Thomas Quick (42 page)

The investigation confirmed that a large number of young Arab men had worked for Ben Ali between 1986 and 1988. A couple of his female friends claimed during questioning that they had met Yenon Levi in Ben Ali’s flat in the summer of 1988.

‘I’ve seen that guy. I remember that nose,’ said one of the women when the police showed her a photo of Levi.

According to the woman he had been sitting on the sofa with Ben Ali, watching television.

In early June Ben Ali had been to Stockholm to pick up two young Moroccans, Mohammed and Rashid. As soon as they came to Borlänge they left, and when they came back a few days later, one of them had been wearing a second-hand jacket which he’d not had before. It was red, white and blue and looked exactly like Yenon Levi’s missing jacket.

A station inspector at Stockholm Central was the last confirmed witness who saw Yenon Levi alive. He made a statement soon after the murder in 1988: Yenon Levi had been sitting in the waiting area with some Arabic-speaking people. Levi had asked him in English about the train to Mora-Falun.

Another station inspector identified Ben Ali from photographs. He claimed to be ‘100 per cent certain’ that Ben Ali used to come to Stockholm Central, where he sought out other foreigners and pretended to be looking for someone he knew.

Yenon Levi’s family came from the Yemen, he had a distinct Arab appearance and spoke Arabic. He could, therefore, easily be mistaken
for an Arab, although in actual fact he was an Israeli Jew and had served as a sergeant in the Israeli Army during the war in Lebanon.

Bearing in mind Ben Ali’s well-known hatred of Jews, Yenon Levi may have been in danger if it had emerged while they were together that he was really an Israeli Jew.

Ben Ali was arraigned as a suspect in the murder of Yenon Levi but was never formally charged. After he had served his sentence in Sweden he was deported.

In the spring of 1996 the Quick investigation was in its most intensive phase. In addition to questioning, reconstructions and crime scene reconnaissances for the Yenon Levi case and the missing ‘Norway boys’, Quick was being ferried round Drammen and Ørje Forest as a part of the investigation into the murder of Therese Johannesen. It was during this time that Quick described how he had chopped Therese’s body into small pieces and submerged them in a boggy pond in the forest.

On 28 May a huge group assembled at the police station in Ørje: Norwegian National Criminal Police (Kripos), investigators into the Therese case, local police from Ørje, forensic personnel, biologists, a professor of anatomy, dog handlers, cadaver dogs, Norwegian fire fighters, frogmen and members of Norwegian civil defence units. The Swedish investigation was represented by Seppo Penttinen and Anna Wikström, who kept a record of the macabre and costly operation.

On that first day, the pumps were turned on at the edge of Ringentjärnen (Circle Pond). A small army toiled with the various stages of the process. As the water was extracted it passed through a sieve which was carefully monitored, frogmen examined the bottom of the pond, cadaver dogs prowled the area, and the edges of the bog and pond were checked. Wikström noted in her log:

Shaken glances pass again and again between Seppo and the signatory below the same slightly panicked thought: has he given us correct information?

By the fine-meshed sieve where Therese’s body parts were expected to turn up stood Professor Per Holck, the anatomical expert advising the investigation. He had brought the skeleton of a child of Therese’s age with him to Ørje in order to show the investigators what they would be looking for.

The work at the pond continued in long shifts, seven days a week, in pouring rain. The absence of any tangible evidence began to worry Wikström and Penttinen early on. In meetings with their Norwegian colleagues they checked their notes from the reconnaissance trips. A sense of doubt was apparent in Wikström’s log entries:

Obviously there are continuous thoughts about TQ’s way of expressing himself, his credibility, etc . . . how are we supposed to evaluate this??

Oh . . . if one only had an answer (Saida . . .) [. . .]

Understand that this is difficult to process, I even find it difficult myself to accept that we have to ‘stand in line for TQ’ but the goal is to give the families an answer. TQ will not be going anywhere anyway.

The agonised notes are interspersed with cheerful descriptions of fun and games between the Norwegian and Swedish colleagues. The log was concluded after eight days, when Wikström and Penttinen temporarily had to return to Sweden for further investigations into the Yenon Levi case.

