Thomas Quick (35 page)

They got into the minibus and headed back towards Gällivare. This was the conclusion of the trip to Lapland. Ture Nässén left Messaure steeped in gloom.

‘That day we were in Messaure I was really ashamed of being a policeman,’ he told me, summarising his memories from 11 July 1995.

A month later, at approximately seven in the morning on 17 August, Rune Nilsson was fetched by the police and driven to the station in Jokkmokk to be questioned ‘about his activities and observations in the summer of 1984’. When he got there he was fingerprinted and treated as if he were a suspect for the murders in Appojaure.

However, Seppo Penttinen didn’t ask anything about Appojaure, Thomas Quick or Johnny Farebrink. Instead, the interrogation focused on the intimate details of Rune Nilsson’s life. He was forced to describe his family, his separation from his wife, custody arrangements for their children, his working life, trips abroad, the friends he had, vehicles he had owned, etc. Seppo Penttinen made the following note in his report:

He was asked whether he is familiar with someone named Larsson in Jokkmokk. Rune responded, ‘Not as far as I know.’ As a further response to this he said spontaneously, ‘You’re asking such strange questions.’

Rune Nilsson’s comment was absolutely justified. The interrogator’s questions were being asked in a manner as if Nilsson were some sort of hardened criminal who had to be outsmarted with devious questions.

Penttinen continued, asking if Nilsson had any poachers among his circle of acquaintances, if he had any connection with the Sami folk high school (where Quick had once been a student), if he knew people who had been in trouble with the police and whether he
knew anyone from Mattisudden (Farebrink’s place of birth). Nilsson answered patiently but negatively to all the questions.

Penttinen confronted him with eight photographs of various men, one of whom was Farebrink. Nilsson said he did not recognise any of them.

When shown another collection of photographs, Nilsson said that he recognised number seven as ‘the person who’s had his photo in the papers, the one they call the Säter Man, Thomas Quick’.

Rune Nilsson was not under suspicion for any crime, yet he was interrogated ‘for information purposes’ for more than four hours.

The following week he was called in for more questioning. ‘Today’s interview will be about 1984’, wrote Penttinen in the interrogation report.

Rune Nilsson told him that when school was finished for the summer, his seventeen-year-old son started working in the turbine hall of the power station in Messaure and lived with him all summer. Nilsson was mostly at home ‘waiting with the dinner ready when he came back in the evening’.

Further questioning followed about Nilsson’s private life. Earlier he had described how once he tried to distil his own schnapps and almost blew the equipment to smithereens. There was only this one failed attempt, yet he was forced to disclose in detail how he did it, how he pulped the potatoes, what sort of containers he used and so on.

Nilsson was again pressed about what he had done in 1984.

‘Look, I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘Nope. And that’s all there is to it. I called the boy and asked him if he could remember what he did in ‘84. Yeah – and he said he was working for Vattenfall. And then we went water-skiing when the work dried up.’

Penttinen explained that Thomas Quick had identified Nilsson from a photograph and even pointed out his property, where he said he had visited.

‘Well, that might be so, but I can’t recall him ever being there.’

‘But can you explain what reason there would have been for him to visit you in 1984?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It seems pretty unlikely to me that he would just identify you by chance and say that you live in this property in Messaure and then describe certain other things about you that seem to be accurate.’

‘Mm. But anyone can describe a house from the outside. And I’ve been on TV quite a bit and all that.’

Penttinen most likely realised that this wasn’t good. He asked, ‘On TV and all that?’

What Penttinen didn’t know was that at least three TV programmes had been made about Rune Nilsson and that several newspapers had published articles about him as the only inhabitant of Messaure.

‘Has there been any filming inside your house?’

‘Also that, yeah.’

‘And what did they show?’

‘They showed the kitchen.’

That was not good either. It was Nilsson’s kitchen that Quick had spoken about at such length. Penttinen clutched at the final straw: maybe the films had never actually been broadcast.

