Authors: Hannes Råstam
The question is, how would the district court have judged the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik if they had been informed that a large number of the murders on the list were evidently figments of Quick’s imagination?
THE CRIME JOURNALIST
BJÖRN ERICSON’S CHIEF
prosecutor’s group didn’t get very far in terms of their own decision on a retrial for Sture Bergwall, but on 17 December 2009 they finished their review of the petition for a new trial in the Yenon Levi case. Björn Ericson announced that it had been accepted.
Meanwhile, Ericson kept requesting materials on each case and had now reached the famous bone fragments from the Therese Johannesen inquiry. The Norwegians handed them over and before long they had been sent to SKL for analysis.
One of the osteologists who studied the bone pieces was Ylva Svenfelt, an independent research scientist and a specialist in burnt bones from the Iron Age. She was very surprised when she saw the bone fragments, which were allegedly from a human child.
On Thursday, 18 March 2010 a number of media sources revealed that the bones had only been subjected to a visual inspection ahead of the first trial: in other words, professors Per Holck and Richard Helmer had only looked at them before announcing their expert, scientific findings. This time, however, they were examined at molecular and biological levels. They proved not to be bones at all, but were actually wood with an added component of glue – most likely fibreboard.
‘Anyone who has worked with burnt bone fragments can see straight away that this is not bone. I can’t interpret it in any other way than scientific fraud,’ Ylva Svenfelt commented to
Aftonbladet
.
Thomas Olsson made a statement to
Expressen
: ‘It’s so incredible,
even we couldn’t have anticipated this. But it’s symptomatic of the Quick case, where people of academic repute have offered their services to the whole circus.’
Two days after this news, which perhaps more than any other had added a sheen of ridicule to the whole investigation, I received the Guldspaden Prize (the Golden Spade) from Föreningen Grävande Journalisters (the Association of Investigative Journalists) for my Quick documentaries.
Their annual three-day conference was held that year at Radiohuset (SVT’s main building) in Stockholm, and on the Sunday the whole event was rounded off with a debate between me and Gubb Jan Stigson on the role of the media in the Quick scandal. Among the audience in the auditorium of the Radio Symphony Hall were about a hundred colleagues, including Jenny Küttim, Johan Brånstad and Thomas Olsson.
It was with mixed feelings that I waited for the debate to begin on the podium.
I owed Gubb Jan a great debt of thanks. Not only had he in some sense persuaded me to take on the case, but he had also helped me to get hold of significant amounts of material and opened many doors with his recommendations.
He was now the only one who still adhered to the view that Quick was guilty, but he was still willing to defend that view in an open forum. He had therefore become something of a spokesman for van der Kwast and Penttinen, as well as Ståhle, Christianson and Borgström. He received no other reward for this than the increasing mirth of his peers.
And to a very large extent this was my fault.
At the same time his obstinate refusal to accept proven facts was beginning to come across as quite extraordinary. Strangely enough, he was also blind to the role he had played in the story. During my research for the third documentary I continued to delve into material, including the preliminary investigation notes on Trine and Gry, in an attempt to find out who exactly, other than Kåre Hunstad, had provided Quick with the original tip-off for the murder.
In a document from 26 January 2000 I found an inventory, the
result of a Sisyphean task completed by a poor policeman by the name of Jan Karlsson, who had trawled through every Swedish newspaper that might have mentioned Gry Storvik’s name after she was found murdered on 25 June 1985. After fruitlessly scanning every edition of
Aftonbladet
,
Dagens Nyheter
and
Expressen
he came to
Dala-Demokraten
.
And there – on 2 October 1998, ten months before the famed visit to the crime scene – was an article on the subject written by none other than Gubb Jan Stigson.
Dala-Demokraten
was one of the newspapers which Ward 36 at Säter Hospital subscribed to, and in interrogations relating to other cases it had emerged that Quick read it daily. I sought out the article in question at the Kurs-och tidskriftsbiblioteket (Academic and Newspaper Library) in Gothenburg. Under the headline ‘Thomas Quick Now Being Linked to Sex Murders in Norway’, Stigson went on to write, ‘Currently interest is being focused primarily on two murders of women and one disappearance, all three of them Norwegian crime classics.’
