Therese Johannesen’s disappearance was Norway’s most notorious criminal case to date and led to the biggest police operation in its history. At its peak, some 100 police officers were working on the case. In the first years they questioned 1,721 people. In total, 4,645 tip-offs and leads were passed on to the police, who logged 13,685 observations and movements of cars in the area. But without any success.
In the spring of 1996, Swedish and Norwegian police established close working relations to look in more detail at the murders of Therese Johannesen and two African asylum seekers who had disappeared from a refugee centre in Oslo in March 1989. Quick had confessed to murdering all three of them.
Experience suggests that serial killers usually have a certain modus operandi. Some seek their victims within a particular geographical area; others have a particular type of victim, such as young boys, prostitutes, couples making love and so on. Some murder their victims in a particular way. Ted Bundy, for instance, lured his victims – always white, middle-class women – into his car, where they were killed by a blow to the head with a crowbar.
In light of this, there was scepticism in some quarters when Quick departed from his own stated preferences and practices and confessed to the murder of a girl who had lived in Norway. Even his previous lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, who up until that point had never expressed the slightest reservation, was dubious about this new confession. ‘It’s so off-key, so completely different from his usual behaviour,’ he said.
While admitting that the murder did certainly diverge from established patterns, Christer van der Kwast, who was in charge of the investigation, believed that ‘the investigators must therefore broaden their perspectives’ and understand that killing for its own sake can give the serial killer sexual satisfaction.
On 26 April 1996 Quick left Säter accompanied by a group that consisted of police officers, care assistants from Säter Hospital, memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, psychotherapist Birgitta Ståhle and prosecutor Christer van der Kwast.
Quick was taken on a tour of Fjell. He described to the police where he had first chanced upon Therese, where he rendered her unconscious by dashing her against a stone, and how he carried her into his car and took her away from the scene. He also described how in 1988 there had been a bank in the street and wooden planks on the ground, adding that the balconies had since been repainted in a new colour. This information was found to be correct and Quick was notified that he was under suspicion for the murder of Therese.
The following day, Thomas Quick found himself at the head of a long convoy of cars travelling along Highway E18 towards Sweden. Close to the settlement of Ørje, the convoy swung onto a forest road, where Quick had promised to lead the police to a sandpit where he had hidden Therese’s body. As he walked them round the area, Quick described how he had cut up the body into small parts, which he lowered into the middle of a small lake known as Ringen. After considerable discussion, the investigators decided to drain the lake in order to find Therese’s body parts. The most expensive crime scene investigation in Nordic history took place over the next seven weeks. The lake was drained and all the sediment at the bottom was pumped up until the investigators had reached levels dating back 10,000 years. Water and mud from the bottom were filtered and searched twice without so much as a splinter of bone being found.
‘Thomas Quick has either lied or mistaken the location. We have reason to doubt his credibility,’ said Drammen’s chief of police Tore Johnsen when the last pumps at Lake Ringen were turned off on 17 July.
When the Norwegians reassessed the enormous amount of Therese-related material that had been amassed, they did not find a single sighting, of either people or cars, that could be connected to Thomas Quick.
Many were convinced that this would be the end of the investigation into Quick’s involvement in the murder of Therese, and possibly even the end of the whole Quick inquiry. Yet one year later Thomas Quick was back in Ørje Forest with his entourage of investigators and care assistants.
‘He performed stupendously. This extended reconnaissance was enormously straining for him,’ said the lawyer Claes Borgström afterwards.
‘Now I’m convinced that it was Quick who murdered Therese,’ said Inge-Lise Øverby at the Prosecution Authority in Drammen. ‘We have established that Thomas Quick really was here in the forest. We have very strong circumstantial evidence that he was also in Drammen at the time of Therese’s disappearance.’
The police had found a tree marked with a symbol that Quick claimed he had carved; a saw-blade that Quick said he had left on the scene had also been recovered and a blanket that allegedly belonged to Quick.
But the police’s most important find was a charred spot where Quick said that he had burned Therese’s body parts. At one of these aforementioned places the cadaver dog Zampo picked up the scent of human remains. Among the ashes, forensic technicians had found some scorched pieces that, according to experts, were fragments of a child’s bones.
‘Quick’s Victim Found’, Dala-Demokraten announced across its entire front page on 14 November 1997.
Triumphantly, Christer van der Kwast declared that for the first time they had been able to follow Quick’s confession all the way to the discovery of a murder victim. He described Therese’s bone fragment as a breakthrough for the entire investigation.
‘The remains of a person of Therese Johannesen’s age have been found in a place near Örje, where Thomas Quick says that he hid the body parts of the nine-year-old girl in 1988,’ Gubb Jan Stigson summarised in Dala-Demokraten.
