Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  In 95 per cent of all cases, clients who developed MPD were ‘survivors’ of sexual abuse during their childhood. Usually these clients didn’t know they had been subjected to such abuse at the outset of therapy, but the therapists helped them recover their repressed memories of the abuse. However, a significant number of patients discovered that the recovered memories were false, and that it was actually the therapists who had made them develop their multiple personalities. A number of therapists were sued in courts of law, accused of inappropriate treatment methods and forced to pay damages amounting to millions of dollars to their clients.

  More recently the diagnosis itself has been strongly questioned and many professionals in the field believe that the condition arises due to the influence of the media and irresponsible therapists, combined with medication – especially benzodiazepines. Multiple personality disorder has now been phased out as a diagnosis in itself and instead has been integrated into a broader diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.

  When in 1995 Thomas Quick started switching identity more frequently, it caused a good deal of consternation among the nurses in Ward 36.

  One day a nurse found him in the shower with a towel round his head, thrashing his arms about and repeating, ‘Nano’s coming, Nano’s coming.’ Two Xanax, two Stesolid suppositories and a few calming words helped him through the crisis. The nurse telephoned Birgitta Ståhle to ask what this ‘Nano’ was. Ståhle corrected the nurse and explained that Nana was the name used for Quick’s mother.

  ‘Nana has been present in the therapy for a while and is an even stronger figure than Ellington.’

  Quick’s new personalities soon become a part of the daily reality of life on the ward. I was able to read in the notes what form they took – for example, during telephone calls using the ward’s payphone, which were scrupulously recorded word for word by Ståhle, alongside her own comments.

  ‘Is this the therapist?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Hello, Sture! How are things?’

  ‘This is not Sture. It’s Ellington,’ grunted Quick, laughing with his hollow Ellington voice.

  ‘Where is Sture?’ wondered Ståhle.

  ‘This is Ellington and Sture is in his room. Ha-ha! He’s not here. He’s a weed who likes to make a victim of himself. Really he’d prefer to go to the music room. Undress himself until he’s naked and play the victim. I have something to tell the therapist. Ellington has written a letter.’

  ‘Do you have the letter there that you can read?’ Ståhle asked.

  Ellington read it out:

  Hello!

  Sture is a mythomaniac, a bloody pig.

  He doesn’t have a chance against me!

  Tonight I’ll trick him so he hangs himself. Satisfied, oh so satisfied, I’ll watch.

  I have the truth, Sture doesn’t. It was Sture who killed the foetus he calls Simon.

  I’ll put a stop to his accusations. I don’t feel threatened but Sture has lost control and that’s because he doesn’t listen to me.

  I’M STRONG!

  He can kill himself, with my help of course, but he doesn’t understand that.

  I’ll play on his so-called anxiety. I need to kill but I can’t have that weed at my side.

  I wish you a pleasant discovery, hope you enjoy tidying it up.

  I don’t give a shit if my farewell does not suit your prudish world.

  With DEADLY greetings

  Ellington

  P.S. My regards to his ‘excellent’ therapist!!!

  ‘Sture . . .’

  ‘I’m Ellington!’

  ‘I want to make contact with Sture.

  ‘Impossible. Only Ellington is here.’

  ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘You mean can I play along in your therapy game? Can I play along in your therapy game?’

  Ståhle noted that Ellington suddenly started ‘pleading, having earlier had a hard, disdainful tone’.

  ‘You can. But first I want you to open the door of the telephone booth and call the staff over.’

  ‘You mean I should call the people outside? Why?’

  ‘I need to talk to them.’

  Ellington opened the door and called out, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’

  In the file, the staff on duty noted that Thomas had called for them and added, ‘The therapist is going to fool you!’

  Birgitta Ståhle’s written account ends on a very different note:

  Now Ellington’s power over Sture has been broken. At first he’s quiet and I hear Sture’s voice very faintly, then stronger, partly because I am supporting him so he can make contact with reality again. When he leaves the telephone booth he can see the peaceful faces of the dead boys projected against the wall.

