Authors: Hannes Råstam
I don’t give a shit about Seppo’s talk about credibility in terms of a trial for Johan, the credibility is up to him and Kwast!! For God’s sake – does no one understand, deep down, how divided I am about the meeting with Sten-Ove!? I
want
to see him and I can understand it may not be appropriate but my will to do it is much stronger than my intellect.
Sunday was the last chance to stop the meeting, and every bit of firepower was concentrated on Quick to make him back off. If not, Sten-Ove’s visit had to be stopped by legal means.
Thomas Quick spent the entire Sunday on the telephone with Ståhle, Penttinen, Kall and Borgström. They were unanimous in their view that Quick should voluntarily cancel his meeting with Sten-Ove.
In the end the matter was settled by Erik Kall, who decided to impose a visitation ban on Sten-Ove Bergwall. Quick accepted the decision. In his diary he noted Penttinen’s comment: ‘We were lucky to dodge that bullet.’
One might wonder why everyone around Thomas Quick should be so terrified about the meeting of the two brothers. It is a reaction that one associates with very secretive cults.
Sture told me later that he had no doubt about what the consequences would have been if the meeting had taken place.
‘If me and Sten-Ove had been allowed to meet and talk, I’m sure the Quick era would have come to an end as early as 1995. There wouldn’t have been any more police investigations, because if me and Sten-Ove had been allowed to talk, I couldn’t have persisted with my
lie. Birgitta Ståhle realised that, maybe even Seppo Penttinen. That’s why they were willing to do absolutely anything to stop the meeting.’
In the period that followed, Thomas Quick stopped bothering to get out of bed, answered questions monosyllabically and stopped eating.
THE TRIAL IN GÄLLIVARE DISTRICT COURT
JAN OLSSON AND
the medical examiner Anders Eriksson were due to make a joint presentation of the forensic findings that matched Quick’s description of the murders in Appojaure.
Olsson told me that he had breakfast with Christer van der Kwast at Hotell Dundret in Gällivare on the day that his and the medical examiner’s testimony was being presented. Olsson had appeared in a number of trials as an expert, and in this sense it was just another day at the office. Despite that, and even though their joint presentation was close to airtight and would certainly have a profound effect on the outcome of the case, he felt slightly uneasy about his testimony.
After breakfast, Jan Olsson and van der Kwast walked to the district court together in the Arctic cold. Olsson was consumed by his doubts about the murders in Appojaure and he remembers saying, ‘That rubbish bag. The upright bag in the tent. Quick couldn’t have gone into the tent and done what he said without overturning it.’
Earlier in the trial Thomas Quick had described making his way into the tent through the rip in the canvas, whereupon the whole tent collapsed.
If Christer van der Kwast thought anything at all about what Jan Olsson was saying, he didn’t put it in words. Olsson had studied the photographs from inside the tent with a magnifying glass until he could visualise every detail from memory. It wasn’t just the upright rubbish bag that disturbed him. The little schnapps glass was even worse.
Inside the tent on the small area of floor between the two murder
victims, where Quick had supposedly positioned himself during the attack, stood a tiny schnapps glass of sherry. The glass had not been knocked over.
‘It just couldn’t be right,’ Jan Olsson told me.
He and van der Kwast, both with similarly grim faces, turned left from Storgatan into Lasarettsgatan. They had reached the district court.
Jan Olsson and Anders Eriksson were well rehearsed for their presentation and, using overhead projectors, they demonstrated both the tears in the canvas and the victims’ injuries. The presentation was informative and highly convincing. It seemed clear that over the course of the investigation Thomas Quick had accounted for more or less every wound he had inflicted on the couple with the knife.
Sture Bergwall remembered them in the district court.
‘Very strong feelings can come up in a courtroom and that’s how it was when Jan Olsson and the medical examiner gave their testimony. It was incredibly significant. That I had described the wounds in Appojaure was almost as important a thing as Therese’s bone in Ørje.’
Jan Olsson agreed.
‘We did a good job, me and Anders Eriksson.’
