The Chancellor of Justice simply had no idea any more on which foot he should stand.
It is easy to come to the conclusion that everything is black or white. That either the psychotherapist Birgitta Ståhle, the policeman Seppo Penttinen, the prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, the lawyer Claes Borgström or a couple of journalists, such as for instance Dala-Demokraten’s Gubb Jan Stigson, are utterly mistaken and may even have conspired in certain ways. Or that those who are totally misguided include Leif G.W. Persson, Jan Guillou, the psychiatrist Ulf Åsgård, the lawyer Pelle Svensson, the policeman Jan Olsson and the journalist Hannes Råstam. In fact it need not be one or the other. All these people could have done a good job and drawn fairly reasonable, though quite different, conclusions.
Göran Lambertz’s conclusion was symptomatic: ‘If Thomas Quick has been wrongly convicted, then surely it is a huge miscarriage of justice? Yes, all commentators seem to be agreed about that. But obviously the conviction could also be correct, and we’ll have to wait for the answer that may eventually emerge. But one has to emphasise that in principle it is less serious if the legal system convicts an innocent person who has confessed and wishes to be convicted, than if it convicts an innocent person who maintains his innocence.’
This was undoubtedly an interesting thought from the country’s highest-ranking lawyer.
Anne Ramberg of Advokatsamfundet was every bit as wavering in her arguments when she tried to present her position in Advokaten magazine’s first editorial of 2009, where she suggested that Thomas Quick could very well ‘be correctly sentenced even if innocent’.
On 16 February 2009 the Prosecutor-General announced that he did not intend to press for any investigation into the conduct of responsible parties behind the Thomas Quick convictions.
His reason for this was that most of the alleged instances of professional misconduct had taken place more than ten years earlier and therefore fell outside the statute of limitation. Even misconduct at a later stage, which could therefore be relevant to an investigation of this kind, would have been made before the Chancellor’s assessment of 2006. And: ‘The Chancellor of Justice found after a thorough review that a preliminary investigation should not be initiated’ as there had not been any ‘significant failings from the prosecutor’s side, or that of the police’.
Because the Chancellor of Justice was the country’s highest-ranking lawyer, the Prosecutor-General noted that he didn’t have the authority to question his decision. And with this, the matter had run its course.
The two individuals who had pressed charges against the police also wanted the Office of Prosecution to take a position on whether it would be justified in initiating its own court process to re-examine the Quick judgments. On this point Perklev conceded that they had good reason to do so and the matter was handed over to the National Authority for Police Court Cases in Malmö, where the Chief Prosecutor Björn Ericson put together a group consisting of himself, three other prosecutors and a fact-finder to scrutinise the entire Quick investigation.
THIRTEEN BINDERS
ON 20 APRIL 2009 Thomas Olsson and his colleague Martin Cullberg handed in Sture Bergwall’s petition for a retrial of the Yenon Levi murder. The document, seventy-three pages long and consisting of 274 bullet points, listed all the peculiarities over the course of the investigation: the bypassing of SKL’s findings and everything else that strongly spoke in favour of an alternative perpetrator, ‘Ben Ali’, the first unsuccessful reconstruction, the obvious lie about his accomplice – Patrik – and how Quick had changed pretty much every statement he had made in a meandering journey spanning fourteen long interviews to the courtroom where his final story was presented.
Because Björn Ericson’s group had already been charged with examining the Quick investigation, they were asked to take a position on Sture Bergwall’s first petition for a new hearing.
In principle it is impossible to overturn verdicts once they have been adjudicated. This principle is one of the cornerstones of the Swedish legal system and also goes by another name, orubblighetsprincipen – the principle of immovability.
During the entire twentieth century there had only been four retrials of murder convictions – one in every twenty-five years. In the 2000s there hadn’t as yet been a single retrial. Now Sture Bergwall was hoping to have eight murder convictions overturned. The odds were worse than lousy, but I never doubted that this was what eventually would happen. The more I dug around in the case, the more indications I had of Sture Bergwall’s innocence.
