Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  But despite remaining under suspicion for the murder of Johan Asplund, which should mean that arrest was obligatory by the Rules of Court in the Code of Judicial Procedure, Thomas Quick was spared arrest and no restrictions on newspapers, the telephone or receiving visitors were put in place.

  During the period that followed, the file deals almost exclusively with the approval of Quick’s leave outings to Borlänge, Avesta and Hedemora, as well as several trips to Stockholm. There is no mention in the file of the purpose of these trips.

  There is no doubt about the fact that discussions were under way on the sidelines about the direction of the continued investigation. There were certain additional matters to look into on the Johan Asplund case, but not even Kjell Persson believed that Quick had anything further to divulge there. What the doctors and medics were discussing, rather, was a statute-barred crime – the murder of Thomas Blomgren in Växjö in 1964.

  A DEEP-SEA DIVE INTO THE PAST

  AFTER DISCUSSION BETWEEN Seppo Penttinen and Quick’s doctors, a decision was made to hold further police interviews, at which Göran Fransson and Kjell Persson would also be present.

  On Wednesday, 22 September 1993 Thomas Quick travelled unsupervised to Stockholm. As usual, Göran Fransson, who authorised the trip, didn’t refer to its purpose in the file.

  When, during the first police interview about the murder of Johan Asplund, Thomas Quick confessed to a second murder ‘before 1967 somewhere in Småland, maybe in Alvesta’, he also mentioned his accomplice Sixten and his unusual car, and that the victim’s name was probably Thomas. Now, almost seven months later, it was time for Quick to dig up some facts. So he ordered back issues of newspapers from the archives at the National Library.

  The murder of Thomas Blomgren was one of the best-documented crimes of the 1960s.

  It was twenty to ten on Whitsun Eve in 1964 when Thomas Blomgren opened the front door of the family’s house on Riddaregatan in Växjö.

  ‘Don’t worry! I’ll be home soon,’ he called out to his parents.

  His tone revealed that he was half joking, but there was also an underlying seriousness to his words. The last time he had been to Folkets Park (the People’s Park) his parents had humiliated him by showing up to fetch him. Thomas walked down Dackevägen, passing many other locals from Växjö who were strolling down to the park at a more leisurely pace. Several of them noticed a man standing under some trees on the corner where Dackevägen meets Ulriksbergspromenaden.

  In the police interrogation that followed, the witnesses would describe the man as about forty-five years old, approximately five foot nine, well built, with a round face and dark, back-combed hair, a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. He was not a local, it was generally agreed. A number of people were curious and took an extra careful look at the man, who was standing by himself in an odd place. He was untroubled by the glances, however, and merely stood there in the bushes as if he were looking out for something.

  It was a quarter to ten when the man saw a boy coming down Dackevägen. Thomas turned off Dackevägen and went towards the clump of trees, directly towards the spot where the man was standing. It was his usual short cut to the People’s Park.

  After seeing Ing-Britt’s Cocktail Show on stage, Thomas didn’t go straight home, as he had promised his parents. Instead he strolled around the park and when he passed the target-shooting stand, the proprietor asked Thomas to go and buy him a hot dog. He was paid with a couple of tokens and later tried his hand at some shooting.

  When Thomas finally left the People’s Park, he was more than an hour late and he had only a few minutes left to live.

  Meanwhile, the car mechanic Olle Blomgren and his wife, Berta, had grown so anxious that they had gone out to look for their son. At half past one Olle called the police, but despite a great deal of effort and search parties the boy was not found.

  At half past ten in the morning on Whitsun, a caretaker named Erik Andersson went to pick up a bag of onions from his brother-in-law’s tool shed at Dackevägen 21. When he opened the door, which was latched from the outside, he found the body of a dead boy who’d been thrown in head first among the bicycles and tools. His clothes were disordered, his belt was undone, the trouser button torn off and his face smeared with blood.

  Thomas Blomgren had clearly been subjected to an extremely violent sexual assault which also caused his death.

