Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
that it seems true to him. It’s a known tendency for people to be encouraged to produce false memories in therapy,’ he said to Expressen, with firm assurances that his parents could not have been guilty of what Thomas Quick was alleging.
Sten-Ove explained that his purpose in writing the book was not to make money, but rather to reclaim the childhood that Thomas Quick had taken from him by the statements he had made. He also wanted to clear the names of his late parents, as they weren’t able to defend themselves against Quick’s accusations.
‘I’m not suggesting that we grew up in a perfect family, but none of us siblings have memories that back up his story. We were not a bunch of people living in isolation, we were not rejected and mysterious. We socialised with people, we travelled a lot and visited relatives at weekends, at Christmas and on birthdays.’
However, when it came to the murders that Thomas Quick had confessed to, Sten-Ove had no doubts: ‘When I heard that a man had confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.’
The trial for the Appojaure murders began in January 1996 at Gällivare District Court. At the trial in Piteå, Thomas Quick had insisted on closed doors while he was being cross-examined, but in Gällivare he conducted himself with great confidence in the courtroom. In front of an audience he accounted for the murder of the Dutch couple in a convincing manner. He described how he had taken a train to Jokkmokk, wanting to find a teenage boy, and there he met a group of German youths and selected one of the boys as his victim.
On a stolen women’s bicycle he had cycled to Domus supermarket, where he met Johnny Farebrink, a ‘gruesome and deeply depressed knife-lunatic’. After a drinking session they had gone together to Appojaure, where the Stegehuises were camping. According to Quick, their reason for going was that Johnny Farebrink had ‘aversions’ to the Dutch couple, while Quick was keen to target the German boy he had met in Jokkmokk, and got the impression that the boy was the Dutch couple’s son.
‘When I asked her directly, the woman denied her own son. I was furious,’ Quick told the court.
The murder of the couple, which had earlier seemed inexplicable, was now revealing a certain underlying logic, though a crazily contorted one.
‘I tried to lift her up so her face was right in front of mine. I wanted to see her fear before she died,’ Quick went on. ‘But I didn’t really have the strength, so I just stabbed and stabbed.’
Counsel Claes Borgström asked Quick what had turned him against the woman.
‘Because of her denial, I identified her with M, and there was also a physical resemblance,’ answered Quick.
M was Quick’s name for his mother. The murder was thus a murder of his own mother.
A relative of the Stegehuises, with whom the couple stayed in the first few days of their holiday, had come to Gällivare in order to try and understand why Janny and Marinus had been killed. After listening to Quick’s account of the double murder, the relative made a statement to Expressen: ‘Quick is a pig, he doesn’t deserve to live.’
The outcome of the trial for the murders in Appojaure was hardly a foregone conclusion. There were questions about a number of aspects of Thomas Quick’s story, especially concerning the information about an accomplice. The investigators had not found anything or anyone to back up Quick’s information about Johnny Farebrink: no one had seen them together and the drinking session they allegedly indulged in was denied by everyone who was present. For these reasons he was not a co-defendant in the case.
A local artist who had been a student at the same high school as Quick in the 1970s did testify that she was almost sure she had seen him at the train station in Gällivare at the time of the murders in Appojaure.
The district court also believed that Quick’s presence in Jokkmokk on the day before the murder was confirmed by the testimony of the owner of a stolen bicycle. She said that the bicycle’s gears were broken in precisely the way that Quick had described.
Seppo Penttinen, who had conducted all the interviews with Quick, testified in court as to the reasons why Quick had constantly changed his story over the course of the investigation. It was because Quick ‘had to protect his inner self by inventing something that verged on the truth’. Yet the central aspects of Quick’s memories were clear and distinct, according to Penttinen.
Sven Åke Christianson explained Quick’s difficulties in remembering his murders and described two contradictory mechanisms in the function of human memory. Remembering what harms us is, on the one hand, an important survival mechanism. On the other hand, we cannot constantly ‘go round remembering all the misery we’ve been through’. It is important to be able to forget, Christianson asserted.
Thomas Quick’s memory function had been examined by Christianson, who concluded that it was absolutely normal. He claimed that there wasn’t anything to suggest that this might be a case of a false confession.
A medical examiner and forensic technician gave convincing testimony that Quick had described all the most serious injuries sustained by the Stegehuises during questioning, and that his story had been confirmed by forensic evidence found at the scene.
The district court was also impressed by Seppo Penttinen’s account of how Quick had been able to describe the murder scene in the very first interviews, and stated in its summing-up: ‘On the basis of what we have seen, the district court finds beyond any reasonable doubt that Quick is guilty of these crimes. The circumstances of the crimes are such that it must be considered as murder.’
Thomas Quick had now been found guilty of three murders. But the investigation was still in its very infancy.
YENON LEVI
The accepted definition of a serial killer is taken from the FBI and stipulates that he or she must have committed three or more murders on separate occasions. By contrast, multiple murders that lack a ‘cooling-off period’ in between are categorised as ‘spree murders’.
So far, Thomas Quick had ‘only’ been convicted of three murders on two separate occasions and thus he didn’t meet the formal criteria to be classed as a serial killer. However, during the investigation into the murders in Appojaure the list of confessions to other murders had grown considerably, and Quick was very definitely a serial killer in waiting.
These confessions were not always initially made to the police. Pelle Tagesson of Expressen was able to reveal in August 1995 that Thomas Quick had confessed during an interview with him to having ‘murdered in Skåne’ and, by inference, was accepting responsibility for the sadistic sex murder of nine-year-old Helén Nilsson of Hörby in 1989. In the same interview, Quick also confessed to the killing of two boys in Norway and two males from ‘central Sweden’.
Christer van der Kwast was clearly put out by Quick’s bypassing both therapists and investigators to make his confessions directly to the media. ‘I can only hope that he also confesses to me,’ he commented.
By leaving clues and making suggestive allusions about murders, sometimes to the police and sometimes to therapists or journalists, Quick was playing a game of cat and mouse that irritated more people than just van der Kwast.
Journalists and the media were assuming an important but unclear role in the investigation. Quick was free to meet any reporters he liked and he always read what had been written about him. Van der Kwast could do little but accept that he had to learn from Expressen that Quick had committed one of his ‘new’ murders in the region of Dalarna, which immediately led the investigation to the notorious murder of the Israeli citizen Yenon Levi on the edge of the village of Rörshyttan on 11 June 1988.
Yenon Levi was a twenty-four-year-old tourist who was found dead beside a forest track in Dalarna. An extensive police investigation had led to a suspect, but the evidence was not sufficiently conclusive to go to trial.
The murder in Rörshyttan had been bubbling under the surface of the Quick