Barely an hour later, Gunnar Lundgren walked into the music room of Ward 36 and greeted his client and the chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen before taking a seat in the usual red-and-black-striped armchair opposite Thomas Quick. The last time they sat here they had been talking about the statute-barred murder of Thomas Blomgren.
But he was no longer firing blanks. If there was any substance to Quick’s latest confession, he would be charged with the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
Penttinen switched on the little cassette recorder. He made himself comfortable and turned to Quick, who was trying to concentrate on the task that lay ahead of him.
‘Sture, if you could start by explaining what you were doing in the area at the time you made contact with this lad.’
‘Well, it was the same thing as the other trips. It was an unpl . . . unplanned, planned, unplanned trip. Er . . .’
Quick told them that he got there in a car.
‘In which case it would be interesting if you can tell us what car that was,’ said Penttinen.
Sture told me that he remembered the problems he had had with the car he claimed to have borrowed from Ljungström at the time of the murder of Johan Asplund. This time he wanted to avoid similar difficulties at all cost. For this reason he answered curtly that he didn’t want to say what car he had been using. Not yet.
Penttinen turned off the tape recorder while Quick conferred with his lawyer. Quick told Lundgren that he knew what car he had been travelling in, but for secret reasons was unable to divulge this information today.
The crime had figured in his therapy for a while, Quick explained, under the designation ‘the dark boy’. Then the first name had ‘emerged’.
Yet ‘the dark boy’ is not a particularly apt description. Charles was not dark; his skin tone was fair and his hair ash blond. This was backed up by the police description from 1976, in which Charles’s hair was described as ‘dark blond’.
Quick also said that Charles didn’t have long hair, which was an inaccurate description of his centre-parted shoulder-length hair.
‘What about his clothes?’ asked Seppo.
‘Today I’d like to say that he had one of those denim jackets with a woolly lining.’
At a later stage in the interview Quick tried to hedge his bets by describing the coat as being made of a slippery material and he would guess it was a black down jacket.
At the time of his disappearance, Charles wore a striking, expensive, full-length leather coat. It seems unlikely that it would be confused with a denim jacket with a lining or a black down jacket.
Nor did Quick remember Charles’s especially tight jeans, even though he said that he removed his trousers.
‘Sort of trousers for special occasions, so to speak. I don’t know what you call that material, er . . .’
‘You don’t mean denim?’
‘No.’
‘Is it a thinner fabric?’
‘And with a clasp here,’ said Quick, pointing at his own waistband.
Thomas Quick seemed to be describing a pair of gabardine trousers and he also indicated that Charles was wearing boots, whereas in fact he was wearing brown suede Playboy brand shoes. He also said that he had buried Charles’s body, although it was a rather shallow grave.
But on this point the forensic technicians were able to make a categorical statement after examining the scene. ‘There is no indication that any of the findings have been buried’, was the conclusion given in the report. And Quick’s method of killing the boy was so odd that it gave rise to further questioning.
‘I used a, one of those little, er . . . er . . . shoe horns made of metal,’ Quick told them.
The forensic examination of Charles’s remains had not pointed to any signs of Charles being the victim of a crime.
Charles’s remains had been scattered over a fairly large area and the technicians stated that the bones had been pulled out of the clothes by wild animals. Some of the largest bones of the body were missing altogether.
Bearing in mind that Quick had previously told them about how he cut up Johan Asplund’s body, Seppo Penttinen’s next question was entirely logical: ‘Was there any kind of cutting up of the body?’
‘No, not . . . not that. No severing of any body part in that way,’ explained Quick.
Seppo Penttinen came back to the question of whether the body was cut up during questioning on 19 April. The new information Thomas Quick gave on this point became the strongest evidence for his guilt.
Before the interview began, they discussed the question of whether there had been any cutting up of the body and, if so, whether Quick had removed any of the body parts from the scene. This conversation took place, as on so many other similar occasions, without the tape recorder being switched on and without an interview witness or the presence of a lawyer. When the tape recorder was switched on the question was cleared up by means of Penttinen making suggestions that Quick confirmed.
PENTTINEN: You were sort of developing a line of thinking when we had a break before we started this interview that you had taken some limb with you from this place, and then in that conversation you mentioned that something had happened to his legs, and while I’m talking about this now you’re nodding in agreement. Do I understand you correctly that you removed a leg?
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: How much . . . What part of the leg? You showed me in that conversation that it was around the knee.
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: Would that be both legs or just the one we’re talking about?
TQ: Well, one more than the other.
PENTTINEN: How do I interpret that if you say that it’s one more than the other?
TQ: Er . . . I-i-it’s both, but yes . . .
PENTTINEN: You took both of the lower legs away with you?
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: You’re nodding there as an answer.
This was precisely in line with the police investigation. But some forensic technicians returned to the relevant area a few months later to make a more thorough inspection. On 6–7 June they searched a larger area and in so doing found one of the lower legs that Quick had indicated he’d brought back to Falun with him.