  *

  Kjell Persson wrote in the file that since his patient’s trip to Stockholm, Thomas Quick had ‘dived deep into the past’ and ‘all his memories had come back’. Previously, Quick hadn’t even been able to name the town where the murder took place. Now he was suddenly able to provide a remarkably detailed description of the 1964 murder in Växjö.

  On Monday, 27 September 1993 Penttinen went back to Säter.

  ‘Let’s start with the time aspect, can you be precise about when in the 1960s this happened?’ Penttinen was heard asking on the interview tape.

  ‘Sixty-four,’ Quick answered without hesitation.

  ‘Are you quite clear about that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what way are you able to tie down this year?’

  Quick answered that he connected the year to a certain event that took place in the spring of 1963.

  ‘Certain lucid moments,’ interjected Kjell Persson, who was also present.

  ‘Yes,’ said Quick.

  ‘I don’t know if you need to go into detail about . . . it has nothing to do with what happened in Småland,’ Persson continued. ‘It relates to what you were subjected to yourself.’

  What Kjell Persson was alluding to was that Quick, in therapy, had described his father’s last sexual assault in the woods in 1963. The murder of Thomas Blomgren was a re-enactment of this final paternal assault on Sture, according to the psychiatric principles that held sway at Säter Hospital. From the assault on him in the woods, as Quick was later to explain, it was only ‘a single step’ to the People’s Park in Växjö on Whitsun Eve, 1964.

  Quick remembered that the events in question took place in late spring, and he had recollections of ‘lilac and bird cherry’.

  Seppo Penttinen had also been swotting up on the investigation documents from the Thomas Blomgren murder. Witnesses had seen a boy with a Beatles hairstyle in the People’s Park.

  ‘At that time the Beatles look was all the rage, wasn’t it?’ tried Penttinen. ‘Have you ever been a fan of long hair like that?’

  No, he hadn’t, said Quick.

  ‘Do you know if you have any photographs of yourself from around that time?’

  Quick didn’t know.

  ‘No confirmation photos or anything like that? I remember we went to see your sister at home and we looked at some photos. I don’t remember if they were from this time.’

  ‘No, I can’t say either,’ said Quick abruptly.

  He preferred to talk about the dance pavilion and the lottery booths in the park. Everything was exactly right. But the name of the town was too traumatic to say out loud.

  ‘I can only say it’s a town in Småland and it starts with a “V”,’ he said.

  ‘So there’s no doubt about the fact that you mean Växjö in this context?’

  Quick nodded.

  During questioning on 1 March, Quick had said that the murder took place in Alvesta or Ljungan. Kjell Persson explained to Penttinen that Quick had to give them the wrong name because the name Växjö gave rise to such painful emotions.

  ‘In a sense it’s about undoing what’s been done,’ he clarified.

  These were the same psychological mechanisms that made Quick show them the wrong way when they were inspecting crime scenes, Persson continued. It was because Quick did not ‘dare speak plainly about what’s going on’.

  Penttinen interrupted the psychological explanation by asking Quick how he made his way to Växjö when he was only fourteen years old and lived in Korsnäs, outside Falun, 550 kilometres from Växjö.

  ‘I went to Växjö
by car,’ he replied.

  ‘So with whom, then?’ Penttinen wanted to know.

  ‘Rather not say.’

  On 1 March, Quick had described how he had travelled with Sixten Eliasson, the Salvation Army soldier, in his Borgward Isabella. But now Quick explained that he didn’t want to answer the question of whom he had travelled with, not now and not in the future either. Nor did he want to explain his reasons for this decision.

  Instead, Quick said that he came to the People’s Park in the evening, where he remembered Thomas standing by a throwing or target-shooting stall.

  Kjell Persson was dissatisfied. He told Penttinen how things worked during their therapy sessions. Quick’s recall of the images from his memory were such that Persson felt it was as if Quick was reliving everything, with the actual conversations, the feelings and smells.

  ‘Almost like a hypnotic journey in a time machine,’ he went on.

