Although the story was relatively shaky, and ‘people with insight into the case had expressed their doubts about the man’s story’, Stigson couldn’t quite help himself from revealing the suspect’s identity. He wrote that the man who had confessed to the murder of Johan was a ‘42-year-old Falun resident, well known as the kidnapper of a bank manager in Grycksbo’. The question of the identity of the ‘Falun resident’ who had murdered Johan was thereby answered for all who had ever known of Sture Bergwall.
The following day, Gubb Jan Stigson continued his reporting and was able to divulge that ‘the Falun resident had pointed out where Johan is buried’.
‘He has provided workable information on the body,’ the head of the preliminary investigation, Christer van der Kwast, commented to Dala-Demokraten. ‘This is obviously very interesting to us. The case had earlier been held up by the absence of a body.’
The article was illustrated by a large full-body photograph of Sture Bergwall and his dog Upfold, a Scottish deerhound – most likely the only dog of this breed to be found in Falun. For ‘ethical reasons’, Sture’s face had been blurred out. A few days later, Stigson got hold of another photograph of Sture, sitting on his racing bicycle. Once again, the newspaper had ‘preserved his anonymity’ by blurring his face.
When the leaks from the investigation started running dry, Stigson called in the bank robber Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, who had previously been locked up in Säter Hospital with Quick.
‘He’s probably telling the truth,’ said ‘Svarten’ (Blackie) in Dala-Demokraten.
On Saturday, 13 March Kjell Persson drove Thomas Quick to Sundsvall for the second time. Other passengers in the car included Göran Fransson and a psychiatric nurse from Säter Hospital. When they reached the town of Myre in Njurunda they met with Christer van der Kwast, the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren, police inspector C.G. Carlsson and senior officer Seppo Penttinen.
Penttinen took the wheel of the Volvo in which Quick was travelling and they headed directly for Norra Stadsberget in Sundsvall. The trip went smoothly apart from Quick suffering a few anxiety attacks concerning what lay ahead. Once they got there, Quick was led onto the path where he had previously walked with Kjell Persson.
This time, the walk gave rise to enormous anxiety in Quick, who had to be supported under the arms by Fransson and Persson. Quick signalled that he wanted to turn right, only to be overwhelmed by such heavy anxiety that he ‘leaned back into the arms of the accompanying doctors’.
Finally they reached the spot where Quick claimed he had killed Johan. He sat down on a boulder, held his arms out at an angle of forty-five degrees and announced that within this area he had hidden Johan’s clothes and ‘footwear’. When Quick had to specify the exact position he grew vague and could neither say how far into the terrain the police should search nor describe the general appearance of the hiding place. Suffering intense anxiety, he then went on to describe how he had carried Johan back to the car.
In his report, Göran Fransson wrote:
The patient has now been questioned by police after confessing to the long-unsolved murder of the boy Johan Asplund in Sundsvall. A reconnaissance of the area had been set up for next week, but in view of the leaks within the police and the great press interest, we will make the reconnaissance today under conditions of absolute secrecy. [. . .] During the inspection [of the woods by Norra Stadsberget] the patient suffered from increasingly high anxiety and constantly lost his grip on reality, upon which he asked us to bring him back, which we did with concrete calls emphasising time and place. The last short distance he was more or less carried by the arms by me and Kjell. By then, he was overwhelmed by strong anxiety and hyperventilating. He had to breathe into a plastic bag.
‘After a moment of rest and a toilet visit, as well as consumption of coffee and sandwiches, Quick announced that he had enough strength back to resume the inspection,’ noted Seppo Penttinen in his police report. The route they took seemed haphazard, with a good deal of uncertainty. Quick said that he ‘very likely travelled on smaller roads’ towards the Obs! supermarket, which in practice proved impossible; he ‘seemed to recall’ he went this way, and he ‘experienced’ that he probably went that way.