The find in Ørje Forest meant that the Quick investigators now identified new priorities and focused all their energy on the investigation into Therese’s murder. The prosecutor charged Quick with the murder of Therese Johannesen at Hedemora District Court, announcing with great confidence on 13 March 1998: ‘In this case we have a strong concentration on technical evidence.’ Oddly enough, the trial for a murder committed in Norway was entrusted to Hedemora District Court, although the proceedings were held in the high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court. This, apparently, was for reasons of ‘personal safety’.
Christer van der Kwast emphasised that Quick had given them thirty unique details connecting him to the crime. ‘Quick has provided exclusive information of a scope and direction that connect him to the relevant places and to the girl,’ he maintained in his summing-up.
Counsel Claes Borgström had no reservations about the evidence against his client: ‘There is no conclusion to be drawn other than that he committed the act for which prosecution has been brought.’
When Quick gave his own summing-up in the district court, he tried to provide a psychological explanation for his murder of Therese. ‘My guilt is fixed and heavy and a suffering to me, but I want you to understand that I have re-enacted my own experiences from my damaged childhood,’ he said.
As expected, Hedemora District Court reached the verdict that Thomas Quick had beyond all reasonable doubt murdered Therese Johannesen, sentencing him to continued psychiatric care. Quick had been found guilty of his fifth murder.
THE DOUBTERS
The critics who had questioned Quick’s guilt in the early stages, during the trial for the double murder in Appojaure, hadn’t had very much exposure and were soon forgotten. But in the spring of 1998, while the Therese Johannesen case was under way, a heated Quick debate flared up which would this time become entrenched and give rise to an embittered, apparently endless exchange of hostile fire.
The debate began with an article in DN Debatt written by the journalist Dan Larsson, a former miner from Malmberget who had taken up a new job as the crime correspondent for Norrländska Socialdemokraten. Having followed Quick’s trials for the murders of Charles Zelmanovits and the Stegehuis couple, he was absolutely convinced that Quick was innocent. In his article, Larsson pointed to a number of dubious issues, including the fact that all the investigations had been led by the same small, cohesive band of individuals. He als
o alluded to the way that Quick, in every successful prosecution against him, had mentioned an accomplice whose participation had to be strongly called into question.
Four days later, DN Debatt published an article written by Nils Wiklund, a university lecturer of forensic psychiatry, who wrote:
The Thomas Quick murder trials are unique in a number of ways. Western judicial procedure is based on an adversarial confrontation, where the court of law seeks to arrive at the truth by evaluating the prosecutor’s argument as well as that of the defence, which seeks to present things in a different way.
During the Quick trials, Wiklund went on, the adversarial principle had been abandoned because the prosecution and defence adopted the same position. His observation was certainly true of the ongoing trial, in which Claes Borgström not only clearly accepted his client’s guilt but also turned to the journalists, psychologists and lawyers taking part in the case and urged them to ‘be responsible’.
‘The repeated attempts of the defence lawyer to silence public debate is both upsetting and irresponsible. He should have tried to achieve an impartial examination within the framework of the court’s examination,’ Wiklund went on.
The heat of the debate was further fuelled when Johan Asplund’s father, Björn, called for Christer van der Kwast to be put on trial. He alleged that van der Kwast’s failure to prosecute Quick’s accomplice in the Therese Johannesen trial amounted to gross professional misconduct. Quick had identified an accomplice and had stated that this person had helped to abduct the girl as well as raping her in a car park. Björn Asplund wrote:
If the Assistant Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast believes that Quick is credible, how can it be that this named person who is known to the police (also to Kwast) is not brought in by the court for questioning?
Acting as an accessory to murder and gross sexual assaults on children are crimes that fall under general prosecution. Asplund therefore believed that van der Kwast had failed to fulfil his duty to prosecute and as a consequence should be tried for misconduct.
Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had followed the trials closely from the very beginning and they were both convinced that Quick’s confessions were false. They fought hard to ‘separate Quick from Johan’.
Other media channels threw themselves into the debate and more critics signed up, including the barrister Kerstin Koorti. In SVT’s (Swedish Television) news programme Aktuellt, she declared that she didn’t believe Thomas Quick was guilty of a single murder. She described the Quick trials as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the twentieth century’.
Criticism of an even more serious nature was published in the debate section of Svenska Dagbladet on 12 June 1998. Under the headline ‘The Quick Case – a Defeat for our System of Justice’, the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson criticised the team of prosecutor, police and psychiatrist who had ‘single-mindedly focused on looking for anything that implicated Quick in the murders’.
Astrid Holgersson had reviewed interrogation reports from several of the murder investigations and she gave tangible examples of how Christer van der Kwast had prompted Quick to come up with ‘the right answers’ during questioning. It was generally known that Quick, in the early stages of the investigations, had made a number of incorrect statements. However, no systematic analysis of his witness testimony had ever been made, Holgersson said. Instead, the courts had been persuaded to accept unscientific psychological explanations for Quick’s errors. She gave an example from the verdict for the murder of Yenon Levi:
The court noted that ‘the final version has emerged after a number of interviews’ but did not attempt any critical analysis of how it emerged. There was acceptance of psychological speculation on the reasons for this, namely that ‘Quick had problems in confronting some of the details’.
