Authors: Hannes Råstam
So what was the story I was telling?
More or less this: a psychiatric hospital had drugged a sectioned patient, effectively turning him into a drug addict. He had then been subjected to intensive therapy. With the help of a good deal of cajoling and free access to narcotics, he had confessed to about thirty murders.
Despite the patient constantly being caught out lying, the prosecutor, investigators, therapists and all manner of specialists managed to bring eight confessed murders to prosecution. Six courts had unanimously found the patient guilty in each case.
In my documentary the patient took back all of his confessions and declared that he had never murdered anyone.
The first two documentaries told in some detail the oddities of the investigations into the murders of Therese Johannesen, the Stegehuises in Appojaure and Yenon Levi in Rörshyttan. But the most important new information was obviously that Sture Bergwall, the serial confessor, was now claiming that he was innocent.
PART III
‘
The criticism is pure nonsense. I see nothing wrong in what I have done, just because the arguments are made very loudly.
’
Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast to TT, 20 April 2009
THE WIND CHANGES
THE FINDINGS IN
my documentaries meant that the Thomas Quick case was once again dominating the national media. By the Sunday evening on 14 December 2008, just after Sture Bergwall had retracted his confessions at the end of the first documentary, the lawyer Thomas Olsson made a statement to TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå), Sweden’s leading news service, that Sture Bergwall was intending to apply for a judicial review of all the murders for which he had been convicted. The first petition for a new trial regarding the murder of Yenon Levi would be sent to Svea High Court in the New Year.
Christer van der Kwast counterattacked the following day on a national radio programme known as
Studio Ett
.
‘These are unfounded claims,’ he said, responding to the suggestion that he and Seppo Penttinen had misled the courts. ‘Everything has been openly accounted for in the investigations. It is not true that we have fed Quick with information.’
He also insisted that he was still absolutely convinced of Quick’s guilt.
‘What weighs in most heavily is that in every case he has been able to give us information that could only have been known to the perpetrator. This has been cross-checked with forensic evidence and certification from medical examiners among other things. There has been supporting evidence for every one of his confessions.’
Seppo Penttinen chose not to comment on the matter. ‘There’s a petition for a judicial review under way and I don’t want to make any comment before that process has come to a close,’ he told TT.
The same strategy was chosen by Birgitta Ståhle, Sven Åke Christianson and Claes Borgström.
Legal experts such as the lawyer Per E. Samuelsson and the General Secretary of Advokatsamfundet (the Bar Association) Anne Ramberg made a statement on Sture Bergwall’s prospects of being cleared, which, in their view, were not favourable because withdrawal of the confessions did not constitute enough of a reason in itself. ‘In order to be cleared, there must be some sort of new information which the court can take a position on,’ Anne Ramberg commented to TT.
A few days later van der Kwast popped up again in a rare interview in
Svenska Dagbladet
. He referred to my documentaries as a ‘low point’ of investigative journalism and dismissed various reporters who had wanted to interview him, suggesting that they ‘didn’t have a clue’ what it was all about. In his view, nothing new of any substance had turned up, apart from the fact that Sture Bergwall had retracted his confessions.
Van der Kwast embarked on a series of arguments that seemed a little strange, at least to anyone who was informed on the subject. He said it was nonsense that the case of the refugee boys demonstrated how Quick was making up murders after being fed with information from the media.
‘In actual fact he started talking about one of the boys on 16 November 1994, before anything had even turned up in the media,’ he told the newspaper.
I was having a hard time believing what I was reading. On 16 November 1994 Seppo Penttinen visited Säter Hospital to hear what in his own notes he described as ‘association material’ which ‘very likely bears a relation to reality’.
On this occasion Thomas Quick mentioned the murder of a ‘younger boy’ at some time around ‘1988–1990’.
From Penttinen’s notes: ‘In this context the place name of Lindesberg is hovering in his mind. The boy couldn’t speak Swedish. Quick mentioned some Slavic-sounding name like “Dusjunka”. The boy was wearing a denim jacket, a moss-green jumper and oversized jeans with turned-up trouser legs. He had black hair and a southern appearance.’
