Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  In the interrogations that followed, I was able to read how Thomas Quick denied having read anything about any Norwegian murders in the newspapers, despite the fact that he asked for the serialised articles from Verdens Gang. He gave assurances that he had not seen any photographs of the missing asylum-seeking boys.

  I could therefore confirm the following with absolute certainty: Quick had actively sought out information about feasible murders in Norway, he made use of this information during questioning, then lied about not having seen any information about the murders.

  The series of articles which Thomas Quick received from Norway also offered another snippet of information. Next to the main article was a smaller item where Verdens Gang speculated on whether Thomas Quick might have been involved in Norway’s most notorious unsolved crime.

  Therese Johannesen (9) went missing from the neighbourhood of Fjell in Drammen on 3 July 1988. Her disappearance triggered the most extensive manhunt in Norwegian history.

  During this period of time Quick has said that he committed murders in Norway.

  Admittedly, the article doesn’t provide any further details on either Therese or Fjell, but it does contain a number of critical pieces of information: the name of the girl and the place and date of her disappearance.

  It is proven that Thomas Quick had access to these facts by the end of July 1995, and it is therefore hardly surprising that in the very first interview he was able to say that Therese was nine years old and went missing from Fjell in the summer of 1988.

  But with questions that were not answered in the article in Verdens Gang he had less success.

  As in most of the murder investigations, Quick’s confession to the murder of Therese Johannesen had started during therapy. ‘Events had floated up’ and Birgitta Ståhle felt bound to report them, she said. Quick had been incoherent and ‘Ståhle described the circumstances as twisted’, Penttinen noted.

  The idea was to get the whole story out on Wednesday, 20 March 1996. Birgitta Ståhle and Thomas Quick walked into the music room at Säter Hospital, where Seppo Penttinen and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström were already sitting waiting in the red and black armchairs.

  Penttinen asked Quick to describe the residential area of Fjell.

  ‘I can see properties,’ said Quick. ‘Not apartment blocks. Family houses.’

  The place name Fjell (Mountain) may have given Quick the wrong associations, because he described the place as a bucolic idyll with scattered family homes here and there – possibly the Norwegian word for a city neighbourhood, bydel (a part of a village in Swedish), may have caused him some confusion, too. He claimed to have travelled there via an unpaved road.

  ‘It’s very small,’ Quick clarified in the interview.

  In actual fact Fjell is a typical 1970s concrete suburb with high-rise blocks, viaducts, shopping centres and 5,000 inhabitants in a fairly concentrated area.

  Quick’s voice grew increasingly quiet and finally he whispered, ‘This is going to be bloody difficult!’

  If at the time of questioning Penttinen was aware of how badly Quick’s description corresponded to reality, he hid it well. He kept plying him with new questions:

  PENTTINEN: Do you know what time of day this is, more or less?

  TQ: Should be more or less lunchtime.

  PENTTINEN: What does lunchtime mean for you?

  TQ: The middle of the day.

  PENTTINEN: Do you remember what the weather was like?

  TQ: The weather was quite good, high clouds. Summer . . .

  Therese disappeared at twenty past eight in the evening. Quick’s remark on the decent summer weather did not ring particularly true, as at the time of Therese’s disappearance Fjell was experiencing some of the worst torrential rainfall in ten years.

  After the interview, Seppo Penttinen summarised Quick’s descriptions of Therese’s appearance and clothes:

  He stated that she had fair, shoulder-length hair, her hair bounced when she ran. She was wearing trousers and possibly a jacket. Later in the interview he said there was something pink, and he has a memory of it being a T-shirt with buttons. Her panties were patterned. She was wearing a wristwatch. Quick made an association of the strap being thin with a simple buckle and he had a colour impression of the watch as light green or pink.

  Improbably enough, all these descriptions were wrong, and one would be quite justified in describing the account as a ‘total miss’, as certain critics of the Quick case have pointed out.

