To latter-day readers, the article almost seems like an application to join the Quick investigation. Christianson seductively offered up all manner of questions his expertise might help to answer:
Psychological awareness of how to relate to psychiatrically disturbed people or people in emotionally charged conditions would be of great help to both interrogators and prosecutors.
Despite the fact that Sweden hadn’t previously had a serial killer of this kind, Christianson dwelled on the unusual phenomenon:
Studies have been made of grossly violent men and serial killers; how they behave, what drives them, how they see their own crimes and what they remember of them. Some are what we term psychopaths, such as the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the USA. He kept pieces from the corpses of fifteen people in his home.
What needs are being satisfied in these psychiatrically disturbed people?
Sven Åke Christianson arrived at Säter Hospital on 14 April 1994 and immediately set about testing Thomas Quick’s memory functions.
Sture Bergwall still remembers their first meeting. ‘I found it difficult to believe that this slight little man was a psychology lecturer.’
Christianson’s enthusiasm at having been offered a job with an investigation that would require all his specialist skills was unmistakable. In addition to memory research he had a burning interest in serious, violent crime and serial killers. Alongside his assignments within the justice system, Christianson spent his spare time at Säter, engaging himself in conversations with Thomas Quick. These conversations sometimes continued for seven or eight hours at a time, and tended to explore all manner of questions on the subject of the serial killer’s behaviour. Christianson was the theorist in these conversations, while Quick was the practitioner expected to come up with answers to the academic’s deep, probing questions on the bizarre inner life of a serial killer.
‘Sven Åke Christianson was a real serial-killer freak who intended to write books on Thomas Quick and other serial killers, books this thick,’ Sture told me, holding his arms straight out to indicate their imagined thickness from cover to cover.
‘Jeffrey Dahmer was one of his favourites in these conversations, the serial killer who kept chopped-off heads in his flat. I remember when Sven Åke asked me how Jeffrey Dahmer felt as he was cutting up his victims. And he asked me to describe the feeling of eating the victim, the sensual and erotic feeling of it. Sven Åke felt that Jeffrey Dahmer must have had a sensual feeling. And I was supposed to describe that.’
Sture also told me that Christianson carried out various exercises with him. Prior to his departure for Piteå, where Quick was supposed to show the investigators how he had murdered Charles Zelmanovits, Christianson took him out into the grounds of Säter Hospital.
In a copse behind the hospital museum Quick was told to pretend he was carrying the body of Charles Zelmanovits. He was supposed to make a ‘trial walk’ with the body from the forest road to its final resting place.
‘He asked me to remember my emotional state of mind. I was meant to feel that I was excited and tense, but also that I was weighed down with a great sorrow about the dead body. Also anger, I was supposed to feel that. “Don’t forget you’re carrying a heavy body,” he said.’
Sture remembered that as he trudged up the wooded slope, pretending to be carrying the body and the sorrow, Christianson walked beside him with a watch in his hand, counting his steps out loud.
‘When I had walked 300 steps, Sven Åke said, “We’re here now!” Then he asked me if I had any new memories about Charles Zelmanovits. “Oh yes, I certainly do,” I told him. In that way I affirmed him, as well,’ Sture Bergwall recalled.
During the same period Sture also remembers a trip in a car on a forest road to Björnbo, some thirty kilometres from Säter.
‘Me and Seppo took the car out, with three care assistants. We were inspecting different kinds of ditches. We sat in the car and kept going until the road came to a dead end.’
Before long they found a ditch that was very wide and apparently very similar to another ditch in Piteå. Sture claims that Penttinen made him aware of what sort of ditch they were after – not in so many words, but with a certain finesse.
‘I mean, that’s the secret. He said, “Maybe the ditch looked a bit like this?” And then I understood that the ditch did look like that. “Yeah, this is what it looked like,” I said.’
