On that first day, the pumps were turned on at the edge of Ringentjärnen (Circle Pond). A small army toiled with the various stages of the process. As the water was extracted it passed through a sieve which was carefully monitored, frogmen examined the bottom of the pond, cadaver dogs prowled the area, and the edges of the bog and pond were checked. Wikström noted in her log:
Shaken glances pass again and again between Seppo and the signatory below the same slightly panicked thought: has he given us correct information?
By the fine-meshed sieve where Therese’s body parts were expected to turn up stood Professor Per Holck, the anatomical expert advising the investigation. He had brought the skeleton of a child of Therese’s age with him to Ørje in order to show the investigators what they would be looking for.
The work at the pond continued in long shifts, seven days a week, in pouring rain. The absence of any tangible evidence began to worry Wikström and Penttinen early on. In meetings with their Norwegian colleagues they checked their notes from the reconnaissance trips. A sense of doubt was apparent in Wikström’s log entries:
Obviously there are continuous thoughts about TQ’s way of expressing himself, his credibility, etc . . . how are we supposed to evaluate this??
Oh . . . if one only had an answer (Saida . . .) [. . .]
Understand that this is difficult to process, I even find it difficult myself to accept that we have to ‘stand in line for TQ’ but the goal is to give the families an answer. TQ will not be going anywhere anyway.
The agonised notes are interspersed with cheerful descriptions of fun and games between the Norwegian and Swedish colleagues. The log was concluded after eight days, when Wikström and Penttinen temporarily had to return to Sweden for further investigations into the Yenon Levi case.
By this time, Wikström was suffering enormous anxiety about what the consequences would be if no tangible evidence were found after the enormous ordeal of going through the contents of the pond. She quotes a line from Karin Boye, the Swedish poet: ‘Yes, there is goal and meaning in our journey – but it’s the path that is the labour’s worth.’
The signatory below has to content herself with this, irrespective of the end result.
Seppo and the same signatory have planned the escape route, destination unknown, possibly we will first pass through Säter [. . .] we find ourselves in a game of ‘high stakes’, luckily our neighbours do not have a national debt.
This log is hereby concluded on Tuesday, 4 June 1996.
Anna Wikström, Det. Insp.
The work of draining the pond continued from 28 May to 17 July 1996 at a cost of several million crowns, without any evidence being found.
THE QUICK COMMISSION BREAKS DOWN
DESPITE THE DEBACLE of the first reconstruction of the Yenon Levi murder, the investigation kept driving forward and it was with great surprise that Jan Olsson received the news that Quick was participating in a new reconstruction. He tried to explain to me how extraordinary this decision was.
‘To repeat a reconstruction is unheard of – you just don’t do it. Why would you?’
Ahead of this second reconstruction, Seppo Penttinen had had access to the forensic technicians’ crime report for some six months, and this was the period in which he’d been questioning Quick.
Under these circumstances the reconstruction went considerably better for Quick, but his story was still inconsistent on many key points with statements made by the medical examiners and forensic technicians. Christer van der Kwast called a meeting to iron out the problems.
Olsson described it to me: ‘It was in the evening at CID and everyone who was involved was there – the medical examiner Anders Eriksson, the investigators from Falun and Stockholm, Christer van der Kwast and me. In that meeting I sensed from the very start that van der Kwast had a different tone.’
Previously Olsson had felt he had the full support of van der Kwast and Penttinen, despite earlier in the investigation having expressed some doubts about Quick’s credibility.
‘They often said they appreciated my approach, they said it was good that I questioned things. They said I was an asset to the investigation team,’ Olsson explained to me.
But he was about to find out that there were limits to van der Kwast’s tolerance.
In the meeting at CID, Christer van der Kwast expressed his dissatisfaction with how the medical examiners’ report was formulated. Among other things it had been stated quite clearly in writing that most of the explanations given by Thomas Quick during the investigation did not match Yenon Levi’s injuries. Nor had Quick provided any credible explanation of a number of the deadly injuries inflicted on Levi. The report was signed by the assistant physician and certified by her chief, Anders Eriksson.
‘Christer van der Kwast demanded that Anders Eriksson, who was the chief examiner and a professor at Umeå, should change the report,’ Olsson told me.
As head of the department and a professor, Anders Eriksson had the authority to reject the report and write another one, and Jan Olsson was surprised that Eriksson succumbed to van der Kwast’s wishes.
Having solved the problem of the medical examiner’s report so conveniently, Christer van der Kwast got to grips with the forensic investigation, which in his view fell short in many respects.
‘Kwast came at me with a similar attitude. It was almost like a cross-examination in some sort of law court. I realised that he was intending to force this through to prosecution. And then I said to him, “But how are you going to get past the glasses?” And then it all came to an end, and he wouldn’t carry on.’
Olsson’s apparently innocuous question to van der Kwast was seen as a declaration of war, which would have consequences.
‘I’ve never experienced a prosecutor trying to influence technical experts in that way,’ says Olsson.
