Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  A short pause was made halfway there, when all partook of coffee and sandwiches. By 12.00 we were approaching Örje Forest and the vehicles entered the so-called ‘Ringen area’.

  The reconstruction began at 13.20 and various passengers switched places in the vehicles. Travelling in the CID minibus were Quick, Borgström, Ståhle, Penttinen, Christianson, Wikström, a sound technician and driver called Håkon Grøttland from Drammen police.

  Progress was slow, with a stop by the pond that had been drained the preceding summer. The convoy moved on and passed another bog on the left-hand side. ‘Thomas Quick shied away abruptly from this by looking to the right,’ noted Wikström.

  The police minibus drove along the narrow lanes of this vast forest and Quick reacted with anxiety at the sight of a ridge. After various manoeuvres they stopped and Quick uttered the words, ‘Yes, we’re here now.’

  At 14.00 we had a coffee break in the so-called ‘Skumpen’. At this point Thomas Quick wandered about 50 metres away from the car towards the rock formation and was given his coffee while sitting in the road. Thomas Quick cried desperately in his loneliness and maintained a dialogue with himself. Exactly what Thomas was saying wasn’t clear to the undersigned but my sense of it was that he was speculating in the sense that he has arrived at the place and it may possibly be ‘the time’.

  Quick wandered around in deep anxiety. He appealed for help from the therapist.

  In connection with this, Thomas Quick clearly cried out his anxiety, ‘Nomis, come and help me!’ Thomas Quick’s calls echoed loudly across the landscape. Nomis is the name Simon backwards. The name Simon is a frequently recurring theme in Thomas Quick’s therapy world.

  ‘At 14.25 we left this place of anxiety,’ noted Wikström, and the journey continued a kilometre or so to a rock formation which Quick wanted to climb. There he started ‘an anxiety game’ which seemed to be about exchanging a few words with his alleged accomplice, Patrik. He carried on into the forest, where he smelt and tasted the bark of a tree, then lay down in a foetal position. ‘Powerful anxiety came to the fore in Thomas Quick and care assistants intervened,’ according to the report.

  Afterwards Quick revealed that he had been between only twenty and twenty-five metres from a hiding place.

  The police minibus drove on to ‘Torget’, a place Quick claimed he recognised very well. He told Penttinen about ‘some of the cutting activities’. Repeatedly he called out the words ‘five intestines’. The significance of this was left to the interpretation of the spectators. Suddenly Quick rushed up a slope towards a drop, then he fell at the steepest part and smacked his cheek and nose against a boulder.

  Thomas Quick remained lying down in a powerful fit of anxiety and told us during this anxiety attack after he had calmed himself down somewhat about what he has hidden in the different places. At 16.30 he said, when he woke from his fall and the shock of it, ‘Now I’m close.’ Then he spoke in an anxious voice about place one, i.e. the first place we went in the reconstruction, where one can find the torso and ribs. In place number two, i.e. at the edge of the rock with a gravel and sand pit, the head of Therese can be found. Further in place three, where we are now, Therese’s thigh bones, feet and arms should be found. He mentioned: ‘I have cut off her feet.’

  Quick was informed that Norwegian police had found a tree ‘with markings carved on the trunk’. This was destined to be one of the stronger items of evidence weighing in against Quick. However, he went on to say that he was ‘slightly unsure where the tree is’.

  He was also informed that a cadaver dog had reacted to the area and was asked to make a last attempt to approach one of his hiding places. ‘Thomas Quick took note of this, a clear reaction was seen, but he didn’t have much strength left,’ wrote Wikström.

  Quick told them that Therese’s hand should be ‘nearby’ and made an unsuccessful attempt to go to the place. ‘He fell into deep anxiety and cried uncontrollably some 10–15 metres from the team.’

  After five and a half hours in Ørje Forest, the group begin their retreat for Säter, without having had occasion to use either the metal spit or the spade.

