Authors: Hannes Råstam
Sweden’s foremost proponent of object relations theory was the psychiatrist Margit Norell, who had broken away from the Association of Psychoanalysts in the 1960s to create her own association for ‘holistic’ psychoanalysis, before also breaking away from this. At the time of Sture Bergwall’s committal to Säter Hospital the seventy-eight-year-old veteran of object relations theory was working as a supervisor for the clinic’s psychologists and therapists. According to Sture, she was treated with extreme reverence by the staff, and in his own notes he occasionally referred to her as ‘the Great One’.
In Säter’s library he immersed himself in the theories underlying the hospital’s therapeutic treatment methods, he told me: ‘I hadn’t been at Säter for very long when I started reading Alice Miller, who wrote about the child and the parents. Her point was that because the child is so dependent on the parents, it can’t bear the memory
of the parents’ sexual abuse. When memories are as difficult as that they’re repressed instead and become inaccessible. I soon realised that Alice Miller’s theories fitted very well with the clinic’s outlook. You had to look to your childhood for explanations as to the way you ended up as an adult. And difficult memories were repressed. When I started my conversations with Kjell Persson I was well aware of what was on his mind, and I was able to express myself so that I got a positive response. I made this adjustment to get what I wanted, which was human interaction.’
Sture used his counselling to discuss all manner of things, including the contents of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial bestseller: ‘For me it became important to discuss the book with Kjell, to compare Patrick Bateman’s fantasies with my own. The book
American Psycho
, Alice Miller’s theories on repressed memories from childhood, the ideas in circulation at the clinic – all these things created a very special and fertile ground for the serial killing. One has to bear in mind that the people committed to the clinic were violent. I was in this environment, I socialised with these people, I became a part of all this. And in the end I wanted to be a part of that world, because I had nothing else.’
DRUG ABUSE AND THERAPY
WITH KJELL PERSSON’S
help Sture began to ‘reawaken’ traumatic memories from his childhood so painful to him that they had been ‘fragmented’ and hidden away. Successively, fragments of memories were assembled into events, which created an overall impression of a terrible childhood filled with violence, sexual abuse and death.
The effort Sture put into his therapy was viewed very positively and he was now treated with a level of appreciation that he hadn’t previously encountered in his life.
One of the consequences of Sture opening up were ‘rewards’ in the form of leave, which was gradually increased. Persson’s notes, in this case from 2 October, were increasingly upbeat in their tone:
Continued conversation with the patient once a week. He fluctuates between more openness and more introspection. When he is closed to communication he tends to wear a jovial mask, and it is evident that at such times he grows more weary with himself.
By the autumn, Sture had been given three hours of ‘leave’ per day and, judging by staff notes in the file, was managing this perk without any problem at all. Persson wrote that the patient’s care does not ‘give cause for even the slightest concern’. He was ‘always very polite and accommodating’. In accordance with Sture’s wishes, the counselling was increased to two weekly sessions, Persson noted on 4 November, and ‘at the very heart of the conversation is his sense of
alienation. He does not dare show who he is and he feels very little justification for his life.’
Sture’s patient files and earlier court verdicts pointed to a life in which an extensive abuse of alcohol, drugs and prescription medicines had caused him serious problems. This issue was never touched upon in the file notes.
Sture’s consumption of legally prescribed narcotics was escalating, yet his well-documented long-term substance abuse never seems to have been meaningfully addressed in the counselling. For later readers of these files, this is a bit of a mystery, as is the fact that Sture preferred to speak of himself as a sex criminal, serial killer and cannibal rather than an ingrained alcoholic and drug addict.
In his first months at Säter, Sture established that while there were individuals that he liked among both the staff and the other inmates, there were also some that he had difficulties putting up with. In both camps there were people he could make use of. One of the people that Sture liked and found useful was twenty-two-year-old Jimmie Fagerstig, an intelligent repeat offender with a violent criminal background whose entire body was covered in tattoos.
