Christer van der Kwast’s fateful cabinet of curiosities lacked one item that would have constituted strong evidence against Quick, who had said a number of times that Charles had been wearing a robust leather belt with a large metal buckle. Charles’s younger brother had been summoned to the court to talk about this belt. The district court wrote in its verdict:
Frederick Zelmanovits states that he cannot say with absolute confidence whether Charles owned the sort of belt referred to. Though he remembers that he had one such belt himself, at the time of his brother’s disappearance.
In its verdict, the district court confirmed that ‘the brothers could have shared the belt’.
If Quick was speaking the truth, there ought to have been a leather belt somewhere near Charles’s remains. The forensic technicians had carefully searched the forest outside Piteå with metal detectors. The buttons and studs of the decomposed jeans were found, but no belt was ever located.
For this reason the belt was missing on the prosecutor’s table. Instead it had been decorated with three other objects.
Of all the things that happened in the district court in Piteå, one in particular made an unforgettable impression: the screening of the video from the reconstruction in the forest.
The Quick reporter from Expressen, Pelle Tagesson, still remembers his impression of those days in Piteå: ‘I met Quick during the trial and thought he seemed a fairly normal bloke. Then I saw the films of the reconstruction. It was absolutely rattling! I remember feeling uneasy about having shaken his hand.’
Despite the inconsistencies of the case, Pelle Tagesson grew utterly convinced of Quick’s guilt when the prosecutor showed the video in which the suspect was making those bestial, guttural sounds. All doubts were swept aside: ‘It’s impossible to act out what happened in the reconstruction.’
*
Before the trial, Christer van der Kwast had written to the district court suggesting that they would need additional expertise in the field of psychology. He recommended that the members should rely on the services of Sven Åke Christianson.
As Christianson had been working as a part of the investigation on behalf of the prosecutor for a lengthy period of time, it would obviously be inappropriate, almost impossible, for him to accept an assignment from the district court to assess his own findings. This did not prevent him from accepting the offer.
Christianson provided two specialist statements, one of them ‘concerning the conditions of Thomas Quick’s testimony from a psychological perspective’:
In terms of what the perpetrator is able to remember, I have concentrated on the patterns of behaviour and memories of serial killers as well as the background factors for this type of crime.
This formulation makes it quite clear that his starting position was that Quick was a serial killer. Even before the trial he had publicly pointed him out as both a serial killer and a cannibal.
‘It’s a primitive way of behaving – his actions are those of the child within himself. And when one eats parts of someone’s body it can be an illusion that the victim lives on inside, that the children are still alive inside his body,’ Christianson explained in an interview with Expressen on the first day of the trial.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that Thomas Quick hadn’t yet been found guilty of a single murder.
In his testimony, Professor Lars Lidberg was crystal clear on the question of guilt and causality for the behaviour of the serial killer.
‘The significant thing in Quick’s case is that Quick has been subjected to sexual molestation from the father and mother, and that a connection has been made between sexuality and aggression.’
He did not reveal how he was in a position to know that any such violence or sexual assaults from the parents had ever taken place, and simply based his scientific reasoning on the assumption as if it were a fact.
Quick’s compulsive and repeated killing accorded very well with how ‘Quick hides parts of people he has killed and keeps certain body parts as some form of talisman,’ Lidberg went on.
As Quick had already confessed to the murder of Charles Zelmanovits, the trial was ultimately about determining whether or not this could be a false confession.
Sven Åke Christianson, in his testimony, described various types of false confessions and finished with this conclusion: ‘These are not relevant to Quick’s case.’
When it was time for Quick to testify in court, the defence demanded that it must happen behind closed doors, which the district court granted. Once the public had left the courtroom, Quick assured the court that he had not at any stage read anything about Charles Zelmanovits’s disappearance. This was important information. Unfortunately it was also untrue. Not only did Quick confess to the murder after reading about the discovery of Charles’s remains in the newspaper – but as he was under no restrictions he was able to carefully monitor any on-going reporting on the matter. In Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle’s manuscript of their book on Quick, I also found a passage revealing that he eventually managed to acquire an even sharper information source. The authors quoted Quick:
When I read the investigation reports I saw and I felt Charles’s whole life for the first time. He was not just someone I killed; he powerfully turned into the whole person Charles whom I had murdered.
In other words, when Quick was brought to trial in Piteå he had read the entire preliminary investigation report, with technical examinations and many interviews.
These gave Quick an overall picture of ‘the whole person Charles’. Also in the patient files I found a note about Thomas Quick ‘going through the preliminary investigation of Charles Z during the autumn’.
Therefore it’s hardly surprising that Thomas Quick, behind the closed doors of the district court, managed to portray what had happened with sufficient detail.
And yet how could the district court find Quick guilty of murder when almost everything he had said under police questioning was incorrect? Why was the sentence unaffected by Quick’s inability to find his own way to where the body had been found?