What was clear, however, was that the process would take time. Sweden doesn’t have a separate institution for retrials, so prosecutors looking at petitions must do so when they have a spare moment from their usual tasks.
In a legal system where trials are postponed for months and years because of staff shortages, it goes without saying that a petition for a retrial of a case more than ten years old will not be given very high priority.
In addition, as there is no legal aid for the plaintiff in such an application, this means that the lawyer who takes on the case will be doing so on a pro bono basis – and thus, like the prosecutor reviewing the case, will have to squeeze it in whenever possible.
In the spring of 2009 Johan Brånstad, the editor of Dokument inifrån and I decided to go ahead with a third documentary on Thomas Quick to tell the full story of the cases there had not been time to deal with in the first two films. The intention was also to take some of the focus away from Sture Bergwall and to point the spotlight more on the circle that facilitated the miscarriages of justice.
At the same time I kept searching for the missing interviews.
Gun Bergwall remembered a few more things about the interview in which she gave her brother an alibi for the murder of Thomas Blomgren. She couldn’t be precise about the date, only that it took place in the early 1990s, and that the police officer came from Luleå and recorded it on tape. His name was Barsk, she remembered, and there was also another person present.
‘He asked a lot about the Whitsun weekend in 1964. I wondered why, what had happened that weekend, but they didn’t want to tell me. They wanted to look at photos as well,’ said Gun Bergwall.
She had shown them one in which Sture could be seen in his confirmation clothes at the same time as he was supposedly murdering a child in Växjö. When Gun found out that Sture had confessed to the murder of Thomas Blomgren that weekend she firmly stated that Sture had not left Falun. Not that weekend and not at any other time during this period. Sture was always at home.
To have person after person telling me how they had given the police information that firmly spoke against the possibility of Quick being the murderer was one thing – certainly it was enough in its own right to show on television. But to have the thing confirmed in writing in an archived and withheld interrogation report would obviously put everything in a different light.
I sent letter after letter to the police authority in Sundsvall, but either they didn’t answer at all or issued denials via Seppo Penttinen.
At the same time the Chief Prosecutor Björn Ericson’s group entrusted with the inquiry began to slowly close in. Soon Ericson was demanding to have all investigation materials held by the police in Sundsvall sent to him.
In mid-October 2009 out of the blue I received a fairly grovelling letter from Seppo Penttinen, with copies of the two interrogation reports I had been searching for. Penttinen explained that these two interviews with Örjan Bergwall hadn’t been included in the investigation files because they had been judged to be a part of the so-called ‘slush’.
In response to my repeated question about the contents of this slush and where it was kept, he wrote, ‘The undersigned is aware of the existence of a small number of interviews which, like Örjan Bergwall’s interview, have been judged to be a part of the “slush”. These interviews have no particular connection to any specific matter. They are interviews of persons in Sture Bergwall’s circle of acquaintances and were part of the p
rocess of researching his general background. [. . .] We are now informing you that all the investigation materials in the concluded proceedings have been sent to the National Authority for Police Court Cases in Malmö.’
I wasn’t all that convinced that Seppo Penttinen would actually send all the materials to Björn Ericson, so I sent Ericson a list of eight interviews which I knew existed and had requested from the police in Sundsvall. Had they succeeded where I had failed, had they been given these interviews?
When it turned out that Penttinen had not sent them, the internal investigators contacted him and politely asked him if there was a possibility that he had some additional material in his study – oddly enough, this was where all the Quick material was stored.
My third documentary on Thomas Quick was aired on 8 November 2009.
After that, no further programmes had been planned, but I couldn’t let go of the question of the missing interviews. It had become a personal matter for me.
After a number of nudges the internal investigators seemed to have received all of the material. In total, there were thirteen binders, which for many years had been kept out of sight of the courts, the public and journalists. Because the documents were not registered they had been impossible to track through police authority filing.