‘I remember when Sture came to the regional clinic. I thought he shouldn’t be there at all. A smart person with a lot of ideas. But he had his anxiety and one hell of a death wish. He asked me to beat him to death with a bit of furniture. He lay down on the floor and said, “Just bloody kill me, Jimmie!”’
Eventually Sture rose in Jimmie’s esteem, not because he was the ward champion at Scrabble but because he told him he was serving a sentence for aggravated robbery. Sture was someone on Jimmie’s own level, but older and more experienced.
‘Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool dressing up as Father Christmas and robbing a bank! So he got some brownie points for a while,’ said Jimmie when I met with him.
Their bond was cemented more than anything by their common interest in drugs, and Jimmie was impressed by Sture’s amazing ability to get himself extra doses of medicine.
‘He’d throw himself on the floor and start screaming. When that happened they didn’t come with the dispenser, they just brought the
whole jar. “Sture, how many do you want?” He was smart! He put on his panic attacks and got as many Halcions and Xanax as he liked.’
The doctors soon realised that Sture wasn’t satisfied with the drugs available in the clinic and was topping himself up from illegal sources. Sture’s most important supplier was Jimmie Fagerstig.
‘We had so many damned drugs that sometimes they’d call in from outside,’ said Fagerstig. ‘If there wasn’t any junk in Hedemora they called me. “Yeah sure, come at nine”, I used to tell them.’
‘Fishing with a jar’ meant that the inmates lowered a jar of drugs on a string from a ventilation window. When the jar came up again, there was money inside.
During the autumn and winter of 1991, Sture was viewed as sufficiently reliable and stable to be allowed to attend the service at Säter Church unaccompanied, and to go jogging on his own around Lake Ljustern.
But on 18 December he gave his care assistant a shock by absconding with another patient. From the file:
We waited until 18.00 when the leave expired. He did not come back to the ward. A fax was sent at 18.19 to notify the police in Falun.
When Sture’s room was searched, a number of suicide notes to doctors and nurses were found, in which Sture announced that he had decided to kill himself.
A patient and a fellow patient have thus absconded and the patient has left a pile of suicide notes behind, mostly dated September and October this year, with one addition written on the day of leaving. Among other things the patient apologises for his behaviour. He gives fairly extensive instructions on how to proceed after his death, and he further writes that his body will be found within a close radius of the hospital grounds.
However, it later emerges that the patient has been down to the hospital cashier’s office several times in the morning before absconding to ask for his pension payment, which at that time had still not come in. Staff have searched the hospital grounds without finding anyone. Today, the police have passed us the information that the patient and fellow patient have most likely hired a car in Sala.
On the following day Sture and the other patient returned to Säter in a rented Volvo. Sture admitted that he took amphetamines at the time of the escape, and that among other places they had been in Åre. He said that the purpose of the escape had been to commit suicide by driving the car head-on into a rock wall, but because the other patient was in the car, he was unable to put his plan into action. Sture said to his doctor, Kjell Persson, that the reason for his escape was his bad conscience about buying amphetamines in the Säter Hospital grounds.
File notes after the escape suggest that staff on the ward had begun to suspect that Sture was self-medicating and that he had suppliers other than Säter’s own doctors. The personnel were authorised to search Sture after leave outings and he was caught a number of times trying to smuggle banned substances or pharmaceutical drugs into the ward.
In his therapy, Sture had begun to talk more and more about harrowing experiences in his childhood. He told Kjell Persson that he had not previously had any recall of them, but now one nightmarish event after another was surfacing. It began with the suggestion that his parents had been emotionally cold and indifferent to his needs. Then came images of being sexually assaulted at the age of three by his father.
Sture’s mother, Thyra Bergwall, was well known in Korsnäs as a warm, considerate woman who kept the family together and pretty much single-handedly brought in the income needed to look after her seven children. In his conversations with Kjell Persson, Sture found
memories were resurfacing of his mother’s dual nature. He described how she tried to drown him in a hole in an ice-covered lake when he was four years old. Sture lost consciousness but was saved by his father at the very last moment. On another occasion his mother tried to kill him by pushing him into the path of an approaching tram. Somehow he also managed to survive this attempted murder.
