Authors: Hannes Råstam
The interrogator is supposed to ask open-ended questions: ‘What happened? Tell me!’ If the interrogator asks leading questions answerable with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the interview is not being handled correctly.
The substance of McCrary’s insights was like an echo of what the Quick-critical policeman Jan Olsson had said to me early on: ‘Think about one thing: has he ever given a single piece of information that the police didn’t already know? I’d say that’s what you ought to be thinking about.’
CHARLES ZELMANOVITS’S DISAPPEARANCE
CHARLES ZELMANOVITS LAY
on the floor while his younger brother, Frederick, tried to help him squeeze his slim body into the even slimmer Wrangler jeans.
Fred struggled and pulled at the waistband; Charles sucked in his stomach and finally managed to get the brass button through the buttonhole. Stiff and clumsy, he got onto his feet and ran his hand across the denim, which was stuck to his thighs like an eel skin. As the trouser legs reached his feet, they widened to cover them completely.
Frederick Zelmanovits was only twelve years old but he clearly remembered the evening of 12 November 1976, just before the unfathomable happened. I met him in the little restaurant he ran in Piteå and found that Charles’s younger brother had aged; his flowing locks had thinned, turned grey and been cut short. He had children and soon he would be turning forty-five.
He spoke of the disappearance of Charles, which had left a permanent feeling of emptiness in his chest: ‘It was my best friend who disappeared.’
Charles was the one Frederick always turned to when there were arguments in the family, or whenever he had problems of any kind. That last evening with Charles had been quite normal. Frederick remembers how earlier on he had thrown a dog bowl of water over Charles. Then he had helped him get his jeans on and the dog bowl was forgotten.
Charles and Frederick had mixed their blood, one thumb pressed to another, before they left their childhood home in Spain and moved
with their family to Piteå, in the cold and dark of the north. It was their mother, Inga, who had insisted on the move from Fuengirola so the boys could have a better education. Her Spanish husband, Alexander, was a surgeon, but he had taken a position as company doctor for Munksund Sawmills.
Inga Zelmanovits had always spoken Swedish with her sons, so Charles had no problems with the language when he started at Pitholm School – just the odd word came out wrong sometimes. He was accepted by the other pupils and soon became one of the most popular boys in the class, which was possibly helped along by his gleaming ash-blond shoulder-length hair, his almond-shaped brown eyes and a smile that revealed a perfect row of teeth.
But despite all his good points, Charles was still a foreigner and an outsider. That was how it was in Piteå in 1976.
On the evening in question, Charles had been reminded that his position among his circle of friends shouldn’t be taken for granted. His classmate Anna had the house to herself over the weekend, so there was a party at her parents’ lavish villa. Everyone was coming, but no one had thought to invite Charles.
He gave his jeans a final check, then put on the long leather coat which had been hand-sewn to order in Spain. In his pocket was a secret bottle of Bacardi even his blood-brother didn’t know about – but the world has knowledge of it now, thanks to the police’s scrupulous mapping-out of his last evening.
Charles drummed up his courage and dialled the number. Anna answered and Charles could hear that the party was already in full swing, even though it was only half past six. Of course he was welcome, she said, no problem.
Before long Charles was ringing the doorbell. The other boys had beer, wine and spirits, which they offered to the girls. Charles pulled out his bottle of Bacardi and sat down on a footstool.
By half past eight most of them were drunk, someone called a taxi and the party came to an abrupt and chaotic end. Charles and a few others who couldn’t squeeze into the taxi ended up walking the three kilometres to the school disco at Pitholm School.
As soon as he walked into the school canteen Charles saw Maria.
And she saw him. They danced and kissed a bit before she went outside with him. They brought the rum with them to a hidden spot. It was six degrees outside. They had sexual intercourse but it was over almost before it started. Maria was in a bad mood when they went inside again.
But Charles was soon back outside with all the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds who hadn’t been allowed inside the school disco. His rum was almost finished and Charles was quite drunk. He didn’t have a clue where Maria was.
