‘Of course,’ said Quick.
‘Right,’ said Jörgen Persson. ‘And how do you see this whole question of legal representation? Can I continue this conversation with you and we’ll discuss your legal advice later, or do you want to have a lawyer? At what point do you want a lawyer involved?’
‘That’s a difficult question,’ Quick stated. ‘We never thought about that.’
‘No,’ confirmed Persson, the interview witness. ‘I can’t answer that.’
‘No, we can’t,’ said Quick.
‘And I’m not a lawyer,’ said Kjell Persson.
‘No,’ Quick agreed. ‘I think, formally speaking, we should be right and proper in that respect, so maybe he should be here right from the start.’
When he had no backing from either his doctor or the police officer, he continued making his point: ‘A lawyer might be good in the sense that he could be the slightly neutral force in all this. I’m thinking that it might be quite good, really.’
But things did not work out this way. Instead, Jörgen Persson turned off the tape recorder and had ‘a little discussion about it’, as he put it in the report afterwards. When the recording resumed, the interview continued without a lawyer being present.
When, fifteen years later, I read out the interrogation transcript to Sture Bergwall and he heard how, with good reason, he argued that he should have a lawyer present from the very beginning, he said, ‘I get so incredibly emotional when I hear how it was done. Upset. And I recognise the situation so well, how much I wanted to please Kjell Persson. If I’d admitted that everything I’d said in therapy was just made up, I’d embarrass Kjell Persson. And I also didn’t want to embarrass myself to Kjell.’
For several months, three times a week, he had been talking about the murder with his doctor, who now suddenly figured as the interview witness – with whom Quick, as a psychiatric patient committed into care, was in an extreme position of dependence.
‘I mean, it was absolutely impossible for me in that position to say that I had lied my way through hundreds of therapy sessions,’ says Sture.
I asked him to explain what he meant when, in the interview in 1993, he said that a lawyer could ‘be the slightly neutral force in all this’.
‘I meant that a lawyer could be a balancing factor to Kjell Persson and me; that he could ask, “Is this really true, Sture?” And explain that we should take it easy.’
When the interview was resumed, Quick was made to describe in detail how he had tricked Johan into coming closer, how he had pulled him into the car and dashed his head against the dashboard until he passed out.
‘Then what happened?’ asked Officer Persson.
‘We left the area, and I still didn’t know, so to speak, where we were going, but in the end we got to Stadsberget in Sundsvall and parked the car there. I brought Johan out of the car with me and we walked a good distance into the woods there. That’s where the actual . . . I mean, I strangled him there.’
A little later in the interview, Officer Persson asked what happened to the body.
‘It’s under a large boulder, under some rocks,’ said Quick.
‘And at what time did the body end up there?’ wondered Jörgen Persson.
‘Well, that same morning.’
‘Mm,’ said Officer Persson. ‘Shall we break for lunch, then?’
In the afternoon the interview picked up where it had left off, on Stadsberget, where Quick said that he had strangled Johan and hidden the body.
‘So how did you do it, when you strangled him?’ asked Officer Persson.
‘Using my hands.’
‘Had anything in particular happened before you strangled him?’
‘No, nothing in particular.’
But when he was asked more questions about his intentions when he lured Johan into the car, Quick recalled that he subjected Johan to a sexual assault before strangling him.
‘And then, once he was dead, what did you do? I’m thinking, you said he ended up under some rocks, that’s what I’m thinking about.’
At this point the story took a new and unexpected turn.
‘I took off his shoes and leg coverings or whatever the hell I should call them. And I’m sort of a bit unclear here. I think, but I don’t know for sure, that I hid his clothes in, somewhere where we are, I mean. I rolled up the clothes and put them under some stones or whatever they were. And then I went to fetch a blanket from the car and I put him in that. And so in fact I don’t think I hid his body on Stadsberget but I think I drove off with him. And I went by pretty much the same route as when we came and then headed north, so I mean we drove out of Sundsvall again, headed north a distance towards Härnösand. And I mean I think, after that road, I found a smaller road which I turned into and found a place to hide him.’
Quick described a place with ‘a dip in the landscape’ where he found a few boulders he could remove. Once he had done so, he put the body there and then rolled the boulders back. Jörgen Persson listened patiently to all of Quick’s versions of what happened, or may have happened, but he got stuck on details in the account.
‘Let’s put it like this, Sture: you said “I think” when you were talking about the body. Are you sure you loaded the body into the car again and drove off, or are you not quite sure?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’
‘So the body could still be there on Stadsberget somewhere, is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ said Quick.
By now, Officer Persson had fixed on another detail that was coming up in the interview and he found curious.
‘How did you know you were going to Stadsberget? You knew the actual name of the area, I’m thinking about that.’
Quick turned to Kjell Persson and answered while facing him.
‘I know that from our trip, that it’s called Stadsberget, so to speak. I didn’t know that before, I don’t think.’
‘I suppose you have to say what happened,’ said Kjell Persson.
But Jörgen Persson didn’t let Quick talk about the trip. Instead he turned to the interview witness.
‘So you’ve been up there, have you, to Sundsvall?’
