AND JANNY Stegehuis from the Netherlands were a childless couple aged thirty-four and thirty-nine respectively. For three years they had been saving up for their dream holiday in the Nordic Alps and in the summer of 1984 it was finally going to happen.
On 28 June they left their home in the town of Almelo at dawn and drove without stopping to Ödeshög in Östergötland, where some relatives of Marinus lived. They were on a tight budget and couldn’t afford overnight stays in hotels. After spending three days in Ödeshög, they continued their journey to Finland, where they had friends whom they knew from a church choir.
When Janny and Marinus left Mustasaari in Österbotten they pointed their Toyota Corolla north, towards the real adventure. They went across Nordkalotten via North Cape and then down through the Swedish Alps, where they planned to live in the wilderness and take each day as it came. They looked forward to fishing, experiencing the wildlife and photographing nature.
The journey was harder than they had anticipated due to a great deal of rain, wind and temperatures close to freezing. They were plagued by mosquitoes. But things were to get even worse. An engine problem outside Vittangi resulted in two tows, a night in a hotel and expensive repairs in a garage.
With empty pockets they left Kiruna and headed south. On the evening of 12 July they put up their tent on the tip of a spit at the northern end of Lake Appojaure. Janny wrote in her diary:
Drove to Sjöfallets National Park. Beautiful surroundings. Took some photos. Filmed reindeer and saw a stoat at the roadside. Put up the tent at 16.30 on some wooded land. The mosquitoes continue to torment us. From Kiruna went 150 km in drizzling rain. Then it cleared up. Now it’s raining.
They rigged up their gas stove outside the tent flap so they had some shelter from the rain while preparing a simple meal of sausages and green beans.
Just before midnight on Friday, 13 July, the police in Gällivare received a call from Matti Järvinen, a resident of Gothenburg holidaying in the Swedish mountains, who reported that he had chanced upon a dead person in a tent at a picnic spot next to Lake Appojaure. Detective Inspector Harry Brännström and senior officer Enar Jakobsson set off at once and after driving eighty kilometres through the rain in the bright northern summer night they reached the place the tourist had described. Before long they found a collapsed two-man tent. Carefully they raised the poles at the short end and unzipped the flap. The scene that met their eyes was described in the police report:
By the long wall on the west side lies the corpse of a man. He is estimated to be between 30 and 40 years old. The body is on its back. [. . .] The heaviest bloodstains are on the face and around the neck and on the right shoulder. A dense area of absorbed blood is on the right side of the jumper by the sleeve seam at nipple level. Other visible parts of the jumper are bloodstained. The dead man has stab wounds or slashes to his right upper arm, to the left side of his throat as well as to the right of his breast beside the nipple. There is what looks like a contusion across his mouth. [. . .]
To the right of the man, as viewed from the tent flap, lies the dead body of a woman. Her head, the right cheek resting against the floor of the tent, lies alongside the man’s hip. The body is lying on its right side and is bent to an angle of almost 90 degrees. The left arm is extended and rests at an angle of about 45 degrees from the upper body. The upper parts of the body are wrapped in a patterned duvet cover of the same kind as the one the man lies in. The duvet cover is very heavily bloodstained.
Outside the tent the police found what might have been the murder weapon – a thin-bladed fillet knife made by Falcon, a Swedish manufacturer. The blade had snapped off and was later found between the woman’s arm and body. It had broken when the knife struck bone with great force.
Between the tent’s opening and the lake a grey-green Toyota Corolla with Dutch number plates was parked. The car was locked, the interior was in good order and there was no sign of unlawful entry.
The police were quickly able to identify the victims. The crime scene gave a strong indication that this had been the work of a lunatic, pure and simple.
The following day the bodies were transported to Umeå, where the medical examiner Anders Eriksson made a thorough forensic examination. In two autopsy reports he describes a very large number of stab and slash wounds.
The investigators concluded that the murderer had stabbed the sleeping couple in a frenzied fashion through the fabric of the tent. Both the woman and the man had woken during the attack – they had defensive wounds on their arms – but neither of them had even been able to get out of their sleeping bags. The incident itself must have happened very quickly.
The news of the murder shook the whole country. Perhaps the worst part of it was the cowardice of whoever had sneaked up on an unknown, wholly defenceless couple in their sleep; or perhaps it was the anonymous, faceless nature of the attack, with the knife stabbing through the thin canvas of the tent, making it impossible for the victims to understand what was happening or see who was attacking them; or was it the frenzy revealed by the large number of wounds? All the evidence at the scene pointed to a perpetrator without any kind of motive. The double murder of the Stegehuises was so strange and twisted in every respect, the only explanation was that it must have been committed by someone unfathomably sick.
The brutal crime in the Swedish wilderness also attracted a good deal of attention outside the country. In the police investigation that followed, more than a thousand people were questioned without any progress being made.
When lengthy murder inquiries are solved it is usually found that the perpetrator has made an appearance somewhere in the investigation documents, but in this case there was no trace of the man who confessed to the crime ten years later. Another fact puzzling the investigators was that Thomas Quick – who up until that point had been known as a murderer only of boys – was confessing to the brutal knife killing of a couple in their thirties.
In the first police interview, held on 23 November 1994, Quick described taking a train from Falun to Jokkmokk, a place he was familiar with from his time as a student at the High School in the academic year 1971–2. He stole a bicycle from outside the Sami Museum and rode off without any particular destination in mind. By coincidence he ended up on the road known as Vägen Västerut, which runs from Porjus towards Stora Sjöfallet.
At the picnic spot by Appojaure he caught sight of the Stegehuises, then later that night he attacked them with a hunting knife he had brought with him.
Quick’s account was vague. He even explicitly stated that he wasn’t absolutely certain that he had had anything to do with the murder. What made him doubt it, he said, was the nature of the violence, and also because one of the victims was a woman.
In his second interview Quick changed his story, bringing in a second man whom he had arranged to meet in Jokkmokk. This accomplice was a well-known hardened criminal named Johnny Farebrink, whose name, unlike Quick’s, had already cropped up in the investigation.
Thomas Quick claimed that they had driven in Farebrink’s Volkswagen pickup to Appojaure, where together they stabbed the Stegehuises to death. More interviews followed and Quick’s story grew more detailed. Quick told the police that he had met with a school friend from his old high school and that he and Johnny had visited another person in his home in Porjus.
The news that Thomas Quick had an accomplice in the murder of the Stegehuises was picked up by the newspapers. At the time, Johnny Farebrink was serving a ten-year sentence for another murder, and when Expressen asked him to comment on Quick’s accusation, he responded, ‘This is bloody rubbish! I don’t know this guy. I’ve never met him.’
However,
