Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  The request was conveyed to Källberg at a meeting on 7 February, after which Persson immersed himself in a telephone consultation with van der Kwast to schedule police questioning in the coming period. Having concluded this, he left the clinic and went home.

  In the midst of this messy conflict, the investigation pressed on with further interviews. It can be seen from Göran Källberg’s notes that at this time he was beginning to have doubts about the method of the therapy Quick was being put through. Källberg and Kjell Persson happened to meet on a train, and they spoke about how the therapy would be organised if Quick moved to Växjö.

  Kjell also tells me that he is now taking on a great challenge with the therapy. At the same time [I am] slightly dubious about whether this really is therapy. [Kjell] tells me that he mostly sits in silence and the patience starts remembering as soon as Kjell sits down in the room.

  On 21 February Göran Fransson, who was still on sick leave, communicated his unwillingness to go back to his job at the clinic, where ‘he feels exposed to some sort of plot and that someone wants to do him harm’.

  Göran Källberg wrote in his memorandum after the telephone call that he viewed Fransson as ‘clearly paranoid’. In short, the atmosphere at the regional clinic in Säter was not at its best.

  Kjell Persson never went back to his job at Säter. Instead, he focused all his energy on the transfer of Thomas Quick. For his own part, he was going to be working at St Lars in Lund, commuting twice weekly to Växjö for the therapy sessions with Quick.

  Shortly before Quick’s departure, Persson was informed of the rules in force at Växjö, including the prohibition of all forms of benzodiazepine. This was an unexpected problem. Would Quick agree to it? And if he did, would he have to be detoxified before he was moved to Växjö?

  On 28 February Källberg wrote:

  Have initiated a reduction in the dosage of benzodiazepine for TQ. Unfortunately it has not been clear to me just how much he is taking. He is also motivated to quickly cut his intake.

  Sture Bergwall tells me that all this was just a pretence: ‘It was a shocking piece of news that they weren’t offering benzo at Växjö. At first Kjell said it would sort itself out, he’d talk to chief physician Drottved. When they wouldn’t agree to it, Kjell said it would all sort itself out once I got there.’

  Thomas Quick suffered withdrawal symptoms during his detoxification which lasted a few weeks, but he was eager to get it over with as quickly as possible. After all, once he was there everything was going to ‘sort itself out’.

  On 3 March Källberg noted that ‘TQ is having withdrawal symptoms but he wants to carry on with the rapid detox’.

  Less than two weeks later a removals van took Thomas Quick and his belongings to the regional psychiatric clinic in Växjö, which immediately proved to be an entirely different institution to Säter Hospital. The hope that things would fall into place as far as provision of benzodiazepines was concerned was quickly scuppered. The Växjö clinic emphasised ‘security aspects, the establishment of boundaries and assessments of the dangers posed by patients’, Quick was told.

  The move was also a disappointment for Kjell Persson, who had been looking forward to resuming his successful therapy with Quick. According to Sture, Persson visited him twice for the purpose of the therapy, but on both occasions he came in vain.

  ‘I couldn’t speak a single word. I couldn’t describe anything without benzo, so we just sat there,’ he said, laughing at the memory.

  Nor did the infamous patient from Säter live up to the expectations that had grown among the staff at Växjö, who noted in the file:

  The patient has been kept in our admissions ward for the last two weeks. The ward staff perceive him as withdrawn and introspective in any communication.

  Via his therapist Kjell [Persson] the patient has communicated that he can’t put up with the methods of care practised in our clinic. The therapist Kjell also takes the view that he cannot continue his therapeutic programme under existing routines here.

  Thomas Quick would only communicate with staff via Kjell Persson, and the management of the clinic confirmed that it had proved impossible to integrate the two different care regimes of Säter and Växjö, ‘which means that we cannot satisfy the patient’s views and wishes on full clearance, medications, etc.’.

  By the time this note was made, Thomas Quick had already called Ward 36 at Säter Hospital to say that he couldn’t stand it any more. He wanted to go back.

