Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
you have a payphone I can use?’ he asked.
The proprietor did not recognise the man whose image was on the cover of both evening newspapers. Calmly he showed him the telephone. The customer made a brief call to Bollnäs police.
‘I’m handing myself in,’ he said.
‘And who might you be, then?’ asked the duty constable.
‘Quick,’ replied Thomas Quick.
The escape triggered a heated debate about lax security in the country’s psychiatric institutions. Most indignant of all was National Police Commissioner Björn Eriksson.
‘It’s so tiresome that these things happen,’ said Eriksson. ‘There are so few really dangerous people around; it really ought to be possible to guard them. In the police force, we prioritise the safety of the public over rehabilitation.’
The barb of the criticism was directed at Säter Hospital, but on 10 July 1994 an article strongly defending the institution was published in the debate section of Dagens Nyheter. It had been written by Thomas Quick himself, who paid effusive tribute to the staff and quality of the care at Säter, while at the same time putting the boot into the press corps:
My name is Thomas Quick. After my escape last Monday (4/7) and the massive uproar that followed in the media, neither my name nor my face are unfamiliar.
I neither want to, nor would I even be able to defend my escape from Säter Hospital, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to highlight some of the good work that has been done and continues to be done at this clinic; this is utterly lost in the general screeching of the journalists in their hunt for sensational stories, and it even overwhelms the good intellectual forces attempting to be heard in this domineering choir of voices.
Many were surprised by his words, which indicated that Quick was an articulate, intelligent person. For the first time, the public gained an insight into the mind of a serial killer. They also learned about the process that had played itself out in all of Thomas Quick’s murder confessions.
‘When I came to the regional psychiatric unit in Säter I had no memory of the first twelve years of my life. Just as effectively repressed were the murders which I have now confessed to and which are being investigated by the police in Sundsvall.’
Thomas Quick heaped praise on the staff who had helped him to recover his repressed memories of the murders, and he described how the therapists had supported him in this painful process: ‘My anxiety, guilt and sorrow over what I have done are so boundless, so heavy, that in real terms they cannot be borne. I am responsible for what I have done and also for what I do henceforth. The misdeeds I am guilty of cannot be remedied in any sense, but today I can at least say what they are. I am prepared to do so in my own time.’
Quick explained that he had not escaped in order to commit new crimes, but rather to kill himself: ‘After I had parted from my companion, I sat for thirteen hours with a sawn-off shotgun pointing at my forehead. But I couldn’t do it. Today I can take responsibility for yesterday, and I think it was this sense of responsibility that stopped me ending my life and made me telephone the police to ask to be arrested. That is what I want to believe.’
CHARLES ZELMANOVITS
ON 18 OCTOBER 1994 Piteå District Court received an application for a summons from the prosecutor Christer van der Kwast with the following brief description of the offence: ‘On the night of 13 November 1976 in a wooded area outside Piteå, Quick took the life of Charles Zelmanovits, born 1961, by strangulation.’
The trial in Piteå was set to begin on 1 November and, in the face of the impending legal inquiry into Quick’s confessions, the media released more and more details on the background of the alleged serial killer. While previously it had mainly been the tabloids that took an interest in Quick’s bizarre stories, now the broadsheets threw themselves into the ring. On 1 November Svenska Dagbladet published an article with descriptions of Thomas Quick that from this point were taken as hard facts. The journalist Janne Mattsson wrote:
Thomas Quick was the fifth of seven siblings. His father was a nursing assistant in a home for alcoholics and his mother a caretaker and cleaner at a school that has since closed. Both parents are deceased. [. . .] What lay hidden behind the outer façade remained a well-kept family secret. From the age of four, Thomas Quick claims to have been a victim of his father’s constant sexual predations and was forced to have oral and anal sex with him.
During one of these assaults, something took place that was to shape Quick’s life and morbid sexuality – his mother suddenly appeared and saw what was happening. She was so shocked that she miscarried. Screaming at four-year-old Thomas, she accused him of having murdered his little brother.
The father echoed these accusations and implied that the boy had seduced him. The mother’s relations with her son were henceforth marked by hatred, after the loss of her unborn child. She put all the blame on her son’s shoulders, and this is a burden which he is incapable of carrying.
On at least one occasion she tried to kill him, Quick alleges.
He also alleges that his mother began sexually assaulting him alongside his father.
Janne Mattsson further stated that Quick had already committed two murders while still a teenager:
By the time he was thirteen, Quick had had enough of his father’s abuse and he fought off one of his attempted rapes. On this occasion Quick reports that he wanted to kill his father, but he didn’t dare.
Instead he took on his father’s perverted urges, but with even greater morbid and sadistic aspects. Six months later, at the age of fourteen, he murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö. [. . .] Three years later, on 16 April 1967, a thirteen-year-old boy fell prey to Thomas Quick’s hand.
Although Quick was not yet officially linked to the murders and had not been successfully prosecuted for or convicted of any of them, the media assumed that he was guilty. The same was true of the accusations against the parents, who had allegedly subjected their son to systematic rape, assault and murder attempts.
The stance of the media during this period can be explained by three factors. First, there were Thomas Quick’s confessions. Second, the public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, had made categorical statements that there was other evidence connecting Quick to several of the crimes. Third, these statements were mixed with information about sexual transgressions demonstrably committed by Thomas Quick against young boys in 1969, as well as extracts from statements made by forensic psychiatrists on the danger he posed to the public.
In this way, a complete, apparently logical life story was created for the monstrous killer who would now be prosecuted for the first in a series of murders.
Once again, the article in Svenska Dagbladet cited the forensic psychiatrist who had examined Quick in 1970, claiming that Quick was suffering from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as paedophilia cum sadismus’.
Falu District Court had convicted Quick of the assaults on the boys and he was committed to protective psychiatric care. Four years later, at the age of twenty-three, Quick was judged healthy enough to be released.
‘With hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to release him,’ the article summed up, before closing with the anticipation of a guilty verdict in the approaching trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits: ‘They released a live-wired bomb packed with repressed angst. It was this angst that would eventually bring Quick and a homosexual acquaintance to Piteå in order to desecrate, kill and cut up a fifteen-year-old boy.’
Although a great many shocking details had already been published in the newspaper, the actual encounter with Thomas Quick in Piteå District Court was a disturbing experience for those present. The journalists competed in their declarations of disgust and loathing for the monster on the stand.
‘Is a Human Being Capable of Such Cruelty?’ was the headline run by Expressen at the end of the opening day in court.