Borgström simply rejected the relevance of whatever I asked him. As he saw it, the investigation material was so complicated that it could be used to back up any hypothesis at all. It made no difference if I found ninety circumstances that were wrong and ten that were right.
‘Just one correct detail could be enough,’ said Borgström.
I wondered if I had really understood him correctly, so asked, ‘Ninety-nine that are wrong and one that’s correct?’
‘Yes, if that one circumstance is strong enough to connect a person to a crime. Ultimately it is up to the court to make that judgement.’
‘Can you suggest one such circumstance?’
‘I’m not going to do that, no, but of course there are many. You’ll just have to read the verdicts. That’s all there is to it.’
Claes Borgström could confidently fall back on the six unanimous court verdicts that had firmly established Sture Bergwall’s guilt in the murder of eight people. Whether Quick had been wrong in ninety-eight or ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, it didn’t change the fact that a Swedish court judgment was immovable.
‘JK says that the verdicts are very well formulated. They show the underlying arguments of the verdicts, by what route they arrived at the conclusion that guilt had been established beyond any reasonable doubt. My views have no importance in the matter. It’s the view of the court that counts,’ said Borgström modestly.
‘In certain respects the reasoning of the court doesn’t reflect the actual reality,’ I pointed out. ‘The verdicts don’t give a very fair picture of the evidence.’
‘Maybe you have made poor judgements yourself, just as you deem others have done,’ Borgström objected.
‘They’re based on easily checked facts,’ I said.
‘No,’ Borgström protested. ‘They are difficult to check. You’re talking about such extensive material that it’s easy to pull out bits that fit with any given hypothesis.’
The interview had been going on for over an hour and we were not getting anywhere. Borgström seemed to feel that I was way off target, although he did admit that I had done my homework.
I saved my most dramatic information until the moment when the interview was almost over. I tried to control my voice and facial expression as I said, ‘Your former client Thomas Quick has retracted all of his confessions and says he’s innocent.’
‘Well . . . yes, he may have done,’ said Borgström, confused.
He tried to grasp the meaning of this unexpected turn, rapidly running through the likely consequences for him and devising a strategy for the rest of the interview. Having spoken to Sture Bergwall just a few minutes before the interview, it must have been difficult for him to process the information.
Borgström stared at me and asked, ‘So that’s his view today? That he’s been wrongly convicted?’
I confirmed that this was indeed the case. Borgström gave the matter some serious thought. A little smile hovered somewhere on his face. I could see his usual combative self re-emerging.
‘You shouldn’t be so sure that this is his current position.’
‘I am sure of it,’ I said.
An anxious look crossed Borgström’s face.
‘Have you spoken to him today?’ he asked nervously.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘At what time?’
Now you’re really clutching at straws, I thought, before replying, ‘I’m not going into that. It’s not important. I know this is Sture’s current position.’
‘Typical,’ said Borgström, looking quite downcast. ‘You have no obligation of confidentiality, have you?’
The interview was turning into a conversation, probably because neither of us had the energy for much else. I told him about Quick’s medication and the actual reasons for his ‘time out’ some seven years earlier.
Just as Christer van der Kwast had behaved the day before, Borgström now swung between great humility at the idea that Quick might have been wrongly convicted and an insistent defence of the legal process in which he had played a decisive part.
‘Whatever position Thomas Quick takes in future, neither you nor I nor anyone else will be able to know for certain what has happened here. For the time being it’s the court rulings that matter.’
Admittedly he was right about this.
‘Are you confident about your performance in the Thomas Quick case?’ I asked.
‘I have not collaborated in putting an innocent person behind bars,’ Borgström answered.
‘That’s quite a bold statement,’ I said.
‘OK. I’ll add one word: I have not consciously collaborated in putting an innocent person behind bars.’
Borgström felt I should spend some time reflecting on Quick’s reasons for doing what he had done. I replied that I had put months of work into trying to understand precisely this.
Borgström had his doubts about that, but he wanted to finish things off by giving me something to think about.
‘Quick came to Säter Hospital after being found guilty of aggravated robbery. It is now 2008 and he’ll never be released, even if he pushes for a review.’
‘Isn’t that a little outside your field of expertise?’
‘Yes, but I’m entitled to my opinion.’
‘When did you last see Sture?’
‘A long time ago.’
And yet you are quite happy to condemn your former client to a life sentence, I thought, keeping silent.
The atmosphere in Borgström & Bodström’s law firm was more than a little frosty when I took my leave.
SYSTEMIC FAULTS
CLAES BORGSTRÖM SEEMED to me the greatest mystery in the case of Thomas Quick. He was much too intelligent not to have seen the fraud in what had been going on for all these years, and at the same time too honest to have consciously taken part in a miscarriage of justice such as this one.
Who was he? And what was really going on behind those eyes?
After the interviews with Christer van der Kwast and Claes Borgström, we had only another four weeks before broadcast. It was now a question of putting the last pieces into place. I made a final attempt to have the bone fragments released for independent examination and Jenny Küttim hunted for the missing interrogation reports.