How could Christer van der Kwast seriously suggest that this bore any relation to the story of the African refugee boys in Norway?
Kwast continued listing the ‘unique details’ Quick had provided during the investigation, which proved his guilt: Johan Asplund’s testicular hernia and unusual birthmark, Therese Johannesen’s atopic eczema and that Quick had been able to describe ‘the wounds of the Appojaure murder victims, which were not known outside the circle of investigators’. And then came the trump card: that in the Therese case, Thomas Quick had been able to lead police to a place in the forest where he had cut up and burnt bodies, a place where a cadaver dog reacted to the presence of human remains – and when they dug, they uncovered fragments of burnt bone.
Van der Kwast also found it difficult to believe that any of the cases would be overturned.
‘What’s happening now is a soap opera spectacle. I am counting on the courts keeping a cool head. There will not be any retrials,’ he said.
In the tidal wave of news, feature articles and editorials that followed, one of Sture Bergwall’s real victims came forward: the man whom he came close to murdering in 1974 in a student residence in Uppsala. In a piece on
Newsmill
the man described the traumatic event and went on to express his disappointment in me:
When I saw the programme on Thomas Quick on SVT yesterday I felt it was very biased – it gave the impression that he was innocent of the murders he’d been convicted of. I was a hair’s breadth away from being murdered by Quick, or Sture Bergwall as he was called in those days, and it’s difficult for me to believe that he’s just a pathetic “petty criminal” as he’s been described by Jan Guillou and other writers in the evening newspapers. [. . .] For the sake of my family I’ve not said very much about what happened to me almost 35 years ago. I’ve paid a price for my silence. When I now see the skewed image of Quick that is being presented I feel I have a responsibility to tell my story. Hannes Råstam’s programme and the writers in the evening press make me feel sick.
The man, who was also interviewed in
Dagens Nyheter
, wrote, ‘In fact I called Hannes Råstam when I heard about his documentary project. I wanted to tell him that I still had the police report from the attempted murder of me and that Råstam was welcome to read it. But Råstam wasn’t interested in meeting me – he only wanted to know if Quick had been under the influence of drugs at the time.’
A few days later, on 17 December,
Expressen
published an interview with the stepfather of the nine-year-old whom Sture Bergwall had sexually molested at the age of nineteen while working as a nursing assistant in 1969. ‘He is capable of murdering any number of people,’ said the stepfather, who was coming forward because, in his view, ‘it is important to highlight that Thomas Quick has been found guilty of violent acts before’.
As well as describing the assault at the hospital, the quotation was once again given from the psychiatric examination of 1970, stating that Quick suffered from a ‘high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as
paedophilia cum sadismus
’ and, under certain circumstances, would be ‘extremely dangerous to the safety, well-being and lives of others’.
Even some of my colleagues felt that I had painted the picture of Sture Bergwall in a somewhat rosy light by not delving deeper into his earlier wrongdoings in the documentaries, where they were only briefly alluded to. The criticism was not unexpected and yet it was palpable. At the same time, it couldn’t have been done in any other way: the aim of my investigation was to uncover whether Sture Bergwall had committed the eight murders he had been convicted of, not to go deeper into crimes we already knew he had committed. As it was, it had been almost impossible to compress the enormously complex story into two hours of television.
Soon the situation was very much like the Quick feud raging at its worst about ten years before, with the difference that the doubters, who earlier had been in a noisy minority, now made up the majority. Those who still believed that Quick was guilty as charged were a rapidly shrinking group.
On 17 December
Dagens Nyheter
ran the following editorial:
That Thomas Quick has been convicted of eight murders and accepted the blame for many more may well be one of our country’s greatest miscarriages of justice. But it could also be a case of a guilty murderer. Whatever the crime status of Thomas Quick, one thing can be said unequivocally: in the Quick case, the Swedish legal system has shown some worrying weaknesses, weaknesses that remind one of the legal rot of the 1950s. A legal review should now take place in accordance with legal practice and common sense. Such investigations should have as their purpose to clarify what has happened, what the role of the alleged guilty party has been and, above all – they must be unprejudiced.
