Jan Olsson tells me that he listened with a sense of amazement to Quick’s grovelling speech to the gallery.
Quick continued: ‘What I have to say should not be seen as a defence of the deeds this lunatic has carried out, nor as some sort of quasi-psychologising reasoning about them, or a tearful attempt to look for my own human worth.’
Quick described how growing up in an emotionally cold family home formed him into a murderer. When he spoke of his constant anxiety and death wish as a child, a number of the younger members of the audience started crying.
Jan Olsson twisted awkwardly in his seat and looked in turn from Quick to the weeping listeners and to the chief judge, Roland Åkne.
‘“Why does no one tell him to stop?” I thought. It was so unbearably offensive! It was as if the courtroom had been turned into a place of worship.’
When the emotional speech was over, the district court had to adjourn before defence counsel Borgström could make his closing comments.
Claes Borgström agreed with the prosecutor that Quick’s guilt had been overwhelmingly shown in the main proceedings and that the only reasonable punishment would be continued psychiatric care.
The court announced its decision on 25 January 1996. Thomas Quick was found guilty of his second and third murders and sentenced to continued psychiatric care.
Accusations have often been made that Seppo Penttinen and others committed gross perjury in the trials of Thomas Quick. Whatever the truth, this will never be legally proven. In any case, any perjury committed at the court hearing in Gällivare has been statute-barred since January 2006.
However, we can say with confidence that there were many facts surrounding the murders in Appojaure that weren’t actually presented to the court, and others that were presented in a confusing way.
The only murder weapon that can with certainty be said to have been used against the Stegehuises was their own fillet knife. Despite fifteen interviews with Thomas Quick amounting to some 713 pages of transcripts, he was never able to describe this knife. This was a palpable weakness in his story, but the district court was never told of it.
The district court was greatly influenced by Seppo Penttinen’s testimony that the first time he was questioned, Quick ‘was able to sketch out a detailed plan of the camping place’. While this was true, Penttinen failed to mention that Quick had put the car and the tent in completely the wrong positions.
Another significant piece of information, according to the verdict, was the women’s bicycle that Quick claimed he had stolen outside the Sami Museum in Jokkmokk. A bicycle like this had been stolen at the time of the murder, as the owner confirmed at the trial. But what Quick originally said during questioning with Seppo Penttinen was that he had stolen a men’s bicycle.
Birgitta Ståhle was present at all the murder trials of Thomas Quick. During the proceedings in Gällivare she made extensive notes of what was said, and long excerpts are reproduced in her unpublished book on Thomas Quick. These make it very clear how the court was duped.
On the second day of court proceedings, statements were made by several parties, including Detective Inspector Seppo Penttinen.
Penttinen has been interviewing Sture since March 1993 and the first interview on the Appojaure murders took place on 23 November 1994.
Penttinen described his experience of the questioning visually. It was as if Sture experienced a lowered French blind, in which some of the flaps have been opened, and he described a story incoherent in terms of time, before a regression took place to another space and time. Sture changed his body language, felt strong anxiety. Penttinen described the course of events, how Sture started to have memories of the murders. Sture’s way of describing it was similar to previous cases. He described certain fragments of memory but over the course of the interview the sequence of events ‘opened up’ more and more.
The story wasn’t coherent from the beginning. Sture himself explained that because of his feelings of anxiety he had to protect his inner self by making things up that bordered on the truth. Then in the following interview he corrected some details he had given earlier.
Yet Quick’s memories are, according to Seppo Penttinen, clear and distinct in terms of the central aspects of an event. Other more peripheral aspects, such as journeys to and from a place, are rather unclear in his narrative.
As for the places where these aforementioned events took place, during questioning Quick provided a detailed sketch of the camping place and the road that leads to it. He further described the type of ground on which the tent stood, the existence of a seating area made of logs as well as the distance between the lake, the tent and the couple’s car.
Ståhle’s statement clearly shows that her and Margit Norell’s theories have been guiding lights for the police investigation: the idea that Thomas Quick makes contact with repressed memories by means of regression. Seppo Penttinen can hardly have been unaware that his testimony under oath had given the court an inaccurate impression of Quick’s changing story during the course of the investigation. But we will let Ståhle continue with her account, as Penttinen’s deception of the court was about to get even worse.
During questioning on 23 November and 19 December, Quick mentioned that the tent canvas was cut open and that a long rip was created as well as a smaller rip in the place where he had stabbed at the man.
He also gave a description of the couple and their positions in the tent. Information given was entirely spontaneous. According to Penttinen there was no divergence between what Quick stated earlier in the investigation and what he has stated here in the main proceedings.
The first interview with Thomas Quick runs to eighty-one pages. Practically all the information Quick gives on this occasion is factually flawed and a number of items are later changed, often more than once, before he reaches his ‘final story’. I have italicised all the factual errors from the first interview:
• He steals a gentlemen’s bicycle.
• Using this, he cycles to Appojaure.
• The weather is fair.
• He acts on his own.
• The picnic spot is situated between 500 metres and one kilometre from the main road.