Penttinen was in Piteå when the new bone was found and he wasted no time in scheduling a new round of questioning with Quick on 12 June 1994.
When I read the interview report I was struck by the fact that although Quick had already indicated which limbs he had removed from the scene, Seppo Penttinen pretends that the subject hasn’t been mentioned before.
PENTTINEN: Is there some limb you’re 100 per cent sure should not be on the scene?
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: Can you say what sort of limb that would be?
TQ: Leg.
PENTTINEN: A leg. Is it the right or the left one, can you confirm that with any degree of confidence?
TQ: Not with any confidence, no.
PENTTINEN: But a leg with a shin bone and a thigh bone?
TQ: Yeah, yeah . . .
PENTTINEN: Which won’t be found there?
TQ: No.
PENTTINEN: Is there any uncertainty about that?
TQ: Definitely not the thigh bone.
Order had thankfully been restored, the number of Charles’s disappeared and recovered lower legs had gone back to two. But there is cause to reflect on what sort of interrogation methods were being used – when Quick evidently had the opportunity to correct the erroneous information he had given earlier.
Penttinen does not ask if there are any limbs missing. Instead he asks if some limb is missing. The answer is given in the question – the right answer being one limb.
Quick cautiously answers ‘leg’ without making it absolutely clear if he is using the singular or plural.
‘A leg,’ Seppo Penttinen clarifies and asks if this would be the right or the left leg. Then he establishes that they are speaking of a bone consisting of a thigh bone and a shin bone.
When they first ins
pected the scene, forensic technicians confirmed the presence of a number of fox earths south of the spot where the body was found. Most of the bones located after the removal of Charles’s remains were within a large fan-shaped area spreading out towards the fox earths to the south. The investigators mentioned a bone from an arm: ‘Everything points to an animal having ripped the fabric and bone from the leather sleeve.’
Talking to the forensic technicians, their view, even today, is that there is nothing to indicate anything other than that foxes or other wild animals dispersed the body parts over a wide area, and that some of the bones may have been dragged underground into the fox earths.
Quick claimed that he cut up the body using a saw of the kind used to lop logs for firewood. The medical examiners haven’t found any evidence of the sort of damage a saw would give rise to; on the other hand, there are plenty of signs of damage by animals.
Quick claimed that he removed the jeans – which were almost impossible for Charles to put on while he was alive – prior to cutting up the body. Evidently he mistook these tight jeans for a pair of gabardine trousers.
‘Which leg taken from there could be described as the whole leg,’ Seppo asked. ‘Is it the whole left leg?’
‘Yes,’ answered Quick.
But if Quick did indeed take one of Charles’s legs from the scene, it must have been the right leg. According to the medical examiner, the thigh bone found nearby was the left one.
The forensic technicians have marked eighteen locations on a map where bones and parts of clothes were found, after quite clearly being dragged away by wild animals. The bones found at the furthest distance from the original position of the body were the largest bones of the body – that is, the pelvis, a thigh bone and a shin bone.
If we study the interrogation using the methodology of Gregg McCrary, the conclusion we reach is astonishing.
In the part where Quick describes how he has cut up and removed bones, the questions are closed throughout – in other words, the correct answers are contained within the questions. In the two crucial sections of the interview on the body parts, Penttinen accounts for over 90 per cent of what is said (142 words) and Quick for only 10 per cent (15 words). In the second interview, the split is 83 per cent for Penttinen and 17 per cent for Quick.
But the most troubling aspect is the formulation of the questions themselves, the way that Penttinen’s questions repeatedly contain the answers he is looking for.
Quick only needs to say ‘yes’, nod or mumble an answer. And he does exactly that.
Sture is rarely any help in clarifying what actually took place during the investigations. His recall of the reconstructions and questioning is completely wiped clean, he claims, because of being heavily medicated with benzodiazepines.
There is a slight glimmer of hope when I ask him how he first found out that Charles Zelmanovits had disappeared in Piteå in 1976. Sture seems enthusiastic about finally having something tangible to say regarding the investigation.
‘I clearly remember sitting in the day room in Ward 36, reading Dagens Nyheter. I saw an article on how they had found Charles’s remains.’
My first search for ‘Charles Zelmanovits’ in a database of Dagens Nyheter articles is disappointing. The article Sture claims to have read is not there.
Dejected, I call to let him know that there is no such article in existence. Maybe he has made a mistake?
‘No, no! I even remember the article was in the column on the far left of the page,’ says Sture with absolute conviction.
Jenny Küttim eventually found the article manually in SVT’s press archive, published in Dagens Nyheter on 11 December 1993, on the left-hand side of the column, exactly as Sture said.
The headline ran: ‘16 Year-Old Murder Mystery Solved’.
I noticed that the caption writer had mistaken the year. When the article was written, it was not sixteen but actually seventeen years since Charles’s disappearance. Interestingly, the year 1976 was not mentioned in the article.