On 16 December I went to Malmö to look through the thirteen files. Their contents decisively changed the overall picture of the investigation. Here were the interviews that showed that the man who had supposedly driven the young Sture to Växjö couldn’t possibly have done so, along with other similarly impossible accomplices and helpers. In a file marked ‘Other Interviews’ I found, among other things, fourteen interviews with all of Thomas Quick’s siblings, who unanimously gave a picture that completely contradicted the terrifying childhood memories elicited in the climate of Säter’s drug-induced object relations therapy. The interviews also ruled out the possibility that Sture Bergwall could have driven a car before 1987.
What defined all these interviews – which were regarded by Seppo Penttinen as irrelevant – was quite simply that they showed the extent to which Quick was making it all up.
The most interesting thing in the files was an interrogation of Thomas Quick on 27 January 1999, showing that Quick was systematically making up murders and that the investigators were aware of it. Two weeks earlier, in conversation with Detective Inspector Anna Wikström and Birgitta Ståhle, Thomas Quick had spoken about a ‘breakthrough in the therapy’. For the first time, Quick had drawn up a list of all his murders in chronological order.
From the verdict on the Trine and Gry proceedings I knew that on the second day of the main hearing in Falu District Court Christer van der Kwast had handed in a similar list containing some twenty-nine people.
When Thomas Quick came to the interview on 27 January he had this list in his back pocket. It is worth pointing out that Quick’s lawyer, Claes Borgström, and Jan Karlsson from the CID were present during the entire interview.
After a long opening exchange with Penttinen, Quick began his story:
TQ: This is a chronological list starting in 1964: Thomas Blomgren.
PENTTINEN: Mm. So the first name is Thomas, then you’ve listed Lars, Alvar, the Hospital boy, Björn, ‘Michael’, ‘Per’, Björn – Norway, Reine, Martin, Charles, Benny, Johan, the Värmland boy, the car boy, Olle, the Stegehuises, Magnus, the West Coast, Levi, Marianne – Norway, the woman by the road, Therese – Norway, Trine – Norway, the woman in the car park – Norway [. . .] And then up on the right M–Z. Duska – Norway, J. Tony – Finland.
Penttinen carried on reading Quick’s note: ‘I have a sacred place between Sågmyra and Grycksbo. I have a place of massacre by and around Främby Point. I have a small but very valuable hiding place in Ölsta.’
The first name on the list after Thomas Blomgren was ‘Lars’, who had supposedly been murdered by Quick in ‘central Sweden’ in 1965. The truth, however, is that ‘Lars’ was feeding ducks with a friend on the ice when the ice broke and the boy drowned. There were witnesses to the accident and the family is absolutely certain that it was nothing but pure misfortune. I knew this because Jenny Küttim and I had already looked through all the confessions Quick had made over the years – not just the ones that led to proceedings in law courts. Therefore I knew that this confession was regarded as so unbelievable by the Quick investigators, they didn’t even bother to contact the family of ‘Lars’.
A ‘named youth’, according to the list, had been abducted in 1985 in Norrland, from where, according to Thomas Quick, he was brought to Falun and his body placed in one of Quick’s ‘hides’.
‘We know who he is,’ Christer van der Kwast said mysteriously in an interview with TT in the spring of 2000.
In one of the withheld interviews it emerged that this was about a fifteen-year-old boy, Magnus Jonsson, who had disappeared in Örnsköldsvik early in 1985. However, the truth was that the police had found Magnus’s lone footprints on the ice leading to open water, where he had obviously fallen in and drowned. A few years later Magnus Jonsson’s remains were found and identified with the help of DNA analysis.
The list of Quick’s victims also included a number of confessed murders that, according to local police authorities, lacked all foundation in reality – there were no disappearances that matched the given times and places.