  After the second reconstruction in Ørje Forest, an extensive search of the terrain was carried out. In the places where Quick had stated that Therese’s head, torso, ribs, arms and hands were hidden, nothing at all was found.

  When this was reported to him, Quick changed his story again. He said that he had returned to the area the following year and removed Therese’s remains from the scene. Quick was told that a cadaver dog had reacted to the area. Quick said that perhaps some smaller pieces of the body had been left behind.

  Professor Per Holck, who had been the investigation’s anatomical expert during the process of draining the pond, returned to work in Ørje Forest with renewed energy. In October and November 1997 he collected a very large number of samples from the areas pointed out by Quick or picked out by the cadaver dog.

  The samples consisted primarily of charred wood, but among the hundreds of pieces Per Holck believed a few that had been found in old fire sites in ‘Torget’ were very likely burnt pieces of bone. His judgement was that they were fragments of tubular bone with a hard surface and an inner porous material, scientifically known as spongiosa. According to Professor Holck, the transition between the inner porous material and the hard surface of the bone was indicative of human bone. On one of the bone fragments there was a ‘growth ridge’ that suggested it belonged to a human being aged between five and fifteen.

  The alleged bone pieces were sent to one of Holck’s colleagues in Germany, Professor Richard Helmer, who confirmed that in all probability these came from a child.

  The bone fragment with the growth ridge was so badly charred that no DNA could be extracted from it; nor could it be established in any other way that it came from Therese. Despite this, the discovery of the bone was felt to be the greatest triumph of the Quick investigation.

  As soon as the news reached Gubb Jan Stigson’s ears, on 14 November, it was served up on the front page of Dala-Demokraten:

  QUICK VICTIM FOUND

  The investigation has made a breakthrough

  This discovery means that the investigators, for the first time in the five-year history of the Quick investigation, have been able to follow Quick’s fragmentary confession right through to the actual remains of his victim.

  In other words, this is the breakthrough the investigators, Quick and perhaps most importantly the doubters have needed for so long.

  It is easy to understand the triumph of the investigators and ‘Quick believers’ at the discovery of the bone. Equally it was a setback for the doubters. The bone fragment seemed, in retrospect, one of the greatest mysteries of the Quick investigation.

  It also became a very real problem for me. Everything in the investigation consistently showed that Quick lacked any knowledge of Therese and the location of her body. So how could one explain the discovery of the burnt bone fragments in a place where Quick claimed he had incinerated Therese?

  If it really was a human bone at all.

  A TIGHT-KNIT TEAM

  FOR TWO DAYS the chief judges of Hedemora District Court, Lennart Furufors and Mats Friberg, had listened to the testimonies of Therese’s mother, Inger-Lise Johannesen, members of the Norwegian police and Thomas Quick. It had emerged that Quick had taken sixteen-year-old Patrik Olofsson with him to Norway, and that he had participated in the abduction and murder of Therese. According to Quick, Patrik had raped Therese at a viewpoint on the way to Ørje Forest.

  After hearing this, the judges called Christer van der Kwast and Claes Borgström to ask why Patrik had not been summoned. Van der Kwast and Borgström firmly dismissed any such possibility, and Lennart Furufors seemed willing to leave it at that.

  Notably, neither van der Kwast nor Borgström had ever been interested in questioning any of Quick’s alleged witnesses or accomplices in a court of law.

  Johnny Farebrink, who according to Quick had been
his driver and accomplice in the murder in Appojaure, was not prosecuted or allowed to testify – even though he wanted to appear, not least because he was mentioned in the crime description and therefore wanted the chance to clear his name. Not even Rune Nilsson in Messaure, who had allegedly been taken to the murder scene and shown the murdered couple, was called as a witness.

  Patrik was also named as an accomplice in the murder of Yenon Levi, and the district court had expressed a desire to question him. The same thing happened on that occasion – the prosecutor and defence agreed there was no need for it and the matter was dropped.