The simple answer is that the members of the district court were unaware of practically all the aspects of the investigation. They hadn’t read any of the interviews with Quick.
Under Swedish rules of procedure there is no obligation for a court to immerse itself in the investigation material; in fact, this is one of the cornerstones of Swedish law, known as the Immediacy Principle of the Code of Judicial Procedure (Chap. 17.2§). According to this basic principle, the members of the court are only permitted to attach significance to what they observe in the main proceedings.
The lawyer Gunnar Lundgren could have – and many would probably say should have – called the interviews with Thomas Quick to the court’s attention. He could have read out passages from the reports to show that Quick knew nothing about Charles Zelmanovits or Pitholmen at the beginning of the investigation. He could have informed the court that Quick had provided contradictory accounts and that he had been encouraged by leading questions.
But Lundgren had no such objections. He quite simply took the view that the district court should find Quick guilty of the murder in question; he even expressed this view in the courtroom.
The phenomenon that was later criticised by the forensic psychologist Nils Wiklund and Detective Chief Inspector Jan Olsson – the suspension of the adversarial process – was already taking place in the first Quick trial.
The prosecution for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits was Lundgren’s one and only case as Thomas Quick’s defence lawyer. Later, in an interview, he gave his opinion of the role of the lawyer in cases where the defence pursues an identical line of argument to the prosecution.
The reporter from Aftonbladet asked if Lundgren had helped his client ‘get caught for as many crimes as possible’.
Lundgren agreed with this assessment: ‘Yes. He wanted to confess to what he had done and so it was my responsibility to help him with that.’
There
was a united front in Piteå District Court: prosecutor, investigators, the defence lawyer, the suspect, therapists, doctors, experts and journalists. All seemed to be pulling in the same direction, so how could it have ended in any other way?
In its verdict of 16 November 1994, the district court wrote:
Quick has admitted to his deed and his confession is backed up by the information he has provided. However, there is no technical evidence to connect Quick to the crime.
The last part was obviously a weakness in the prosecution’s case. Nor had any witnesses seen Quick in Piteå at the time of the murder. But these things, according to the district court, were counteracted by other circumstances:
Quick’s statements on the body parts he removed from the scene conform very well with the evidence, in the sense that these body parts are missing from the crime scene. This fact makes a very strong supporting case for the accuracy of Quick’s information.
The forensic technicians who examined the scene where the remains were found concluded that there were no signs of a crime having been committed and definitely no signs of the body having been cut into pieces. The investigators had noted that Charles’s bones had been dragged in the direction of some fox earths to the south of the remains. The absence of certain bones was therefore not evidence that the body had been cut up.
The views of the forensic technicians were not taken into account. Quite the opposite: the missing leg bones were judged to be ‘very strong supporting evidence’ for Quick’s guilt.
Thomas Quick, who had gone back to Säter after his testimony, received the court verdict delivered by fax to the hospital reception. Eagerly he rifled through the pages until he reached the important part:
By way of a summarising judgment the district court finds Quick guilty beyond any reasonable doubt of the act for which prosecution has been brought. The circumstances of the crime are such that the crime should be considered as murder.
Because of the lack of technical evidence, the pronouncements of specialists in psychology and psychiatry carried a great deal of weight in the judgment. Professor Lidberg, in an interview in Aftonbladet on 15 April 1997, did not hesitate for a moment about his own significance in the outcome of the case.
‘Thomas Quick was convicted on my evidence in Piteå. I am wholly convinced that he was guilty of the charges and that was also the view taken by the court.’
Lidberg’s conclusion that he had single-handedly determined the outcome of the case is certainly an exaggeration of his own importance, but quite clearly the guilty verdict was a great success both for him and for Christianson.
Christer van der Kwast had been concerned about their difficulties in coming up with a single piece of evidence for any of Quick’s confessed murders. He therefore had every reason to be very satisfied.
‘With this guilty verdict I have been given a green light so that an investigation can be conducted as we have done here. A confession, reconnaissance of the crime scene and a profile of the perpetrator are enough for a successful prosecution, despite a lack of traditional technical evidence.’
Future events would soon prove that van der Kwast had made an entirely correct assessment. That ‘traditional’ evidence was no longer required would soon become a matter of concern for many more people, but with the recent verdict in his hands, van der Kwast was full of confidence.
‘I am counting on this having a very positive impact on the on-going investigation,’ he said.
NOCTURNAL DOUBTS
‘I WONDER WHAT you’d think of me if you found out that I’d done something really serious.’
It was with this comment that it had all begun, during a bathing trip with a young care assistant from Ward 36 in June 1992.
At that time Quick was still called Sture Bergwall and was regarded as so harmless that he was being reintroduced into the community with his own flat in Hedemora.
