trial in Piteå was set to begin on 1 November and, in the face of the impending legal inquiry into Quick’s confessions, the media released more and more details on the background of the alleged serial killer. While previously it had mainly been the tabloids that took an interest in Quick’s bizarre stories, now the broadsheets threw themselves into the ring. On 1 November Svenska Dagbladet published an article with descriptions of Thomas Quick that from this point were taken as hard facts. The journalist Janne Mattsson wrote:
Thomas Quick was the fifth of seven siblings. His father was a nursing assistant in a home for alcoholics and his mother a caretaker and cleaner at a school that has since closed. Both parents are deceased. [. . .] What lay hidden behind the outer façade remained a well-kept family secret. From the age of four, Thomas Quick claims to have been a victim of his father’s constant sexual predations and was forced to have oral and anal sex with him.
During one of these assaults, something took place that was to shape Quick’s life and morbid sexuality – his mother suddenly appeared and saw what was happening. She was so shocked that she miscarried. Screaming at four-year-old Thomas, she accused him of having murdered his little brother.
The father echoed these accusations and implied that the boy had seduced him. The mother’s relations with her son were henceforth marked by hatred, after the loss of her unborn child. She put all the blame on her son’s shoulders, and this is a burden which he is incapable of carrying.
On at least one occasion she tried to kill him, Quick alleges.
He also alleges that his mother began sexually assaulting him alongside his father.
Janne Mattsson further stated that Quick had already committed two murders while still a teenager:
By the time he was thirteen, Quick had had enough of his father’s abuse and he fought off one of his attempted rapes. On this occasion Quick reports that he wanted to kill his father, but he didn’t dare.
Instead he took on his father’s perverted urges, but with even greater morbid and sadistic aspects. Six months later, at the age of fourteen, he murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö. [. . .] Three years later, on 16 April 1967, a thirteen-year-old boy fell prey to Thomas Quick’s hand.
Although Quick was not yet officially linked to the murders and had not been successfully prosecuted for or convicted of any of them, the media assumed that he was guilty. The same was true of the accusations against the parents, who had allegedly subjected their son to systematic rape, assault and murder attempts.
The stance of the media during this period can be explained by three factors. First, there were Thomas Quick’s confessions. Second, the public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, had made categorical statements that there was other evidence connecting Quick to several of the crimes. Third, these statements were mixed with information about sexual transgressions demonstrably committed by Thomas Quick against young boys in 1969, as well as extracts from statements made by forensic psychiatrists on the danger he posed to the public.
In this way, a complete, apparently logical life story was created for the monstrous killer who would now be prosecuted for the first in a series of murders.
Once again, the article in Svenska Dagbladet cited the forensic psychiatrist who had examined Quick in 1970, claiming that Quick was suffering from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as paedophilia cum sadismus’.
Falu District Court had convicted Quick of the assaults on the boys and he was committed to protective psychiatric care. Four years later, at the age of twenty-three, Quick was judged healthy enough to be released.
‘With hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to release him,’ the article summed up, before closing with the anticipation of a guilty verdict in the approaching trial for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits: ‘They released a live-wired bomb packed with repressed angst. It was this angst that would eventually bring Quick and a homosexual acquaintance to Piteå in order to desecrate, kill and cut up a fifteen-year-old boy.’
Although a great many shocking details had already been published in the newspaper, the actual encounter with Thomas Quick in Piteå District Court was a disturbing experience for those present. The journalists competed in their declarations of disgust and loathing for the monster on the stand.
‘Is a Human Being Capable of Such Cruelty?’ was the headline run by Expressen at the end of the opening day in court. The newspaper’s very own ‘Quick expert’, Pelle Tagesson, went on:
Once you know the terrible truth of what Thomas Quick did to his victims – and once you have heard his deep, bestial roar – only one question remains:
Is he really human?
The scenes that played out yesterday in Piteå District Court must have been the worst ever to take place in a Swedish court of law.
The Säter Man, Thomas Quick, was facing charges for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
He wept – but no one felt sorry for him.
In Aftonbladet, Kerstin Weigl wrote that Thomas Quick was ‘beyond all understanding’. Fortunately the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson was there to explain what normal people couldn’t understand. ‘I don’t think a normal person could ever process what he has done. It’s inconceivable, that’s why we push it away,’ he said, adding that there was a sort of ‘logic’ underlying Quick’s actions. ‘Quick was raped by his father from the age of four. His childhood was stolen from him. He cannot endure his fear, so he attempts to transfer this fear to someone else who can take it on. He has an illusion that he can destroy someone else’s life and thereby re-create his own. But the effects are short-lived. He has to kill again.’
By the end of the first day’s proceedings, any doubt concerning Thomas Quick’s guilt seemed to have vanished: ‘The man is a serial killer, paedophile, necrophile, cannibal and sadist. He is a very, very sick man,’ declared Aftonbladet.
A video from the forest in Piteå showed Quick explaining, in tears and with heart-rending moans, how he had murdered and cut up Charles Zelmanovits. No one in the courtroom was left unmoved.
Kerstin Weigl continued:
For my own part, after hearing those sounds, I cannot have the slightest doubt. The words came in bursts, with deep convulsions as if he was vomiting. Yes – this must be a true account.
Seventeen years after the murder, Quick was able to point out the place where the boy’s body parts were found. He sat on the stone where he had desecrated and cut up the body. He explained exactly where he had hidden what.
The trial in Piteå District Court in November 1994 was a walkover for prosecutor Christer van der Kwast. The members of the District Court unanimously found Thomas Quick guilty of the murder of Charles Zelmanovits.
Their confidence massively boosted, the investigators continued to unravel the case. Up until then they had been focusing on Quick’s whereabouts at the times of unsolved murders of young boys, or whenever boys had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Less than a week after the verdict in Piteå, the entire investigation was thrown on its head when Thomas Quick telephoned the home of senior officer Seppo Penttinen at Sundsvall police to say, ‘It would probably be a good thing if I was confronted with information about the double murder in Norrbotten about ten years ago. I know I was up there at some point . . .’
APPOJAURE
