Thomas Quick (6 page)

‘Do you see anything here that corresponds to the length of it?’ asked Penttinen, while at the same time indicating a measure of
about a metre between his hands. Quick immediately went and picked up a wooden stick of more or less that length, which conveniently enough was lying nearby.

Christer van der Kwast did not subscribe to the view that Quick’s constantly changing story was damaging his credibility. ‘The difficulty has been that the memories of the murders have been fragmented and unstructured and that sometimes it has taken a very long time before he can piece together the various fragments into a cohesive whole,’ he explained, sounding very much like Quick’s therapists at Säter Hospital.

After one and a half years of therapy, police questioning and repeated reconstructions, Thomas Quick had managed to structure his fragmented memories into a more or less cohesive story: Quick and his accomplice had initially forcibly removed Yenon Levi from a train platform at Uppsala station to a car park, where he was bundled into the car. Thereafter the accomplice had kept Levi in check by holding a knife to his throat, while Quick drove them to the murder scene.

On 10 April 1997 Christer van der Kwast handed in a court application to Hedemora District Court. The crime description was short:

Thomas Quick took Yenon Levi’s life by blunt violence against Levi’s head and upper body between 5–11 June 1988 in Rörshyttan, in the municipality of Hedemora.

This was the third murder trial in which Thomas Quick was alleging that he had killed with the help of an accomplice. Also for the third consecutive time, the accomplice had not been called to appear at court. His full name was given in the verdict and his participation in the murder of Yenon Levi described in detail, but as he had denied the charge and there was no evidence against him, no further action could be taken against him. ‘Questioning NN with regard to this case would not be productive for us,’ Christer van der Kwast concluded.

Hedemora District Court was forced to acknowledge that during the trial ‘no evidence had been presented that directly connected
Thomas Quick to the crime’. However, the court believed that Quick’s account of the murder had been coherent and free of serious inconsistencies. He had provided a great deal of accurate information about the murder scene, the victim’s clothes and wounds – details that, according to the court, corresponded very well with facts established by the autopsy and the forensic examination of the scene.

Quick had also referred to other specific details which seemed to suggest that he really had murdered Yenon Levi: for instance, he described finding a carved wooden knife in his backpack which the victim had mentioned in a postcard to his mother.

Seppo Penttinen explained to the court that Quick’s discrepancies weren’t particularly remarkable. The convoluted process of arriving at the correct murder weapon, for example, had always seemed reasonable to Penttinen because he ‘had had the impression that Thomas Quick knew all along that it was a club-like piece of wood, but for reasons of personal distress he had not been able to say so’. Penttinen also gave testimony on the emergence of Quick’s story in questioning and the manner in which the interviews were conducted, which was considered highly important in the sentencing. There was a view that Quick had provided detailed information which only the murderer could possibly have known.

On 28 May 1997 Thomas Quick was found guilty and convicted of the murder of Yenon Levi:

In conclusion, the court finds that Thomas Quick’s account has high evidential value. By his confession and the investigation as a whole it is placed beyond all reasonable doubt that Thomas Quick has committed the act for which prosecution has been brought. Thomas Quick shall therefore be held responsible for wilfully taking Yenon Levi’s life.

Thomas Quick was handed back into continued psychiatric care.

He had now been found guilty of four murders on three different occasions and could therefore, even by the FBI’s strict definition, call himself a serial killer.

THERESE JOHANNESEN

During the investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi, Thomas Quick continued remembering that he had also killed an assortment of other people. One of many new confessions concerned the murder of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen, who on 3 July 1988 disappeared without trace from her home in a residential area known as Fjell, outside Drammen in Norway.

Therese Johannesen’s disappearance was Norway’s most notorious criminal case to date and led to the biggest police operation in its history. At its peak, some 100 police officers were working on the case. In the first years they questioned 1,721 people. In total, 4,645 tip-offs and leads were passed on to the police, who logged 13,685 observations and movements of cars in the area. But without any success.

