Thomas Quick (11 page)

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 read how Thomas Quick denied having read anything about any Norwegian murders in the 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:

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.