Thomas Quick (46 page)

By the next interview, on 9 September 1996, the Norwegians had passed on the information to Seppo Penttinen that Therese had eczema on the insides of her arms, and he brought up the matter with Quick.

In other words, Penttinen mentions ‘arms’ in his question, while Quick had only spoken of a scar on her right arm. He also gives Quick a hint that something to do with Therese’s arms could be important.

During questioning on 14 October Penttinen returned again to the matter.

Even though Quick was given the information about ‘arms’ and ‘skin condition’ he couldn’t come up with the right answer. But his answer
was ‘right enough’ for the investigators, in their testimonies in the courtroom, to be able to turn Quick’s extremely vague but increasingly correct description of eczema into the notion that he had described how Therese had scars from eczema on the inside of her arms at the very beginning of the investigation. Whether she actually had them at the time of her disappearance was something that even her own mother was unsure about. Nonetheless it was regarded as compelling evidence.

Among all of Quick’s information which was interpreted by the district court as evidence for his murder of Therese, I found only one detail that wasn’t incorrect or sourced from a newspaper or transmitted via Seppo Penttinen: during the reconstruction in Fjell, Quick had said that the balconies of the apartment block used to be a different colour.

Quick’s description of the repainted balconies is correct. It seems notable in itself that Quick would be able to remember their colour eight years later after a few moments spent in a residential area, especially as they weren’t especially eye-catching but neutrally white.

Today, Quick can’t even remember that he was taken on an inspection to Fjell – which is easily understood when one considers the heavy doses of medication he was on – and he can’t think of an explanation as to why he was right about the balconies.

‘If I’ve come up with a hundred descriptions then maybe ninety-eight are wrong and two right,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve given them such
an incredible amount of information that of course I have to get it right sometimes.’

That’s as far as I got – Quick was right about the balconies. Hardly evidence compelling enough to find a man guilty of murder.

And then there was that little piece of bone . . .

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE
of the bone fragments was toned down in the verdict of Hedemora District Court on 2 June 1998, on the basis of technical legal considerations. Quick had said that he wouldn’t exclude the possibility of ‘other body parts than those from Therese’ being found in the places he had pointed out in Ørje Forest. In other words, the court wanted to insure itself against the possibility of the bone at some point in the future being identified as that of another child who was also disposed of by Quick in the same place. The verdict mentions the boy ‘Dusjka’, whom Quick claimed he had abducted, murdered and cut up in Norway.

But the value of the bone as evidence was not questioned.

‘It was obviously a very important element that they found the remains of a child who’d been incinerated in Ørje Forest, in precisely the place indicated by Quick,’ said the chief judge, Lennart Furufors.

The verdict declared: ‘Even if the remains of organic material found in the abovementioned forest cannot tie Thomas Quick to Therese, they nonetheless suggest that his story is true.’

‘Clearly it made a big impression on us that burnt human remains had been found in the forest. It was important evidence,’ Furufors confirmed to me.

In the heated debate that flared up in 1998 over the Quick investigation, the bone found in Ørje Forest was effectively used as a bat against anyone who questioned the role of the prosecution – such as the attacks from the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson, who was critical in general of the handling of the Quick investigation, and from
Nils Wiklund, the senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry, who questioned the role of Claes Borgström as a lawyer and the subsequent lack of an adversarial process. Borgström responded as follows, in a polemical piece in
DN Debatt
on 6 June of the same year:

In Örje Forest, south-east of Oslo, someone has buried organic material in a variety of places. In one place burnt pieces of bone have been found. Professors Per Holck from Norway and Richard Helmer from Germany have independently confirmed that the pieces of bone are of human origin, most likely a younger person.

It is Thomas Quick who told us where in that huge forest we should dig to find the remains of a human being, the Norwegian girl Therese Johannesen.

The psychologist Nils Wiklund is concerned (
DN Debatt
8/5) that Quick’s confessions are false and produced partly in conversation therapy and partly through leading questions asked by police. I hope that Wiklund will now rest easier.

Surely not even he could believe that someone has revealed to Quick where he should stick his finger in the ground and say, ‘Dig!’

Equally, for Seppo Penttinen writing in the
Nordisk kriminalkrönika
(‘Nordic Crime Chronicle’) and Gubb Jan Stigson – in article after article – the bone fragments were the primary line of defence against the doubters.

While doing research before the broadcasting of my documentary, Jenny Küttim was tipped off by SVT veteran Tom Alandh, who suggested that she should dig out the TV series
Tidningsliv
(‘Newspaper Life’). The twelve-part documentary series, shown on SVT1 at the end of 2003, was a portrait of the newspaper
Dala-Demokraten
, Gubb Jan Stigson’s employer. In the penultimate episode Christer van der Kwast gives a talk at the Crime Journalists’ Club (KJK) in Stockholm. The driving force behind the evening had been Gubb Jan Stigson, who had invited the prosecutor so that he could talk about the Thomas Quick investigations.

