Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  Quick had driven to Oslo to find a boy, but instead it was seventeen-year-old Trine who crossed his path. He asked her to show him the way to the Royal Castle.

  ‘And unfortunately the girl got into the car,’ said Quick in a cracked voice.

  He snivelled and had to take long pauses while he described his ‘grotesque and bizarre behaviour’, which in this case consisted of assaulting, undressing and then strangling Trine with the strap of her handbag.

  By this time it was widely known that the investigators’ big problem with Quick’s murder confessions was how to connect him to the crimes.

  ‘Our checking of his story has been rigorous,’ said van der Kwast, and his assertion was backed up by Claes Borgström.

  ‘When he was taken for a tour of the area he was able to point out within a thirty-metre margin of error where the body had been left. This was in a big forest in Norway, eighteen years after the event,’ explained Claes Borgström to the journalists covering the trial.

  Birgitta Ståhle was there to explain to the court the underlying mechanisms of Quick’s development into the serial killer he was.

  ‘In his formative years and up to the age of thirteen, Thomas Quick’s father abused him sexually. His father’s ruthlessness and cruelty were frightening and horrendous. Yet his fear of his mother is far stronger.’

  Next she described how at the age of four Quick witnessed the birth of his younger brother Simon, who was then killed by his parents. Afterwards he went with his father into the forest to bury the remains.

  ‘When Thomas Quick was about four years and ten months old, his mother tried to drown him in a hole in the ice,’ Birgitta said, continuing the apparently endless depiction of misery from Quick’s childhood.

  The chief judge of the court, Hans Sjöquist, listened with growing astonishment to the testimony and when it was over he asked, ‘Has it been possible to verify this information?’

  ‘No. But if something is incorrect it usually emerges in the therapy sooner or later,’ answered Ståhle.

  It was undoubtedly difficult to understand why a homosexual paedophile and serial killer had driven twice from Falun to Oslo in order to commit sexually motivated murders of women. The therapist was also able to answer this, in the form of a motive for the murders.

  ‘Murdering women and girls is a form of revenge, a hatred directed at women who become a representation of the mother. His twin sister has also been mentioned and the aggression in regard to her is based on jealousy,’ explained Ståhle, before going on to conclude her testimony with the following words: ‘It requires moral sense to speak of the ultimate immorality which these murders represent.’

  Bengt Eklund – the ward head from Säter Hospital – was also in attendance so that he could assure the court (as described in the reports) that ‘Thomas Quick had very limited access to Norwegian newspapers and could not have got hold of more than the odd newspaper without my knowledge.’

  To lend further support to Quick’s credibility, Sven Åke Christianson made a statement on an experiment he had conducted with ten volunteers in the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University. First they were instructed to read a number of Norwegian newspaper articles on both murders. Afterwards they were asked to describe the main details of the crimes from memory. This was compared with both the facts known to the police and those contained in the newspaper articles. Unsurprisingly, the volunteers’ descriptions contained more or less the same number of correct details, irrespective of what sorts of comparisons were made. However, when Thomas Quick’s statements were subjected to the same test, a clear difference was evident: his story contained more information known to the police than could have been obtained from media sources.

  The court was greatly impressed by Christianson’s ingenuity and included a lengthy description of the test in its verdict. The paragraph concluded with the following: ‘The result supports the assertion that Thomas Quick has had access to considerably more factual information than has been published in the newspapers.’

  So that the court would not be misled into drawing one of two possible conclusions from this summary – namely that Quick had acquired the information elsewhere, most likely from the investigators and his own therapist – both Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle testified that they had not conveyed factual information to him in any way whatsoever.

  All in all, the court was left with an impression that was very far from the truth.

  On one of my trips to Norway I met with Kåre Hunstad, the crime reporter who had been the first to supply Thomas Quick with information about Trine Jensen, thereby connecting her murder with the Quick investigation.

