‘I know that,’ I interrupted. ‘I’ve read what they have to say about it. But now I’m asking you. You strike me as fairly normal. Reasonable.’
‘Yes?’ his voice rose in that characteristic way of his. He smiled and looked as if I had said something absurd. ‘Wasn’t I supposed to be?’ he added rhetorically.
‘No you weren’t! You’re regarded as Sweden’s most dangerous and craziest basket case. Haven’t you understood that?’
Sture didn’t seem to have taken offence, but the question remained unanswered: what would happen if Sture Bergwall were released?
The question was justified.
The man in front of me appeared to be sensitive and kind. It was difficult to merge one’s impression of him with that of the cruel, sadistic serial killer.
And what conclusions might I infer from that?
None at all, I thought.
The silence was broken by the care assistants from Ward 36 coming to take the serial killer back to his cell.
We said our farewells without agreeing to meet again.
UNCLE STURE
I SPENT THAT summer reading pre-trial investigation material and contacting a number of police who had worked on the Quick inquiries, Sture Bergwall’s family and friends, the families of the victims and the accomplices he had pointed out. The list was apparently endless. Many of them were welcoming and generous. For obvious reasons it proved difficult to establish a line of communication with the people responsible for the care of Thomas Quick at Säter Hospital. My expectations were close to zero when I telephoned Säter’s retired chief physician at home.
Göran Källberg was not enthused when he heard about my plans to make a documentary about Thomas Quick. I said that I didn’t want to discuss the question of guilt, but rather how the investigation and psychiatric care had been managed. As soon as he heard this, his tone softened considerably.
It was obvious that the Quick case was troubling Göran Källberg, but for reasons that were unclear. He was critical of prosecutor van der Kwast’s handling of the relationship with Säter Hospital. He was also self-critical with regard to certain elements in the psychiatric care.
‘In any case, patient confidentiality makes it impossible for me to discuss an individual patient,’ he explained.
I asked what his position would be if Sture Bergwall gave him authority to speak freely. He didn’t want to answer this, but he was prepared to think about it.
His ambivalence was obvious. Something was bothering him, something he very much wanted to talk about. But he struggled with it. I understood that this conversation had placed Göran Källberg in a dilemma of sorts.
‘I feel a great deal of loyalty to Säter psychiatric clinic and the people who work there,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I don’t want to participate in the cover-up of a miscarriage of justice.’
What was he saying? A miscarriage of justice? I did my best to hide my excitement. So this was how the ex-chief physician of Säter Hospital regarded the case of Thomas Quick – as a miscarriage of justice.
Göran Källberg indicated that his concerns centred on the events around the time of Quick’s withdrawal, his ‘time out’. He told me that on his own initiative he had asked a couple of different judges about the possibilities of overturning the verdicts and demanding restitution for Quick. The answer he received was that in principle it would be impossible. He had no choice but to leave it there.
However much I thought about it I couldn’t imagine what it was that Källberg considered to be a possible reason for the conviction to be overturned.
One thing I have learned in my years as an investigative journalist is the importance of chronology: to clearly define the order in which things occurred, so that one can rule out incongruities – meaning certain things that couldn’t possibly have happened at the same time – and separate cause and effect.
By meticulously arranging the eyewitness accounts of the death of Osmo Vallo on a timeline, I was able to show that the police’s version of events was not credible. In the same way, accusations against the man convicted of incest in ‘The Case of Ulf’ were disproved by the simple fact that he was elsewhere at the time when he was supposedly assaulting his daughter. After the Gothenburg riots, by breaking things down into units of time – in this case, using the large volume of video footage taken at the time of shots being fired on Vasaplatsen – Janne Josefsson and I were able to show what had actually happened.
Now my attention was focused on the investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi in 1988. The murder took place in Avesta police district, where the police inspectors Lennart Jarlheim and Willy Hammar had done an impressive job of mapping out Thomas Quick’s life chronologically, from the cradle to Säter Hospital.
By way of a summary they had established in 1956, the Bergwall family had moved to a flat at 4 Bruksgatan in Korsnäs outside Falun. The father, Ove, passed away in 1977 and, after his death, Sture took care of the household and his sick mother, Thyra, up until her death in 1983.
During these years Sture had been declared medically unfit for work because of his psychological problems, and he was claiming disability benefits. Helped along by his mother’s pension, they managed to pay their way. He spent a lot of time with his siblings and their families and had particularly strong ties to his nieces and nephews. At home he kept himself busy with rug-weaving, household chores and by spending time with his mother and her friends.
Sture Bergwall’s life seemed to be improving when, in August 1982, he opened a tobacco shop with his older brother, Sten-Ove. One year later their mother died, and he was now living by himself in the parental home.
A number of youths would hang out at the kiosk in the evenings; one in particular, an eleven-year-old referred to as Patrik Olofsson, started helping out with minor chores and also enjoyed taking care of Peja, Sture’s Scottish deerhound. Sture was soon on friendly terms with the Olofsson family.
In 1986 the Bergwall brothers wound down their entrepreneurial project and Sture became unemployed. He opened a new kiosk on Drottningplan in the town of Grycksbo with a new business partner – this time Patrik’s mother, Margit Olofsson.
The new kiosk quickly became a hang-out for teenage boys in the area, who increasingly also visited Sture at home. Sture had started taking driving lessons and on 27 March 1987, after many attempts, he passed his driving test. His first car was a 1965 red Volvo PV. Sture’s popularity among the boys was at its peak when he began to organise ‘heavy metal’ trips to Stockholm in his twenty-two-year-old car. They went to concerts by Kiss, Iron Maiden and WASP.
Having previously survived on disability benefits, Sture Bergwall had now become a shopkeeper. During the Grycksbo years he worked as a bingo caller and newspaper delivery man too, and he was demonstrably popular with customers, colleagues and employers.
Patrik Olofsson spent more and more time with Sture and even lived with him during certain periods, with his parents’ approval. The relationship between Sture and the Olofsson family was now so tight that it seemed perfectly natural for Sture to celebrate Christmas with them.
But the story ended in catastrophe for the Olofssons. The husband and wife separated, a deep disagreement arose between Sture and Mrs Olofsson, the kiosk went out of business and Patrik turned his back on his family. Sture’s time in Grycksbo came to an end when his and Patrik’s financial and social predicament drove them to rob the town’s branch of Gotabanken.
The foolishness of the robbery was almost mystifying: Sture was a customer of the bank, which was next door to his previous kiosk. On the morning of 14 December 1990 the robbers forced their way into the home of the bank manager and took the family hostage. They had disguised themselves with Santa Claus masks