  The following day Birgitta Ståhle handed Thomas Quick her transcript of Ellington’s telephone call. He read what Ellington had got up to in the night. They were both extremely excited about what had happened. Sture told me that he pretended he was unaware of the telephone call, because the alternating identities, at least according to prevailing theories, were not supposed to be aware of one another.

  In a note in the file, Birgitta Ståhle explained the underlying mechanisms of Sture’s different identities and how they expressed themselves:

  The deep personality rift in his disturbance has emerged in direct form in his therapeutic process. This personality rift can be compared to a multiple personality disorder, because Thomas refers to both figures as having different names and character attributes. Even to an outsider the change is very apparent, because he changes his personality and his voice. Psychologically these divided aspects are a way of controlling the serious anxiety he has from his early life. By these inner figures taking form outside himself, it becomes possible in the therapy to see and understand the significance and the context in which Thomas internalises these frightening experiences and how they have been dissociated.

  The early traumas in the form of sexual abuse and violence, in addition to the great emotional poverty in which Thomas grew up, have formed his personality and his disturbance. Our work is to join up his life story and confront the early exposure and terror which have been avoided.

  Through regression he makes contact with these early experiences and gains an understanding of how these have been responded to and reawakened at an adult age. How as an adult he has handled his early terror by putting other boys in a position of mortal terror and then killing them. Through this, he achieves a temporary decline in his anxiety and a sense of retaining the illusion of life. Through this working process, the picture emerges with more and more clarity, with a gradual move towards a reality that has been averted and contorted.

  In the time that followed, the ward staff noted in the file that Quick longed to die, that he cut his throat with a bottle, wept or took medication alternately, stopped eating, ‘lives under his blanket’, threw himself into walls, tried to cut off his right leg and behaved in generally bizarre ways.

  Birgitta Ståhle preferred to refer to it in the file as ‘intensive therapeutic work’ and continued:

  Clarity and definition about his own life story have resulted in a gradually improved stability and activity – self-development. This takes several different forms. Thomas exists in reality to a greater degree in his therapeutic work and has a deepened connection.

  A few days later, Quick’s ‘self-development’ resulted in him completely refusing to eat or drink and being ‘in an utter panic about anyone being able to see any part of him’. Whenever he had to venture outside his room in the ward, he covered himself from head to toe and wore a hat pulled down over his face and gloves on his hands.

  When I spoke to Sture about this time he remembered above all how obviously pleased his therapist had been when he adopted his alternate personalities. He dug out a newspaper cutting he was given by Birgitta Ståhle to help him understand what he was going through. The article was about multiple personality disorder and, among other things, discussed the case of an American woman, Tru
ddi Chase, who after eight years of therapy had developed ninety-two personalities. There were even examples of the ‘alternate identities’ within a person’s body speaking in foreign languages that the ‘host person’ had not mastered.

  Thomas Quick, who despite several years of therapy had only developed two extra personalities thus far – Ellington and Nana – used the information in his time-honoured fashion. Twelve days after Ståhle had handed him the article, he was able to proudly let her know that a new personality had made itself known to him. His name was ‘Cliff’ and in the night he had written a letter on his computer – in English! In fact ‘Cliff’ only spoke English, which was a language that Thomas Quick hadn’t mastered. Cliff wrote:

  Hello babyface!

  This isn’t a dream!

  I’ve looked at you and I find a little crying child – oh I like it!

  I’m so glad that you named him Tony . . . You can’t remember his realname, because you are a tired, uglified fish!

  How are you???

  I’m fine, because I like the feeling of your deadline!

