Thomas Quick

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Thomas Quick Page 34

by Hannes Råstam


  A week later, Quick woke in the middle of the night with a powerful feeling of anxiety, was ‘slipping in and out of different personalities (Ellington among others). Spoke English and all sorts of dialects. After about two hours Thomas came back to reality however, with the help of staff and medication.’

  Of this period Birgitta Ståhle wrote:

  Despite this difficult and very heavy existential condition, the psychotherapeutic work is progressing. Hopefully a decision will be made on prosecution concerning Rörshyttan [Levi] before Christmas so that Thomas can enjoy a period of well-earned rest.

  But the prosecution was taking its time and Quick’s condition deteriorated further after the New Year. Notes in the file constantly speak of severe anxiety, suicidal thoughts and deep lethargy. All afflictions were treated with still more benzodiazepines. One note in the file from 28 January 1997 gives a typical impression of Quick’s condition:

  Thomas regressed during the therapy session in the morning with severe anxiety attacks and cramps. Nursing staff had to hold him down and give him two 10 mg Diazepam suppositories. After an hour somewhat better. He was often checked up on. Slept about an hour after lunch. At 14.00 he got up, quickly deteriorated with marked despair and anxiety. Was given Xanax, 1 mg, 2 tablets, a little improvement after about 45 minutes, although exhausted and listless. At about 19.00 Dr Erik Kall prescribed Heminevrin, 300 mg, 3 tablets for the night and supervision as Thomas was having active suicidal thoughts. In the evening he was under the influence of medication but he was capable of controlling himself and listening to music and having normal conversations with the nursing staff. However, at about 18.00 he had another breakdown with heavy weeping and despair. He was given more Xanax, 1 mg, 2 tablets, and with support from the nursing staff he was brought back to his senses. He took 3 capsules of Heminevrin, 300 mg, at 20.50. Slept until 01.00 at night. Woke with a headache. Took 2 paracetamol tablets, supplemented with Voltaren, 50 mg, and 1 Xanax, 1 mg, after about an hour. Goes back to sleep at about 03.00 and woke at 07.00. This morning after therapy he had difficulties walking and moving. His body is not doing what he tells it to do. He was given 2 Xanax, 1 mg. After about an hour he felt better again, he lay on the bed resting. During the doctor’s rounds the decision was made to maintain suicide watch until further notice.

  At the beginning of April 1997 Christer van der Kwast brought legal proceedings for the murder of Yenon Levi and Quick’s condition deteriorated further. The medication was increased even more – he was now being injected with benzodiazepines. On 13 April the chief physician, Jon Gunnlaugsson, ordered an injection of Diazepam, 20 mg, and Quick was ‘placed on capsule Heminevrin, 300 mg, 2 x 4, and tablet Rohypnol, 1 mg, 2, for the night’. Despite this heavy medication Quick slept only an hour and a half that night. A care assistant wrote in the file: ‘Now in the morning he is more or less catatonic. He trembles, sweats and has difficulties talking.’

  At 08.45 a doctor came to give Quick an injection of Diazepam, 20 mg, ‘which had no marked effect’. At 10.30 he came back to administer another injection. ‘After about half an hour the enormous tension was released.’ The doctor prescribed an increase in Quick’s intake of the very strong drug Heminevrin to 3 x 4 capsules, as well as another injection at night.

  Just before the trial Thomas Quick received a number of death threats. Hedemora District Court therefore decided that the main proceedings would take place in the police station in Falun.

  On the first day, 5 May 1997, several family members of Quick’s victims were among the spectators in the courtroom. Johan Asplund’s parents doubted Quick and wanted to see for themselves how his trials were conducted. Olle Högbom’s father, Ruben, was there for the same reason.

  ‘He says that he is driven to confess out of a sense of moral obligation to the families. If that’s the case he should tell us where Johan is, give us some evidence. Instead he just plants new seeds of doubt,’ Björn Asplund commented to Expressen the following day.

