In a country that very few people in the world know what it is, lives a Swedish old man who is about to turn 70 . It has wide entrances, white beard, dark blue eyes and look of affable grandfather. He has changed his identity and calls himself by a name that, like his place of residence, he keeps in the strictest secret. He walks freely through that mysterious town where he resides and from which the only thing that is known for sure is that he is not in his native Sweden. He sits on a bench to quietly read the newspaper in the sun, walks through its streets, stops to look at the window of this or that store ...
That man, who today lives austerely on a low pension, was once known as Thomas Quick, the most terrible serial killer in the history of Europe.
Quick confessed in the 90s to have committed over two decades, between 1964 and 1993, a total of 39 murders. For adults and children, with episodes of cannibalism, rapes, mutilations, with the entire gallery of imaginable horrors included. Baptized by the media as the Swedish Hannibal Lecter , he was found guilty of eight of those killings by six different Swedish courts.
With the peculiarity that it was all a lie. Quick was innocent. He had never killed anyone.
His incredible story now reaches the cinema. The next day 20 of this month premieres in Sweden and Norway Quick , a film by Mikael Håfström that will later make the leap to screens around the world. A film that narrates a film event that was clarified only thanks to the determination and commitment of a journalist, Hannes Råstam (already deceased), and his collaborator, Jenny Küttim . It was they who managed to prove that Quick was actually innocent, and managed to have all convictions weighing on him canceled.
Quick is actually called Sture Bergwall . He was born in a family of devout Christian Pentecostals in which he was always the black sheep. “He used drugs and was gay but, having grown up in that deeply religious family that criminalized homosexuality, he repressed it. He began to annoy children while he was placed on drugs or drunk, ” Jenny Küttim tells Chronicle from Stockholm.
Stole a bank to buy drugs
At 41, and dressed as Santa Claus, Quick tried in 1991 to rob a bank armed with a knife to get money for drugs. He ended up in jail first and then, at his own request, at the Säter high-security psychiatric clinic, 200 kilometers from Stockholm.
In that psychiatric prison there was then a group of avant-garde psychotherapists led by Margit Norell, an important and respected figure in Sweden who died in 2005. Norell was determined to understand how a criminal's mind worked and used a therapy based on the teachings of Freud, according to which women with hysteria had repressed memories and therefore developed that nervous disease.
“They tried to get those supposed repressed memories of Quick . But Quick had no incredible story to tell and that was not enough for therapists, who showed more interest in other patients, ”reveals Jenny Küttim. “However, Quick wanted to continue receiving therapy, because he wanted to understand himself and also because he was given benzodiazepines (psychotropic medications that are frequently prescribed to drug addicts to help them overcome the monkey). Quick was an addict, he wanted those drugs, so he began to lie to gain the attention of psychiatrists.
It was easy for Quick, he was used to lying. In addition, he had been a loser all his life, so first becoming a precious object of study by therapists and then seeing his name written in large letters in the newspapers satiated his ego. Finally it was someone.
So he began to confess crimes. Some based on real murders. He had always been a voracious reader, devoured newspapers and knew all the cases of murders that had shaken Sweden and had not been resolved. Other crimes he decided to attribute were completely invented.
“The therapists were excited by Quick's confession of those murders, of those who remembered nothing until they arrived at Säter. To help him remember the therapists, he was handed books of serial killers, novels like American Psycho, newspaper articles ... », says Küttim. In addition, in the early years, Quick had permission to leave Säter from time to time. He then went to the public libraries in Stockholm, where he swallowed all the articles on murders in old newspapers. And, with all that material at his disposal, he gradually composed a fiction story in which he accused 39 crimes, some real and others invented but each one more horrifying.
CANÍBAL AND PRECOZ
On the 11-year-old Johan Asplund, who disappeared in 1980 without his body being found, said he had dismembered his body, that the pieces had been buried in different places and that some had eaten them. He also said that his first crime had been committed with 14 years, when he murdered and sexually abused in a forest of Thomas Blomgren, a boy of his same age. Something impossible, because just when Thomas was killed Quick was receiving confirmation in a Pentecostal church. Even so, the name of Thomas Quick composed it with the name of that false first victim and his mother's last name.
The psychiatrists expert in repressed memories were convinced of the truthfulness of Quick's testimony, they considered it absolutely credible. And it didn't take them long to persuade the police to investigate those cases.
However, when Quick said that he had thrown a corpse in this or that place and the police combed the area never came to find remains of those bodies. But of course, the therapists argued, their repressed memories were still blurred. The only material evidence that came to be against him was in the case of Therese Johannesen , a nine-year-old girl killed in 1988 in Drammen, in Norway, which Quick claimed to have killed by breaking his skull with a stone and whose body he claimed to have thrown into a lake.
The police spent two weeks draining the 35 million liters of water from that lagoon. They did not find any human remains. But very close there they found a small fragment of just 0.5 millimeters that according to an expert was a piece of bone of a child under 14 years. It fit Quick's story.
