actual fact Fjell is a typical 1970s concrete suburb with high-rise blocks, viaducts, shopping centres and 5,000 inhabitants in a fairly concentrated area.
Quick’s voice grew increasingly quiet and finally he whispered, ‘This is going to be bloody difficult!’
If at the time of questioning Penttinen was aware of how badly Quick’s description corresponded to reality, he hid it well. He kept plying him with new questions:
PENTTINEN: Do you know what time of day this is, more or less?
TQ: Should be more or less lunchtime.
PENTTINEN: What does lunchtime mean for you?
TQ: The middle of the day.
PENTTINEN: Do you remember what the weather was like?
TQ: The weather was quite good, high clouds. Summer . . .
Therese disappeared at twenty past eight in the evening. Quick’s remark on the decent summer weather did not ring particularly true, as at the time of Therese’s disappearance Fjell was experiencing some of the worst torrential rainfall in ten years.
After the interview, Seppo Penttinen summarised Quick’s descriptions of Therese’s appearance and clothes:
He stated that she had fair, shoulder-length hair, her hair bounced when she ran. She was wearing trousers and possibly a jacket. Later in the interview he said there was something pink, and he has a memory of it being a T-shirt with buttons. Her panties were patterned. She was wearing a wristwatch. Quick made an association of the strap being thin with a simple buckle and he had a colour impression of the watch as light green or pink.
Improbably enough, all these descriptions were wrong, and one would be quite justified in describing the account as a ‘total miss’, as certain critics of the Quick case have pointed out.
In the original police investigation after Therese’s disappearance, a great deal of care was given to the girl’s description, including every possible detail, with her clothes carefully specified. The most recent photograph was also there.
The girl in the colour photograph is standing in front of a brick wall, looking candidly into the camera. Her hair is black, her skin a golden brown, her eyes dark brown. A happy smile reveals a gap of two missing front teeth, pulling the corners of her eyes into a squint.
Quick spoke about Therese’s big front teeth. Maybe they had grown since the photograph was taken?
When I called Inger-Lise Johannesen, Therese’s mother, she told me they hadn’t even started coming through.
Thomas Quick’s blonde version of Therese is quite simply a stereotype of a Norwegian girl, a guess with reasonably good odds, statistically speaking, of being correct. In the end, everything was wrong except the information Thomas Quick had read in the little side article in Verdens Gang.
THE DEAD END
ONE LATE AFTERNOON on 23 April 1996 the police’s little convoy of vehicles drove via Örebro and Lindesberg on Highway E18 into a little settlement known as Ørje on Svenskvejen (‘the Swedish road’) towards Oslo. Thomas Quick sat in the middle seat of a white minibus next to Inspector Seppo Penttinen.
The aim of the trip was for Quick to show where and how he had murdered two asylum-seeking African boys and nine-year-old Therese Johannesen in Norway.
The details Quick had given corresponded exactly with the case of two boys who had gone missing from the Red Cross asylum-seekers’ centre on the outskirts of Oslo.
During the trip to Norway he outlined the route for how to get there. Before the trip he had made a drawing of the building, which was a fairly unusual old wooden house with a number of unique details. When they arrived, they found that the house looked exactly as in the drawing.
Quick showed them the way to a place known as Mysen, where apparently one of the boys had been killed. The boys’ bodies had then been moved by Quick to Sweden, where he had cannibalised his victims before burying them in Lindesberg.
Detective Inspector Ture Nässén told me how Thomas Quick and the investigators drove to the football pitch in Lindesberg. There, the forensic technicians dug up a large area that Quick had pointed out. The cadaver dog Zampo reacted to the presence of human remains. When no body parts were found, Quick said that he had made a mistake; they should be searching the football pitch in Guldsmedshyttan instead. Despite determined digging and further sniffing by the cadaver dog, nothing was found there either.
While the excavations were in full swing in Guldsmedshyttan, something quite remarkable happened. Ture Nässén received confirmation that the two murder victims the police were looking for were in fact alive. Both had made their way to Sweden, where one of them had settled. The other was living in Canada.
And so two of Thomas Quick’s Norwegian murders no longer existed. Undeterred, their investigations into the third murder continued with renewed energy. After an inquiry lasting some two years, and twenty-one interviews about Therese Johannesen, in which Quick changed his story countless times, his insights into the murder were deemed to be of such accuracy that Hedemora District Court found him guilty.
With my newly acquired insights into witness psychology, and having recently learned of Svein Arne Haavik’s efforts as an informer, I realised that Quick’s testimony wasn’t worth a great deal. Nonetheless, there were the remaining bits of evidence: the pin-pointing of the crime scene in Ørje Forest, the fragments of bone . . .
I needed to go to Drammen, so I called Inspector Håkon Grøttland and invited myself.
‘You’re welcome,’ he agreed.
RECONNAISSANCE IN ØRJE FOREST
IN SEPTEMBER 2008, the photographer Lars Granstrand and I crossed the border at the same place as the Quick investigators during their journey to Norway twelve years earlier.
At Drammen police station we met with Håkon Grøttland, who had participated in all of Quick’s trips to Norway.
‘He’s not like us – he’s not rational or logical,’ said Grøttland.
He explained the specific difficulties investigators had faced in their dealings with Thomas Quick.
‘Quick says “yes” and shakes his head at the same time! And he says “left” when he means right. There are simpler things in God’s world than trying to figure out Thomas Quick.’
Personally, he hadn’t been able to understand him, Grøttland explained. But Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle knew what Quick meant.
Håkon Grøttland had worked on the Therese Johannesen investigation when she disappeared in July 1988. After that, he was part of a Norwegian police unit investigating Thomas Quick and he was still convinced that Quick had murdered Therese Johannesen.
‘What is it that really convinces you?’ I wondered.
‘Just imagine Quick sitting there in a psychiatric clinic in Sweden, having all this detailed knowledge about Therese and Fjell and Ørje Forest. So we go out and check what he has said, and we find that it’s actually true.’
