Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam

      RECONNAISSANCE IN ØRJE FOREST

      IN SEPTEMBER 2008, the photographer Lars Granstrand and I crossed the border at the same place as the Quick investigators during their journey to Norway twelve years earlier.

      At Drammen police station we met with Håkon Grøttland, who had participated in all of Quick’s trips to Norway.

      ‘He’s not like us – he’s not rational or logical,’ said Grøttland.

      He explained the specific difficulties investigators had faced in their dealings with Thomas Quick.

      ‘Quick says “yes” and shakes his head at the same time! And he says “left” when he means right. There are simpler things in God’s world than trying to figure out Thomas Quick.’

      Personally, he hadn’t been able to understand him, Grøttland explained. But Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle knew what Quick meant.

      Håkon Grøttland had worked on the Therese Johannesen investigation when she disappeared in July 1988. After that, he was part of a Norwegian police unit investigating Thomas Quick and he was still convinced that Quick had murdered Therese Johannesen.

      ‘What is it that really convinces you?’ I wondered.

      ‘Just imagine Quick sitting there in a psychiatric clinic in Sweden, having all this detailed knowledge about Therese and Fjell and Ørje Forest. So we go out and check what he has said, and we find that it’s actually true.’

      I agreed it was difficult to find any other plausible explanation than the fact that Quick was guilty.

      Grøttland gave us a lift to Fjell, where Therese had lived with her mother. We drove past the Fjell Centre and the video rental store where Therese had gone to buy sweets with the sixteen crowns and fifty öre she had in her pocket. Grøttland parked the car and showed us a wide-open area of grass, with a high-rise apartment block towering against the sky – Lauritz Hervigsvei 74. Grøttland pointed to the row of windows on the fifth floor.

      ‘That’s where she lived. And Quick stood here when Therese came walking from over there,’ said Grøttland, pointing at a slope leading down to the road we had just driven along. ‘It was here he took her.’

      I counted the eight floors of the block, thirty-five large windows on each floor.

      So Thomas Quick had supposedly abducted Therese in front of 280 large windows, right under the eyes of her mother, who had described how she stood on the balcony keeping an eye out for her the whole time.

      ‘Christ, it’s like abducting a child right in front of the main stand at Råsunda Stadium,’ the photographer whispered into my ear.

      Thomas Quick was never seen by anyone in connection with any of the thirty murders to which he had confessed and had never left any signs of his presence. That was why I had assumed he must always have exercised extreme caution.

      During the investigation into Therese’s murder, as we know, some 1,721 people were questioned by the police, but none of them had seen anything that could be related in any way to Thomas Quick. Nor did any of the 4,645 tip-offs that came in have any connection with Thomas Quick. I looked up at Therese’s balcony and confirmed to myself that everything must have happened in full and public view.

      ‘Then he smashed her head against a boulder on that slope, went and got his car and put her inside,’ Grøttland explained.

      ‘Seems incredibly risky,’ I said.

      ‘Yes, obviously,’ answered the inspector.

      *

      The following day I met Grøttland’s colleague, Ole Thomas Bjerknes, who had also worked on the Quick investigation. He showed me Hærland Church, where supposedly Quick had killed Therese. Then we went to Ørje Forest and drove several kilometres down bumpy forest tracks before reaching the area where Quick had disposed of Therese’s body.

      Bjerknes was teaching at the Norwegian police high school. That same day he had given a lecture about the Quick investigation, and he happened to have brought along three video tapes of raw footage from the Norwegian reconnaissance trips with Quick. I tried not to sound too keen when I asked if there was any chance of being able to have a look at the tapes. To my surprise, he readily handed them over. I took the coveted tapes, promising to return them to him before leaving Norway.

      The same evening I sought out a television production company in Drammen and managed to hire the equipment needed to copy the tapes. I started at eight o’clock in the evening, in my hotel room. There were about ten hours of reconnaissance on the three tapes. The tapes to which I was transferring the material had to be changed every hour.

      The most interesting footage was of Thomas Quick sitting in the car, while another camera filmed out of the windscreen. The camera pointed at Quick – from time to time also taking in Seppo Penttinen on his right-hand side – but the road was shown in a little superimposed box on the top left of the screen.

      Quick’s eyes rolled about. Sometimes they seemed to drop or stare with a crazed expression. It was extremely perplexing and unpleasant. The Thomas Quick of these recordings was an altogether different person from the one I had met at Säter Hospital about a week before. I wondered what could have triggered this personality transformation. Even his way of talking was different.

      To keep myself awake through the night I forced myself to watch all three video tapes as I was copying. Often it was uneventful and excruciatingly dull, moving along without a word being uttered for half an hour, or with long sequences in which the cameraman had put down the camera and it had continued filming the car seat. Because I was copying I couldn’t fast-forward; I had to suffer every minute of it.

      It was already past midnight as I slotted in a new tape. We were now with a hand-held camera in the car behind Thomas Quick’s van. Quick had requested that the car should stop but the camera kept rolling. In the recording, you can hear a care assistant coming into Quick’s car and offering him medicine.

      CARE ASSISTANT: Are you taking your Xanax?

      TQ: Mm.

      CARE ASSISTANT: Can you get it down without water?

      TQ: I have . . . Coca-Cola . . .

      On the tape, Thomas Quick speaks with a sluggish voice as if he is finding it difficult to formulate words at all.

      CARE ASSISTANT: Put it in your mouth . . . Is one enough? . . . Shouldn’t you have another one right away?

      TQ: Yes, maybe . . .

      Thomas Quick’s answer is something between crying and talking, a sound made by a person going through terrible suffering.

      I hear Quick taking another pill and after that the journey can go on.

      The clinical drug Xanax is a tranquilliser classed as a narcotic, of a type known as a benzodiazepine, notorious for being extremely addictive and with a number of serious side effects.

      What I had just seen convinced me that Thomas Quick was as high on drugs as he looked. I also recalled Göran Källberg’s insinuations. Could this be what he had been alluding to, namely that Quick had been medicated with such strong drugs that his confessions must be viewed as unreliable? I watched the material with renewed interest. My tiredness had been swept away.

      *

      Again I changed the tape. Now Thomas Quick is in the first car in a convoy of four or five, heading towards Ørje Forest. He is leading a procession that includes a chief prosecutor, a police interrogator, a lawyer, a psychotherapist, a memory expert, several drivers and nurses, as well as a large number of Swedish and Norwegian police