‘So that’s a programme shown on TV? Did they show the kitchen in the programme?’

‘Yes.’

In other words, Messaure’s last inhabitant was a television celebrity. The value of Quick pointing him out had been rendered null and void in a single stroke. Penttinen evaded the issue – like water running off a duck’s back – and continued his questioning as if nothing had happened.

Penttinen explained that in their first interview with Nilsson they had taken his fingerprints because certain things had been stolen from

the tent in Appojaure. Had he possibly been given any objects from the Appojaure murders?

‘No, I haven’t. Absolutely not!’

Nilsson explained that if he had found out anything about the frenzied attack in Appojaure he wouldn’t have sat on his hands.

‘That person would have been in serious trouble. I’d have contacted the police, of course. People who behave like that shouldn’t be allowed to live. They should do what they do in Finland, just gun them down!’

‘You think so?’

‘Oh yeah! People like that shouldn’t be kept alive. It’s much too soft here in Sweden, the way we treat them.’

Later, Rune Nilsson’s son was visited by the police at his workplace. He was questioned about his father’s activities in the summer of 1984. He told them that he’d worked for Vattenfall throughout the summer of 1984 and stayed with his father. He assured them that ‘absolutely no strangers came to visit or stay the night’.

The son also told them that the safe in Rune Nilsson’s house, which Quick had mentioned, did not and had not ever existed.

Extensive investigation into the Messaure story had clarified that Quick had been wrong about travelling by railbus from the village, that he had somehow been there without realising that the village no longer existed and that he had identified a person who had appeared in a number of reports in the newspapers and on television. Furthermore, a number of specific snippets of information Quick had provided on Rune Nilsson proved to be incorrect.

Nilsson was just a man who loved living a simple life in nature, who lacked any known motivation to protect the frenzied Appojaure killers. So far, he had been treated in the interviews as a liar.

Astonishingly, the police decided to subject him to one more round of questioning, on 1 September 1995, this time in his own home. On this occasion the police found what they considered to be a major breakthrough in the investigation – an old quilt on a chair in the bedroom.

The interrogator confronted Nilsson with the circumstance that made it especially suspicious he should own such a quilt: ‘During questioning, Thomas Quick mentioned an old, padded quilt with a checked pattern, possibly blue.’

‘But it isn’t blue, is it! It’s white and blue, you hear! And it isn’t checked, it’s got a floral pattern.’

‘I’m asking you how long you’ve had that quilt. Can you answer me?’

Nilsson couldn’t remember when he bought the quilt. And despite
the fact that it was neither blue nor checked, the police confiscated this unique find as evidence of something or other.

Rune Nilsson, meanwhile, had had enough and refused to play any further part in this investigation, which he couldn’t understand the point of.

MORE PERSONALITIES

THE PARADOX OF
the trip to Appojaure was that Quick’s initial, utterly failed reconstruction, the one that played itself out before the video recording was stopped, seemed, in retrospect, to be the triumph of the whole exercise. The sequence where he was transformed into Ellington and threw himself at the tent with a growl, attacking the stand-ins lying there, was shown on television and etched into the collective consciousness of the Swedish public. A cornerstone of the Thomas Quick brand had been established.

On their return to Säter Hospital, Birgitta Ståhle wrote down a few reflections in the file, suggesting that the trip was seen internally as a great success too: confirmation that Quick had made contact with his repressed memories through regression.

The reconstruction of the first day went very well and Thomas was able to carry out the reconstruction in a very satisfactory way. With an initial regression he came into contact with the event in its entirety and thereby he was able to put out a complete memory sequence. Just like in the therapy, where he regresses in order to establish contact with earlier contexts and emotions, it is also possible to make use of the same process under these circumstances.

One week after the reconstruction in Appojaure a senior physician made a note in the file about Quick’s psychological status which went much further than anything we had seen before:

Clinically speaking the patient has a condition that is comparable to schizophrenia. The patient has a well-functioning superficial layer, he is verbally adept and logical. There are profound fissures in his personality which, on inauspicious occasions, create such disparate reaction patterns that one can could realistically speak of psychosis. One could also speak of MPD [multiple personality disorder].

