Authors: Hannes Råstam
Admittedly the knot was not very good, but Penttinen sat in the passenger seat with his hands tied while Quick told Anna Wikström to get into the back seat and close the door.
‘And from that side you show us you have a knife.’
‘OK,’ said Wikström/Patrik.
‘Can you wind down the window so the camera picks it up better?’ said Quick, concerned that the knife threat to Yenon Levi should be clear in the video. ‘In the footage while we’re moving you should also indicate the knife towards the throat,’ he explained to Anna Wikström.
Jan Olsson observed what was taking place and made notes on every stage in the sequence of events.
He was struck by how Quick was behaving like a director in a film production. Sometimes Quick went to one side, lit a cigarette and had a think, then went back to directing his fellow actors in the scene.
It took an incredibly long time to get everything exactly as Quick wanted, but finally a driver who was standing in for Quick, as he was not trusted to take the wheel himself, got into position. The short drive from the road to the house was enacted and filmed with satisfactory results.
During the six rounds of questioning which Quick had been put through about the Levi murder, he had given several different accounts of it and how it took place: with one or two blows of a stone against the skull; by striking a jack against the head, or a crowbar, or a short-handled axe, etc. The place where Yenon Levi was murdered had also varied from one interview to another. Sometimes it took place by the holiday cottage in Ölsta, sometimes in Rörshyttan at the scene where the body was found.
A certain tension was apparent at the reconstruction, as everyone waited to see where Quick would kill Levi this time and with what murder weapon. Jan Olsson was absolutely certain about the place where Levi had been beaten to death and with what murder weapon.
However, he was keeping quiet about this. Quick had to reveal the information himself without any help.
Quick seemed to be struggling with these questions. He told Seppo Penttinen that he wanted ‘to feel the jack’, while, at the same time, he was trying to build up a sense of himself talking English to Yenon Levi. Despite his poor grasp of English, a certain level of communication was going on.
‘I tell him things like “Take it cool”, things like that,’ he explained.
Seppo Penttinen had fetched the jack so that Quick could try it out, but Quick wasn’t happy with what he saw. It was definitely the wrong type of jack, he said, it was supposed to be one of those jacks with ‘antennas’ on it.
‘Does no one here know about jacks?’ asked Quick.
‘I’m not much good on them,’ admitted Penttinen.
A long discussion on jack design broke out between the two men, who both felt they were not particularly well informed on the subject. At long last the reconstruction was resumed.
Quick pulled out his knife substitute and ‘cut’ Yenon Levi’s hands free, and then a rapid and wild chase followed. Levi fled towards the road but was caught by Quick. Levi fell and hurt his shoulder, Quick explained.
His accomplice held on to Levi while Quick gave him ‘a couple of nasty blows’ and scratched his chest with the tip of his knife.
‘And here there’s a violent kick to his stomach, and a few more kicks and – the way I’m feeling it – against his side from here. I’d like to have a feel of a stone and the jack,’ said Quick, unsure to the last of the murder weapon.
First, Quick wanted to demonstrate how terribly hard he kicked Levi. The dummy lying on the ground weighed about eighty kilos.
Quick summoned all his strength and kicked the dummy as hard as he could. Because of its weight it didn’t move an inch; it was like kicking a wall.
‘Ouch, ouch, ouch,’ Quick moaned, hopping about on one leg, clutching his painful foot.
A number of the onlookers turned away discreetly or suddenly pretended to be interested in other things.
By the time Quick had pulled himself together he had come to a decision about the murder weapon.
‘It’s a stone. It’s a stone,’ he said, demonstrating how, using a stone, he struck Levi, who was already unconscious, on the temple.
After this, Quick wanted to take a break and Penttinen took the chance to go over to Jan Olsson.
‘How is Thomas doing?’
Olsson muttered something evasive by way of an answer. So far his worst fears had been confirmed, which made him even more concerned that he should not reveal whether Quick’s story was consistent with the forensic evidence.
Now Quick had to demonstrate how he and his accomplice had placed Levi’s bloody corpse on the back seat, where it was hidden under a blanket.
