Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  ‘One thing we know for certain is that he’s been fed with medications,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, absolutely . . . I’m not disputing that he was given medications of various kinds, but I’m not in a position to know their effects.’

  ‘Some doctors have said that this goes far beyond drug abuse. I mean, you can even hear in your reconstructions the way he says, “I have to have more Xanax. I don’t care if I overdose.”‘

  ‘I’m sure he did. He was in such bad shape that he had to seek help. That’s how it was perceived, rightly or wrongly . . .’

  While we were on the subject of hospital care and medications, I asked van der Kwast what he thought of the fact that Quick had not had any memories of his childhood or the murders – that all the memories had been repressed and then reawakened. And what was his opinion of object relations theory and Birgitta Ståhle’s therapy?

  ‘I’m extremely sceptical of all that! I’ve not bought into those models, I’ve only acted on hard facts. Those were just working methods to get the job done. Using various techniques like cognitive interviewing was worth a try.’

  ‘You’re familiar with the Simon illusion?’

  ‘Yes, and the whole dilemma. I mean, some people are Freudians and they’re engaged in all sorts of ideas. I’d say it’s more up to her to answer professionally for her approach. It never had the slightest importance for me in my role as prosecutor.’

  ‘But it had importance in terms of Quick talking about what happened.’

  ‘Yes, it made it possible to . . . I don’t know how the people on the therapy side have worked together. I couldn’t have insight into that.’

  ‘But you did have insight!’

  ‘Yes, I understood more or less. But I maintain that it did not have any significance. What was important was what came out of it.’

  Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast had taken memories extracted in therapy and used them as a foundation for murder prosecutions, yet now he claimed to be ‘extremely sceptical’ about the notion of repressed memories reawakened in therapy. Clearly, he was anxious to disassociate himself from anything that might be interpreted as psychological hocus-pocus.

  ‘I maintain that the courts made their decisions based on hard facts. And I reject the idea – and also feel it is disrespectful to come here and claim that we were so bewildered that we believed Quick’s stories based on some general psychological theories. Or that we would have intentionally manipulated situations so we could get evidence. I mean, that’s rubbish!’

  The interview continued, swinging between discussions of details and out-and-out rows about interpretations and assessments. In retrospect, Christer van der Kwast describes the experience as being ‘interrogated for four hours’. It is true that the interview went on for that length of time. At the end, we were both tired and crestfallen. Christer van der Kwast repeated that there was no longer a need for him to take a stand on the case. But he raised his finger in a warning gesture, as if to point out the risks I was facing.

  ‘Just jumping on the bandwagon of one story or another that he chooses to tell for mysterious reasons, I would be very careful about that!’

  ‘Thanks for the advice,’ I said politely.

  ‘I mean, he’s an extraordinarily manipulative person,’ explained van der Kwast.

  Lars Granstrand packed up the lights, tripods and leads. After he had gone I stayed for another hour and carried on discussing the subject with van der Kwast. I realised that we were both facing a significant risk. By this stage I was absolutely sure that Sture Bergwall was innocent of the eight murders for which he had been found guilty. I felt quite confident about the material I would present on television. Nonetheless it was hard to question six unanimous courts of law, the Office of the Attorney General and the chief prosecutor of the Anti-Corruption Unit. In the end, I would damage either van der Kwast or myself; it wasn’t possible that both of us could emerge with our honour intact.

  Christer van der Kwast seemed immersed in a similar train of thought.

  ‘So what’s the end result of all this, then? Will he be there on camera saying he’s innocent and he just made it all up as he went along?’

  I confirmed that this was what Sture Bergwall could be expected to say in the documentaries.

  After that, we established that there wasn’t much we agreed on, and on that note said our farewells.

  INTERVIEW WITH THE LAWYER

  QUICK WAS FOUND guilty of six murders while being defended by Claes Borgström. Many critics argued that Borgström had not defended Quick, that in fact he had failed in his duty to scrutinise Christer van der Kwast’s evidence.

  That Borgström had also sent out invoices to the tune of several million Swedish crowns just to have his client found guilty had also created some bad blood. Maybe this was the reason why Borgström had so feverishly defended the verdicts against Quick and, with more aggression than anyone else, had attacked whoever dared question the investigation.

  Just after lunch on Friday, 14 November 2008 I installed myself in a dingy café not far from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) building on Norra Bantorget in Stockholm. I was waiting for the hour to strike two, which was the time we had agreed for my long-standing appointment with Claes Borgström.

  I didn’t know if Christer van der Kwast had had time to let Borgström into the secret that Sture Bergwall had retracted all of his murder confessions. To avoid being caught up in small talk with Borgström – and risk giving away the news before the interview – I killed time in the café while Lars Granstrand rigged up the camera and lights. When I came to the office we were supposed to be ready to start on the dot of two.

