Thomas Quick (20 page)

‘He had a black . . . what are those cars called?’ Quick pondered.

‘Studebaker,’ prompted Kjell Persson.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Quick.

‘Quite an unusual car,’ the chief physician pointed out.

‘Yes,’ said Quick, then remembered what sort of car Sixten actually had. It was an Isabella.

‘A Borgward Isabella,’ Kjell Persson corrected.

‘Exactly,’ said Quick.

‘What happened to that boy, then?’

‘Him? He was hidden. I hid him.’

‘Do you know where you hid him?’

Quick turned to his therapist.

‘I told you about that one, didn’t I? That half-rotted ladder I lifted up and there was a space underneath?’

‘A ladder, you’re saying?’ Officer Persson tried to clarify.

‘A big ladder, I mean, sort of partly overgrown with vegetation and soil, and I mean it was fairly rotten. But when I lifted it up the ground came away underneath.’

‘Yes, yes, something that was not in use but . . .’

‘Exactly, it had been lying there for years.’

Officer Persson asked if Quick knew anything else about the boy. What was his name? Where did he come from? How old was he?

‘Well, he was my own age or a couple of years younger. And his name was probably Thomas.’

‘Has the boy’s body been found since the murder?’

Quick didn’t remember if he had spoken about this in therapy, and he turned to Kjell Persson, who had no recollection of Quick ever having mentioned it. Quick said that he didn’t believe the body was found for many years.

Even though Quick had confessed so readily to the murders of Johan in Sundsvall and Thomas in Småland, Officer Persson was not satisfied.

‘I’m thinking along the lines of if there’s anyone else you’ve . . . killed in a similar way to these others you’ve told me about?’

‘No,’ said Quick. ‘But when you think about how hidden these events have been, I obviously can’t give you a categorical no. What I can say is “no, I don’t think so”. I suppose that’s how I can answer a question like that.’

‘But is there something in your thoughts that maybe makes you think there could be something more? Is there some image, something you remember inside that makes you . . .’

‘No, no memory,’ Quick answered patiently, but Jörgen Persson would not let it go.

‘There’s nothing in your thoughts that makes you think there could be any more?’

‘No, nothing apart from this. Like I just said, this has been so well hidden that I can’t totally rule out that something else has happened.’

‘Do you have any more faint images, memories of anything?’

‘No,’ Quick answered.

Perhaps the chief physician Göran Fransson had described Quick’s ‘fantasies or visions on the subject of . . . Peter and Mikael’. In any case, Officer Persson wasn’t about to let the matter drop. He insisted on trying to make Quick confess to more murders.

‘I was thinking there might be something sort of tucked away,’ he tried, ‘which you have some vague sense of or a few thoughts about.’

But his efforts were fruitless. Quick refused to go along with the idea that he had committed any other murders. Finally, Jörgen Persson suggested that they should leave it there.

The interview had lasted three hours and Quick was formally notified that he was now suspected of murder.

At Borlänge police station, Chief Prosecutor Lars Ekdahl was given a verbal report on the questioning. It was destined to be the last contact the Borlänge police ever had with Thomas Quick.

AIMLESS WANDERING AND DIVERSIONS

AS THE MURDER
of Johan Asplund had been committed in the county of Västernorrland, the case ended up on the desk of Christer van der Kwast at the regional Prosecution Authority in Härnösand.

Christer van der Kwast was forty-eight years old, born and raised in Stockholm. After completing his legal studies he worked as the chief clerk at Södertörn District Court in the late 1960s, then as a trainee prosecutor in Umeå and Östersund.

After finishing a strategically useful course in corporate finance, he was taken on in 1986 as the regional prosecutor in Härnösand, with his principal focus on financial crime. In 1990, the Social Democrats announced that financial crime would be a priority area in the legal system. That same year van der Kwast was made a chief prosecutor. Perhaps his foremost achievement in those years as regional prosecutor was the so-called Leasing Consult case, with a total of twenty individuals prosecuted and a number of trials throughout the 1980s – but many of the cases ended up in the appeals court, with reduced sentences and acquittals. White-collar crime in Västernorrland was not a particularly common problem, and for this reason he had to devote much of his time to other crimes. The only murder investigation he had previously been involved with was that of Eva Söderström, who was stabbed to death. The investigation ran into the sand. He spent most of 1992 on speeding offences.