  We met in a hotel bar in Drammen. Hunstad had written more articles on Thomas Quick than any other Norwegian journalist during the golden ‘Quick era’ between 1996 and 2000. At the time he had closely monitored developments. But his interest in the Swedish serial killer went further back than that.

  ‘It was in the early 90s and I was the crime correspondent at Dagbladet. I used to read Aftonbladet and Expressen every day.’

  During the trial relating to the Appojaure murders, Hunstad had been in attendance in Gällivare, not to report on it but as a spectator.

  ‘Because I wanted to try and understand Quick,’ he explained. ‘For a hungry reporter it was natural to hope that Thomas Quick had also been in Norway, and maybe one could connect him to unsolved murders there too.’

  The hungry reporter’s dream came true soon after he’d returned from Gällivare, when Quick unexpectedly – thanks to the information he had obtained from Hunstad’s Norwegian colleague Svein Arne Haavik – confessed to the murder of Therese Johannesen. It was a significant development.

  Hunstad tried to make me understand how enormous the Therese case had been in Norway, and he told me about the unfolding story on which he and his colleagues had reported over the years.

  ‘Then Quick comes along and confesses to the murder! I already knew a lot about the Swedish cases. The whole story was a proper farce, lacking in evidence and with weak sequences of events stitched together. It didn’t seem credible. It was like a big travelling circus.’

  Hunstad had written countless conventional articles simply reporting the latest news on the serial killer Quick, so his sceptical stance surprised me. He was Norway’s foremost reporter on the subject; he was often the one to break new stories on the investigations.

  Hunstad wrote about Quick’s inspection of the refugee centre in Norway, from where he claimed to have abducted the two boys. The day after this article, on 24 April 1996, Thomas Quick was able to read for himself in Dagbladet about other Norwegian murders that might be attributed to him.

  Bearing in mind Quick’s earlier focus on young boys, Hunstad wrote that investigations should be resumed into thirteen-year-old Frode Fahle Ljøen, who had disappeared in July 1974. A police source also stated that the murder of seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen in Oslo in 1981 and the disappearance of seven-year-old Marianne Rugaas Knutsen from Risør that same year would be looked into as soon as possible.

  After his return to Säter Hospital, during severe convulsions in a therapy session, Thomas Quick regained the first memory fragments of his alleged murders of Trine, Marianne and Frode – all of which he had read about in Dagbladet.

  However, Quick was having problems articulating the name of Frode and for the time being he referred to him as ‘Björn’.

  The author of the useful article gained the privilege of becoming Thomas Quick’s very good friend – a friendship that would prove mutually beneficial.

  ‘I had his telephone number and could call whenever I liked. I built up a good relationship with him. We had a great deal of contact and . . . he was a dealer. Every time we met he wanted to get something out of it,’ said Kåre Hunstad.

  On one occasion Quick wanted a high-end new computer as payment for an interview. In a fax retained from 20 May 1996, Hunstad wrote that Dagbladet had turned down his demand but the radio
station P4 was willing to provide it instead. In a letter Quick wrote later on he said, ‘You can have a good interview with me before then, but my conditions are a bit tough. I’ll meet you on the condition that I get 20,000 crowns [about £2,000]. Claes [Borgström] knows about this so you don’t have to run it past him.’

  According to Hunstad, it was rarely a case of more than a few thousand crowns, but even so the newspaper found it problematic.

  ‘I still have a letter he wrote that says if he’s paid he’ll confess to new crimes. That was the payback. He could be like that.’

  During one of his visits to Säter, Kåre Hunstad had brought along a video camera so he could film the interview. Quick understood that the most interesting thing for a Norwegian audience was his Norwegian murders. The interview began with Quick describing how he had driven to Norway in 1987 and had caught sight of a boy of about thirteen.