‘We’ve been there, yes. That’s right.’
The questioning did not provide any answers as to what the therapist and Quick were doing on Stadsberget and why they went there.
However, one aspect of the story of great interest from a police perspective was that Quick described how the car had been bloodied inside. He explained in painstaking detail how he had stopped at a petrol station on the way home to clean the car and wash away the traces of blood. At the same time, he took the opportunity to telephone his mother, with whom he was living, to tell her not to worry.
Quick turned to his therapist and said, ‘I know I’m being difficult, Kjell, but can you check if they’ve put on coffee?’
When Kjell Persson left the room to fetch coffee, Officer Persson took the chance to ask Quick what happened when he went to Sundsvall with his therapist. To make the officer aware of the purpose of the trip, Quick had to explain the function of the memory when dealing with traumatic experiences.
‘This event had been completely hidden to me. There were pieces of it in my conscious memory. Then, my therapist and I worked on it for a long time and very intensively. We have been meeting three times a week and slowly the blockages have worked themselves free. I was about 80 per cent sure that I had killed Johan, but I kept the trapdoor open – I mean, as if this weird thing just couldn’t be true. So what did we do? We went to Sundsvall and I didn’t know where we were going and all that. The therapist drove the car and I sat next to him and we arrived in Sundsvall and I didn’t know where we were going.’
‘That sounds about right,’ Kjell Persson interjected. He had just come back into the interview room with the coffee.
‘But eventually I recognised the place,’ said Quick.
‘I should add that I knew where we were going,’ Kjell Persson pointed out.
&
nbsp; ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Quick.
‘But I didn’t want to. I wanted you to show me the way, to lead us. I had found out in advance where Johan lived. That was where I wanted you to lead us, and I let you do that to a certain extent, although I had to help you a little bit,’ added Kjell Persson.
Quick described how he had recognised an Obs! supermarket and was able to give approximate directions from there, although he hadn’t managed to point out the exact junction and Kjell Persson had reminded him.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Quick.
‘I noticed that we’d gone wrong,’ said Persson.
Finally they reached Johan’s house. Quick was keen to give his impression of the moment.
‘Well, that’s when I knew I’d had an opening. This unreal stuff couldn’t be true. But once we were there, then I saw everything and so I knew that it was true.’
‘You had that feeling at this point?’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘Are you absolutely sure now that it’s true?’
‘Yes. After the trip. That was the trip that closed, closed . . .’
Officer Persson had been listening to Quick’s interpretations and trying to understand his metaphors about open trapdoors and how apparently the trip to Sundsvall had closed everything. At the same time he seemed aware of the lack of tangible evidence to show that Quick was in Sundsvall and had in fact murdered Johan. He found it odd that the confession should come at this point, twelve and a half years after the crime.
‘Sture, did you ever do anything, try and tell anyone around you that you did this?’ he asked.
‘I never knew it was me,’ answered Quick.
‘You never knew?’
‘That’s the difficult bit.’
Quick went on to explain how he, like everyone else, had read in the newspapers about Johan’s murder and at the time had felt he might have been the one who did it. But these feelings were pushed away. He described the long process in therapy, when images from the murder slowly started resurfacing.
‘More like fantasies to begin with,’ Kjell Persson clarified.
‘Yes, precisely,’ Quick agreed.
‘As I’ve understood it, that is apparently how you have experienced things,’ Kjell Persson filled in.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Quick agreed.
‘Hm,’ said Officer Persson. ‘So you haven’t been back there since to change anything, look for clothes, move the body?’
‘No,’ Quick quickly affirmed.
‘You’re quite sure of that? Or is there a possibility that you might have been there?’
‘No, I don’t think there’s any such possibility.’
‘And when we went there, it’s fair to say we stopped when we discovered that Stadsberget was where it happened, and then we left it at that. Then we went home,’ explained Kjell Persson.
‘Precisely,’ Quick confirmed.
‘You couldn’t handle any more than that,’ the chief physician went on.
‘I see,’ said Officer Persson. ‘So at no point did you go into the woods and traipse about in there?’
‘We only went in a very short distance,’ answered Persson.
‘A very short distance, definitely,’ confirmed Quick.
‘You recognised the place and then we went back,’ said Kjell Persson.
In this first police interview Thomas Quick confessed to another murder of a boy which had apparently taken place before 1967, somewhere in the region of Småland, possibly in the town of Alvesta. Quick described how he had been driving around with a man ten years older than himself – we’ll refer to him here as Sixten Eliasson. Sixten was homosexual, but as a member of the Salvation Army he had to hide his sexual orientation behind a matrimonial façade.
‘He had a black . . . what are those cars called?’ Quick pondered.
‘Studebaker,’ prompted Kjell Persson.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Quick.
‘Quite an unusual car,’ the chief physician pointed out.
‘Yes,’ said Quick, then remembered what sort of car Sixten actually had. It was an Isabella.
‘A Borgward Isabella,’ Kjell Persson corrected.
‘Exactly,’ said Quick.
‘What happened to that boy, then?’
‘Him? He was hidden. I hid him.’
‘Do you know where you hid him?’