Sven Åke Christianson was in the direct line of fire of Astrid Holgersson’s criticisms. His contribution to the investigation was described as unethical and unscientific. ‘With suggestion and manipulative methods’, he had tried to help Quick to cobble together an account that didn’t contradict the facts of the crime. Holgersson also pointed out that Christianson was performing a secondary professional role on the side of the prosecution while at the same time serving the district courts ‘as an expert capable of assessing the value of his own findings in the investigation’. Accepting both of these roles, according to Holgersson, was plainly ‘unethical’.
Astrid Holgersson further maintained that Christianson had ‘impacted on public opinion in a biased fashion – in direct conflict with the role of professional psychiatrists at court hearings – by spreading his subjective views on the question of guilt in various lectures that he gave on the “serial killer” Quick’.
In the anthology Recovered Memories and False Memories (Oxford University Press, 1997), Christianson had published an article in which he stated that Quick was a serial killer, which presumably should have been the very issue for the courts to determine. Holgersson quoted from Christianson’s article about Quick’s repressed memories which were recovered in therapy:
The memories of the murders caused overwhelming anxiety as these were re-creations of the sexual and sadistic assaults to which the serial killer had himself been subjected as a child.
Astrid Holgersson commented:
As mentioned before, there is no actual evidence for the supposition that Quick is a serial killer, that he was subjected to sexual abuse as a child or that this should be considered a distinguishing feature of serial killers.
The members of what Holgersson denoted ‘Team Quick’ – prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen, therapist Birgitta Ståhle and memory expert Sven Åke Christianson – kept their heads down and remained silent throughout the exchange. The one person who did come forward as a defender of the investigation was Claes Borgström. He had already taken a few hard knocks, as a number of critics had remarked on his passivity during the investigation and trial.
Borgström’s response to Holgersson’s critique in Svenska Dagbladet under the headline ‘An Unusually Nasty Conspiracy Theory’ was laced with sarcasm and irony:
One must really thank Astrid Holgersson for her scientifically well-founded judgements on these horrific crimes that won’t leave those affected by them any peace for the rest of their lives. All she has to do is go through a few papers and have a look at a few video clips. She will find the truth lying there, ready and waiting.
The Quick feud reached its peak in August 1998 with the publication of Dan Larsson’s book Mytomanen Thomas Quick (‘Thomas Quick, the Mythomaniac’), which was primarily concerned with the double murder in Appojaure. Larsson believed that those murders were the work of a local bodybuilder who was abusing amphetamines, alcohol and anabolic steroids. Gubb Jan Stigson reviewed the book in the news section in Dala-Demokraten under the headline ‘New Book on Quick an Embarrassing Bungled Job’. Even though the newspaper had set aside a full page for the review, Stigson concluded by stating: ‘The failings in Larsson’s background material are so numerous that there simply isn’t enough space for them all here. This examination will therefore continue in tomorrow’s edition of DD.’
And sure enough, the ‘review’ did continue the following day. By this stage, the Quick feud had forced all the participants into diametrically opposed positions and had become an irreconcilable battle of personal prestige in which it was no longer possible for any of the parties to retreat a single inch from their stated positions.
TRINE JENSEN AND GRY STORVIK
THOMAS QUICK CONTINUED making new confessions of murders. By the summer of 1999 he had reached twenty-five, of which he had been convicted of five. The growing pile of unexamined crimes to which he was confessing made Dagens Nyheter rank him as ‘one of the worst serial killers in the world’.
But something had changed since the Quick feud. Had it sown the seeds of doubt that were now taking root among crime reporters? Or were they and the general public s
imply growing tired of Thomas Quick?
At any rate, the press archives speak their own clear language: Thomas Quick no longer generated big headlines. Nor was anyone surprised when ‘the boy killer’ Quick, in the spring of 2000, was prosecuted for two typical heterosexual murders of young women in Norway: seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen, found raped and murdered in August 1981, and twenty-three-year-old Gry Storvik, murdered in June 1985. Both women were natives of Oslo and their bodies were found just outside the city.
Police technicians had found traces of sperm inside Gry Storvik. Thomas Quick admitted that he had had sexual intercourse with her prior to the murder, despite his clear-cut homosexual disposition since the age of about thirteen. These two new murders meant that Quick had made the full journey from a boy killer to an omnivorous serial killer without any preferences, patterns of behaviour or geographical limitations.
DNA analysis revealed that the sperm did not belong to Thomas Quick, but even this didn’t give rise to any noticeable consternation. The guilty charge against Quick for murders six and seven was only briefly alluded to in Expressen. Falu District Court made a statement to the effect that there was a lack of technical evidence connecting Thomas Quick to the crimes. Despite this, the court reached the same verdict as in the other cases:
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.
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