With the researcher Jenny Küttim, I was producing a documentary in two parts, scheduled for broadcast on 14 and 21 December 2008. We had exactly three months to complete our task.
We had questions for Sture on a daily basis and relying on the patient telephone in his ward was no longer an option. We got him a simple mobile phone which we posted to him in Säter, so that we could talk as often as we liked.
Sture Bergwall had no money to pay for the legal advice he needed now, but the lawyer Thomas Olsson, with whom I became acquainted during ‘The Case of Ulf’, accepted the commission on a pro bono basis, at no cost to the client.
Jenny Küttim and I devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to checking Sture’s statements and working our way through the colossal amounts of documentation to which we now had access. Sture’s patient files stretched from 1970 to the present. They confirmed Sture’s own account of a senseless over-medication.
The material makes for remarkable reading. What we were seeing was no less than an inconceivable healthcare scandal.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE SERIAL KILLER
AFTER THE BOTCHED bank robbery in Grycksbo in 1990, Sture Bergwall was initially given a psychiatric evaluation at the state clinic for forensic psychiatry in Huddinge. In her eleven-page social investigation, the counsellor Anita Stersky summarised her patient’s life thus far: sexual assaults on young boys at the end of the 1960s, the consequent sentence of psychiatric care, a spell at Sidsjön Hospital in Sundsvall, then the release on trial and subsequent studies at the folk high school in Jokkmokk. ‘After this period, things took a turn for the worse,’ wrote Stersky. ‘SB got involved with homosexuals abusing narcotics and alcohol. Despite this, he had a certain feeling of belonging with the group, which gave him a negative identity but an identity nonetheless.’
Sture was confined to Säter Hospital for the first time in January 1973, then conditionally released to pursue his studies at Uppsala University. Everything seemed to be going well until March 1974, when he attacked a homosexual man, whom he came very close to stabbing to death. The social report listed further periods of confinement, more conditional releases, Bergwall’s ‘death wish’ and suicide attempts; then, in 1977, a definite release from Säter. Of Sture Bergwall’s attraction to young boys, Anita Stersky concluded: ‘He has learned that he is not allowed to live out his desires.’ She added: ‘One of the most important factors in SB being able to control these desires was that he completely stopped using narcotics and alcohol.’
There followed a description of the years in Grycksbo: the kiosk venture, life with Patrik, the cancellation of disability payments, bankruptcy, financial problems, his time as a bingo caller and finally the failed robbery of Gotabanken.
In her closing statement as counsellor, Stersky wrote:
In our conversations, SB has usually been extremely anxious and nervous, and occasionally bursts into crying fits. When we speak of particularly emotional subjects, SB has a tendency to become hysterical. He chews, scratches or pulls at his beard, closes his eyes and shakes in an almost convulsive manner, or he sits stiffly and keeps his eyes closed for several minutes and at such times is not receptive to any attempts to communicate with him. [. . .] In my opinion SB suffers from a significant psychiatric disturbance and needs to kept in confined psychiatric care. This should be arranged for him at a hospital equipped to deal with high-maintenance patients, because of the level of danger he presents.
Sture told me about the almost bottomless despair he felt at this time: ‘I had a good life in Grycksbo. Many friends and a job as a bingo caller in Falun. The old ladies liked me; many of them picked the days when I was working to come in. I was the caller, I sold the chips, took care of the old girls, fetched coffee, joked with them. I made them enjoy themselves. It was a nice job and it suited me really well. By getting caught for the bank robbery I burned all my bridges. Relatives, friends, my work, I lost everything.
‘I had done bad things before. But that was a long time ago, when I was a young man in the 1960s and 1970s. After the robbery I couldn’t even imagine looking into my siblings’ eyes again. I was utterly alone and had nothing to go back to. Nothing.’
His time in Huddinge gave him two things, he explained to me.
‘At the psychiatric clinic in Huddinge I learned that even a horrifying mass murderer like Juha Valjakkala could awaken feelings of admiration among some of the staff. He’d been kept in a special isolation ward under constant surveillance. There was this terrible fascination for Juha and his crimes.’