‘Charles!’
Leif was calling him. Charles was fond of nineteen-year-old Leif, who was an unusually decent guy and was Maria’s friend.
‘You want a nip?’ asked Charles, holding out the bottle to offer him the last few drops.
Leif shook his head and said, ‘Maria told me about it. You’ve really upset her. And made her angry.’
Charles finished off the last sip without answering. But Leif wouldn’t let it go.
‘You can’t just get your bloody end away and then not give a damn about her for the rest of the night. You have to be with her tonight! Then after that you can do what you want . . .’
Charles couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say by way of a response and just stood there with his empty bottle. Leif repeated how much he disliked the way Charles had behaved and then left him by himself in the dark.
The rumour spread like wildfire: ‘Charles fucked Maria.’
After all, she was the best-looking girl in the school, even the eighteen-year-olds thought so. Before long the gossip was that ‘the Greek’ had raped her.
Lars-Ove was eighteen and had stayed sober so that he could be the designated driver that night. When he caught sight of Maria he suggested a drive in his car. They drove into the centre of town, but things didn’t work out as Lars-Ove had hoped – Maria was upset and spoke only about Charles.
Charles was still at the disco at Pitholm School. He looked for Maria until he was the last person left and then hurried homewards.
After a few kilometres down the long straight road known as Järnvägsgatan (Railway Road) he caught sight of a large gang of schoolmates. He ran until he caught up with them, but Maria wasn’t there.
Charles exchanged only a few words with his friends from the party earlier at the villa before hurrying on. The last his friends saw of him was when he passed under the street light by the T-junction at the end of Järnvägsgatan. No one saw if he took a right or a left turn into Pitholmsgatan.
He never reached home.
When Charles disappeared into the darkness, his younger brother, Frederick, was sleeping, so he was unaware of what had happened until he awoke the next morning.
‘There were loads of police outside and soon enough I guess I understood what they were doing there. In the beginning we thought he’d come back, but as time passed it got worse and worse.’
Frederick described Charles’s disappearance as a family catastrophe. He tried to put into words the endless torment of uncertainty, how his parents’ spirits were broken, telephone calls from someone who said, ‘Hi, it’s Charles’, and then hung up. He described the foolish hope that he would find Charles standing there one day, that he was not dead and everything would be as it had been before.
‘Of course you always wanted to think that he was out there somewhere. But time passed. It was quite chaotic.’
Frederick never believed in the suicide theories or that Charles had been unwell or hadn’t dared go home. Frederick said it was inconceivable that Charles would have disappeared on purpose.
‘Someone did something to him, that’s always been my firm belief.’
Sunday, 19 September 1993 was a beautiful morning in Norra Pitholmen. A young hunter had made plans to spend the best part of the day in the forest, on land where his family had hunting rights.
With a firm grip on his shotgun, he hurried to keep up with his dog, which had almost reached the clearing at the top of the slope.
The dog barked to signal wildfowl. The hunter was peering up into the sun when he stumbled over something. The object looked like a large, greyish white mushroom but felt hard as a stone. It was too large to be an animal bone, too round for an animal cranium. With one foot he scraped away the moss, picked it up and found himself standing with a human cranium in his hand.
His discovery was puzzling. A body couldn’t have lain here for a long period of time without being found. They often used beaters here for the hunting and he had passed the spot countless times. A few years earlier his father had cut down the forest a stone’s throw away. The hunter looked at the cranium one more time before carefully putting it back on the ground, memorising the place and hurrying away after his dog.
Churning thoughts of the skull wouldn’t give him any peace and after an hour of unproductive stalking he went back to have another look at the object. He remembered the boy who had gone missing without trace seventeen years before, and it dawned on him that he had to go home and call the police.
The police patrol confirmed the presence of several more bones and decaying garments in the area. They found what looked like the sleeve of a brown leather jacket.
‘The person associated with this cranium is currently not known to us,’ wrote Detective Inspector Martin Strömbäck in his report, although he didn’t have the slightest doubt about the identity of the dead person.
