TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: What’s your memory of that today?
TQ: Oh, I don’t know.
PENTTINEN: Do you remember mentioning it?
TQ: No, I don’t.
In other words, Penttinen mentions ‘arms’ in his question, while Quick had only spoken of a scar on her right arm. He also gives Quick a hint that something to do with Therese’s arms could be important.
During questioning on 14 October Penttinen returned again to the matter.
PENTTINEN: I’ve asked you this before, you mentioned something during this inspection, that you had a memory concerning her arms, some sort of skin condition or similar?
TQ: I never said that . . . a bit inflamed . . .
PENTTINEN: Yes, but you have not described it, like, you haven’t said in a concrete way what you mean, you’ve said you have a memory about this.
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: If you can develop it a bit that would be good.
TQ: It’s a, a flare-up. I’m hoping we mean the same thing by flare-up.
PENTTINEN: Is it something that passes or is it something lasting, something that she, is it an illness or some kind of natural flare-up just for the moment or . . .
TQ: I don’t know, I don’t know. It could be she had just flared up for the moment. It could also be something she has, because it’s a clear, a clear flare-up.
PENTTINEN: You’re indicating the upper side of your arm now?
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: Is that where you see it or is it over the whole arm or is it both arms?
TQ: It’s on both arms, yeah.
PENTTINEN: It’s on both arms?
TQ: Yes.
PENTTINEN: Is it round the whole arm or is it, is it something that’s patchy or . . .
TQ: It’s a patchy mark. A patchy redness, I mean.
Even though Quick was given the information about ‘arms’ and ‘skin condition’ he couldn’t come up with the right answer. But his answer was ‘right enough’ for the investigators, in their testimonies in the courtroom, to be able to turn Quick’s extremely vague but increasingly correct description of eczema into the notion that he had described how Therese had scars from eczema on the inside of her arms at the very beginning of the investigation. Whether she actually had them at the time of her disappearance was something that even her own mother was unsure about. Nonetheless it was regarded as compelling evidence.
Among all of Quick’s information which was interpreted by the district court as evidence for his murder of Therese, I found only one detail that wasn’t incorrect or sourced from a newspaper or transmitted via Seppo Penttinen: during the reconstruction in Fjell, Quick had said that the balconies of the apartment block used to be a different colour.
TQ: Mm, mm, I don’t remember exactly if the houses had the colour they have, have now . . . uh . . .
PENTTINEN: What colour would you suggest then, if there was a change?
TQ: I’d like to say the edges of the balconies were white . . . then you have to remember as well that the trees here . . . and everything was . . . another colour, it was green, wasn’t it . . . uh . . . it throws me off to some extent . . . also the memory . . . uh . . . if I think of the houses further off over there . . . uh . . . there isn’t a . . . [inaudible] like this . . . high-rise.
Quick’s description of the repainted balconies is correct. It seems notable in itself that Quick would be able to remember their colour eight years later after a few moments spent in a residential area, especially as they weren’t especially eye-catching but neutrally white.
Today, Quick can’t even remember that he was taken on an inspection to Fjell – which is easily understood when one considers the heavy doses of medication he was on – and he can’t think of an explanation as to why he was right about the balconies.
‘If I’ve come up with a hundred descriptions then maybe ninety-eight are wrong and two right,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve given them such an incredible amount of information that of course I have to get it right sometimes.’
That’s as far as I got – Quick was right about the balconies. Hardly evidence compelling enough to find a man guilty of murder.
And then there was that little piece of bone . . .
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS
THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE of the bone fragments was toned down in the verdict of Hedemora District Court on 2 June 1998, on the basis of technical legal considerations. Quick had said that he wouldn’t exclude the possibility of ‘other body parts than those from Therese’ being found in the places he had pointed out in Ørje Forest. In other words, the court wanted to insure itself against the possibility of the bone at some point in the future being identified as that of another child who was also disposed of by Quick in the same place. The verdict mentions the boy ‘Dusjka’, whom Quick claimed he had abducted, murdered and cut up in Norway.
But the value of the bone as evidence was not questioned.
‘It was obviously a very important element that they found the remains of a child who’d been incinerated in Ørje Forest, in precisely the place indicated by Quick,’ said the chief judge, Lennart Furufors.
The verdict declared: ‘Even if the remains of organic material found in the abovementioned forest cannot tie Thomas Quick to Therese, they nonetheless suggest that his story is true.’
‘Clearly it made a big impression on us that burnt human remains had been found in the forest. It was important evidence,’ Furufors confirmed to me.
In the heated debate that flared up in 1998 over the Quick investigation, the bone found in Ørje Forest was effectively used as a bat against anyone who questioned the role of the prosecution – such as the attacks from the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson, who was critical in general of the handling of the Quick investigation, and from Nils Wiklund, the senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry, who questioned the role of Claes Borgström as a lawyer and the subsequent lack of an adversarial process. Borgström responded as follows, in a polemical piece in DN Debatt on 6 June of the same year:
In Örje Forest, south-east of Oslo, someone has buried organic material in a variety of places. In one place burnt pieces of bone have been found. Professors Per Holck from Norway and Richard Helmer from Germany have independently confirmed that the pieces of bone are of human origin, most likely a younger person.