He was obviously uneasy about the topic of conversation, although he wasn’t avoiding any difficult questions. His own view was that the district court in Gällivare was duped, because so many of the circumstances that strongly refuted Quick’s account were never brought up in the courtroom. He was thinking of that schnapps glass; he was thinking about some of the curious events at the reconstruction and the fact that the couple’s radio was found in Vittangi. He was also thinking about the rubbish bag, which, he felt, showed that Quick didn’t have a clue about the crime and what had actually taken place.
‘Afterwards, I thought I should have said all this in the courtroom. But then again – and I guess this is an excuse – I was an expert witness who was supposed to answer questions, not draw my own conclusions. I was expecting questions about it from the defence lawyer. But there was total silence there.’
Jan Olsson knew from experience that the defence lawyer will always attack any point of uncertainty in the technical evidence, so Claes Borgström’s passivity came as a surprise to him.
Surely he has to ask about this rubbish bag
, I thought. ‘It’s accounted for in the crime scene report. There has to be a lawyer who questions things – it’s a necessity,’ he added.
Instead, Olsson and Eriksson received a number of appreciative comments after their joint testimony.
I also read in the trial report that Sven Åke Christianson had been lined up to make a statement on Quick’s credibility. Claes Borgström asked him if there was any risk that they were dealing with a false confession. Christianson’s answer, by way of a summing-up, was that ‘nothing had emerged that might lend support to the notion that this was a false confession by Quick’.
Oddly enough, at this very moment a fax arrived at the district court from a forensic psychiatrist – it was a long and detailed letter warning of the risks of false confessions and false memories. The fax was handed over to the chief judge.
Gubb Jan Stigson, the crime reporter and expert on Quick, referred to the moment in his column in
Dala-Demokraten
the following day:
There was a bit of a palaver while the judge, prosecutor and defence discussed how to handle the letter. At that point Quick stepped in:
‘I don’t even think we should look at that. If some quack from Älmhult sends something here, we obviously have to put it in the bin!’
His request was approved!
Apparently there was an outburst of hilarity in the district court at this elegant solution to the ill-fated letter from a ‘quack from Älmhult’. Nils Wiklund, the letter-writer, was in fact a senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry from Stockholm who specialised in witness psychology.
Nils Wiklund still has the letter that the district court chose to
consign to the wastepaper basket and showed it to me when I visited him. It concludes with the following lines on the warning signs of false confessions, of which the district court should have been more aware:
1. Has the patient for a long period of time not had any memory of events which have ‘come back to him’ in the therapy process? This increases the risk of false memories.
2. Are there tape recordings of the conversations that touch upon the memories? If so, any alleged process of influence can be analysed. If not, the therapist may not realise whether the interaction has called up false memories.
3. Are the suspicions backed up in other respects by evidence unrelated to the patient’s own account (fingerprints, DNA analysis, technical evidence)?
If only the account itself is considered to give credence to the suspicions, the account should be carefully analysed to see whether it could have been fetched from other sources, such as the mass media.
If there is any risk of memories having been produced in the therapeutic process, the account should be subjected to expert scrutiny by a psychologist with university training in witness psychology. [. . .] If therapy-induced memories are used as a foundation for court judgments without any such analysis, there is a risk of miscarriages of justice.
With kind regards
Nils Wiklund
Registered psychologist, senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry, specialist in clinical psychology
Unusually, on the last day of the trial the defendant, Thomas Quick, was given the option to present his own ‘plea’ – a speech to the courtroom, the audience and the press. He stood up and read from six densely written A4 pages.
‘In this court we have experienced and been shown a cruelty which, for most of us, is beyond explanation, a crime with the most horrible ingredients,’ Thomas Quick began, with a tremor in his voice, obviously close to tears.
Jan Olsson tells me that he listened with a sense of amazement to Quick’s grovelling speech to the gallery.
Quick continued: ‘What I have to say should not be seen as a defence of the deeds this lunatic has carried out, nor as some sort of quasi-psychologising reasoning about them, or a tearful attempt to look for my own human worth.’
