Sture Bergwall

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.

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.

His first murder, according to his own accounts, occurred in Växjö in 1964, when Quick was only 14 years old.

The victim, Tomas Blomgren, was described by Quick as being the same age but not as strong and tall as himself.

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 the years following 1990, when Quick was sentenced to closed psychiatric confinement, he confessed to several well publicised unsolved murders.

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.

After the robbery conviction, Quick was confined to care in an institution for the criminally insane.

Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight of these murders.

Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight murders (in chronological order) at six different District Court trials:

In Sweden a defendant always gains access to the full police investigation prior to the trial.

Quick's lawyer Claes Borgström has been criticised for failing to protect his mentally disturbed client's objective interest in being judged not guilty.

However, he withdrew all of his confessions in 2008.

In a December 2008 television interview with Hannes Råstam, Quick denied taking part either in any of the murders for which he had been sentenced or in the more than 30 murders he had confessed to.

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.

The credibility of Quick's confessions was widely debated in the Swedish media.

Critics of these confessions, and the trials, including a policeman involved in one of the investigations, wrote that there was no evidence that tied Quick to any of the murders he had confessed, and that until he could show something he had taken that belonged to one of his victims, the probability was that he was a compulsive liar.

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.

Bergwall grew up in Korsnäs with his six siblings.

Because the only evidence to support the convictions were his own confessions, that he now retracted, and nothing else remained on which to base the judgments, Quick changed his lawyer and the eight murder convictions handed down in six trials were all quashed on appeal, the last one in July 2013.

Quick, who now reverted to his birth name of Sture Bergwall, was released from custody after having been confined for more than twenty years in an institution for the criminally insane, with conditions that he refrain from alcohol and narcotics.