der Kwast believes that Quick is credible, how can it be that this named person who is known to the police (also to Kwast) is not brought in by the court for questioning?
Acting as an accessory to murder and gross sexual assaults on children are crimes that fall under general prosecution. Asplund therefore believed that van der Kwast had failed to fulfil his duty to prosecute and as a consequence should be tried for misconduct.
Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had followed the trials closely from the very beginning and they were both convinced that Quick’s confessions were false. They fought hard to ‘separate Quick from Johan’.
Other media channels threw themselves into the debate and more critics signed up, including the barrister Kerstin Koorti. In SVT’s (Swedish Television) news programme Aktuellt, she declared that she didn’t believe Thomas Quick was guilty of a single murder. She described the Quick trials as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the twentieth century’.
Criticism of an even more serious nature was published in the debate section of Svenska Dagbladet on 12 June 1998. Under the headline ‘The Quick Case – a Defeat for our System of Justice’, the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson criticised the team of prosecutor, police and psychiatrist who had ‘single-mindedly focused on looking for anything that implicated Quick in the murders’.
Astrid Holgersson had reviewed interrogation reports from several of the murder investigations and she gave tangible examples of how Christer van der Kwast had prompted Quick to come up with ‘the right answers’ during questioning. It was generally known that Quick, in the early stages of the investigations, had made a number of incorrect statements. However, no systematic analysis of his witness testimony had ever been made, Holgersson said. Instead, the courts had been persuaded to accept unscientific psychological explanations for Quick’s errors. She gave an example from the verdict for the murder of Yenon Levi:
The court noted that ‘the final version has emerged after a number of interviews’ but did not attempt any critical analysis of how it emerged. There was acceptance of psychological speculation on the reasons for this, namely that ‘Quick had problems in confronting some of the details’.
Sven Åke Christianson was in the direct line of fire of Astrid Holgersson’s criticisms. His contribution to the investigation was described as unethical and unscientific. ‘With suggestion and manipulative methods’, he had tried to help Quick to cobble together an account that didn’t contradict the facts of the crime. Holgersson also pointed out that Christianson was performing a secondary professional role on the side of the prosecution while at the same time serving the district courts ‘as an expert capable of assessing the value of his own findings in the investigation’. Accepting both of these roles, according to Holgersson, was plainly ‘unethical’.
Astrid Holgersson further maintained that Christianson had ‘impacted on public opinion in a biased fashion – in direct conflict with the role of professional psychiatrists at court hearings – by spreading his subjective views on the question of guilt in various lectures that he gave on the “serial killer” Quick’.
In the anthology Recovered Memories and False Memories (Oxford University Press, 1997), Christianson had published an article in which he stated that Quick was a serial killer, which presumably should have been the very issue for the courts to determine. Holgersson quoted from Christianson’s article about Quick’s repressed memories which were recovered in therapy:
The memories of the murders caused overwhelming anxiety as these were re-creations of the sexual and sadistic assaults to which the serial killer had himself been subjected as a child.
Astrid Holgersson commented:
As mentioned before, there is no actual evidence for the supposition that Quick is a serial killer, that he was subjected to sexual abuse as a child or that this should be considered a distinguishing feature of serial killers.
The members of what Holgersson denoted ‘Team Quick’ – prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen, therapist Birgitta Ståhle and memory expert Sven Åke Christianson – kept their heads down and remained silent throughout the exchange. The one person who did come forward as a defender of the investigation was Claes Borgström. He had already taken a few hard knocks, as a number of critics had remarked on his passivity during the investigation and trial.
Borgström’s response to Holgersson’s critique in Svenska Dagbladet under the headline ‘An Unusually Nasty Conspiracy Theory’ was laced with sarcasm and irony:
One must really thank Astrid Holgersson for her scientifically well-founded judgements on these horrific crimes that won’t leave those affected by them any peace for the rest of their lives. All she has to do is go through a few papers and have a look at a few video clips. She will find the truth lying there, ready and waiting.
The Quick feud reached its peak in August 1998 with the publication of Dan Larsson’s book Mytomanen Thomas Quick (‘Thomas Quick, the Mythomaniac’), which was primarily concerned with the double murder in Appojaure. Larsson believed that those murders were the work of a local bodybuilder who was abusing amphetamines, alcohol and anabolic steroids. Gubb Jan Stigson reviewed the book in the news section in Dala-Demokraten under the headline ‘New Book on Quick an Embarrassing Bungled Job’. Even though the newspaper had set aside a full page for the review, Stigson concluded by stating: ‘The failings in Larsson’s background material are so numerous that there simply isn’t enough space for them all here. This examination will therefore continue in tomorrow’s edition of DD.’
And sure enough, the ‘review’ did continue the following day. By this stage, the Quick feud had forced all the participants into diametrically opposed positions and had become an irreconcilable battle of personal prestige in which it was no longer possible for any of the parties to retreat a single inch from their stated positions.
TRINE JENSEN AND GRY STORVIK
THOMAS QUICK CONTINUED making new confessions of murders. By the summer of 1999 he had reached twenty-five, of which he had been convicted of five. The growing pile of unexamined crimes to which he was confessing made Dagens Nyheter rank him as ‘one of the worst serial killers in the world’.
But something had changed since the Quick feud. Had it sown the seeds of doubt that were now taking root among crime reporters? Or were they and the general public simply growing tired of Thomas Quick?
At any rate, the press archives speak their own clear language: Thomas Quick no longer generated big headlines. Nor was anyone surprised when ‘the boy killer’ Quick, in the spring of 2000, was prosecuted for two typical heterosexual murders of young women in Norway: seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen, found raped and murdered in August 1981, and twenty-three-year-old Gry Storvik, murdered in June 1985. Both women were natives of Oslo and their bodies were found just outside the city.
Police technicians had found traces of sperm inside Gry Storvik. Thomas Quick admitted that he had had sexual intercourse with her prior to the murder, despite his clear-cut homosexual disposition since the age of about thirteen. These two new murders meant that Quick had made the full journey from a boy killer to an omnivorous serial killer without any preferences, patterns of behaviour or geographical limitations.
DNA analysis revealed that the sperm did not belong to Thomas Quick, but even this didn’t give rise to any noticeable consternation. The guilty charge against Quick for murders six and seven was only briefly alluded to in Expressen. Falu District Court made a statement to the effect that there was a lack of technical evidence connecting Thomas Quick to the crimes. Despite this, the