  In the original police investigation after Therese’s disappearance, a great deal of care was given to the girl’s description, including every possible detail, with her clothes carefully specified. The most recent photograph was also there.

  The girl in the colour photograph is standing in front of a brick wall, looking candidly into the camera. Her hair is black, her skin a golden brown, her eyes dark brown. A happy smile reveals a gap of two missing front teeth, pulling the corners of her eyes into a squint.

  Quick spoke about Therese’s big front teeth. Maybe they had grown since the photograph was taken?

  When I called Inger-Lise Johannesen, Therese’s mother, she told me they hadn’t even started coming through.

  Thomas Quick’s blonde version of Therese is quite simply a stereotype of a Norwegian girl, a guess with reasonably good odds, statistically speaking, of being correct. In the end, everything was wrong except the information Thomas Quick had read in the little side article in Verdens Gang.

  THE DEAD END

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON on 23 April 1996 the police’s little convoy of vehicles drove via Örebro and Lindesberg on Highway E18 into a little settlement known as Ørje on Svenskvejen (‘the Swedish road’) towards Oslo. Thomas Quick sat in the middle seat of a white minibus next to Inspector Seppo Penttinen.

  The aim of the trip was for Quick to show where and how he had murdered two asylum-seeking African boys and nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in Norway.

  The details Quick had given corresponded exactly with the case of two boys who had gone missing from the Red Cross asylum-seekers’ centre on the outskirts of Oslo.

  During the trip to Norway he outlined the route for how to get there. Before the trip he had made a drawing of the building, which was a fairly unusual old wooden house with a number of unique details. When they arrived, they found that the house looked exactly as in the drawing.

  Quick showed them the way to a place known as Mysen, where apparently one of the boys had been killed. The boys’ bodies had then been moved by Quick to Sweden, where he had cannibalised his victims before burying them in Lindesberg.

  Detective Inspector Ture Nässén told me how Thomas Quick and the investigators drove to the football pitch in Lindesberg. There, the forensic technicians dug up a large area that Quick had pointed out. The cadaver dog Zampo reacted to the presence of human remains. When no body parts were found, Quick said that he had made a mistake; they should be searching the football pitch in Guldsmedshyttan instead. Despite determined digging and further sniffing by the cadaver dog, nothing was found there either.

  While the excavations were in full swing in Guldsmedshyttan, something quite remarkable happened. Ture Nässén received confirmation that the two murder victims the police were looking for were in fact alive. Both had made their way to Sweden, where one of them had settled. The other was living in Canada.

  And so two of Thomas Quick’s Norwegian murders no longer existed. Undeterred, their investigations into the third murder continued with renewed energy. After an inquiry lasting some two years, and twenty-one interviews about Therese Johannesen, in which Quick changed his story countless times, his insights into the murder were deemed to be of such accuracy that Hedemora District Court found him guilty.

  With my newly acquired insights into witness psychology, and having recently learned of Svein Arne Haavik’s efforts as an informer, I realised that Quick’s testimony wasn’t worth a great deal. Nonetheless, there were the remaining bits of evidenc
e: the pin-pointing of the crime scene in Ørje Forest, the fragments of bone . . .

  I needed to go to Drammen, so I called Inspector Håkon Grøttland and invited myself.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he agreed.

  RECONNAISSANCE IN ØRJE FOREST

  IN SEPTEMBER 2008, the photographer Lars Granstrand and I crossed the border at the same place as the Quick investigators during their journey to Norway twelve years earlier.

  At Drammen police station we met with Håkon Grøttland, who had participated in all of Quick’s trips to Norway.

  ‘He’s not like us – he’s not rational or logical,’ said Grøttland.

  He explained the specific difficulties investigators had faced in their dealings with Thomas Quick.

  ‘Quick says “yes” and shakes his head at the same time! And he says “left” when he means right. There are simpler things in God’s world than trying to figure out Thomas Quick.’

  Personally, he hadn’t been able to understand him, Grøttland explained. But Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle knew what Quick meant.