This cryptic and ominous question had, justifiably so, given rise to concern among the carers at Säter Hospital, and soon Quick had confessed to his first murder and hinted at more.
Confessions by innocent people are not particularly rare – especially among patients in psychiatric clinics – but for a real serial killer who has never been suspected of a single murder to start confessing to a series of murders is, according to researchers, unique. It has never happened before.
Psychological profiling is one of the few tools available for tracking down serial killers. When Quick first started confessing, there was almost no awareness of this technique in the Swedish police force.
But during the hunt for the Laser Man, the psychiatrist Ulf Åsgård, who had a long-established interest in psychological profiling, teamed up with Detective Chief Inspector Jan Olsson, at that time the assistant chief of the forensic division in Stockholm.
Their psychological profile of the Laser Man was the first attempt of its kind in Swedish criminal history. The profile didn’t play an important role in the capture of the Laser Man, which was instead the result of skilled and patient police work. But Jan Olsson and Ulf Åsgård’s psychological profile was nonetheless seen as a success, because in retrospect it was found to ‘correspond by about 75 per cent’ with John Ausonius. Analytical police work was the theme tune of the time and profiling was here to stay.
Lennart Håård, the crime correspondent of Aftonbladet, was one of many journalists who visited Säter Hospital in the autumn of 1994.
In the middle of the interview he asked a peculiar question: ‘Are you being investigated for a double murder in the Swedish northern mountains?’
He was clearly alluding to the murder of the Stegehuises and Quick kept his answer short: ‘No, we haven’t spoken about that.’
After the trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits there was a great worry that Thomas Quick would stop talking. Birgitta Ståhle emphasised how essential it was that he continued ‘his important work’ and her instructor Margit Norell wrote letters to Quick, pleading with him: ‘Find the strength to go on, Sture!’
The situation was complex.
Quick had confessed to murdering five boys. He had now been found guilty of one murder. Two were statute-barred – those of Thomas Blomgren and Alvar Larsson – and the investigations into the murders of Johan Asplund and Olle Högbom had come to a standstill. So how could he ‘go on’ with his talking?
Lennart Håård’s question about Appojaure resurfaced now in Quick’s mind and on 21 November 1994 he called Seppo Penttinen to tell him about what had come up in the interview.
‘I’ve been thinking about it since then,’ said Quick. ‘I think it would be good if I were confronted with the facts of that murder.’
Penttinen asked why he thought it would be good.
‘Well, because I know I was up there in that region around the time of the murder,’ answered Quick.
But then the interview ground to a halt.
‘I don’t feel like going into it further right now,’ he said.
The idea that Quick, the boy murderer, would attack a couple in their thirties went against all serial-killer logic. Nonetheless, the next day Penttinen informed Christer van der Kwast, who, just to be on the safe side, notified the National Criminal Investigation Department. Van der Kwast was told that there was already an investigation under way into the Appojaure murders, and a possible suspect – a fifty-one-year-old male by the name of Johnny Farebrink, a native of Jokkmokk. The individual in question was a drug addict with a violent background who was currently serving a ten-year sentence for murder at Hall, a maximum-security prison. The Criminal Investigation Department had not yet found anything to tie him to the murdered couple and hadn’t even had time to question him as yet.
Christer van der Kwast realised that there was a risk of setting up a competing police investigation with a different murder suspect. His thinking on the matter is difficult to understand, but he put forward the bold suggestion that Quick and Farebrink might have murdered the couple together.
A searc
h of the population registry revealed that Johnny was born Johnny Larsson-Auna but nowadays went by the name of Johnny Farebrink. Van der Kwast called Penttinen and told him to ask Thomas Quick if he knew someone called Johnny Larsson-Auna. Or Farebrink.
The following day Seppo Penttinen went to Säter to conduct the first round of questioning about the double murder in Appojaure, in the presence of the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren. Since the successful prosecution in Piteå, Penttinen had been promoted to Detective Inspector, a title that from now on decorated all interrogations and documents where his name appeared, as was required by police procedure. While he was still only a senior police assistant, he and his boss Christer van der Kwast had been less scrupulous in their use of titles – back then Penttinen was usually described as ‘chief interrogator’.
‘So, Thomas, I want you to get straight to the heart of the matter and not linger too long on the periphery. Start where you feel you have some memories of the actual deed,’ he said.
‘Hm,’ said Quick.
‘Can you develop that a bit further?’
The three men sat in silence for a long time in the music room on Ward 36.
‘Yeah . . . it was brutal,’ said Quick.
Then he ran out of steam and couldn’t take the story any further.
‘What was the question?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to influence you,’ explained Penttinen, and asked Quick to tell him what first came to mind.
Again there was a long silence.
‘Well, the knife is the first thing.’
‘What do you remember about it?’
‘Its size.’
‘OK.’
Quick cleared his throat.
‘Try to describe it a bit more.’
Thomas Quick Page 23