  ‘I stopped the car and he stopped cycling. It was early autumn, August or September, about seven in the evening. The boy understood there was something strange going on. He tried to dodge me and run away. He was wearing a thin jacket which I grabbed. And then I hit him across the jaw and he fell to the ground and I smashed his head against the asphalt until he passed out or died. Then I took the body and put it alongside the car and arranged the bicycle in a special way. There were apartment blocks around, a crossroads. Then I went back to the car and ran the bicycle over. The car was not noticeably damaged, but the bicycle was really badly damaged.’

  The murder had supposedly taken place in Lillestrøm, just north of Oslo, and had been seen as a traffic accident, Quick went on. Kåre Hunstad realised that what he had here on video was a confession to a previously unknown murder. It’s a scoop, he thought to himself.

  Quick carried on talking about another Norwegian murder, of a prostitute in Oslo. Already one such person featured in the investigation – Gry Storvik – but this was someone else.

  ‘Have you told the police about it?’ asked Kåre Hunstad.

  ‘I think I’ll talk about it in the autumn. Then I’ll tell them about the prostitute,’ said Quick, and took a slurp of his coffee. ‘I can say this much: as far as I could tell she was a narcotics . . . user. A junkie.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  ‘About twenty-five years old. Quite down at heel, dark, and she was murdered with three stabs of a knife. I met her in Oslo. I can’t quite say where.’

  ‘You’re sure she was a drug user? Did you pick her up like any other customer?’

  ‘Yes, yes. We went a short distance in the car to a place in Oslo I don’t really know so well. A place with some vacant flats. That’s where she was killed.’

  ‘So you attacked her? Was she raped?’

  ‘No.’

  Quick couldn’t remember the exact year but he thought it was probably 1987.

  After this they spoke about the murder of Marianne Rugaas Knutsen. Quick had already confessed and was under investigation for this murder, but there were others.

  Quick described how he had driven to Bergen in the 1970s, where he met a boy of about sixteen or seventeen.

  ‘One of your first victims in Norway?’

  ‘Yes, my first victim with a deadly outcome,’ Quick confirmed in a matter-of-fact way. ‘He got into the car voluntarily and we drove just outside Bergen. I stopped the car in the forest and raped and strangled him. I drove back to Bergen and left him at the port. In a different place to where I’d picked him up.’

  ‘So you had the body inside the car?’

  ‘Yes, I had the body inside the car. And I left the body fully clothed.’

  ‘Which means you put the clothes back on the body.’

  When Kåre Hunstad left Säter Hospital he wondered whether he had a scoop or had just revealed a pathological liar.

  Hunstad approached his contacts in the police force and made some enquiries of his own based on the information Quick had given him. He was soon able to confirm that there had not been any deaths, disappearances or murders in Norway that fitted with the three murders Quick had described on camera. It was highly likely that Quick had just made it all up.

  I was struck by the fact that Quick had once again been caught out confessing to murders that had never taken place. But why hadn’t Hunstad taken a more critical stance to Quick’s confessions?

  ‘I never believed Quick,’ said Hunstad. ‘I tried to understand serial killers and learned that they kill specific kinds of people. But here we’re talking about boys and girls, young and old. To this you have to add that there are never any witnesses, no technical evidence and everything is a goddamn mysterious circus.’

  Hunstad said that as a journalist he was trying to ‘crack the code’, which didn’t make a great deal of sense to me. ‘The more people who dig around in the Quick case the better,’ said Hunstad, wishing me the very best of luck before we parted.

  When it comes to the verdicts for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik from 22 June 2000, there is not much of a code to crack. A close reading of the investigation shows how the stories, as usual, are modified as they emerge in a close interchange between Thomas Quick and his circle. In the numerous interviews, Quick variously attacks his Norwegian female victims with a knife, a piece of firewood, an axe or a metal dildo, or – when his imagination is found lacking – head butts or elbows or slams them against some part of the car. Crucial information that proves to be erroneous is followed up and corrected, though it is often still not quite right and so is repeatedly followed up in subsequent interviews.