It is Thomas Quick who told us where in that huge forest we should dig to find the remains of a human being, the Norwegian girl Therese Johannesen.
The psychologist Nils Wiklund is concerned (DN Debatt 8/5) that Quick’s confessions are false and produced partly in conversation therapy and partly through leading questions asked by police. I hope that Wiklund will now rest easier.
Surely not even he could believe that someone has revealed to Quick where he should stick his finger in the ground and say, ‘Dig!’
Equally, for Seppo Penttinen writing in the Nordisk kriminalkrönika (‘Nordic Crime Chronicle’) and Gubb Jan Stigson – in article after article – the bone fragments were the primary line of defence against the doubters.
While doing research before the broadcasting of my documentary, Jenny Küttim was tipped off by SVT veteran Tom Alandh, who suggested that she should dig out the TV series Tidningsliv (‘Newspaper Life’). The twelve-part documentary series, shown on SVT1 at the end of 2003, was a portrait of the newspaper Dala-Demokraten, Gubb Jan Stigson’s employer. In the penultimate episode Christer van der Kwast gives a talk at the Crime Journalists’ Club (KJK) in Stockholm. The driving force behind the evening had been Gubb Jan Stigson, who had invited the prosecutor so that he could talk about the Thomas Quick investigations.
In a long introduction, van der Kwast condemned the journalists who had taken a critical stance to the investigation, but he also mentioned the great problem over the years: that the prosecutions had been based on circumstantial evidence.
The documentary film-maker Tom Alandh was not a member of the Crime Journalists’ Club, but he was in attenda
nce and he was the only one who reacted to what had just been said: ‘So is that really the case, there’s no technical evidence at all for any of the eight murders he’s been convicted of? Is that right?’
The question caused van der Kwast to lose his footing slightly, despite this being a relatively well-known fact.
‘Well, what is technical evidence? I mean . . . One has to . . . I say . . . it’s a bit sloppy, so to speak, if one says, “There is no technical evidence.” Normally by technical evidence one means things like DNA matching between the victim and perpetrator. This type of thing we do not have. But on the other hand, there are other things, so to speak, of a technical nature, such as, for instance, burnt human remains which have been cut into as he described.’
Again, the fragments of bone. But not only that. Van der Kwast described the finds in Ørje Forest as if there were no room for doubt. He assumed that the information was correct.
The forensic investigation report shows that van der Kwast’s ‘human remains’ consist of small burnt fragments of a total weight of less than half a gram. The largest piece, ‘cut into as he described’, weighs 0.36 grams.
Was it really possible to determine from such a small burnt particle that it was human bone? And that it came from a child aged between five and fifteen?
The discovery of the burnt fragments of bone in Ørje Forest gave the investigators new hope of also finding body parts in Sweden, and they especially pinned their hopes on finding Johan Asplund’s remains. Thomas Quick had announced that he was going into phase two of the investigation, in which he would be able to give information so that body parts could be found.
While the debate on Quick was raging in the press, the main character in the drama was being ferried around Sweden for various inspections. He pinpointed hiding places outside Sundsvall, but also in the vicinity of Korsnäs, Grycksbo and other places in Dalarna where he had lived in the 1980s. In the end, the list comprised some twenty-four locations.
The next stage was to let Zampo, the cadaver dog, examine the places specified by Quick with his owner and handler John Sjöberg. To everyone’s great joy, Zampo signalled the presence of corpses almost everywhere he was taken. In all, he reacted positively in some forty-five different places.
To assure himself of the dog’s ability, Professor Per Holck dug six pits in Ørje Forest and filled five of them with different materials: three were filled with organic material from humans, one with burnt animal bone and one with charcoal, while in the sixth pit there was nothing at all. Zampo reacted to human remains in all of the pits except the one containing burnt animal bone. This high incidence of error should have given cause for concern, but the dog’s owner explained that most likely the spade had contaminated the pits with olfactory molecules. The test results were dismissed and no other test of Zampo’s reliability was ever carried out.
After the test, the policeman Håkon Grøttland wrote an appreciative letter to the dog handler: ‘You should know that we would never have solved this [the Therese murder] without you and Zampo.’
Wherever in Sweden Zampo had reacted, suspicious material was removed and the location was excavated by an archaeological unit.
In view of the fact that Quick claimed to have cut up a number of bodies in small pieces and spread them around, large quantities of soil were handed in for analysis at the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (Natural History Museum) in Stockholm, where Rita Larje, the CID’s osteologist at the Working Group on Forensic Archaeology, studied the finds with a magnifying lens and microscope.
She said to me, ‘I received lots of bags and was told that there were supposedly human remains in there, because a so-called cadaver dog had reacted to it. Osteologists just scrape through whatever they’re given. If it’s soil it’s sieved and then we look for organic elements. And in this case I was supposed to be looking for bones.’