  ‘We’ll come and pick you up tomorrow’, was the immediate decision.

  The following day three care assistants went to Växjö to effect the move. Sture enthusiastically told me about the journey back to Säter: ‘It was wonderful! As soon as we got into the car they got out a paper bag of Diazepam! Home at last!’

  They stopped off in Gränna to eat at a restaurant and bought sweets at Svampen in Örebro. When they came back to Ward 36 all the staff were waiting for Quick with open arms. At the front stood Birgitta Ståhle.

  Now things would really get started.

  BIRGITTA STÅHLE TAKES OVER

  AFTER HIS RETURN to Säter Hospital on 30 March 1994, Thomas Quick moved into his old room and the doctors put him back on a moderate dose of benzodiazepines. A liberating sense of calm descended over the clinic which had for so long been riven by dispute.

  For Quick, on the other hand, the loss of his therapist Kjell Persson was difficult to endure. Birgitta Ståhle wrote in the file that Quick, after his stay in Växjö, was extremely impatient to continue his therapy and also very clear about the need to do this within the framework of the clinic at Säter, because he felt so secure and at home in his ward. He asked Ståhle to help him and she agreed.

  As the chief physicians Fransson and Persson had left the field, Birgitta Ståhle emerged as the undisputed winner of a bitter contest in which she had not even needed to participate.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon on 14 April 1994 the new core of the Quick investigation assembled in the music room of Ward 36. In the four red and black armchairs sat Seppo Penttinen, Thomas Quick, Birgitta Ståhle and the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren. The fifth wheel of the cart was Sven Åke Christianson, a lecturer in psychology from Stockholm University, who was there in his capacity as a memory expert with a particular interest in serial killers.

  In advance of the session, Thomas Quick had passed on the message that he had important information about the murder of Johan Asplund. He had consumed large amounts of benzodiazepines over the course of the day. His account grew painfully detailed and fuzzy while Seppo Penttinen listened patiently, asking questions and trying to move the story on.

  Towards the end of the long interview things became extremely problematic when Quick, via Ståhle, revealed to the police that the doctors had been conducting their own investigation.

  TQ: I think we made some real finds as well.

  PENTTINEN: What was that, then?

  TQ: Two . . . Two . . . One of those and one of those . . .

  PENTTINEN: Mm. You’re looking at two bones of your long finger. Where are they now?

  TQ: I have to go outside while Birgitta says where they are.

  Thomas Quick left the room and Birgitta Ståhle took over to explain what had emerged in their therapeutic conversations regarding Johan’s recovered finger bones.

  ‘This is the difficult part,’ she began hesitantly. ‘This is what he told me. Now. Er . . . because he told me he found pieces of bone from the hand by the stream and he showed them to Göran and Kjell but then he ate them, so they’re no longer available to us.’

  Penttinen sat in silence.

  That two doctors had been running their own investigation and actively keeping this information from the investigators was probably shocking enough. Even worse was that Quick had allegedly eaten the only technical evidence to have emerged in the entire investigation.

  Birgitta Ståhle’s short intervention was recorded on tape and would be transcribed and become public
on the day the prosecution was announced for the murder of Johan Asplund. Seppo Penttinen had already heard enough.

  ‘I see,’ he said tersely. ‘We’re pausing this interview at 16.06.’

  Kjell Persson’s successor, Birgitta Ståhle, never involved herself in investigative activities, choosing instead to cooperate fully with the police. She conducted therapy sessions with Thomas Quick at least three times a week and reported anything of police interest to Seppo Penttinen.

  The greatest difficulty was that Quick, when he came to Säter Hospital, was unaware of having committed any murders at all. These memories were completely repressed, as were all the sexual assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood.

  Under Ståhle’s custodianship Quick managed to go back mentally into his childhood in Falun in the 1950s. In the therapy he seemed to be transformed into the little boy Sture, who, with a child’s vocabulary, recounted his experiences in detail while Ståhle continuously made notes and recorded his reactions.

