– when I was thirty-seven years old – but I immediately managed to sell a number of stories to Swedish Television’s (SVT) investigative journalism programme Striptease. I enjoyed the work, I had unlimited energy and I felt everything was going astonishingly well. Before I knew it I was a permanent employee.
My interest from the very beginning was focused on crime and justice reporting, and within a couple of years, working with the reporter Janne Josefsson, we chanced upon a scoop that I was certain I would never be able to trump. It concerned the drug addict Osmo Vallo, whose time of death happened to coincide with a hundred-kilo police constable stamping on his back while he lay on the ground with his hands cuffed. There was no connection between his death and the police’s treatment of him, according to the medical examiners.
Our examination of the case forced two new autopsies of Osmo Vallo’s body, resulting in the conclusion that the cause of death was precisely the effect of the policeman stamping on Vallo’s back.
We were awarded the Swedish Great Journalism Award for our reporting on Osmo Vallo. In my first years as a journalist I received a number of other national and international prizes and honours.
These successes gave me a great deal of freedom at SVT, where my superiors saw in me a trusty provider of broadcast-quality reportage. After ten years as a researcher, working with the reporters Johan Brånstad and Janne Josefsson, I became a reporter in my own right in 2003. I began with the most politically incorrect and taboo-laden subject one could imagine: ‘The Case of Ulf’. This concerned a man sentenced to eight years in prison, though he denied all charges, for sexually abusing his daughter. Following my report on Uppdrag granskning (Investigation Assignment) the accused appealed and, after three years in prison, was able to leave the court a free man.
Most likely it was this case that led to my home telephone ringing one September evening in 2007. I heard an elderly man’s voice asking me if I was the one who had made television documentaries on old legal cases. I couldn’t deny that I was. He told me about a large number of deliberately started fires, ‘more than fifty’, in and around the town of Falun between 1975 and 1976.
I thought this was beginning to sound like yet another of those extraordinarily deterring tip-offs I received more or less by the minute.
‘A group of youths and children got blamed for it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t thought about it very much over the years, but now as I’m growing older it’s started eating away at me . . . I’m calling so you can help put things in order.’
‘OK?’ I said, puzzled.
‘You see, the one who started those fires . . . was me.’
The hairs on my arms stood up. I realised I’d never be able to stop myself trying to find out if what he was saying was true.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m willing to dig out the verdicts and other material on the fires to check what you’ve told me. How do I contact you?’
‘You don’t,’ said the anonymous voice. ‘I have children, I live in an area far from Falun and I’m not prepared to reveal my identity.’
‘Are you serious? I’m supposed to put in weeks of full-time work “to put things in order” for you, without even knowing who you are?’
‘I’ll call you in two weeks. If you do a bit of background research about the fires, you can test my knowledge with a few questions. I promise you’ll be convinced I really am the “Falun Arsonist”.’
Things worked out exactly as my informer said they would. He called back two weeks later, by which time I had read some of the verdicts and newspaper articles on the case. I asked him several questions about the fires, which he was able to answer convincingly.
There was only one problem. Of the ten suspects questioned by the police, nine had admitted their guilt. Surely the case was cut and dried? But the anonymous caller stood his ground: these young people were innocent.
So I tracked them all down and got the same story from each of them – they had had nothing to do with the fires; the arson story had ruined their lives. They had been arrested and subjected to tough police questioning. Their interrogators had denied them both legal representation and the possibility of calling their parents. But if they made full confessions they would be released and could go home. And so they confessed.
They did it to get out of an unbearable situation. But their confessions were used by the social services to have them put into institutional care and they ended up in children’s homes. As adults, many of them had tried to keep this aspect of their past secret, even to their children and spouses. They were in despair that I had shown up to rake over the ashes. Participating in an investigative programme was out of the question for most of them.
Gubb Jan Stigson had covered the hunt for the Falun Arsonist in 1975–6 and had written countless articles on the fires. When I stepped into his office at Dala-Demokraten on a bright winter’s day in January 2008, I wasn’t thinking about Thomas Quick at all.
Stigson sat behind his crowded desk, with his feet on the table – he was wearing clogs – and his hands behind his neck. He didn’t rise to greet me, merely nodded nonchalantly at the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk. Some of the faded piles of paper looked as if they had been there for years.
I spotted an unframed and yellowing diploma curling up around a lone drawing pin above Stigson’s black tufts of hair. It read: ‘The 1995 Grand Prize of the Publicists’ Club to Gubb Jan Stigson. For his passionate and patient work as a crime reporter for more than 20 years.’
Once we had got my main errand, relating to the Falun Arsonist, out of the way he fixed his peppercorn eyes on me.
‘We should help each other expose the liars spreading false information about Thomas Quick,’ he suggested in the melodious dialect of Dalarna. ‘People who say Quick is innocent don’t know what they are talking about!’
I wasn’t surprised. Stigson was the most dedicated fact-grubber when it came to Thomas Quick, and he was still pushing his line of argument in the Quick feud, ten years after it first broke out.
Nor was it the first time I had listened to Stigson’s arguments; he had been trying to convince me for years to take a long, hard look at the case of Thomas Quick, who, he was convinced, was guilty of all eight murders as charged. I had replied that it would not be much of a journalistic feat to reveal that past court judgments had been correct. A handful of critics maintaining Quick’s innocence didn’t change this fact.
By coincidence, I had discussed the matter only a week earlier with Stigson’s chief enemy, Leif G.W. Persson.
‘Thomas Quick is just a pathetic paedophile,’ Persson had told me. ‘By managing to get the bastard convicted, the police, prosecutors and therapists have only helped protect the real murderers. It’s a sad story. I’d even call it the greatest miscarriage of justice we’ve ever seen in this country. Remember, there is not a shred of evidence against Thomas Quick except his confessions.’
‘But surely you can’t deny that Quick said quite a lot about the murder victims, the crime scenes and the victims’ injuries?’ I objected. ‘How did he manage that?’
Persson scratched his beard and muttered in his inimitable way, ‘That’s pure nonsense, criminological tittle-tattle spread by Quick’s coterie of reporters, investigators and the prosecutor. Quick doesn’t actually know very much when he’s first up for questioning.’
‘Quick’s