If Thomas Quick had relied on this article alone as the source for his confession he must have tried to calculate in which year he would have murdered Charles. He would have counted back sixteen years and ended up in the autumn/winter of 1977. And that is precisely what he did.
Quick had already been talking to his therapist about the murder of Charles for three months when the first police interview was held. Seppo Penttinen asked whether Quick could remember in which year it took place.
‘Ten years after the Alvar event,’ said Quick, referring to the murder of Alvar
Larsson on Sirkön in 1967.
‘Ten years after,’ answered Penttinen. ‘In which case it would be 1977.’
‘Yes,’ said Quick.
Thomas Quick also confirmed the year 1977 by claiming that the murder was committed as a reaction to his father’s death in September of that year. These mnemonic constructions increased the credibility of Quick’s story, but however well backed up it seemed, Penttinen was well aware that Quick had ended up in the wrong year.
‘Is that an absolutely definite thing that it was in 1977? Could there be some sort of variation there?’
‘When it happened the Alvar memory popped up. And I remember thinking I was seventeen then and I’m twenty-seven now,’ Quick persisted.
The lawyer Gunnar Lundgren intervened and removed them from their predicament by suggesting that they should come back to the date on another occasion.
‘It was a bit vague today,’ said Lundgren. ‘I think you and I can work it out in some way later on.’
In fact they never went back to the question of the date of the murder, nor did they go into why he had suggested that the murder was connected to his father’s death and took place exactly ten years after the killing of Alvar.
Seppo Penttinen was obviously aware that Quick’s confession was coming close on the tail of the mass media reporting on the discovery of the bones in Piteå and so he asked the obvious question: ‘Have you read anything in the newspapers about this?’
‘If I have I can’t remember. Kjell [Persson] mentioned it when he said his surname, and there’d been an article about it.’
Thomas Quick’s knowledge of Charles Zelmanovits no longer seemed so impressive. He had only talked of the murder after Dagens Nyheter published an article on the bones that had been found. He had relied on Dagens Nyheter’s erroneous information about the year, retrospectively tying this to his father’s death and the murder of Alvar Larsson.
These were some of the first instances I came across that even the murders Thomas Quick had been found guilty of were based on false confessions. A thousand and one questions remained to be answered before I was prepared to believe that six courts of law had convicted an innocent psychiatric patient of eight murders he had never committed.
As I carried on reading the interrogation transcripts I was amazed to find that pretty much every statement Thomas Quick made on Charles Zelmanovits was incorrect.
Quick stated that he met Charles south-west of Piteå, whereas we know that Charles disappeared in Munksund, north-east of central Piteå. After their initial meeting, Quick described how he and an accomplice drove through central Piteå on their way to the murder scene. The fact is that Charles disappeared in the vicinity of his home and the place where his remains were found lies some four kilometres away, directly east on Norra Pitholmen.
According to Quick, they had caught sight of Charles late in the afternoon or in the evening. As we know, Charles was with his friends the whole evening, right up to the point where he disappeared after one in the morning.
Quick said that there was snow cover in Piteå, but on 12 November 1976 there was no snow at all, as there had been several days of rain and thaw.
The forensic technicians confirmed that the body had not been buried, as Quick claimed.
Thomas Quick suggested that Charles voluntarily agreed to have sex with him, which seems less than likely given that Charles had just had s
ex with his school friend Maria a few hours earlier.
How did Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast respond to these anomalies? Quick had even suggested that he had managed to persuade a married man without a criminal background to drive 1,500 kilometres on winter roads to find a young boy – did they not consider how unlikely this seemed? And why would they drive all the way to Piteå?
What prosecutor Christer van der Kwast thought about all this is not mentioned in the investigation material, although he did approach the psychiatrist Ulf Åsgård for guidance on the psychological issues. Åsgård, who worked for the National Swedish Police Board, declined as he was busy with the Palme Unit. Instead, van der Kwast had to settle for the services of an unknown lecturer and memory expert from Stockholm University who could think of nothing he’d rather do than throw himself into a study of the psyche of a real serial killer.
COGNITIVE INTERVIEW TECHNIQUES
AT THE SAME time as the first police interviews with Thomas Quick were being conducted in March 1993, DN Debatt published an article by Sven Åke Christianson, a senior lecturer in psychology, who mercilessly criticised Sweden as ‘a third-world country in terms of its commitment to psychological research and the use of psychological knowledge in the judiciary and the police service’.
Christianson’s article proposed a number of solutions to the problems facing the Thomas Quick investigation:
At the moment, psychological research is being conducted into how violent criminals and psychopaths perceive and approach emotional situations. Special studies are also being made of serial killers to try and establish personality types, background factors, the sort of victims they select and how they operate. This type of research should be of extreme relevance to the police, in view of the violent crimes that are so prevalent in our time.
Thomas Quick Page 21