• In the middle of the open area is a brown four-man tent.
• The tent is positioned closest to the lake.
• A car is parked next to the forest facing away from the lake.
• A couple of clothes-lines have been strung up at the scene.
• Quick kills the couple with ten to twelve stabs.
• The murder weapon is a large hunting knife with a broad blade.
• The woman comes out of the tent opening.
• Her upper body is naked.
• She has long brown hair and is about twenty-seven years old.
• The woman lies on the right side inside the tent, the man on the left.
• Quick cuts open one of the long sides of the tent after the murder.
• He sees that they have their rucksacks in the tent.
• The inside of the car is in disarray.
• Quick does not steal anything from the tent and after the murder cycles back to Jokkmokk.
• He does not know Johnny Farebrink.
• He is unsure if he actually committed the murders.
• He never spoke to the couple.
SETBACKS
THE COURT’S VERDICT on the Appojaure murders kicked up a hornets’ nest of interest in Quick in Norway, and in the spring of 1996 a number of Norwegian journalists began conferring with the talkative serial killer.
Quick’s Norwegian adventure had in fact started in November 1994, when Quick told Penttinen about a murder that had apparently taken place between 1988 and 1990. The victim was a young boy of Slavic appearance with an oversized bicycle. Quick mentioned a place known as Lindesberg and the first name ‘Dusjunka’. A month later the boy’s name had changed to ‘Dusjka’ and was being associated with a place called ‘Mysa’ in Norway.
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bsp; In December 1994, Penttinen made an enquiry to the Norwegian police about any missing boys who might correspond with the description provided by Quick. The answer, as we already know, was that no one answering to the name of ‘Dusjunka’ or ‘Dusjka’ had gone missing, but two African teenage boys had disappeared from a refugee centre in 1989. The journalist Svein Arne Haavik at Verdens Gang picked up the story and in July 1995 published further information on the two boys in his series of articles on Thomas Quick – the same articles that tipped off Quick about the disappearance of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in July 1988.
The Norwegian murder victims – Therese Johannesen and the two African refugees – were added to the police investigation via Quick’s ‘therapy board’, a noticeboard on which symbolic images were pinned up and used in the sessions with Birgitta Ståhle. The board was regularly photographed by Seppo Penttinen, who tried to interpret the more or less codified messages.
By February 1996 the therapy board had been supplemented with a map of Norway and photographs of a blonde nine-year-old girl and two teenage boys of an African appearance. Penttinen understood perfectly well what Quick was trying to say.
After the successful conviction in Gällivare, reconstructions were held in Norway and Sweden so that Thomas Quick could show how the abduction and killing of the two boys had occurred. The Norwegian reconstructions were extensively covered by the media, which did not escape the attention of anyone involved – least of all Quick.
‘We bought the newspapers for him, after all. He wanted Verdens Gang and Dagbladet,’ the inspector Ture Nässén told us.
On 23 April 1996, while Quick and his entourage were in Norway, Dagbladet ran an article that included photos of the two boys. The investigators were aware of the fact that Quick read the newspapers on a daily basis, but seemed unconcerned about any information he might pick up in this way.
When they stayed the night at Ullevål Hospital in Oslo, one of the nurses gave Quick a baseball cap with ullevål sykehus printed on it and they established a friendly connection. Quick was careless enough to show the nurse the article in Dagbladet where the two boys had been circled in a group photograph. Quick pointed at them and said, ‘I recognise those two.’ The nurse called the Norwegian police and reported what had happened.
In other words it was a nurse who wasn’t even involved in the case, rather than the investigators, who brought the fact that Quick had seen a photograph of the ‘Norway boys’ to the Norwegian police’s attention.
Before they disappeared, both of Quick’s alleged victims had had to provide fingerprints in Norway, and while digging for the boys’ remains in a place known as Guldsmedshyttan it was decided, just to cover every possibility, to run these fingerprints against the Swedish register. Hits were received for both.
One of the boys had gone to Stockholm, where he had sought political asylum at police headquarters in Kungsholmen. He had been ‘dacted’, which meant that he had been photographed and had provided fingerprints for electronic dactyloscope scanning and storage. The police were immediately able to call up the name, social security number and registered address of the alleged murder victim, and before long Detective Inspector Ture Nässén was having a chat with him.
‘He was a nice chap, living in Fisksätra with his wife and children, but he’d never met Thomas Quick,’ Nässén told me.
Quick’s second victim had found his way to Ljungby, from where he went on to Canada. Nässén reached him there by telephone, and after that his conclusion about Quick was clear cut: ‘The whole thing was just fiction! They said they left Norway because they knew they wouldn’t get political asylum there.’
Without describing what they had learned, the police prepared a photo line-up of African boys, in which both of the ‘disappeared’ boys were included. This was carried out in the police van in Guldsmedshyttan while the forensic technicians were outside the vehicle, digging for the two murder victims who had already been found alive.
Penttinen began by reminding Quick of the number of times he had changed his story.
‘If one looks overall at the information you have given in various interviews and the reconstructions we have done, one could end up with a bit of a confused impression.’
