Authors: Hannes Råstam
Nowadays, the reliability of such repressed memories extracted in therapy is viewed with scepticism, not least in legal systems around the world, but in the 1990s these ideas were at the very heart of the treatment of Thomas Quick and other violent prisoners at Säter.
Neither the doctors nor the psychiatrists at Säter ever questioned
the fact that Quick had no memories of any of his murders even though he was, apparently, the worst serial killer in Sweden. There was a broad consensus that experiences of this kind were so unendurable that the memories were ‘dissociated’ and hidden in the far reaches of the brain. Nor did anyone at any stage examine Ståhle’s competence at extracting such memories by use of regression techniques.
As the fragmented memories gradually returned, an intellectually stimulating process took over in which the pieces were joined up – ‘integrated’ – while Birgitta Ståhle and her curious patient watched in terror as the image of the serial killer Thomas Quick materialised before their very eyes.
I knew that Ståhle was having weekly coaching from object relations theory guru Margit Norell for her therapy with Quick, but their reasoning and approach were a well-kept secret. There was no documentation about it apart from Sture Bergwall’s meagre and unconfirmed memories.
Birgitta Ståhle had been keeping careful notes on every therapy session, and after Sture retracted all his confessions he demanded to see these notes, which, legally speaking, were a part of his file. Her answer was astonishing: Ståhle maintained that she had destroyed them all.
Sture also told me that Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle had written a book about Thomas Quick. The authors had said it would be a groundbreaking work on a par with Sigmund Freud’s case study of ‘the Wolf Man’. But for unknown reasons the book was never published.
Sture and I realised that we would never have access to the manuscript.
Evidently my only source of information on Birgitta Ståhle’s ten-year period of therapy with the serial killer Quick was Sture Bergwall, the person with possibly the least credibility in the whole country.
After Sture Bergwall’s retraction of his confessions, the hospital management imposed a variety of reprisals on the troublesome serial killer. Among other things the doctors withdrew his so-called ‘fresh
air’ outings, and it was decided that the blinds that afforded him a measure of privacy and protected him from direct sunlight in his room should be removed. The bookcases with books and CDs that had been in his room for almost two decades were also removed.
When Sture was packing the contents of the last bookcase into a cardboard box, he found an unmarked scuffed folder at the bottom of a pile of old vinyl records. Sture opened the file and read the lines at the top of the first page in amazement:
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this book is to describe a very difficult and unusual therapeutic process which I, in my capacity as supervising therapist, have been monitoring in the years 1991–95 . . .
Sture could hardly believe his eyes: he had found Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle’s manuscript, which we had all thought was lost. He continued reading:
Before the therapeutic process began, Sture had no memories at all from before the age of 12. His awareness of the murders he had committed – the first of them at the age of 14 – had initially only come up in the therapeutic process. In no case was he ever the object of suspicion or under investigation for any of these crimes. Whenever a murder and the particular details of it were sufficiently clarified in the therapy, Sture himself asked the police to come and question him and investigate the matter.
A few days later I held the priceless manuscript in my hands, all 404 pages of unedited text, sections of it indigestible in its thorny, psychological jargon – but nonetheless it was the therapists’ own account of their process with Thomas Quick.
In my early research on Thomas Quick I had often come across the expression ‘the Simon illusion’. I understood this to be a central theme of the therapy but had some difficulty grasping the precise meaning of the illusion. As soon as I got the chance I asked Sture to explain.
‘Simon came into the picture in my therapy with Birgitta Ståhle. He was born in connection with a sexual assault on me by both my father and my mother. I can’t remember how I described it, but he was killed by dismemberment. I mean the head was cut off. Then the foetus was wrapped in newspaper and put on the back of a bicycle and then me and Dad went and buried it on Främby Point.’
Sture was four years old when he witnessed the murder of his little brother, and an idea took hold of him that he should try to ‘mend Simon’, and make him whole and alive once again. Somehow this idea transformed into the concept of Sture being able to ‘gain life’ by killing. In his therapy with Birgitta Ståhle this train of thought became the explanation behind Sture’s development into a murderer of boys.