  Also in attendance was Detective Inspector Lennart Jarlheim, helping van der Kwast keep order among all the maps, the photographs, the murder weapon and other evidence. Jarlheim had put together the preliminary investigation report himself and knew it inside out. Jarlheim was surprised that a prosecution had been brought at all. In his opinion there was not enough evidence to establish guilt.

  Because of a lack of technical evidence to connect Quick to the crime, the evidence comprised statements he had made during the investigation, as well as his confession. Quick’s different identities also played a part in the trial. When questioned about his ability to communicate with Yenon Levi in his poor English, Quick came up with an unexpected answer: ‘I turned into Cliff and he speaks excellent English.’

  In his testimony, Seppo Penttinen described how the investigation had been run: ‘Thomas Quick changed his story as the investigation proceeded. These changes have come about without any coercion. In other words Thomas Quick cannot have become aware of “errors” by investigators persistently repeating the same question or asking whether he was really sure about his version of events.’ The district court placed great emphasis on Penttinen’s positive evaluation of the quality of his own interviews.

  But when I actually read the interviews, an entirely different picture emerged.

  In their first interview sessions, Quick had claimed that he met Yenon Levi in Uppsala and that Levi wanted to accompany him to Falun. However, Penttinen knew that Levi had gone missing in Stockholm. How Quick’s erroneous statement was corrected is a blatant example of how Penttinen was constantly interpreting and commenting upon Quick’s psychological signals. This psychological reasoning could not hide the fact that in reality Penttinen was telling Quick that his answers were wrong.

  PENTTINEN: Are you 100 per cent certain that you met Yenon Levi in Uppsala?

  TQ: Yes.

  PENTTINEN: No doubt at all?

  TQ: No.

  PENTTINEN: Well, I have to read your reaction here again. When I asked you in that way you reacted in a manner that I interpret as a sort of doubt in your method of expressing yourself, your facial expression gives me that impression.

  TQ: Hmm.

  PENTTINEN: This is a very important question if you’ve been telling me for a long time now that the meeting took place in Uppsala and then somehow you signal that there could be some doubt about it.

  A few pages later in the interview Quick changed his mind and said that he had met Levi in Stockholm. In this laborious way the investigation was dragged forward, one detail after another modified so that Quick’s story didn’t depart too much from known facts.

  Christer van der Kwast also couldn’t resist giving Quick a helping hand. In the first two interviews Quick had stated that Levi’s bag was left on the scene. Yet in the third interview Quick was again asked what had happened to the bag. He answered that it had been left by the body. This answer was not accepted and van der Kwast came back to the question a little later:

  KWAST: Again, what happened to those things?

  TQ: They’re by the body.

  Next, Quick explained where the body had been left, and wrongly stated that it could not be seen from the road. Van der Kwast took this opportunity to ask again about the bag:

  KWAST: And the bag, then? That large bag?

  TQ: Yes.

  KWAST: Where was that?

  QUICK: It was behind him.

  Despite Quick’s clear statement, van der Kwast didn’t give up. The question was too important and therefore he asked it a fourth time:

  KWAST: What about when you leave the scene? What happens to the bag?

  TQ: It’s left there.

  KWAST: Well, right there, you see, we have a problem. In fact this bag has never been found.

  In the next interview Quick described how the bag was removed from the scene. The district court was unaware and remained unaware of these circumstances. Lennart Jarlheim places much of the responsibility for this on Quick’s defence lawyer.
/>   ‘The trial was an absolute farce! Claes Borgström didn’t ask a single critical question in the whole trial. It was so clear that all they wanted was to make sure TQ was found guilty,’ he said.

  Nor did the proceedings in the district court convince Johan Asplund’s parents. Quite the opposite: they added further fuel to the fire.

  ‘The entire trial was a piece of theatre directed by Quick,’ Björn Asplund commented in Expressen on 8 May.

  The chief judge and jurors in Hedemora District Court didn’t share the Asplunds’ opinion. Thomas Quick was unanimously found guilty of the murder of Yenon Levi. In its verdict, the district court wrote that it had been ‘established by the testimony of Seppo Penttinen that the questioning has been conducted in an exemplary way without any leading questions or insistent repetitions’.

