Authors: Hannes Råstam
‘Not all the information,’ protested Borgström.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Not the atopic eczema on her arms,’ Borgström objected.
‘No, but that came much later!’
‘But you were saying that he got all the information!’
‘I said he got all the information he needed to confess to the murder,’ I said with a certain measure of despair. ‘He said that she was blonde! And he said that she was wearing entirely different clothes from the ones she was actually wearing. Everything was wrong!’
‘Not everything,’ protested Borgström. ‘The hairclips were not wrong, nor the buckles on her shoes.’
In actual fact, when she disappeared, Therese’s hair had been put up with a blue hairgrip and a rubber band. After eight months of police questioning, Quick, on 14 October 1996, said that Therese had a hairband – in other words, neither a hairgrip nor a rubber band – which may possibly have been orange. After another year of questioning, on 30 October 1997 he still maintained that she had worn a hairband.
I realised that my strategy of outlining a set of circumstances and letting the interview subjects explain their view of it was not working.
How could Claes Borgström, after invoicing for a thousand hours of work, have been so ill-informed? Was it really possible that he had failed to see that Quick had provided so much incorrect information that even chance might have resulted in a story that was, at the very least, no further from the truth?
I had turned into one of those litigious freaks that fussed about details no one outside our little circle understood or had any interest in. And it made for really, really bad television.
‘The devil is in the details,’ I muttered quietly to myself, and persisted in my idiotic attempt to explain how the media had supplied Quick with information. Borgström wasn’t interested. As far as he was concerned, the case was in the past and Quick had been found guilty of eight murders. He was clearly even regretting his decision to take part in this televised interview.
I handed over the letter written by Thomas Quick to the Norwegian journalist Kåre Hunstad. Borgström read:
I’ll meet you on the condition that I get 20,000 (my speakers have broken and I need new ones) and that when you come you bring a receipt showing that the money has been deposited in my account. Claes knows about this so there’s no need to run it past him. If you agree to these terms I promise you a good interview – I get paid for my efforts and in return you get a good story.
After reading the letter, which showed that Borgström had also been aware of the commercial aspects of Quick’s confessions, he looked at me and said with forced indifference, ‘How sick are you if you do something like that? “Give me twenty thousand and I’ll confess to a murder I never committed.” And get locked up for the rest of your life. People who think he’s innocent are describing a human being virtually as sick as someone who could commit these murders.’
The lawyer seemed to feel that it didn’t make a great deal of difference whether his client was guilty or not – clearly he was just as crazy in either case. Borgström’s argument led us seamlessly on to the next subject.
‘Were you aware that Quick was abusing benzodiazepines during the entire investigation?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ answered Borgström truculently. ‘But I knew he had a drug problem, yes. Though not while he was at Säter,’ he added.
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Drug abuse?’
‘Yes. At Säter Hospital it was referred to as needs-based medication. He was able to graze freely on various kinds of benzodiazepines,’ I said.
‘I don’t accept that statement!’
‘It’s the view of the chief physician at the time, it’s not my own,’ I explained.
‘I don’t accept that statement,’ repeated Borgström, and thereby put a stop to any further questioning on medication.
*
I changed tack, turning to the investigation into the Yenon Levi murder and Christer van der Kwast’s actions regarding the spectacles found on the scene. Why had he ignored the findings of SKL (the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science) and procured an opinion elsewhere, so that Quick could be presented as the assailant?
‘I’m not here to defend the prosecutor, but I can’t help noticing an insinuation that the prosecutor wasn’t satisfied until he had an outcome that moved things in that general direction,’ said Borgström.
‘It surprises me that you didn’t use the SKL findings in the courtroom.’
‘Yes, I hear that it surprises you,’ answered Borgström sarcastically. ‘No comment!’
I pulled out the next document, a list of eighteen circumstances which, according to the forensic technicians, directly contradicted Quick’s Levi story. This was all hard evidence, such as confirmed tyre marks on the scene that did not correspond with the tyres of the car Quick claimed to have been using; Quick said that he had rolled up Levi’s body in a dog blanket, but no dog hairs or fibres from the blanket were found on Levi’s body; the bloodstains on Levi’s shoes did not conform with Quick’s version of events; the soil on Levi’s clothes came from the place where the body was found, not the place referred to by Quick.
The forensic technician Östen Eliasson had summed up the forensic evidence as follows: ‘Nothing concrete in the forensic investigation backs up Quick’s story.’
‘There are eighteen forensic conclusions that go against your client’s story,’ I said to Borgström.
‘Really? Maybe there are even more,’ answered Borgström.
‘Was this list something you made use of?’
‘How would I use it?’
‘I can think of a number of ways, but as a lawyer you know better than me.’
‘Well, as you can’t seem to tell me how I should have used the list, I won’t answer your question.’
Borgström simply rejected the relevance of whatever I asked him.
As he saw it, the investigation material was so complicated that it could be used to back up any hypothesis at all. It made no difference if I found ninety circumstances that were wrong and ten that were right.
‘Just one correct detail could be enough,’ said Borgström.
I wondered if I had really understood him correctly, so asked, ‘Ninety-nine that are wrong and one that’s correct?’
‘Yes, if that one circumstance is strong enough to connect a person to a crime. Ultimately it is up to the court to make that judgement.’
‘Can you suggest one such circumstance?’
‘I’m not going to do that, no, but of course there are many. You’ll just have to read the verdicts. That’s all there is to it.’
Claes Borgström could confidently fall back on the six unanimous court verdicts that had firmly established Sture Bergwall’s guilt in the murder of eight people. Whether Quick had been wrong in ninety-eight or ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, it didn’t change the fact that a Swedish court judgment was immovable.
