Authors: Hannes Råstam
Sture has mentioned in therapy that he had been subjected to sexual molestation by his parents and Gun’s comment on this is that ‘it’s shocking’. She says that it is inexplicable that something like this has happened. When she looks back and really analyses her childhood she can’t imagine that anything like this could have happened.
Gun also gave a positive view of the time they spent in Jokkmokk, where she and Sture attended the folk high school. On one occasion
she noticed that Sture had gone outside the student hall of residence and was standing there screaming. She took care of him but never found out what had happened. By this time she had already begun to suspect he was under the influence of drugs. Also Sture’s periods within various institutions were, as she saw it, largely caused by Sture’s drug problems.
In terms of the confessions made by Sture during the investigation Gun is dubious about the information she has got partly from the investigating team and also in the mass media. She says there is a question mark hanging over the whole thing for the siblings, as far as Sture’s behaviour is concerned during these years. Their reason for this is that they never really noticed anything worthy of comment about Sture, apart from his drug abuse, which they all confirm he has struggled with.
Earlier in the interview we touched upon the claim of sexual molestation made by Sture against his parents. Gun feels that this statement seems overblown and that there must be other reasons for Sture behaving as he has done. She also mentions that she has given thought to various occasions in the past when Sture fell and hurt himself and was even rendered unconscious.
Finally Gun was asked to describe her family very briefly.
Mother, Thyra: Very caring about her family. Cheerful, always willing to help.
Father, Ove: Silent and brooding, but always fair.
Oldest sister, Runa: Happy, nice person.
Sten-Ove: Complicated, difficult to understand, analytical and hot-tempered but a nice person.
Torvald: Lovely person getting on with his life.
Örjan: A person who never grows up but wants the best for everyone.
Sture: Pleasant, an extrovert and a smart person.
Eva: Always chatting, happy and extroverted.
As far as Jenny and I were concerned, the document was an encouraging sign that the missing interviews from the investigation had in
fact been kept, and were most likely in the possession of Seppo Penttinen. However, he had sent only one of the two interviews with Gun Bergwall we had asked for – the one which we had been able to specify by date and time.
And we hadn’t seen any sign of the interview where she had spoken of their confirmation, which would verify Sture’s alibi for the murder of Thomas Blomgren.
Travelling up to Stockholm on the train one morning in November 2008, an idea suddenly occurred to me to call the Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, and ask if he might have time for a cup of coffee that same morning. He replied that I was welcome to come up to his office.
It was a beautiful winter’s day when I walked from the Central Station across the bridge to Riddarholmen and the elegant palace of the Office of the Chancellor of Justice. Lambertz received me in his impressive room on the first floor.
The duties of the Chancellor of Justice are highly diverse and often contradictory in their scope.
The chancellor is the government’s highest-ranking ombudsman and effectively functions as the lawyer of the state. As such, he or she acts as the legal adviser and representative of the government and state. If, for instance, the state has in some way infringed upon the rights of a citizen who is now demanding compensation, the chancellor will defend the state against that citizen. At the same time the chancellor is supposed to keep an eye on the workings of public authorities and law courts on behalf of the government, while also playing the part of ultimate guarantor in protecting the rights of the citizens against abuses of power. If the state has done something wrong – such as sending an innocent person to prison – the Chancellor of Justice determines the level of financial compensation that should be paid out.
In short, the Office of the Chancellor of Justice is a very odd concept – a manifestation of the decent state: the chancellor is the incorruptible Swedish public servant who represents benign authority
and the best interests of the citizens, while being elevated above the most impossible conflicts of interest.
Faced with Chancellor of Justice Hans Regner’s plans to step down from the job in 2001, the Justice Minister Laila Freivalds had wanted to see a list of possible applicants for the vacant position. This preparatory task was given to Göran Lambertz, head of the legal secretariat at the Foreign Office, who commented some time after, ‘I presented a number of names to Laila Freivalds and outlined the various abilities of each candidate. Then as the presentation came to a close I added, “I’d rather just have the job myself.”’