Sture’s twin sister, Gun, found a note in a diary where she had written down the time, date and name of the interviewer who had come to see her. On the morning of Friday, 19 May 1995 she had been questioned by Anna Wikström and a local policeman. We had already tried several times to get our hands on this interview – like all the other transcripts of the interviews with Sture’s siblings. Finally, validated by Gun’s specific information, Jenny called Seppo Penttinen to inform him that it was an offence not to hand over official documents of this kind.
Late that same evening the interview transcript came juddering out of the fax machine at SVT and we were able to confirm that it pertained to the investigation into the Appojaure murders.
The next day I immersed myself in it.
Gun began by describing the members of the family and where they had lived. She said that their ‘school years and time with the family were positive on the whole’.
Gun mentioned that she has always viewed Sture as very gifted and knowledgeable. Among other things she mentioned that Sture always kept up with the news and newspapers, which has given him a very good general knowledge. She also says that he was politically interested from an early age.
Further, Sture wasn’t very interested in sport, which meant that he didn’t socialise very much with the other boys in his class.
As a result Sture was often outside the circle of his classmates and most of his social interaction was with Gun.
Gun sometimes felt that Sture was maybe bullied a little by his classmates and she had a recollection of some of the boys locking Sture into an outhouse in a barn.
Gun can’t remember if Sture suffered as a result of this bullying.
The socialising in the family was a
lso frequent and Gun mentioned that she mainly spent time with the boys in the family.
Gun says that during high school Sture spent a lot of his time on the school newspaper.
Concerning her family Gun sees her childhood as very positive. She mentioned that her father was very hot-tempered and has memories of him at various times throwing saucepans on the floor. She can’t remember what the arguments were about, but she said that they resolved themselves in due course.
Sture has mentioned in therapy that he had been subjected to sexual molestation by his parents and Gun’s comment on this is that ‘it’s shocking’. She says that it is inexplicable that something like this has happened. When she looks back and really analyses her childhood she can’t imagine that anything like this could have happened.
Gun also gave a positive view of the time they spent in Jokkmokk, where she and Sture attended the folk high school. On one occasion she noticed that Sture had gone outside the student hall of residence and was standing there screaming. She took care of him but never found out what had happened. By this time she had already begun to suspect he was under the influence of drugs. Also Sture’s periods within various institutions were, as she saw it, largely caused by Sture’s drug problems.
In terms of the confessions made by Sture during the investigation Gun is dubious about the information she has got partly from the investigating team and also in the mass media. She says there is a question mark hanging over the whole thing for the siblings, as far as Sture’s behaviour is concerned during these years. Their reason for this is that they never really noticed anything worthy of comment about Sture, apart from his drug abuse, which they all confirm he has struggled with.
Earlier in the interview we touched upon the claim of sexual molestation made by Sture against his parents. Gun feels that this statement seems overblown and that there must be other reasons for Sture behaving as he has done. She also mentions that she has given thought to various occasions in the past when Sture fell and hurt himself and was even rendered unconscious.
Finally Gun was asked to describe her family very briefly.
Mother, Thyra: Very caring about her family. Cheerful, always willing to help.
Father, Ove: Silent and brooding, but always fair.
Oldest sister, Runa: Happy, nice person.
Sten-Ove: Complicated, difficult to understand, analytical and hot-tempered but a nice person.
Torvald: Lovely person getting on with his life.
Örjan: A person who never grows up but wants the best for everyone.
Sture: Pleasant, an extrovert and a smart person.
Eva: Always chatting, happy and extroverted.
As far as Jenny and I were concerned, the document was an encouraging sign that the missing interviews from the investigation had in fact been kept, and were most likely in the possession of Seppo Penttinen. However, he had sent only one of the two interviews with Gun Bergwall we had asked for – the one which we had been able to specify by date and time.
And we hadn’t seen any sign of the interview where she had spoken of their confirmation, which would verify Sture’s alibi for the murder of Thomas Blomgren.
Travelling up to Stockholm on the train one morning in November 2008, an idea suddenly occurred to me to call the Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, and ask if he might have time for a cup of coffee that same morning. He replied that I was welcome to come up to his office.
It was a beautiful winter’s day when I walked from the Central Station across the bridge to Riddarholmen and the elegant palace of the Office of the Chancellor of Justice. Lambertz received me in his impressive room on the first floor.
The duties of the Chancellor of Justice are highly diverse and often contradictory in their scope.
The chancellor is the government’s highest-ranking ombudsman and effectively functions as the lawyer of the state. As such, he or she acts as the legal adviser and representative of the government and state. If, for instance, the state has in some way infringed upon the rights of a citizen who is now demanding compensation, the chancellor will defend the state against that citizen. At the same time the chancellor is supposed to keep an eye on the workings of public authorities and law courts on behalf of the government, while also playing the part of ultimate guarantor in protecting the rights of the citizens against abuses of power. If the state has done something wrong – such as sending an innocent person to prison – the Chancellor of Justice determines the level of financial compensation that should be paid out.