The case of Thomas Quick shows many departures from accepted procedure. Attention is also being directed at the prosecutor, interrogator, defence counsel, law courts, and the whole line-up around the murderer Thomas Quick. This attention is hardly flattering.
It is quite clear that Thomas Quick has been ‘helped to remember’, that therapeutic treatment has been combined with a police investigation, and that any circumstances that might put a ‘dent’ in his guilt have been removed from sight. Arguably, it is problematic for the legal system as a whole that this can happen. Now there must be an investigation into how a number of people in positions of responsibility have conducted themselves in the case of Quick. His lawyer’s awaited petition for a new trial will hopefully be granted. Any faults and/or omissions can thereby be exposed and blame apportioned.
The broader question is whether the treatment of Thomas Quick says something about our legal system in general. The role of the theory of repressed memories is striking. This theory has been discredited to some extent in recent years, but for a few years it was accepted in Swedish law courts and a number of people were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of allegations apparently based on memories. The fact that many years had passed and that there were no witnesses or other evidence to back up these memories seemed to have no
importance. Even more troubling is that legal authorities whose task it is to watch over order in the legal system have also been pulled along and lost their sense of critical awareness.
The Chancellor of Justice allowed himself to be convinced by the sheer number of convictions against Thomas Quick and dismissed the objections by declaring that they touched upon circumstances that by and large had little significance. So what happened to that elegant phrase ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’?
In addition to the heated state of public opinion and the fact that Sture Bergwall intended to petition for a retrial, there was another awkward issue for those who had worked to convict Thomas Quick or insisted on emphasising his guilt: now even the Prosecutor-General, Anders Perklev, was looking at the case, after two civilians in Sundsvall had reported Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast for gross professional misconduct.
Clearly even the Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, was increasingly aware of the ground moving beneath his feet. On Monday, 22 December, the morning after the second documentary had been aired, he appeared on TV4’s
Nyhetsmorgon
(‘News Morning’).
‘I don’t know if he was guilty but I’m quite sure that he’s guilty of at least some of these murders. There is absolutely overwhelming evidence for a few of the sentences,’ he said in his appearance.
‘So you’re certain that he’s guilty?’ the presenter asked.
‘Yes, for a couple of the murders I am certain,’ said Lambertz. ‘And one also has to bear in mind that it has been established beyond all doubt that he has the capacity to do this. He has been judged by many psychiatrists to be a highly dangerous person with a sadistic and paedophilic nature and he has evidently committed a couple of extremely serious violent crimes, which he’s already been convicted of.’
This was undoubtedly quite a significant step away from the opinion he presented in his decision of 2006. In a debate article in
Aftonbladet
on 6 January 2009 he went one step further. After outlining the factors that spoke in favour of Quick’s guilt, he wrote:
1. It is absolutely possible that he decided to ‘become a mass murderer’, memorised as much as possible from the media and managed to portray himself as guilty by continually modifying his story and behaviour to what was required so that he would be believed. The influence of drugs and psychotherapy may have played a role. His current story may be the correct one.
2. For at least a few of the eight murders there are other persons under strong suspicion.
3. Certain highly significant parts of Quick’s stories seem to have been absolutely incorrect. These errors are difficult to explain in any other way than that he made them up.
Lambertz went on to write that there was not ‘a vestige of evidence’ to suggest that the investigators ‘had tried to mislead the courts and the general public into believing that Thomas Quick was guilty of crimes that they did not themselves believe he had committed’. However: ‘The police and prosecution may have proceeded a little hastily at times, possibly not taking enough account of the circumstances that argued against Quick’s implication in the crimes. This would not be a good thing, but it could be seen as a human error given the investigation process in which they found themselves.’