The suggestion that there was a modified forensic report of Yenon Levi’s injuries had circulated in Quick mythology for several years, but despite attempts by journalists and lawyers the original report had never been found either in the preliminary investigation material or at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Umeå. For this reason I was therefore a little sceptical about Jan Olsson’s description of the meeting at CID – that the prosecutor would press the medical examiner to change a scientific report in such a blatant way.
On 23 September 2008 I visited one of the investigators in the Levi case, retired Chief Detective Inspector Lennart Jarlheim, at his home in Avesta. Jarlheim received me on the glass sun porch which he’d built himself. Since retiring from the criminal division of Avesta police, he told me, he’d been busier than ever. He was renovating his children’s houses, working in their companies, constantly keeping busy with practical tasks and enjoying life more than ever.
‘Oh, so you’re interested in Quick,’ he said with a wry smile that could have been interpreted in a number of ways. ‘You’re not the first to come here on that mission,’ he added, lighting his freshly prepared pipe and leaning back in his chair.
Jarlheim was the chief investigator at Avesta police when CID came knocking on their door in the autumn of 1995 to let them know that a patient at Säter had confessed to the murder of Levi.
Lennart Jarlheim and his colleague Willy Hammar started a thorough investigation into Thomas Quick’s life and social connections at the time of the murder, but it was not long before they discovered that this was an investigation with its own set of rules.
‘Usually it’s like this: a police district is in charge of its own case and it can request back-up from CID, but in this instance it was the other way round. We had little influence over what should or shouldn’t be done.’
Jarlheim and Hammar were extremely surprised when Christer van der Kwast, in his capacity as the head of the investigation, prohibited them from questioning an ex-girlfriend of Quick’s alleged accomplice. Lennart Jarlheim also wanted a search warrant for a storage unit in which Quick’s belongings were kept, where there might be letters, diaries and oth
er evidence. Van der Kwast put a stop to that, as well as the proposed forensic examination of properties where Quick had previously lived.
Lennart Jarlheim and his colleagues took the view that there were two other likely suspects in the Levi case: ‘The Spectacle Man’ Ben Ali and a well-known murderer who had been observed in the area at the time of Levi’s death. Christer van der Kwast stopped them from investigating these lines of enquiry further.
‘The way I saw it was that Christer van der Kwast, Seppo Penttinen and Anna Wikström were completely fixed on Thomas Quick and all they wanted was to bring him to prosecution, even though so very little spoke in favour of Thomas Quick being the guilty party,’ said Jarlheim.
He was frustrated about being prevented from conducting as rigorous an investigation as possible. Now he understood the decision of Ture Nässén at CID to resign.
‘Me and Willy Hammar also questioned our ongoing participation in the Quick investigation. There was nothing that suggested TQ was guilty of the murder of Levi. Nothing!’
Despite this, Hammar and Jarlheim stayed on out of loyalty and followed the orders of the head of the investigation, Christer van der Kwast.
The sun was setting on Jarlheim’s glass porch and I was just about to take my leave when he got up and disappeared into an adjoining room, returning with a heavy cardboard box.
‘You can take this with you. I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity and I think now is probably the time,’ he said, putting down the box on the floor in front of me.
I thanked him, this decent detective inspector, picked up the box and went to my hotel, where I eagerly opened it and looked through its contents.
It was the investigation material from the Yenon Levi case, the African asylum-seeking boys and other relevant matters from the time when Jarlheim was working in the investigation team.
At the top of the pile was the medical examiner’s report on Yenon Levi – the one that Olsson had claimed van der Kwast had demanded should be redrafted. It was dated 17 November 1996 and signed by assistant physician Christina Ekström and Professor Anders Eriksson.
On its opening page someone had written in ballpoint pen: ‘Working copy. Incorrect according to Kwast, to be revised.’
Another two versions of the statement were in the box, the last copy signed by Anders Eriksson alone.
Now that I had the much sought-after statement in my hand it wasn’t difficult finding the passages that prosecutor van der Kwast had perceived as ‘incorrect’.
The medical examiner Christina Ekström had checked the forensic findings against information provided by Quick during questioning. By way of a conclusion she wrote, ‘In his description of the sequence of events Quick has left many different versions which in many instances are contradictory.’
One troubling circumstance for the investigators was that Yenon Levi had a very special type of injury in the form of a fracture on the right side of his pelvis in the so-called ilium bone. According to this first report, Quick’s various explanations could not explain this deadly injury.
Seppo Penttinen had personally gone to see Christina Ekström to try and convince her that Quick was capable of causing the damage to the ilium with a kick or stamping. ‘Just think how big Quick’s feet are,’ Penttinen had said. But Ekström stuck to her conclusion that the injury could only be explained by a fall from a great height, a traffic accident or similar.
I contacted an independent medical examiner who confirmed that the injury to Yenon Levi’s ilium bone was unique. It was deadly in its own right and could only have been caused by high-impactviolence, most likely through being hit by a car.
Anders Eriksson solved the prosecutor’s problem by ignoring about 90 per cent of the information that Christina Ekström had used as the basis for her report. In the final version of the report, attention was given only to what Quick had described in his second reconstruction and the interviews that followed.