Multiple personality disorder is a mysterious and much-debated psychiatric condition that was first recognised in the 1500s, when a French nun was possessed by unknown ‘personalities’. In 1791 the physician Eberhardt Gmelin published a case study on a twenty-year-old woman from Stuttgart who was capable of suddenly changing identity and turning into an alternate personality who could speak perfect French. When she went back to her original identity she had no memory of what she had done in her guise as ‘the Frenchwoman’. In his eighty-seven-page report, Gmelin described how he could make the woman switch between her two personalities with a simple hand gesture.

Up until 1980 there had been 200 known cases of MPD, but with the introduction of a large number of new clinics in the USA for the condition, often attached to larger psychiatric clinics, the number of diagnosed cases increased dramatically – oddly enough. Between 1985 and 1995, 40,000 diagnoses of multiple personality disorder were made, most of which were in North America alone.

This rapid increase has been attributed to high-profile books, films and TV documentaries encouraging and inspiring new cases.

In American literature there are examples of people who have developed more than 1,400 ‘alternate personalities’, each with unique characteristics and names. The various personalities are unaware of the existence or traits of the others.

Specialised forms of therapy that deal with unblocking repressed memories and bringing multiple personalities to light were turned into a highly profitable industry. Unfortunately the golden years were followed by a bad hangover, which started making itself felt in the early 1990s.

In 95 per cent of all cases, clients who developed MPD were ‘survivors’ of sexual abuse during their childhood. Usually these clients didn’t know they had been subjected to such abuse at the outset of therapy, but the therapists helped them recover their repressed memories of the abuse. However, a significant number of patients discovered that the recovered memories were false, and that it was actually the therapists who had made them develop their multiple personalities. A number of therapists were sued in courts of law, accused of inappropriate treatment methods and forced to pay damages amounting to millions of dollars to their clients.

More recently the diagnosis itself has been strongly questioned and many professionals in the field believe that the condition arises due to the influence of the media and irresponsible therapists, combined with medication – especially benzodiazepines. Multiple personality disorder has now been phased out as a diagnosis in itself and instead has been integrated into a broader diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.

When in 1995 Thomas Quick started switching identity more frequently, it caused a good deal of consternation among the nurses in Ward 36.

One day a nurse found him in the shower with a towel round his head, thrashing his arms about and repeating, ‘Nano’s coming, Nano’s coming.’ Two Xanax, two Stesolid suppositories and a few calming words helped him through the crisis. The nurse telephoned Birgitta Ståhle to ask what this ‘Nano’ was. Ståhle corrected the nurse and explained that
Nana
was the name used for Quick’s mother.

‘Nana has been present in the therapy for a while and is an even stronger figure than Ellington.’

Quick’s new personalities soon become a part of the daily reality of life on the ward. I was able to read in the notes what form they took – for example, during telephone calls using the ward’s payphone, which were scrupulously recorded word for word by Ståhle, alongside her own comments.

‘Is this the therapist?’

‘Yes, it is. Hello, Sture! How are things?’

‘This is not Sture. It’s Ellington,’ grunted Quick, laughing with his hollow Ellington voice.

‘Where is Sture?’ wondered Ståhle.

‘This is Ellington and Sture is in his room. Ha-ha! He’s not here. He’s a weed who likes to make a victim of himself. Really he’d prefer to go to the music room. Undress himself until he’s naked and play the victim. I have something to tell the therapist. Ellington has written a letter.’

‘Do you have the letter there that you can read?’ Ståhle asked.

Ellington read it out:

Hello!

Sture is a mythomaniac, a bloody pig.

He doesn’t have a chance against me!

Tonight I’ll trick him so he hangs himself. Satisfied, oh so satisfied, I’ll watch.

I have the truth, Sture doesn’t. It was Sture who killed the foetus he calls Simon.