  Claes Borgström commented on the Asplunds’ dubious reaction in the same Expressen article, in which he admitted that their feelings about Thomas Quick’s credibility were understandable.

  ‘But the crucial question is: Where has he got the information from, how does he know all these details?’ said Borgström.

  The reporter Pelle Tagesson let a few well-chosen quotes from Christer van der Kwast’s closing argument round off the debate: ‘He leaves us with a concrete and accurate picture, far removed from any guesswork [. . .] What more could one ask for? This must be viewed as probable beyond any reasonable doubt.’

  TO ØRJE FOREST!

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, a fax came through to Ward 36 at Säter Hospital from the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University addressed for the attention of Thomas Quick. The front sheet, with a personal message from the sender to the recipient, was slowly fed out. A seven-page document followed, under the heading ‘Guidelines for the reconnaissance of the crime scene by Thomas Quick in Norway on 11 June in connection with the disappearance of Therese Johannesen in 1988’.

  A year had gone by since the Norwegian fiasco with the fruitless inspections and the equally fruitless draining of the lake, and now eyebrows were being raised here and there over the fact that Quick was once again being driven to Ørje Forest to lead them to the location of Therese’s body.

  The renewed hopes of the investigators were based on the fact that Christer van der Kwast had paid for the services of a private dog handler and cadaver dog which had been taken to Ørje Forest to search a large wooded area at the end of May 1997. The result was staggering.

  Earlier the police had concentrated on the immediate surroundings of the small lake known as Ringen, but the search had now been expanded to cover several square kilometres and divided into areas designated as ‘Skumpen’ (the Bump), ‘Torget’ (the Square) and ‘Kal Sten’ (Bare Rock). The dog had reacted to the presence of human remains in all three places. After this breakthrough all they had to do was loosen Quick’s psychological barriers so that he could lead them to where he had hidden Therese’s body. Sven Åke Christianson had been given carte blanche to create the optimum conditions for Quick to remember and find the ‘courage’ to make it all the way to Therese’s grave.

  The pages juddering out of the fax machine now were the results of Christianson’s intellectual labour. That I was able to see them at all was the result of an improbable discovery.

  Sture Bergwall is like a squirrel and over the years he has gathered an impressive number of documents which are kept in storage in the basement at Säter Hospital. Every time he visited his storage space he brought up astonishing material that provided new insights into the investigations. One day he told me in an excited voice that he had found this fax.

  The document is too long to be reproduced here in its entirety, but it’s also too unbelievable to be summarised in a credible way. Instead, what follows are some excerpts from Christianson’s guiding principles, which were very broad in scope. First there were some instructions that some might have interpreted as an insult to the investigators:

  In order for the reconnaissance and identification of the place/places where Therese lies buried to take place in an optimal [way] two basic conditions must be observed:

  1) Thomas Quick’s (TQ) approach: ‘I can do this, I might not be able to do this, we’ll see.’ [. . .]

  2) We should endeavour to make the inspection as simple as possible. We should leave Säter Hospital and go to the hiding place in Norway. TQ should lead us there and we should in principle only function as a support to him (perhaps just make him feel less lonely in the process).

  The small details are also of great importance in creating optimal conditions:

  Carefully prepare clothes, provisions and other equipment. To bring on the journey: coffee, water/drinks, sandwiches, chocolate biscuits (sweets) and cigarettes.

  To help the investigators understand better, Christianson wrote a ‘feasible sequence of events on the day of TQ’s reconnaissance’:

  Departure from Säter Hospital by car as early as possible in the morning. Ask TQ to step inside the car. ‘We’re leaving now.’ TQ’s attitude: Let this happen now, and he goes and sits in the car and we depart without any decisions being taken or talk of what lies ahead. [. . .]

  A Walkman can be brought as a means of relaxation.

  Once we have passed the Norwegian border we should start activating TQ. ‘We’re passing the Norwegian border. Hello! Wake up!’ Ask TQ to remove his Walkman.

  On the way to the ‘hiding place’ Christianson was in favour of Quick choosing the route himself, without any leading questions. If he directed them to the right when Seppo Penttinen knew it should be left, he should not be corrected.

