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Authors: Hannes Råstam
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The man who had been created less than ten years earlier no longer existed.
The Thomas Quick era was over.
The judicial case of Thomas Quick, on the other hand, lived on in the culture pages of the newspapers, where the investigation and the verdicts were challenged by more and more people. Even some of the police detectives involved in the investigations came forward to express their doubts.
But Sture Bergwall remained at Säter Hospital, in silence, year after year.
When I visited him on 2 June 2008 his time out had lasted for almost seven years.
Why had Quick gone silent? Was it really because his credibility had been questioned by Leif G.W. Persson and other sceptics? Or were there other, hidden reasons?
WHY DID THEY CONFESS?
I BECAME A journalist rather late in life – when I was thirty-seven years old – but I immediately managed to sell a number of stories to Swedish Television’s (SVT) investigative journalism programme Striptease . I enjoyed the work, I had unlimited energy and I felt everything was going astonishingly well. Before I knew it I was a permanent employee.
My interest from the very beginning was focused on crime and justice reporting, and within a couple of years, working with the reporter Janne Josefsson, we chanced upon a scoop that I was certain I would never be able to trump. It concerned the drug addict Osmo Vallo, whose time of death happened to coincide with a hundred-kilo police constable stamping on his back while he lay on the ground with his hands cuffed. There was no connection between his death and the police’s treatment of him, according to the medical examiners.
Our examination of the case forced two new autopsies of Osmo Vallo’s body, resulting in the conclusion that the cause of death was precisely the effect of the policeman stamping on Vallo’s back.
We were awarded the Swedish Great Journalism Award for our reporting on Osmo Vallo. In my first years as a journalist I received a number of other national and international prizes and honours.
These successes gave me a great deal of freedom at SVT, where my superiors saw in me a trusty provider of broadcast-quality reportage. After ten years as a researcher, working with the reporters Johan Brånstad and Janne Josefsson, I became a reporter in my own right in 2003. I began with the most politically incorrect and taboo-laden subject one could imagine: ‘The Case of Ulf’. This concerneda man sentenced to eight years in prison, though he denied all charges, for sexually abusing his daughter. Following my report on Uppdrag granskning (Investigation Assignment) the accused appealed and, after three years in prison, was able to leave the court a free man.
Most likely it was this case that led to my home telephone ringing one September evening in 2007. I heard an elderly man’s voice asking me if I was the one who had made television documentaries on old legal cases. I couldn’t deny that I was. He told me about a large number of deliberately started fires, ‘more than fifty’, in and around the town of Falun between 1975 and 1976.
I thought this was beginning to sound like yet another of those extraordinarily deterring tip-offs I received more or less by the minute.
‘A group of youths and children got blamed for it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t thought about it very much over the years, but now as I’m growing older it’s started eating away at me . . . I’m calling so you can help put things in order.’
‘OK?’ I said, puzzled.
‘You see, the one who started those fires . . . was me.’
The hairs on my arms stood up. I realised I’d never be able to stop myself trying to find out if what he was saying was true.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m willing to dig out the verdicts and other material on the fires to check what you’ve told me. How do I contact you?’
‘You don’t,’ said the anonymous voice. ‘I have children, I live in an area far from Falun and I’m not prepared to reveal my
The Thomas Quick era was over.
The judicial case of Thomas Quick, on the other hand, lived on in the culture pages of the newspapers, where the investigation and the verdicts were challenged by more and more people. Even some of the police detectives involved in the investigations came forward to express their doubts.
But Sture Bergwall remained at Säter Hospital, in silence, year after year.
When I visited him on 2 June 2008 his time out had lasted for almost seven years.
Why had Quick gone silent? Was it really because his credibility had been questioned by Leif G.W. Persson and other sceptics? Or were there other, hidden reasons?
WHY DID THEY CONFESS?
I BECAME A journalist rather late in life – when I was thirty-seven years old – but I immediately managed to sell a number of stories to Swedish Television’s (SVT) investigative journalism programme Striptease . I enjoyed the work, I had unlimited energy and I felt everything was going astonishingly well. Before I knew it I was a permanent employee.
My interest from the very beginning was focused on crime and justice reporting, and within a couple of years, working with the reporter Janne Josefsson, we chanced upon a scoop that I was certain I would never be able to trump. It concerned the drug addict Osmo Vallo, whose time of death happened to coincide with a hundred-kilo police constable stamping on his back while he lay on the ground with his hands cuffed. There was no connection between his death and the police’s treatment of him, according to the medical examiners.
Our examination of the case forced two new autopsies of Osmo Vallo’s body, resulting in the conclusion that the cause of death was precisely the effect of the policeman stamping on Vallo’s back.
We were awarded the Swedish Great Journalism Award for our reporting on Osmo Vallo. In my first years as a journalist I received a number of other national and international prizes and honours.
These successes gave me a great deal of freedom at SVT, where my superiors saw in me a trusty provider of broadcast-quality reportage. After ten years as a researcher, working with the reporters Johan Brånstad and Janne Josefsson, I became a reporter in my own right in 2003. I began with the most politically incorrect and taboo-laden subject one could imagine: ‘The Case of Ulf’. This concerneda man sentenced to eight years in prison, though he denied all charges, for sexually abusing his daughter. Following my report on Uppdrag granskning (Investigation Assignment) the accused appealed and, after three years in prison, was able to leave the court a free man.
Most likely it was this case that led to my home telephone ringing one September evening in 2007. I heard an elderly man’s voice asking me if I was the one who had made television documentaries on old legal cases. I couldn’t deny that I was. He told me about a large number of deliberately started fires, ‘more than fifty’, in and around the town of Falun between 1975 and 1976.
I thought this was beginning to sound like yet another of those extraordinarily deterring tip-offs I received more or less by the minute.
‘A group of youths and children got blamed for it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t thought about it very much over the years, but now as I’m growing older it’s started eating away at me . . . I’m calling so you can help put things in order.’
‘OK?’ I said, puzzled.
‘You see, the one who started those fires . . . was me.’
The hairs on my arms stood up. I realised I’d never be able to stop myself trying to find out if what he was saying was true.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m willing to dig out the verdicts and other material on the fires to check what you’ve told me. How do I contact you?’
‘You don’t,’ said the anonymous voice. ‘I have children, I live in an area far from Falun and I’m not prepared to reveal my
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