With his Finnish girlfriend Marita, Juha Valjakkala had murdered an entire family in Åmsele, in the region of Västerbotten, in 1988. After their arrest in Denmark, Juha was put through an extensive psychiatric assessment at the clinic of forensic psychiatry in Huddinge. Although some time had passed since Valjakkala left the clinic, his shadow still hung heavily over the ward.
‘Some of the staff were talking to me about Juha all the time. I was like a vent for their need to talk about Juha and the murders,’ said Sture. ‘I realised that even a loathsome criminal could be admired and loved.’
That was one thing. The other thing that came up, Sture explained to me, was that Anita Stersky told him about a ‘fantastic form of psycho-dynamic therapy’ that had been developed at Säter Hospital. He looked forward to that.
The dark blue Volvo passed Säter golf club, slowly turned onto the road known as Jonshyttevägen, or Jon’s Cabin Way, and glided along the leafy shore of Lake Ljustern. The passenger in the back seat had no idea that he was destined for international fame and, in terms of the number of murders he had committed, would overtake giants like Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
But it was early spring in 1991, the piles of sticks and branches built up for Walpurgis Night had not yet been lit and Thomas Quick was still known as Sture Bergwall. He did not know that his life story would occupy psychologists, doctors, researchers, journalists and a large part of the Swedish legal establishment for decades to come. He had no idea that internationally distinguished academics, believing that his case was unprecedented, would follow his remarkable fate with great interest.
When Sture Bergwall arrived at Säter Hospital on 29 April 1991, the concept of the serial killer was relatively new to the average Swede. A number of cases in the USA had caused the FBI to coin the term and develop new methods – in particular so-called profiling techniques – in an attempt to track down the elusive perpetrators. The phenomenon had been the subject of extensive research among American criminologists and behavioural experts in the latter part of the 1980s. A few years later it began to be exploited by writers and film-makers in popular culture.
In the spring of 1991, the new anti-hero of popular culture was taking possession of the stage in grand style, represented by Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter in the screen dramatisation of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs. In the film, the brilliant serial killer helps the investigators – with a series of infernally cryptic clues – identify the serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’, who catches and kills women with the express intention of sewing himself a suit made from their skins. Dr Lecter offers sharp-witted and psychologically insightful leads in the form of anagrams and personal questions directed at FBI agent Clarice Starling, often with learned references and quotations from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. But the razor-sharp cannibal’s clues are so sophisticated and cryptic that they can only be deciphered with enormous difficulty.
Sture wasn’t able to go to the cinema, but he rented the film on video and, like everyone else in Sweden, began to learn how serial killers operated and how they could be hunted down.
At the same time the successful novel American Psycho was published, in which the ice-cold sadist, millionaire and serial killer Patrick Bateman looked for amusement and a cure for his overriding boredom by assaulting his victims, with perfectly judged indifference, using electric drills and staple guns. The library at Säter Hospital acquired the book, which Sture Bergwall
immediately borrowed and read.
‘The main character of the novel, Patrick Bateman, is incredibly intelligent, which I think was important to me. I saw that one could be intelligent and a serial killer at the same time. The Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho also got a certain status because they were reviewed in Dagens Nyheter and Expressen’s culture pages. Because of that, serial killers also became interesting to me,’ Sture recalled.
For Sture Bergwall, having an identity as an intellectual person was important, and he noted that his doctors and psychologists were interested in the new phenomenon. And with an almost uncanny sense of timing, the successful stories in popular culture were soon finding their equivalent in real life.
One warm evening at the end of July 1991, two police officers were cruising through a district of Milwaukee in Wisconsin known for its prevalence of heavy crime, when a young black man came running up to them with a handcuff dangling from one of his wrists.
The man’s name was Tracy Edwards and he told them about a ‘strange guy’ who had put the handcuffs on him before he managed to escape from the apartment.
