Authors: Hannes Råstam
Christer van der Kwast was delighted. When he got back home he wrote a letter to the police in Piteå:
I want to pass on my warmest thanks for the excellent assistance provided to us by the police force in Piteå, overseen by Commissioner Harry Nyman on the occasion of the reconnaissance undertaken with Thomas Quick in Piteå on 21 August and for the additional arrangements that were made on the same occasion.
A MACABRE SHOW
IN THE MEDIA
reporting on Thomas Quick that summer the image of the archetypal evil serial killer grew increasingly defined
Experts on the topic had popped up everywhere, and now they were making confident statements on how Thomas Quick had definitely murdered the five boys, in accordance with his own confessions. A professor of forensic psychiatry, Lars Lidberg, who had been recruited by prosecutor van der Kwast, single-handedly determined Quick’s guilt in so far as the Zelmanovits case went before the court had even passed its own judgment.
‘It is my view that Thomas Quick is guilty of the murders of these boys to which he has confessed. There is nothing to suggest that he is fabricating, exaggerating, wants to make himself important or is seeking to impress others by talking about his experiences,’ Lidberg told
Expressen
on 3 November 1994.
Obviously a serial killer like Thomas Quick had to be kept under lock and key, but incarceration alone was not enough, Lidberg went on: ‘If he won’t agree to castration voluntarily, there is the possibility of forcibly injecting him.’
No punishment was severe enough, no security measures too elaborate for the serial killer Thomas Quick.
‘People like this only get worse and worse, they can never stop,’ van der Kwast explained in
Expressen
on 18 October 1994.
Thomas Quick’s file from this period is extremely limited in scope, but it does reveal that his intake of benzodiazepines was steadily
increasing and the notes provide several snapshots of a patient sliding out of control:
2 May 1994
Today Thomas had a severe panic attack in the afternoon, approached the staff and said, ‘I’m going mad, help me.’ He was given a Xanax pill, and was helped to the music room, where he lay on the floor screaming, held down by staff from time to time. After about 45 minutes it passed.
6 June 1994
Thomas had a severe panic attack as a result of therapy. We held onto him for a moment and he was given a Xanax pill. Once the anxiety passed the conversation continued. Thomas had another attack at about 13.00, when we found him in the therapy room. He had removed his clothes and was extremely anxious. We decided to put him in a straitjacket.
Care assistants have to be called repeatedly to give medication to Quick or to hold onto him so he doesn’t harm himself during the therapeutic conversations. These file notes about a patient who requires large amounts of narcotics and has to be put in a straitjacket might be viewed by the modern reader as signs of failure in his psychiatric care. But Quick’s reactions to Birgitta Ståhle’s treatment were viewed as genuine evidence that the therapy was working. His extreme state of anxiety was seen as a logical consequence of his regression during the therapeutic process. Ståhle wrote in the file:
The regress [
sic
] means that the patient makes contact with his early traumatic childhood memories, and also how these are retold by the patient in his adult life through the assaults and murders which he has spoken of during the current police investigation.
Before the trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits, the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren wrote to the district court to explain the particular psychological and medical factors that applied to his client:
When he is confronted with and is about to talk of dramatic details and horrors in this current legal process, there is a risk that he will be so severely affected by anxiety that one may be forced into a number of adjournments. Apart from being afflicted by cramps he also has great difficulty speaking. This can, however, pass fairly quickly with a few moments’ rest and a few pills.
A great deal hung in the balance in this court case, as an acquittal would most likely have meant the end of any further investigation into Thomas Quick. Many members of the public had turned up to see the beast first-hand and hear about his terrible deeds.
When the public was let into the courtroom on 1 November they were met by a macabre sight that could hardly have disappointed those who wanted a bit of sensationalism. Christer van der Kwast had arranged a table of items that the members of the court, the prosecution team and spectators in the gallery would constantly have before their eyes during the proceedings. On the table lay a lopping saw, the remains of a partially decomposed leather jacket and a Playboy shoe that had seen better days.
Charles Zelmanovits’s mother, Inga, and younger brother, Frederick, passed the table with a shudder, turning their eyes away but not before they had recognised Charles’s shoe and parts of the jacket that he had worn seventeen years earlier. And the saw . . .
Throughout the main proceedings these items were an eerie and tangible reminder of what this case was about, but they also created a false impression of being some sort of technical evidence.
Admittedly, the saw had been found about a hundred metres from Charles’s remains, but the forensic investigation hadn’t been able to identify any damage to the bones from a saw. Quick hadn’t even said that he had left a saw in the forest. The same applied to the parts of the leather jacket – another troublesome reminder that Thomas Quick, despite all the questioning, had never managed to say exactly what outdoor garments Charles had been wearing. The Playboy shoe on the prosecutor’s table was just as puzzling. In interview after interview Quick had maintained that Charles was wearing boots.
Christer van der Kwast’s fateful cabinet of curiosities lacked one item that would have constituted strong evidence against Quick, who had said a number of times that Charles had been wearing a robust leather belt with a large metal buckle. Charles’s younger brother had been summoned to the court to talk about this belt. The district court wrote in its verdict:
Frederick Zelmanovits states that he cannot say with absolute confidence whether Charles owned the sort of belt referred to. Though he remembers that he had one such belt himself, at the time of his brother’s disappearance.
In its verdict, the district court confirmed that ‘the brothers could have shared the belt’.
If Quick was speaking the truth, there ought to have been a leather belt somewhere near Charles’s remains. The forensic technicians had carefully searched the forest outside Piteå with metal detectors. The buttons and studs of the decomposed jeans were found, but no belt was ever located.
For this reason the belt was missing on the prosecutor’s table. Instead it had been decorated with three other objects.
