Thomas Quick by Hannes Råstam Read Free Book Online Page A

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 connectedThomas 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.

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