unexamined crimes to which he was confessing made Dagens Nyheter rank him as ‘one of the worst serial killers in the world’.
But something had changed since the Quick feud. Had it sown the seeds of doubt that were now taking root among crime reporters? Or were they and the general public simply growing tired of Thomas Quick?
At any rate, the press archives speak their own clear language: Thomas Quick no longer generated big headlines. Nor was anyone surprised when ‘the boy killer’ Quick, in the spring of 2000, was prosecuted for two typical heterosexual murders of young women in Norway: seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen, found raped and murdered in August 1981, and twenty-three-year-old Gry Storvik, murdered in June 1985. Both women were natives of Oslo and their bodies were found just outside the city.
Police technicians had found traces of sperm inside Gry Storvik. Thomas Quick admitted that he had had sexual intercourse with her prior to the murder, despite his clear-cut homosexual disposition since the age of about thirteen. These two new murders meant that Quick had made the full journey from a boy killer to an omnivorous serial killer without any preferences, patterns of behaviour or geographical limitations.
DNA analysis revealed that the sperm did not belong to ThomasQuick, but even this didn’t give rise to any noticeable consternation. The guilty charge against Quick for murders six and seven was only briefly alluded to in Expressen . Falu District Court made a statement to the effect that there was a lack of technical evidence connecting Thomas Quick to the crimes. Despite this, the court reached the same verdict as in the other cases:
On a balanced judgement of what has been shown, the district court finds that Thomas Quick’s confessions are supported by the investigation to such a degree that it must be considered beyond all reasonable doubt that he has committed the acts as stated by the prosecutor.
‘There’s no need to speculate about whether he is lying. He has qualified knowledge of the murder’, was Sven Åke Christianson’s comment on the verdict.
‘Yesterday, Thomas Quick was convicted without technical evidence for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik’, Norway’s Aftenposten pointedly concluded.
And that was all.
JOHAN ASPLUND
THE STORY OF Thomas Quick begins and ends with Johan Asplund.
When, during therapy in 1992, Quick started remembering the murder of Johan, he was very unsure whether he had had anything to do with it. It is unlikely that he would have suspected at this point that he would eventually remember committing another thirty murders.
If Thomas Quick had begun by confessing to the murder of Yenon Levi, the matter would have ended up in the Avesta police district rather than with the Sundsvall police. But the murder of Johan came first and the Quick file therefore landed on the desk of prosecutor Christer van der Kwast and the Sundsvall police, where senior officer and narcotics investigator Seppo Penttinen was charged with heading the investigation.
It would be understandable if Seppo Penttinen had harboured a dream of being the one to solve the murder of Johan Asplund, Sundsvall’s greatest crime mystery. Over the years, the police had invested enormous amounts of manpower and resources with a view to producing some sort of technical evidence as the Quick case progressed.
After the verdicts for the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen, the investigation took a firm new grasp on Johan’s murder inquiry, as it had done so many times before.
‘We’re getting very close now with Johan Asplund,’ said van der Kwast.
‘Again!’ commented Björn Asplund acidly. ‘There’s bound to be another murder in Norway he’d rather talk about . . .’
But this time the investigators were determined to bring Johan’s case to court and reach a verdict. On Valentine’s Day 2001 van der Kwast called Björn Asplund to let him know there was now enough
But something had changed since the Quick feud. Had it sown the seeds of doubt that were now taking root among crime reporters? Or were they and the general public simply growing tired of Thomas Quick?
At any rate, the press archives speak their own clear language: Thomas Quick no longer generated big headlines. Nor was anyone surprised when ‘the boy killer’ Quick, in the spring of 2000, was prosecuted for two typical heterosexual murders of young women in Norway: seventeen-year-old Trine Jensen, found raped and murdered in August 1981, and twenty-three-year-old Gry Storvik, murdered in June 1985. Both women were natives of Oslo and their bodies were found just outside the city.
Police technicians had found traces of sperm inside Gry Storvik. Thomas Quick admitted that he had had sexual intercourse with her prior to the murder, despite his clear-cut homosexual disposition since the age of about thirteen. These two new murders meant that Quick had made the full journey from a boy killer to an omnivorous serial killer without any preferences, patterns of behaviour or geographical limitations.
DNA analysis revealed that the sperm did not belong to ThomasQuick, but even this didn’t give rise to any noticeable consternation. The guilty charge against Quick for murders six and seven was only briefly alluded to in Expressen . Falu District Court made a statement to the effect that there was a lack of technical evidence connecting Thomas Quick to the crimes. Despite this, the court reached the same verdict as in the other cases:
On a balanced judgement of what has been shown, the district court finds that Thomas Quick’s confessions are supported by the investigation to such a degree that it must be considered beyond all reasonable doubt that he has committed the acts as stated by the prosecutor.
‘There’s no need to speculate about whether he is lying. He has qualified knowledge of the murder’, was Sven Åke Christianson’s comment on the verdict.
‘Yesterday, Thomas Quick was convicted without technical evidence for the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik’, Norway’s Aftenposten pointedly concluded.
And that was all.
JOHAN ASPLUND
THE STORY OF Thomas Quick begins and ends with Johan Asplund.
When, during therapy in 1992, Quick started remembering the murder of Johan, he was very unsure whether he had had anything to do with it. It is unlikely that he would have suspected at this point that he would eventually remember committing another thirty murders.
If Thomas Quick had begun by confessing to the murder of Yenon Levi, the matter would have ended up in the Avesta police district rather than with the Sundsvall police. But the murder of Johan came first and the Quick file therefore landed on the desk of prosecutor Christer van der Kwast and the Sundsvall police, where senior officer and narcotics investigator Seppo Penttinen was charged with heading the investigation.
It would be understandable if Seppo Penttinen had harboured a dream of being the one to solve the murder of Johan Asplund, Sundsvall’s greatest crime mystery. Over the years, the police had invested enormous amounts of manpower and resources with a view to producing some sort of technical evidence as the Quick case progressed.
After the verdicts for the murders of Gry Storvik and Trine Jensen, the investigation took a firm new grasp on Johan’s murder inquiry, as it had done so many times before.
‘We’re getting very close now with Johan Asplund,’ said van der Kwast.
‘Again!’ commented Björn Asplund acidly. ‘There’s bound to be another murder in Norway he’d rather talk about . . .’
But this time the investigators were determined to bring Johan’s case to court and reach a verdict. On Valentine’s Day 2001 van der Kwast called Björn Asplund to let him know there was now enough
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