Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 16

THERESE JOHANNESEN

During the investigation into the murder of Yenon Levi, Thomas Quick continued remembering that he had also killed an assortment of other people. One of many new confessions concerned the murder of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen, who on 3 July 1988 disappeared without trace from her home in a residential area known as Fjell, outside Drammen in Norway.

Therese Johannesen’s disappearance was Norway’s most notorious criminal case to date and led to the biggest police operation in its history. At its peak, some 100 police officers were working on the case. In the first years they questioned 1,721 people. In total, 4,645 tip-offs and leads were passed on to the police, who logged 13,685 observations and movements of cars in the area. But without any success.

In the spring of 1996, Swedish and Norwegian police established close working relations to look in more detail at the murders of Therese Johannesen and two African asylum seekers who had disappeared from a refugee centre in Oslo in March 1989. Quick had confessed to murdering all three of them.

Experience suggests that serial killers usually have a certain modus operandi. Some seek their victims within a particular geographical area; others have a particular type of victim, such as young boys, prostitutes, couples making love and so on. Some murder their victims in a particular way. Ted Bundy, for instance, lured his victims – always white, middle-class women – into his car, where they were killed by a blow to the head with a crowbar.

In light of this, there was scepticism in some quarters when Quick departed from his own stated preferences and practices and confessed to the murder of a girl who had lived in Norway. Even his previous lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, who up until that point had never expressed the slightest reservation, was dubious about this new confession. ‘It’s so off-key, so completely different from his usual behaviour,’ he said.

While admitting that the murder did certainly diverge from established patterns, Christer van der Kwast, who was in charge of the investigation, believed that ‘the investigators must therefore broaden their perspectives’ and understand that killing for its own sake can give the serial killer sexual satisfaction.

On 26 April 1996 Quick left Säter accompanied by a group that consisted of police officers, care assistants from Säter Hospital, memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, psychotherapist Birgitta Ståhle and prosecutor Christer van der Kwast.

Quick was taken on a tour of Fjell. He described to the police where he had first chanced upon Therese, where he rendered her unconscious by dashing her against a stone, and how he carried her into his car and took her away from the scene. He also described how in 1988 there had been a bank in the street and wooden planks on the ground, adding that the balconies had since been repainted in a new colour. This information was found to be correct and Quick was notified that he was under suspicion for the murder of Therese.

The following day, Thomas Quick found himself at the head of a long convoy of cars travelling along Highway E18 towards Sweden. Close to the settlement of Ørje, the convoy swung onto a forest road, where Quick had promised to lead the police to a sandpit where he had hidden Therese’s body. As he walked them round the area, Quick described how he had cut up the body into small parts, which he lowered into the middle of a small lake known as Ringen. After considerable discussion, the investigators decided to drain the lake in order to find Therese’s body parts. The most expensive crime scene investigation in Nordic history took place over the next seven weeks. The lake was drained and all the sediment at the bottom was pumped up until the investigators had reached levels dating back 10,000 years. Water and mud from the bottom were filtered and searched twice without so much as a splinter of bone being found.

‘Thomas Quick has either lied or mistaken the location. We have reason to doubt his credibility,’ said Drammen’s chief of police Tore Johnsen when the last pumps at Lake Ringen were turned off on 17 July.

When the Norwegians reassessed the enormous amount of Therese-related material that had been amassed, they did not find a single sighting, of either people or cars, that could be connected to Thomas Quick.

Many were convinced that this would be the end of the investigation into Quick’s involvement in the murder of Therese, and possibly even the end of the whole Quick inquiry. Yet one year later Thomas Quick was back in Ørje Forest with his entourage of investigators and care assistants.

‘He performed stupendously. This extended reconnaissance was enormously straining for him,’ said the lawyer Claes Borgström afterwards.

‘Now I’m convinced that it was Quick who murdered Therese,’ said Inge-Lise Øverby at the Prosecution Authority in Drammen. ‘We have established that Thomas Quick really was here in the forest. We have very strong circumstantial evidence that he was also in Drammen at the time of Therese’s disappearance.’

The police had found a tree marked with a symbol that Quick claimed he had carved; a saw-blade that Quick said he had left on the scene had also been recovered and a blanket that allegedly belonged to Quick.

But the police’s most important find was a charred spot where Quick said that he had burned Therese’s body parts. At one of these aforementioned places the cadaver dog Zampo picked up the scent of human remains. Among the ashes, forensic technicians had found some scorched pieces that, according to experts, were fragments of a child’s bones.

‘Quick’s Victim Found’, Dala-Demokraten announced across its entire front page on 14 November 1997.

Triumphantly, Christer van der Kwast declared that for the first time they had been able to follow Quick’s confession all the way to the discovery of a murder victim. He described Therese’s bone fragment as a breakthrough for the entire investigation.

‘The remains of a person of Therese Johannesen’s age have been found in a place near Örje, where Thomas Quick says that he hid the body parts of the nine-year-old girl in 1988,’ Gubb Jan Stigson summarised in Dala-Demokraten.

The find in Ørje Forest meant that the Quick investigators now identified new priorities and focused all their energy on the investigation into Therese’s murder. The prosecutor charged Quick with the murder of Therese Johannesen at Hedemora District Court, announcing with great confidence on 13 March 1998: ‘In this case we have a strong concentration on technical evidence.’ Oddly enough, the trial for a murder committed in Norway was entrusted to Hedemora District Court, although the proceedings were held in the high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court. This, apparently, was for reasons of ‘personal safety’.

Christer van der Kwast emphasised that Quick had given them thirty unique details connecting him to the crime. ‘Quick has provided exclusive information of a scope and direction that connect him to the relevant places and to the girl,’ he maintained in his summing-up.

Counsel Claes Borgström had no reservations about the evidence against his client: ‘There is no conclusion to be drawn other than that he committed the act for which prosecution has been brought.’

When Quick gave his own summing-up in the district court, he tried to provide a psychological explanation for his murder of Therese. ‘My guilt is fixed and heavy and a suffering to me, but I want you to understand that I have re-enacted my own experiences from my damaged childhood,’ he said.

As expected, Hedemora District Court reached the verdict that Thomas Quick had beyond all reasonable doubt murdered Therese Johannesen, sentencing him to continued psychiatric care. Quick had been found guilty of his fifth murder.