Thomas Quick – Guilty or not?

By Vanessa Sidlo

Thomas Quick is a well-known case that has received a lot of attention from the media, even today. It has never in history happened that a man confesses to about 30 murders, gets charged and sentenced and then some years later released due to the lack of evidence. This is Sweden´s biggest justice scandal and there are many mixed feelings about whether he should be free or not.

Thomas Quick, today more known as Sture Bergwall has received a lot of attention in media, where he´s been known as Sweden´s worst serial killer. He has not only confessed to about 30 murders in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, but he has also been convicted for 8 of them. However, some years ago they started to acquit him from some of the murders and on 4. November 2013 he was released from the last case: the murder of Charles Zelmanovitz.

The Quick-case, also known as Sweden´s biggest justice scandal is very well known in the Swedish media and there are many people that have an opinion on whether he should be free or not. The prosecutor Van der Kwast´s book will be released on the 21 January, in which he tells his side of the story. In an article from SVT, Van der Kwast is described as strongly critical to the part mass media has taken in all of this and also to how the legal system has dealt with it. He also tells them that he with this book will put an end to the Quick/Bergwall case and move forward.

It was in 1993 Quick confessed to the first crime; the murder of the Swedish boy Johan Asplund. It is later during his psychotherapy, Quick starts to confess to more than 30 murders and later he gets sentenced to compulsory psychiatric care.

So there is now convincing evidence that proves Quick´s guilt as he can explain all of the victims´ injuries and give details that add up to the evidence found in the crime scene. In other words, Quick knows all of the details that only the murderer could have known, at least according to the former chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz and the prosecutor Van der Kwast. However everyone does not agree.

In 2008, when the late journalist Hannes Råstam started to investigate and interview Quick for a documentary, he started to take back his confessions. Later Råstam released a book: “Att skapa en seriemördare” (= Too create a serial killer) and in the book he criticizes the police´s investigation. He believes that they have “helped” Quick/Bergwall by giving him all of the details, and he has therefore been able to prove his guilt to the court. For example in the first interrogations Quick reports the weather wrongly, when he came to the reconstruction of the crime scene the set was almost finished, and in one of the cases Quick indicates that he killed the victim inside a tent but according to the evidence the murderer never entered the tent. In other words Råstam believes that they have put the words in his mouth.

In his chronicle at DN Lambertz responds to Råstam’s criticism: “I looked into all of the facts”…”It proves then that there are exceptionally convincing evidence that proves Quick´s guilt to the two murders that I´ve looked into”.

Lambertz believes that Råstam´s book has “pulverized all of the arguments that the police and prosecutor have presented”. But he´s not alone; the Swedish journalist Gubb Jan Stigsson believes that “nothing in the book is true” and Van der Kwast “admits that the book is very skilled but of course untrue from beginning to end”.

The Swedish writer and journalist Jan Guillou is one of the people that believe that Quick actually is innocent. In a debate with Göran Lambertz at “Nyhetsmorgon”, Guillou claims that the evidence that was presented in court was “manipulated and wrong” therefore it wasn´t so strange that the court judged the way they did. However he thinks that it is strange that someone with a legal education is sitting there and doesn´t do anything to object. He also says that in his article Lambertz “moves past the difficulties and finds a small detail at the end” that might explain Quick´s guilt.

To this Lambertz only responds, that what he wanted to show with his article, is that everything has been “correct” from the start.  He also tells that Quick was diagnosed as a paedophile and he had also abused four boys when he was only 19 years old. In addition to that, he has also been in the psychiatry care during the bigger part of his life, even before his confessions.

But after years of negotiations and discussions with the psychologies at the Säter institution, Thomas Quick is now free from the forensic psychiatry care, where he has been locked up for about 23 years. However in the verdict it says that Quick still suffers from psychological disorder and therefore shall he have certain restrictions.

There is still a lot of unanswered questions, for example, we still don´t know who actually killed these people.

So Quick went from being Sweden´s worst serial killer to a drugged mythomaniac.