Is he really human?
The scenes that played out yesterday in Piteå District Court must have been the worst ever to take place in a Swedish court of law.
The Säter Man, Thomas Quick, was facing charges for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
He wept – but no one felt sorry for him.
In Aftonbladet, Kerstin Weigl wrote that Thomas Quick was ‘beyond all understanding’. Fortunately the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson was there to explain what normal people couldn’t understand. ‘I don’t think a normal person could ever process what he has done. It’s inconceivable, that’s why we push it away,’ he said, adding that there was a sort of ‘logic’ underlying Quick’s actions. ‘Quick was raped by his father from the age of four. His childhood was stolen from him. He cannot endure his fear, so he attempts to transfer this fear to someone else who can take it on. He has an illusion that he can destroy someone else’s life and thereby re-create his own. But the effects are short-lived. He has to kill again.’
By the end of the first day’s proceedings, any doubt concerning Thomas Quick’s guilt seemed to have vanished: ‘The man is a serial killer, paedophile, necrophile, cannibal and sadist. He is a very, very sick man,’ declared Aftonbladet.
A video from the forest in Piteå showed Quick explaining, in tears and with heart-rending moans, how he had murdered and cut up Charles Zelmanovits. No one in the courtroom was left unmoved.
Kerstin Weigl continued:
For my own part, after hearing those sounds, I cannot have the slightest doubt. The words came in bursts, with deep convulsions as if he was vomiting. Yes – this must be a true account.
Seventeen years after the murder, Quick was able to point out the place where the boy’s body parts were found. He sat on the stone where he had desecrated and cut up the body. He explained exactly where he had hidden what.
The trial in Piteå District Court in November 1994 was a walkover for prosecutor Christer van der Kwast. The members of the District Court unanimously found Thomas Quick guilty of the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
Their confidence massively boosted, the investigators continued to unravel the case. Up until then they had been focusing on Quick’s whereabouts at the times of unsolved murders of young boys, or whenever boys had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Less than a week after the verdict in Piteå, the entire investigation was thrown on its head when Thomas Quick telephoned the home of senior officer Seppo Penttinen at Sundsvall police to say, ‘It would probably be a good thing if I was confronted with information about the double murder in Norrbotten about ten years ago. I know I was up there at some point . . .’
APPOJAURE
MARINUS AND JANNY Stegehuis from the Netherlands were a childless couple aged thirty-four and thirty-nine respectively. For three years they had been saving up for their dream holiday in the Nordic Alps and in the summer of 1984 it was finally going to happen.
On 28 June they left their home in the town of Almelo at dawn and drove without stopping to Ödeshög in Östergötland, where some relatives of Marinus lived. They were on a tight budget and couldn’t afford overnight stays in hotels. After spending three days in Ödeshög, they continued their journey to Finland, where they had friends whom they knew from a church choir.
When Janny and Marinus left Mustasaari in Österbotten they pointed their Toyota Corolla north, towards the real adventure. They went across Nordkalotten via North Cape and then down through the Swedish Alps, where they planned to live in the wilderness and take each day as it came. They looked forward to fishing, experiencing the wildlife and photographing nature.
The journey was harder than they had anticipated due to a great deal of rain, wind and temperatures close to freezing. They were plagued by mosquitoes. But things were to get even worse. An engine problem outside Vittangi resulted in two tows, a night in a hotel and expensive repairs in a garage.
With empty pockets they left Kiruna and headed south. On the evening of 12 July they put up their tent on the tip of a spit at the northern end of Lake Appojaure. Janny wrote in her diary:
Drove to Sjöfallets National Park. Beautiful surroundings. Took some photos. Filmed reindeer and saw a stoat at the roadside. Put up the tent at 16.30 on some wooded land. The mosquitoes continue to torment us. From Kiruna went 150 km in drizzling rain. Then it cleared up. Now it’s raining.
They rigged up their gas stove outside the tent flap so they had some shelter from the rain while preparing a simple meal of sausages and green beans.
Just before midnight on Friday, 13 July, the police in Gällivare received a call from Matti Järvinen, a resident of Gothenburg holidaying in the Swedish mountains, who reported that he had chanced upon a dead person in a tent at a picnic spot next to Lake Appojaure. Detective Inspector Harry Brännström and senior officer Enar Jakobsson set off at once and after driving eighty kilometres through the rain in the bright northern summer night they reached the place the tourist had described. Before long they found a collapsed two-man tent. Carefully they raised the poles at the short end and unzipped the flap. The scene that met their eyes was described in the police report:
By the long wall on the west side lies the corpse of a man. He is estimated to be between 30 and 40 years old. The body is on its back. [. . .] The heaviest bloodstains are on the face and around the neck and on the right shoulder. A dense area of absorbed blood is on the right side of the jumper by the sleeve seam at nipple level. Other visible parts of the jumper are bloodstained. The dead man has stab wounds or slashes to his right upper arm, to the left side of his throat as well as to the right of his breast beside the nipple. There is what looks like a contusion across his mouth. [. . .]
To the right of the man, as viewed from the tent flap, lies the dead body of a woman. Her head, the right cheek resting against the floor of the tent, lies alongside the man’s hip. The body is lying on its right side and is bent to an angle of almost 90 degrees. The left arm is extended and rests at an angle of about 45 degrees from the upper body. The upper parts of the body are wrapped in a patterned duvet cover of the same kind as the one the man lies in. The duvet cover is very heavily bloodstained.
Outside the tent the police found what might have been the murder weapon – a thin-bladed fillet knife made by Falcon, a Swedish manufacturer. The blade had snapped off and was later found between the woman’s arm and body. It had broken when the knife struck bone with great force.
Between the tent’s opening and the lake a grey-green Toyota Corolla with Dutch number plates was parked. The car was locked, the interior was in good order and there was no sign of unlawful entry.
The police were quickly able to identify the victims. The crime scene gave a strong indication that this had been the work of a lunatic, pure and simple.
The following day the bodies were transported to Umeå, where the medical examiner Anders Eriksson made a thorough forensic examination. In two autopsy reports he describes a very large number of stab and slash wounds.
The investigators concluded that the murderer had stabbed the sleeping couple in a frenzied fashion through the fabric of the tent. Both the woman and the man had woken during the attack – they had defensive wounds on their arms – but neither of them had even been able to get out of their sleeping bags. The incident itself must have happened very quickly.
The news of the murder shook the whole country. Perhaps the worst part of it was the cowardice of whoever had sneaked up on an unknown, wholly defenceless couple in their sleep; or perhaps it was the anonymous, faceless nature of the attack, with the knife stabbing through the thin canvas of the tent, making it impossible for the victims to understand what was happening or see who was attacking them; or was it the frenzy revealed by the large number of wounds? All the evidence at the scene pointed to a perpetrator without any kind of motive.