The police were forced to make certain ‘route adjustments’. Quick was clearly unsure during the inspection and ‘tried to work out how, in a logical sense, he would have chosen the route’. Göran Fransson explained in the file how the search took place:
The patient sort of feels and is helped by Kjell [Persson] to interpret those feelings. When he had a sense that he recognised a particular stretch of terrain he had a very severe panic attack with intense chest pains. He also had a severe headache. He hyperventilated and had to breathe into a plastic bag again. He got another 5 mg Diazepam and 2 Citodon for the headache.
After a two-hour diversion based on Quick’s directions, the file makes it clear that a collective decision had been made not to listen to him:
The police suggested another route than the one he has reacted to, and after driving along this road for about ten minutes we reached an area he had earlier described well during police questioning, where once again he grew extremely anxious but was also more collected than he was earlier.
The cars turned into an open area, where they parked. In his memo of the inspection Seppo Penttinen noted:
At 16.15 Quick stepped out of the car, saying that he recognised the place. He had had severe panic symptoms in the car and had not dared look out to the right where the rocks drop away with a line of visible boulders. He strolled along the right-hand side of the fields, with the intention of trying to point out the place where he had hidden Johan Asplund’s body. At that point he was surrounded by his doctors and his psychiatric nurses. It was difficult for him to turn his eyes to the edge of the rocks.
Thomas Quick now revealed that he had cut up Johan Asplund’s body. He indicated where he hid the head ‘with a fairly high level of probability’ and where the police should look for other body parts. After three and a half hours of reconniassance he was utterly exhausted and Christer van der Kwast made the assessment that the suspect had given them all the information he had. The inspection was concluded.
*
In the spring of 1993, with great optimism, dog patrols with cadaver dogs, forensic technicians and other personnel searched the places Quick had pointed out. Readers of Dala-Demokraten were able to follow Gubb Jan Stigson’s daily bulletins on the search for Johan Asplund’s body.
On 19 March the newspaper ran its seventh article on Quick in ten days: ‘It came to nothing,’ Stigson wrote, with obvious disappointment.
‘We have a strange starting point,’ explained Christer van der Kwast in the article. ‘For once we have a person who’s confessed to a serious crime. Now we have to confirm in some way that what he has admitted to is actually true.’
During the questioning taking place alongside the search, Thomas Quick was constantly coming up with new versions of events. On 18 March he said that he cut the body into several parts using a lopping saw. Seppo Penttinen wondered how he had managed to part the head from the body.
‘Was it difficult in any way to make a saw run smoothly through the actual tissue?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Quick. ‘It was quite bothersome.’
He said that the head was left on a rocky ridge in Åvike, just outside Sundsvall. Then he drove to another hill, carried Johan’s body to the top and threw it into a ravine.
On 21 April Quick offered that he had wrapped Johan’s torso in the seat covers of the car. The head was left behind in Åvike, while all the other body parts were placed in a cardboard box marked ‘Korsnäs Bread’. He drove towards Härnösand and stopped on the bridge to Sandö, where he dumped the cardboard box and its contents into the Ångerman river. In the end, the questioning had to be stopped on account of Quick’s overwhelming panic attacks.
The car used by Sture Bergwall in the murder of Johan had been borrowed from a homosexual acquaintance
, he claimed. There was nothing remarkable about that, until the investigators started looking into the matter.
For the owner of the car, referred to here as Tord Ljungström, the telephone call came as a shock. He couldn’t understand why a police detective should want to see him. However, he ensured that the interview was held in a neutral, discreet place, in room 408 at the Scandic Hotel in Falun.
‘I don’t know anyone by the name of Thomas Quick and no Sture Bergwall either,’ Ljungström insisted.
Only when Seppo Penttinen described Sture Bergwall’s appearance was Ljungström’s memory jogged.
‘Could this possibly be the Sture who’s been committed to Säter Hospital?’
Ljungström conceded that he did remember him. He described how they had been acquainted some ten or twelve years ago.
‘We met maybe seven or eight times and had sexual relations,’ he admitted. ‘We always met at the sports hall in Lugnet, by the public pool. Always on a Tuesday, because Tuesday was my day off. I was working at a grocery at that time.’