Quick described how growing up in an emotionally cold family home formed him into a murderer. When he spoke of his constant anxiety and death wish as a child, a number of the younger members of the audience started crying.
Jan Olsson twisted awkwardly in his seat and looked in turn from Quick to the weeping listeners and to the chief judge, Roland Åkne.
‘“Why does no one tell him to stop?” I thought. It was so unbearably offensive! It was as if the courtroom had been turned into a place of worship.’
When the emotional speech was over, the district court had to adjourn before defence counsel Borgström could make his closing comments.
Claes Borgström agreed with the prosecutor that Quick’s guilt had been overwhelmingly shown in the main proceedings and that the only reasonable punishment would be continued psychiatric care.
The court announced its decision on 25 January 1996. Thomas Quick was found guilty of his second and third murders and sentenced to continued psychiatric care.
Accusations have often been made that Seppo Penttinen and others committed gross perjury in the trials of Thomas Quick. Whatever the truth, this will never be legally proven. In any case, any perjury committed at the court hearing in Gällivare has been statute-barred since January 2006.
However, we can say with confidence that there were many facts
surrounding the murders in Appojaure that weren’t actually presented to the court, and others that were presented in a confusing way.
The only murder weapon that can with certainty be said to have been used against the Stegehuises was their own fillet knife. Despite fifteen interviews with Thomas Quick amounting to some 713 pages of transcripts, he was never able to describe this knife. This was a palpable weakness in his story, but the district court was never told of it.
The district court was greatly influenced by Seppo Penttinen’s testimony that the first time he was questioned, Quick ‘was able to sketch out a detailed plan of the camping place’. While this was true, Penttinen failed to mention that Quick had put the car and the tent in completely the wrong positions.
Another significant piece of information, according to the verdict, was the women’s bicycle that Quick claimed he had stolen outside the Sami Museum in Jokkmokk. A bicycle like this had been stolen at the time of the murder, as the owner confirmed at the trial. But what Quick originally said during questioning with Seppo Penttinen was that he had stolen a men’s bicycle.
Birgitta Ståhle was present at all the murder trials of Thomas Quick. During the proceedings in Gällivare she made extensive notes of what was said, and long excerpts are reproduced in her unpublished book on Thomas Quick. These make it very clear how the court was duped.
On the second day of court proceedings, statements were made by several parties, including Detective Inspector Seppo Penttinen.
Penttinen has been interviewing Sture since March 1993 and the first interview on the Appojaure murders took place on 23 November 1994.
Penttinen described his experience of the questioning visually. It was as if Sture experienced a lowered French blind, in which some of the flaps have been opened, and he described a story incoherent in terms of time, before a regression took place to another space and time. Sture changed his body language, felt strong anxiety. Penttinen described the course of events, how
Sture started to have memories of the murders. Sture’s way of describing it was similar to previous cases. He described certain fragments of memory but over the course of the interview the sequence of events ‘opened up’ more and more.
The story wasn’t coherent from the beginning. Sture himself explained that because of his feelings of anxiety he had to protect his inner self by making things up that bordered on the truth. Then in the following interview he corrected some details he had given earlier.
Yet Quick’s memories are, according to Seppo Penttinen, clear and distinct in terms of the central aspects of an event. Other more peripheral aspects, such as journeys to and from a place, are rather unclear in his narrative.
As for the places where these aforementioned events took place, during questioning Quick provided a detailed sketch of the camping place and the road that leads to it. He further described the type of ground on which the tent stood, the existence of a seating area made of logs as well as the distance between the lake, the tent and the couple’s car.
Ståhle’s statement clearly shows that her and Margit Norell’s theories have been guiding lights for the police investigation: the idea that Thomas Quick makes contact with repressed memories by means of regression. Seppo Penttinen can hardly have been unaware that his testimony under oath had given the court an inaccurate impression of Quick’s changing story during the course of the investigation. But we will let Ståhle continue with her account, as Penttinen’s deception of the court was about to get even worse.