Original subtitles

This programme contains graphic descriptions

and re-enactments of serial killer violence

including against children and scenes of self-harm.

GORAN LAMBERTZ: The police found terrible texts

that he had written on pads and papers

in the '90s when he was in the hospital,

where he said that he...

..ate parts of little boys and that he was aroused sexually by doing it.

JENNY KUTTIM: We had our own Hannibal Lector.

GORAN FRANSSON: As more and more confessions came, I thought,

"This is one of the greatest criminal cases in Swedish history."

JENNY KUTTIM: He confessed to 39 murders.

I mean, he was big, big shot, big story, yes.

All these murders, a serial killer...

One of our first,

maybe our first real serial killer.

He changed his name, you know.

Sture Bergwall, it's not a good name for a serial killer.

But Thomas Quick, that means in English Thomas the Fast.

STURE BERGWALL:

GORAN FRANSSON: He was actually one of the strangest persons

I've met so far.

He had been into psychiatric hospitals before.

He had tried to strangle a young boy

when he worked at Falun hospital.

He had expressed feelings of sadism and paedophilia.

When he started therapy inside Sater, in '92,

he had something on his conscience.

Therapist came into me one day and said,

"I must talk to you about what Sture says.

"He's telling about that he has killed,"

and he mentioned a specific boy that had disappeared several years ago.

That is a very famous case in Sweden.

It's about the boy who disappeared from his...

..where he lived, and was never found again.

On November 7th, 1980,

Johan was supposed to come to my place

and stay over the weekend.

It was the Father's Day and it was the first time

that Johan also should bring one of his friends.

I arrived about 1.30.

And Johan was supposed to stop school at three o'clock.

So we had some time talking about what's going to happen

during the week and, yeah, you know,

like normal parents caring for their child.

It was on the TV news that night.

Just after a couple of hours,

there was plenty of people at the school.

Hundreds of hundreds of people were here,

starting to go over the whole area.

He said that he had killed Johan,

raped him and stuck a knife through his heart.

I'm an investigating reporter,

crime reporter

for one of the local newspapers here.

Thomas Quick has been a big part of my job, yes.

There aren't many like him in Swedish crime history.

This is the first story ever written in...

..on March the 10th, 1993.

"Did he kill Johan?"

And on the inside...

"Man from Falun confesses murder of disappeared boy."

GORAN LAMBERTZ: I read about it in the paper.

Everybody was interested in it.

This character,

Thomas Quick, who started confessing one murder after the other.

That was interesting to everyone.

We never talked about Sture, never.

Because there was nothing to talk about.

It was just an evil person.

JENNY KUTTIM: I learned something in school,

that we had this serial killer, he was notorious,

and he killed like everybody,

girls and boys,

and he, like, moved as a shadow

through Sweden,

and he was going to be incarcerated

for the rest of his life,

so we didn't have to feel any fear.

BELL TOLLS

It was a pretty tough upbringing.

His father was not very nice.

He was a pretty depressed guy,

absent and sad.

I think his mother took care of everything,

but she had...there were so many children

that she couldn't possibly give them

all the security and love that they really needed, I think.

So he... It was not an easy life for him.

JENNY KUTTIM: He was the black sheep of the family.

You know, he got nothing right.

In school, he didn't have that great grades,

and he also was very lost early in life.

DAN JOSEFSSON: I think it was hard

for anyone to be homosexual in Sweden at that time.

I mean, homosexuality was a psychiatric diagnosis.

In the beginning, he was very dysfunctional.

I mean, he was sort of trying to touch his classmates

and stuff like that,

so he became a sort of like a psychiatric problem child

very early on.

When he was 19 years old,

he fell in love with an older guy.

They had something that he said was very beautiful.

That made him use much more drugs and was drinking,

and that turns into this...

When he attacked these kids.

GUBB JAN STIGSON: He got convicted of four assaults in 1978,

committed from March to October '69.

The latest was in the hospital here, in Falun.

DAN JOSEFSSON: It was a nine-year-old boy, I think,

that was in a hospital bed,

and he sort of started to touch that boy when he was asleep.

And then he woke up, and apparently, Sture very well panicked

and tried to stop the boy from screaming.

GORAN LAMBERTZ: He was psychiatrically diagnosed

as a very dangerous man.

He had strangled the boy not to death, but almost,

and he had committed others kinds of assaults on little boys.

DAN JOSEFSSON: When he was 23 years old,

he started to study

in Uppsala, which is a big university town.

His life really revolved around drugs very much

and, of course, of trying to get some kind of relationship

or have sex, and very chaotic.

He was mixing different drugs and he was using them more and more.

He told me once about this stabbing in Uppsala.

We went out to...to find someone to kill,

and he said he wanted to kill his...his own sexuality -

why couldn't he be a normal homosexual?

If you're born

with his psychiatric problems...

..what a destiny.

You can never have an equal sexual relationship,

you can ever have an equal partner

You have an urge to hurt people, to live out your sexuality.

They decided that they were not going to put him on trial

and correct him or anything because they thought he's in medical care

anyway, psychiatric care, so they just sent him back to the hospital.

It was almost no consequence at all for him. He just...

A few months later, he was out again.

After this terrible stabbing in Uppsala,

he actually started to organise his life a little bit

and he managed to, during the '80s, he were practically drug-free.

But in the end of the '80s, he started to use drugs again,

and then everything fell to pieces.

Mama!

SHE SCREAMS

YELLING IN SWEDISH

SHE YELLS IN SWEDISH

THEY SPEAK IN SWEDISH

GUBB JAN STIGSON: And so the family was held hostage

for about three hours.

