Thomas Quick Read Free Page A

had allegedly been hidden in the Sundsvall area, but despite careful searching with a cadaver dog, so far nothing had been found.
    ‘The fact that we have not found anything doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing there,’ the prosecutor commented.
    No other evidence had been found to connect the suspect to Johan Asplund’s disappearance and van der Kwast was forced to concede that there was little basis on which to call a trial. Yet suspicions remained, he pointed out, because although there was insufficient evidence in this case, the Säter patient was still tied to an entirely different murder.
    Van der Kwast told the press that in 1964 the man in question hadmurdered a boy of his own age in Växjö: fourteen-year-old Thomas Blomgren.
    ‘The details provided by the Säter patient in his account are so comprehensive and well supported by the investigation that under normal circumstances I would not have hesitated to bring charges against the man,’ said van der Kwast.
    His argument was doubly hypothetical, partly because the statute of limitation for the murder – which at that time was twenty-five years – had expired and partly because the Säter Man had been only fourteen years old at the time of the murder and therefore too young to be tried in a criminal court. Nonetheless, the murder of Thomas Blomgren became highly significant in the continuing investigation: that the Säter Man had murdered at the age of fourteen was undoubtedly compromising.
    However, Christer van der Kwast did not reveal how the Säter Man was connected to the murder of Thomas Blomgren, and as there couldn’t be a prosecution in the case, the investigation was never made public. Nevertheless, the Säter Man’s lawyer, Gunnar Lundgren, fully agreed with the prosecutor’s views and asserted that his client’s statement was credible.
    Increasingly unpleasant details were emerging in the media coverage of the Säter Man’s background and character. He had committed an ‘attempted sex murder’ of a nine-year-old boy at Falu Hospital, according to Gubb Jan Stigson in the Dala-Demokraten : ‘When the nine-year-old screamed the man tried to strangle him. The forty-three-year-old himself describes how he tightened his grip on the boy’s throat until blood spurted from his mouth.’
    According to Dala-Demokraten , the doctors had been warning since 1970 that the Säter Man was a likely child killer, and the news paper cited a forensic psychiatrist’s statement confirming that he suffered from ‘a constitutionally formulated, high-grade sexual perversion of the type known as paedophilia cum sadismus ’. He was not only a threat but also, under certain circumstances, extremely dangerous to the safety, well-being and lives of others.
    On 12 November 1993 Gubb Jan Stigson revealed that the police investigation regarding the Säter Man had been widened to include five murders. In addition to Johan Asplund in 1980 and Thomas Blomgren in 1964 he was under suspicion for the murders of fifteen-year-old Alvar Larsson from Sirkön, who disappeared in 1967, forty-eight-year-old Ingemar Nylund, who was murdered in Uppsala in 1977, and eighteen-year-old Olle Högbom, who disappeared without trace in Sundsvall in 1983.
    According to Stigson, the Säter Man had confessed to all five murders. Increasing numbers of journalists were claiming that Quick was Sweden’s first real serial killer.
    ‘He is telling the truth about the boy murders’, Expressen ’sfull-page article announced on 17 June 1994. The Säter Man had confessed to yet another murder and this time the investigators had finally had a breakthrough. It concerned fifteen-year-old Charles Zelmanovits, who had disappeared after a school disco in Piteå in 1976.
    The Säter Man had confessed that he and an older friend had driven from Falun to Piteå in search of a young boy to assault. They came across Charles and lured him into the car. In a nearby wooded area the Säter Man had strangled