And there – on 2 October 1998, ten months before the famed visit to the crime scene – was an article on the subject written by none other than Gubb Jan Stigson.
Dala-Demokraten was one of the newspapers which Ward 36 at Säter Hospital subscribed to, and in interrogations relating to other cases it had emerged that Quick read it daily. I sought out the article in question at the Kurs-och tidskriftsbiblioteket (Academic and Newspaper Library) in Gothenburg. Under the headline ‘Thomas Quick Now Being Linked to Sex Murders in Norway’, Stigson went on to write, ‘Currently interest is being focused primarily on two murders of women and one disappearance, all three of them Norwegian crime classics.’
After a short outline of the Trine Jensen and Marianne Rugaas Knutsen cases came the crucial information:
The third case concerns 23-year-old Gry Storvik, who went missing in central Oslo and was found murdered in a car park in Myrvoll on 25 June 1985. The discovery was not far from the place where Trine’s body was found. The cases have several similarities. The victim’s bodies bear signs of violence with many similarities. And furthermore, both girls disappeared within a radius of just a few hundred metres.
The information on the murder of Gry which Quick was able to read in Dala-Demokraten was undoubtedly quite a good start, given how the questioning was carried out and how Quick’s stories were usually ‘developed’ over the course of an investigation.
For some unknown reason, when during my initial research Gubb Jan Stigson was kind enough to photocopy around three hundred of his articles on Quick, he chose not to include this one in the collection.
The fact that the article was entered into the CID investigation report didn’t prevent the district court from being kept in the dark about its existence.
The podium debate began with the moderator, Monica Saarinen, also the presenter of Studio Ett, pointing out the irony of Gubb Jan Stigson having received the Grand Prize of Publicistklubben (the Publicists’ Club) in 1995 for his journalism on Quick – the very same subject as mine.
After some small talk about how we had first come into contact with one another, and clarifying that we had taken radically opposed positions on the question of Quick’s guilt, Stigson explained: ‘You get to a point where you can’t get any further, you just have to accept that he’s guilty. I’d like to say that I’ve maintained a critical outlook all along. And then all this happens, all this nonsense. This suggestion that he was just a clown. There’s been complete silence about his background, which is unique in Swedish criminal history.’
‘Hannes, how can you be so sure he’s innocent?’ Saarinen asked.
‘I’ve read all the material,’ I explained. ‘Above all I’ve lined up everything that spoke in favour of his guilt. And there’s nothing left. There’s not a shred of evidence. These judgments only rest on Quick’s testimony, and once you read his stories and realise how they’ve emerged, you see how in the beginning he knew absolutely nothing about these murders. He’s wrong about practically everything.’
At this point Stigson started shaking his head and I felt a stab of irritation.
‘You’re shaking your head and you’re doing it even though you know better. The audience hasn’t read these interrogation reports, but you have. So what circumstances is he aware of, then, in the early interviews, for even one of his murders?’
‘The point is . . . in every case he says something early on that sort of makes it worth carrying on with it, and then he complicates it and in the end you uncover astonishing information. How did he end up in Ørje Forest?’
‘He read about it in Verdens Gang.’
‘About Ørje Forest? No one knew anything about Ørje Forest before he . . .’
‘Ørje Forest is mentioned in Verdens Gang. As is all the information he gives about the Therese murder.’
‘No, no . . .’
‘Perhaps you don’t know any better, but you are mistaken.’
Gubb Jan Stigson changed the subject and asked why I seemed unconcerned about Sture Bergwall’s previous criminal record. I answered that I was looking into how the Swedish legal system and the Swedish system of psychiatric care were capable of dealing with a mentally ill person, who was also drugged, who confessed to murders – not what his prior criminal record had been.
This didn’t prevent Stigson from going on. Instead he launched into a description of ‘ten to twelve sexual attacks of varying degrees of severity’ which Sture Bergwall had apparently begun committing at the age of fifteen, followed by the stabbing in 1974. Monica Saarinen interjected that Stigson, ahead of the debate, had sent her eighty articles which she had read, and that he mentioned these earlier crimes in an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of them.
‘I mean they are the prerequisite for what comes after,’ Stigson claimed.
‘How do you mean?’ asked Saarinen.
‘Yeah, but I mean . . . he has suffered with this . . . these are perversions that are virtually incurable.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Saarinen.
‘Well . . . I mean . . . that’s what the statistics say.’
Stigson alluded to two other cases and the doctors he had spoken to.
‘You mean that because he did this he could very well be guilty?’ asked Saarinen.
‘No, but because he’s got this thing it’s worth investigating to see if he’s guilty. But it says . . . Fransson checks his background and comes to the conclusion that . . .’
At this stage I could no longer hold my silence, and I interrupted him.
‘What Gubb Jan is talking about is a mix of hearsay, uninvestigated incidents, alleged incidents and so on. There are two prosecutions where he confessed and he was found guilty. That is correct. And I’ve mentioned that he has been found guilty of two extremely serious violent crimes. I don’t think there’s much point going over events that go back decades. What’s incredible is that he has been found guilty of eight murders which I and many others are saying he never committed. If we could just leave the 1960s behind and make our way into modern times it would be a huge relief. To keep stirring and stirring and stirring the pot as Gubb Jan Stigson has been doing now for twenty years about these various statements made by doctors, about events that happened when he was only nineteen, these so-called . . .’