  Håkon Grøttland had worked on the Therese Johannesen investigation when she disappeared in July 1988. After that, he was part of a Norwegian police unit investigating Thomas Quick and he was still convinced that Quick had murdered Therese Johannesen.

  ‘What is it that really convinces you?’ I wondered.

  ‘Just imagine Quick sitting there in a psychiatric clinic in Sweden, having all this detailed knowledge about Therese and Fjell and Ørje Forest. So we go out and check what he has said, and we find that it’s actually true.’

  I agreed it was difficult to find any other plausible explanation than the fact that Quick was guilty.

  Grøttland gave us a lift to Fjell, where Therese had lived with her mother. We drove past the Fjell Centre and the video rental store where Therese had gone to buy sweets with the sixteen crowns and fifty öre she had in her pocket. Grøttland parked the car and showed us a wide-open area of grass, with a high-rise apartment block towering against the sky – Lauritz Hervigsvei 74. Grøttland pointed to the row of windows on the fifth floor.

  ‘That’s where she lived. And Quick stood here when Therese came walking from over there,’ said Grøttland, pointing at a slope leading down to the road we had just driven along. ‘It was here he took her.’

  I counted the eight floors of the block, thirty-five large windows on each floor.

  So Thomas Quick had supposedly abducted Therese in front of 280 large windows, right under the eyes of her mother, who had described how she stood on the balcony keeping an eye out for her the whole time.

  ‘Christ, it’s like abducting a child right in front of the main stand at Råsunda Stadium,’ the photographer whispered into my ear.

  Thomas Quick was never seen by anyone in connection with any of the thirty murders to which he had confessed and had never left any signs of his presence. That was why I had assumed he must always have exercised extreme caution.

  During the investigation into Therese’s murder, as we know, some 1,721 people were questioned by the police, but none of them had seen anything that could be related in any way to Thomas Quick. Nor did any of the 4,645 tip-offs that came in have any connection with Thomas Quick. I looked up at Therese’s balcony and confirmed to myself that everything must have happened in full and public view.

  ‘Then he smashed her head against a boulder on that slope, went and got his car and put her inside,’ Grøttland explained.

  ‘Seems incredibly risky,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, obviously,’ answered the inspector.

  *

  The following day I met Grøttland’s colleague, Ole Thomas Bjerknes, who had also worked on the Quick investigation. He showed me Hærland Church, where supposedly Quick had killed Therese. Then we went to Ørje Forest and drove several kilometres down bumpy forest tracks before reaching the area where Quick had disposed of Therese’s body.

  Bjerknes was teaching at the Norwegian police high school. That same day he had given a lecture about the Quick investigation, and he happened to have brought along three video tapes of raw footage from the Norwegian reconnaissance trips with Quick. I tried not to sound too keen when I asked if there was any chance of being able to have a look at the tapes. To my surprise, he readily handed them over. I took the coveted tapes, promising to return them to him before leaving Norway.

  The same evening I sought out a television production company in Drammen and managed to hire the equipment needed to copy the tapes. I started at eight o’clock in the evening, in my hotel room. There were about ten hours of reconnaissance on the three tapes. The tapes to which I was transferring the material had to be changed every hour.

  The most interesting footage was of Thomas Quick sitting in the car, while another camera filmed out of the windscreen. The camera pointed at Quick – from time to time also taking in Seppo Penttinen on his right-hand side – but the road was shown in a little superimposed box on the top left of the screen.

  Quick’s eyes rolled about. Sometimes they seemed to drop or stare with a crazed expression. It was extremely perplexing and unpleasant. The Thomas Quick of these recordings was an altogether different person from the one I had met at Säter Hospital about a week before. I wondered what could have triggered this personality transformation. Even his way of talking was different.

  To keep myself awake through the night I forced myself to watch all three video tapes as I was copying. Often it was uneventful and excruciatingly dull, moving along without a word being uttered for half an hour, or with long sequences in which the cameraman had put down the camera and it had continued filming the car seat. Because I was copying I couldn’t fast-forward; I had to suffer every minute of it.