Both the re-enactment on the hospital grounds and the investigators’ approach of taking Thomas Quick into the forest to look at ditches were practical examples of the new ideas about ‘cognitive interview techniques’ as proposed by Sven Åke Christianson. By re-creating the same ‘inner and outer environment’ as at the time of the murder, it would supposedly become easier for Quick to access his memories of the crime. In this context, even leading questions might be justifiable, according to Christianson.
On the specific occasions described by Sture there was such an obvious risk of the investigators providing him with decisive information that I couldn’t quite take his words at face value. The whole thing went absolutely against all established investigative methodology. Could this really be true?
While on a personal level I believed what Sture was telling me, it struck me that I had once again run into information so outlandish that unless I could back it up in some way it would be entirely useless to me.
On the afternoon of 20 August 1994 a private chartered plane landed at Piteå Airport. The passengers on board included Thomas Quick, Birgitta Ståhle, Sven Åke Christianson, the investigators and nursing staff from Säter Hospital.
Piteå-Älvdal Hospital had placed a whole ward at the disposal of the Quick investigation team. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but everyone could at least stay in the same place and the safety of both Quick and the general public could be guaranteed.
The following morning, the entire group – now also accompanied by Christer van der Kwast and Anders Eriksson, the medical examiner from Umeå – went to the police station in Piteå, where Commissioner Harry Nyman had prepared a welcoming spread of coffee and pastries.
Shortly after, Thomas Quick was travelling in an unmarked police car with Christianson, Ståhle, Penttinen and a nurse from Säter, who were all waiting tensely for the alleged serial killer to lead them to the place where he had murdered and hidden Charles Zelmanovits.
Various documentary sources from the car journey indicate that Quick didn’t have a clue where the car was supposed to be going.
‘As I said during questioning, I don’t have much of a sense of direction here,’ he excused himself.
Because Seppo Penttinen knew the way, they weren’t entirely clueless. The car drove out of the town centre along a road known as Timmerleden (the Timber Route) and then continued a few kilometres on the Norra Pitholmsvägen. Before long they were out in the sticks.
Although they were quite close to their destination, Quick still couldn’t get his bearings, so Penttinen kept moving in the right direction. When they were only 500 metres away, Quick had to take over and show them the way.
‘We’re now in the area that’s of interest to us,’ said Penttinen to Quick.
Along the remaining short stretch of road there was a junction, where Quick had to determine which way they should turn. He chose to go left. The car continued for two kilometres before Penttinen revealed that this was wrong. They turned back and tried the right-hand turning instead.
Soon Quick noticed a number of police officers a short distance into the forest. They drove past. After continuing a few kilometres they reached a settlement and Quick realised they had gone too far. Again they turned back, passed the place where the body had been found and parked by the side of the road. Quick knew that he was very close to the spot. He indicated that he wanted to walk. After fifteen to twenty metres on the forest road he stopped.
‘We looked for ditches like this when we did an inspection in Säter,’ he said.
There it was – proof that it had
happened exactly as Sture described it to me.
A single, stray comment in hours and hours of wandering about in the Piteå forest, absolutely puzzling to all but those who were most closely involved with the case, and for the same reason so very easy to overlook.
When they reached the ditch closest to where the body had been found, Quick noticed that a path had been formed by the police and technicians who had examined the location in the last few weeks.
‘Think we have to go in here,’ said Quick.
After a few steps he hesitated.
‘I can’t cope with walking on my own to the place.’
He was ushered into the forest and on the video tape you can hear Quick saying, ‘It’s supposed to be as far as the trial walk I did with Sven Åke. Three hundred steps . . .’
Once again the cognitive interview techniques were reaping rewards.
Quick was supported and led into the forest by Seppo Penttinen. After they had gone 300 steps the relevant spot was visible. Forensic technicians had dug up the ground in their search for bones removed by foxes and other wild animals, and a large area of the ground had been disturbed.
Penttinen noted in his memo of the reconnaissance that Quick ‘is extremely bothered by the ground being disturbed and the moss torn up’.
