with the facts established by the murder investigation,’ he said in an interview with Expressen on 23 April 1995. ‘I can only say that the deeper we dig into this story, the more certain we are that Thomas Quick is not lying or fantasising. Thomas Quick was in the vicinity of Appojaure when the murders took place and he had local knowledge from his time as a student at the folk high school in Jokkmokk.’
Thomas Quick had now confessed to seven murders, which – if he was telling the truth – would make him Sweden’s worst serial killer. Two highly experienced police officers from the Palme Unit, which was investigating the murder of the late prime minister, were transferred to the Quick case, including the chief officer, Hans Ölvebro. The inquiry was now of the very highest priority.
On 9 July a specially chartered private jet took off from Arlanda bound for Gällivare. In luxurious armchairs sat Thomas Quick, his therapist Birgitta Ståhle, the public prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, and a number of other officers and care assistants. The purpose of the trip was to carry out a reconstruction of the murder of the Stegehuises.
Also on the plane was Gunnar Lundgren, Quick’s lawyer. Considering the fact that this was now a high-profile and important criminal investigation, a county barrister like Lundgren no longer seemed appropriate. After conferring with Seppo Penttinen and Christianson, the decision had been made that Quick should switch to Claes Borgström, the celebrity lawyer. Borgström accepted the brief, but he was at the very beginning of a five-week holiday. For this reason Gunnar Lundgren had been reluctantly invited to take his place in one of the plane’s leather seats.
The following day Thomas Quick guided the investigators towards Porjus and Vägen Västerut, eventually turning off the forest path to the picnic spot by Appojaure. Here, police technicians had set up the crime scene to look exactly as it did on the night of 13 July 1984. Hans Ölvebro and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström took part in preparing the scene. The gas stove, sleeping bags and other props were arranged just as they had been found after the murders. A specially ordered tent from the Netherlands, exactly like the one in which the Stegehuises had slept on the night of the murders, had been erected at the edge of the forest. Inside, Ölvebro lay in Marinus Stegehuis’s place on the left and Wikström in Janny Stegehuis’s place on the right.
Armed with a stick as a knife, Thomas Quick sneaked up to the tent. He threw himself at it and stabbed in a frenzied manner at the canvas, before making his way inside through the opening. He grunted and roared while Anna Wikström, genuinely terrified, called for help. Quick was overpowered and the reconstruction was brought to a halt.
His actions did not in any way correspond with the known facts of the sequence of events.
After a break, the reconstruction recommenced and now Thomas Quick performed with great concentration and in accordance with the known facts. He calmly described to Penttinen every lunge he made with the knife, while also outlining his collaboration with his accomplice, Johnny Farebrink. He demonstrated how the long tear had been made in the short end of the tent, through which he had made his way inside.
Seven hours later, when the reconstruction was over, both the investigators and the prosecutor expressed their satisfaction with the outcome. Van der Kwast was quoted in Expressen on 12 July saying, ‘It’s gone very, very well.’ He now held the view that Thomas Quick had convincingly shown in the reconstruction that he really had murdered the Dutch couple: ‘He was both willing and able to show in great detail how the murders happened.’
An increasing number of real and self-proclaimed experts set out to explain the experiences and circumstances that had turned the boy, Sture Bergwall, into the sadistic serial killer known as Thomas Quick. Kerstin Vinterhed, a highly respected journalist who wrote for Dagens Nyheter, described his childhood home as a place ‘entirely silent and cut off from the outside world. It was a home where no one visited, where no children were ever seen playing nearby.’
Again, Quick’s childhood was covered – including his father’s rapes, his mother’s cruelty and the two murder attempts against him. His transformation into a murderer was thought to have happened after his father’s last assault, which took place in the forest when Thomas Quick was thirteen. Thomas wanted to kill his father, but changed his mind when he saw how pathetic he looked with his trousers around his ankles.
‘And then I ran away. And it’s like a single, giant step from that moment to the murder I committed in Växjö six months later when I was fourteen,’ Quick explained.
‘So it was as if you were killing yourself, was it?’ Kerstin Vinterhed wondered.
‘Yes, I was killing myself,’ Quick confirmed.
There was a belief that during this murder, just as with all the others, Thomas Quick was both the assailant and the victim. The murders were in actual fact a sort of re-enactment of the assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood. This was the theoretical model used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Quick and was also a method approved by the investigators.
Thomas Quick’s siblings, nephews and nieces responded with powerless shame to the horrifying accounts in the media of the parents’ dreadful cruelty. The Bergwall family no longer talked about Sture. If necessary, he was referred to as ‘TQ’. Sture Bergwall did not exist.
They maintained their silence for a long time. But in 1995 the oldest son, Sten-Ove Bergwall, stepped forward as the family’s spokesman. In the book Min bror Thomas Quick (‘My Brother, Thomas Quick’)
‘I don’t doubt that it seems true to him. It’s a known tendency for people to be encouraged to produce false memories in therapy,’ he said to Expressen, with firm assurances that his parents could not have been guilty of what Thomas Quick was alleging.
Sten-Ove explained that his purpose in writing the book was not to make money, but rather to reclaim the childhood that Thomas Quick had taken from him by the statements he had made. He also wanted to clear the names of his late parents, as they weren’t able to defend themselves against Quick’s accusations.
‘I’m not suggesting that we grew up in a perfect family, but none of us siblings have memories that back up his story. We were not a bunch of people living in isolation, we were not rejected and mysterious. We socialised with people, we travelled a lot and visited relatives at weekends, at Christmas and on birthdays.’
However, when it came to the murders that Thomas Quick had confessed to, Sten-Ove had no doubts: ‘When I heard that a man had confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.’
The trial for the Appojaure murders began in January 1996 at Gällivare District Court. At the trial in Piteå, Thomas Quick had insisted on closed doors while he was being cross-examined, but in Gällivare he conducted himself with great confidence in the courtroom. In front of an audience he accounted for the murder of the Dutch couple in a convincing manner. He described how he had taken a train to Jokkmokk, wanting to find a teenage boy, and there he met a group of German youths and selected one of the boys as his victim.
On a stolen women’s bicycle he had cycled to Domus supermarket, where he met Johnny Farebrink, a ‘gruesome and deeply depressed knife-lunatic’. After a drinking session they had gone together to Appojaure, where the Stegehuises were camping. According to Quick, their reason for going was that Johnny Farebrink had ‘aversions’ to the Dutch couple, while Quick was keen to target the German boy he had met in Jokkmokk, and got the impression that the boy was the Dutch couple’s