Charles’s father was no longer alive, but Frederick and his mother, Inga, were soon notified that Charles had been identified by means of his dental records.
‘At least it was something definite . . . A lot of people say it’s such a relief when a body is found, but I have a hard time feeling that. What’s the meaning of a body? I want to know what happened. For a number of years we were clear about the fact that he no longer existed. When the body was found the uncertainty returned: OK? Why is it lying there? What really happened?’
*
It wasn’t until three months later, on Friday, 10 December, that the newspapers reported that Charles Zelmanovits’s remains had been found.
The riddle of the missing fifteen-year-old had been partially solved. The Zelmanovits family had received written confirmation that Charles was dead. How he had died or why he had ended up in the forest on Norra Pitholmen were questions that the investigation could not answer. The forensic technicians hadn’t found anything to suggest that Charles had been the victim of a crime.
A few days after the publication of the articles on Charles Zelmanovits, Thomas Quick mentioned during a therapy session with Kjell Persson that he had ‘come into contact with new material’. He had become aware of some memories of murdering a boy in Piteå in the 1970s.
Kjell Persson replied that he had read an item in the newspaper about that particular case, because the police had found Charles’s remains in a forest outside Piteå.
‘Oh really,’ said Quick, surprised. ‘I never saw that.’
It was after eight in the morning on 9 February 1994 when the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren walked out of his magnificent Dalecarlian mansion, got into his Honda and drove just short of fifty kilometres to Säter Hospital.
Lundgren was sixty-one years old and the best-known lawyer in Dalarna, having defended the most notorious criminals in the region, including the bank robber Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, the mass murderer Mattias Flink and now also Thomas Quick, the alleged serial killer. A confident person, Lundgren didn’t hesitate to express controversial opinions in public, as was clear when he explained his views on his assignment to act as Thomas Quick’s lawyer: ‘Quick has confessed to five murders, but the police are still not entirely convinced that he’s telling the truth. I am. It is therefore going to be my assigned task to convince the police that my client has murdered people.’
Barely an hour later, Gunnar Lundgren walked into the music
room of Ward 36 and greeted his client and the chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen before taking a seat in the usual red-and-black-striped armchair opposite Thomas Quick. The last time they sat here they had been talking about the statute-barred murder of Thomas Blomgren.
But he was no longer firing blanks. If there was any substance to Quick’s latest confession, he would be charged with the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
Penttinen switched on the little cassette recorder. He made himself comfortable and turned to Quick, who was trying to concentrate on the task that lay ahead of him.
‘Sture, if you could start by explaining what you were doing in the area at the time you made contact with this lad.’
‘Well, it was the same thing as the other trips. It was an unpl . . . unplanned, planned, unplanned trip. Er . . .’
Quick told them that he got there in a car.
‘In which case it would be interesting if you can tell us what car that was,’ said Penttinen.
Sture told me that he remembered the problems he had had with the car he claimed to have borrowed from Ljungström at the time of the murder of Johan Asplund. This time he wanted to avoid similar difficulties at all cost. For this reason he answered curtly that he didn’t want to say what car he had been using. Not yet.
Penttinen turned off the tape recorder while Quick conferred with his lawyer. Quick told Lundgren that he knew what car he had been travelling in, but for secret reasons was unable to divulge this information today.
The crime had figured in his therapy for a while, Quick explained, under the designation ‘the dark boy’. Then the first name had ‘emerged’.
Yet ‘the dark boy’ is not a particularly apt description. Charles was not dark; his skin tone was fair and his hair ash blond. This was backed up by the police description from 1976, in which Charles’s hair was described as ‘dark blond’.
Quick also said that Charles didn’t have long hair, which was an inaccurate description of his centre-parted shoulder-length hair.
‘What about his clothes?’ asked Seppo.
‘Today I’d like to say that he had one of those denim jackets with a woolly lining.’
At a later stage in the interview Quick tried to hedge his bets by describing the coat as being made of a slippery material and he would guess it was a black down jacket.