  The individual named by Quick as a witness who was present during the murder of Charles Zelmanovits was, conveniently enough, dead by the time of the trial. But Quick had also pointed out other accomplices in murders for which prosecution had never been brought.

  All these people who had supposedly participated in or had knowledge of Quick’s murders give rise to an interesting question: how common is it for serial killers to work with an accomplice?

  The psychiatric expert of the Pscyhological Profiling Group, Ulf Åsgård, was assigned by CID to investigate the feasibility of Quick’s alleged accomplices.

  ‘In order to be able to tackle this I have to know exactly how many accomplices we are talking about,’ Åsgård said to Jan Olsson. ‘I also have to know exactly what relationship the accomplices had to Quick. And most importantly I have to read the interrogation reports.’

  Olsson passed on Åsgård’s requirements to van der Kwast and Penttinen, but after conferring with them he had to put the brakes on Åsgård.

  ‘They say it’s impossible,’ said Olsson.

  After collecting available data on collaborations between serial killers from all over the world, Åsgård was nonetheless able to answer the question of how common the occurrence is, generally speaking. He summed up the report he had handed in to the Quick Commission to me like this: ‘Quick had five different accomplices and that’s a world record, without a doubt. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that it wasn’t true, simple as that.’

  The damning report was received without comment. No one from the investigation contacted Åsgård.

  ‘In this investigation freethinkers weren’t tolerated,’ he said. ‘Anyone who indulged in that sort of thing was thrown out.’

  Ulf Åsgård wasn’t given anything else to do by the Quick investigation and he described a strange, icy silence after ‘I’d sworn in church’, as he put it.

  ‘I’m not suggesting this was a cult, but they had certain cult-like mechanisms; there was no openness to discussion and certain people’s authority was raised to a level above what they actually had.’

  After Ulf Åsgård had completed this single task, only to find that he was never again contacted by the Quick investigators, he continued examining the verdicts and investigations. He soon became convinced that Quick couldn’t possibly be the serial killer he claimed to be.

  ‘Nothing fits with our police experience of perpetrators. The physical evidence is non-existent and our collective understanding of serial killers speaks strongly against Thomas Quick being one himself.’

  Sven Åke Christianson’s exact role in the Thomas Quick investigation continued to be unclear, but he did have an assignment as a consultant working for the prosecutor. In the Therese trial he had made a statement on Quick’s memory functions, which he found to be normal.

  There were two aspects to Quick’s story that seemed inconsistent: in the initial interviews, his descriptions of Therese and the area of Fjell where she lived were incorrect in every respect. Yet he was still able to recall details about the victim, the environment and the crime which, to a layman, might seem unlikely so many years later.

  Christianson solved the problem by explaining to Hedemora District Court that ‘traumatic events are well preserved in the memory, but there can be protective mechanisms that subconsciously repress any memories of them’, which was a scientific explanation for why Quick sometimes remembered things surprisingly inaccurately and sometimes suspiciously well.

  Between his assignments for the Quick investigation, Sven Åke Christianson busied himself giving lectures on his patient, conversation partner and research subject. After his testimony under oath at the Therese trial – but before the trial had come to an end – he lectured to a packed auditorium in Gothenburg on the subject ‘How to Understand a Serial Killer’.

  The audience was faced with a projected image on a large white screen of Thomas Quick and his twin sister. It is summertime in the photo and the roses in the flower beds by their grandparents’ cottage are in full bloom. The twins, wearing their Sunday best – shorts and skirt – are holding hands and smiling at the camera.

  ‘Can we see which of these two children is going to become a serial killer?’ Christianson asked rhetorically. ‘My view is that a person develops into a serial killer, they aren’t born to it. What Quick did to Therese Johannesen is incomprehensible. But we can understand how it came to that. This is the logic of the perpetrator. Crimes are often about acting out thoughts, feelings and memories that cannot be dealt with.’

  No one seemed to react to the fact that Christianson was exposing his patient publicly in this way, or that he was showing a photograph of the twin sister, who at this point in time was doing everything she could to keep from being associated with her brother.