Quick turned to his therapist.
‘I told you about that one, didn’t I? That half-rotted ladder I lifted up and there was a space underneath?’
‘A ladder, you’re saying?’ Officer Persson tried to clarify.
‘A big ladder, I mean, sort of partly overgrown with vegetation and soil, and I mean it was fairly rotten. But when I lifted it up the ground came away underneath.’
‘Yes, yes, something that was not in use but . . .’
‘Exactly, it had been lying there for years.’
Officer Persson asked if Quick knew anything else about the boy. What was his name? Where did he come from? How old was he?
‘Well, he was my own age or a couple of years younger. And his name was probably Thomas.’
‘Has the boy’s body been found since the murder?’
Quick didn’t remember if he had spoken about this in therapy, and he turned to Kjell Persson, who had no recollection of Quick ever having mentioned it. Quick said that he didn’t believe the body was found for many years.
Even though Quick had confessed so readily to the murders of Johan in Sundsvall and Thomas in Småland, Officer Persson was not satisfied.
‘I’m thinking along the lines of if there’s anyone else you’ve . . . killed in a similar way to these others you’ve told me about?’
‘No,’ said Quick. ‘But when you think about how hidden these events have been, I obviously can’t give you a categorical no. What I can say is “no, I don’t think so”. I suppose that’s how I can answer a question like that.’
‘But is there something in your thoughts that maybe makes you think there could be something more? Is there some image, something you remember inside that makes you . . .’
‘No, no memory,’ Quick answered patiently, but Jörgen Persson would not let it go.
‘There’s nothing in your thoughts that makes you think there could be any more?’
‘No, nothing apart from this. Like I just said, this has been so well hidden that I can’t totally rule out that something else has happened.’
‘Do you have any more faint images, memories of anything?’
‘No,’ Quick answered.
Perhaps the chief physician Göran Fransson had described Quick’s ‘fantasies or visions on the subject of . . . Peter and Mikael’. In any case, Officer Persson wasn’t about to let the matter drop. He insisted on trying to make Quick confess to more murders.
‘I was thinking there might be something sort of tucked away,’ he tried, ‘which you have some vague sense of or a few thoughts about.’
But his efforts were fruitless. Quick refused to go along with the idea that he had committed any other murders. Finally, Jörgen Persson suggested that they should leave it there.
The interview had lasted three hours and Quick was formally notified that he was now suspected of murder.
At Borlänge police station, Chief Prosecutor Lars Ekdahl was given a verbal report on the questioning. It was destined to be the last contact the Borlänge police ever had with Thomas Quick.
AIMLESS WANDERING AND DIVERSIONS
AS THE MURDER of Johan Asplund had been committed in the county of Västernorrland, the case ended up on the desk of Christer van der Kwast at the regional Prosecution Authority in Härnösand.
Christer van der Kwast was forty-eight years old, born and raised in Stockholm. After completing his legal studies he worked as the chief clerk at Södertörn District Court in the late 1960s, then as a trainee prosecutor in Umeå and Östersund.
After finishing a strategically useful course in corporate finance, he was taken on in 1986 as
the regional prosecutor in Härnösand, with his principal focus on financial crime. In 1990, the Social Democrats announced that financial crime would be a priority area in the legal system. That same year van der Kwast was made a chief prosecutor. Perhaps his foremost achievement in those years as regional prosecutor was the so-called Leasing Consult case, with a total of twenty individuals prosecuted and a number of trials throughout the 1980s – but many of the cases ended up in the appeals court, with reduced sentences and acquittals. White-collar crime in Västernorrland was not a particularly common problem, and for this reason he had to devote much of his time to other crimes. The only murder investigation he had previously been involved with was that of Eva Söderström, who was stabbed to death. The investigation ran into the sand. He spent most of 1992 on speeding offences.
The conversation with the chamber of prosecutions in Borlänge on 1 March 1993 must have been a welcome change. Admittedly at least ten other nutters had already confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund. Now a patient from Säter would also be joining their number.
Yet the confession had to be checked, and this meant that Christer van der Kwast needed an investigator. He chose Seppo Penttinen, a Sundsvall policeman specialising in narcotics surveillance who, after twenty-three years in his job, still had the title of Senior Police Officer. Very much like van der Kwast, his experience was focused on a different type of criminality. And up until that point he had operated in almost complete anonymity.
That would soon be a thing of the past.
The new investigators had hardly had time to finish their initial questioning at Säter before Anna-Clara Asplund took the telephone call from Expressen and was informed that ‘a bloke down in Falun’ had confessed to the murder of her son, Johan.
It didn’t take long before the crime reporter Gubb Jan Stigson had a secret source – ‘one of the investigators’, according to his article – for the most important story of his career. His first article on Thomas Quick was published in Dala-Demokraten on 10 March 1993 under the headline ‘Falun Resident Confesses to Murder of Missing Boy’.
‘If the confession is true it means that one of Sweden’s most notorious criminal cases has been solved,’ wrote Stigson. ‘One of the investigators’ had told him that final proof had not yet been found; Johan’s body was still missing.
Thomas Quick Page 15