By this time, Wikström was suffering enormous anxiety about what the consequences would be if no tangible evidence were found after the enormous ordeal of going through the contents of the pond. She quotes a line from Karin Boye, the Swedish poet: ‘Yes, there is goal and meaning in our journey – but it’s the path that is the labour’s worth.’

The signatory below has to content herself with this, irrespective of the end result.

Seppo and the same signatory have planned the escape route, destination unknown, possibly we will first pass through Säter
[. . .] we find ourselves in a game of ‘high stakes’, luckily our neighbours do not have a national debt.

This log is hereby concluded on Tuesday, 4 June 1996.

Anna Wikström, Det. Insp.

The work of draining the pond continued from 28 May to 17 July 1996 at a cost of several million crowns, without any evidence being found.

THE QUICK COMMISSION BREAKS DOWN

DESPITE THE DEBACLE
of the first reconstruction of the Yenon Levi murder, the investigation kept driving forward and it was with great surprise that Jan Olsson received the news that Quick was participating in a new reconstruction. He tried to explain to me how extraordinary this decision was.

‘To repeat a reconstruction is unheard of – you just don’t do it. Why would you?’

Ahead of this second reconstruction, Seppo Penttinen had had access to the forensic technicians’ crime report for some six months, and this was the period in which he’d been questioning Quick.

Under these circumstances the reconstruction went considerably better for Quick, but his story was still inconsistent on many key points with statements made by the medical examiners and forensic technicians. Christer van der Kwast called a meeting to iron out the problems.

Olsson described it to me: ‘It was in the evening at CID and everyone who was involved was there – the medical examiner Anders Eriksson, the investigators from Falun and Stockholm, Christer van der Kwast and me. In that meeting I sensed from the very start that van der Kwast had a different tone.’

Previously Olsson had felt he had the full support of van der Kwast and Penttinen, despite earlier in the investigation having expressed some doubts about Quick’s credibility.

‘They often said they appreciated my approach, they said it was good that I questioned things. They said I was an asset to the investigation team,’ Olsson explained to me.

But he was about to find out that there were limits to van der Kwast’s tolerance.

In the meeting at CID, Christer van der Kwast expressed his dissatisfaction with how the medical examiners’ report was formulated. Among other things it had been stated quite clearly in writing that most of the explanations given by Thomas Quick during the investigation did not match Yenon Levi’s injuries. Nor had Quick provided any credible explanation of a number of the deadly injuries inflicted on Levi. The report was signed by the assistant physician and certified by her chief, Anders Eriksson.

‘Christer van der Kwast demanded that Anders Eriksson, who was the chief examiner and a professor at Umeå, should change the report,’ Olsson told me.

As head of the department and a professor, Anders Eriksson had the authority to reject the report and write another one, and Jan Olsson was surprised that Eriksson succumbed to van der Kwast’s wishes.

Having solved the problem of the medical examiner’s report so conveniently, Christer van der Kwast got to grips with the forensic investigation, which in his view fell short in many respects.

‘Kwast came at me with a similar attitude. It was almost like a cross-examination in some sort of law court. I realised that he was intending to force this through to prosecution. And then I said to him, “But how are you going to get past the glasses?” And then it all came to an end, and he wouldn’t carry on.’

Olsson’s apparently innocuous question to van der Kwast was seen as a declaration of war, which would have consequences.

‘I’ve never experienced a prosecutor trying to influence technical experts in that way,’ says Olsson.

The suggestion that there was a modified forensic report of Yenon Levi’s injuries had circulated in Quick mythology for several years, but despite attempts by journalists and lawyers the original report had never been found either in the preliminary investigation material or at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Umeå. For this reason I was therefore a little sceptical about Jan Olsson’s description of the meeting at CID – that the prosecutor would
press the medical examiner to change a scientific report in such a blatant way.

On 23 September 2008 I visited one of the investigators in the Levi case, retired Chief Detective Inspector Lennart Jarlheim, at his home in Avesta. Jarlheim received me on the glass sun porch which he’d built himself. Since retiring from the criminal division of Avesta police, he told me, he’d been busier than ever. He was renovating his children’s houses, working in their companies, constantly keeping busy with practical tasks and enjoying life more than ever.

