Sture Ragnar Bergwall (born 26 April 1950), also known as Thomas Quick from 1993–2002, is a Swedish man previously believed to have been a serial killer, having confessed to more than 30 murders while detained in a mental institution for personality disorders. Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight of these murders. However, he withdrew all of his confessions in 2008. As a result, his murder convictions were quashed, the final one in July 2013, and he was released from hospital. The episode raised issues about how murder convictions could have been obtained on such weak evidence, and has been called the largest miscarriage of justice in Swedish history. Journalists Hannes Råstam and Jenny Küttim and Dan Josefsson published TV documentaries and books about the murder cases; they claimed that bad therapy led to false confessions. Dan Josefsson claims that a "cult"-like group led by psychologist Margit Norell manipulated the police and talked Sture Bergwall into false confessions.
Early life
Bergwall grew up in Korsnäs with his six siblings. He adopted his mother's maiden name, Quick, around 1991. After a history of criminal behavior (molestations of boys and various assaults and drug use), Quick was sentenced in 1991 for armed robbery. He also stabbed a man while in outpatient treatment from a psychiatric facility.
Confessions and convictions of murder
After the robbery conviction, Quick was confined to care in an institution for the criminally insane. During therapy, he confessed to more than thirty murders committed in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland between 1964 and 1993. The therapy sessions were followed by police interviews. One of his confessions led to the apparent solving of an 18-year-old murder considered to be unsolvable, and another to the apparent informal solving of a murder in Växjö in 1964. This 1964 crime was outside the then 25-year statute of limitations in Sweden, but with the information given by Quick, the case was considered closed.
With no eyewitnesses or technical forensic evidence to connect him to the crimes, Quick was convicted solely on the basis of his own confessions while undergoing recovered-memory therapy on benzodiazepines followed by police interrogations. Details in the confessions were wildly wrong and Quick relied on hints and body language from his interrogators to guess the answers expected of him. Bergwall/Quick had been researching unsolved murders on microfilm in the Royal Library, Stockholm when he was on day release. Consequently, his confession to a murder in Norway led to a Norwegian newspaper writing his story. Quick requested back copies including earlier reports of the story from Norwegian journalists that included details hitherto unknown to the Swedish police, leading them to believe that only the perpetrator knew them.
Nine-year-old Therese Johannessen had disappeared from Fjell in Drammen in 1988 and had never been found. Ten years later Quick was convicted of murdering her. The crucial evidence was the discovery of burnt bone fragments from what should have been a child. In 2012 laboratory tests showed that the supposed bone fragments were composed of wood and glue fused together – probably hardboard. An analysis had not been performed before the evidence was presented to the court.
Examination of his answers showed that his initial attempts to provide answers to questions concerning (for example) murder weapons and birthmarks were wrong, leading questions were asked in police interviews, and the initial erroneous guesses edited out of the version presented to the court.
The involvement of therapists meant that Quick's early failure to provide anything more than a vague, confused and vacillating picture that gradually sharpened and focused was explained away as the result of repressed memories being retrieved as a result of therapy; e.g. in the judgment for the case of Therese one can read that the psychologist Christianson told the court that "Traumatic events are retained in the memory but there can be protective mechanisms that work in the unconscious to repress their recall." Similar arguments about Quick's "repressed" memories recur again and again in the judgments.