In a long introduction, van der Kwast condemned the journalists
who had taken a critical stance to the investigation, but he also mentioned the great problem over the years: that the prosecutions had been based on circumstantial evidence.

The documentary film-maker Tom Alandh was not a member of the Crime Journalists’ Club, but he was in attendance and he was the only one who reacted to what had just been said: ‘So is that really the case, there’s no technical evidence at all for any of the eight murders he’s been convicted of? Is that right?’

The question caused van der Kwast to lose his footing slightly, despite this being a relatively well-known fact.

‘Well, what is technical evidence? I mean . . . One has to . . . I say . . . it’s a bit sloppy, so to speak, if one says, “There is no technical evidence.” Normally by technical evidence one means things like DNA matching between the victim and perpetrator. This type of thing we do not have. But on the other hand, there are other things, so to speak, of a technical nature, such as, for instance, burnt human remains which have been cut into as he described.’

Again, the fragments of bone. But not only that. Van der Kwast described the finds in Ørje Forest as if there were no room for doubt. He assumed that the information was correct.

The forensic investigation report shows that van der Kwast’s ‘human remains’ consist of small burnt fragments of a total weight of less than half a gram. The largest piece, ‘cut into as he described’, weighs 0.36 grams.

Was it really possible to determine from such a small burnt particle that it was human bone? And that it came from a child aged between five and fifteen?

The discovery of the burnt fragments of bone in Ørje Forest gave the investigators new hope of also finding body parts in Sweden, and they especially pinned their hopes on finding Johan Asplund’s remains. Thomas Quick had announced that he was going into phase two of the investigation, in which he would be able to give information so that body parts could be found.

While the debate on Quick was raging in the press, the main
character in the drama was being ferried around Sweden for various inspections. He pinpointed hiding places outside Sundsvall, but also in the vicinity of Korsnäs, Grycksbo and other places in Dalarna where he had lived in the 1980s. In the end, the list comprised some twenty-four locations.

The next stage was to let Zampo, the cadaver dog, examine the places specified by Quick with his owner and handler John Sjöberg. To everyone’s great joy, Zampo signalled the presence of corpses almost everywhere he was taken. In all, he reacted positively in some forty-five different places.

To assure himself of the dog’s ability, Professor Per Holck dug six pits in Ørje Forest and filled five of them with different materials: three were filled with organic material from humans, one with burnt animal bone and one with charcoal, while in the sixth pit there was nothing at all. Zampo reacted to human remains in all of the pits except the one containing burnt animal bone. This high incidence of error should have given cause for concern, but the dog’s owner explained that most likely the spade had contaminated the pits with olfactory molecules. The test results were dismissed and no other test of Zampo’s reliability was ever carried out.

After the test, the policeman Håkon Grøttland wrote an appreciative letter to the dog handler: ‘You should know that we would never have solved this [the Therese murder] without you and Zampo.’

Wherever in Sweden Zampo had reacted, suspicious material was removed and the location was excavated by an archaeological unit.

In view of the fact that Quick claimed to have cut up a number of bodies in small pieces and spread them around, large quantities of soil were handed in for analysis at the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (Natural History Museum) in Stockholm, where Rita Larje, the CID’s osteologist at the Working Group on Forensic Archaeology, studied the finds with a magnifying lens and microscope.

She said to me, ‘I received lots of bags and was told that there were supposedly human remains in there, because a so-called cadaver dog had reacted to it. Osteologists just scrape through whatever they’re given. If it’s soil it’s sieved and then we look for organic elements. And in this case I was supposed to be looking for bones.’

Rita Larje did not find any pieces of bone, so she went back to scrutinising the material through a microscope, as there might have been traces of organic material which had been burned – flesh then forms small, porous balls. But she found none of these either.

With Rita Larje’s help I went through the reports of her soil analyses on behalf of the Quick investigation – in all, some twenty of them. In one place bones had been found that were visible to the naked eye.

‘In this case we found they were rib bones from a cow, with signs of gnawing by rodents. And then we found teeth from cattle.’

One might think that the investigators would have drawn the logical conclusion, when the massive effort delivered so little: Quick was lying and Zampo reacted a little too readily. But the investigations kept rolling on.

Rita Larje and I reached the last report, which was from Sågmyra, where Sture Bergwall had lived the last time he was a free man. When hiding place after hiding place had proved entirely devoid of human remains, Quick implied that he had taken his trophies with him as he moved to different homes. Hopes were therefore high that ‘Quick’s mausoleum’ would be found in Sågmyra, with pieces of many of his victims.