Sture’s memories of parental abuse grew increasingly torrid. In the end he described the entire family as being involved in the outrages, both as victims and perpetrators. The more extreme the memories recovered by Sture in therapy, the more positive the response of Persson to his patient.
Over time he has become more and more open in his communication, he has found the courage to scrutinise himself and his sexual perversion in a way that has clearly led to new insights for the patient, including how ‘sick’ his actions have been, which was something he was earlier repressing and unable to integrate. There is a marked dual nature in the patient, whereby he displays both a timid and an accommodating nature on the ward, yet behind this mask some very stormy emotions lie hidden which he dares not show or speak of.
Kjell Persson’s note on 9 April mentions Sture’s timid, accomodating nature in his day-to-day life in the ward. However, during their therapeutic conversations he realised that this behaviour was little more than a mask, behind which Sture’s ‘dual nature’ lay hidden. The therapy began to close in on this perceived dual nature, in order to uncover what lay hidden there.
In the same entry, Persson goes on:
The patient has gone into his childhood experiences, which previously seemed fairly well established, but now a number of fresh memories have come to the fore. He has also been interpreting dreams. In short, one could say that there seems to have been an extremely tense situation in the family, where there was hardly any space for the patient’s own needs during his childhood.
In his file notes, Kjell Persson is rather evasive about what he has discovered, as he wants to try and preserve his secret for as long as he can. His own conviction is that, through therapeutic support, he has managed to help Sture regain control of old, repressed memories about the horrifying assaults to which he was subjected as a child. According to the dogma holding sway at Säter, Persson had managed this feat as a consequence of his professional skills as a therapist.
In the spring of 1992, Sture was placed in a high-security ward known as Ward 36. At the same time he was also given more recreational opportunities. Some rather sparse notes record that Sture took walks, jogged round Lake Ljustern and travelled to Avesta while on leave. From time to time he suffered from anxiety, and whenever this happened he was given Diazepam and other narcotic-strength medications, in particular benzodiazepines.
As summer drew near, his doctors felt Sture was now so stable that, from 6 June 1992, he was given full clearance – that is, he had the freedom to move about in the community during the daytime as he pleased.
Yet the brief and harmonious file notes hide the great drama that was unfolding three times a week, with stormy emotions and tales of sexual abuse and violence. Kjell Persson knew that the truth about Sture would not trickle out slowly, rather it would drop like a bomb. And on that day, the patient and his therapist would end up on the front pages of the country’s newspapers. But not yet. The therapy had to carry on for a little longer.
THE BATHING TRIP
THURSDAY, 25 JUNE 1992
was a balmy, sunny day, perfect for a bathing trip to Lake Ljustern with Therese, one of Sture’s favourite nurses, who was easy to talk to and also seemed comfortable in his company.
They lay on the beach, basking in the sun while distractedly speaking of Sture’s life and the crimes he had committed.
‘I wonder what you’d think of me if you found out that I’d done something really serious.’
Therese gave Sture a searching look.
‘What do you mean, “serious”?’
‘Well, something really, really serious. You understand. How would that change the way you saw me?’
‘I don’t get what you’re saying at all! Really, really serious! Why don’t you just say what you mean.’
‘I’ll give you a clue.’
‘OK.’
Sture thought about it in silence for a few moments, before spelling out, ‘M-U.’
‘M-U?’
Therese gave him a troubled smile.
‘Sture, I’m not getting any of this.’
She felt that the entire gist of the conversation was odd, maybe also a touch unpleasant, although she kept this to herself. It was hardly difficult imagining what ‘something really serious’ could mean for a patient who had been sectioned at a secure psychiatric clinic and who had already committed aggravated robbery, sexual assaults
on children and grievous bodily harm. She managed to steer him off the subject, but once she got back to the ward she reported what Sture had said.