After that, Penttinen asked if Quick had seen any photographs of the boys, but he answered very firmly that he had not.
At this point, Christer van der Kwast broke into the interview. This time he put pressure on Quick, but he started cautiously.
‘We’ve had a third-party tip-off from Ullevål Hospital suggesting that you’ve seen photographs of these boys in the newspaper,’ said van der Kwast.
‘What newspaper would that have been?’ asked Quick, mystified.
Quick wouldn’t accept that he had seen a photo, and he wasn’t willing to change his story that he had murdered the two boys.
‘I’m not quite sure you described what happened to boy number two, the one who was taken from Mysen alive,’ van der Kwast probed. ‘Where did he die?’
‘He died here,’ Quick answered without any hesitation.
Quick’s message was clear -the boys had been moved from Oslo to Guldsmedshyttan and the police would find the bodies if they just kept digging.
When Quick was shown the photo line-up he carefully scrutinised the faces of the twelve dark-skinned boys.
‘There’s an immediate recognition of one of the faces,’ said Quick, and put his right index finger on photo number five, a youth with a thin face, sad eyes and a half-open mouth.
‘And possibly . . .’ he said with a certain hesitation, pointing at number ten.
‘Five and ten,’ Penttinen concluded. ‘With number five you said there was an immediate recognition.’
Christer van der Kwast excused himself and said they needed to ‘check something’, upon which Penttinen turned off the tape recorder and they left the van. Five minutes later they were back again, and it was left to van der Kwast to deliver the crushing blow.
‘So I have to tell you something about the person you’ve just pointed out, number five,’ he said in his most authoritative voice.
Quick hummed by way of an answer and realised the news would not be good.
‘According to the information I have, this person is still alive,’ said van der Kwast. ‘This has been possible to confirm using fingerprints.’
Quick had no comment to make on this but he seemed shocked.
Ture Nässén was present throughout the process of the interrogations, the photo line-up and the eventual discovery of Quick’s African victims, living in Sweden and Canada respectively.
‘There was panic in the ranks! I had to drive Quick back to Säter Hospital. It’s a mystery to me that the investigation could go on after the African boys.’
Yet even after this, Christer van der Kwast and Seppo Penttinen kept ignoring the troubling fact that Quick was obtaining his information about murders from newspapers and journalists. But events at Guldsmedshyttan had finally convinced Ture Nässén that Quick was just a big talker.
‘The outcome for me was that I resigned from the investigation. I was done with Thomas Quick.’
Alongside the Norwegian investigations, the work on the Yenon Levi murder was still ongoing and it was decided to stage a reconstruction in May 1996.
In the original Levi investigation, extensive forensic work had been done, and this material was carefully examined by Jan Olsson and the forensic technician Östen Eliasson.
Based on this they outlined a likely sequence of events for the murder. However, after their experiences of the reconstructions in Appojaure and the trial in Gällivare, Olsson suspected that Seppo Penttinen was leaking information to Quick. For this reason, he and Eliasson decided not to let Penttinen have access to their findings prior to the reconstruction.
At eleven in the morning on 20 May 1996, Thomas Quick arrived at the alleged crime scene to describe how he had murdered Yenon Levi. The usual entourage – police, nurses from Säter, the therapist, the
memory expert, the prosecutor and the forensic technicians – were all assembled.
Thomas Quick, wearing a black baseball cap, blue-and-white bomber jacket, black trousers and trainers, was not in the mood. Before the reconstruction began, he asked to say a few words to everyone. There was no mistaking that he was emotionally fraught.
‘To begin with I want to say this to Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast – I am still both upset and frustrated over what happened last Monday. I just don’t understand why Christer van der Kwast can’t come to me directly and apologise!’
It was only a week since the humiliating fiasco in Guldsmedshyttan. Subsequently Quick had been taken to Stockholm with Birgitta Ståhle for a meeting with van der Kwast. They met late in the evening at the CID offices and van der Kwast took a hard line, demanding tangible evidence and ‘mature behaviour’ from Quick, who was not used to this kind of treatment. He left the meeting in a fury.
Now there was a golden opportunity to confront van der Kwast before the whole investigation team.
‘I don’t know if it will make me clam up today. I hope it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t it’s no thanks to Christer van der Kwast. I don’t think he’s admitted his responsibility in this whole matter. He hasn’t found a sense of perspective on himself as a person, and he mixes personal things with his professional role, I feel. I’m really disappointed and I hope Christer van der Kwast has the courage to apologise to me personally.’
Seppo Penttinen ignored the embarrassing prelude and tried to get Quick in a good mood by telling him how they had managed to satisfy all the demands Quick had made prior to the reconstruction. It had not been an easy task to get hold of a Mazda Kombi 929L, an unusual model which Quick had used occasionally in 1988, although it was owned by Patrik Olofsson’s mother. Now it stood there, parked.
Also in position was a dummy representing Yenon Levi, and a second person who would be playing the part of Quick’s accomplice.
Thomas Quick Page 31
