investigation documents.
Quick had given descriptions of the victims’ injuries, details of the crime scenes and information about the victims’ clothes and belongings that had apparently not been mentioned in the media.
How did Quick know that a nine-year-old girl named Therese had gone missing from Fjell in July 1988? Hedemora District Court had recognised the significance of this in its summary of the evidence.
In its verdict for the Therese case, the district court writes: ‘Information about this event available to Quick in the media – in so far as it has been shown – would have been limited.’ And Quick had also given testimony on the subject: ‘He has no memory of having read anything about these events before his confession’, the sentencing document states.
The collected investigation material into the case of Thomas Quick amounts to more than 50,000 pages. I decided to organise the sections pertaining to Therese Johannesen along a timeline, and sat down to read all the interviews and documents from when Quick first started talking about her disappearance. How did he and the investigation get embroiled with Norwegian crimes in the first place?
I found a report in the police investigation stating that Quick had had contact with the Norwegian journalist Svein Arne Haavik. Thomas Quick hadn’t initially attracted any attention at all in Norway, but in July 1995 Haavik wrote him a letter in which he explained that he was working for Norway’s biggest newspaper, Verdens Gang, which had recently published a series of lengthy articles on Thomas Quick. Haavik requested an interview with the serial killer.
The police report gives the following information:
Shortly after, Haavik was telephoned by Thomas Quick, who asked Haavik to send all the newspaper articles about him and his murders in Norway.
Haavik therefore sent Thomas Quick the newspapers from the 6, 7 and 8 July 1995.
The series of articles began on 6 July 1995 with a three-page opener. The front page was filled with a brooding photograph of Thomas Quick looking into the camera.
‘Swedish mass murderer admits: I MURDERED A BOY IN NORWAY.’
Thomas Quick poses across an entire spread, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, Birkenstock sandals and white socks. The reporter describes his ‘murders of bestial cruelty’ and also reveals a snippet of new information: ‘Under a cloak of secrecy, Norwegian and Swedish police have for several months been investigating at least one murder of a young boy in Norway.’
‘I can confirm that a part of our investigation concerns a Norwegian boy whom Quick has told us he killed. The problem has been that we have yet to identify him, but we have some ideas about who the boy might be’, Verdens Gang quoted from a statement by prosecutor Christer van der Kwast.
The following day the next article continued with Thomas Quick’s description of the boy he had killed in Norway as ‘12–13 years old and cycling’.
The concluding article, on 8 July, was a long piece with the headline: ‘Where Quick’s Possible Victims Went Missing’. A half-page photograph shows a refugee centre in Oslo and there is also a smaller image of two African boys.
The boy who went missing disappeared from this refugee centre in Skullerudsbakken in Oslo, which has since closed down, and was most likely the same boy that Thomas Quick (45) has admitted that he killed.
In March 1989, two boys of about 16 and 17 went missing on separate occasions from the Red Cross reception for lone minors.
In other words, when Quick first mentioned Norway it was in reference to the murder of a boy – not a girl. But where did this information come from?
I dug my way back through the investigation material and found that Quick had told Seppo Penttinen in November 1994 about a dark-haired boy of about twelve of ‘Slavic appearance’ whom he called ‘Dusjunka’. He associated the boy with the town of Lindesberg and a Norwegian place which he referred to as ‘Mysen’.
Penttinen wrote to the police in Norway to ask whether they had a case with a boy of such a description who had gone missing. They did not, but his Norwegian colleagues sent information about two asylum-seeking boys of about sixteen or seventeen who had disappeared in Oslo.
Once the article appeared in Verdens Gang, the information became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After a long period of making suggestive comments, Thomas Quick confessed to Penttinen in February 1996 that he had murdered two African boys in Oslo in March 1989. Penttinen immediately started preparing a trip to Norway.
In the interrogations that followed, I was able to read how Thomas Quick denied having read anything about any Norwegian murders in the newspapers, despite the fact that he asked for the serialised articles from Verdens Gang. He gave assurances that he had not seen any photographs of the missing asylum-seeking boys.
I could therefore confirm the following with absolute certainty: Quick had actively sought out information about feasible murders in Norway, he made use of this information during questioning, then lied about not having seen any information about the murders.
The series of articles which Thomas Quick received from Norway also offered another snippet of information. Next to the main article was a smaller item where Verdens Gang speculated on whether Thomas Quick might have been involved in Norway’s most notorious unsolved crime.
Therese Johannesen (9) went missing from the neighbourhood of Fjell in Drammen on 3 July 1988. Her disappearance triggered the most extensive manhunt in Norwegian history.
During this period of time Quick has said that he committed murders in Norway.
Admittedly, the article doesn’t provide any further details on either Therese or Fjell, but it does contain a number of critical pieces of information: the name of the girl and the place and date of her disappearance.
It is proven that Thomas Quick had access to these facts by the end of July 1995, and it is therefore hardly surprising that in the very first interview he was able to say that Therese was nine years old and went missing from Fjell in the summer of 1988.
But with questions that were not answered in the article in Verdens Gang he had less success.
As in most of the murder investigations, Quick’s confession to the murder of Therese Johannesen had started during therapy. ‘Events had floated up’ and Birgitta Ståhle felt bound to report them, she said. Quick had been incoherent and ‘Ståhle described the circumstances as twisted’, Penttinen noted.
The idea was to get the whole story out on Wednesday, 20 March 1996. Birgitta Ståhle and Thomas Quick walked into the music room at Säter Hospital, where Seppo Penttinen and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström were already sitting waiting in the red and black armchairs.
Penttinen asked Quick to describe the residential area of Fjell.
‘I can see properties,’ said Quick. ‘Not apartment blocks. Family houses.’
The place name Fjell (Mountain) may have given Quick the wrong associations, because he described the place as a bucolic idyll with scattered family homes here and there – possibly the Norwegian word for a city neighbourhood, bydel (a part of a village in Swedish), may have caused him some confusion, too. He claimed to have travelled there via an unpaved road.
‘It’s
