Authors: Hannes Råstam
Claes Borgström, Thomas Quick’s defence lawyer 1995–2000, in an interview with the author on 14 November 2008
LIVING A LIE
I WAS STANDING
by the door to the visiting room, waiting for the guard to let me out. But first Sture had to answer my question.
Thomas Quick’s trips to Stockholm when he was on leave were noted in the police investigation material. On his return from one of these trips, it was as if he had made ‘a hypnotic journey in a time machine’ and now had amazing recall of every detail of his murder of Thomas Blomgren in Växjö. At least this was how his therapist interpreted the sudden return of his memory.
‘Oh, I can tell you that all right,’ said Sture triumphantly. ‘I sat in a library in Stockholm reading newspaper articles about Thomas Blomgren. Yeah, I sat there scanning through microfilm. I noted down important facts and made a drawing of the outhouse. I smuggled these into Säter and mugged up on them before I got rid of them.’
Although I had suspected this was exactly what had taken place, it was almost unsettling to learn how infernally crafty he had been. Why on earth had he put so much effort into duping the police?
According to Sture, his goal had not been to trick the police. It had all been about achieving credibility with his therapist and trying to be an interesting patient.
‘I was forced to the library by Kjell Persson,’ Sture explained. ‘You have to understand the enormous pressure I was under in my therapy. We sat there three times a week, a couple of hours every time. And I talked and talked without being able to come up with any real facts. It was also about Kjell Persson and [chief physician] Göran
Fransson wanting to pass on something substantial to Seppo and Kwast. Talking about Thomas Blomgren seemed harmless. It was a statute-barred crime and there was no risk I’d be prosecuted for it.’
I heard what Sture was saying, but however hard I tried to understand, it was all too crazy for me.
‘And anyway,’ Sture continued with a pointed glance, ‘I have an alibi for the murder of Thomas Blomgren! A very strong alibi!’
I still hadn’t quite got over what he’d said about the library.
‘Me and my twin sister were confirmed on that Whitsun weekend in 1964,’ Sture told me eagerly. ‘The confirmation stretched over two days! It was at home, in Falun! We were in folk costume! We were part of a folk-dancing group and we were all confirmed together.’
‘Are you really sure about this? You’re sure you have the right date and the right year?’
‘Quite sure,’ he said emphatically. ‘I was worried all along that they’d find out about the confirmation. My siblings knew about it! And the others who were being confirmed. It wouldn’t have been so difficult to find out about it!’
Finally the guard came to let me out. We had to say a quick goodbye.
My head was spinning as I walked out into the autumn air and went to my car. There was a great deal to process here; I remained deep in thought all the way back to Gothenburg.
Sture Bergwall’s retraction of his confessions to all the murders had a fundamental impact on the work with my planned television documentary.
He soon got over his initial resistance to letting me have his files and before long I had access to material far beyond anything I could ever have dreamed of. The material primarily consisted of patient notes, records of medications and so on, but Sture had also kept masses of correspondence, diaries, private notes and old investigation documents.
Sture provided me with everything I wanted and didn’t even bother reading through what he was passing to me.
‘That’s my big security, I
know
there’s nothing in this material that will contradict me. For the first time I have nothing to hide. Nothing!’
‘The truth will set us free,’ I answered in a slightly jaunty tone, but at the same time there was a deep underlying seriousness.
If Sture’s new version of events was indeed the truth, I knew that the mere fact of telling it would be a great relief to him.
In the time after Sture’s turnaround we often spoke about the devastating consequences of any attempt on his part to lie to me. Even the most inconsequential lie would send us both into limbo. In my heart I knew he was telling me the truth. I knew it. But for reasons of plain self-preservation I was determined to question every-thing he said.
As far as the outside world was concerned he was the foremost lunatic in the whole country, a person entirely devoid of credibility. The fact that he now claimed it was all made up wouldn’t necessarily change that perception.
Yet the convictions imposed on Thomas Quick were also based on additional evidence, and I knew that I would have to scrutinise – and rule out – every single piece. If even one item could not be explained in any other way than by Sture’s guilt, his entire story would collapse like a house of cards.
