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THE DOUBTERS

The critics who had questioned Quick’s guilt in the early stages, during the trial for the double murder in Appojaure, hadn’t had very much exposure and were soon forgotten. But in the spring of 1998, while the Therese Johannesen case was under way, a heated Quick debate flared up which would this time become entrenched and give rise to an embittered, apparently endless exchange of hostile fire.

The debate began with an article in DN Debatt written by the journalist Dan Larsson, a former miner from Malmberget who had taken up a new job as the crime correspondent for Norrländska Socialdemokraten. Having followed Quick’s trials for the murders of Charles Zelmanovits and the Stegehuis couple, he was absolutely convinced that Quick was innocent. In his article, Larsson pointed to a number of dubious issues, including the fact that all the investigations had been led by the same small, cohesive band of individuals. He also alluded to the way that Quick, in every successful prosecution against him, had mentioned an accomplice whose participation had to be strongly called into question.

Four days later, DN Debatt published an article written by Nils Wiklund, a university lecturer of forensic psychiatry, who wrote:

The Thomas Quick murder trials are unique in a number of ways. Western judicial procedure is based on an adversarial confrontation, where the court of law seeks to arrive at the truth by evaluating the prosecutor’s argument as well as that of the defence, which seeks to present things in a different way.

During the Quick trials, Wiklund went on, the adversarial principle had been abandoned because the prosecution and defence adopted the same position. His observation was certainly true of the ongoing trial, in which Claes Borgström not only clearly accepted his client’s guilt but also turned to the journalists, psychologists and lawyers taking part in the case and urged them to ‘be responsible’.

‘The repeated attempts of the defence lawyer to silence public debate is both upsetting and irresponsible. He should have tried to achieve an impartial examination within the framework of the court’s examination,’ Wiklund went on.

The heat of the debate was further fuelled when Johan Asplund’s father, Björn, called for Christer van der Kwast to be put on trial. He alleged that van der Kwast’s failure to prosecute Quick’s accomplice in the Therese Johannesen trial amounted to gross professional misconduct. Quick had identified an accomplice and had stated that this person had helped to abduct the girl as well as raping her in a car park. Björn Asplund wrote:

If the Assistant Chief Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast believes that Quick is credible, how can it be that this named person who is known to the police (also to Kwast) is not brought in by the court for questioning?

Acting as an accessory to murder and gross sexual assaults on children are crimes that fall under general prosecution. Asplund therefore believed that van der Kwast had failed to fulfil his duty to prosecute and as a consequence should be tried for misconduct.

Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had followed the trials closely from the very beginning and they were both convinced that Quick’s confessions were false. They fought hard to ‘separate Quick from Johan’.

Other media channels threw themselves into the debate and more critics signed up, including the barrister Kerstin Koorti. In SVT’s (Swedish Television) news programme Aktuellt, she declared that she didn’t believe Thomas Quick was guilty of a single murder. She described the Quick trials as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the twentieth century’.

Criticism of an even more serious nature was published in the debate section of Svenska Dagbladet on 12 June 1998. Under the headline ‘The Quick Case – a Defeat for our System of Justice’, the witness psychologist Astrid Holgersson criticised the team of prosecutor, police and psychiatrist who had ‘single-mindedly focused on looking for anything that implicated Quick in the murders’.

Astrid Holgersson had reviewed interrogation reports from several of the murder investigations and she gave tangible examples of how Christer van der Kwast had prompted Quick to come up with ‘the right answers’ during questioning. It was generally known that Quick, in the early stages of the investigations, had made a number of incorrect statements. However, no systematic analysis of his witness testimony had ever been made, Holgersson said. Instead, the courts had been persuaded to accept unscientific psychological explanations for Quick’s errors. She gave an example from the verdict for the murder of Yenon Levi:

The court noted that ‘the final version has emerged after a number of interviews’ but did not attempt any critical analysis of how it emerged. There was acceptance of psychological speculation on the reasons for this, namely that ‘Quick had problems in confronting some of the details’.

Sven Åke Christianson was in the direct line of fire of Astrid Holgersson’s criticisms. His contribution to the investigation was described as unethical and unscientific. ‘With suggestion and manipulative methods’, he had tried to help Quick to cobble together an account that didn’t contradict the facts of the crime. Holgersson also pointed out that Christianson was performing a secondary professional role on the side of the prosecution while at the same time serving the district courts ‘as an expert capable of assessing the value of his own findings in the investigation’. Accepting both of these roles, according to Holgersson, was plainly ‘unethical’.

Astrid Holgersson further maintained that Christianson had ‘impacted on public opinion in a biased fashion – in direct conflict with the role of professional psychiatrists at court hearings – by spreading his subjective views on the question of guilt in various lectures that he gave on the “serial killer” Quick’.

In the anthology Recovered Memories and False Memories (Oxford University Press, 1997), Christianson had published an article in which he stated that Quick was a serial killer, which presumably should have been the very issue for the courts to determine. Holgersson quoted from Christianson’s article about Quick’s repressed memories which were recovered in therapy:

The memories of the murders caused overwhelming anxiety as these were re-creations of the sexual and sadistic assaults to which the serial killer had himself been subjected as a child.

Astrid Holgersson commented:

As mentioned before, there is no actual evidence for the supposition that Quick is a serial killer, that he was subjected to sexual abuse as a child or that this should be considered a distinguishing feature of serial killers.

The members of what Holgersson denoted ‘Team Quick’ – prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, chief interrogator Seppo Penttinen, therapist Birgitta Ståhle and memory expert Sven Åke Christianson – kept their heads down and remained silent throughout the exchange. The one person who did come forward as a defender of the investigation was Claes Borgström. He had already taken a few hard knocks, as a number of critics had remarked on his passivity during the investigation and trial.

Borgström’s response to Holgersson’s critique in Svenska Dagbladet under the headline ‘An Unusually Nasty Conspiracy Theory’ was laced with sarcasm and irony:

One must really thank Astrid Holgersson for her scientifically well-founded judgements on these horrific crimes that won’t leave those affected by them any peace for the rest of their lives. All she has to do is go through a few papers and have a look at a few video clips. She will find the truth lying there, ready and waiting.

The Quick feud reached its peak in August 1998 with the publication of Dan Larsson’s book Mytomanen Thomas Quick (‘Thomas Quick, the Mythomaniac’), which was primarily concerned with the double murder in Appojaure. Larsson believed that those murders were the work of a local bodybuilder who was abusing amphetamines, alcohol and anabolic steroids. Gubb Jan Stigson reviewed the book in the news section in Dala-Demokraten under the headline ‘New Book on Quick an Embarrassing Bungled Job’. Even though the newspaper had set aside a full page for the review, Stigson concluded by stating: ‘The failings in Larsson’s background material are so numerous that there simply isn’t enough space for them all here. This examination will therefore continue in tomorrow’s edition of DD.’

And sure enough, the ‘review’ did continue the following day. By this stage, the Quick feud had forced all the participants into diametrically opposed positions and had become an irreconcilable battle of personal prestige in which it was no longer possible for any of the parties to retreat a single inch from their stated positions.