During earlier questioning Quick had described sitting on a stone or a tree stump. Once he was at the scene he found a large boulder near the place where the remains were found. He tried to show how he had sat there after Charles had been murdered.
Despite the dark November night there had been no problems, said Quick. He had seen both his accomplice and Charles quite clearly. Anyone who has been in a forest at night will immediately realise the problem. In a Norrbotten forest at two in the morning, you would be hard pressed to make out your hand in front of your own face. Quick nonetheless claimed that he had been able to see the ground in front of him and could differentiate between spruce and pine. No one questioned how this could have been possible.
In accordance with Sven Åke Christianson’s cognitive interview techniques, the police had brought along a dummy to represent Charles Zelmanovits. Penttinen asked Quick to place the dummy on the ground exactly as he had placed Charles’s body.
The dug-up section of ground showed the position of the body but not which way the head was pointing. Quick had a 50 per cent chance of getting it right. The dummy ended up 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
Penttinen asked if the body had really faced in that direction.
‘Yes, I’d say so. I’d say so,’ said Quick.
At this point, Sven Åke Christianson stepped in, gesturing with his hands to help Quick access his emotional recall.
‘Shall we try and put it in that direction as well? So he can get a feeling for that?’
However, Quick refused to move the dummy, so Penttinen had to turn it round himself in accordance with Christianson’s suggestion. Finally the dummy ended up in the right position.
‘I don’t know if the video camera is picking it up, but Thomas is nodding vigorously,’ Penttinen clarified into camera.
Anders Eriksson asked a few questions about the cutting up of the body, which Quick had problems answering. He was unsure whether he had lopped off one of the arms. If so, he believed it was left at the scene.
‘What about the hands, did something happen to them?’ asked Penttinen.
But Quick couldn’t bear the exchange any longer.
‘I can’t take it, can’t take it. I can’t cope any more.’
Quick was crying uncontrollably, sobbing and shaking.
‘Give me another Xanax. I don’t give a damn if I overdose . . .’
‘Of course.’ There was a chorus of voices in the background.
‘You haven’t had one for quite a while,’ said Birgitta Ståhle.
A care assistant from Säter brought the jar of pills and Quick got what he wanted. Twilight was beginning to fall over the forest and Quick began to weep in a monotone that soon turned into a strange sort of guttural braying.
Once Quick’s moaning and weeping had calmed down, the large group left the forest feeling absolutely triumphant. With a measure of forethought, Harry Nyman had booked a table at Paltzerian in Öjebyn, north of Piteå – the only restaurant in the world that exclusively served palt, a northern speciality made from offal and rye.
Sture remembers the restaurant visit with mixed feelings.
‘They were all so happy and pleased! The one who was most pleased of all was Seppo Penttinen. Many different kinds of palt were brought in and we munched them all down with a lot of chatting. As if the murderer was being celebrated after the successful reconnaissance! It was repulsive and macabre . . .’
Christer van der Kwast was delighted. When he got back home he wrote a letter to the police in Piteå:
I want to pass on my warmest thanks for the excellent assistance provided to us by the police force in Piteå, overseen by Commissioner Harry Nyman on the occasion of the reconnaissance undertaken with Thomas Quick in Piteå on 21 August and for the additional arrangements that were made on the same occasion.
A MACABRE SHOW
IN THE MEDIA reporting on Thomas Quick that summer the image of the archetypal evil serial killer grew increasingly defined
Experts on the topic had popped up everywhere, and now they were making confident statements on how Thomas Quick had definitely murdered the five boys, in accordance with his own confessions. A professor of forensic psychiatry, Lars Lidberg, who had been recruited by prosecutor van der Kwast, single-handedly determined Quick’s guilt in so far as the Zelmanovits case went before the court had even passed its own judgment.