The meetings had always taken a certain form, according to Ljungström. He had arrived in his car while Sture cycled from his home in Korsnäs to Lugnet.
Had he possibly owned a light blue Volvo, a model from 1980, wondered the investigator?
Ljungström answered that he had owned many cars, most of them Volvos, but never a light blue one. What about a dark blue one?
The interrogation report gives a consistent impression of Ljungström trying to be cooperative and answer the questions truthfully. But when Officer Carlsson suggested that Ljungström had lent his Volvo to Sture Bergwall, Ljungström became less cooperative.
‘That’s absolutely incorrect! I’m very particular about my cars and I’ve never lent my car to anyone. Well, except my wife, of course,’ he added.
Tord Ljungström was willing to answer all kinds of personal questions, but he categorically denied ever having lent his car to Sture. The interview finished without the investigators having managed to budge him by a single inch on that point.
The following day, Christer van der Kwast disclosed to journalists that Thomas Quick had pointed out the person who had lent him the car used for the murder. But he seemed to imply that the ‘car lender’ was a tricky customer who had tried to give them the slip.
‘The individual in question initially denied knowing the forty-three-year-old but later admitted that he was familiar with him. Their relationship was of a sort that would do a great deal of damage to the individual in question if his identity were ever to be revealed.’
The day after questioning Tord Ljungström, Seppo Penttinen drove to Säter to interview Quick yet again. Göran Fransson was also present.
‘If we could begin by talking a bit about your driving licence and so forth,’ began Penttinen. ‘When did you take your driving test?’
‘In 1987,’ answered Quick.
Everyone in the room must have realised that the answer was a strange one.
‘In 1987?’ asked Penttinen with sincere surprise.
He twisted and turned and repeated the question, but the answer remained unchanged. Sture obtained his driving licence in 1987 and, prior to this, didn’t have any significant driving experience.
‘The drive to the Sundsvall area, did that not, so to speak, cause you problems in terms of driving the car on your own?’ Penttinen wondered.
‘No. Oh no! No problems at all,’ Quick assured him.
The following day, Penttinen visited Quick’s younger sister, Eva.
‘Eva, would you say that Sture was capable of comfortably driving a vehicle at the time we are looking at, 1980?’
‘I actually never saw Sture drive a car before 1987,’ she replied. ‘The first time was in 1987, when he got his licence.’
Eva recalled that Sture was such an awful driver that he’d even had problems changing gears after passing his test.
Hurriedly they summoned the car owner, Tord Ljungström, for more questioning that same evening. Despite great pressure applied by the interrogators, he would not budge from his denial.
‘Ljungström is not changing his view that he is 100 per cent sure he never lent the car to Sture Bergwall,’ noted Penttinen in the interrogation report. The next day, on 18 March, he was back at Säter Hospital to crack the nut of the car. He put out a set of colour charts. Quick picked a colour known as Tintomara 0040-R90B.
‘As light as that?’ Penttinen burst out. ‘That was the colour of the car?’
‘Hm.’
‘Right. Well, then I have to inform you that we spoke to Ljungström yesterday and we’ve been able to confirm that he never owned a blue Volvo like this during the relevant period.’
‘Hm.’
‘What do you have to say to that?’
‘What can I say? That must be right, then.’
By referring to the National Road Administration’s vehicle registry, Seppo Penttinen was later able to establish that Ljungström had bought a new 1981 model of a Volvo 244 from Falu Motor AB two weeks before the murder. The car was not blue, as Quick had claimed. It was red.
If Quick’s story were true it would mean that the shop assistant Tord Ljungström had bought a brand-new Volvo on hire purchase, for the equivalent of a year’s salary, only to immediately lend it to an unemployed man, Sture Bergwall, whom he hardly knew. Also a man who couldn’t drive and who didn’t have a driving licence.
