‘Sorry, it’s just so terrible thinking about it,’ he managed to tell me through his convulsions.
I don’t think I have ever seen a grown man cry with such abandon. Like a child. It was touching and frightening at the same time.
I was concerned that I had ruined everything I had started to build up, but Sture soon pulled himself together, wiped his tears and went to the locked door.
‘Wait here! I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, pressing the button.
Before long a care assistant was there to let him out. A few moments later he came back with a big tin box containing hundreds of photographs from his childhood, adolescence and adult years. We sat there for a long time, looking through the photographs. Many were of Sture posing or indulging in horseplay for the camera.
The television producer in me only had one thought: How can I persuade Sture to lend me this box?
One of the photos was of a woman in her mid-thirties. She was sitting in a kitchen, smiling at the camera. Sture held the photo under my nose.
‘This is a bit odd. This is the only woman I ever had sex with,’ he said.
I sensed a certain pride in him.
‘The only one?’ I asked, dumbfounded. ‘Ever?’
‘Yeah. Just with her. There are some special reasons for it,’ he explained cryptically.
Long after, I learned that these ‘special reasons’ were that at a certain time in his life he dreamed of having children. Maybe he could manage to live with a woman despite his sexual orientation? The attempt was unsuccessful.
For my own part, that photograph and what Sture had just told me had another significance. Gry Storvik, I thought to myself. The woman working as a prostitute in Norway, who had been murdered and dumped in a car park with a man’s sperm inside her body. That woman in the photo is not Gry Storvik! With whom you claimed you had intercourse.
So why had Sture told me this intimate detail? Had he given himself away? Or was he consciously leading me down this train of thought? No, we had never spoken of either Gry Storvik or any other murder, so why would he think I knew about his claim to have had sexual intercourse with Gry? My thoughts swung back and forth along these lines as we continued looking through the photographs.
As my visit started drawing to a close I asked, in a slightly absentminded way, ‘Do you think you could lend me a few of your photos?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to.’
I made do with five photographs: Sture in the kiosk; Sture and the guys on a hard rock outing; Sture looking with mock alarm into his empty wallet; Sture at the kitchen table; Sture posing outside the Olofssons’ holiday cottage, where allegedly Yenon Levi was murdered.
That Sture let me take the five photographs was a clear indication of trust. As we parted, I knew that Sture would participate in my documentary. One way or another.
A DISCOVERY
BY THE END of the summer of 2008, both Gubb Jan Stigson and Leif G.W. Persson were becoming irritated with me.
‘If you still haven’t twigged what this is about you must be bloody stupid!’ said Persson petulantly.
Stigson thought my mental faculties were just as impaired, since I hadn’t understood that Quick really was the serial killer he had been convicted as.
‘Take the murder of Therese Johannesen, for example. Therese was nine years old when she disappeared from a residential neighbourhood known as Fjell in Norway on 3 July in 1988. Seven years later Thomas Quick confesses to the murder. He’s in Säter Hospital by then, he’s capable of describing Fjell; he’s shown the police to the spot, he’s told them there was a bank there in 1988, he knew that the balconies had been repainted – all completely correct! He’s said there was a children’s playground being built and there were wooden planks scattered about on the ground. How could Quick know all that?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘If what you’re saying is right, then I suppose at least he must have been there,’ I admitted.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Stigson. ‘And then he showed the police a wooded area where he murdered her and hid the body. That’s where they found pieces of bone that proved to be from a human aged eight to fifteen. In one of the fragments there was a groove from a saw blade! Thomas Quick was able to show where he had hidden a hacksaw blade which fitted into the groove in the bone.’
Stigson shook his head.
‘And then they say there’s no evidence! I mean, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, which is exactly what the Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz, wrote after he’d reviewed all of Quick’s verdicts.’
‘Sure, it sounds convincing,’ I said.
Gubb Jan Stigson had such a rabid, unshakeable and one-eyed view of Thomas Quick that I was reluctant to argue with him. Even so, I was grateful to him. He was a well-informed and invaluable person to talk to, who had also generously supplied me with material from the extensive investigations.
On one occasion he photocopied all three hundred articles he had written on the subject.
But his most important contribution was probably that he put in a good word for me with his allies – Seppo Penttinen, Christer van der Kwast and Claes Borgström. I don’t know exactly who he spoke to, but I do know that he opened many doors for me.
Penttinen wasn’t dismissive when I phoned him, despite his great suspicion of journalists who wanted to talk about Thomas Quick. He made it quite clear to me that he would never agree to be interviewed – he never agreed to interviews on principle – but he sent material that he felt I ought to read, including his own article ‘The Chief Interrogator’s View of the Mystery of Thomas Quick’, published in 2004 in the Nordisk kriminalkrönika (‘Nordic Crime Chronicle’), where, among other things, he wrote, ‘To demonstrate what sort of evidence underpinned the successful convictions, the investigation into the murder of Therese Johannesen in Drammen might serve as a typical example.’
Even van der Kwast had emphasised the Therese investigation as the one where there had been the strongest proof against Quick. If Stigson, Penttinen and van der Kwast were agreed on this, there was no longer any doubt about which case I would try to get to the bottom of, to examine whether there was any basis for the murmurings about a judicial scandal.
Thomas Quick revealed things about his victims that only the perpetrator and the police could have known. Sometimes he even said things that the police were unaware of. This was clearly stated in the sentencing documents.
In several instances it was also difficult to see how he could have been aware of some of the murders at all. This was not least true of the Norwegian murders, which had hardly been covered in the Swedish media. How could Quick, locked up at Säter Hospital, even have had the knowledge to talk about the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen? Or show the way to the remote places where their bodies had been found?
I felt that many of those who had doubted Thomas Quick’s testimonies had dismissed the question of the information he had provided too lightly. Some of Quick’s so-called unique