‘Oh, so you’re interested in Quick,’ he said with a wry smile that could have been interpreted in a number of ways. ‘You’re not the first to come here on that mission,’ he added, lighting his freshly prepared pipe and leaning back in his chair.

Jarlheim was the chief investigator at Avesta police when CID came knocking on their door in the autumn of 1995 to let them know that a patient at Säter had confessed to the murder of Levi.

Lennart Jarlheim and his colleague Willy Hammar started a thorough investigation into Thomas Quick’s life and social connections at the time of the murder, but it was not long before they discovered that this was an investigation with its own set of rules.

‘Usually it’s like this: a police district is in charge of its own case and it can request back-up from CID, but in this instance it was the other way round. We had little influence over what should or shouldn’t be done.’

Jarlheim and Hammar were extremely surprised when Christer van der Kwast, in his capacity as the head of the investigation, prohibited them from questioning an ex-girlfriend of Quick’s alleged accomplice. Lennart Jarlheim also wanted a search warrant for a storage unit in which Quick’s belongings were kept, where there might be letters, diaries and other evidence. Van der Kwast put a stop to that, as well as the proposed forensic examination of properties where Quick had previously lived.

Lennart Jarlheim and his colleagues took the view that there were
two other likely suspects in the Levi case: ‘The Spectacle Man’ Ben Ali and a well-known murderer who had been observed in the area at the time of Levi’s death. Christer van der Kwast stopped them from investigating these lines of enquiry further.

‘The way I saw it was that Christer van der Kwast, Seppo Penttinen and Anna Wikström were completely fixed on Thomas Quick and all they wanted was to bring him to prosecution, even though so very little spoke in favour of Thomas Quick being the guilty party,’ said Jarlheim.

He was frustrated about being prevented from conducting as rigorous an investigation as possible. Now he understood the decision of Ture Nässén at CID to resign.

‘Me and Willy Hammar also questioned our ongoing participation in the Quick investigation. There was nothing that suggested TQ was guilty of the murder of Levi. Nothing!’

Despite this, Hammar and Jarlheim stayed on out of loyalty and followed the orders of the head of the investigation, Christer van der Kwast.

The sun was setting on Jarlheim’s glass porch and I was just about to take my leave when he got up and disappeared into an adjoining room, returning with a heavy cardboard box.

‘You can take this with you. I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity and I think now is probably the time,’ he said, putting down the box on the floor in front of me.

I thanked him, this decent detective inspector, picked up the box and went to my hotel, where I eagerly opened it and looked through its contents.

It was the investigation material from the Yenon Levi case, the African asylum-seeking boys and other relevant matters from the time when Jarlheim was working in the investigation team.

At the top of the pile was the medical examiner’s report on Yenon Levi – the one that Olsson had claimed van der Kwast had demanded should be redrafted. It was dated 17 November 1996 and signed by assistant physician Christina Ekström and Professor Anders Eriksson.

On its opening page someone had written in ballpoint pen: ‘Working copy. Incorrect according to Kwast, to be revised.’

Another two versions of the statement were in the box, the last copy signed by Anders Eriksson alone.

Now that I had the much sought-after statement in my hand it wasn’t difficult finding the passages that prosecutor van der Kwast had perceived as ‘incorrect’.

The medical examiner Christina Ekström had checked the forensic findings against information provided by Quick during questioning. By way of a conclusion she wrote, ‘In his description of the sequence of events Quick has left many different versions which in many instances are contradictory.’

One troubling circumstance for the investigators was that Yenon Levi had a very special type of injury in the form of a fracture on the right side of his pelvis in the so-called ilium bone. According to this first report, Quick’s various explanations could not explain this deadly injury.

Seppo Penttinen had personally gone to see Christina Ekström to try and convince her that Quick was capable of causing the damage to the ilium with a kick or stamping. ‘Just think how big Quick’s feet are,’ Penttinen had said. But Ekström stuck to her conclusion that the injury could only be explained by a fall from a great height, a traffic accident or similar.