After a short outline of the Trine Jensen and Marianne Rugaas Knutsen cases came the crucial information:
The third case concerns 23-year-old Gry Storvik, who went missing in central Oslo and was found murdered in a car park in Myrvoll on 25 June 1985. The discovery was not far from the place where Trine’s body was found. The cases have several similarities. The victim’s bodies bear signs of violence with many similarities. And furthermore, both girls disappeared within a radius of just a few hundred metres.
The information on the murder of Gry which Quick was able to read in
Dala-Demokraten
was undoubtedly quite a good start, given how the questioning was carried out and how Quick’s stories were usually ‘developed’ over the course of an investigation.
For some unknown reason, when during my initial research Gubb Jan Stigson was kind enough to photocopy around three hundred of his articles on Quick, he chose not to include this one in the collection.
The fact that the article was entered into the CID investigation report didn’t prevent the district court from being kept in the dark about its existence.
The podium debate began with the moderator, Monica Saarinen, also the presenter of
Studio Ett
, pointing out the irony of Gubb Jan Stigson having received the Grand Prize of Publicistklubben (the Publicists’ Club) in 1995 for his journalism on Quick – the very same subject as mine.
After some small talk about how we had first come into contact with one another, and clarifying that we had taken radically opposed positions on the question of Quick’s guilt, Stigson explained: ‘You get to a point where you can’t get any further, you just have to accept that he’s guilty. I’d like to say that I’ve maintained a critical outlook all along. And then all this happens, all this nonsense. This suggestion that he was just a clown. There’s been complete silence about his background, which is unique in Swedish criminal history.’
‘Hannes, how can you be so sure he’s innocent?’ Saarinen asked.
‘I’ve read all the material,’ I explained. ‘Above all I’ve lined up everything that spoke in favour of his guilt. And there’s nothing left. There’s not a shred of evidence. These judgments only rest on Quick’s testimony, and once you read his stories and realise how they’ve emerged, you see how in the beginning he knew absolutely nothing about these murders. He’s wrong about practically everything.’
At this point Stigson started shaking his head and I felt a stab of irritation.
‘You’re shaking your head and you’re doing it even though you know better. The audience hasn’t read these interrogation reports, but you have. So what circumstances is he aware of, then, in the early interviews, for even one of his murders?’
‘The point is . . . in every case he says something early on that sort of makes it worth carrying on with it, and then he complicates it and in the end you uncover astonishing information. How did he end up in Ørje Forest?’
‘He read about it in
Verdens Gang
.’
‘About Ørje Forest? No one knew anything about Ørje Forest before he . . .’
‘Ørje Forest is mentioned in
Verdens Gang
. As is all the information he gives about the Therese murder.’
‘No, no . . .’
‘Perhaps you don’t know any better, but you are mistaken.’
Gubb Jan Stigson changed the subject and asked why I seemed unconcerned about Sture Bergwall’s previous criminal record. I answered that I was looking into how the Swedish legal system and the Swedish system of psychiatric care were capable of dealing with a mentally ill person, who was also drugged, who confessed to murders – not what his prior criminal record had been.
This didn’t prevent Stigson from going on. Instead he launched into a description of ‘ten to twelve sexual attacks of varying degrees of severity’ which Sture Bergwall had apparently begun committing at the age of fifteen, followed by the stabbing in 1974. Monica Saarinen interjected that Stigson, ahead of the debate, had sent her eighty articles which she had read, and that he mentioned these earlier crimes in an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of them.
‘I mean they are the prerequisite for what comes after,’ Stigson claimed.
‘How do you mean?’ asked Saarinen.
‘Yeah, but I mean . . . he has suffered with this . . . these are perversions that are virtually incurable.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Saarinen.
‘Well . . . I mean . . . that’s what the statistics say.’
Stigson alluded to two other cases and the doctors he had spoken to.
‘You mean that because he did this he could very well be guilty?’ asked Saarinen.
‘No, but because he’s got this thing it’s worth investigating to see if he’s guilty. But it says . . . Fransson checks his background and comes to the conclusion that . . .’