  Before, there had been a feeling of presence which he did not observe at all in the police interviews with Penttinen. His way of explaining the change was that they didn’t rely on questions and answers like Penttinen did.

  ‘I let it all float free,’ Persson explained. ‘And I listen and follow as we go along. Hopefully in combination with strong emotions, of course.’

  ‘Is it possible to get to that level with four of us sitting round a table?’ wondered Penttinen.

  ‘No, it’s impossible,’ said Quick.

  ‘There’s no way,’ Kjell confirmed.

  ‘So we’ll have to stick to the normal way of talking, then,’ Penttinen agreed with some disappointment.

  Kjell Persson wasn’t quite willing to throw in the towel just yet.

  ‘I think he can give a pretty good account of what came out on that occasion.’

  Persson turned to Quick and clarified his remark: ‘When you travelled back in time . . .’

  Penttinen asked Quick if that was what he was doing.

  ‘That’s what we were doing,’ Quick confirmed.

  And then Quick described Thomas as small and slight, at least a head shorter than himself, ruddy and wearing a nylon jacket. When Thomas was about to go home from the People’s Park, Sture asked his anonymous driver to follow them. Once they were a few hundred metres away from the park, the driver caught up with them and took hold of Thomas’s hands. He held the boy’s arms while Sture gripped him from behind, his right hand across Thomas’s nose and mouth.

  The boy got a nose bleed and was soon unconscious.

  The driver was caught out by the rapid turn of events and ran to pick up the car.

  ‘I picked him up and carried him. I put him in this shed, closed the door. And then the car came and we left the place.’

  As they left the scene, the anonymous driver repeated, ‘This hasn’t happened. This hasn’t happened . . .’

  What Quick was saying about the twenty-nine-year-old murder had an astonishing level of detail. It chimed so well with known facts that Seppo Penttinen could hardly have had a moment’s doubt that Quick’s memories were authentic. Quick was also able to draw a surprisingly detailed sketch of the tool shed where he had hidden the body, even though he had only been at the scene for a minute at most and it was pitch dark at the time. It was even more curious when one considered that six months earlier he had described hiding Thomas Blomgren’s body under a rotten ladder in the woods. He also claimed that he had strangled the boy – not suffocated him, which was the actual cause of death.

  It was as if the strengths of his new testimony erased all of the earlier contradictions.

  Even an out-and-out Quick-doubter like Leif G.W. Persson found his convictions wavering when he was later able to listen to Quick’s account of the murder of Thomas Blomgren. Quick had spoken of blood from Thomas’s nose running across his right hand and said that he felt the boy’s chest through his undershirt. The forensic technicians had found a handprint there in blood, as if the murderer had wanted to assure himself that the heart really had stopped beating. Leif G.W. Persson commented on Quick’s description of the bloody hand as ‘pretty damn toxic’.

  Soon after, Göran Fransson gave Thomas Quick permission for another unsupervised outing, and on 19 October Quick went off to Stockholm. The following day he was questioned again about the murder in Växjö and was able to answer all of the questions put to him by his interrogator.

  In Sture’s file is Kjell Persson’s description of the earth-shattering breakthrough in the therapy. On 22 October he wrote:

  These deep-sea dives have absolutely solidified in the sense that all the memories have come back from the actual train of events, integrating the thoughts that the patient had, various sensory impressions including smell, memories of things the patient said and what others said, and so on.

  Kjell Persson was convinced that through his psychoanalytical treatment methods, he had managed to recover Sture’s repressed memories of the murder of Thomas Blomgren. Not without disappointment, he was also compelled to state that ‘we are still waiting for a definitive breakthrough with the material concerning Johan Asplund, many of the details are still too difficult for the patient to be able to deal with as there are strong emotions involved, especially concerning the sense of exposure and aggression associated with the events’.

  Thomas Quick’s knowledge of the murder of Thomas Blomgren was seen as such a significant breakthrough in the investigation that Christer van der Kwast no longer had the slightest hesitation that Quick had been tied to his first murder. Through this, the prosecutor suggested that suspicions were also sharpened in relation to Johan.