The conversation with the chamber of prosecutions in Borlänge on 1 March 1993 must have been a welcome change. Admittedly at
least ten other nutters had already confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund. Now a patient from Säter would also be joining their number.

Yet the confession had to be checked, and this meant that Christer van der Kwast needed an investigator. He chose Seppo Penttinen, a Sundsvall policeman specialising in narcotics surveillance who, after twenty-three years in his job, still had the title of Senior Police Officer. Very much like van der Kwast, his experience was focused on a different type of criminality. And up until that point he had operated in almost complete anonymity.

That would soon be a thing of the past.

The new investigators had hardly had time to finish their initial questioning at Säter before Anna-Clara Asplund took the telephone call from
Expressen
and was informed that ‘a bloke down in Falun’ had confessed to the murder of her son, Johan.

It didn’t take long before the crime reporter Gubb Jan Stigson had a secret source – ‘one of the investigators’, according to his article – for the most important story of his career. His first article on Thomas Quick was published in
Dala-Demokraten
on 10 March 1993 under the headline ‘Falun Resident Confesses to Murder of Missing Boy’.

‘If the confession is true it means that one of Sweden’s most notorious criminal cases has been solved,’ wrote Stigson. ‘One of the investigators’ had told him that final proof had not yet been found; Johan’s body was still missing.

Although the story was relatively shaky, and ‘people with insight into the case had expressed their doubts about the man’s story’, Stigson couldn’t quite help himself from revealing the suspect’s identity. He wrote that the man who had confessed to the murder of Johan was a ‘42-year-old Falun resident, well known as the kidnapper of a bank manager in Grycksbo’. The question of the identity of the ‘Falun resident’ who had murdered Johan was thereby answered for all who had ever known of Sture Bergwall.

The following day, Gubb Jan Stigson continued his reporting and
was able to divulge that ‘the Falun resident had pointed out where Johan is buried’.

‘He has provided workable information on the body,’ the head of the preliminary investigation, Christer van der Kwast, commented to
Dala-Demokraten
. ‘This is obviously very interesting to us. The case had earlier been held up by the absence of a body.’

The article was illustrated by a large full-body photograph of Sture Bergwall and his dog Upfold, a Scottish deerhound – most likely the only dog of this breed to be found in Falun. For ‘ethical reasons’, Sture’s face had been blurred out. A few days later, Stigson got hold of another photograph of Sture, sitting on his racing bicycle. Once again, the newspaper had ‘preserved his anonymity’ by blurring his face.

When the leaks from the investigation started running dry, Stigson called in the bank robber Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, who had previously been locked up in Säter Hospital with Quick.

‘He’s probably telling the truth,’ said ‘Svarten’ (Blackie) in
Dala-Demokraten
.

On Saturday, 13 March Kjell Persson drove Thomas Quick to Sundsvall for the second time. Other passengers in the car included Göran Fransson and a psychiatric nurse from Säter Hospital. When they reached the town of Myre in Njurunda they met with Christer van der Kwast, the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren, police inspector C.G. Carlsson and senior officer Seppo Penttinen.

Penttinen took the wheel of the Volvo in which Quick was travelling and they headed directly for Norra Stadsberget in Sundsvall. The trip went smoothly apart from Quick suffering a few anxiety attacks concerning what lay ahead. Once they got there, Quick was led onto the path where he had previously walked with Kjell Persson.

This time, the walk gave rise to enormous anxiety in Quick, who had to be supported under the arms by Fransson and Persson. Quick signalled that he wanted to turn right, only to be overwhelmed by such heavy anxiety that he ‘leaned back into the arms of the accompanying doctors’.

Finally they reached the spot where Quick claimed he had killed Johan. He sat down on a boulder, held his arms out at an angle of forty-five degrees and announced that within this area he had hidden Johan’s clothes and ‘footwear’. When Quick had to specify the exact position he grew vague and could neither say how far into the terrain the police should search nor describe the general appearance of the hiding place. Suffering intense anxiety, he then went on to describe how he had carried Johan back to the car.