  The audience was spellbound by Christianson’s explanations for all this evil, explanations that closely echoed the object relations theory which was being practised at Säter Hospital.

  ‘Hence we see that the murders are the serial killer’s story about his own traumatic experience,’ Christianson asserted, using a turn of phrase that could just as well have been spoken by his supervisor, Margit Norell.

  The team around Thomas Quick were tightly forged together; everyone shared the same vision of Quick and his guilt and there was a sense of absolute rigidity about their position. In his book Avancerad förhörs-och intervjumetodik (‘Advanced Interrogation and Interview Methodology’) Sven Åke Christianson offers his ‘very special thanks’ to Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle for ‘the comprehensive expertise you have contributed’.

  There was only one way forward – more investigations and more guilty verdicts.

  Quick was found guilty of the murder of Therese. The verdict was thorough and seemed well substantiated. The odd thing about the case was that there were very strong indications that Quick had constructed his story using information obtained from Norwegian newspapers. In addition, the whole story was absurd. He had given incorrect statements on pretty much everything. One mistake after another had been corrected during endless questioning with Penttinen in a process that had been going on for three and a half years.

  So how could the verdict seem so well substantiated?

  Again I went through the ‘evidence’ and was able to confirm to myself that most of it was utterly worthless.

  The investigators claimed that Quick had carved a symbol into a tree, which was later found as described in Ørje Forest. What Quick had actually said was that there was a tree about as thick as a man’s thigh at the pond known as Ringen. He had carved a symbol of a square into this tree. Within this square there was a ‘Y’ which had been carved on its side. The investigators searched repeatedly for this tree without finding it. At long last a birch tree with some form of damage or marking on it was found, but in an entirely different place in the forest. The mark on the tree bore no resemblance to what Quick had described. Considering the number of years that had passed since Therese’s disappearance, the birch must have been extremely spindly in 1988, possibly no more than a few centimetres in diameter, which would seem an odd choice for someone who wanted to carve a symbol into a tree for posterity.

  Another piece of evidence was Quick’s description of a pile of wooden planks in Fjell, some of which had been scattered by children. In fact the planks turned out to have been delivered in the days after Therese’s disappearanc
e.

  Quick had described Fjell as a small rural village consisting of single-family homes. He had also said there was a bank or shop there.

  In his usual way, Seppo Penttinen had attached importance only to the bank, and he made a great deal of the fact that Quick knew the bank had closed down.

  Things continued in this vein until the introduction of what the district court viewed as the most significant piece of evidence in the whole case. From the verdict of the district court:

  However, an absolutely unique circumstance is his statement on Therese’s eczema in the crooks of her arms. This had not been known even by the police, and Therese’s mother had not mentioned it until she was asked by the police after Thomas Quick had referenced it.

  So what was revealed in the investigation material about this matter, which certainly did seem highly important?

  At a reconstruction in Fjell on 25 April 1996 Quick had said that he had ‘a memory of Therese having scar tissue on the arm and he pointed, when he said this, at his right arm’. He couldn’t say anything more about it.

  When she disappeared, her mother had detailed all of Therese’s physical characteristics on a form. In the box for ‘scars and other defining marks’ she noted a birth mark on her cheek but nothing about any scars in the crooks of her arms. The Norwegian investigators immediately contacted Therese’s mother, who told them that her daughter had atopic dermatitis on the inside of her arms. The condition bothered her less during the summer and she couldn’t say whether Therese had had eczema at the time of her disappearance, or scars in the crooks of her arms.

  By the next interview, on 9 September 1996, the Norwegians had passed on the information to Seppo Penttinen that Therese had eczema on the insides of her arms, and he brought up the matter with Quick.

  PENTTINEN: In connection with that inspection we did, you offered some information on Therese’s appearance. You mentioned among other things that she supposedly had some sort of scars on her arm or arms, I can’t quite remember, but anyway in that region of the body.