  When TQ says: ‘Stop the car, we’re getting out’, it is important to do so, and to respect that it is TQ who is in charge of the car stopping or reversing.

  Christianson imagined that Quick, once they started moving forward on foot, might ‘break into a sweat, feel anxious or slow his steps’.

  In the event of this some mild coercion may be needed. A physical push of a gentle kind. This is the decisive stage of making one’s body cross the threshold of anxiety. Seppo or Anna could give him a little shove.

  Christianson recommended that Quick should have unlimited access to narcotics-strength medications, and he reminded the investigators not to forget the very strongest of these:

  Medicines Xanol (?) in doses decided by TQ. Also a medical readiness if TQ finds he is capable of showing us the hiding place, for instance Heminivrin (?) if his reaction is too strong.

  Professor Christianson’s recommendations about ‘Xanol’ and ‘Heminivrin’ do not seem to be based on any pharmacological knowledge (both Xanax and Heminevrin are misspelt) but rather seem to be Quick’s own preferences.

  ‘I’d probably told him they weren’t to fuss about the Xanax. I wanted to have as much as I wanted,’ said Sture. ‘I mean, Heminevrin is a very strong drug that has a very rapid effect. It’s pretty much like knocking back a quarter-bottle of schnapps. A nurse here at Säter told me recently that I used to sing to her when she gave me Heminevrin. It’s exactly like being drunk.’

  Christianson added that all conditions that could disturb TQ’s concentration and focus on the place where Therese lay buried must be eliminated. Police questions about the event or sequence of events at the time of the murder were to be saved for a later date. On the day of the reconnaissance, on 11 June, the only priority was to find where the corpse had been hidden.

  One of the disruptive elements Christianson worried about most was the intrusion of journalists and he advocated extreme measures to keep them at bay:

  Evade media monitoring. Close off the whole area, including aerial surveillance. Any awareness of the presence of the media will adversely affect concentration.

  Unlike other reconstructions with Quick, this inspection in Ørje Forest was not recorded on video, which was in accordance with Sven Åke Christianson’s guidelines.

  ‘If possible we shouldn’t film TQ as he makes his way to his hiding place,’ the professor wrote. ‘It will disturb his focus on T
herese.’

  In Christianson’s imagined sequence of events, Quick was now approaching his hiding place:

  If TQ comes this far, he should be able to say, ‘Now I open this grave’ or ‘Can you open it . . . Pick that up, give me a moment to feel.’

  Christianson realised that it would be annoying not to be able to open the grave once they had reached it. Therefore he suggested the following:

  Certain tools may be required if the ground has hardened, for instance something to turn the ground, a metal spit, a smaller spade or similar.

  [. . .]

  If TQ actually goes all the way to a hiding place (grave) he should be given the opportunity to take a short moment in private. Allow TQ the chance to open the hiding place himself or assign this to someone else (if he wants this) and then TQ should have the chance to physically touch a piece of bone, for instance a rib bone. It is important that we respect this desire and he should not be made to feel any shame about it.

  Nor should we ask him why.

  In his book I huvudet på en seriemördare (‘In the Mind of a Serial Killer’), Christianson suggested that retained body parts help the serial killer ‘relive the aspect of lust in the attack’ and ‘create intimacy and give sexual excitation’.

  According to Christianson, body parts might be ‘used as stimulants for masturbation or Satanic symbols’.

  In view of these possible scenarios, the suggestion that Ørje Forest should be sealed off, including aerial surveillance, seemed like reasonable measures.

  But the reconstruction didn’t play itself out as Christianson had imagined.

  *

  On the morning of 11 June the expedition set off for Norway. Quick was travelling in a minibus with his nurses and Birgitta Ståhle, so that he wouldn’t feel any pressure from the investigators. Anna Wikström, Sven Åke Christianson and Seppo Penttinen were in a car behind them. At first, Christianson’s guidelines were followed scrupulously. The medicines had been brought, as had coffee, sandwiches and sweets. Wikström kept continuous notes on what was happening.

 

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