In his report, Göran Fransson wrote:

The patient has now been questioned by police after confessing to the long-unsolved murder of the boy Johan Asplund in Sundsvall. A reconnaissance of the area had been set up for next week, but in view of the leaks within the police and the great press interest, we will make the reconnaissance today under conditions of absolute secrecy. [. . .] During the inspection [of the woods by Norra Stadsberget] the patient suffered from increasingly high anxiety and constantly lost his grip on reality, upon which he asked us to bring him back, which we did with concrete calls emphasising time and place. The last short distance he was more or less carried by the arms by me and Kjell. By then, he was overwhelmed by strong anxiety and hyperventilating. He had to breathe into a plastic bag.

‘After a moment of rest and a toilet visit, as well as consumption of coffee and sandwiches, Quick announced that he had enough strength back to resume the inspection,’ noted Seppo Penttinen in his police report. The route they took seemed haphazard, with a good deal of uncertainty. Quick said that he ‘very likely travelled on smaller roads’ towards the Obs! supermarket, which in practice proved impossible; he ‘seemed to recall’ he went this way, and he ‘experienced’ that he probably went that way.

The police were forced to make certain ‘route adjustments’. Quick was clearly unsure during the inspection and ‘tried to work out how, in a logical sense, he would have chosen the route’. Göran Fransson explained in the file how the search took place:

The patient sort of feels and is helped by Kjell [Persson] to interpret those feelings. When he had a sense that he recognised a particular stretch of terrain he had a very severe panic attack with intense chest pains. He also had a severe headache. He hyperventilated and had to breathe into a plastic bag again. He got another 5 mg Diazepam and 2 Citodon for the headache.

After a two-hour diversion based on Quick’s directions, the file makes it clear that a collective decision had been made not to listen to him:

The police suggested another route than the one he has reacted to, and after driving along this road for about ten minutes we reached an area he had earlier described well during police questioning, where once again he grew extremely anxious but was also more collected than he was earlier.

The cars turned into an open area, where they parked. In his memo of the inspection Seppo Penttinen noted:

At 16.15 Quick stepped out of the car, saying that he recognised the place. He had had severe panic symptoms in the car and had not dared look out to the right where the rocks drop away with a line of visible boulders. He strolled along the right-hand side of the fields, with the intention of trying to point out the place where he had hidden Johan Asplund’s body. At that point he was surrounded by his doctors and his psychiatric nurses. It was difficult for him to turn his eyes to the edge of the rocks.

Thomas Quick now revealed that he had cut up Johan Asplund’s body. He indicated where he hid the head ‘with a fairly high level of probability’ and where the police should look for other body parts. After three and a half hours of reconniassance he was utterly exhausted and Christer van der Kwast made the assessment that the suspect had given them all the information he had. The inspection was concluded.

*

In the spring of 1993, with great optimism, dog patrols with cadaver dogs, forensic technicians and other personnel searched the places Quick had pointed out. Readers of
Dala-Demokraten
were able to follow Gubb Jan Stigson’s daily bulletins on the search for Johan Asplund’s body.

On 19 March the newspaper ran its seventh article on Quick in ten days: ‘It came to nothing,’ Stigson wrote, with obvious disappointment.

‘We have a strange starting point,’ explained Christer van der Kwast in the article. ‘For once we have a person who’s confessed to a serious crime. Now we have to confirm in some way that what he has admitted to is actually true.’

During the questioning taking place alongside the search, Thomas Quick was constantly coming up with new versions of events. On 18 March he said that he cut the body into several parts using a lopping saw. Seppo Penttinen wondered how he had managed to part the head from the body.

‘Was it difficult in any way to make a saw run smoothly through the actual tissue?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Quick. ‘It was quite bothersome.’

He said that the head was left on a rocky ridge in Åvike, just outside Sundsvall. Then he drove to another hill, carried Johan’s body to the top and threw it into a ravine.

On 21 April Quick offered that he had wrapped Johan’s torso in the seat covers of the car. The head was left behind in Åvike, while all the other body parts were placed in a cardboard box marked ‘Korsnäs Bread’. He drove towards Härnösand and stopped on the bridge to Sandö, where he dumped the cardboard box and its contents into the Ångerman river. In the end, the questioning had to be stopped on account of Quick’s overwhelming panic attacks.