  However, there was no talk of the alleged double murderer being kept under lock and key. Despite having been sentenced to closed psychiatric care and then suspected of two murders, the prosecutor and doctors at Säter were in agreement that he should be free to move as he wished in the community and go on unsupervised trips.

  STURE’S ALIBI

  WHEN JENNY KÜTTIM, my researcher, and I ordered old newspaper articles about Thomas Blomgren, it was clear that they offered all the correct information given by Thomas Quick on the murder. Sture had told me that he particularly remembered an aerial photograph of Växjö, in which the route from the People’s Park to the tool shed had been marked out. Thomas Blomgren’s home was also marked. We found the photograph in Aftonbladet from 19 May 1964, with the headline ‘This is the Route of Death’.

  The policeman Sven Lindgren from Växjö was eighty-five years old, but his memory was crystal clear when he spoke about the murder of Thomas Blomgren, which had taken place some forty-four years earlier. He had continued working on the case until it was statute-barred in 1989.

  ‘I know that Thomas Quick is innocent of the murder of Thomas Blomgren,’ the old policeman told me on the phone.

  He spoke with a halting voice and was so hard of hearing that I had to shout out the words one at a time for him to be able to hear my questions.

  The reason for Sven Lindgren’s confidence on the matter, he told me, was that he knew the identity of the real murderer. Apparently his colleague from that time, Detective Superintendent Ragnvald Blomqvist, could tell me more. Before long I was in my car and on the road to Småland.

  Blomqvist received me in a tidy detached 1960s house in Växjö. He was equally dismissive of the notion of Thomas Quick’s involvement in the murder: ‘We succeeded in mapping out Thomas Blomgren’s night from the moment he walked out of his home to when he left the People’s Park. In effect there was an unbroken chain of events and meetings with people in the park. There’s just no room for an unknown boy like Thomas Quick in this narrative.’

  Perhaps one of the strongest indicators for Quick not having murdered Thomas Blomgren was a ‘highly credible key witness’ who had been sitting in a car outside the People’s Park as it was closing. At half past eleven she had seen Thomas Blomgren leaving the park in the company of a forty-year-old man. They headed off in the direction of the clump of trees where the same man had been observed earlier t
hat evening.

  Quick had claimed that he had been with Thomas Blomgren in the People’s Park and that they had left together. This just wasn’t possible, according to Ragnvald Blomqvist.

  Sven Lindgren made much the same statement to journalists when he first heard of Quick’s confession, according to Dala-Demokraten on 3 November 1993: ‘If it had been a boy from outside he would have figured in the investigation. That’s why I don’t believe this.’

  Ragnvald Blomqvist told me that the police eventually managed to identify ‘the man in the copse’ and that he was detained on 6 January 1971 and later formally arrested as a murder suspect by Växjö District Court. According to the ‘key witness’, the detained man was the same person who had left the park with Thomas Blomgren. The suspect was kept under arrest for a substantial period of time, but his defence lawyer appealed against the arrest and Göta Appeal Court released the suspect, though by the smallest possible margin – three judges in favour, two opposing. The superintendents in Växjö accepted the decision of the appeal court but were still convinced that the case was ‘solved as far as the police was concerned’.

  Reading the 1964 press cuttings, it is clear that the police investigation leaked like a sieve from day one. Pretty much every scrap of information the police had on the murder and the boy’s injuries immediately ended up in the newspapers. Several articles declared that this was allegedly a case of a ‘homosexual murder’ without specifying what this assertion was based upon. The police had in fact secured technical evidence that pointed to a murder of this kind, but at least they managed to keep this piece of information under wraps.

  I accompanied Ragnvald Blomqvist to the People’s Park and he showed me where the various witnesses had been standing and what route Thomas Blomgren had taken when he left the park in the company of the ‘man in the copse’. Blomqvist showed me the place where the small copse had once been. Given that the man detained for the murder was now dead, Blomqvist felt he could tell me the only secret the police had managed to keep for all these years.