No one had ever heard of Simon before Thomas Quick started talking about him to Birgitta Ståhle, and according to Sture these were pure fantasies that had come up in the therapy room.
I sat with the manuscript in which Ståhle described in her own words how Thomas Quick regressed in the therapy and was transformed into the four-year-old witnessing how his parents murdered and cut up his little brother Simon:
The face is contorted with the terror of dying, with a gaping mouth. I, Birgitta, can communicate with Sture, which demonstrates that although he is in deep regression he nonetheless still has a connection with the here and now.
The first lunge with the knife stabs into the right-hand side of the torso and is delivered by the mother. Thereafter the father takes the knife. The Sture-shell repeatedly says not the throat, not the throat, then holds up the throat. The knife stabs and cuts up the torso and then the right leg is removed.
M [Mother] takes flesh from Simon and puts it in the Sture-shell’s gaping mouth.
The Sture-shell says, ‘I’m not hungry.’ Sture says that M and F embrace and it gives him an unpleasant feeling. Then he reaches out to take Simon’s hand. Realises that it is loose, it is unattached. Says, ‘I’ve broken off my little brother’s hand.’
In the therapy, Simon’s birth and the parents’ killing of him were perceived as truths. Sture’s experience of the murder as a child would later be re-enacted in the murders of Johan Asplund, Charles Zelmanovits and the other boys. The memories were repressed but the adult Sture was able to ‘recount’ his experiences by means of the murders and by desecrating and cutting up the bodies, just as his parents had cut up his little brother.
In the book, Sture’s mother is referred to throughout as ‘M’ or ‘Nana’, euphemisms for a creature of such evil that her real name would be too frightening to speak out loud. Birgitta Ståhle returns in several passages to the evil mother’s heinous deeds:
Sture starts talking spasmodically. Nana has just pressed her hands round Sture’s throat. ‘He feels her hands. Now she goes to Simon’, where Sture remains behind his closed eyes. She was there, right in front of Simon’s undamaged face. The body was broken but Sture can concentrate on the face so he doesn’t have to look at the broken body. Sture sees Nana’s bloody, clenched hand. He grows silent, then he says, ‘Maybe that red stuff is fruit syrup?’ . . .
According to Margit Norell, the fact that Thomas Quick believed the blood on his massacred younger brother was fruit syrup could be seen as evidence that he was telling the truth. She wrote in the manuscript:
So how can we know if what Sture is describing is the truth?
When it comes to the experiences of the child: the childlike language, the typical childish reactions, the manner of the regression, the emotional expressions – and the ever clearer memories.
As for the repressed adult experiences: the reconstructions and their correspondence with police records and, lastly, the connection between the two.
Investigators searched in vain for Simon’s buried body on Främby Point. They ordered the mother’s medical records from Falu Hospital,
and these indicated that Thyra Bergwall had not given birth to a child at this time nor suffered a miscarriage. No one close to the family had noticed any pregnancy and neither had Sture’s six siblings. Despite this, no one in the investigating team seems to have had the slightest doubt about the authenticity of Sture’s account. Not the police, not the prosecutor, not the courts and not Margit Norell.
Like all children, Sture has tried to maintain a positive image of his parents. He has done so particularly with his father, who was sometimes capable of showing kind sides – even if rather sentimental in their form. But mostly it was his mother who was frightening to Sture, and one of the forms this took was that he no longer dares remember her face or look at it. When this is no longer possible – in connection with the death and cutting up of the Simon foetus – Sture divides his image of the father into two parts – P and Ellington – where Ellington represents the terrifying, evil part of his father.
During one regression, Thomas Quick talked about a ‘time-fall to the level of 1954’ – P had left the room after the murder of Simon and soon after came back wearing a clean shirt.
It’s a man who’s borrowed Daddy’s shirt
, thought Sture the child, and named his father’s evil incarnation, Ellington. In the therapy Quick often used the euphemisms ‘Ellington’ and ‘P’ for his father, but he was able to enunciate the word ‘Father’ without any particular problems. Using the word ‘Mother’ when speaking of her was, however, an impossibility.
