Gubb Jan Stigson often quotes forensic psychiatric statements or court verdicts. With his detailed grasp, he can attack his opponents by pointing out factual errors in their comments and articles.
Besides Leif G.W. Persson, the person Stigson most detested was the writer and journalist Jan Guillou. Demonstratively he waved a couple of A4 sheets in the air: rejected articles on the subject which he had sent to national newspapers.
‘In Jan Guillou’s book Häxornas försvarare [The Witches’ Attorney]
It was with a certain relief that I said farewell to Stigson and walked out into an unwelcoming, bitterly cold Falun day to knuckle down to my investigative report on the Falun Arsonist, which was increasingly proving to be about the phenomenon of false confessions.
Why will certain people, under police questioning, confess to serious crimes even if they are absolutely innocent? It seems almost inconceivable. Most people would never think they could do something so idiotic. And yet, in Falun, nine young people had confessed to starting a large number of fires. Later they claimed they had had nothing to do with it. In the early stages I found it very difficult to believe them.
Once I started looking into the research on false confessions I realised just how common they are. Nor could they be described as a recent occurrence. When the baby son of the celebrity Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, was kidnapped in 1932, over two hundred people came forward to make confessions. Almost as many have confessed over the years to the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
Since its establishment in 1992 the American organisation Innocence Project had managed, by use of DNA technology, to help release 282 people innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. The organisation confirmed that about 25 per cent of these had confessed their guilt entirely, or to some degree, during police investigations. That they later retracted their confessions did not help them in their court cases.
Children, young people, people with mental illnesses or impairments and drug users are by far the largest group. When subsequently asked why they confessed, the most common answer given is, ‘I just wanted to go home.’
My research into the phenomenon revealed that some of the most significant legal scandals have come about because of false confessions. In Britain, for instance, there were the draconian sentences handed out to the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. Sweden seemed to be one of the few judicial states in which the problem of false confessions was more or less unknown.
I went to New York, where I interviewed Professor Saul Kassin, one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject.
Saul Kassin wasn’t surprised for a second to hear of the young people in Falun who had confessed to the crimes. The most surprising part of the story, in his opinion, was that a thirteen-year-old girl, who had been kept under arrest in isolation while subjected to tough questioning, continued to deny any involvement for three days.
‘It’s very unusual for a thirteen-year-old to hold out for three days!’ he told me. ‘Most will confess in a few hours or a day.’
Professor Kassin was able to back up his views with a series of astonishing cases in which teenagers had confessed to extremely serious crimes even though they demonstrably had nothing to do with them.
When I met the ‘youths’ who had confessed to arson, they were in their fifties. Finally, eight of them agreed to participate in my documentary. It was enormously liberating for them to tell their stories. The police who had conducted the investigation agreed that it had not been done properly and that they hadn’t managed to uncover the truth about the arson case.
The programme was aired on SVT’s Dokument inifrån (‘Inside Document’)
THE LETTER TO STURE BERGWALL
I HAD NO idea whose version of events was correct, Gubb Jan Stigson’s or Leif G.W. Persson’s. The entire Quick debate seemed quite absurd to me. Six district courts had unanimously found Thomas Quick guilty of eight murders. In other words, they had taken the view that he was guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet a number of perfectly rational people were claiming that he was innocent of all these murders.
Surely it couldn’t be possible? Logic would seem to suggest that if there was enough evidence to convict Quick for eight murders, it must also be a relatively easy matter to show that Persson, Guillou and the other doubters were mistaken.
On the other hand, if Quick really was innocent, then what Leif G.W. Persson had said would be true: this would be the most significant Swedish miscarriage of justice of all time.
For my own part I had no particular opinion on Quick, nor did I have any ambition to reveal the truth of his guilt, or not, as the case may be. Rather, my idea was to make a documentary about the feud and its colourful principal characters.
At the same time there was probably a subconscious connection between my recent knowledge of false confessions and my keenness to get started on Thomas Quick, who for more than ten years had been referred to as the country’s worst ‘serial confessor’ of crimes he had not committed.
After my documentary on the Falun Arsonist had aired on television, I read a number of the books that had been published on Thomas Quick and, on 22 April, I wrote my first tentative letter to him.
Sture Bergwall,
By coincidence I found your book Kvarblivelse [What Remains] in a second-hand bookshop and I am reading it now with great interest, if also with a certain unease.
[. . .]
I am aware that you turned your back on journalists a number of years ago, which I can appreciate as a perfectly reasonable decision, but nevertheless I want to ask if it would be possible to meet you. I want to emphasise that this should not be viewed as a request for an interview! Nothing that we discuss in any meeting will be published, I am only asking for an unprejudiced meeting. I am convinced that such a meeting would be productive, not only for me but also for you.
The reply came just a few days later. I was welcome at Säter Hospital.
MY CONVERSATIONS WITH JAN OLSSON
TO PREPARE MYSELF I read the court’s verdict and various articles on the subject. The volume of material was overwhelming.
On 29 May 2008 – three days before my first meeting with Sture Bergwall – I phoned Jan Olsson.
Now retired from his position as a detective chief inspector, Jan Olsson had more than thirty years’ experience as a murder investigator and forensic technician. He had been the assistant head of the forensic division in Stockholm and the head of the National Police Board’s profiling group. What interested me most about him was that he had been in charge of the forensic investigations into the murders of the Dutch married couple at Appojaure and Yenon Levi at Rörshyttan.
He had made no secret of his belief that Thomas Quick was wrongly convicted, and he had written articles on the subject. The fact that he was a policeman set him apart in the diverse crowd protesting Quick’s innocence.
I wanted to hear, in his own words, precisely what had convinced him that Quick was wrongly convicted. Olsson was a pleasant man who took his time, carefully outlining about ten different aspects that had given rise to his misgivings. His arguments centred on the two murder cases he had worked on. From what I understood, Olsson’s criticisms were of three failings that might be categorised as systemic faults:
1. From an early stage, the investigators had searched for whatever