In short, the Office of the Chancellor of Justice is a very odd concept – a manifestation of the decent state: the chancellor is the incorruptible Swedish public servant who represents benign authority and the best interests of the citizens, while being elevated above the most impossible conflicts of interest.
Faced with Chancellor of Justice Hans Regner’s plans to step down from the job in 2001, the Justice Minister Laila Freivalds had wanted to see a list of possible applicants for the vacant position. This preparatory task was given to Göran Lambertz, head of the legal secretariat at the Foreign Office, who commented some time after, ‘I presented a number of names to Laila Freivalds and outlined the various abilities of each candidate. Then as the presentation came to a close I added, “I’d rather just have the job myself.”’
This was precisely how it turned out. Göran Lambertz had shown himself to be a champion of the legal rights of the individual. He publicly commented on the fact that many innocent people were incarcerated, that the police sometimes lied to protect their colleagues and that judges were occasionally lazy. To everyone’s surprise, Lambertz got involved in specific case reviews and even drafted a petition calling for the review of a murder conviction that he considered wrong. It seemed that Sweden had got itself a fearless Chancellor of Justice, one who often appeared in the media and was prepared to challenge powerful interests. It is probably fair to say that he won the love of the people.
In May 2004 Göran Lambertz started the ‘Chancellor of Justice Legal Rights Project’ and two years later his department published a report entitled ‘Wrongly Convicted’. The report was based on all retrials since 1990 where the prison term had exceeded three years and the convicted person had subsequently been cleared of all charges.
The report stated that up until the 1990s retrials of this kind had been extremely rare. Three of the convictions that had been overturned had been very much in the news. The remaining cases in the report made it pure dynamite: eight of the eleven wrongful convictions were for sexual crimes, mostly sexual abuse of children and teenagers. In most of the cases, teenage girls had made accusations against their fathers and stepfathers while seeing psychologists and therapists.
A number of prominent jurists – including Madeleine Leijonhufvud and Christian Diesen – with a long-established commitment to fighting the sexual exploitation of minors, attacked the report fiercely and demanded Göran Lambertz’s resignation.
I should probably add at this stage that I can’t be considered as unbiased on the subject, given that two of the retrials in the chancellor’s report were the direct result of a case I had investigated and made the subject of a television documentary. ‘The Case of Ulf’ told the story of a young girl who, in therapy, had described being subjected to extremely disturbing assaults with aspects of Satanic practices and even ritual murder. A large amount of evidence that showed the girl wasn’t telling the truth had been withheld by the police, prosecutor and Prosecutor-General.
The battle lines in the debate on the chancellor’s report were well defined. What sort of testimony should be seen as reliable? What was the proper role of therapists and prosecutors in the legal system? The debate was highly relevant to the legal process in the case of Thomas Quick. Most of the critics who had defended Lambertz in this debate on rule of law were also sceptical about Quick’s convictions.
For this reason it wasn’t surprising that in the early days of his term of office, Göran Lambertz had expressed strong
doubts about Thomas Quick’s convictions. Johan Asplund’s parents met Göran Lambertz and for the first time felt that a public official understood them and was taking them seriously.
‘He encouraged us to bring him a statement so that he could make enquiries into all eight of Thomas Quick’s convictions,’ Anna-Clara Asplund told me.
The lawyer Pelle Svensson – the Asplunds’ representative in 1984, when they brought civil proceedings against Anna-Clara’s ex-partner – was assigned to draft the petition.
On 20 November 2006 Svensson handed in a ‘legal inquiry’ of sixty-three pages to the Chancellor of Justice, with supporting material in cardboard boxes containing all of the court verdicts, investigation material, video tapes and so on.
Pelle Svensson’s report was supported by Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund, as well as by Charles Zelmanovits’s brother Frederick, who had never believed in Quick’s guilt.
When the Chancellor of Justice announced his decision on Thomas Quick a week later, it came as a surprise to everyone. Had he really been able to review all the material and draft a decision on it in just a week? His decision was as follows:
The Chancellor of Justice will not start an investigation nor in other respects implement any further measures in this matter.
The Chancellor’s decision ran to eight pages and concluded with the following claim:
The verdicts imposed on TQ are in all essential respects very well written and solid. They contain among other things extensive descriptions of the assessment of evidence by the courts.
Even Christer van der Kwast and Seppo Penttinen earned praise from Lambertz:
In terms of the serious allegations directed at the prosecutor and head of the preliminary enquiries, I particularly want to emphasise that the investigation gives no cause for any other conclusion than that these persons have conducted themselves with skill under difficult circumstances.
Göran Lambertz’s decision gave rise to speculation about the real motives behind him dropping the whole matter of Thomas Quick so quickly and readily. Especially surprising were Lambertz’s laudatory comments on the excellent work of the police, prosecutor and courts.
Thomas Quick Page 41