  It was already past midnight as I slotted in a new tape. We were now with a hand-held camera in the car behind Thomas Quick’s van. Quick had requested that the car should stop but the camera kept rolling. In the recording, you can hear a care assistant coming into Quick’s car and offering him medicine.

  CARE ASSISTANT: Are you taking your Xanax?

  TQ: Mm.

  CARE ASSISTANT: Can you get it down without water?

  TQ: I have . . . Coca-Cola . . .

  On the tape, Thomas Quick speaks with a sluggish voice as if he is finding it difficult to formulate words at all.

  CARE ASSISTANT: Put it in your mouth . . . Is one enough? . . . Shouldn’t you have another one right away?

  TQ: Yes, maybe . . .

  Thomas Quick’s answer is something between crying and talking, a sound made by a person going through terrible suffering.

  I hear Quick taking another pill and after that the journey can go on.

  The clinical drug Xanax is a tranquilliser classed as a narcotic, of a type known as a benzodiazepine, notorious for being extremely addictive and with a number of serious side effects.

  What I had just seen convinced me that Thomas Quick was as high on drugs as he looked. I also recalled Göran Källberg’s insinuations. Could this be what he had been alluding to, namely that Quick had been medicated with such strong drugs that his confessions must be viewed as unreliable? I watched the material with renewed interest. My tiredness had been swept away.

  *

  Again I changed the tape. Now Thomas Quick is in the first car in a convoy of four or five, heading towards Ørje Forest. He is leading a procession that includes a chief prosecutor, a police interrogator, a lawyer, a psychotherapist, a memory expert, several drivers and nurses, as well as a large number of Swedish and Norwegian police officers. Quick has announced that he will show them the way to a gravel pit where Therese Johannesen’s body has been buried. The gravel pit is in Ørje Forest – he knows the way.

  The convoy moves east along Highway E18 towards Sweden, and Quick complains about all the houses. He says that this also disturbed him after murdering Therese. Finally the situation becomes critical. The road signs indicate that the Swedish border is getting very close, and Quick has been qui
te clear about Therese’s body being buried in Norway.

  TQ: . . . we’re approaching the border and I have to find a road before . . .

  PENTTINEN: Before we get to the border?

  TQ: Yes.

  PENTTINEN: Yes, that’s how you described it earlier.

  TQ: Yes.

  PENTTINEN: Do you recognise that, Thomas?

  TQ: Yes.

  What Quick claims to recognise is Klund Church. After a good deal of conferring they decide to turn off onto a forest track on the right.

  There is a road barrier and Quick says it was also there the last time round, but ‘then there was no problem getting past it’.

  Seppo Penttinen nonetheless has his doubts and he asks if there is really such a place as the one Quick has described down this road.

  TQ: It should be a sort of levelled area, of that characteristic, and then there should be . . . as if at some point it has been a kind of, of . . . I’ve had trouble describing it during questioning as well . . . like a gravel pit or soil pit or . . .

  penttinen: You mean like someone’s been removing some kind of gravel?

  TQ: Yes.

  The convoy heads down the forest track, which proves very long. They shake and rattle, kilometre after kilometre. It already seems quite inconceivable that this track made for forestry vehicles should lead to a gravel pit.

  Quick had said earlier that the church could be used as a marker to gauge how far down the road they should drive, but the steeple has long since disappeared from view.

  TQ: Mm. I’m feeling that we have gone very far in relation to my memory of the distance I went.

  PENTTINEN: Yes. Have we gone too far?

  TQ: I don’t know.

  Quick says that he’s had certain ‘points of recognition’ along the road, so they continue. I note that Quick is now noticeably slurring his words. He says that it is difficult for him to go down this road. After a while he starts flapping his arms.

  PENTTINEN: You’re waving your hand. What are you trying to say?