The door to apartment 213 was opened at once by the tenant, Jeffrey Dahmer, a handsome, presentable thirty-one-year-old man with blond hair who showed no signs of nerves. He readily offered to go and get the keys to his boyfriend’s handcuffs from the bedroom. The policemen gleaned that Dahmer looked to be a decent person living in an apartment which was unusually neat and well furnished for the area. Despite this, something made one of the policemen insist on taking a look at the bedroom where the key was kept.
In the bedroom the policeman discovered a large vat containing 300 litres of acid, in which three human bodies were dissolving. His colleague opened the refrigerator to find four human heads lined up on the glass shelves. No food was kept in the fridge, only human body parts. Another seven craniums were stored in the wardrobe, and Dahmer had baited a lobster trap with the penis of one of his victims.
The well-mannered, attractive young man had drugged his victims, drilled holes in their skulls and poured various chemical substances directly into their brains. Once this was over, he had raped them, cut them into pieces and then eaten choice parts of their bodies.
How does one explain such behaviour? And what does one call a person who has committed such deeds? The newspapers did their best to find suitable labels. ‘Satan’, ‘The Cannibal from Milwaukee’ and ‘A Living Monster’ were some of the names given to Jeffrey Dahmer, but words never seemed to be enough.
However repellent the details revealed about Jeffrey Dahmer were, the media was soon reporting on an even worse serial killer, ‘The Russian Devil’ – guilty of at least fifty-two murders.
Once again it was an apparently harmless, friendly soul who was uncovered as the personification of evil. Fifty-five-year-old Andrei Chikatilo, described as a ‘mild-mannered language teacher’, lived a peaceful life with his wife and children in the south Russian town of Novocherkassk. In their twenty-seven-year marriage, his wife had never suspected her husband of hiding any dark secrets.
The serial killer could be anyone. You, me, the neighbour or your spouse.
During their twelve-year hunt for the Russian serial killer, the police had arrested several others. One of these suspects was made to confess and, even worse, was eventually executed for murders that were later connected to Chikatilo.
Another suspect managed to kill himself before the trial.
During Sture Bergwall’s first autumn at Säter, an unknown perpetrator started shooting at immigrants in the Stockholm area. Before the shots were fired a small red spot had been observed on the victims, which gave the evening press the idea of calling the perpetrator the ‘Laser Man’.
On 8 November the Laser Man shot his fifth victim – the only one who actually died. National police were under pressure, knowing that the Laser Man would carry on shooting immigrants until he was arrested. This was particularly troubling, as the police had no idea where or in what circles such a criminal should be sought.
The modus operandi of the Laser Man was in many ways consistent with the clichés of serial killers. He chose victims that were non-Caucasian; he worked in a defined geographical area; he had no relationship to the ten victims; he was disciplined and hardly left any traces. On the other hand, the Laser Man had usually failed to kill; of his ten victims, only the fifth died of his injuries, which must be put down to luck, as he hadn’t fitted the weapon’s silencer correctly.
Frustrated at the survival of the first four victims, the Laser Man departed from his earlier methods and sneaked up on his fifth from behind, put the barrel to the back of the thirty-four-year-old man’s head and pulled the trigger. Not even the incorrectly fitted silencer could have saved him.
*
At Säter, Sture Bergwall was placed in psychiatric care alongside heavily criminalised, violent men. The status of the patients was largely determined by how interesting their life stories were, and their crimes. In this context, Sture was rather out of his depth.
A SPECIAL PATIENT
KJELL PERSSON AND Göran Fransson were the chief physicians in charge of Säter Hospital in the early 1990s and have stuck together ever since.
During the assessment period, before Sture Bergwall was placed in psychiatric care, Göran Fransson had collected 650 kronor (about £50) for offering his psychiatric opinion on the failed bank robber. This opinion – known as a P7 – is sought in order to determine whether a person arraigned for trial should be given a more extensive psychiatric evaluation.