With the researcher Jenny Küttim, I was producing a documentary in two parts, scheduled for broadcast on 14 and 21 December 2008. We had exactly three months to complete our task.
We had questions for Sture on a daily basis and relying on the patient telephone in his ward was no longer an option. We got him a simple mobile phone which we posted to him in Säter, so that we could talk as often as we liked.
Sture Bergwall had no money to pay for the legal advice he needed now, but the lawyer Thomas Olsson, with whom I became acquainted during ‘The Case of Ulf’, accepted the commission on a
pro bono
basis, at no cost to the client.
Jenny Küttim and I devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to checking
Sture’s statements and working our way through the colossal amounts of documentation to which we now had access. Sture’s patient files stretched from 1970 to the present. They confirmed Sture’s own account of a senseless over-medication.
The material makes for remarkable reading. What we were seeing was no less than an inconceivable healthcare scandal.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE SERIAL KILLER
AFTER THE BOTCHED
bank robbery in Grycksbo in 1990, Sture Bergwall was initially given a psychiatric evaluation at the state clinic for forensic psychiatry in Huddinge. In her eleven-page social investigation, the counsellor Anita Stersky summarised her patient’s life thus far: sexual assaults on young boys at the end of the 1960s, the consequent sentence of psychiatric care, a spell at Sidsjön Hospital in Sundsvall, then the release on trial and subsequent studies at the folk high school in Jokkmokk. ‘After this period, things took a turn for the worse,’ wrote Stersky. ‘SB got involved with homosexuals abusing narcotics and alcohol. Despite this, he had a certain feeling of belonging with the group, which gave him a negative identity but an identity nonetheless.’
Sture was confined to Säter Hospital for the first time in January 1973, then conditionally released to pursue his studies at Uppsala University. Everything seemed to be going well until March 1974, when he attacked a homosexual man, whom he came very close to stabbing to death. The social report listed further periods of confinement, more conditional releases, Bergwall’s ‘death wish’ and suicide attempts; then, in 1977, a definite release from Säter. Of Sture Bergwall’s attraction to young boys, Anita Stersky concluded: ‘He has learned that he is not allowed to live out his desires.’ She added: ‘One of the most important factors in SB being able to control these desires was that he completely stopped using narcotics and alcohol.’
There followed a description of the years in Grycksbo: the kiosk
venture, life with Patrik, the cancellation of disability payments, bankruptcy, financial problems, his time as a bingo caller and finally the failed robbery of Gotabanken.
In her closing statement as counsellor, Stersky wrote:
In our conversations, SB has usually been extremely anxious and nervous, and occasionally bursts into crying fits. When we speak of particularly emotional subjects, SB has a tendency to become hysterical. He chews, scratches or pulls at his beard, closes his eyes and shakes in an almost convulsive manner, or he sits stiffly and keeps his eyes closed for several minutes and at such times is not receptive to any attempts to communicate with him. [. . .] In my opinion SB suffers from a significant psychiatric disturbance and needs to kept in confined psychiatric care. This should be arranged for him at a hospital equipped to deal with high-maintenance patients, because of the level of danger he presents.
Sture told me about the almost bottomless despair he felt at this time: ‘I had a good life in Grycksbo. Many friends and a job as a bingo caller in Falun. The old ladies liked me; many of them picked the days when I was working to come in. I was the caller, I sold the chips, took care of the old girls, fetched coffee, joked with them. I made them enjoy themselves. It was a nice job and it suited me really well. By getting caught for the bank robbery I burned all my bridges. Relatives, friends, my work, I lost everything.
‘I had done bad things before. But that was a long time ago, when I was a young man in the 1960s and 1970s. After the robbery I couldn’t even imagine looking into my siblings’ eyes again. I was utterly alone and had nothing to go back to. Nothing.’
His time in Huddinge gave him two things, he explained to me.
