A Deep-sea Dive into the Past
Charles Zelmanovits’s Disappearance
Cognitive Interview Techniques
Unique Interrogation Situation
The Trial in Gällivare District Court
The Quick Commission Breaks Down
Chronology of Sture Bergwall/Thomas Quick
FOREWORD BY ELIZABETH DAY
Many of you will find it hard to believe the story you are about to read.
I first came across the extraordinary tale of Thomas Quick, the serial killer who never was, when I read a brief news article in August 2012 about a book that had just been published in Sweden. The book, which went on to be a bestseller, was written by investigative journalist Hannes Råstam and exposed one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice in recent times. It told the story of how a patient incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital had confessed to more than thirty murders he never committed.
The man was called Thomas Quick. He was once believed to be Sweden’s most notorious serial killer. Throughout the 1990s, his bespectacled face stared out from front pages and television screens. The newspapers even gave him his own nickname – ‘The Cannibal’.
On the strength of his confessions, Quick was convicted of eight murders. But when Råstam started investigating the case in 2008, he discovered that there was not a shred of technical evidence that existed to back up the confessions. There were no DNA traces, no murder weapons and no eyewitnesses – nothing apart from Quick’s first-hand accounts, many of which were riddled with inaccuracies and had been given when he was under the influence of narcotic-strength drugs.
The book you now hold in your hands is testament to Råstam’s bloody-minded genius, to the fact that he asked questions and kept asking them, even when it became clear that the Quick scandal reached the highest echelons of Swedish society and even when there were plenty of people who wanted him to stop, who dismissed Råstam’s painstaking research as wild theorising and who didn’t want to admit that something, somewhere had gone so terribly wrong.
Because to admit that Råstam was right was to admit that an innocent man had been wrongfully incarcerated for years. It was to admit that there were murderers at loose who had never been brought to justice for their crimes. That the police, the lawyers and the therapists were all responsible for astonishing lapses of judgement, and an ensuing travesty of justice. And it was to admit that what happened in Sweden
