Thomas Quick (38 page)

‘That name Larsson-Auna, where did you snap that one up?’

‘From you, of course.’

‘From me? You couldn’t have done. My name is Farebrink. And Auna is an old family name my dad used.’

Johnny had never used the Auna family name. Not even his old friends and acquaintances knew it. It only existed in local authority records.

Quick went on to describe a friend who lived in a hut in the forest, where he and Johnny visited.

‘I especially remember one time,’ said Quick. ‘I can’t help speculating that this might be a sensitive subject for you . . . We had a sexual encounter, you and me. We masturbated each other in the home of that person.’

‘Hey! Can I tell you what I think about fucking pigs like you? Can I tell you?’ said Johnny.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Quick.

‘Are you suggesting that Johnny’s homosexual?’ asked van der Kwast.

‘No, absolutely not,’ answered Quick.

‘Christ,’ moaned Farebrink.

Anna Wikström turned to Farebrink and suggested that he should respond to what Quick had just said.

‘No, I can’t respond to stupid things like this. I’m not gonna do it. This is so bloody out there, it’s bloody mad.’

Johnny pointed at Quick, eyes narrowing into two slits.

‘You better get clear about one thing! To come here and accuse me of being a fag, you know . . .’

‘I haven’t done that,’ said Quick.

‘Are you some kind of pathological liar or what? Do you believe what you’re saying yourself? Do you?’

Following a break in the proceedings, Quick went on to talk in detail about their meeting in Jokkmokk, the journey to Messaure and the murders in Appojaure. After Quick had given his version of events, Anna Wikström turned to Farebrink.

‘To begin with, what do you have to say about running into Thomas Quick in a restaurant across from Konsum?’

‘Ah! Bullshit. I was never in Jokkmokk that year.’

‘That restaurant opposite Konsum in Jokkmokk, do you know it?’ asked Wikström.

‘No. I know there’s a Konsum supermarket. But there’s no restaurant there,’ answered Farebrink.

Even the investigators knew that the restaurant mentioned by Quick did not exist, which was a fairly significant fault in Quick’s story.

‘Are you familiar with the name Rune Nilsson?’ Wikström prodded.

‘No, absolutely not,’ said Farebrink.

‘Thomas Quick says that you two were meeting some people you’d seen earlier, who were camping by Appojaure.’

‘Which people are you talking about?’ asked Farebrink. ‘I don’t know any bloody Dutch people.’

‘The comment Thomas makes here, that you had some idea these people had insulted you, what about that?’

‘Ah, he’s an idiot, that one! Can’t you hear he’s crazy? What he’s saying is just rubbish. He’s a pathological liar!’

At this point Quick told the story of Rune Nilsson in Messaure, whom Farebrink had supposedly threatened with a knife before he’d gone to Appojaure to murder the couple. After the murder, he then fetched Nilsson and showed him the massacred bodies in the tent.

‘Johnny was showing him that things don’t go well for people who don’t treat Johnny well,’ explained Quick.

‘Who the hell is Rune Nilsson?’ asked Farebrink.

‘He’s a person who lives in Messaure,’ answered Christer van der Kwast.

‘Have you got hold of him? What’s Rune Nilsson saying about all this?’

Everyone on the investigation team knew that Rune Nilsson had denied meeting Quick as adamantly as Farebrink.

‘I’m the one asking the questions,’ said van der Kwast.

The questioning had been going on for almost three hours and Johnny Farebrink was beginning to understand that the situation was serious. He turned to Thomas Quick.

‘You’ve never met me. How the hell can you get me mixed up in this? And these bloody Dutch people . . . Can you tell me how I’m supposed to know them?’

He turned to van der Kwast and put the question to him.

‘When did I meet them?’

‘I’m the one who asks the questions!’

Ture Nässén told me he was suffering as he listened to the interview. He knew that van der Kwast was tormenting Johnny Farebrink quite unnecessarily and that the whole spectacle was a forgone conclusion. Once again he was ashamed of being a policeman.

At long last van der Kwast seemed to understand that he’d gone too far and the questioning led on to Farebrink’s own version of what had happened in July 1984.

‘How was Ingela feeling during this period, the month of July?’

‘Ingela was pretty run down when I was released. She’d been taking drugs the whole time while I was locked up. She was in a pretty bad state.’

