‘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’) on 30 March 2008, and by way of a conclusion I said, ‘I can’t quite stop myself from asking – how many others are there who have confessed to crimes they never committed?’
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 backed up Quick’s story. Information that seemed to exonerate him was not considered or further examined.
2. The same prosecutor had been in charge of the investigations into all the cases, and only one interrogator was allowed to question Quick. After the first conviction it became almost impossible for the investigators to challenge Quick, and with each new conviction it became even more difficult. In a sense, according to Olsson, the investigators had become ‘the prisoners of the prisoner’.
3. The adversarial relationship in the legal process means that a trial should be a contest between the prosecutor and the defence lawyer. Because the defence led by Claes Borgström did not question the evidence against Quick, the system had collapsed.
After two long and interesting conversations with Jan Olsson, that evening I read the articles he had written over the years. One of the articles published in DN Debatt on 3 October 2002 concludes as follows:
Thomas Quick himself says that he has murdered all these people. All I have to say to him is: Make those of us who doubt you and spread this doubt into the world shut our mouths. Make me stand here, humiliated at having been so wrong to suspect you. You only need to show a single piece of tangible evidence to make it so. One of the body parts you claim to have kept, an object you have stolen from one of your victims. Until this happens I urge the Prosecutor-General to re-examine this case.
I had myself been considering whether I might offer to be an aide to Sture Bergwall, to help him put a stop to the braying of Jan Olsson, Jan Guillou, Leif G.W. Persson, Nils Wiklund and all the others who said that he was just making it up. If Quick really had ‘treasure troves’ of body parts, he could safely reveal these to me without having to ‘give them up’, which, it had been alleged, was the main psychological block to revealing the locations of the bodies. I imagined I might be able to bring some item from a hiding place, have it analysed and then the whole thing would be over.
Caught up in these naive ruminations, I was woken by the phone ringing. From the display I could see it was time for a third conversation with Olsson.
‘Yeah . . . hello . . . It’s Janne. Jan Olsson. I just wanted to mention something that occurred to me. A little piece of advice for you.’
‘Please, go ahead,’ I said.
‘You’re reading all the interrogations with Quick. Think about one thing: has he ever given a single piece of information that the police didn’t already know? I’d say that’s what you ought to be thinking about.’
I thanked him for the advice and promised to stick to it faithfully. It was probably very good advice.
But for the rest of the evening I thought about all the information Thomas Quick had provided during questioning which was supposedly unknown to the police: Therese Johannesen’s eczema scars in the crooks of her arms, the pinpointing of the spot where burnt remains of a child were found, the location of the stab wounds in Appojaure, his shepherding of the police to the place where Gry Storvik was found murdered, all the details about the murder of Thomas Blomgren in 1964. And so on . . .
If the ‘doubters’ knew how Quick could be in possession of all these details, they certainly hadn’t managed to explain it to me yet.
THE HERMIT
AFTER THE CARE assistants had left us alone in the visiting room, Sture Bergwall got out some coffee cups and a Thermos. I produced a few tired-looking cheap pastries from Willy’s in Säter. F
or a while we indulged in small talk about my drive from Gothenburg, how spring was on its way and other trivialities.
We spoke about how he had been inside these walls since Ingvar Carlsson had become prime minister and Mikhail Gorbachov had been at the helm of the Soviet Union! Sture had arrived at Säter before the first web page on the Internet had been created.
‘I’ve never had a conversation on a mobile phone,’ said Sture, who had understood from watching television that nowadays everyone walked around with a telephone pressed to their ear.
‘How do you survive such a long period of isolation?’ I asked. ‘What do you do with all this time?’
His answer flowed like water, as if he had been waiting a long time to give it.
‘My day starts at exactly 05.29. Usually I just wake up, or else there’s the alarm clock. Then I listen to Ekot [News] on the radio and get up at 05.33. After the morning procedures I walk to the canteen at 05.54 to get coffee and buttermilk. I’m so punctual that the assistants say they can set their watches by me!’
He took a bite of his pastry and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee.
‘At exactly 06.05 I ring the bell to be let outside. On the dot! That’s the only way to survive in here,’ he explained. ‘I have to be incredibly routine-ey. Incredibly routine-ey!’
I nodded, understanding very well what he meant.
‘Today is the two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seventh day in a row that I’ve taken a walk round the exercise yard. I do it every day.’
Sture looked at me as if expecting a reaction.
‘Two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven days,’ I repeated, impressed.
‘My walk in the exercise yard is for exactly one hour and twenty minutes, in the pattern of a figure of eight. At 07.25 I take a shower and then I have a coffee and read the newspapers. Then I start my work of solving crossword puzzles. I subscribe to a number of difficult crossword magazines. I’ve never left a crossword unsolved. Sometimes it can take days to solve the last few clues, but I always solve them. Often I send them in – I use the name of someone who works here so I don’t attract any attention – and I’ve won small prizes quite a few times, a lottery ticket or something. It’s like a job. The crosswords keep me busy from eight thirty to four in the afternoon. In the daytime I always keep the radio on. Always P1! The programmes I like are Tendens [‘Tendency’], Släktband [‘Family Ties’], Lunchekot [‘Midday News’], Vetandets värld [‘The World of Knowledge’] and Språket [‘Our Language’]. At six in the evening I retire to my room and after that I don’t want to be disturbed by anyone. Then the evening routines begin, and they are mainly about watching television. I go to bed at nine thirty. At ten o’clock I turn out the lights and go to sleep.’
It was exactly as I had suspected. Sture Bergwall had no contact with anyone outside the hospital. No one at all. Hardly even with his fellow patients.
‘Sture, you’ve confessed to a large number of murders. And you’ve been convicted for eight of them. Do you still stand by your confessions?’
Sture looked at me in silence, before answering.
‘The confessions stand firm. They do . . .’
There was a lull in the conversation while we let this decisive prerequisite for our meeting sink in. I looked at the mysterious man sitting before me.
Either he was the worst serial killer in northern Europe, or he was a mythomaniac who had duped the entire Swedish judicial system.
Nothing about the man gave me the slightest clue as to which alternative seemed most likely.
‘You’re living under rigorous security conditions,’ I said, trying to move things along. Sture listened attentively. ‘The clinic seems more or less escape-proof: steel doors, reinforced glass, alarms.’
He mumbled his agreement.
‘I’m wondering . . . What would happen if you were allowed to rejoin society?’
Now Sture was looking at me with incomprehension.
‘Would you fall back into criminality, start murdering and cutting up children again?’
His heavy gaze grew even sadder.
‘No, no, no!’
Slowly he shook his head, then stopped and sat there with his eyes looking down at his lap.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
I didn’t give up.
‘So what would happen if you were allowed to live in society under supervision?’
‘The doctors believe that I need to be kept in psychiatric care—’
‘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 Källbe
rg 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.
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