‘JK says that the verdicts are very well formulated. They show the underlying arguments of the verdicts, by what route they arrived at the conclusion that guilt had been established beyond any reasonable doubt. My views have no importance in the matter. It’s the view of the court that counts,’ said Borgström modestly.
‘In certain respects the reasoning of the court doesn’t reflect the actual reality,’ I pointed out. ‘The verdicts don’t give a very fair picture of the evidence.’
‘Maybe you have made poor judgements yourself, just as you deem others have done,’ Borgström objected.
‘They’re based on easily checked facts,’ I said.
‘No,’ Borgström protested. ‘They are
difficult
to check. You’re talking about such extensive material that it’s easy to pull out bits that fit with any given hypothesis.’
The interview had been going on for over an hour and we were not getting anywhere. Borgström seemed to feel that I was way off target, although he did admit that I had done my homework.
I saved my most dramatic information until the moment when the interview was almost over. I tried to control my voice and facial
expression as I said, ‘Your former client Thomas Quick has retracted all of his confessions and says he’s innocent.’
‘Well . . . yes, he may have done,’ said Borgström, confused.
He tried to grasp the meaning of this unexpected turn, rapidly running through the likely consequences for him and devising a strategy for the rest of the interview. Having spoken to Sture Bergwall just a few minutes before the interview, it must have been difficult for him to process the information.
Borgström stared at me and asked, ‘So that’s his view today? That he’s been wrongly convicted?’
I confirmed that this was indeed the case. Borgström gave the matter some serious thought. A little smile hovered somewhere on his face. I could see his usual combative self re-emerging.
‘You shouldn’t be so sure that this is his
current
position.’
‘I am sure of it,’ I said.
An anxious look crossed Borgström’s face.
‘Have you spoken to him today?’ he asked nervously.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘At what time?’
Now you’re really clutching at straws
, I thought, before replying, ‘I’m not going into that. It’s not important. I know this is Sture’s current position.’
‘Typical,’ said Borgström, looking quite downcast. ‘You have no obligation of confidentiality, have you?’
The interview was turning into a conversation, probably because neither of us had the energy for much else. I told him about Quick’s medication and the actual reasons for his ‘time out’ some seven years earlier.
Just as Christer van der Kwast had behaved the day before, Borgström now swung between great humility at the idea that Quick might have been wrongly convicted and an insistent defence of the legal process in which he had played a decisive part.
‘Whatever position Thomas Quick takes in future, neither you nor I nor anyone else will be able to know for certain what has happened here. For the time being it’s the court rulings that matter.’
Admittedly he was right about this.
‘Are you confident about your performance in the Thomas Quick case?’ I asked.
‘I have not collaborated in putting an innocent person behind bars,’ Borgström answered.
‘That’s quite a bold statement,’ I said.
‘OK. I’ll add one word: I have not
consciously
collaborated in putting an innocent person behind bars.’
Borgström felt I should spend some time reflecting on Quick’s reasons for doing what he had done. I replied that I had put months of work into trying to understand precisely this.
Borgström had his doubts about that, but he wanted to finish things off by giving me something to think about.
‘Quick came to Säter Hospital after being found guilty of aggravated robbery. It is now 2008 and he’ll
never
be released, even if he pushes for a review.’
‘Isn’t that a little outside your field of expertise?’
‘Yes, but I’m entitled to my opinion.’
‘When did you last see Sture?’
‘A long time ago.’
And yet you are quite happy to condemn your former client to a life sentence
, I thought, keeping silent.
The atmosphere in Borgström & Bodström’s law firm was more than a little frosty when I took my leave.
SYSTEMIC FAULTS
CLAES BORGSTRÖM SEEMED
to me the greatest mystery in the case of Thomas Quick. He was much too intelligent not to have seen the fraud in what had been going on for all these years, and at the same time too honest to have consciously taken part in a miscarriage of justice such as this one.
Who was he? And what was really going on behind those eyes?
After the interviews with Christer van der Kwast and Claes Borgström, we had only another four weeks before broadcast. It was now a question of putting the last pieces into place. I made a final attempt to have the bone fragments released for independent examination and Jenny Küttim hunted for the missing interrogation reports.
Sture’s twin sister, Gun, found a note in a diary where she had written down the time, date and name of the interviewer who had come to see her. On the morning of Friday, 19 May 1995 she had been questioned by Anna Wikström and a local policeman. We had already tried several times to get our hands on this interview – like all the other transcripts of the interviews with Sture’s siblings. Finally, validated by Gun’s specific information, Jenny called Seppo Penttinen to inform him that it was an offence not to hand over official documents of this kind.
Late that same evening the interview transcript came juddering out of the fax machine at SVT and we were able to confirm that it pertained to the investigation into the Appojaure murders.
The next day I immersed myself in it.
Gun began by describing the members of the family and where they had lived. She said that their ‘school years and time with the family were positive on the whole’.
Gun mentioned that she has always viewed Sture as very gifted and knowledgeable. Among other things she mentioned that Sture always kept up with the news and newspapers, which has given him a very good general knowledge. She also says that he was politically interested from an early age.
Further, Sture wasn’t very interested in sport, which meant that he didn’t socialise very much with the other boys in his class.
As a result Sture was often outside the circle of his classmates and most of his social interaction was with Gun.
Gun sometimes felt that Sture was maybe bullied a little by his classmates and she had a recollection of some of the boys locking Sture into an outhouse in a barn.
Gun can’t remember if Sture suffered as a result of this bullying.
The socialising in the family was also frequent and Gun mentioned that she mainly spent time with the boys in the family.
Gun says that during high school Sture spent a lot of his time on the school newspaper.
Concerning her family Gun sees her childhood as very positive. She mentioned that her father was very hot-tempered and has memories of him at various times throwing saucepans on the floor. She can’t remember what the arguments were about, but she said that they resolved themselves in due course.