  For months I had studied Claes Borgström’s participation in almost all of the interrogation sessions and reconnaissances in the Quick investigations. In the video recordings I had watched Thomas Quick being led around in forests, so drugged that he could barely talk or walk without being propped up by his therapist and interrogator. Claes Borgström walked beside them, but he never brought up the fact that his client was high as a kite. On a number of occasions Borgström had also seen Quick confess to murders that had obviously never happened. He had heard facts being distorted or concealed in the courts without intervening. Why?

  After all, the lawyer Claes Borgström had always taken a stand against repression, he spoke up for human rights and was a committed type with left-leaning sympathies at heart who had always protected the weaker members of society. The picture of him did not add up. Who was he?

  When the Social Democratic government of 2000 offered Borgström the job as Sweden’s first male Equality Ombudsman he resigned as Quick’s defence lawyer just before the trial for the murder of Johan Asplund. After seven years as Equality Ombudsman, Borgström joined forces with Thomas Bodström (the former Minister for Justice) and set up the law firm Borgström & Bodström, with offices at Västmannagatan 4. Borgström’s new venture – with the previous Minister for Justice as his partner, in an imposing building with an upmarket address, with LO’s Stockholm District and Unga Örnar (Young Eagles) as neighbours – could certainly be interpreted as a means to an end.

  At a quarter to two, as I was standing up to leave, my mobile rang.

  ‘Claes Borgström called! He hasn’t spoken to Kwast and he doesn’t know anything,’ said an unusually excited Sture Bergwall.

  Borgström had told him that he was about to be interviewed by SVT and that he was nervous about the interview.

  ‘But then he looked at his invoices for three of the cases and it calmed him down. He invoiced for a thousand hours’ work for those three cases you’ll be talking about.’

  With a thousand invoiced working hours, Borgström felt safe in the conviction that he had an unbeatable advantage in terms of knowledge of those cases.

  ‘He was guessing that you had probably put in forty hours of preparation,’ said Sture with a laugh.

  I thought to myself that if I had been sending out invoices as a lawyer for
my hours I’d be financially independent by this stage.

  ‘You know what else he told me? He’s become a party member and he’s aiming for a ministerial post after the election. Imagine him telling me something like that! Isn’t it strange?’

  ‘Really strange,’ I replied, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

  I found myself standing at the front entrance of Västmannagatan 4. We finished our call and I walked up the palatial staircase and rang the doorbell of Borgström & Bodström.

  Everything had been rigged up and prepared, so when Claes Borgström appeared a few minutes later we got on with it right away. He asked me what my points of reference were for the interview. What was my angle?

  I told him quite truthfully that I had not held any firm opinions on the matter at the beginning, but that as time passed I had grown increasingly sceptical about the investigation. He looked at me searchingly with his sharp blue-grey eyes.

  ‘How much time have you put into this?’ he asked.

  ‘About seven months,’ I said, and thought of Sture’s telephone call.

  ‘Seven months? Full-time?’

  Borgström gave me a dubious glance while I explained that I worked longer hours than a standard working week.

  ‘I looked at three of the trials I took part in, Therese, Appojaure and Levi,’ said Borgström. ‘When I checked my remuneration I had a thousand hours logged for all three.’

  ‘So you’re well prepared,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘Yes, it means I have a certain amount of insight.’

  I started carefully and asked Borgström to describe how he came to be Quick’s lawyer.

  ‘He called me during the ongoing investigation into the so-called Appojaure murders and asked if I wanted to represent him. Obviously I agreed that I would. And then I ended up representing him in four trials over a period of several years.’

  Borgström talked without needing to be prompted, and before long he brought up the subject of the unique situation of defending a serial killer who was voluntarily talking about his own crimes.

  ‘As a defence lawyer it isn’t unprecedented. I have defended other people who have confessed to murders.’

  ‘Even when they weren’t under suspicion?’

  ‘No, in general there has been suspicion and then a confession has come,’ Borgström admitted.

  Claes Borgström particularly emphasised that a confession on its own wasn’t enough; it had to be backed up by other evidence. In Thomas Quick’s case the supporting evidence was that time and time again he had described things that only the perpetrator could have known. Borgström cited the murder of Therese Johannesen as an example.

  I answered by showing Borgström a photograph of the concrete suburb of Fjell, which Quick had described as a country hamlet with low-rise family homes. Then I showed him the photograph of Therese, black-haired and with an olive complexion, described by Quick as a blonde girl, and after that a reconstruction of Therese’s clothes at the time of her disappearance.

  ‘Why was Quick so wrong when he tried to talk about his murders?’ I asked.

  ‘If you go through the investigation material you’ll find a lot more inaccuracies. Those are just a couple,’ said Borgström.

  Quick also said that Therese wore pink velour trousers, patent-leather shoes and had large front teeth. Borgström looked at my photos of Therese from the relevant time: a denim skirt, mocassins and a wide gap where those big front teeth were supposed to be.

  ‘But he changed his mind, I seem to remember. He said she had dark hair. And he talked about buckles on her sandals. He was convicted on the basis of providing information that when checked proved to be accurate and impossible to explain in any other way than that he was there at the time of the crime being committed.’

