Thomas Quick by Hannes Råstam Read Free Book Online Page B

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 back10,000 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.’
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