Apart from his own confession, that was the only material evidence against Quick. But the therapists and the police had no doubt that they were facing a serial killer. «They were like a cult. They were convinced that Quick was a serial killer, they had decided and they didn't want anything to spoil it. If anyone raised any objection about Quick's guilt, he was immediately expelled from the group. When some agents questioned, for example, how it was possible that Quick had committed his murders using 13 different methods, something unusual in a serial killer, they were removed from the investigation, ”says Jenny Küttim. Nor was anyone shocked that Quick had committed all those killings without anyone ever seeing him hanging around crime scenes.
«It was in the early 90s, we were all very shocked by the character of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and when the case of Quick came to light many rushed to compare him with him, there was great media pressure. The media simply did not do their job: they were confident that the police investigation had been correct, they were delighted that there was a serial killer. They could have easily reviewed all of Thomas Quick's material, but they didn't. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, lived a great moment. And Quick was also the perfect patient, the perfect killer. It all came together.
Total: He was convicted of eight murders by six different courts . The sentences added a total of several decades of imprisonment.
But there was someone who did not fit things: the Swedish investigative journalist Hannes Råstam. She decided to review the case and for this she hired as a collaborator a young woman who was then 24 years old, Jenny Küttim. Together they reviewed the 50,000 pages with the confessions of Quick, the complete medical records of their psychotherapy sessions, the video recordings of their interrogations ... Everything.
THE INVESTIGATION THAT DISMANTLED THE INVENTION
«We start from scratch and check everything, absolutely everything. Råstam was an obsessive journalist with details, and the key is almost always in the details. As soon as he saw something that didn't fit him, he didn't stop until he understood it, ”reveals Küttim.
After six months of investigation and several visits to Quick, one day the alleged murderer released them:
«What can I do if I have not really committed all these murders? I'm trapped".
And Råstam snapped at him: "Now you have your great opportunity: tell me the truth." Quick then confessed that everything was a lie, that he had never killed anyone.
«We knew that Quick was a great liar, a masterful liar. But when he retracted his confessions we were convinced that he was not lying. Everything fit together, ”Küttim tells us. In 2008, Swedish television broadcast a documentary made by Hannes Råstam that left the ojiplático country: Quick not only recanted all the confessions in which 39 murders had been attributed but the doubts about his guilt were piled up.
But there was still a big pitfall: that little piece of bone found by the lake in which Quick claimed to have thrown the body of the girl Therese Johannesen and that an expert had ruled that she was a child under 14 years old. «For several months that supposed bone rest gave us huge headaches, it confused us a lot, very much. But in 2010 it was shown that it was actually a piece of wood and plastic, ”recalls Küttim. And it is that only in 2010 the rest was analyzed in the laboratory and subjected to scientific tests. The fiercest test that pointed to Thomas Quick as a serial killer vanished.
In the following years all the sentences for murder that weighed on him were reviewed and, one after another, they were annulled. On July 30, 2013 Quick was exonerated of the last of the eight crimes for which he had been sentenced. After 23 years of his first entry into prison for attempted armed robbery at a bank and then in Säter's psychiatric prison, he was released without charge.
The journalist Hannes Råstam could not see it: a fulminant cancer of the pancreas and liver ended his life in January 2012ater, when he was only 56 years old. In fact, his book Thomas Quick, how he becomes a serial killer (published in Spain by the main publisher) saw the light after his death.
AND THE THERAPISTS?
No therapist of those who treated Quick, no police of those who investigated his case, has been brought to trial for that case or received any punishment for his performance. A commission investigated what happened, but ruled that no person could be held liable for what happened and that Quick himself had been largely to blame for what had happened to him. With that argument, he was not assigned any financial compensation.
«Quick has now been clean of drugs for 16 years and is really a normal person. He lives very simply and poorly, from a small pension. He is free, happy and wants to leave behind everything he has lived, ”says Küttim, who is still in contact with him. «On the one hand, he is aware of all the damage he has done, especially to the families of the victims. Charge with a tremendous feeling of guilt. And, to be able to live with that enormous weight, he presents himself as a victim. To some extent he is a victim, of course he is, but he is also responsible for what happened. It was he who shattered the investigations into various crimes carried out by the police: when he confessed guilty to these murders, the police stopped looking for the real perpetrators of them. And by the time it was revealed that Quick was innocent it was already late, it had been a long time.
In fact, none of the eight murders for which Quick was convicted has been clarified. What further explains the animosity that the relatives of these victims feel towards him, who consider that he destroyed their lives.
Quick now lives in a secret place, with a secret identity. «He doesn't want to know where he is. I obviously know where he is, but I can't tell him. He does not live in Sweden, yes, and is trying to start over. He doesn't want to talk to anyone. Sometimes I give him some requests to interview him by email or by phone, but he rejects all ».
Probably, in the world there must be other Thomas Quick. «His is an absolutely extraordinary story, with all the imaginable ingredients. But false confessions are quite common in police investigations. What is not so common is to confess as many murders as Thomas Quick confessed and for such a long period of time. Regarding the repressed memories, they are gaining ground again thanks to the Metoo movement. So I think that stories like Thomas Quick's will continue to appear from time to time because the components that make them possible are still there. Word of the woman who dismantled the invention of the greatest serial killer.
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