Quick had also described how Johan had bled inside the car and the cut-up body was later transported in the boot inside a cardboard box so soaked in blood that the base fell out. Ljungström’s old vehicle was traced and picked up by the police from its current owner. If Quick’s story was true and a cut-up corpse had been handled and transported in the car, there would feasibly still be some contamination from the blood. The Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science (SKL) examined the car’s seats, the carpet in the boot and other exposed surfaces, without finding any trace of blood.
Ljungström maintained until his death that he had never lent his car to Sture. There was no suggestion that he had committed a crime, only that he had lent his car to someone, and it is difficult to see why he would protect a murderer. In the police interviews he had been truthful about his homosexuality and in answering other sensitive questions, whereas Quick was time and time again caught out telling lies and changing his story. Despite this, the investigators chose to believe Quick’s version of events, while Tord Ljungström was assumed to be lying.
On 26 April Thomas Quick, Kjell Persson, Seppo Penttinen and Inspector Björn Jonasson travelled to a settlement known as Ryggen about ten kilometres east of Falun to look for one of Johan Asplund’s hands.
First, Quick had to get his bearings and walk round the area with Persson. Having wandered around for an hour, they returned to the investigators and announced that they needed more time. One and a half hours later, after a good deal more walking, Quick was overwhelmed by such terrible anxiety that he had to ‘rest’. A hospital vehicle was brought forward. After spending some time with his doctors – and possibly taking some medication – Quick announced that he was ready to show them where the hand was hidden.
Yet he didn’t manage to find the little creek where he said he had hidden the hand. There was only a small ditch in the area. Quick kept talking incoherently, describing a torch he had brought with him when he hid the hand, mentioning the stones under which he left the hand, recalling a Mora knife that he hid at the same time and a boom that was lowered. But Quick didn’t manage to lead the group to any hand.
The forensic technicians arrived shortly afterwards and examined the scene without finding anything of interest. Once again, Quick had promised to pinpoint where he had hidden body parts, in a place where the police later found nothing.
Kjell Persson wrote a disappointed note in the file. Quick’s story ‘has been judged by police and prosecutors to be of varying credibility, and as a result of nothing being found the level of doubt is obviously growing’.
On 5 May Quick’s lawyer wrote a letter to Christer van der Kwast. The letter revealed that Gunnar Lundgren had had extensive ‘discussions’ with Quick, who still wanted to solve the murder of Johan. The lawyer concluded his letter as follows:
However, he has now confirmed to me that he cannot offer to supply any further information but he would rather that you make a decision to prosecute on the basis of the existing investigation, or that you abandon the case altogether.
After considering his options for a couple of weeks, van der Kwast called a press conference where he announced that he lacked the grounds for any prosecution of Quick, although the suspicions still remained and the investigation would continue. In reality the investigation went to sleep very soundly that summer.
Having read the report of the preliminary investigation, what actually emerges is that Thomas Quick did not manage to provide one single item of information that indicated he knew anything at all about Johan’s disappearance – while a great deal seemed to speak for his having invented the whole thing.
Meanwhile, at Säter Hospital, Thomas Quick’s psychotherapy continued and there were no doubts at all about his guilt there.
At the end of May, Kjell Persson wrote that Quick was quite sure about the reality of the murder of Johan and that it was extremely unsatisfactory that no finds had been made at the scene of the crime. He also pointed out that Quick ‘had thoughts and fantasies about other murder cases’.
Thomas Quick’s files record many difficult panic attacks and suicide attempts during the investigation. When the questioning ceased in the spring and summer his anxiety tailed off, and by July Quick was allowed full clearance in and out of the hospital grounds. On 2 August his Diazepam was withheld and a week later the other benzodiazepines were also removed from Quick’s list of medications. As part of this process, Quick was moved to an open ward.
‘The level of danger he poses is perceived as having been considerably reduced, and currently he finds himself in an unusually good psychological condition,’ wrote Kjell Persson. This harmonious observation was followed by the ominous note that Seppo Penttinen had been in touch that same day to inform them that the criminal investigation would be ongoing as before.
Thomas Quick Page 16