‘Fourteen.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t the oldest go back to when he’s fourteen? About fourteen. That’s what he says, anyway.’
‘Oh, I see, you’re going even further back now. Soon you’ll be back in the 1950s. I think it’s shameful, actually. Gubb Jan Stigson’s journalism is a character assassination of a psychiatric patient.’
‘Character assassination? But this is . . . this is . . .’
‘Gubb Jan Stigson has copied three hundred of his articles for me and there’s this constant dwelling on this . . .’
I was forced to turn towards him, rather than the audience.
‘I really don’t understand what you are doing, because it doesn’t have a bloody thing to do with the actual verdicts.’
‘Oh, it absolutely does!’
‘The question of his guilt in these murders?’
‘No, no, it’s not as simple as that!’
‘The question of guilt in murders? That is what we’re supposed to be discussing here. A person who’s been wrongly convicted of murder.’
‘Oh, but it’s so easy to wriggle out of this one. It’s almost fraudulent not to include his background . . .’
Monica Saarinen tried to break the poisonous atmosphere by changing the subject, but Stigson and I quickly launched into a new argument. He insisted that Quick was also guilty of the murder of Thomas Blomgren and I tried in vain to convince him that it was absolutely impossible, while at the same time informing the audience of Quick’s visits to the Kungliga biblioteket (the Royal National Library) in Stockholm to revise his facts.
‘Hannes, are you saying that Gubb Jan also helped Thomas Quick acquire information so he could keep co
nfessing?’
‘Gubb Jan has published articles where he’s named victims, detailed where the victims disappeared, described the sort of violence the victim was subjected to, where the victim was found and so on, before Thomas Quick had even mentioned anything about it, and . . .’
‘What case are you talking about?’ Gubb Jan cut in.
‘Gry Storvik, for example.’
‘Yes . . . but . . . surely . . .’
‘Surprisingly enough, that’s one of the articles you chose not to copy for me. I found it in a newspaper archive. On 2 October 1998 you published an article that described everything Thomas Quick needed to know to make a confession. Before this point he had never even mentioned the name Gry Storvik.’
‘I knew nothing about Gry Storvik until I heard that he’d named her!’ Stigson hissed.
‘So it must be a forgery that’s found its way into the archived microfilm, then?’ Stigson slumped a little over the lectern where we were standing.
‘I have it on my computer. I’ll show it to you immediately afterwards,’ I said.
‘Have you yourself given any thought to the possibility that Thomas Quick could have got information from your articles?’ asked Saarinen.
‘There is nothing in my articles that has any bearing on these cases,’ Stigson insisted. ‘He says I gave him this book . . . Göran Elwin’s book on the Johan case. Nothing in that book has any bearing on the court verdict!’
‘Well, it contains descriptions of all his clothes and his red rucksack,’ I said. ‘These are the types of things I know for a fact that Thomas Quick carefully made a note of so that he could talk about it. So of course you’ve given him information.’
‘Yeah, but . . .’
‘And you gave him that book.’
‘But if he could go to the library anyway, why would he come to me for a book?’
Stigson changed tack again with a long description of his contact with Quick and how he had frequently had telephone contact with him because he felt ‘sorry for him’.
I tried to hit the rewind button: ‘It’s important to grasp that these murder investigations, the entire Thomas Quick story, is driven by the media, the police and his therapy in a strange process of collusion. In which the media is used by the police in order to . . .’
‘Bloody hell . . .’ Stigson shook his head.
‘What are you trying to say?’ I asked.
‘Well, bloody hell! You think I’ve been colluding with the police?’
‘Every time Thomas Quick starts talking or suggesting anything it’s immediately leaked to you or other journalists who start publishing photos of the victims, of . . .’
‘Who’s leaking?’
‘Well, clearly someone on the inside of the police investigation. Sometimes van der Kwast, sometimes Seppo Penttinen. Why would anyone do that during an ongoing police investigation?’
‘That’s rubbish. I’ve never had anything like that . . .’
‘Look me in the eye! Is this really just rubbish?’
‘Yes, that I . . . yes, yes! That on a regular basis they were supplying me with something so he’d be able to . . . yes, it’s rubbish. Not in any way!’
‘But you’ve had information from day one!’ I protested.
Stigson started talking about an interview he did with Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, and all the positive things he had said about repressed memories and therapy.
‘You’ve totally lost touch with reality,’ I said.
But Stigson just carried on talking about Svartenbrandt. Monica Saarinen wanted us to start rounding things off, and I asked what – if anything – might make Gubb Jan Stigson change his mind about the case of Thomas Quick. He said that he hadn’t seen ‘anything that explains anything away’.
‘Nothing?’ I wondered.
‘Nothing.’
‘But what could make you . . .’
‘In the end you reach an end point. I’ve reached that point as far as these cases go.’
I was starting to feel faint. So it really was that simple: it was about faith.
