Thomas Quick (40 page)

During questioning on 23 November and 19 December, Quick mentioned that the tent canvas was cut open and that a long rip was created as well as a smaller rip in the place where he had stabbed at the man.

He also gave a description of the couple and their positions in the tent. Information given was entirely spontaneous. According to Penttinen there was no divergence between what
Quick stated earlier in the investigation and what he has stated here in the main proceedings.

The first interview with Thomas Quick runs to eighty-one pages. Practically all the information Quick gives on this occasion is factually flawed and a number of items are later changed, often more than once, before he reaches his ‘final story’. I have italicised all the factual errors from the first interview:

SETBACKS

THE COURT’S VERDICT
on the Appojaure murders kicked up a hornets’ nest of interest in Quick in Norway, and in the spring of 1996 a number of Norwegian journalists began conferring with the talkative serial killer.

Quick’s Norwegian adventure had in fact started in November 1994, when Quick told Penttinen about a murder that had apparently taken place between 1988 and 1990. The victim was a young boy of Slavic appearance with an oversized bicycle. Quick mentioned a place known as Lindesberg and the first name ‘Dusjunka’. A month later the boy’s name had changed to ‘Dusjka’ and was being associated with a place called ‘Mysa’ in Norway.

In December 1994, Penttinen made an enquiry to the Norwegian police about any missing boys who might correspond with the description provided by Quick. The answer, as we already know, was that no one answering to the name of ‘Dusjunka’ or ‘Dusjka’ had gone missing, but two African teenage boys had disappeared from a refugee centre in 1989. The journalist Svein Arne Haavik at
Verdens Gang
picked up the story and in July 1995 published further information on the two boys in his series of articles on Thomas Quick – the same articles that tipped off Quick about the disappearance of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in July 1988.

The Norwegian murder victims – Therese Johannesen and the two African refugees – were added to the police investigation via Quick’s ‘therapy board’, a noticeboard on which symbolic images were pinned up and used in the sessions with Birgitta Ståhle. The
board was regularly photographed by Seppo Penttinen, who tried to interpret the more or less codified messages.

By February 1996 the therapy board had been supplemented with a map of Norway and photographs of a blonde nine-year-old girl and two teenage boys of an African appearance. Penttinen understood perfectly well what Quick was trying to say.

After the successful conviction in Gällivare, reconstructions were held in Norway and Sweden so that Thomas Quick could show how the abduction and killing of the two boys had occurred. The Norwegian reconstructions were extensively covered by the media, which did not escape the attention of anyone involved – least of all Quick.

‘We bought the newspapers for him, after all. He wanted
Verdens Gang
and
Dagbladet
,’ the inspector Ture Nässén told us.

On 23 April 1996, while Quick and his entourage were in Norway,
Dagbladet
ran an article that included photos of the two boys. The investigators were aware of the fact that Quick read the newspapers on a daily basis, but seemed unconcerned about any information he might pick up in this way.

When they stayed the night at Ullevål Hospital in Oslo, one of the nurses gave Quick a baseball cap with ullevål sykehus printed on it and they established a friendly connection. Quick was careless enough to show the nurse the article in
Dagbladet
where the two boys had been circled in a group photograph. Quick pointed at them and said, ‘I recognise those two.’ The nurse called the Norwegian police and reported what had happened.

In other words it was a nurse who wasn’t even involved in the case, rather than the investigators, who brought the fact that Quick had seen a photograph of the ‘Norway boys’ to the Norwegian police’s attention.

Before they disappeared, both of Quick’s alleged victims had had to provide fingerprints in Norway, and while digging for the boys’ remains in a place known as Guldsmedshyttan it was decided, just to cover every possibility, to run these fingerprints against the Swedish register. Hits were received for both.

One of the boys had gone to Stockholm, where he had sought political asylum at police headquarters in Kungsholmen. He had been ‘dacted’,
which meant that he had been photographed and had provided fingerprints for electronic dactyloscope scanning and storage. The police were immediately able to call up the name, social security number and registered address of the alleged murder victim, and before long Detective Inspector Ture Nässén was having a chat with him.

‘He was a nice chap, living in Fisksätra with his wife and children, but he’d never met Thomas Quick,’ Nässén told me.

Quick’s second victim had found his way to Ljungby, from where he went on to Canada. Nässén reached him there by telephone, and after that his conclusion about Quick was clear cut: ‘The whole thing was just fiction! They said they left Norway because they knew they wouldn’t get political asylum there.’

Without describing what they had learned, the police prepared a photo line-up of African boys, in which both of the ‘disappeared’ boys were included. This was carried out in the police van in Guldsmedshyttan while the forensic technicians were outside the vehicle, digging for the two murder victims who had already been found alive.

Penttinen began by reminding Quick of the number of times he had changed his story.

‘If one looks overall at the information you have given in various interviews and the reconstructions we have done, one could end up with a bit of a confused impression.’

After that, Penttinen asked if Quick had seen any photographs of the boys, but he answered very firmly that he had not.

At this point, Christer van der Kwast broke into the interview. This time he put pressure on Quick, but he started cautiously.

‘We’ve had a third-party tip-off from Ullevål Hospital suggesting that you’ve seen photographs of these boys in the newspaper,’ said van der Kwast.

‘What newspaper would that have been?’ asked Quick, mystified.

Quick wouldn’t accept that he had seen a photo, and he wasn’t willing to change his story that he had murdered the two boys.