  Birgitta Ståhle was delighted. Now she had even more complexity to pore over, analyse and build new theories around. On a later date she wrote in the manuscript of her book:

  Sture switched personality. He was standing in the corridor of the ward, speaking English and saying that his name was Cliff. He was in a catatonic state and his face was pale, wax-like. He turned his head away from the staff and said, ‘He’s afraid [Sture]. Don’t look.’ Then he asked for Ellington.

  After that he said, ‘Cliff is strong. He’s weak – Sture.’ The staff made him take some medicine and he was brought back to reality. Cliff is a shadow of Nana.

  AN INCENSED ROAR

  A LETTER WITH Norwegian stamps was waiting for Thomas Quick when he came home from the reconstruction in Appojaure. The crime reporter Svein Arne Haavik had written a long series of articles on Quick which had recently been published in Norway’s highest-circulation newspaper, Verdens Gang (VG). Now he was wondering if there might be a possibility of getting an interview as a follow-up.

  Quick immediately called Haavik and offered VG an interview for a fee of 20,000 Swedish crowns (about £1,800). But first of all he wanted Haavik to send him the material he had published.

  VG’s article series was no journalistic masterpiece. Yet as we know it was destined to have more impact on the investigation than any other publication.

  But the Norwegian adventure was still a way into the future – it was July 1995 and everyone was still fully occupied with the double murder in Appojaure. Quick didn’t tell anyone about the articles and stashed them away for a rainy day.

  On 1 August 1995 a philatelist was going through an old issue of the Post Office’s magazine for stamp collectors, Nyhets-Posten, when, in an article on a stamp auction held in Malmö in 1990, he saw a photograph of the audience in which a man with steel-rimmed glasses bore an uncanny resemblance to the serial killer Thomas Quick. Instead of contacting the police – probably because they wouldn’t be willing to pay for the tip-off – he called Expressen’s news hotline and was put through to the ‘Quick expert’, Pelle Tagesson.

  Tagesson went to visit him in his home and was able to confirm for himself that the man in the photo was indeed Quick.

  ‘Are there any murders that could be connected with the serial killer Thomas Quick’s mysterious trip to Skåne?’ Tagesson mused. The obvious association was the murder of Helén.

  On 20 March 1989 eleven-year-old Helén Nilsson put on her pink jacket and left the dinner table, promising her father she would be home no later than seven. She hurried off to meet her friends Sabina and Linda, who were waiting at the discount store in Hörby town centre.

  Six days later Helén’s body was found in a plastic sack by a mound of stones in Tollarp, some twenty-five kilometres from her home. The medical examiner concluded that Helén had been held captive by a paedophile who had raped and abused her for several days until she had died.

  There were several things that went against any attempt to connect the murder of Helén Nilsson with Quick’s presence at the stamp auction. For a start, there was a full year between the two events. But there was an even stronger reason not to publish the story: the bald man in the photo wasn’t actually Thomas Quick. The mistake should have been confirmed when Quick was shown the photo, and the whole episode passed over without further embarrassment. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

  ‘I was shocked when I saw the photo,’ Quick commented to Expressen. ‘I’d repressed the trip but now I remember it.’

  Quick even managed to eliminate the problem of the year between the murder of Helén and the auction in Malmö.

  ‘I went to the auction in Malmö in 1989 and again in 1990,’ Quick explained.

  The serial killer at Säter assured everyone that he had gone to Skåne to commit another murder, and he did not deny that Helén had been his victim.

  Expressen ran the story on two consecutive days. On the first day they ran the headline ‘I have murdered in Skåne’ and, on the second day, ‘The image that shows Quick was in Skåne’. Quick is circled in the photo from the stamp auction and the ‘mass murderer’s’ own comments on it can be read in the article.

  One reader almost choked on his coffee when he caught sight of the old photo in the newspaper. He recognised ‘Thomas Quick’ in the photo and phoned Kvällsposten, Expressen’s biggest competitor in Skåne.

  ‘I don’t think Sven-Olof Karlsson will be very happy about being pointed out as a serial killer in Expressen,’ he said.