In the spring of 1996, Swedish and Norwegian police established close working relations to look in more detail at the murders of Therese Johannesen and two African asylum seekers who had disappeared from a refugee centre in Oslo in March 1989. Quick had confessed to murdering all three of them.

Experience suggests that serial killers usually have a certain modus operandi. Some seek their victims within a particular geographical area; others have a particular type of victim, such as young boys, prostitutes, couples making love and so on. Some murder their victims in a particular way. Ted Bundy, for instance, lured his victims – always white, middle-class women – into his car, where they were killed by a blow to the head with a crowbar.

In light of this, there was scepticism in some quarters when Quick departed from his own stated preferences and practices and confessed to the murder of a girl who had lived in Norway. Even his previous lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, who up until that point had never expressed the slightest reservation, was dubious about this new confession. ‘It’s so off-key, so completely different from his usual behaviour,’ he said.

While admitting that the murder did certainly diverge from established patterns, Christer van der Kwast, who was in charge of the investigation, believed that ‘the investigators must therefore broaden their perspectives’ and understand that killing for its own sake can give the serial killer sexual satisfaction.

On 26 April 1996 Quick left Säter accompanied by a group that consisted of police officers, care assistants from Säter Hospital, memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, psychotherapist Birgitta Ståhle and prosecutor Christer van der Kwast.

Quick was taken on a tour of Fjell. He described to the police where he had first chanced upon Therese, where he rendered her unconscious by dashing her against a stone, and how he carried her into his car and took her away from the scene. He also described how in 1988 there had been a bank in the street and wooden planks on the ground, adding that the balconies had since been repainted in a new colour. This information was found to be correct and Quick was notified that he was under suspicion for the murder of Therese.

The following day, Thomas Quick found himself at the head of a long convoy of cars travelling along Highway E18 towards Sweden. Close to the settlement of Ørje, the convoy swung onto a forest road, where Quick had promised to lead the police to a sandpit where he had hidden Therese’s body. As he walked them round the area, Quick described how he had cut up the body into small parts, which he lowered into the middle of a small lake known as Ringen. After considerable discussion, the investigators decided to drain the lake in order to find Therese’s body parts. The most expensive crime scene investigation in Nordic history took place over the next seven weeks. The lake was drained and all the sediment at the bottom was pumped up until the investigators had reached levels dating back
10,000 years. Water and mud from the bottom were filtered and searched twice without so much as a splinter of bone being found.

‘Thomas Quick has either lied or mistaken the location. We have reason to doubt his credibility,’ said Drammen’s chief of police Tore Johnsen when the last pumps at Lake Ringen were turned off on 17 July.

When the Norwegians reassessed the enormous amount of Therese-related material that had been amassed, they did not find a single sighting, of either people or cars, that could be connected to Thomas Quick.

Many were convinced that this would be the end of the investigation into Quick’s involvement in the murder of Therese, and possibly even the end of the whole Quick inquiry. Yet one year later Thomas Quick was back in Ørje Forest with his entourage of investigators and care assistants.

‘He performed stupendously. This extended reconnaissance was enormously straining for him,’ said the lawyer Claes Borgström afterwards.

‘Now I’m convinced that it was Quick who murdered Therese,’ said Inge-Lise Øverby at the Prosecution Authority in Drammen. ‘We have established that Thomas Quick really was here in the forest. We have very strong circumstantial evidence that he was also in Drammen at the time of Therese’s disappearance.’

The police had found a tree marked with a symbol that Quick claimed he had carved; a saw-blade that Quick said he had left on the scene had also been recovered and a blanket that allegedly belonged to Quick.

But the police’s most important find was a charred spot where Quick said that he had burned Therese’s body parts. At one of these aforementioned places the cadaver dog Zampo picked up the scent of human remains. Among the ashes, forensic technicians had found some scorched pieces that, according to experts, were fragments of a child’s bones.

‘Quick’s Victim Found’,
Dala-Demokraten
announced across its entire front page on 14 November 1997.