  Claes Borgström was a man of striking intelligence and I wanted to believe that he was also intellectually honest. In my eagerness to make him understand, I tried to explain how Quick had been provided with information. I told him about the series of articles from the Norwegian newspaper VG, where evidently Quick obtained the information he needed to make his first confession.

  ‘Not all the information,’ protested Borgström.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Not the atopic eczema on her arms,’ Borgström objected.

  ‘No, but that came much later!’

  ‘But you were saying that he got all the information!’

  ‘I said he got all the information he needed to confess to the murder,’ I said with a certain measure of despair. ‘He said that she was blonde! And he said that she was wearing entirely different clothes from the ones she was actually wearing. Everything was wrong!’

  ‘Not everything,’ protested Borgström. ‘The hairclips were not wrong, nor the buckles on her shoes.’

  In actual fact, when she disappeared, Therese’s hair had been put up with a blue hairgrip and a rubber band. After eight months of police questioning, Quick, on 14 October 1996, said that Therese had a hairband – in other words, neither a hairgrip nor a rubber band – which may possibly have been orange. After another year of questioning, on 30 October 1997 he still maintained that she had worn a hairband.

  I realised that my strategy of outlining a set of circumstances and letting the interview subjects explain their view of it was not working.

  How could Claes Borgström, after invoicing for a thousand hours of work, have been so ill-informed? Was it really possible that he had failed to see that Quick had provided so much incorrect information that even chance might have resulted in a story that was, at the very least, no further from the truth?

  I had turned into one of those litigious freaks that fussed about details no one outside our little circle understood or had any interest in. And it made for really, really bad television.

  ‘The devil is in the details,’ I muttered quietly to myself, and persisted in my idiotic attempt to explain how the media had supplied Quick with information. Borgström wasn’t interested. As far as he was concerned, the case was in the past and Quick had been found guilty of eight murders. He was clearly even regretting his decision to take part in this televised interview.

  I handed over the letter written by Thomas Quick to the Norwegian journalist Kåre Hunstad. Borgström read:

  I’ll meet you on the condition that I get 20,000 (my speakers have broken and I need new ones) and that when you come you bring a receipt showing that the money has been deposited in my account. Claes knows about this so there’s no need to run it past him. If you agree to these terms I promise you a good interview – I get paid for my efforts and in return you get a good story.

  After reading the letter, which showed that Borgström had also been aware of the commercial aspects of Quick’s confessions, he looked at me and said with forced indifference, ‘How sick are you if you do something like that? “Give me twenty thousand and I’ll confess to a murder I never committed.” And get locked up for the rest of your life. People who think he’s innocent are describing a human being virtually as sick as someone who could commit these murders.’

  The lawyer seemed to feel that it didn’t make a great deal of difference whether his client was guilty or not – clearly he was just as crazy in either case. Borgström’s argument led us seamlessly on to the next subject.

  ‘Were you aware that Quick was abusing benzodiazepines during the entire investigation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ answered Borgström truculently. ‘But I knew he had a drug problem, yes. Though not while he was at Säter,’ he added.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Drug abuse?’

  ‘Yes. At Säter Hospital it was referred to as needs-based medication. He was able to graze freely on various kinds of benzodiazepines,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t accept that statement!’

  ‘It’s the view of the chief physician at the time, it’s not my own,’ I explained.

  ‘I don’t accept that statement,’ repeated Borgström, and thereb
y put a stop to any further questioning on medication.

  *

  I changed tack, turning to the investigation into the Yenon Levi murder and Christer van der Kwast’s actions regarding the spectacles found on the scene. Why had he ignored the findings of SKL (the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science) and procured an opinion elsewhere, so that Quick could be presented as the assailant?

  ‘I’m not here to defend the prosecutor, but I can’t help noticing an insinuation that the prosecutor wasn’t satisfied until he had an outcome that moved things in that general direction,’ said Borgström.

  ‘It surprises me that you didn’t use the SKL findings in the courtroom.’

  ‘Yes, I hear that it surprises you,’ answered Borgström sarcastically. ‘No comment!’

  I pulled out the next document, a list of eighteen circumstances which, according to the forensic technicians, directly contradicted Quick’s Levi story. This was all hard evidence, such as confirmed tyre marks on the scene that did not correspond with the tyres of the car Quick claimed to have been using; Quick said that he had rolled up Levi’s body in a dog blanket, but no dog hairs or fibres from the blanket were found on Levi’s body; the bloodstains on Levi’s shoes did not conform with Quick’s version of events; the soil on Levi’s clothes came from the place where the body was found, not the place referred to by Quick.

  The forensic technician Östen Eliasson had summed up the forensic evidence as follows: ‘Nothing concrete in the forensic investigation backs up Quick’s story.’

  ‘There are eighteen forensic conclusions that go against your client’s story,’ I said to Borgström.

  ‘Really? Maybe there are even more,’ answered Borgström.

  ‘Was this list something you made use of?’

  ‘How would I use it?’

  ‘I can think of a number of ways, but as a lawyer you know better than me.’

  ‘Well, as you can’t seem to tell me how I should have used the list, I won’t answer your question.’