strangled Johan and buried the body.
The reporter had also managed to get hold of Björn Asplund, who took a fairly sceptical view of this new information. He still believed that Johan had been murdered by the man they had taken action against in the district court. But he was keeping an open mind on the matter.
‘If it’s shown that a totally different person has taken Johan’s life I’ll just have to swallow my pride,’ he told Expressen. ‘The most important thing is that we know the truth.’
Expressen continued following the case and a few days later Anna-Clara Asplund was able to read more details of the confession made by the Säter patient.
‘I picked up Johan outside the school and lured him into my car,’ the Säter Man – as he was known in the press from that day on – said to Expressen on 15 March. ‘I drove to a wooded area where I sexually assaulted the boy. I never meant to kill Johan. But I panicked and strangled him. Then I buried the body so no one would find it.’
The forty-two-year-old was clearly a very sick person. As far back as 1969 he had committed sexual assaults against young boys. His most recent crime had been in 1990, when he and a younger accomplice had been arrested for a bank robbery in Grycksbo outside Falun and confined to Säter Hospital. It was here, during a therapy session, that he had confessed to Johan’s murder. According to Expressen he had said, ‘I can’t live with this any more. I want to start clearing things up; I want atonement and forgiveness so I can move on.’
You can’t live with it any more? Anna-Clara thought, and put away the newspaper.
The public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, was an energetic man of about fifty with very short dark hair and a neat beard. He was renowned for his ability to present his views in a forceful tone and with such conviction that they were accepted as given, by both subordinates and journalists. All in all, he was a man who exuded self-confidence and seemed to relish taking command of his troops, plotting the course by which the whole army should march.
Van der Kwast called a press conference at the end of May. In front of a crowd of expectant journalists, the prosecutor announced that the Säter Man had identified various places where he had hidden the body parts of Johan Asplund. Police technicians were currently searching for his hands in a location outside Falun. Other parts of the dismembered body had allegedly been hidden in the Sundsvall area, but despite careful searching with a cadaver dog, so far nothing had been found.
‘The fact that we have not found anything doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing there,’ the prosecutor commented.
No other evidence had been found to connect the suspect to Johan Asplund’s disappearance and van der Kwast was forced to concede that there was little basis on which to call a trial. Yet suspicions remained, he pointed out, because although there was insufficient evidence in this case, the Säter patient was still tied to an entirely different murder.
Van der Kwast told the press that in 1964 the man in question had murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö: fourteen-year-old Thomas Blomgren.
‘The details provided by the Säter patient in his account are so comprehensive and well supported by the investigation that under normal circumstances I would not have hesitated to bring charges against the man,’ said van der Kwast.
His argument was doubly hypothetical, partly because the statute of limitation for the murder – which at that time was twenty-five years – had expired and partly because the Säter Man had been only fourteen years old at the time of the murder and therefore too young to be tried in a criminal court. Nonetheless, the murder of Thomas Blomgren became highly significant in the continuing investigation: that the Säter Man had murdered at the age of fourteen was undoubtedly compromising.
However, Christer van der Kwast did not reveal how the Säter Man was connected to the murder of Thomas Blomgren, and as there couldn’t be a prosecution in the case, the investigation was never made public. Nevertheless, the Säter Man’s lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, fully agreed with the prosecutor’s views and asserted that his client’s statement was credible.
Increasingly unpleasant details were emerging in the media coverage of the Säter Man’s background and character. He had committed an ‘attempted sex murder’ of a nine-year-old boy at Falu Hospital, according to Gubb Jan Stigson in the Dala-Demokraten: ‘When the nine-year-old screamed the man tried to strangle him. The forty-three-year-old himself describes how he tightened his grip on the boy’s throat until blood spurted from his mouth.’
According to Dala-Demokraten, the doctors had been warning since 1970 that the Säter Man was a likely child killer, and the news paper cited a forensic psychiatrist’s statement confirming that he suffered from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as paedophilia cum sadismus’. He was not only a threat but also, under certain circumstances, extremely dangerous to the safety, well-being and lives of others.
On 12 November 1993 Gubb Jan Stigson revealed that the police investigation regarding the Säter Man had been widened to include five murders. In addition to Johan Asplund in 1980 and Thomas Blomgren in 1964 he was under suspicion for the murders of fifteen-year-old Alvar Larsson from Sirkön, who disappeared in 1967, forty-eight-year-old Ingemar Nylund, who was murdered in Uppsala in 1977, and eighteen-year-old Olle Högbom, who disappeared without trace in Sundsvall in 1983.
According to Stigson, the Säter Man had confessed to all five murders. Increasing numbers of journalists were claiming that Quick was Sweden’s first real serial killer.
‘He is telling the truth about the boy murders’, Expressen’s
The Säter Man had confessed that he and an older friend had driven from Falun to Piteå in search of a young boy to assault. They came across Charles and lured him into the car. In a nearby wooded area the Säter Man had strangled the boy and cut up the body, taking some of the body parts with him.
According to the investigators, Quick had not only provided the sort of information that had enabled them to find the various body parts, but also specified which body parts he had taken home with him.
For the first time, van der Kwast had the sort of evidence the police hadn’t managed to obtain in their other investigations: a confession involving actual body parts and a statement demonstrating that the Säter Man had information that could only possibly be known by the perpetrator.
‘The 43 year-old is a sex killer’, Expressen declared in an article on 17 June.
‘We know he is telling the truth about two of the murders,’ van der Kwast confirmed.
IN THE HEADLINES
WHEN THE SÄTER Man’s therapist, Birgitta Ståhle, went on holiday in July 1994 there was widespread concern about how he would manage without the constant therapeutic support that had become increasingly important to him. On Monday, 4 July his team of carers had planned a lunch at the golf club restaurant in Säter. The Säter Man was accompanied on the outing by a young psychiatry student who was standing in for Ståhle.
She and her patient left Ward 36 at a quarter to twelve and strolled in the direction of the golf course, when he suddenly told her that he urgently needed to relieve himself. He went