  The prediction proved to be absolutely accurate. When the philatelist came back from a business trip to Paris and saw that he had been identified by Expressen as a serial killer, he hit the roof. He called Kvällsposten.

  ‘This is about as wrong as it gets! It’s quite incredible that someone can just sit there and make up a story like this without checking the facts. I’m outraged about being called a murderer like this,’ said Karlsson to the reporter at Kvällsposten.

  He intended to sue Expressen for defamation and report Pelle Tagesson to the police, he said.

  The erroneous accusations were obviously bad enough, but for the investigators it was even more problematic that Thomas Quick had, once again, lied about making a long-distance trip in order to commit a known murder. He had confirmed Expressen’s rather unlikely story even though he must have realised that he was not the person in the photo from the stamp auction.

  In the year that followed, Quick continued making remarks that suggested he had a part in Helén Nilsson’s death. When the police investigated what Quick had been doing at the time of the murder, it emerged that he had been attending regular therapy sessions with the psychologist Birgitta Rindberg, who had been seeing Sture Bergwall off and on at Säter Hospital throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

  Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast despatched Ture Nässén and Ann-Helene Gustafsson to Avesta to interview Birgitta Rindberg. The following is from the interrogation report:

  Birgitta Rindberg was asked if on 21 March 1989 Thomas Quick was at Säter Hospital for a personal visit or if they communicated via telephone. Birgitta Rindberg answered that she believes it was most likely a personal visit. She went on to state that if it had been a telephone consultation she would have made a note to this effect and judging by the notes she made in the file, there was a great likelihood that he was there in person.

  With this, Rindberg gave Thomas Quick an alibi for the murder of Helén Nilsson. Ann-Helene Gustafsson wasn’t satisfied with asking just this one question, however – she suspected Quick’s psychologist might have other valuable information for them. And she certainly did:

  She further described how she saw a programme on Thomas Quick, which was called The Reporters. Among other things, Thomas Quick was talking about how he had been subjected to sexual abuse by his father.

  Birgitta Rindberg stated that this whole matter of sexual abuse by the father does not c
oncur at all with what emerged during the period when he was her patient. What she recognised from his statements in the TV programme was that he didn’t like his father. The memory Birgitta Rindberg retains from their therapeutic conversations was that Quick’s father was ‘the weak one’ and his mother ‘dominant’ in their family.

  Rindberg went on to talk about the time in 1974 when Quick called her to say that he was going to commit suicide. She managed to trace the call and was thereby able to save his life.

  In retrospect, considering all that she had read about the murders, she found it odd that he had never lightened the load on his heart by talking to her, particularly when he was calling to say goodbye before his death. She had a clear impression that his suicide attempt was a reaction to the difficulties he had in relating to other people.

  Birgitta Rindberg was then asked how she viewed Thomas Quick as her patient in the mid-1970s and 1989. She said quite spontaneously that she never saw him as a murderer. She was never afraid of him, and although there was aggression in him, he never had any violent tendencies towards her. The only violence she encountered was the violence he did against himself. Birgitta Rindberg believes that chief physician Mårten Kalling shared her view on Thomas as a patient.

  In the interview, Rindberg said that the Thomas Quick she had witnessed in the media was far more articulate and more of an exhibitionist than he was during the period of his therapy with her. Neither she nor Mårten Kalling believed that Quick was credible as a serial killer.

  After returning to Stockholm, Ann-Helene Gustafsson typed up the interview and left it in Chief Inspector Stellan Söderman’s room.

  Gustafsson told me what happened a few days after that. She heard an incensed roar coming from Stellan Söderman’s room and then a voice calling for her. There she found Christer van der Kwast, who had just read the interrogation report and was very upset.

  ‘He gave me a real telling-off, shouting at me that I had exceeded my duties,’ she said.

  According to van der Kwast, she was only supposed to have asked about Quick’s therapy session on 21 March 1989. Nothing else!