Thomas Quick or, to give him his real name, Sture Bergwall, had been until 2008 Sweden's most notorious serial killer.
Over nine years, he had as Quick confessed to more than 30 unsolved murders, revealing he had maimed and raped his victims and eaten the remains.
The book about Quick was written by investigative journalist Hannes RAstam, and published posthumously in Sweden in 2012. RAstam died at age 56 from pancreatic and liver cancer the day after the book was finished.
A former investigative reporter for SVT (Swedish Television), RAstam was widely acknowledged for his tenacious and thorough research. He was a winner of numerous journalism awards.
Thomas Quick's case intrigued him and in 2008, he visited Quick in hospital. Quick was by now using his real name, Sture Bergwall, and RAstam was the first journalist to get Bergwall's trust.
Subsequently, and after painstakingly reviewing 50,000 pages of collected investigative material, he concluded there was not a shred of technical evidence to support Bergwall's convictions.
Presented with RAstam's findings, Bergwall admitted he had fabricated the whole story.
Six courts had convicted him of eight murders because of his ''confessions'', but in 2001, he stopped co-operating with police and reverted to the name given to him at birth.
The confessions discontinued when a new medical director took him off his high dosages of drugs, principally benzodiazepine.
The medication had reached such high levels it had to be withdrawn in increments over eight months, Bergwall claiming to RAstam he had been on these drugs for nearly 10 years.
Benzodiazepine is a narcotic; the type taken was highly addictive and had serious side effects. At the time of the confessions, Bergwall was receiving high doses of this drug, and because of this RAstam was of the opinion Bergwall's confessions had to be viewed as unreliable.
RAstam writes: ''soon Sture could not live without the medicines. He 'reactivated repressed memories' in therapy, confessed to murder after murder and participated in a string of police investigations. In return, he gained the attention of therapists, doctors, journalists, police and prosecutors. And he had unlimited access to narcotics.''
Sture preferred to speak of himself as a sex criminal, serial killer and cannibal rather than an ingrained alcoholic and drug addict, RAstam says.
Observer journalist and writer of the book's forward, Elizabeth Day, later interviewed Sture Bergwall (Quick) in the psychiatric hospital north of Stockholm where he has been a patient since 1991.
In her Observer article, she wrote that in the country synonymous with the dogged fictional detectives of Henning Mankell and Scandinavian TV drama, this book prompted a public outcry and a judicial scandal.
In addition, not only was Quick's case a massive miscarriage of justice, it was also a healthcare scandal of huge proportions.
RAstam's research was rejected as wild theorising, because to admit he was right was to admit there were murderers on the loose who had never been brought to justice. It was to admit, as the foreword says: ''that what happened in Sweden could conceivably happen again elsewhere''.
Overall, Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer is an engrossing story of the man Thomas Quick, who, impressed by Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho, wanted to follow their example, albeit in his own lonely imagination.
He did so, but with tragic results and by getting people to believe his outrageous stories. Stories, not so much imagined, as drawn from books, newspaper files and his intuitive understanding of how to confirm interviewers' assumptions that he was a major criminal.
The story is also that of man who believed the unbelievable, author and researcher, the late Hannes RAstam. A man who retrieved the truth from the myths of time.
- Ted Fox is a Dunedin online marketing consultant.
