Thomas Quick Wrongful Convictions

Sture Ragnar Bergwall, a Swedish man born on 26 April 1950, used the name Thomas Quick from 1993 to 2002 and was for years believed to be one of Sweden's most prolific serial killers. After being sentenced for armed robbery in 1991, Bergwall was confined to Säter, a secure psychiatric institution, for treatment of personality disorders. Facing the prospect of release, and anxious about leaving the institution, he began describing childhood abuse and recovered memories of committing murders. His therapist, Birgitta Ståhle, came to believe he had multiple personalities, including one she considered the source of the killings, and viewed his case as significant for criminal psychology and trauma theory. Bergwall later said the personalities emerged through therapy and that he developed them to match his therapist's expectations, which in turn reinforced her belief in them.

During therapy sessions followed by police interviews, Quick confessed to more than 30 murders in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland between 1964 and 1993. Between 1994 and 2001, he was convicted of eight of these murders across six separate district court trials. None of the convictions rested on eyewitnesses or technical forensic evidence connecting him to a crime scene; each was based on his own confession, obtained while he was on benzodiazepines and interviewed following therapy built around recovered-memory theory. Investigators later found Quick had repeatedly guessed wrong before arriving at correct details, such as the murder weapon in the case of Israeli tourist Yenon Levi, and that his earlier incorrect guesses were edited out of the account presented at trial. In the case of nine-year-old Therese Johannesen, who disappeared from Fjell, Drammen, Norway, in 1988, the conviction relied on burnt fragments presented as her bones; those fragments were later determined to be composed of wood and glue resembling hardboard, not bone. In the case of Gry Storvik, semen recovered from the victim did not match Quick's DNA.

Journalists Hannes Råstam and Jenny Küttim, and separately Dan Josefsson, later published documentaries and books arguing that flawed therapy produced Quick's false confessions; Josefsson's account describes a group led by psychologist Margit Norell as having shaped both the therapy and the police investigation. In November 2006, retired lawyer Pelle Svensson reported Quick's trials to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice on behalf of a victim's parents seeking to have the convictions declared invalid.

In 2008, during the recording of a television documentary, Quick withdrew all of his confessions; in a December 2008 interview with Råstam he denied taking part in any of the killings he had previously confessed to. With his confessions retracted and no other evidence remaining, Quick's convictions were reconsidered one by one. The Yenon Levi conviction was quashed after Quick was acquitted at retrial in September 2010; the Johan Asplund conviction was quashed in March 2012; the Therese Johannesen conviction in March 2011; the Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik convictions in September 2012; the conviction for the killing of a couple at Appojaure in May 2013; and the Charles Zelmanovits conviction, the last of the eight, in July 2013. Having reverted to his birth name, Bergwall was released from Säter after more than twenty years in confinement. The episode has been described as the largest miscarriage of justice in Swedish history.