Triumphantly, Christer van der Kwast declared that for the first
time they had been able to follow Quick’s confession all the way to the discovery of a murder victim. He described Therese’s bone fragment as a breakthrough for the entire investigation.

‘The remains of a person of Therese Johannesen’s age have been found in a place near Örje, where Thomas Quick says that he hid the body parts of the nine-year-old girl in 1988,’ Gubb Jan Stigson summarised in
Dala-Demokraten
.

The find in Ørje Forest meant that the Quick investigators now identified new priorities and focused all their energy on the investigation into Therese’s murder. The prosecutor charged Quick with the murder of Therese Johannesen at Hedemora District Court, announcing with great confidence on 13 March 1998: ‘In this case we have a strong concentration on technical evidence.’ Oddly enough, the trial for a murder committed in Norway was entrusted to Hedemora District Court, although the proceedings were held in the high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court. This, apparently, was for reasons of ‘personal safety’.

Christer van der Kwast emphasised that Quick had given them thirty unique details connecting him to the crime. ‘Quick has provided exclusive information of a scope and direction that connect him to the relevant places and to the girl,’ he maintained in his summing-up.

Counsel Claes Borgström had no reservations about the evidence against his client: ‘There is no conclusion to be drawn other than that he committed the act for which prosecution has been brought.’

When Quick gave his own summing-up in the district court, he tried to provide a psychological explanation for his murder of Therese. ‘My guilt is fixed and heavy and a suffering to me, but I want you to understand that I have re-enacted my own experiences from my damaged childhood,’ he said.

As expected, Hedemora District Court reached the verdict that Thomas Quick had beyond all reasonable doubt murdered Therese Johannesen, sentencing him to continued psychiatric care. Quick had been found guilty of his fifth murder.

THE DOUBTERS

The critics who had questioned Quick’s guilt in the early stages, during the trial for the double murder in Appojaure, hadn’t had very much exposure and were soon forgotten. But in the spring of 1998, while the Therese Johannesen case was under way, a heated Quick debate flared up which would this time become entrenched and give rise to an embittered, apparently endless exchange of hostile fire.

The debate began with an article in
DN Debatt
written by the journalist Dan Larsson, a former miner from Malmberget who had taken up a new job as the crime correspondent for
Norrländska Socialdemokraten
. Having followed Quick’s trials for the murders of Charles Zelmanovits and the Stegehuis couple, he was absolutely convinced that Quick was innocent. In his article, Larsson pointed to a number of dubious issues, including the fact that all the investigations had been led by the same small, cohesive band of individuals. He also alluded to the way that Quick, in every successful prosecution against him, had mentioned an accomplice whose participation had to be strongly called into question.

Four days later,
DN Debatt
published an article written by Nils Wiklund, a university lecturer of forensic psychiatry, who wrote:

The Thomas Quick murder trials are unique in a number of ways. Western judicial procedure is based on an adversarial confrontation, where the court of law seeks to arrive at the truth by evaluating the prosecutor’s argument as well as that of the defence, which seeks to present things in a different way.

During the Quick trials, Wiklund went on, the adversarial principle had been abandoned because the prosecution and defence adopted the same position. His observation was certainly true of the ongoing trial, in which Claes Borgström not only clearly accepted his client’s guilt but also turned to the journalists, psychologists and lawyers taking part in the case and urged them to ‘be responsible’.

‘The repeated attempts of the defence lawyer to silence public debate is both upsetting and irresponsible. He should have tried to achieve an impartial examination within the framework of the court’s examination,’ Wiklund went on.

The heat of the debate was further fuelled when Johan Asplund’s father, Björn, called for Christer van der Kwast to be put on trial. He alleged that van der Kwast’s failure to prosecute Quick’s accomplice in the Therese Johannesen trial amounted to gross professional misconduct. Quick had identified an accomplice and had stated that this person had helped to abduct the girl as well as raping her in a car park. Björn Asplund wrote: