On a balanced judgement of what has been shown, the district court finds that Thomas Quick’s confessions are supported by the investigation to such a degree that it must be considered beyond all reasonable doubt that he has committed the acts as stated by the prosecutor.
‘There’s no need to speculate about whether he is lying. He has qualified knowledge of the murder’, was Sven Åke Christianson’s comment on the verdict.
‘Yesterday, Thomas Quick was convicted without technical evidence for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik’, Norway’s Aftenposten pointedly concluded.
And that was all.
JOHAN ASPLUND
THE STORY OF Thomas Quick begins and ends with Johan Asplund.
When, during therapy in 1992, Quick started remembering the murder of Johan, he was very unsure whether he had had anything to do with it. It is unlikely that he would have suspected at this point that he would eventually remember committing another thirty murders.
If Thomas Quick had begun by confessing to the murder of Yenon Levi, the matter would have ended up in the Avesta police district rather than with the Sundsvall police. But the murder of Johan came first and the Quick file therefore landed on the desk of prosecutor Christer van der Kwast and the Sundsvall police, where senior officer and narcotics investigator Seppo Penttinen was charged with heading the investigation.
It would be understandable if Seppo Penttinen had harboured a dream of being the one to solve the murder of Johan Asplund, Sundsvall’s greatest crime mystery. Over the years, the police had invested enormous amounts of manpower and resources with a view to producing some sort of technical evidence as the Quick case progressed.
After the verdicts for the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen, the investigation took a firm new grasp on Johan’s murder inquiry, as it had done so many times before.
‘We’re getting very close now with Johan Asplund,’ said van der Kwast.
‘Again!’ commented Björn Asplund acidly. ‘There’s bound to be another murder in Norway he’d rather talk about . . .’
But this time the investigators were determined to bring Johan’s case to court and reach a verdict. On Valentine’s Day 2001 van der Kwast called Björn Asplund to let him know there was now enough evidence to instigate proceedings against Thomas Quick for the murder of Johan.
Both Björn and Anna-Clara Asplund welcomed the decision and approved the prosecution. ‘We just want an end to this after twenty years,’ they said. ‘But we’ll question every detail during the trial.’
‘The details provided by Quick show that he has been in physical contact with Johan,’ van der Kwast assured everyone at the press conference after the announcement of the trial. ‘Even his descriptions of things in Bosvedjan indicate that he was actually there on that morning.’
But Johan’s parents were dismissive of the prosecutor’s line of reasoning.
‘He did not murder my son,’ said Björn Asplund with absolute confidence, pointing to the fact that there was no technical evidence at all. ‘I don’t believe he is guilty of a single murder.’
The most significant failing in the Quick story, Asplund argued, was that none of Quick’s murder convictions had been tested in a higher court. But that would change now.
‘If against all probability he is found guilty, we’ll take it to the court of appeal. And then the bubble around Thomas Quick will hopefully burst.’
During the trial, the district court believed that Quick had given details about the residential area of Bosvedjan which proved that he had been there on the morning of Johan’s disappearance. He was able to describe a boy who lived in the same house as Johan. The fact that Quick could make a drawing of the boy’s jumper was viewed by the court as significant. He had also given precise information about distinguishing marks on Johan’s body.
Sundsvall District Court reached a unanimous verdict on Quick having committed the offence beyond all reasonable doubt. On 21 June 2001 Quick was convicted of his eighth murder.
Only then were Johan’s parents informed that because they had supported the prosecution they were not entitled to appeal against the verdict.
And with this the murder of Johan Asplund had come to a close.
TIME OUT
THREE SIGNIFICANT EVENTS took place in November 2001.
On 10 November an article was published in Dagens Nyheter, written by the historian Lennart Lundmark. It was entitled ‘Circus Quick, A Travesty of Justice’:
The guilty verdicts against Thomas Quick are an all-time low not only for the Swedish judicial system but also for Swedish crime reporting. There is no doubt that the entire story will be refuted.
A few days later, on 14 November, Leif G.W. Persson, the criminologist and professor of police studies, mocked the entire Quick investigation during the Legal Fair at the Stockholm Exhibition Centre. Levelling his comments at the impaired judgement of the investigators, Persson expressed his doubt that Quick had committed a single one of the murders for which he had been convicted.
The following day, Thomas Quick published his third article in DN Debatt, ‘Thomas Quick in the Wake of Accusations of Mythomania: I Will Not Take Part in Further Police Investigations’, in which he stated:
From now on I will take some time out, maybe for the rest of my life, from police investigations into confessions I have made for a number of murders.
Thomas Quick fiercely attacked Leif G.W. Persson, Kerstin Koorti and all the others who had called his confessions into doubt and were now making it impossible for him to continue cooperating with the police investigation.
To be met year after year by entirely unfounded statements from a troika of false prophets claiming that I am a mythomaniac, and to see this little group so uncritically treated by the mass media, is, and will continue to be, far too much of a strain. I resign from any further cooperation with police investigations, also for the sake of the victims’ loved ones who have accepted the evidence just as the courts have done. I do not want them to have to feel unsure about what has happened.
Three months later Thomas Quick took back his original name, Sture Bergwall. The man who had been created less than ten years earlier no longer existed.
The Thomas Quick era was over.
The judicial case of Thomas Quick, on the other hand, lived on in the culture pages of the newspapers, where the investigation and the verdicts were challenged by more and more people. Even some of the police detectives involved in the investigations came forward to express their doubts.
But Sture Bergwall remained at Säter Hospital, in silence, year after year.
When I visited him on 2 June 2008 his time out had lasted for almost seven years.
Why had Quick gone silent? Was it really because his credibility had been questioned by Leif G.W. Persson and other sceptics? Or were there other, hidden reasons?
WHY DID THEY CONFESS?
I BECAME A journalist rather late in life – when I was thirty-seven years old – but I immediately managed to sell a number of stories to Swedish Television’s (SVT) investigative journalism programme Striptease. I enjoyed the work, I had unlimited energy and I felt everything was going astonishingly well. Before I knew it I was a permanent employee.
My interest from the very beginning was focused on crime and justice reporting, and within a couple of years, working with the reporter Janne Josefsson, we chanced upon a scoop that I was certain I would never be able to trump. It concerned the drug addict Osmo Vallo, whose time of death happened to coincide with a hundred-kilo police constable