At this stage I could no longer hold my silence, and I interrupted him.
‘What Gubb Jan is talking about is a mix of hearsay, uninvestigated incidents, alleged incidents and so on. There are two prosecutions where he confessed and he was found guilty. That is correct. And
I’ve mentioned that he has been found guilty of two extremely serious violent crimes. I don’t think there’s much point going over events that go back decades. What’s incredible is that he has been found guilty of eight murders which I and many others are saying he never committed. If we could just leave the 1960s behind and make our way into modern times it would be a huge relief. To keep stirring and stirring and stirring the pot as Gubb Jan Stigson has been doing now for twenty years about these various statements made by doctors, about events that happened when he was only nineteen, these so-called . . .’
‘Fourteen.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t the oldest go back to when he’s fourteen? About fourteen. That’s what he says, anyway.’
‘Oh, I see, you’re going even further back now. Soon you’ll be back in the 1950s. I think it’s shameful, actually. Gubb Jan Stigson’s journalism is a character assassination of a psychiatric patient.’
‘Character assassination? But this is . . . this is . . .’
‘Gubb Jan Stigson has copied three hundred of his articles for me and there’s this constant dwelling on this . . .’
I was forced to turn towards him, rather than the audience.
‘I really don’t understand what you are doing, because it doesn’t have a bloody thing to do with the actual verdicts.’
‘Oh, it absolutely does!’
‘The question of his guilt in these murders?’
‘No, no, it’s not as simple as that!’
‘The question of guilt in murders? That is what we’re supposed to be discussing here. A person who’s been wrongly convicted of murder.’
‘Oh, but it’s so easy to wriggle out of this one. It’s almost fraudulent not to include his background . . .’
Monica Saarinen tried to break the poisonous atmosphere by changing the subject, but Stigson and I quickly launched into a new argument. He insisted that Quick was also guilty of the murder of Thomas Blomgren and I tried in vain to convince him that it was absolutely impossible, while at the same time informing the audience
of Quick’s visits to the Kungliga biblioteket (the Royal National Library) in Stockholm to revise his facts.
‘Hannes, are you saying that Gubb Jan also helped Thomas Quick acquire information so he could keep confessing?’
‘Gubb Jan has published articles where he’s named victims, detailed where the victims disappeared, described the sort of violence the victim was subjected to, where the victim was found and so on, before Thomas Quick had even mentioned anything about it, and . . .’
‘What case are you talking about?’ Gubb Jan cut in.
‘Gry Storvik, for example.’
‘Yes . . . but . . . surely . . .’
‘Surprisingly enough, that’s one of the articles you chose not to copy for me. I found it in a newspaper archive. On 2 October 1998 you published an article that described everything Thomas Quick needed to know to make a confession. Before this point he had never even mentioned the name Gry Storvik.’
‘I knew nothing about Gry Storvik until I heard that he’d named her!’ Stigson hissed.
‘So it must be a forgery that’s found its way into the archived microfilm, then?’ Stigson slumped a little over the lectern where we were standing.
‘I have it on my computer. I’ll show it to you immediately afterwards,’ I said.
‘Have you yourself given any thought to the possibility that Thomas Quick could have got information from your articles?’ asked Saarinen.
‘There is nothing in my articles that has any bearing on these cases,’ Stigson insisted. ‘He says I gave him this book . . . Göran Elwin’s book on the Johan case. Nothing in that book has any bearing on the court verdict!’
‘Well, it contains descriptions of all his clothes and his red rucksack,’ I said. ‘These are the types of things I know for a fact that Thomas Quick carefully made a note of so that he could talk about it. So of course you’ve given him information.’
‘Yeah, but . . .’
‘And you gave him that book.’
‘But if he could go to the library anyway, why would he come to me for a book?’
Stigson changed tack again with a long description of his contact with Quick and how he had frequently had telephone contact with him because he felt ‘sorry for him’.
I tried to hit the rewind button: ‘It’s important to grasp that these murder investigations, the entire Thomas Quick story, is driven by the media, the police and his therapy in a strange process of collusion. In which the media is used by the police in order to . . .’