‘I’m not quite sure you described what happened to boy number two, the one who was taken from Mysen alive,’ van der Kwast probed. ‘Where did he die?’

‘He died here,’ Quick answered without any hesitation.

Quick’s message was clear -the boys had been moved from Oslo to Guldsmedshyttan and the police would find the bodies if they just kept digging.

When Quick was shown the photo line-up he carefully scrutinised the faces of the twelve dark-skinned boys.

‘There’s an immediate recognition of one of the faces,’ said Quick, and put his right index finger on photo number five, a youth with a thin face, sad eyes and a half-open mouth.

‘And possibly . . .’ he said with a certain hesitation, pointing at number ten.

‘Five and ten,’ Penttinen concluded. ‘With number five you said there was an immediate recognition.’

Christer van der Kwast excused himself and said they needed to ‘check something’, upon which Penttinen turned off the tape recorder and they left the van. Five minutes later they were back again, and it was left to van der Kwast to deliver the crushing blow.

‘So I have to tell you something about the person you’ve just pointed out, number five,’ he said in his most authoritative voice.

Quick hummed by way of an answer and realised the news would not be good.

‘According to the information I have, this person is still alive,’ said van der Kwast. ‘This has been possible to confirm using fingerprints.’

Quick had no comment to make on this but he seemed shocked.

Ture Nässén was present throughout the process of the interrogations, the photo line-up and the eventual discovery of Quick’s African victims, living in Sweden and Canada respectively.

‘There was panic in the ranks! I had to drive Quick back to Säter Hospital. It’s a mystery to me that the investigation could go on after the African boys.’

Yet even after this, Christer van der Kwast and Seppo Penttinen kept ignoring the troubling fact that Quick was obtaining his information about murders from newspapers and journalists. But events at Guldsmedshyttan had finally convinced Ture Nässén that Quick was just a big talker.

‘The outcome for me was that I resigned from the investigation. I was done with Thomas Quick.’

Alongside the Norwegian investigations, the work on the Yenon Levi murder was still ongoing and it was decided to stage a reconstruction in May 1996.

In the original Levi investigation, extensive forensic work had been done, and this material was carefully examined by Jan Olsson and the forensic technician Östen Eliasson.

Based on this they outlined a likely sequence of events for the murder. However, after their experiences of the reconstructions in Appojaure and the trial in Gällivare, Olsson suspected that Seppo Penttinen was leaking information to Quick. For this reason, he and Eliasson decided not to let Penttinen have access to their findings prior to the reconstruction.

At eleven in the morning on 20 May 1996, Thomas Quick arrived at the alleged crime scene to describe how he had murdered Yenon Levi. The usual entourage – police, nurses from Säter, the therapist, the memory expert, the prosecutor and the forensic technicians – were all assembled.

Thomas Quick, wearing a black baseball cap, blue-and-white bomber jacket, black trousers and trainers, was not in the mood. Before the reconstruction began, he asked to say a few words to everyone. There was no mistaking that he was emotionally fraught.

‘To begin with I want to say this to Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast – I am still both upset and frustrated over what happened last Monday. I just don’t understand why Christer van der Kwast can’t come to me directly and apologise!’

It was only a week since the humiliating fiasco in Guldsmedshyttan. Subsequently Quick had been taken to Stockholm with Birgitta Ståhle for a meeting with van der Kwast. They met late in the evening at the CID offices and van der Kwast took a hard line, demanding tangible evidence and ‘mature behaviour’ from Quick,
who was not used to this kind of treatment. He left the meeting in a fury.

Now there was a golden opportunity to confront van der Kwast before the whole investigation team.

‘I don’t know if it will make me clam up today. I hope it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t it’s no thanks to Christer van der Kwast. I don’t think he’s admitted his responsibility in this whole matter. He hasn’t found a sense of perspective on himself as a person, and he mixes personal things with his professional role, I feel. I’m really disappointed and I hope Christer van der Kwast has the courage to apologise to me personally.’

Seppo Penttinen ignored the embarrassing prelude and tried to get Quick in a good mood by telling him how they had managed to satisfy all the demands Quick had made prior to the reconstruction. It had not been an easy task to get hold of a Mazda Kombi 929L, an unusual model which Quick had used occasionally in 1988, although it was owned by Patrik Olofsson’s mother. Now it stood there, parked.

Also in position was a dummy representing Yenon Levi, and a second person who would be playing the part of Quick’s accomplice.

‘The basic set-up is that Thomas came into contact with Yenon Levi with an accomplice whom he’s named, Patrik Olofsson, and they travelled from Uppsala in this car to the house in Ölsta,’ explained Penttinen.

Quick’s irritation had passed, and he seemed to be working up an interest in the murder reconstruction.

The reconstruction was intended to start on the road, from which they would drive into the front yard. Everything had to be exactly as it was when they arrived from Uppsala with Yenon Levi.

The accomplice was represented by Anna Wikström, while Seppo Penttinen initially stepped in as Yenon Levi. Later, when Yenon Levi was being beaten to death, Penttinen would be replaced by the dummy.

When Quick, Patrik and Yenon Levi were by the car, Quick said that they had to tear off a shirt sleeve, so that he could bind Penttinen/Levi’s hands. It was important to re-create the situation and
environment exactly; only then would he remember the events in the right way. All those who were involved knew this very well – it was an integral part of Sven Åke Christianson’s well-established interrogation methodology – hence, a shirt sleeve was torn off and handed to Quick.