This was precisely how it turned out. Göran Lambertz had shown himself to be a champion of the legal rights of the individual. He publicly commented on the fact that many innocent people were incarcerated, that the police sometimes lied to protect their colleagues and that judges were occasionally lazy. To everyone’s surprise, Lambertz got involved in specific case reviews and even drafted a petition calling for the review of a murder conviction that he considered wrong. It seemed that Sweden had got itself a fearless Chancellor of Justice, one who often appeared in the media and was prepared to challenge powerful interests. It is probably fair to say that he won the love of the people.
In May 2004 Göran Lambertz started the ‘Chancellor of Justice Legal Rights Project’ and two years later his department published a report entitled ‘Wrongly Convicted’. The report was based on all retrials since 1990 where the prison term had exceeded three years and the convicted person had subsequently been cleared of all charges.
The report stated that up until the 1990s retrials of this kind had been extremely rare. Three of the convictions that had been overturned had been very much in the news. The remaining cases in the report made it pure dynamite: eight of the eleven wrongful convictions were for sexual crimes, mostly sexual abuse of children and teenagers. In most of the cases, teenage girls had made accusations against their fathers and stepfathers while seeing psychologists and therapists.
A number of prominent jurists – including Madeleine Leijonhufvud and Christian Diesen – with a long-established commitment to
fighting the sexual exploitation of minors, attacked the report fiercely and demanded Göran Lambertz’s resignation.
I should probably add at this stage that I can’t be considered as unbiased on the subject, given that two of the retrials in the chancellor’s report were the direct result of a case I had investigated and made the subject of a television documentary. ‘The Case of Ulf’ told the story of a young girl who, in therapy, had described being subjected to extremely disturbing assaults with aspects of Satanic practices and even ritual murder. A large amount of evidence that showed the girl wasn’t telling the truth had been withheld by the police, prosecutor and Prosecutor-General.
The battle lines in the debate on the chancellor’s report were well defined. What sort of testimony should be seen as reliable? What was the proper role of therapists and prosecutors in the legal system? The debate was highly relevant to the legal process in the case of Thomas Quick. Most of the critics who had defended Lambertz in this debate on rule of law were also sceptical about Quick’s convictions.
For this reason it wasn’t surprising that in the early days of his term of office, Göran Lambertz had expressed strong doubts about Thomas Quick’s convictions. Johan Asplund’s parents met Göran Lambertz and for the first time felt that a public official understood them and was taking them seriously.
‘He encouraged us to bring him a statement so that he could make enquiries into all eight of Thomas Quick’s convictions,’ Anna-Clara Asplund told me.
The lawyer Pelle Svensson – the Asplunds’ representative in 1984, when they brought civil proceedings against Anna-Clara’s ex-partner – was assigned to draft the petition.
On 20 November 2006 Svensson handed in a ‘legal inquiry’ of sixty-three pages to the Chancellor of Justice, with supporting material in cardboard boxes containing all of the court verdicts, investigation material, video tapes and so on.
Pelle Svensson’s report was supported by Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund, as well as by Charles Zelmanovits’s brother Frederick, who had never believed in Quick’s guilt.
When the Chancellor of Justice announced his decision on Thomas Quick a week later, it came as a surprise to everyone. Had he really been able to review all the material and draft a decision on it in just a week? His decision was as follows:
The Chancellor of Justice will not start an investigation nor in other respects implement any further measures in this matter.
The Chancellor’s decision ran to eight pages and concluded with the following claim:
The verdicts imposed on TQ are in all essential respects very well written and solid. They contain among other things extensive descriptions of the assessment of evidence by the courts.
Even Christer van der Kwast and Seppo Penttinen earned praise from Lambertz:
In terms of the serious allegations directed at the prosecutor and head of the preliminary enquiries, I particularly want to emphasise that the investigation gives no cause for any other conclusion than that these persons have conducted themselves with skill under difficult circumstances.