It does not fall within the brief of a P7 to make judgements on the level of danger a person presents, even less to speculate on the likelihood of the person having committed as yet undiscovered crimes. Yet this was exactly what Fransson felt he was especially suited to do:
The crime for which he has been convicted shows signs of serious sexual perversions where the risk of repeat offences is high, and in view of this it seems surprising that he has not been prosecuted on other occasions for such crimes.
Göran Fransson’s assumption that Sture Bergwall had committed serious crimes which had not yet been discovered would soon prove to be almost prophetic. That the opinion was inappropriate has even been retrospectively conceded by Fransson himself. ‘I regret writing that. It shouldn’t have been there, in a P7. But I was proved right in the end,’ he said in an interview with Dala-Demokraten in June 1996.
The belief that Sture had committed other undiscovered crimes in the past was soon well established among those in charge of Sture Bergwall’s care. And obviously, whoever seeks shall find.
Sture’s patient notes, medication logs and other documents gave me a detailed insight into his day-to-day life at Säter from the very start. Sture participated apathetically in the routine examinations when he was being admitted: he undressed on command and allowed a medical assistant to shine a torch into his eyes, test his reflexes with a rubber mallet to his knees and inspect his skin for signs of puncture marks or anything out of the ordinary that should be taken into account. On the following day he met with a doctor who was destined to make a number of interventions in Quick’s life that would prove to have a profound impact. Chief physician Göran Källberg had an introductory conversation with Sture and made the following notes in his patient file:
He was calm and collected and entirely at ease with the implications of psychiatric care. He has extensive familiarity with closed psychiatric care. We spoke in general about his situation and his difficulties. [. . .] At times he is overwhelmed by powerful anxiety attacks and even during our conversation he became extremely tense, tearful and also irregular in his breathing. Eventually he calmed down. Apart from this, he maintained a good level of formal communication in the conversation.
When Göran Källberg questioned the existing prescription of medications he was surprised by Sture’s vociferous protest. He allowed the medication to stay as it was for the time being, but noted in his patient file that Sture was ‘clearly add
icted to the little dose of Oxazepam which he has been taking for a number of years’.
Sture’s day-to-day life at Säter Hospital soon fell into sedate normality. Judging by the file, he kept a low profile and settled in without any problems at all.
But the files also repeatedly mention Sture contacting members of staff to report that he was feeling unwell and having suicidal thoughts. On 17 May 1991 Kjell Persson wrote:
Sture Bergwall came today and wanted to speak with a doctor. Mentions that he broods a lot at night, feels anxious, breaks into sweats and wants to cry. ‘I have to talk and get it off my chest.’
Even though Persson was not a psychotherapist he took pity on Sture and let him come to see him from time to time, precisely to ‘get things off his chest’. These informal conversations gradually took the form of counselling sessions. One of Sture’s recurring themes was that he had no justification for his existence, that he should kill himself. He bore a burden of deep sorrow for having lost his former best friend, Patrik, who was twenty-two years his junior. As the elder of the two, he felt guilty that Patrik had been imprisoned. Persson made a note in the file on 24 June 1991:
When one touches upon these and similar matters the patient displays a wealth of tics, convulsive breathing and strange grunting sounds. During rounds today it was reported that there has been less and less of this on the ward. There have not been any other problems.
It seems that Sture Bergwall had a burning desire to be allowed to start psychotherapy; however, it was proving far harder than he had thought. Regardless of whether his panic attacks, tics and grunts were theatrical or the real thing, the doctors remained quite cool in their response. Put simply, they did not view Sture as an interesting patient. On 2 July Kjell Persson wrote in the file:
The patient has been increasingly plagued by anxiety these last few days, is having problems sleeping at night and broods a great deal. He has suicidal thoughts, but says that in actual fact he would not dare hurt himself. This is something he has been experiencing for years, with varying levels of intensity, but he claims that he really did intend to kill himself the evening before the robbery. He claims that he had chosen a place where he would drive his car off the road, when he noticed his dog on the back seat. He said he would like some sort of confirmation that he is so bad that he should really commit suicide.
Thomas Quick Page 12