‘At the psychiatric clinic in Huddinge I learned that even a horrifying mass murderer like Juha Valjakkala could awaken feelings of admiration among some of the staff. He’d been kept in a special isolation ward under constant surveillance. There was this terrible fascination for Juha and his crimes.’
With his Finnish girlfriend Marita, Juha Valjakkala had murdered
an entire family in Åmsele, in the region of Västerbotten, in 1988. After their arrest in Denmark, Juha was put through an extensive psychiatric assessment at the clinic of forensic psychiatry in Huddinge. Although some time had passed since Valjakkala left the clinic, his shadow still hung heavily over the ward.
‘Some of the staff were talking to me about Juha all the time. I was like a vent for their need to talk about Juha and the murders,’ said Sture. ‘I realised that even a loathsome criminal could be admired and loved.’
That was one thing. The other thing that came up, Sture explained to me, was that Anita Stersky told him about a ‘fantastic form of psycho-dynamic therapy’ that had been developed at Säter Hospital. He looked forward to that.
The dark blue Volvo passed Säter golf club, slowly turned onto the road known as Jonshyttevägen, or Jon’s Cabin Way, and glided along the leafy shore of Lake Ljustern. The passenger in the back seat had no idea that he was destined for international fame and, in terms of the number of murders he had committed, would overtake giants like Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
But it was early spring in 1991, the piles of sticks and branches built up for Walpurgis Night had not yet been lit and Thomas Quick was still known as Sture Bergwall. He did not know that his life story would occupy psychologists, doctors, researchers, journalists and a large part of the Swedish legal establishment for decades to come. He had no idea that internationally distinguished academics, believing that his case was unprecedented, would follow his remarkable fate with great interest.
When Sture Bergwall arrived at Säter Hospital on 29 April 1991, the concept of the serial killer was relatively new to the average Swede. A number of cases in the USA had caused the FBI to coin the term and develop new methods – in particular so-called profiling techniques – in an attempt to track down the elusive perpetrators. The phenomenon had been the subject of extensive research among American criminologists and behavioural experts in the latter part
of the 1980s. A few years later it began to be exploited by writers and film-makers in popular culture.
In the spring of 1991, the new anti-hero of popular culture was taking possession of the stage in grand style, represented by Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter in the screen dramatisation of Thomas Harris’s novel
The Silence of the Lambs.
In the film, the brilliant serial killer helps the investigators – with a series of infernally cryptic clues – identify the serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’, who catches and kills women with the express intention of sewing himself a suit made from their skins. Dr Lecter offers sharp-witted and psychologically insightful leads in the form of anagrams and personal questions directed at FBI agent Clarice Starling, often with learned references and quotations from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. But the razor-sharp cannibal’s clues are so sophisticated and cryptic that they can only be deciphered with enormous difficulty.
Sture wasn’t able to go to the cinema, but he rented the film on video and, like everyone else in Sweden, began to learn how serial killers operated and how they could be hunted down.
At the same time the successful novel
American Psycho
was published, in which the ice-cold sadist, millionaire and serial killer Patrick Bateman looked for amusement and a cure for his overriding boredom by assaulting his victims, with perfectly judged indifference, using electric drills and staple guns. The library at Säter Hospital acquired the book, which Sture Bergwall immediately borrowed and read.
‘The main character of the novel, Patrick Bateman, is incredibly intelligent, which I think was important to me. I saw that one could be intelligent and a serial killer at the same time.
The Silence of the Lambs
and
American Psycho
also got a certain status because they were reviewed in
Dagens Nyheter
and
Expressen
’s culture pages. Because of that, serial killers also became interesting to me,’ Sture recalled.
For Sture Bergwall, having an identity as an intellectual person was important, and he noted that his doctors and psychologists were interested in the new phenomenon. And with an almost uncanny sense of timing, the successful stories in popular culture were soon finding their equivalent in real life.
One warm evening at the end of July 1991, two police officers were cruising through a district of Milwaukee in Wisconsin known for its prevalence of heavy crime, when a young black man came running up to them with a handcuff dangling from one of his wrists.