Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
was a children’s playground being built and there were wooden planks scattered about on the ground. How could Quick know all that?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘If what you’re saying is right, then I suppose at least he must have been there,’ I admitted.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Stigson. ‘And then he showed the police a wooded area where he murdered her and hid the body. That’s where they found pieces of bone that proved to be from a human aged eight to fifteen. In one of the fragments there was a groove from a saw blade! Thomas Quick was able to show where he had hidden a hacksaw blade which fitted into the groove in the bone.’
Stigson shook his head.
‘And then they say there’s no evidence! I mean, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, which is exactly what the Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, wrote after he’d reviewed all of Quick’s verdicts.’
‘Sure, it sounds convincing,’ I said.
Gubb Jan Stigson had such a rabid, unshakeable and one-eyed view of Thomas Quick that I was reluctant to argue with him. Even so, I was grateful to him. He was a well-informed and invaluable person to talk to, who had also generously supplied me with material from the extensive investigations.
On one occasion he photocopied all three hundred articles he had written on the subject.
But his most important contribution was probably that he put in a good word for me with his allies – Seppo Penttinen, Christer van der Kwast and Claes Borgström. I don’t know exactly who he spoke to, but I do know that he opened many doors for me.
Penttinen wasn’t dismissive when I phoned him, despite his great suspicion of journalists who wanted to talk about Thomas Quick. He made it quite clear to me that he would never agree to be interviewed – he never agreed to interviews on principle – but he sent material that he felt I ought to read, including his own article ‘The Chief Interrogator’s View of the Mystery of Thomas Quick’, published in 2004 in the Nordisk kriminalkrönika (‘Nordic Crime Chronicle’), where, among other things, he wrote, ‘To demonstrate what sort of evidence underpinned the successful convictions, the investigation into the murder of Therese Johannesen in Drammen might serve as a typical example.’
Even van der Kwast had emphasised the Therese investigation as the one where there had been the strongest proof against Quick. If Stigson, Penttinen and van der Kwast were agreed on this, there was no longer any doubt about which case I would try to get to the bottom of, to examine whether there was any basis for the murmurings about a judicial scandal.
Thomas Quick revealed things about his victims that only the perpetrator and the police could have known. Sometimes he even said things that the police were unaware of. This was clearly stated in the sentencing documents.
In several instances it was also difficult to see how he could have been aware of some of the murders at all. This was not least true of the Norwegian murders, which had hardly been covered in the Swedish media. How could Quick, locked up at Säter Hospital, even have had the knowledge to talk about the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen? Or show the way to the remote places where their bodies had been found?
I felt that many of those who had doubted Thomas Quick’s testimonies had dismissed the question of the information he had provided too lightly. Some of Quick’s so-called unique information could be explained, yet some of it seemed mysterious even after careful scrutiny of the investigation documents.
Quick had given descriptions of the victims’ injuries, details of the crime scenes and information about the victims’ clothes and belongings that had apparently not been mentioned in the media.
How did Quick know that a nine-year-old girl named Therese had gone missing from Fjell in July 1988? Hedemora District Court had recognised the significance of this in its summary of the evidence.
In its verdict for the Therese case, the district court writes: ‘Information about this event available to Quick in the media – in so far as it has been shown – would have been limited.’ And Quick had also given testimony on the subject: ‘He has no memory of having read anything about these events before his confession’, the sentencing document states.
The collected investigation material into the case of Thomas Quick amounts to more than 50,000 pages. I decided to organise the sections pertaining to Therese Johannesen along a timeline, and sat down to read all the interviews and documents from when Quick first started talking about her disappearance. How did he and the investigation get embroiled with Norwegian crimes in the first place?
I found a report in the police investigation stating that Quick had had contact with the Norwegian journalist Svein Arne Haavik. Thomas Quick hadn’t initially attracted any attention at all in Norway, but in July 1995 Haavik wrote him a letter in which he explained that he was working for Norway’s biggest newspaper, Verdens Gang, which had recently published a series of lengthy articles on Thomas Quick. Haavik requested an interview with the serial killer.
The police report gives the following information:
Shortly after, Haavik was telephoned by Thomas Quick, who asked Haavik to send all the newspaper articles about him and his murders in Norway.
Haavik therefore sent Thomas Quick the newspapers from the 6, 7 and 8 July 1995.
The series of articles began on 6 July 1995 with a three-page opener. The front page was filled with a brooding photograph of Thomas Quick looking into the camera.
‘Swedish mass murderer admits: I MURDERED A BOY IN NORWAY.’
Thomas Quick poses across an entire spread, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, Birkenstock sandals and white socks. The reporter describes his ‘murders of bestial cruelty’ and also reveals a snippet of new information: ‘Under a cloak of secrecy, Norwegian and Swedish police have for several months been investigating at least one murder of a young boy in Norway.’
‘I can confirm that a part of our investigation concerns a Norwegian boy whom Quick has told us he killed. The problem has been that we have yet to identify him, but we have some ideas about who the boy might be’, Verdens Gang quoted from a statement by prosecutor Christer van der Kwast.
The following day the next article continued with Thomas Quick’s description of the boy he had killed in Norway as ‘12–13 years old and cycling’.
The concluding article, on 8 July, was a long piece with the headline: ‘Where Quick’s Possible Victims Went Missing’. A half-page photograph shows a refugee centre in Oslo and there is also a smaller image of two African boys.
The boy who went missing disappeared from this refugee centre in Skullerudsbakken in Oslo, which has since closed down, and was most likely the same boy that Thomas Quick (45) has admitted that he killed.
In March 1989, two boys of about 16 and 17 went missing on separate occasions from the Red Cross reception for lone minors.
In other words, when Quick first mentioned Norway it was in reference to the murder of a boy – not a girl. But where did this information come from?
I dug my way back through the investigation material and found that Quick had told Seppo Penttinen in November 1994 about a dark-haired boy of about twelve of ‘Slavic appearance’ whom he called ‘Dusjunka’. He associated the boy with the town of Lindesberg and a Norwegian place which he referred to as ‘Mysen’.
Penttinen wrote to the police in Norway to ask whether they had a case with a boy of such a description who had gone missing. They did not, but his Norwegian colleagues sent information about two asylum-seeking boys of about sixteen or seventeen who had disappeared in Oslo.
Once the article appeared in Verdens Gang, the information became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After a long period of making suggestive comments, Thomas Quick confessed to Penttinen in February 1996 that he had murdered two African boys in Oslo in March 1989. Penttinen immediately started preparing a trip to Norway.
In the interrogations that followed, I was able to