‘How did things work out for her, in general?’

‘Well, everything was all fucked up.’

‘Nothing in particular happened?’

‘No, nothing.’

Christer van der Kwast turned to Anna Wikström. It was time to tell the truth.

‘Tell them what we’ve got,’ he said.

While we were looking into the various events here, we came across a file that states Ingela was at Söder Hospital.’

She didn’t have to say anything else. Farebrink knew exactly what Wikström was talking about. He had been thinking about it for months, but only now did the whole episode clearly come back to him.

‘Yeah, oh yeah!’ he said. ‘She had the psychosis!’

‘Mm.’

‘That’s good, you know,’ he continued. ‘I remember that.’

Everyone in the room listened solemnly to Johnny Farebrink’s account of Ingela’s psychosis. It correlated exactly with Ingela’s testimony. He hadn’t been able to have any contact with Ingela, so there was no doubt about the truth of the story. Their testimony, combined with the file, meant that Johnny Farebrink had a watertight alibi for the Appojaure murders.

THE ‘SHALOM INCIDENT’

IN THE SUMMER
of 1995 the
Efterlyst
(‘Wanted’) series on TV3 aired a lengthy report about the unsolved murder of an Israeli citizen.

Yenon Levi was twenty-four years old when he landed at Arlanda Airport on 3 May 1988 for his dream holiday in Sweden. Just over a month later, on Saturday 11 June, he was found murdered on a forest road in Rörshyttan in the region of Dalarna. The body had been severely battered, with two lethal blows to the skull.

Beside the body lay a 118-centimetre-long wooden stick with its bark cleaned off, which the perpetrator had found on the scene. The stick was flecked with splashes of Yenon Levi’s blood and was judged to be the murder weapon. However, the police withheld that detail in the television programme.

The medical examiner could not pinpoint the time of death, but estimated it had been between 8 and 10 June 1988. The last documented trace of Yenon Levi had been at Stockholm Central Station the Sunday before, on 5 June. His movements up until he was found on 11 June remained a mystery, despite the police in Avesta assigning considerable resources to interviewing large numbers of people. The police had no idea when or how he had ended up in the region of Dalarna, where he was finally murdered on the isolated forest road. The murder looked as if it would remain unsolved.

Quick’s confession to the murder of Yenon Levi started with cryptic allusions to ‘the Shalom incident’, two weeks after the report on
Wanted
.

On the evening of 19 August Quick called Seppo Penttinen. He was not feeling well. He described how with the help of an accomplice he had murdered Yenon Levi. They had picked him up in Uppsala and driven towards Garpenberg. There, Quick had held on to Levi while the anonymous helper struck him with ‘a heavy object from the boot of the car’. The body had been left at the scene, ‘lying on its back more than its side and definitely not on its stomach’.

Later, when Penttinen held the first round of questioning about Yenon Levi, Quick’s story had changed on a few vital points. For instance, Quick now stated that he had committed the crime on his own.

I picked him up in the car in Uppsala . . . offered him a lift. We talked a bit in English, I’m not very good at English. But I told him I’m from Falun, I mentioned the copper mine and said I’d really like to show it to him.

Yenon Levi accepted the offer and travelled to Dalarna with Thomas Quick, where they went to a summer cottage outside Heby. Quick surprised Levi with a punch to the stomach and then he delivered ‘the killing blow with a stone to the forehead or the head, maybe two blows’.

After the murder, Quick loaded the dead man onto the back seat of his green Volvo 264 and drove down a forest road, where he dumped the corpse. Levi’s luggage – a trunk that resembled a ‘sailor’s sack’ – was left beside the body. Quick remembered that Levi had a watch with a leather strap; he thought of taking it, but in the end he didn’t remove anything from the scene.

After two hours, Seppo Penttinen stopped the interview with the intention of coming back to it another day.

‘But before you can go on, first we have to analyse what you’ve told me here,’ said Penttinen.

Quick’s description of the murder was inconsistent with a number of known facts established by the investigation. Though it did tally very closely with the reconstruction shown on
Wanted
.

STEN-OVE MAKES CONTACT

ON TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 1995
the
Expressen
reporter Christian Holmén called Ward 36 at Säter Hospital and asked to speak to Thomas Quick.

‘Your brother Sten-Ove has written an open letter to you which is going to be published in
Expressen
. We’d like you to read it before it’s published,’ said Holmén.

A few moments later Quick picked up Sten-Ove’s letter from the fax machine in the reception. He took the letter into his room, closed the door and sat down on his bed to read.

Open Letter to My Brother Thomas Quick

It has now been a few months since my book
Min bror Thomas Quick
was published [. . .] Since the discussion of what I wrote played out in public I am publishing what you are reading now as an open letter. [. . .]

One of the consequences of the book was that I was reunited with my high school sweetheart and recently we were married. My wife has played a great part in helping me change my view of our kinship.

I put distance between us. I pushed you away as a human being. I even said that your childhood was not my childhood, and that your parents were not my parents.

I do not overlook the things you have done. But deeds do not separate brother from brother. [. . .]

You have yourself in various public forums expressed your consternation over my lack of understanding, my distance, my judgement of you. And you may have your justifications for that. But what I hadn’t understood was that having you, ‘Thomas Quick’, as a brother, meant a lifelong struggle for me.

Now I am able to accept that I am in the middle of this struggle, and that this is about trying to keep you in my heart, trying not to lose faith in our kinship, and not to deny that the same blood flows in our veins.

I stand by your side in the struggle against the evil that exists within you.

I still don’t understand the reasons and mechanisms behind your actions when you are transformed into a bloodthirsty monster. [. . .]

But you are my brother, and I love you. [. . .]

Sten-Ove

Sture Bergwall told me that he sat with his brother’s letter in his hand, trying to understand what was happening. Was this a trick? Was there some ulterior motive? He read the letter again and was convinced of Sten-Ove’s sincerity.

It was as if the letter’s conciliatory and loving tone had opened a floodgate; his emotions came pouring out. He was overwhelmed by his longing to see his brother again.

The next day, Quick spoke again with Christian Holmén. They agreed that Sten-Ove would come to Säter a few days later. Quick went into his room and noted in his diary:

Of course I am tense and nervous but I have no doubt that me and Sten-Ove will find a way back to each other. This first meeting will be a little strange, in the sense that there’s going to be a journalist there. I imagine S-O will come back later and that we will be able to talk in more depth about all the things that have happened, his situation today and mine.

Quick had neither police interviews nor therapy booked in for the next day. No one at Säter Hospital knew what was in the offing, so the reunion of the two brothers was an untarnished promise that brought much happiness to Quick. In his diary he wrote:

9/11 1995

Sten-Ove and his open letter have obviously dominated my thoughts. I don’t know. My situation has changed since the letter and I am faced with difficult decisions. Tomorrow I am seeing Birgitta again, and maybe it will clarify then.

The morning after, Quick told Birgitta Ståhle about his brother’s letter. Her reaction was like an unexpected cold shower for Quick. She was very upset and explained that she had to report what had happened to chief physician Erik Kall.

As soon as Kall found out about Quick’s contact with his brother, he told Christer van der Kwast, and it was only a matter of time before Seppo Penttinen and Claes Borgström were informed.

In his diary Thomas Quick wrote:

Seppo called me up and was really upset. I wasn’t prepared for Sten-Ove’s visit to cause Kwast and Seppo to get so upset.

But what made a meeting between two brothers so problematic?

Quick had talked about the terrible things that Sten-Ove had subjected him to as a child. He had also pointed him out as an accomplice in the murder of Johan Asplund. His immeasurable enthusiasm at the idea of meeting Sten-Ove was damaging to his credibility, in the opinion of Penttinen, van der Kwast and Ståhle.

Thomas Quick listened to their reasoning, saw the sense in what they were saying, but was not prepared to give in. He wrote in his diary:

I
want
to see Sten-Ove although I am beginning to see that it might not be appropriate. But I can’t and will not say no. Seppo suggested that he could be present, which is out of the question
for me. The easiest thing would be if Kwast were to arrest me, then I wouldn’t have to give this a further thought – I can’t say no to Sten-Ove.

When Quick’s team realised that the meeting looked as if it would go ahead, there was panic back at camp. ‘There’s a storm about Sten-Ove’s visit,’ he wrote in his diary. They all tried their hardest to make him cancel the meeting.