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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Serial Killer Has Second Thoughts: The Confessions of Thomas Quick (Unbelievable, scary & weird)
In a remote psychiatric hospital in Sweden, there is a man known as Thomas Quick who has been convicted of unspeakable crimes. Over the course of multiple trials, he would tell his brutal storiesof stabbings, stranglings, rape, incest, cannibalismto almost anyone who would listen. Then, after his eighth and final murder conviction, he went silent for nearly a decade. In the last few years, though, he has been thinking about all he has said and done, and now he has something new to confess: He left out the worst part of all.
Part 1: Inside the asylum.
Sture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at Säter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure eight over and over again. Sometimes he listens to music, but more often to the morning news, eavesdropping on a world he was separated from more than two decades ago.
Sweden is the kind of country where being a convicted murderer in a secure psychiatric unit is not necessarily an impediment to having a Twitter feed, and Bergwall often tweets about these endless morning circuits. "Exercise yard reflections," he titles them. Small wistful poems about what you can see when this is your only physical access to the world beyond: the budding of a branch, the way fresh snow sits on top of the courtyard walls, the glow against the underside of the sky that he knows is from the lights of the waking town to the east. On a good day, he sees a nightingale.
Sture Bergwall is better known to most people in Sweden as Thomas Quick, the name he took not long after he arrived at this institution in 1991. Quick is his mother's family name. Thomas, he liked to explain, was the name of his first victim, a 14-year-old boy whose body was found in a bicycle shed, belt undone, trouser button ripped off, and face bloody. Bergwall was never prosecuted for that murder, because he was 14 years old when it happened, and by the time he confessed to it, the statute of limitations had expired. But he was later convicted in six separate trials for eight other murders, and the full number of murders he has claimed responsibility for is around thirty. That is how he became Sweden's most famous serial killer. "Sweden's answer," as he himself would later put it, "to Hannibal Lecter."
For a time it was a role he seemed to revel in, but then in 2001, after his eighth murder conviction, Bergwall announced that he was no longer going to cooperate with prosecutors and he was no longer going to speak with the media. He reclaimed the name Sture Bergwall and went silent. As his reputation swirled, the man at its center kept his own counsel. But recently he has decided to start talking again, and he has agreed to see me. I have come here to try and understand his storyan awful story about what human beings can do, and about responsibility and guilt, and about deceit and retribution, one that has lessons for us all.
<snip>
Much more: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201308/thomas-quick-serial-killer-august-2013?printable=true
All I could think after I read this was WTF? Just WTF?
PDJane
(10,103 posts)But guilt and innocence are simply not that clean cut, and the drug-addled stew that must have been that man during a certain period are conducive to this kind of tale.
And yes, he may be guilty of an entirely different kind of crime, but it is still crime...and prosecutors aren't infallible.
Skittles
(152,963 posts)Are_grits_groceries
(17,111 posts)Skittles
(152,963 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Corgigal
(9,291 posts)but it has also happened here. You want to bring justice to the victims families, then you add an addict who enjoys the limelight. This is our guy.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/henry_lee_lucas/1.html
cali
(114,904 posts)who committed at least 4 violent sexual assaults.
I'm with the professor who still thinks he's a serial killer.
he's a piece of shit of the worst kind.
I think he probably did them all too. This latest twist is just another sadistic kick for him.
cali
(114,904 posts)the murderer? But beyond that this guy is a heinous, violent offender. 4 undisputed violent sexual assaults- and that's what's known, not to mention stabbing a man repeatedly.
He's a sick fuck.
from the article:
I visit Höglund, the object of his frenzied attack, in his Stockholm apartment. He is now a retired man of 71. For nearly forty years he didn't speak publicly about what happened that night, largely because he had never come out to his family as bisexual. But they are all dead now, and Höglund thinks his voice should be heard in the current debate: "It makes me sick to see him on the TV when he sits there in his cell and blames the hospital for drugging him.... It's just a big act.... He started one show by saying, 'Thomas Quick is deadI am Sture Bergwall.' But when he attacked me, he was Sture Bergwall."
Höglund says there was no warning, no falling out. They talked and drank, and not much else happened. "There might have been some fumbling around, some touching and stuff. He just came rushing toward me," says Höglund. "Crazily stabbed me." He used Höglund's own bread knife. By the end, blood was everywhere, and Höglund remembers watching as Bergwall washed off the knife for fingerprints, tucked it into his leather jacket (it was found in a nearby canal), then left him there, almost bleeding to death: "He just didn't give a fuck."
Höglund had been stabbed twelve timesin the liver, the intestines, the back. His left lung was punctured, and he has had reduced lung capacity and breathing problems ever since. "I will never, ever forget Sture Bergwall," he says. "These scars will always be hereboth physically and mentally.... Every time I think of Sture, my heart starts pounding. He's destroyed my life and keeps on ruining my life."
too bad that Bergwall will soon be released.
boston bean
(36,186 posts)it was man made material.
However, this guy doesn't deserve to be out of the hospital. I also am not convinced. Especially with his past....
malaise
(267,784 posts)Rec
Hestia
(3,818 posts)treestar
(82,383 posts)The writer of that piece is excellent - kept my attention through that long piece, no mean feat!
There is a certain desire to solve a crime - that could lend itself to anyone who confessed as the killer. With that many murders, it's quite hard to believe that he could keep them going for that many, but once a narrative is in place, it is hard to undo it. It would be fascinating to read of further investigation to see if they can finger anyone else for these crimes.
Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)I'm sure glad I don't have stuff like that swirling around inside my head.
A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)It's hard to know what to believe after reading all that. I can't imagine that he should be free either way - it seems like raping those children should be reason enough to keep him locked up.
hlthe2b
(101,699 posts)except to express horror for those poor families who have gone through hell repeatedly and with his recantation, sends them there once again--and with little hope of ever knowing what truly happened to their loved ones.
This level of depravity--drugs or no--leave me feeling he should NOT be released.