Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 22

THE LETTER TO STURE BERGWALL

I HAD NO idea whose version of events was correct, Gubb Jan Stigson’s or Leif G.W. Persson’s. The entire Quick debate seemed quite absurd to me. Six district courts had unanimously found Thomas Quick guilty of eight murders. In other words, they had taken the view that he was guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet a number of perfectly rational people were claiming that he was innocent of all these murders.

Surely it couldn’t be possible? Logic would seem to suggest that if there was enough evidence to convict Quick for eight murders, it must also be a relatively easy matter to show that Persson, Guillou and the other doubters were mistaken.

On the other hand, if Quick really was innocent, then what Leif G.W. Persson had said would be true: this would be the most significant Swedish miscarriage of justice of all time.

For my own part I had no particular opinion on Quick, nor did I have any ambition to reveal the truth of his guilt, or not, as the case may be. Rather, my idea was to make a documentary about the feud and its colourful principal characters.

At the same time there was probably a subconscious connection between my recent knowledge of false confessions and my keenness to get started on Thomas Quick, who for more than ten years had been referred to as the country’s worst ‘serial confessor’ of crimes he had not committed.

After my documentary on the Falun Arsonist had aired on television, I read a number of the books that had been published on Thomas Quick and, on 22 April, I wrote my first tentative letter to him.

Sture Bergwall,

By coincidence I found your book Kvarblivelse [What Remains] in a second-hand bookshop and I am reading it now with great interest, if also with a certain unease.

[. . .]

I am aware that you turned your back on journalists a number of years ago, which I can appreciate as a perfectly reasonable decision, but nevertheless I want to ask if it would be possible to meet you. I want to emphasise that this should not be viewed as a request for an interview! Nothing that we discuss in any meeting will be published, I am only asking for an unprejudiced meeting. I am convinced that such a meeting would be productive, not only for me but also for you.

The reply came just a few days later. I was welcome at Säter Hospital.