Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 15

YENON LEVI

The accepted definition of a serial killer is taken from the FBI and stipulates that he or she must have committed three or more murders on separate occasions. By contrast, multiple murders that lack a ‘cooling-off period’ in between are categorised as ‘spree murders’.

So far, Thomas Quick had ‘only’ been convicted of three murders on two separate occasions and thus he didn’t meet the formal criteria to be classed as a serial killer. However, during the investigation into the murders in Appojaure the list of confessions to other murders had grown considerably, and Quick was very definitely a serial killer in waiting.

These confessions were not always initially made to the police. Pelle Tagesson of Expressen was able to reveal in August 1995 that Thomas Quick had confessed during an interview with him to having ‘murdered in Skåne’ and, by inference, was accepting responsibility for the sadistic sex murder of nine-year-old Helén Nilsson of Hörby in 1989. In the same interview, Quick also confessed to the killing of two boys in Norway and two males from ‘central Sweden’.

Christer van der Kwast was clearly put out by Quick’s bypassing both therapists and investigators to make his confessions directly to the media. ‘I can only hope that he also confesses to me,’ he commented.

By leaving clues and making suggestive allusions about murders, sometimes to the police and sometimes to therapists or journalists, Quick was playing a game of cat and mouse that irritated more people than just van der Kwast.

Journalists and the media were assuming an important but unclear role in the investigation. Quick was free to meet any reporters he liked and he always read what had been written about him. Van der Kwast could do little but accept that he had to learn from Expressen that Quick had committed one of his ‘new’ murders in the region of Dalarna, which immediately led the investigation to the notorious murder of the Israeli citizen Yenon Levi on the edge of the village of Rörshyttan on 11 June 1988.

Yenon Levi was a twenty-four-year-old tourist who was found dead beside a forest track in Dalarna. An extensive police investigation had led to a suspect, but the evidence was not sufficiently conclusive to go to trial.

The murder in Rörshyttan had been bubbling under the surface of the Quick investigation for quite some time. About a month after the reconstruction in Appojaure, Thomas Quick called the chief interrogator, Seppo Penttinen, at home. Penttinen drafted a memo of the conversation:

On Wednesday, 19 August at 19.45 the signatory below was telephoned by Quick. Quick said that he was feeling very bad psychologically and that he wished to talk about certain events he was feeling anxious about. With regard to the case of the Israeli man in Dalarna, Quick says that he was helped by another person to carry out the murder.

Quick stated that they had met Yenon Levi on a side street in Uppsala. His accomplice had spoken English to Levi, who then accompanied them in Quick’s car to Dalarna, where the two men murdered the Israeli.

Quick held him while the other punched him and struck him with ‘a heavy object from the boot of the car’. The body was left at the scene where the man was attacked, and it was not arranged in any particular way. The body ended up more on its back than on its side and definitely not on its stomach.

Quick mentioned that he has kept up with what has been written in the press about the case, but he has avoided looking at the photos and he hasn’t read everything written about it.

Quick’s confession to the murder of Yenon Levi was not greeted with enthusiasm by the investigators. Seppo Penttinen told Quick that so much had been written regarding this murder in the newspapers that it would be difficult to say anything about it that wasn’t already generally known.

Once the preliminary investigation into Appojaure had been completed, further interrogation concerning the Yenon Levi murder was nonetheless carried out. Quick was now suggesting that he had been alone when he caught sight of Levi in Uppsala and convinced the man to accompany him to Falun. Close to Sala they stopped by a holiday cottage, where Quick killed Levi with two blows with a stone to the head. Afterwards, the body was dragged onto the back seat and the journey continued to Rörshyttan, where Quick turned off onto a forest track and dumped it in the woods.

The investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi was long-drawn-out and difficult for everyone involved. Quick’s account of the murder was constantly changing. Sometimes he claimed there was an accomplice involved, sometimes not. The actual place where the murder took place varied, as did the information about where he had first met Levi. Quick was even more confused about the murder weapon he had used.