‘What sort of condition did you feel Levi was in?’ asked Penttinen.
‘Dead,’ Quick answered abruptly.
‘Did he make any sort of sound or anything?’
‘No,’ said Quick.
It was the wrong answer, and Penttinen made it clear that he didn’t accept this version of Levi being killed here.
‘What you’ve said about him vomiting and coughing up blood, how can you see that?’
Quick had not mentioned this during the reconstruction, but he rapidly fell into line.
‘It happened during the car journey.’
The fact that Levi was not dead when he was loaded onto the back seat was greatly significant in terms of the second part of the reconstruction, which would be taking place in the forested area outside Rörshyttan, where Levi’s corpse was found.
‘So how was his condition then?’ asked Penttinen.
‘I’ll tell you when we get there,’ answered Quick cryptically.
Soon a convoy of vehicles was driving along B-road 762 from Rörshyttan towards Ängnäs. A few hundred metres before the end of the road, at a turning area in the middle of the forest, the group
stopped. Thomas Quick was now going to demonstrate how he took Yenon Levi’s life.
At long last the Mazda estate with Levi in the back seat was parked in the right position and Quick struggled to get the dummy out. With his accomplice he pulled it out by tugging at the blanket on which it was lying. Finally he succeeded.
‘So here he’s not dead,’ said Quick.
In other words, his earlier claim that Levi had already been dead at the holiday cottage in Ölsta no longer applied. Helped by Anna Wikström, Quick got the dummy up on its legs. It was very heavy and after a few seconds Quick simply let it fall, explaining that this was how it had happened. His legs gave way beneath him.
The crowbar was taken from the boot of the car and Quick demonstrated in slow motion how the blow hit the back of Yenon Levi’s head.
‘I’m sensing that it’s a crowbar,’ said Quick.
‘Are you unsure about that?’ asked Seppo.
‘I’m unsure about it.’
‘What could it be, if it wasn’t a crowbar?’
‘It could be a spade, but I’m leaning more towards the crowbar.’
Quick sat in the car, which had been moved forward, and tried to ‘feel’ where he left the body. After a good deal of reasoning, he put the body in the wrong place, facing the wrong way and incorrectly positioned. Quick said that he slid his hand under Levi’s jumper and felt the hair on his stomach and chest.
Yenon Levi didn’t have any hair whatsoever on his chest
, Jan Olsson thought. He made a note in his pad but kept a straight face and didn’t show what he was thinking.
The most important find the police had made on the scene in 1988 was a pair of glasses that the murderer had most likely dropped there. Quick hadn’t mentioned anything about any glasses. Tests had shown that they didn’t belong to Quick and, quite simply, they didn’t fit into the story.
Anna Wikström had taken over the role of Yenon Levi and when she was about to lie down, Quick suggested that she should remove her glasses.
The reconstruction continued, but as they were nearing the end, Penttinen asked, ‘Did you want to say anything else, Thomas?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been thinking about something you said. Why did you comment on the glasses? You said they were lying here. I mean they are lying there. Did something occur to you and was there something you were thinking about, or anything else?’ Penttinen asked.
‘Well, they were lying there . . . I don’t know why I said it.’
‘Are you having difficulties talking about it?’
‘No.’
‘Was he wearing glasses?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What made you react to the glasses in particular?’
‘I had a feeling when I saw the glasses on him that they were there to one side, but I don’t know anything about it,’ Quick concluded.
Penttinen’s dogged interest in Quick’s comment on the glasses worn by the stand-in was not an especially subtle signal. During future questioning Quick would claim that they were bought at a petrol station to disguise Patrik, his sixteen-year-old accomplice.
The spectacles in question had a calibration of +4 dioptres and were therefore intended to correct severe long-sightedness. Why they would have chosen such strong lenses for Patrik when he had perfect vision was never explained. Nor did anyone think to ask. The spectacles were estimated to be about ten years old when they were found, which would have meant that they were purchased when Patrik was six years old. Another peculiarity was the assurance of the sales agent that the model had never been on sale at petrol stations.