  Similar situations had been described by Kjell Persson as ‘a hypnotic journey in a time machine’. The psychological term for such time travel is ‘regression’, which implies that the patient goes back to an earlier stage of development, often for the purpose of reliving and working on traumatic experiences.

  Thomas Quick’s term for the experience was ‘time-fall’ and it did in fact seem that in the therapy he was able to go back in time at will, either to his supposedly terrifying childhood or to those occasions when he had committed murders as an adult. According to the theories in practice at Säter Hospital, his violent crimes were ‘re-enactments’ of the traumas of his childhood, so that in effect the violent criminal harboured within himself both the victim and the perpetrator. The connection between the victim and the perpetrator in the same person meant that the reconstituted memory of a sexual assault in the perpetrator’s childhood could be used to gain an understanding of how the abuse had been re-created by the adult. Sture Bergwall had re-enacted his parents’ sexual assaults by raping and murdering young boys.

  Over a period of time, Birgitta Ståhle’s therapy with Thomas Quick developed into a garden of repressed memories, several of which were germinated and developed into stories that held up all the way through legal processes to court verdicts for murder.

  Nowadays, the reliability of such repressed memories extracted in therapy is viewed with scepticism, not least in legal systems around the world, but in the 1990s these ideas were at the very heart of the treatment of Thomas Quick and other violent prisoners at Säter.

  Neither the doctors nor the psychiatrists at Säter ever questioned the fact that Quick had no memories of any of his murders even though he was, apparently, the worst serial killer in Sweden. There was a broad consensus that experiences of this kind were so unendurable that the memories were ‘dissociated’ and hidden in the far reaches of the brain. Nor did anyone at any stage examine Ståhle’s competence at extracting such memories by use of regression techniques.

  As the fragmented memories gradually returned, an intellectually stimulating process took over in which the pieces were joined up – ‘integrated’ – while Birgitta Ståhle and her curious patient watched in terror as the image of the serial killer Thomas Quick materialised before their very eyes.

  I knew that Ståhle was having weekly coaching from object relations theory guru Margit Norell for her therapy with Quick, but their reasoning and approach were a well-kept secret. There was no documentation about it apart from Sture Bergwall’s meagre and unconfirmed memories.

  Birgitta Ståhle had been keeping careful notes on every therapy session, and after Sture retracted all his confessions he demanded to see these notes, which, legally speaking, were a part of his file. Her answer was astonishing: Ståhle maintained that she had destroyed them all.

  Sture also told me that Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle had written a book about Thomas Quick. The authors had said it would be a groundbreaking work on a par with Sigmund Freud’s case study of ‘the Wolf Man’. But for unknown reasons the book was never published.

  Sture and I realised that we would never have access to the manuscript.

  Evidently my only source of information on Birgitta Ståhle’s ten-year period of therapy with the serial killer Quick was Sture Bergwall, the person with possibly the least credibility in the whole country.

  After Sture Bergwall’s retraction of his confessions, the hospital management imposed a variety of reprisals on the troublesome serial killer. Among other things the doctors withdrew his so-called ‘fresh air’ outings, and it was decided that the blinds that afforded him a measure of privacy and protected him from direct sunlight in his room should be removed. The bookcases with books and CDs that had been in his room for almost two decades were also removed.

  When Sture was packing the contents of the last bookcase into a cardboard box, he found an unmarked scuffed folder at the bottom of a pile of old vinyl records. Sture opened the file and read the lines at the top of the first page in amazement:

  INTRODUCTION

  The purpose of this book is to describe a very difficult and unusual therapeutic process which I, in my capacity as supervising therapist, have been monitoring in the years 1991–95 . . .

  Sture could hardly believe his eyes: he had found Margit Norell and Birgitta Ståhle’s manuscript, which we had all thought was lost. He continued reading:

  Before the therapeutic process began, Sture had no memories at all from before the age of 12. His awareness of the murders he had committed – the first of them at the age of 14 – had initially only come up in the therapeutic process. In no case was he ever the object of suspicion or under investigation for any of these crimes. Whenever a murder and the particular details of it were sufficiently clarified in the therapy, Sture himself asked the police to come and question him and investigate the matter.