Rita Larje did not find any pieces of bone, so she went back to scrutinising the material through a microscope, as there might have been traces of organic material which had been burned – flesh then forms small, porous balls. But she found none of these either.
With Rita Larje’s help I went through the reports of her soil analyses on behalf of the Quick investigation – in all, some twenty of them. In one place bones had been found that were visible to the naked eye.
‘In this case we found they were rib bones from a cow, with signs of gnawing by rodents. And then we found teeth from cattle.’
One might think that the investigators would have drawn the logical conclusion, when the massive effort delivered so little: Quick was lying and Zampo reacted a little too readily. But the investigations kept rolling on.
Rita Larje and I reached the last report, which was from Sågmyra, where Sture Bergwall had lived the last time he was a free man. When hiding place after hiding place had proved entirely devoid of human remains, Quick implied that he had taken his trophies with him as he moved to different homes. Hopes were therefore high that ‘Quick’s mausoleum’ would be found in Sågmyra, with pieces of many of his victims.
Larje looked over her report from 1998: ‘Apparently there were 39 units, 39 bags of soil to go through. And most of the contents were wood, charcoal, resinous bark and pebbles – all naturally occurring in a wooded area.’
Rita Larje wrote a report to the effect that there were no bone fragments or anything else of interest. At this point Seppo Penttinen must apparently have snapped. He would not accept the negative result of the last excavations; instead he despatched all the material to Oslo, to Per Holck, who had found Therese’s bone fragments in Ørje Forest. Penttinen wanted a ‘second opinion’. After a few weeks, Holck’s answer came back: ‘No bone remains have been found in the material.’
It was the first time Rita Larje had seen all the documentation together: location searches, excavations, thousands of tests for phosphate levels in the soil in the hunt for body parts, and her own investigations.
She shook her head and said, ‘It leaves you speechless when you see how much work has been put into this. Nothing is ever found and still they go on believing it will be found in the next place right until the very end. And still they find nothing!’
To my great joy, Larje was willing to discuss the Norwegian bone finds with me. I shared all of my material with her and she examined the documentation and the statements made by the professors.
Having read everything, Larje wasn’t willing to make a statement on what the burnt pieces might consist of, but she was highly critical of the opinions expressed by professors Holck and Helmer. She believed they had reached conclusions which the material didn’t support. According to Larje, Holck and Helmer hadn’t identified the bone pieces. In their statements they didn’t specify from what bone or from what part of a bone the largest fragment came.
‘If you can’t say where in the skeleton a piece of bone is from, then you can’t determine what kind of bone it is either.’
Rita Larje asserted that the professors’ statements included a number of conclusions that were not supported by scientific literature and were in part based on absolutely incorrect reasoning.
‘The conclusion that this bone came from a young person was based on very shaky foundations,’ said Larje.
She wouldn’t go any further than this without having access to the bone fragments. However, she was willing to go to Drammen with another osteologist to analyse the fragments.
I contacted Christer van der Kwast, who, according to the Norwegians, had to give his permission for such an examination. He was not wholly dismissive, so I contacted Therese Johannesen’s mother, who also supported a second analysis of the bone fragments.
But no further word was heard and we started running out of time.
After a good deal of chasing, van der Kwast’s answer came back: no independent osteologists were permitted to look at the bones.
THE CRACKED CODE
THE TWO VERDICTS that remained for me to scrutinise were the most unlikely of all.
&
nbsp; When it came to both the disappearance of both Johan Asplund and the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik, the legal cases presupposed that Thomas Quick had driven very long distances on his own before he was even capable of driving a vehicle. The courts confirmed that there was no technical evidence and that the final verdicts for both were therefore entirely based on Quick’s own accounts. In these cases previous murder convictions were given as one reason among very few others to regard Quick as the perpetrator, an argument that was curious even if you ignored the fact that the earlier court cases were hogwash: according to Swedish law, every alleged crime must be judged without reference to any other criminal activity.
So how could the court arrive at a judgment based only on Quick’s own story?
The trial for Thomas Quick’s sixth and seventh murders opened in Falu District Court on 18 May 2000 but for security reasons was transferred to the high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court. Wearing a light grey summer blazer, Quick was brought into the courtroom from a side entrance and took his seat next to Claes Borgström and Birgitta Ståhle. Everything followed the usual routine. The players of the drama were so confident in their roles that on this occasion they seem to have lowered their guard somewhat and taken slightly bigger risks than before.
Prosecutor van der Kwast stated his case and read out the first point of the prosecution.
‘On 21 August 1981 in an area by Svartskog [Black Forest], in the municipality of Oppegård in Norway, Thomas Quick took Trine Jensen’s life by subjecting her to blows to the head and strangulation.’
After declaring his guilt, Quick was supposed to describe the events, but he was interrupted by van der Kwast, who first wanted to play a video recording from the reconstruction, as well as describe what Quick had stated during questioning. Only after Quick had listened to Kwast’s repetition of the whole story was he allowed to give his own account.
Thomas Quick Page 36