As the day drew to a close, Jan Olsson became convinced that the reconstruction they had just carried out would be the end of the entire Quick investigation.
‘I was absolutely certain that it had been clarified: Quick had not committed this murder. It was obvious.’
Olsson knew that Quick had pointed out the wrong location for the murder and the wrong murder weapon. Yenon Levi’s body had ended up in the wrong place and Quick had also failed to report that the body was searched and the pockets emptied of their contents. The technicians had secured an imprint from one of Yenon Levi’s shoes, which not only proved that he was alive but had in fact been fighting so desperately for his life that clumps of grass were torn out of the ground.
All in all, the evidence at the scene suggested that the murder had taken place at the end of a series of events that the murderer would surely be able to describe. Instead, point by point, Quick’s story directly contradicted the evidence that had been found. Quick’s story was simply untrue, Olsson believed.
When the reconstruction was over, Claes Borgström asked Jan Olsson for a lift to Stockholm.
‘I tried to speak to Borgström in the car about the reconstruction and how it showed that Quick had not done it and that none of it had been correct.’
But Borgström answered evasively. Instead he talked about a large sailing yacht he’d just bought. It was a subject he often also discussed with his client, although Quick was uninterested and had no knowledge of sailing and boats.
So what really happened to Yenon Levi?
Two and a half years after the murder, on 10 January 1991, an assistant at the police unit in Borlänge responsible for cases involving foreign nationals made an interesting observation. She believed that a pair of spectacles in a passport photograph were suspiciously similar to the glasses which, as she remembered, had been found by Yenon Levi’s body.
The spectacles and the passport photo were sent to the National Laboratory of Forensic Science SKL for analysis. In its statement, SKL wrote that ‘there was a high probability’ that the spectacles at the murder scene were the same as those in the passport photograph. It was a very firm conclusion, the second strongest indicator on SKL’s nine-point scale.
An optical company, Hoya-Optikslip AB, carried out an advanced investigation which showed that the spectacles in the passport photograph had the same strength as those found on the murder scene – in other words, +4.
The passport photograph with the spectacles from the murder scene was of a man we can call Ben Ali, at the time a fifty-year-old of North African origin, who was already in a jail cell in Falun, conveniently enough. He had just been sentenced to a five-year prison term for assault, incitement to grievous bodily harm, criminal threats and theft.
By threats and coercion, Ben Ali had managed to force an acquaintance to slash his girlfriend’s face with a knife. The woman’s twelve-year-old daughter had witnessed her mother having her face cut to pieces in the brutal attack. The artery on the right side of her throat had been severed and the woman had only just survived. The attacker described how Ben Ali had also asked him to cut out one of the woman’s eyes, which he had refused to do.
As a result of the findings at the SKL laboratories, Ben Ali could be connected to the murder scene. Judging by the crimes he had been convicted of, he had shown himself capable of doing violent harm to other people, and even of killing them. Yet it remained to be seen how he might have made contact with Yenon Levi, and perhaps more importantly whether there was a motive.
Among the old investigation material was a tip-off that had been sent to Avesta police barely two weeks after the murder. The anonymous message was carefully handwritten and the short text covered a whole page of A4 paper:
To the murder investigators
At the Central Station is a group of Arabs with a strong hatred of Jews (they celebrate Hitler).
These Arabs have a connection to Borlänge
(among other things a photo company). It would not surprise me if this was a revenge killing, maybe Levy travelled with them from Stockholm.
A far-fetched thought?
A Swedish girlfriend who was questioned described how Ben Ali used to go to the Central Station in Stockholm to look for young Arab men who would work for him. The work consisted of going round knocking on doors in country districts such as Dalarna, the north of Sweden and Norway, selling paintings to the elderly. Often the men worked in pairs, and while one asked to use the telephone or the toilet, the other took the chance to steal valuables from inside.
Many of the young Arabs who had worked for Ben Ali stated during questioning that they had been picked up at the Central Station and promised work, and even Swedish women. Several of the men had lodged with different women in Dalarna.