  A few days later I held the priceless manuscript in my hands, all 404 pages of unedited text, sections of it indigestible in its thorny, psychological jargon – but nonetheless it was the therapists’ own account of their process with Thomas Quick.

  In my early research on Thomas Quick I had often come across the expression ‘the Simon illusion’. I understood this to be a central theme of the therapy but had some difficulty grasping the precise meaning of the illusion. As soon as I got the chance I asked Sture to explain.

  ‘Simon came into the picture in my therapy with Birgitta Ståhle. He was born in connection with a sexual assault on me by both my father and my mother. I can’t remember how I described it, but he was killed by dismemberment. I mean the head was cut off. Then the foetus was wrapped in newspaper and put on the back of a bicycle and then me and Dad went and buried it on Främby Point.’

  Sture was four years old when he witnessed the murder of his little brother, and an idea took hold of him that he should try to ‘mend Simon’, and make him whole and alive once again. Somehow this idea transformed into the concept of Sture being able to ‘gain life’ by killing. In his therapy with Birgitta Ståhle this train of thought became the explanation behind Sture’s development into a murderer of boys.

  No one had ever heard of Simon before Thomas Quick started talking about him to Birgitta Ståhle, and according to Sture these were pure fantasies that had come up in the therapy room.

  I sat with the manuscript in which Ståhle described in her own words how Thomas Quick regressed in the therapy and was transformed into the four-year-old witnessing how his parents murdered and cut up his little brother Simon:

  The face is contorted with the terror of dying, with a gaping mouth. I, Birgitta, can communicate with Sture, which demonstrates that although he is in deep regression he nonetheless still has a connection with the here and now.

  The first lunge with the knife stabs into the right-hand side of the torso and is delivered by the mother. Thereafter the father takes the knife. The Sture-shell repeatedly says not the throat, not the throat, then holds up the throat. The knife stab
s and cuts up the torso and then the right leg is removed.

  M [Mother] takes flesh from Simon and puts it in the Sture-shell’s gaping mouth.

  The Sture-shell says, ‘I’m not hungry.’ Sture says that M and F embrace and it gives him an unpleasant feeling. Then he reaches out to take Simon’s hand. Realises that it is loose, it is unattached. Says, ‘I’ve broken off my little brother’s hand.’

  In the therapy, Simon’s birth and the parents’ killing of him were perceived as truths. Sture’s experience of the murder as a child would later be re-enacted in the murders of Johan Asplund, Charles Zelmanovits and the other boys. The memories were repressed but the adult Sture was able to ‘recount’ his experiences by means of the murders and by desecrating and cutting up the bodies, just as his parents had cut up his little brother.

  In the book, Sture’s mother is referred to throughout as ‘M’ or ‘Nana’, euphemisms for a creature of such evil that her real name would be too frightening to speak out loud. Birgitta Ståhle returns in several passages to the evil mother’s heinous deeds:

  Sture starts talking spasmodically. Nana has just pressed her hands round Sture’s throat. ‘He feels her hands. Now she goes to Simon’, where Sture remains behind his closed eyes. She was there, right in front of Simon’s undamaged face. The body was broken but Sture can concentrate on the face so he doesn’t have to look at the broken body. Sture sees Nana’s bloody, clenched hand. He grows silent, then he says, ‘Maybe that red stuff is fruit syrup?’ . . .

  According to Margit Norell, the fact that Thomas Quick believed the blood on his massacred younger brother was fruit syrup could be seen as evidence that he was telling the truth. She wrote in the manuscript:

  So how can we know if what Sture is describing is the truth?

  When it comes to the experiences of the child: the childlike language, the typical childish reactions, the manner of the regression, the emotional expressions – and the ever clearer memories.