When van der Kwast handed in the list to the district court in May 2000 he commented to TT, ‘We have gone through all the murders, accidents and disappearances that could be possible Quick cases. We have a lot of material that is difficult to check. The clearest ones are these given in the list, that is, where he himself has provided us with the information.’
For members of the district court the list must have suggested that they were dealing with a criminal who was absolutely unique and that the current case was just one in a line that could be expected to grow longer and longer.
The question is, how would the district court have judged the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik if they had been informed that a large number of the murders on the list were evidently figments of Quick’s imagination?
THE CRIME JOURNALIST
BJÖRN ERICSON’S CHIEF prosecutor’s group didn’t get very far in terms of their own decision on a retrial for Sture Bergwall, but on 17 December 2009 they finished their review of the petition for a new trial in the Yenon Levi case. Björn Ericson announced that it had been accepted.
Meanwhile, Ericson kept requesting materials on each case and had now reached the famous bone fragments from the Therese Johannesen inquiry. The Norwegians handed them over and before long they had been sent to SKL for analysis.
One of the osteologists who studied the bone pieces was Ylva Svenfelt, an independent research scientist and a specialist in burnt bones from the Iron Age. She was very surprised when she saw the bone fragments, which were allegedly from a human child.
On Thursday, 18 March 2010 a number of media sources revealed that the bones had only been subjected to a visual inspection ahead of the first trial: in other words, professors Per Holck and Richard Helmer had only looked at them before announcing their expert, scientific findings. This time, however, they were examined at molecular and biological levels. They proved not to be bones at all, but were actually wood with an added component of glue – most likely fibreboard.
‘Anyone who has worked with burnt bone fragments can see straight away that this is not bone. I can’t interpret it in any other way than scientific fraud,’ Ylva Svenfelt commented to Aftonbladet.
Thomas Olsson made a statement to Expressen: ‘It’s so incredible, even we couldn’t have anticipated this. But it’s symptomatic of the Quick case, where people of academic repute have offered their services to the whole circus.’
Two days after this news, which perhaps more than any other had added a sheen of ridicule to the whole investigation, I received the Guldspaden Prize (the Golden Spade) from Föreningen Grävande Journalisters (the Association of Investigative Jou
rnalists) for my Quick documentaries.
Their annual three-day conference was held that year at Radiohuset (SVT’s main building) in Stockholm, and on the Sunday the whole event was rounded off with a debate between me and Gubb Jan Stigson on the role of the media in the Quick scandal. Among the audience in the auditorium of the Radio Symphony Hall were about a hundred colleagues, including Jenny Küttim, Johan Brånstad and Thomas Olsson.
It was with mixed feelings that I waited for the debate to begin on the podium.
I owed Gubb Jan a great debt of thanks. Not only had he in some sense persuaded me to take on the case, but he had also helped me to get hold of significant amounts of material and opened many doors with his recommendations.
He was now the only one who still adhered to the view that Quick was guilty, but he was still willing to defend that view in an open forum. He had therefore become something of a spokesman for van der Kwast and Penttinen, as well as Ståhle, Christianson and Borgström. He received no other reward for this than the increasing mirth of his peers.
And to a very large extent this was my fault.
At the same time his obstinate refusal to accept proven facts was beginning to come across as quite extraordinary. Strangely enough, he was also blind to the role he had played in the story. During my research for the third documentary I continued to delve into material, including the preliminary investigation notes on Trine and Gry, in an attempt to find out who exactly, other than Kåre Hunstad, had provided Quick with the original tip-off for the murder.
In a document from 26 January 2000 I found an inventory, the result of a Sisyphean task completed by a poor policeman by the name of Jan Karlsson, who had trawled through every Swedish newspaper that might have mentioned Gry Storvik’s name after she was found murdered on 25 June 1985. After fruitlessly scanning every edition of Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter and Expressen he came to Dala-Demokraten.
Thomas Quick Page 43
