Aardvarchaeology – by Dr. Martin Rundkvist

Long-term active serial killers are extremely rare. A country of ten million is exceedingly unlikely to suffer the crimes of one in any given quarter century. So Thomas Quick was a very big deal in Sweden. From 1994 to 2001, he was convicted of eight murders, and he confessed to nine additional ones that he was never tried for.

Because Thomas Quick never actually killed anyone. He was a gay junkie with sexual problems, in forced psychiatric custody from 1991 for hostage-taking and robbery. When he entered treatment by one of that period’s characteristic repressed-memories therapists, he came up with a way to get lots of attention and truckloads of primo meds. All he had to do was go to the library and read up on unsolved murder cases, then “remember” committing the murders. He was eventually acquitted in all eight cases.

But for seven years, Swedish news were full of the most awful details about the murders, reported from the trials. We had no idea that it was actually horror fiction created by someone on a lot of benzodiazepines. So who did murder those seventeen people? And how did it happen, now that we know that Quick’s versions were made up? I had the impulse to check a few of the more prominent cases. And in the middle of all the pain and sorrow involved, I think what actually happened is kind of a relief in comparison. There’s even room for a wry laugh here.

In July of 1984 two Dutch hikers, Mr. & Mrs. Stegehuis, were knifed to death with extreme overkill inside their tent at a scenic mountain lake. Reading about this in the Quick era from 1994 onward, Swedes lived with a feeling that anyone inside a tent could get randomly murdered by itinerant maniacs even in a complete wilderness. Well, apparently not.

Nearby on that evening, a group of local men were also having a nice hike. There was a drunken disagreement, and one of them, a bodybuilder notorious for his violent tendencies, angrily left the camp. He later came back covered in blood and carrying a bloody knife, claiming to have butchered a reindeer. None of the men reported anything. Years later, the bodybuilder was in jail and confessed to a fellow inmate that he had been so angry and confused that night that, when he blundered back to teach his buddies a lesson, he had gotten lost and attacked the wrong tent. Alcohol and steroids will do that to you. He killed himself in 1996.

In July of 1988, nine-y-o Therese went missing in Drammen, Norway. Quick spun a really juicy tale about what he’d done to her. It led to a farcical forensics investigation where the police found a single fragment of some white material, a highly qualified osteologist pronounced it to be part of a young human’s lower arm, and later it turned out to be a piece of plastic laminate countertop. Therese has never been found, dead or alive. Any archaeologist could have told the police that the bones of a nine-y-o do not disintegrate in a few years, particularly not if the body is cremated, as Quick claimed he had done.

But the girl’s parentage was a little uncertain. One man who may have thought he was her father was a Pakistani neighbour and former partner of her mother’s. It is quite possible that Therese is currently a middle-aged Muslim farmer’s wife in a village somewhere along the River Indus. Norwegian police have been there to look for her, unsuccessfully.