Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
newspapers, despite the fact that he asked for the serialised articles from Verdens Gang. He gave assurances that he had not seen any photographs of the missing asylum-seeking boys.
I could therefore confirm the following with absolute certainty: Quick had actively sought out information about feasible murders in Norway, he made use of this information during questioning, then lied about not having seen any information about the murders.
The series of articles which Thomas Quick received from Norway also offered another snippet of information. Next to the main article was a smaller item where Verdens Gang speculated on whether Thomas Quick might have been involved in Norway’s most notorious unsolved crime.
Therese Johannesen (9) went missing from the neighbourhood of Fjell in Drammen on 3 July 1988. Her disappearance triggered the most extensive manhunt in Norwegian history.
During this period of time Quick has said that he committed murders in Norway.
Admittedly, the article doesn’t provide any further details on either Therese or Fjell, but it does contain a number of critical pieces of information: the name of the girl and the place and date of her disappearance.
It is proven that Thomas Quick had access to these facts by the end of July 1995, and it is therefore hardly surprising that in the very first interview he was able to say that Therese was nine years old and went missing from Fjell in the summer of 1988.
But with questions that were not answered in the article in Verdens Gang he had less success.
As in most of the murder investigations, Quick’s confession to the murder of Therese Johannesen had started during therapy. ‘Events had floated up’ and Birgitta Ståhle felt bound to report them, she said. Quick had been incoherent and ‘Ståhle described the circumstances as twisted’, Penttinen noted.
The idea was to get the whole story out on Wednesday, 20 March 1996. Birgitta Ståhle and Thomas Quick walked into the music room at Säter Hospital, where Seppo Penttinen and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström were already sitting waiting in the red and black armchairs.
Penttinen asked Quick to describe the residential area of Fjell.
‘I can see properties,’ said Quick. ‘Not apartment blocks. Family houses.’
The place name Fjell (Mountain) may have given Quick the wrong associations, because he described the place as a bucolic idyll with scattered family homes here and there – possibly the Norwegian word for a city neighbourhood, bydel (a part of a village in Swedish), may have caused him some confusion, too. He claimed to have travelled there via an unpaved road.
‘It’s very small,’ Quick clarified in the interview.
In actual fact Fjell is a typical 1970s concrete suburb with high-rise blocks, viaducts, shopping centres and 5,000 inhabitants in a fairly concentrated area.
Quick’s voice grew increasingly quiet and finally he whispered, ‘This is going to be bloody difficult!’
If at the time of questioning Penttinen was aware of how badly Quick’s description corresponded to reality, he hid it well. He kept plying him with new questions:
PENTTINEN: Do you know what time of day this is, more or less?
TQ: Should be more or less lunchtime.
PENTTINEN: What does lunchtime mean for you?
TQ: The middle of the day.
PENTTINEN: Do you remember what the weather was like?
TQ: The weather was quite good, high clouds. Summer . . .
Therese disappeared at twenty past eight in the evening. Quick’s remark on the decent summer weather did not ring particularly true, as at the time of Therese’s disappearance Fjell was experiencing some of the worst torrential rainfall in ten years.
After the interview, Seppo Penttinen summarised Quick’s descriptions of Therese’s appearance and clothes:
He stated that she had fair, shoulder-length hair, her hair bounced when she ran. She was wearing trousers and possibly a jacket. Later in the interview he said there was something pink, and he has a memory of it being a T-shirt with buttons. Her panties were patterned. She was wearing a wristwatch. Quick made an association of the strap being thin with a simple buckle and he had a colour impression of the watch as light green or pink.
Improbably enough, all these descriptions were wrong, and one would be quite justified in describing the account as a ‘total miss’, as certain critics of the Quick case have pointed out.
In the original police investigation after Therese’s disappearance, a great deal of care was given to the girl’s description, including every possible detail, with her clothes carefully specified. The most recent photograph was also there.
The girl in the colour photograph is standing in front of a brick wall, looking candidly into the camera. Her hair is black, her skin a golden brown, her eyes dark brown. A happy smile reveals a gap of two missing front teeth, pulling the corners of her eyes into a squint.
Quick spoke about Therese’s big front teeth. Maybe they had grown since the photograph was taken?
When I called Inger-Lise Johannesen, Therese’s mother, she told me they hadn’t even started coming through.
Thomas Quick’s blonde version of Therese is quite simply a stereotype of a Norwegian girl, a guess with reasonably good odds, statistically speaking, of being correct. In the end, everything was wrong except the information Thomas Quick had read in the little side article in Verdens Gang.
THE DEAD END
ONE LATE AFTERNOON on 23 April 1996 the police’s little convoy of vehicles drove via Örebro and Lindesberg on Highway E18 into a little settlement known as Ørje on Svenskvejen (‘the Swedish road’) towards Oslo. Thomas Quick sat in the middle seat of a white minibus next to Inspector Seppo Penttinen.
The aim of the trip was for Quick to show where and how he had murdered two asylum-seeking African boys and nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in Norway.
The details Quick had given corresponded exactly with the case of two boys who had gone missing from the Red Cross asylum-seekers’ centre on the outskirts of Oslo.
During the trip to Norway he outlined the route for how to get there. Before the trip he had made a drawing of the building, which was a fairly unusual old wooden house with a number of unique details. When they arrived, they found that the house looked exactly as in the drawing.
Quick showed them the way to a place known as Mysen, where apparently one of the boys had been killed. The boys’ bodies had then been moved by Quick to Sweden, where he had cannibalised his victims before burying them in Lindesberg.
Detective Inspector Ture Nässén told me how Thomas Quick and the investigators drove to the football pitch in Lindesberg. There, the forensic technicians dug up a large area that Quick had pointed out. The cadaver dog Zampo reacted to the presence of human remains. When no body parts were found, Quick said that he had made a mistake; they should be searching the football pitch in Guldsmedshyttan instead. Despite determined digging and further sniffing by the cadaver dog, nothing was found there either.
While the excavations were in full swing in Guldsmedshyttan, something quite remarkable happened. Ture Nässén received confirmation that the two murder victims the police were looking for were in fact alive. Both had made their way to Sweden, where one of them had settled. The other was living in Canada.
And so two of Thomas Quick’s Norwegian murders no longer existed. Undeterred, their investigations into the third murder continued with renewed energy. After an inquiry lasting some two years, and twenty-one interviews about Therese Johannesen, in which Quick changed his story countless times, his insights into the murder were deemed to be of such accuracy that Hedemora District Court found him guilty.
With my newly acquired insights into witness psychology, and