  Despite this, Quick’s assertions even in the very latest statements were so difficult to match with the forensic conclusions that Christer van der Kwast made do with presenting a report in which medical examiners Anders Eriksson and Kari Ormstad only listed factors that more or less acceptably matched the story to the facts. The autopsy report was never cited, nor the DNA analysis of the sperm found inside Gry Storvik, who had been raped. This detail was dealt with by Quick claiming in the courtroom that his ‘clear memory’ of the event was that he ‘had not ejaculated’ during the rape – despite having said precisely the opposite during questioning.

  The prosecutor, defence counsel, doctors, therapists and members of the court were satisfied to leave it at that.

  One supporting factor for Quick’s story that was particularly emphasised in the verdict was the fabric handbag strap tied into a strangling knot which had been found next to Trine Jensen’s decomposed body and was very likely the murder weapon. It came from her handbag and this had not been conveyed to the mass media, which was why the court placed such importance on Quick’s disclosure of this specific detail.

  The first time Quick mentioned Trine Jensen’s name to the investigators was on 4 October 1996. That was the day the entire Quick entourage was conducting the second reconstruction of the murder of Yenon Levi.

  Quick surprised them by requesting a special interview. He had some information to impart to them and it couldn’t wait.

  Seppo Penttinen, Claes Borgström and Thomas Quick were sitting in a makeshift interview room at Säter when Penttinen turned on the tape recorder at 10.15.

  ‘Go ahead, Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘I just wanted to give you some information. Very briefly. I’m not going to answer any questions about what I’m telling you, but I do want to leave this with you before we start on the Rörshyttan story, so I don’t have to carry this inside me like a burden. I want to mention that two seasons after Johan’s death, in other words in the summer of 1981, I was in Oslo, where I abducted a woman who, I think, was in her late teens. Her name was Trine Jensen. I took her away and murdered her. And that’s all for today.’

  Penttinen called a close to the audience. The time was 10.17. It had lasted two minutes.

  The ‘interview’ where Quick confessed to the murder of Trine Jensen is remarkable in several respects. Obviously first and foremost because it is so brief and the suspect would not accept any questions. Even more irregul
ar is that at a first interview Quick was able to offer such concrete information about a murder: that the victim’s name was Trine Jensen, that she was in her late teens and disappeared from central Oslo in the summer of 1981. All of these details were correct, and they were all available to read in a number of newspaper articles.

  In February 1997, on his own initiative, Thomas Quick brought up the question of Trine Jensen’s disappearance, but the investigators let it lie, presumably because they were too busy with other things. In March 1998 it was time again – in an interview with Kåre Hunstad, Quick said that he would ‘soon be talking about the murder of Trine’.

  On 27 January 1999 the name came up during questioning, when Quick was being interviewed about a large number of alleged murder victims. He provided another few details, such as the fact that he had left Trine’s body by a forest road near a shed.

  Seppo Penttinen tried to press him for more: ‘You say you violated her, what do you mean by that?’

  ‘I violated her body in different ways.’

  ‘In different ways, you say?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You’re talking in quite a low voice here so I’ll clarify it. Can you describe any of the ways that . . .’

  ‘No.’

  It was like talking to a brick wall, but when Quick was pressed he handed over another few snippets of information, for example that Trine was left completely naked in the forest, probably north of Oslo – ‘Well, you know me and my sense of direction, it’s hopeless’ – before he put an end to further questions with the words ‘Well, well, that’s all, we’ll leave it at that.’

  During questioning two weeks later he asserted that he killed Trine with a blow to the back of her head, but not much more. On 17 May it was time for another interview.

  PENTTINEN: What about her age and appearance?

  TQ: No, I can’t cope with that now.

  PENTTINEN: What’s stopping you from describing her? Appearance, fair or dark, tall or short, fat or thin?

  TQ: Fairer than dark, taller than short, chubbier than slim.