Göran Lambertz’s decision gave rise to speculation about the real motives behind him dropping the whole matter of Thomas Quick so quickly and readily. Especially surprising were Lambertz’s laudatory comments on the excellent work of the police, prosecutor and courts.
At the time, Göran Lambertz was under fierce attack and had made enemies among the police, the Office of Prosecutions and the country’s judiciary. To this one could also add certain groups of journalists in the wake of his prosecution of the publisher of
Expressen
in a press freedom case. His enemies also included various groups who were campaigning against sexual crime in general. In other words, his future as the Chancellor of Justice could not be taken for granted.
Göran Lambertz categorically denied that he was ever influenced by such considerations. At the time I had been one of the people who were unsure of his motives. Now I had the opportunity to ask him whether he had really been able to properly review the details before his hasty decision.
‘I only had time to read the verdicts,’ he admitted. ‘I read them twice and the second time I had a red marker pen in my hand.’
He had also relied on assistants who read the supporting material, or at least parts of it. While I was there I met one of the underlings whose services Lambertz had relied on – an apparently newly hatched lawyer who, it seemed, had found Pelle Svensson’s ‘legal inquiry’ far from impressive.
When we bumped into him at the coffee machine, Göran Lambertz called out cheerfully, ‘You two have an interest in common!’
As we shook hands the young lawyer said, with a certain chill in his voice, ‘Yes, but we don’t agree about anything.’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘Come back in a year or so and then we’ll see.’
I almost felt sorry for him. At most he had been given five days to form an opinion on a massive and complex body of material. His significantly more experienced legal colleague Thomas Olsson had put in months of work just to review one of the murder cases. Yet it was this rosy-cheeked lawyer who had provided the grounds which, without a doubt, formed the basis of Lambertz’s most catastrophic decision as Chancellor of Justice.
Lambertz’s verdict was the final nail in the coffin, extinguishing any lingering hope of Pelle Svensson, the Asplunds and many others who had believed that Lambertz would be the one to finally correct this miscarriage of justice. In the meantime, Lambertz’s approval was used by the prosecution as a trump card in the debate: the legal process had been reviewed and praised at the very highest level. I had already seen the argument deployed by Gubb Jan Stigson when we met in Falun right at the beginning of my research, and most recently it had also been repeated by Claes Borgström in his office.
I was astonished by Göran Lambertz’s thoughtless approach to the whole matter. After outlining my findings, I began by talking about the first verdict and how I had come to the conclusion that
there was actually no proper evidence at all. There were overwhelming indications that Quick had nothing at all to do with Charles Zelmanovits’s disappearance, yet the prosecutor had avoided the entire problem.
Lambertz listened with interest. The meeting was amicable in tone. I told him about Sture withdrawing his confessions and then summarised one investigation after another. Finally, just before lunch when I had to leave, Lambertz explained that everything I had said was interesting but did not really make very much difference. Because the biggest mystery remained. How could Quick have talked about Trine and Gry? How could he have led the police to where the bodies were found?
I had to admit that those were the cases on which I had done the least research and that I didn’t have the answers at my fingertips.
I left the meeting with a deep sense of disappointment. Personally, I have always liked Göran Lambertz and regarded him as a man of honour. What I had told him should have resulted in some kind of remorse, but I couldn’t see the slightest trace of that.
As I walked away from the Office of the Chancellor of Justice, I understood two things. First, the forces defending the infallibility of the legal system were much more entrenched than I had realised. Second, the Quick story would keep rumbling along until the very last question mark had been straightened out. This meant that, at least as far as I was concerned, the job was far from done.
THE SVT DOCUMENTARIES
MY FIRST TWO
documentaries on Thomas Quick were aired on SVT’s
Dokument inifrån
(‘Inside Document’) on 14 and 21 December 2008.