Having it or not having it.
The discussion was thrown open to the audience and the first question was familiar: could Swedish courts of law really be so lax that they imposed sentences without any technical evidence?
Stigson put his foot down: ‘Not technical evidence in the sense of fingerprints and DNA. But there’s other technical evidence. Like marks cut into birch trees and things like that. Phosphate mapping. Sniffer dogs.’
‘Yeah, that dog is pretty interesting,’ I said. ‘A privately owned cadaver dog that reacts to human remains in an incredibly large number of places. Archaeological excavations have been carried out in over twenty locations, earth has been put through a sieve, a lake has been emptied, but nothing has been found except for this tiny little fragment weighing half a gram which, it’s now been revealed, is not even bone. Don’t you draw any conclusions from that?’
‘Well, you know . . .’
‘Gubb Jan Stigson, you’re the only one who still believes this.’
‘Yes, I seem to be.’
After the debate had ended I stayed on with a few colleagues up by the stage.
At the same time, Gubb Jan Stigson packed up his things and quickly walked away through the audience.
Before I’d had time to react, he’d left the auditorium. He clearly wasn’t interested in the article I had offered to show him on my computer.
THE LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
ON 20 APRIL 2010 Thomas Olsson and Martin Cullberg handed in Sture Bergwall’s second petition for a new trial, this time regarding the Therese Johannesen case. About a month later, on 27 May, Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné announced her decision in the Yenon Levi case. Although the retrial was accepted, no trial was scheduled. The evidence was so paltry that there was simply no point in holding new proceedings, as would normally happen.
‘After reviewing the case I have come to the conclusion that the evidence does not hold any possibility of corroborating a crime,’ she wrote. ‘Bergwall denies the crime. Certainly over the course of the investigation he has offered some information that tallies with some of the evidence, but his statement is characterised by contradictions and changes to such an extent that a conviction cannot be considered as likely. For these reasons I am dropping all charges against Sture Bergwall.’
Christer van der Kwast was furious.
‘I think it’s rubbish not to seize the opportunity of a full examination out in the open where Quick can explain his earlier confessions. It’s an easy way out of a substantial and difficult new legal process. Quick was convicted on proper grounds and the petition for a retrial has been improperly approved. I believe that media pressure has played a role in this capitulation,’ he commented to TT.
After the summer Björn Ericson announced his decision regarding the Therese retrial. He did not oppose a review.
It was only a matter of time before Sture Bergwall would be freed of all eight murder convictions. He would go down in history – though in an entirely different way to how Birgitta Ståhle, Sven Åke Christianson, Christer van der Kwast, Seppo Penttinen and other participants in the Quick scandal could possibly have imagined.
On 2 September 2010 Chief Prosecutor Bo Lindgren, appointed by Björn Ericson to review the Trine and Gry verdicts, received the original raw footage behind the edited version of the reconnaissance that had been shown to the Falu District Court at the trial in Stockholm.
They were delivered in two boxes. There were thirteen VHS tapes and eight mini-cassettes, in total some thirty-nine hours of recorded video. The technical division transferred the films to DVDs and, before long, copies were delivered to Thomas Olsson at the Leif Silbersky law firm in Stockholm. There, Jenny Küttim burned her own copies, which she transferred to a server in order for me to download them and burn my own copies right away.
There was something almost ceremonial about the way I fed that first film into my laptop. For me, I felt lik
e I had reached the end of my investigation. I had checked all the information I could check, straightened out all the other question marks – the inspection film from the trial for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik was all that remained.
The films had been shot using two cameras. One showed the road in front of the car in which, among others, Thomas Quick, Seppo Penttinen, Christer van der Kwast and Sven Åke Christianson were travelling. Another filmed Quick’s face during the journey, with Penttinen clearly visible in the seat in front.
I quickly realised that this was the footage that was most interesting.
The films were desperately dull for the most part. They showed the trip from Säter to Oslo, then around and around Oslo and then out of the city again. A few of the films showed the reconstructions at the murder scenes, where Thomas Quick tried to demonstrate how he had murdered the women. Basically he didn’t do anything at all right, and sure enough none of these scenes were included in the edited version shown to the district court.
But the most interesting thing was of course to be able at last to see whether Quick, at the inspection in August 1999, eighteen years after the murder of Trine Jensen, was really able to ‘direct the car without any significant difficulty to within a few yards of the place where she was found’, as well as the famous sequence where he spontaneously reacted with powerful anxiety as the convoy of vehicles passed the car park where Gry Storvik’s corpse had been left. In the films shown to the district court there was no doubt about either of these supposed facts.
In the unedited film the cars drove around Oslo for an absolute eternity. Sture sat in the back, high as a kite and with staring eyes. He held up his index finger and slowly wagged it back and forth. Seppo Penttinen was in front, stony-faced.
At long last the police grew tired of driving around aimlessly and decided to go to Kolbotn, which is closer to where the bodies were found. Even here Quick wasn’t able to find his way. Once it was clear that he didn’t have a clue where they were supposed to go, Penttinen took charge.
Thomas Quick Page 44