In the early stages of the preliminary investigation, Thomas Quick had claimed that the murder weapon was a stone, which was incorrect. During further questioning, at various times he suggested that the murder weapon was a car jack, a rim wrench, a short-handled camping axe, an iron bar lever, a piece of firewood or a kick or two. All of these proposals were also incorrect.

Over the course of almost a year, Seppo Penttinen held fourteen interviews with Quick and carried out one reconnaissance of the crime scene and two reconstructions. During the second reconstruction, Quick referred to the murder weapon as ‘a sort of wooden texture’.

‘Do you see anything here that corresponds to the length of it?’ asked Penttinen, while at the same time indicating a measure of about a metre between his hands. Quick immediately went and picked up a wooden stick of more or less that length, which conveniently enough was lying nearby.

Christer van der Kwast did not subscribe to the view that Quick’s constantly changing story was damaging his credibility. ‘The difficulty has been that the memories of the murders have been fragmented and unstructured and that sometimes it has taken a very long time before he can piece together the various fragments into a cohesive whole,’ he explained, sounding very much like Quick’s therapists at Säter Hospital.

After one and a half years of therapy, police questioning and repeated reconstructions, Thomas Quick had managed to structure his fragmented memories into a more or less cohesive story: Quick and his accomplice had initially forcibly removed Yenon Levi from a train platform at Uppsala station to a car park, where he was bundled into the car. Thereafter the accomplice had kept Levi in check by holding a knife to his throat, while Quick drove them to the murder scene.

On 10 April 1997 Christer van der Kwast handed in a court application to Hedemora District Court. The crime description was short:

Thomas Quick took Yenon Levi’s life by blunt violence against Levi’s head and upper body between 5–11 June 1988 in Rörshyttan, in the municipality of Hedemora.

This was the third murder trial in which Thomas Quick was alleging that he had killed with the help of an accomplice. Also for the third consecutive time, the accomplice had not been called to appear at court. His full name was given in the verdict and his participation in the murder of Yenon Levi described in detail, but as he had denied the charge and there was no evidence against him, no further action could be taken against him. ‘Questioning NN with regard to this case would not be productive for us,’ Christer van der Kwast concluded.

Hedemora District Court was forced to acknowledge that during the trial ‘no evidence had been presented that directly connected Thomas Quick to the crime’. However, the court believed that Quick’s account of the murder had been coherent and free of serious inconsistencies. He had provided a great deal of accurate information about the murder scene, the victim’s clothes and wounds – details that, according to the court, corresponded very well with facts established by the autopsy and the forensic examination of the scene.

Quick had also referred to other specific details which seemed to suggest that he really had murdered Yenon Levi: for instance, he described finding a carved wooden knife in his backpack which the victim had mentioned in a postcard to his mother.

Seppo Penttinen explained to the court that Quick’s discrepancies weren’t particularly remarkable. The convoluted process of arriving at the correct murder weapon, for example, had always seemed reasonable to Penttinen because he ‘had had the impression that Thomas Quick knew all along that it was a club-like piece of wood, but for reasons of personal distress he had not been able to say so’. Penttinen also gave testimony on the emergence of Quick’s story in questioning and the manner in which the interviews were conducted, which was considered highly important in the sentencing. There was a view that Quick had provided detailed information which only the murderer could possibly have known.

On 28 May 1997 Thomas Quick was found guilty and convicted of the murder of Yenon Levi:

In conclusion, the court finds that Thomas Quick’s account has high evidential value. By his confession and the investigation as a whole it is placed beyond all reasonable doubt that Thomas Quick has committed the act for which prosecution has been brought. Thomas Quick shall therefore be held responsible for wilfully taking Yenon Levi’s life.

Thomas Quick was handed back into continued psychiatric care.

He had now been found guilty of four murders on three different occasions and could therefore, even by the FBI’s strict definition, call himself a serial killer.