The brutal crime in the Swedish wilderness also attracted a good deal of attention outside the country. In the police investigation that followed, more than a thousand people were questioned without any progress being made.
When lengthy murder inquiries are solved it is usually found that the perpetrator has made an appearance somewhere in the investigation documents, but in this case there was no trace of the man who confessed to the crime ten years later. Another fact puzzling the investigators was that Thomas Quick – who up until that point had been known as a murderer only of boys – was confessing to the brutal knife killing of a couple in their thirties.
In the first police interview, held on 23 November 1994, Quick described taking a train from Falun to Jokkmokk, a place he was familiar with from his time as a student at the High School in the academic year 1971–2. He stole a bicycle from outside the Sami Museum and rode off without any particular destination in mind. By coincidence he ended up on the road known as Vägen Västerut, which runs from Porjus towards Stora Sjöfallet.
At the picnic spot by Appojaure he caught sight of the Stegehuises, then later that night he attacked them with a hunting knife he had brought with him.
Quick’s account was vague. He even explicitly stated that he wasn’t absolutely certain that he had had anything to do with the murder. What made him doubt it, he said, was the nature of the violence, and also because one of the victims was a woman.
In his second interview Quick changed his story, bringing in a second man whom he had arranged to meet in Jokkmokk. This accomplice was a well-known hardened criminal named Johnny Farebrink, whose name, unlike Quick’s, had already cropped up in the investigation.
Thomas Quick claimed that they had driven in Farebrink’s Volkswagen pickup to Appojaure, where together they stabbed the Stegehuises to death. More interviews followed and Quick’s story grew more detailed. Quick told the police that he had met with a school friend from his old high school and that he and Johnny had visited another person in his home in Porjus.
The news that Thomas Quick had an accomplice in the murder of the Stegehuises was picked up by the newspapers. At the time, Johnny Farebrink was serving a ten-year sentence for another murder, and when Expressen asked him to comment on Quick’s accusation, he responded, ‘This is bloody rubbish! I don’t know this guy. I’ve never met him.’
However, four months into the investigation, prosecutor van der Kwast was convinced. ‘Thomas Quick’s confession corresponds with the facts established by the murder investigation,’ he said in an interview with Expressen on 23 April 1995. ‘I can only say that the deeper we dig into this story, the more certain we are that Thomas Quick is not lying or fantasising. Thomas Quick was in the vicinity of Appojaure when the murders took place and he had local knowledge from his time as a student at the folk high school in Jokkmokk.’
Thomas Quick had now confessed to seven murders, which – if he was telling the truth – would make him Sweden’s worst serial killer. Two highly experienced police officers from the Palme Unit, which was investigating the murder of the late prime minister, were transferred to the Quick case, including the chief officer, Hans Ölvebro. The inquiry was now of the very highest priority.
On 9 July a specially chartered private jet took off from Arlanda bound for Gällivare. In luxurious armchairs sat Thomas Quick, his therapist Birgitta Ståhle, the public prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, and a number of other officers and care assistants. The purpose of the trip was to carry out a reconstruction of the murder of the Stegehuises.
Also on the plane was Gunnar Lundgren, Quick’s lawyer. Considering the fact that this was now a high-profile and important criminal investigation, a county barrister like Lundgren no longer seemed appropriate. After conferring with Seppo Penttinen and Christianson, the decision had been made that Quick should switch to Claes Borgström, the celebrity lawyer. Borgström accepted the brief, but he was at the very beginning of a five-week holiday. For this reason Gunnar Lundgren had been reluctantly invited to take his place in one of the plane’s leather seats.
The following day Thomas Quick guided the investigators towards Porjus and Vägen Västerut, eventually turning off the forest path to the picnic spot by Appojaure. Here, police technicians had set up the crime scene to look exactly as it did on the night of 13 July 1984. Hans Ölvebro and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström took part in preparing the scene. The gas stove, sleeping bags and other props were arranged just as they had been found after the murders. A specially ordered tent from the Netherlands, exactly like the one in which the Stegehuises had slept on the night of the murders, had been erected at the edge of the forest. Inside, Ölvebro lay in Marinus Stegehuis’s place on the left and Wikström in Janny Stegehuis’s place on the right.
Armed with a stick as a knife, Thomas Quick sneaked up to the tent. He threw himself at it and stabbed in a frenzied manner at the canvas, before making his way inside through the opening. He grunted and roared while Anna Wikström, genuinely terrified, called for help. Quick was overpowered and the reconstruction was brought to a halt.
His actions did not in any way correspond with the known facts of the sequence of events.
After a break, the reconstruction recommenced and now Thomas Quick performed with great concentration and in accordance with the known facts. He calmly described to Penttinen every lunge he made with the knife, while also outlining his collaboration with his accomplice, Johnny Farebrink. He demonstrated how the long tear had been made in the short end of the tent, through which he had made his way inside.
Seven hours later, when the reconstruction was over, both the investigators and the prosecutor expressed their satisfaction with the outcome. Van der Kwast was quoted in Expressen on 12 July saying, ‘It’s gone very, very well.’ He now held the view that Thomas Quick had convincingly shown in the reconstruction that he really had murdered the Dutch couple: ‘He was both willing and able to show in great detail how the murders happened.’
An increasing number of real and self-proclaimed experts set out to explain the experiences and circumstances that had turned the boy, Sture Bergwall, into the sadistic serial killer known as Thomas Quick. Kerstin Vinterhed, a highly respected journalist who wrote for Dagens Nyheter, described his childhood home as a place ‘entirely silent and cut off from the outside world. It was a home where no one visited, where no children were ever seen playing nearby.’
Again, Quick’s childhood was covered – including his father’s rapes, his mother’s cruelty and the two murder attempts against him. His transformation into a murderer was thought to have happened after his father’s last assault, which took place in the forest when Thomas Quick was thirteen. Thomas wanted to kill his father, but changed his mind when he saw how pathetic he looked with his trousers around his ankles.
‘And then I ran away. And it’s like a single, giant step from that moment to the murder I committed in Växjö six months later when I was fourteen,’ Quick explained.
‘So it was as if you were killing yourself, was it?’ Kerstin Vinterhed wondered.
‘Yes, I was killing myself,’ Quick confirmed.
There was a belief that during this murder, just as with all the others, Thomas Quick was both the assailant and the victim. The murders were in actual fact a sort of re-enactment of the assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood. This was the theoretical model used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Quick and was also a method approved by the investigators.
Thomas Quick’s siblings, nephews and nieces responded with powerless shame to the horrifying accounts in the media of the parents’ dreadful cruelty. The Bergwall family no longer talked about Sture. If necessary, he was referred to as ‘TQ’. Sture Bergwall did not exist.
They maintained their silence for a long time. But in 1995 the oldest son, Sten-Ove Bergwall, stepped forward as the family’s spokesman. In the book Min bror Thomas Quick (‘My Brother, Thomas Quick’)