The three reports I now had before me suggested very persuasively that Jan Olsson’s description of the meeting at CID had been accurate.
*
‘But how are you going to get past the glasses?’ Jan Olsson had asked Christer van der Kwast.
It was a rhetorical question. There was no way of getting past the glasses.
Despite the fact that Olsson was in charge of forensics in the Levi case, van der Kwast sent Anna Wikström to Avesta to pick up the glasses.
They were handed over to SKL – the state forensic institute – with an enquiry about any possible new methods that might lead to a different conclusion.
However, SKL kept to their earlier assessment that there were ‘compelling reasons to suggest that’ the spectacles at the murder scene were identical to those worn by Ben Ali in his passport photograph. This was backed up by the investigation carried out by the optical company Hoya-Optikslip AB.
Christer van der Kwast took the decision that he would ignore the detailed investigation conducted by forensic engineers. Instead, he turned to the technical division at Stockholm police, whose conclusions were quite different. In other words, a report from a cooperative policeman, who relied on the expert judgement of an ordinary optician’s store on Hantverkargatan in Stockholm (also known for giving discounts to police officers who bought their glasses there), ended up overriding the scientific examination carried out at SKL.
When the Quick Commission was set up at the end of 1995 there was a sincere desire, using scientific methods and the best available investigators, to bring some clarity to the unfathomable Thomas Quick and his murder confessions.
By spring 1997 these ambitious plans had gone awry. A couple of police officers from CID openly said that they did not believe Quick. One person had resigned, experts had been shut out of the investigation and two camps had formed in CID. As the head of investigations, Superintendent Sten Lindström was responsible for personnel and the resource-draining Quick investigation was a significant problem for him.
During the first meeting of the Commission, the matter of Seppo Penttinen’s exclusive access to Quick had been brought up. No adjustments had been agreed. On one occasion Lindström had asked whether further thought should be given to the matter.
‘No, damn it! No one but Penttinen can interrogate Quick,’ van der Kwast had answered.
And so it continued. There had also been suggestions that all interviews with Quick should be analysed. Detective Superintendent Paul Johansson, who was later put in charge of the Psychological Profiling Group and was considered the finest witness testimony analyst in the force, was available to scrutinise all the interviews that had been held in the investigation.
Such far-reaching measures obviously needed to be authorised, which was up to the head of the investigation. Johansson began looking through the interview transcripts, but no authorisation was forthcoming from van der Kwast and eventually the project was abandoned.
However, Paul Johansson did have time to read through the investigation into the Yenon Levi murder. When I got hold of him he was unwilling to make any kind of general statement on the Quick investigation because he hadn’t familiarised himself with all the material. But he did have a clear position on the interviews he had read.
‘I believe that the investigation shows that Quick had no idea how the murder [of Yenon Levi] happened.’
Johansson was extremely surprised when he read that the court had found Quick guilty as charged.
‘Nothing in the verdict matches what Quick was saying in the early stages of the investigation. He changed his story every time. But then once he was given access to the investigation material he was able to talk about it. To me it seems odd that the court should have found him guilty.’
Jan Olsson, who was Paul Johansson’s predecessor as the head of the Psychological Profiling Group, wrote a letter to the head of the investigation on 16 February 1997, giving his opinion on the matter.
To Christer van der Kwast
In my work in the investigation to determine
whether Quick murdered Levi, my focus has been to look into this together with colleagues as objectively as possible. [. . .]
Obviously I am aware that the prosecutor makes the final judgement, but I cannot ignore my sense of justice, which has always guided me in my work. For this reason I am deeply shocked to hear that proceedings may be brought against Quick, thus indirectly freeing the person who committed the murder.
The letter continued with a run-through of a number of technical and forensic circumstances that had convinced Olsson that Quick was not guilty of the murder and had no knowledge of it. Olsson did not believe there was anything in Quick’s statement to back up the suggestion that he was actually there when Levi was murdered, even though in the investigation he had come close to describing the actual events.
Olsson provided a plausible explanation for this:
I have taken note of Quick’s intense gaze, which is primarily fixed on the interrogation leader, and I am convinced that he has great sensitivity when it comes to interpreting the tone of voice, glances and mood of those around him.
Christer van der Kwast read the letter, filed it and never replied to Jan Olsson.
Despite setbacks which consistently argued against prosecuting Thomas Quick, van der Kwast was determined to bring the investigation to a guilty verdict.
THE LEVI TRIAL
THE TREATMENT REGIME offered to Thomas Quick was the same as always – high levels of benzodiazepine and therapeutic conversations with Birgitta Ståhle three times a week. Quick’s patient notes from this period are so alarming that it seems unbelievable that no one should have intervened to help him deal with his terrible dependence on narcotics.
On 19 November 1996 staff found Quick in the music room, where he had tried to hang himself from a belt fixed to a radiator. He was naked and drenched in sweat and switching between different personalities. Next to him, he had left a note: ‘I don’t want to be Nana because I am Simon.’ In the end, care assistants managed to give him more Xanax and Diazepam suppositories.
Thomas Quick Page 33
