interrogation concerning the Yenon Levi murder was nonetheless carried out. Quick was now suggesting that he had been alone when he caught sight of Levi in Uppsala and convinced the man to accompany him to Falun. Close to Sala they stopped by a holiday cottage, where Quick killed Levi with two blows with a stone to the head. Afterwards, the body was dragged onto the back seat and the journey continued to Rörshyttan, where Quick turned off onto a forest track and dumped it in the woods.
The investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi was long-drawn-out and difficult for everyone involved. Quick’s account of the murder was constantly changing. Sometimes he claimed there was an accomplice involved, sometimes not. The actual place where the murder took place varied, as did the information about where he had first met Levi. Quick was even more confused about the murder weapon he had used.
In the early stages of the preliminary investigation, Thomas Quick had claimed that the murder weapon was a stone, which was incorrect. During further questioning, at various times he suggested that the murder weapon was a car jack, a rim wrench, a short-handled camping axe, an iron bar lever, a piece of firewood or a kick or two. All of these proposals were also incorrect.
Over the course of almost a year, Seppo Penttinen held fourteen interviews with Quick and carried out one reconnaissance of the crime scene and two reconstructions. During the second reconstruction, Quick referred to the murder weapon as ‘a sort of wooden texture’.
‘Do you see anything here that corresponds to the length of it?’ asked Penttinen, while at the same time indicating a measure of about a metre between his hands. Quick immediately went and picked up a wooden stick of more or less that length, which conveniently enough was lying nearby.
Christer van der Kwast did not subscribe to the view that Quick’s constantly changing story was damaging his credibility. ‘The difficulty has been that the memories of the murders have been fragmented and unstructured and that sometimes it has taken a very long time before he can piece together the various fragments into a cohesive whole,’ he explained, sounding very much like Quick’s therapists at Säter Hospital.
After one and a half years of therapy, police questioning and repeated reconstructions, Thomas Quick had managed to structure his fragmented memories into a more or less cohesive story: Quick and his accomplice had initially forcibly removed Yenon Levi from a train platform at Uppsala station to a car park, where he was bundled into the car. Thereafter the accomplice had kept Levi in check by holding a knife to his throat, while Quick drove them to the murder scene.
On 10 April 1997 Christer van der Kwast handed in a court application to Hedemora District Court. The crime description was short:
Thomas Quick took Yenon Levi’s life by blunt violence against Levi’s head and upper body between 5–11 June 1988 in Rörshyttan, in the municipality of Hedemora.
This was the third murder trial in which Thomas Quick was alleging that he had killed with the help of an accomplice. Also for the third consecutive time, the accomplice had not been called to appear at court. His full name was given in the verdict and his participation in the murder of Yenon Levi described in detail, but as he had denied the charge and there was no evidence against him, no further action could be taken against him. ‘Questioning NN with regard to this case would not be productive for us,’ Christer van der Kwast concluded.
Hedemora District Court was forced to acknowledge that during the trial ‘no evidence had been presented that directly connected Thomas Quick to the crime’. However, the court believed that Quick’s account of the murder had been coherent and free of serious inconsistencies. He had provided a great deal of accurate information about the murder scene, the victim’s clothes and wounds – details that, according to the court, corresponded very well with facts established by the autopsy and the forensic examination of the scene.
Quick had also referred to other specific details which seemed to suggest that he really had murdered Yenon Levi: for instance, he described finding a carved wooden knife in his backpack which the victim had mentioned in a postcard to his mother.
Seppo Penttinen explained to the court that Quick’s discrepancies weren’t particularly remarkable. The convoluted process of arriving at the correct murder weapon, for example, had always seemed reasonable to Penttinen because he ‘had had the impression that Thomas Quick knew all along that it was a club-like piece of wood, but for reasons of personal distress he had not been able to say so’. Penttinen also gave testimony on the emergence of Quick’s story in questioning and the manner in which the interviews were conducted, which was considered highly important in the sentencing. There was a view that Quick had provided detailed information which only the murderer could possibly have known.
On 28 May 1997 Thomas Quick was found guilty and convicted of the murder of Yenon Levi:
In conclusion, the court finds that Thomas Quick’s account has high evidential value. By his confession and the investigation as a whole it is placed beyond all reasonable doubt that Thomas Quick has committed the act for which prosecution has been brought. Thomas Quick shall therefore be held responsible for wilfully taking Yenon Levi’s life.
Thomas Quick was handed back into continued psychiatric care.
He had now been found guilty of four murders on three different occasions and could therefore, even by the FBI’s strict definition, call himself a serial killer.
THERESE JOHANNESEN
During the investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi, Thomas Quick continued remembering that he had also killed an assortment of other people. One of many new confessions concerned the murder of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen, who on 3 July 1988 disappeared without trace from her home in a residential area known as Fjell, outside Drammen in Norway.
Therese Johannesen’s disappearance was Norway’s most notorious criminal case to date and led to the biggest police operation in its history. At its peak, some 100 police officers were working on the case. In the first years they questioned 1,721 people. In total, 4,645 tip-offs and leads were passed on to the police, who logged 13,685 observations and movements of cars in the area. But without any success.
In the spring of 1996, Swedish and Norwegian police established close working relations to look in more detail at the murders of Therese Johannesen and two African asylum seekers who had disappeared from a refugee centre in Oslo in March 1989. Quick had confessed to murdering all three of them.
Experience suggests that serial killers usually have a certain modus operandi. Some seek their victims within a particular geographical area; others have a particular type of victim, such as young boys, prostitutes, couples making love and so on. Some murder their victims in a particular way. Ted Bundy, for instance, lured his victims – always white, middle-class women – into his car, where they were killed by a blow to the head with a crowbar.
In light of this, there was scepticism in some quarters when Quick departed from his own stated preferences and practices and confessed to the murder of a girl who had lived in Norway. Even his previous lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, who up until that point had never expressed the slightest reservation, was dubious about this new confession. ‘It’s so off-key, so completely different from his usual behaviour,’ he said.
While admitting that the murder did certainly diverge from established patterns, Christer van der Kwast, who was in charge of the investigation, believed that ‘the investigators must therefore broaden their perspectives’ and understand that killing for its own sake can give the serial killer sexual satisfaction.
On 26 April 1996 Quick left Säter accompanied by a group that consisted of police officers, care assistants from Säter Hospital, memory expert
