’m telling you,’ explained Quick.
‘You’ve been there to look at the place? So you know what the houses look like, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what did you do when you were there in the car park?’
‘I have to be a bit straight to the point here and use the method that’s available to me. I was looking for a boy and I had noticed there was a school nearby. And two boys came walking by, but soon they went separate ways, and I called out once they had separated, so to speak. I don’t know if they were together but they came at the same time anyway. The boy who came towards me, so to speak, had an unzipped jacket and I called out to him, asked him for help and told him I’d run over a cat, and he came to the car and I took him into the car and drove away, and went to . . . Stadsberget in Sundsvall and there I killed him. And this boy, in other words, was Johan Asplund.’
Quick went silent.
Officer Persson did not seem to know how to go on from here. He had just heard a full confession to the most infamous murder in Sundsvall in modern times – that of an eleven-year-old who disappeared on 7 November 1980.
‘I see,’ sighed Jörgen Persson. ‘And you’ve been carrying this inside you for all these years?’
‘I’ve been carrying it for all these years, but not on a conscious level,’ Quick answered cryptically.
The questioning continued with a general probing to establish a description of Johan’s clothes, but Quick could only remember that he wore a dark blue jacket.
It occurred to Persson then that he was questioning a murder suspect who had no legal representation. It was such a serious issue that he had to deal with it in some way. He said, ‘Just so we do things properly here, Sture, I have to tell you that in saying you killed him, you are under suspicion for murder, you do understand that?’
‘Of course,’ answered Quick.
‘And this whole thing about a right to a lawyer, you know about that, you know one has a right to a lawyer in a police investigation?’
Quick said he hadn’t thought about it. Officer Persson explained that he had to stick to the rules and inform him of his rights.
Thomas Quick Page 14