‘It is my view that Thomas Quick is guilty of the murders of these boys to which he has confessed. There is nothing to suggest that he is fabricating, exaggerating, wants to make himself important or is seeking to impress others by talking about his experiences,’ Lidberg told Expressen on 3 November 1994.
Obviously a serial killer like Thomas Quick had to be kept under lock and key, but incarceration alone was not enough, Lidberg went on: ‘If he won’t agree to castration voluntarily, there is the possibility of forcibly injecting him.’
No punishment was severe enough, no security measures too elaborate for the serial killer Thomas Quick.
‘People like this only get worse and worse, they can never stop,’ van der Kwast explained in Expressen on 18 October 1994.
Thomas Quick’s file from this period is extremely limited in scope, but it does reveal that his intake of benzodiazepines was steadily increasing and the notes provide several snapshots of a patient sliding out of control:
2 May 1994
Today Thomas had a severe panic attack in the afternoon, approached the staff and said, ‘I’m going mad, help me.’ He was given a Xanax pill, and was helped to the music room, where he lay on the floor screaming, held down by staff from time to time. After about 45 minutes it passed.
6 June 1994
Thomas had a severe panic attack as a result of therapy. We held onto him for a moment and he was given a Xanax pill. Once the anxiety passed the conversation continued. Thomas had another attack at about 13.00, when we found him in the therapy room. He had removed his clothes and was extremely anxious. We decided to put him in a straitjacket.
Care assistants have to be called repeatedly to give medication to Quick or to hold onto him so he doesn’t harm himself during the therapeutic conversations. These file notes about a patient who requires large amounts of narcotics and has to be put in a straitjacket might be viewed by the modern reader as signs of failure in his psychiatric care. But Quick’s reactions to Birgitta Ståhle’s treatment were viewed as genuine evidence that the therapy was working. His extreme state of anxiety was seen as a logical consequence of his regression during the therapeutic process. Ståhle wrote in the file:
The regress [sic] means that the patient makes contact with his early traumatic childhood memories, and also how these are retold by the
patient in his adult life through the assaults and murders which he has spoken of during the current police investigation.
Before the trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits, the lawyer Gunnar Lundgren wrote to the district court to explain the particular psychological and medical factors that applied to his client:
When he is confronted with and is about to talk of dramatic details and horrors in this current legal process, there is a risk that he will be so severely affected by anxiety that one may be forced into a number of adjournments. Apart from being afflicted by cramps he also has great difficulty speaking. This can, however, pass fairly quickly with a few moments’ rest and a few pills.
A great deal hung in the balance in this court case, as an acquittal would most likely have meant the end of any further investigation into Thomas Quick. Many members of the public had turned up to see the beast first-hand and hear about his terrible deeds.
When the public was let into the courtroom on 1 November they were met by a macabre sight that could hardly have disappointed those who wanted a bit of sensationalism. Christer van der Kwast had arranged a table of items that the members of the court, the prosecution team and spectators in the gallery would constantly have before their eyes during the proceedings. On the table lay a lopping saw, the remains of a partially decomposed leather jacket and a Playboy shoe that had seen better days.
Charles Zelmanovits’s mother, Inga, and younger brother, Frederick, passed the table with a shudder, turning their eyes away but not before they had recognised Charles’s shoe and parts of the jacket that he had worn seventeen years earlier. And the saw . . .
Throughout the main proceedings these items were an eerie and tangible reminder of what this case was about, but they also created a false impression of being some sort of technical evidence.
Admittedly, the saw had been found about a hundred metres from Charles’s remains, but the forensic investigation hadn’t been able to identify any damage to the bones from a saw. Quick hadn’t even said that he had left a saw in the forest. The same applied to the parts of the leather jacket – another troublesome reminder that Thomas Quick, despite all the questioning, had never managed to say exactly what outdoor garments Charles had been wearing. The Playboy shoe on the prosecutor’s table was just as puzzling. In interview after interview Quick had maintained that Charles was wearing boots.
Thomas Quick Page 22