Of all the things that happened in the district court in Piteå, one in particular made an unforgettable impression: the screening of the video from the reconstruction in the forest.
The Quick reporter from
Expressen
, Pelle Tagesson, still remembers his impression of those days in Piteå: ‘I met Quick during the trial and thought he seemed a fairly normal bloke. Then I saw the films of the reconstruction. It was absolutely rattling! I remember feeling uneasy about having shaken his hand.’
Despite the inconsistencies of the case, Pelle Tagesson grew utterly convinced of Quick’s guilt when the prosecutor showed the video in which the suspect was making those bestial, guttural sounds. All doubts were swept aside: ‘It’s impossible to act out what happened in the reconstruction.’
*
Before the trial, Christer van der Kwast had written to the district court suggesting that they would need additional expertise in the field of psychology. He recommended that the members should rely on the services of Sven Åke Christianson.
As Christianson had been working as a part of the investigation on behalf of the prosecutor for a lengthy period of time, it would obviously be inappropriate, almost impossible, for him to accept an assignment from the district court to assess his own findings. This did not prevent him from accepting the offer.
Christianson provided two specialist statements, one of them ‘concerning the conditions of Thomas Quick’s testimony from a psychological perspective’:
In terms of what the perpetrator is able to remember, I have concentrated on the patterns of behaviour and memories of serial killers as well as the background factors for this type of crime.
This formulation makes it quite clear that his starting position was that Quick was a serial killer. Even before the trial he had publicly pointed him out as both a serial killer and a cannibal.
‘It’s a primitive way of behaving – his actions are those of the child within himself. And when one eats parts of someone’s body it can be an illusion that the victim lives on inside, that the children are still alive inside his body,’ Christianson explained in an interview with
Expressen
on the first day of the trial.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that Thomas Quick hadn’t yet been found guilty of a single murder.
In his testimony, Professor Lars Lidberg was crystal clear on the question of guilt and causality for the behaviour of the serial killer.
‘The significant thing in Quick’s case is that Quick has been subjected to sexual molestation from the father and mother, and that a connection has been made between sexuality and aggression.’
He did not reveal how he was in a position to know that any such violence or sexual assaults from the parents had ever taken place, and simply based his scientific reasoning on the assumption as if it were a fact.
Quick’s compulsive and repeated killing accorded very well with how ‘Quick hides parts of people he has killed and keeps certain body parts as some form of talisman,’ Lidberg went on.
As Quick had already confessed to the murder of Charles Zelmanovits, the trial was ultimately about determining whether or not this could be a false confession.
Sven Åke Christianson, in his testimony, described various types of false confessions and finished with this conclusion: ‘These are not relevant to Quick’s case.’
When it was time for Quick to testify in court, the defence demanded that it must happen behind closed doors, which the district court granted. Once the public had left the courtroom, Quick assured the court that he had not at any stage read anything about Charles Zelmanovits’s disappearance. This was important information. Unfortunately it was also untrue. Not only did Quick confess to the murder after reading about the discovery of Charles’s remains in the newspaper – but as he was under no restrictions he was able to carefully monitor any on-going reporting on the matter. In Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle’s manuscript of their book on Quick, I also found a passage revealing that he eventually managed to acquire an even sharper information source. The authors quoted Quick:
When I read the investigation reports I saw and I felt Charles’s whole life for the first time. He was not just someone I killed; he powerfully turned into the whole person Charles whom I had murdered.
In other words, when Quick was brought to trial in Piteå he had read the entire preliminary investigation report, with technical examinations and many interviews.
These gave Quick an overall picture of ‘the whole person Charles’. Also in the patient files I found a note about Thomas Quick ‘going through the preliminary investigation of Charles Z during the autumn’.
Therefore it’s hardly surprising that Thomas Quick, behind the
closed doors of the district court, managed to portray what had happened with sufficient detail.
And yet how could the district court find Quick guilty of murder when almost everything he had said under police questioning was incorrect? Why was the sentence unaffected by Quick’s inability to find his own way to where the body had been found?
The simple answer is that the members of the district court were unaware of practically all the aspects of the investigation. They hadn’t read any of the interviews with Quick.
Under Swedish rules of procedure there is no obligation for a court to immerse itself in the investigation material; in fact, this is one of the cornerstones of Swedish law, known as the Immediacy Principle of the Code of Judicial Procedure (Chap. 17.2§). According to this basic principle, the members of the court are only permitted to attach significance to what they observe in the main proceedings.
The lawyer Gunnar Lundgren could have – and many would probably say should have – called the interviews with Thomas Quick to the court’s attention. He could have read out passages from the reports to show that Quick knew nothing about Charles Zelmanovits or Pitholmen at the beginning of the investigation. He could have informed the court that Quick had provided contradictory accounts and that he had been encouraged by leading questions.
But Lundgren had no such objections. He quite simply took the view that the district court should find Quick guilty of the murder in question; he even expressed this view in the courtroom.
The phenomenon that was later criticised by the forensic psychologist Nils Wiklund and Detective Chief Inspector Jan Olsson – the suspension of the adversarial process – was already taking place in the first Quick trial.
The prosecution for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits was Lundgren’s one and only case as Thomas Quick’s defence lawyer. Later, in an interview, he gave his opinion of the role of the lawyer in cases where the defence pursues an identical line of argument to the prosecution.
The reporter from
Aftonbladet
asked if Lundgren had helped his client ‘get caught for as many crimes as possible’.
Lundgren agreed with this assessment: ‘Yes. He wanted to confess to what he had done and so it was my responsibility to help him with that.’
There was a united front in Piteå District Court: prosecutor, investigators, the defence lawyer, the suspect, therapists, doctors, experts and journalists. All seemed to be pulling in the same direction, so how could it have ended in any other way?