It’s a strange story. But stranger still is the evolution of the Ellington figure.
In the therapy, Ellington changed from having been his father’s evil alter ego to a personality that quite often took possession of Thomas Quick’s body. Birgitta Ståhle witnessed the transformation many times and recorded one instance of this in the manuscript:
I can promise you that the transformation I saw was the Devil incarnate in literal form, and Sture’s response to this. He bares his throat and after that there is denial in his words, no, this is
not my father, it’s a record that’s jumped out of him and is saying this.
What the Devil has said to him is – you shall taste death.
Ellington’s different roles in Thomas Quick’s story is one of many examples of how the figures in Quick’s descriptions are constantly changing form; no one personality is fixed and is always symbolising someone else. Ellington is the father figure into whom Quick is transformed when he commits his murders.
During the first period of therapy with Birgitta Ståhle the relevant cases were Alvar Larsson, Johan Asplund, Olle Högbom and a boy who was sometimes called ‘Duska’ and sometimes entirely different names. The last name added to the existing list from Kjell Persson’s time was Charles Zelmanovits, and it was in this case that Ellington made his entrance as a murderer of boys.
Charles was fifteen when he disappeared on the way home from a school disco in Piteå on the night of 13 November 1976. Since Thomas Quick’s return from Växjö, the murder of Charles had become the priority case in the therapy sessions and the police investigation.
LEADING QUESTIONS
IN THE SUMMER
of 2008, long before the dramatic meeting at Säter where Sture admitted to me that his confessions were all false, I visited Falu District Court to copy their documents on Sture Bergwall’s youthful transgressions and the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen. There, they were not only helpful but also talkative, and a young law clerk told me that a Norwegian production company had also ordered copies of the two investigation reports of Thomas Quick’s murders.
‘When they got the invoice for 40,000 crowns they refused to pay,’ he told me.
I was curious and slightly concerned about the possibility of a competing television production in Norway, but soon learned that it was a series on psychological profiling.
One of the world’s leading profilers, former FBI agent Gregg McCrary, had compiled psychological profiles of the individuals who had murdered Therese Johannesen, Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik.
Gregg McCrary had not been given access to the interrogation transcripts or other information about Thomas Quick, only technical forensic reports, interviews with people connected to the victims and similar materials. Of course, he hadn’t been told that the same person had been convicted of all three murders.
Quite shamelessly I decided to sponge off my Norwegian colleagues and booked an interview with Gregg McCrary in Virginia, USA.
He received me at the end of September in his grandiose property in a gated community behind walls and manned sentry posts. To McCrary it seemed quite obvious that three different people were
responsible for the Norwegian murders for which Thomas Quick had been found guilty. None of his psychological profiles of the criminals bore any kind of resemblance to Thomas Quick, and in two cases he concluded that the guilty person would have needed very good local knowledge, which Quick didn’t have.
When I told McCrary about my own investigation, he said, ‘The only thing we know for sure is that he’s a liar. First he confessed to the crimes, later he changed his mind about it. What matters now is that we decide which of the two versions is the truth. He may have committed a few of the murders, he may be guilty of them all. In regard to the three murders I am familiar with, I’m positive he’s innocent. And I am extremely dubious about the others.’
He carried on: ‘I’ve been called in many times to check interviews when there’s a suspicion of a false confession. The first thing I usually do is to quickly leaf through the interrogation transcript to see who’s doing the talking. The preponderance should always be on the suspect, if it’s not there’s a big risk that the interrogator is passing information to the suspect.’
Gregg McCrary told me about cases he had worked on himself, where it was found that false confessions had been made, even though the suspects had provided information which only the perpetrator and the police should have been in a position to know.
The interrogators had been absolutely sure that they hadn’t revealed any information of such kind, but after carefully scrutinising the transcripts they noticed that this was precisely what had happened. Information can be revealed by tiny insinuations, or just the way a question is phrased.