He threatened to kill her and the boy.

THEY SPEAK IN SWEDISH

GORAN FRANSSON: I've heard that Bergwall acted very aggressively

when he was watching the mother and her son,

and that was a couple of hours that were really scary, I would say.

SHE SOBS

GUBB JAN STIGSON: I remember from the court,

the mother told him how the boy shivered in her arms

during this event.

It was a very nasty crime, I think.

It took several years

for the family to get over it.

And that's how he got to Sater.

JENNY KUTTIM: When he arrived there, in 1991,

the therapists had no idea he was a serial killer.

Those revelations came later.

GORAN FRANSSON: I was asked to make his psychiatric examination

and found that he suffered from a major mental disorder.

Sater is one of the five large hospitals created for people

sentenced to forensic psychiatric treatment.

JENNY KUTTIM: When he came to Sater,

even his devoted siblings had turned their backs on him.

So he gets to Sater and he wants to understand himself,

so he's eager to get inside therapy.

DAN JOSEFSSON: It was a very progressive place.

They had a very ambitious new treatment plan.

They wanted the criminals to go into therapy to understand themselves,

to understand why they had become this criminal person.

And the idea that was really like the foundation of the entire

thinking at Sater was that these people had committed their crimes

as a direct result of trauma in their childhood

and especially sexual abuse that they had been subject to.

This was Sater's belief.

And they had this idea that if they could make these people

remember the trauma, because they believed their memories were

repressed, if they could help these people remember the trauma,

then the need to commit crimes would simply go away.

At first, Thomas Quick had no memory of killing Johan Asplund.

It just developed in therapy.

The case went to a prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast,

and he took on

an investigator policeman,

Seppo Penttinen.

The police, of course,

really wanted Sture to show some part of Johan Asplund's body.

So that was like the main focus for a pretty long time.

Me at his therapist and Thomas Quick go up to Sundsvall

and meets the attorneys, the police, etc,

which we did on the parking place south of Sundsvall,

and he was to show us the place where he had killed Johan Asplund.

HE SOBS

JENNY KUTTIM: Everyone was keen to find the body.

The police and the doctors from the clinics spent any hours

wandering around the Sundsvall region looking for a corpse.

Thomas Quick said he'd cut up the body into the several parts,

but they never found any of them.

INDISTINCT SPEECH

They didn't find anything.

But they still felt that this was a great success. This great victory.

This is a victory for psychotherapy and it's a victory for Sater.

It's not unusual when you're out with a patient,

then you have dinner at a restaurant.

We do that all the time.

The stupider thing is...

..to order cigars, perhaps.

Well, I can't deny that - we did it.

Sten-Ove thought Sture was calling him

to wish him luck

for the operation,

but instead Sture said,

"I wish that your rotten heart

"were implode and that you will die during the operation."

We said to each other, Sten-Ove and I...

.."We wish that they never will let him out.

"Give him a decent life, but never let him out."

The philosophy at Sater was inspired by a very influential woman,

a psychoanalyst named Margit Norell.

She was born in 1914

and she had been sort of like a rebel in the psychoanalyst

movement in Sweden for many, many years.

And she managed, during the '80s, to get like a stronghold at Sater.

She became the supervisor for the head doctor of the place,

and she very much influenced this new clinic

that was based on giving her kind of treatment to these criminals.

JENNY KUTTIM: This is a very important manuscript

to understand the Thomas Quick story.

Actually, it was found in Sture Bergwall's room,

in the end of his book shelves,

and it was his therapist, Birgitta Stahle,

together with her supervisor, Margit Norell.

They put down everything that happened inside the therapy

of the mind of a serial killer.

The purpose of this book is to describe a very difficult

and unusual therapeutic process

which I have been monitoring between the years of 1991 to 1995.

It was going to be greater than Sigmund Freud's Wolf-Man,

to understand why serial killers think like they do

and why they repress murders.

I met Birgitta Stahle the first time in 1987,

when I started at the clinic.

I liked her for the very beginning.

As a professional and as a good friend.

I think she was brilliant.

She was clever, she was intense in her engagement to the patients.

I thought she was one of those who could do everything.

What they were doing was so humane, it was so progressive.

They tried to, you know, understand a serial killer,

to help him, to cure him, to help

him to come to terms with everything and become a human being again.

After the Johan Asplund case,

he started confessing to the murder, or the killing,

of Charles Zelmanovits.

He was a 15-year-old boy

who disappeared after

he went to a disco with his friends.

I remember everything when he was preparing to get out,

to go out - clothes and everything.

We even had an argument, which is still stuck in my head.

I went to bed in the evening, and in the morning, he wasn't there.

But I didn't think that much about it just then.

But, of course, the longer the time goes, the more you expect the worst.

But you never...

You never get rid of the hope. You always have the hope.

GRUNTING, STRUGGLING

It was about 17 years later, my mum called me

and said the police had called her and said they found the body,

which they were not sure then, but they thought it was my brother.

There was some guy out walking in the forest, well, in the woods,

and he kicked something and he looked and it was a cranium.

And he called the police, and that's how it was found.

He claimed that he had picked up Charles after the party

and taken him to the forest

and wanted to do some sexual acts with him,

and after strangled him and carried him further out

in the forest and cut him and eaten some parts of him,

which...which...

..at that stage is quite horrendous to hear.

JENNY KUTTIM: There were two headlines

after the first trial back in '94

that read, "Once you know the terrible truth

"of what Thomas Quick did to his victim

"and once you have heard his deep bestial roar,

"only one question remains, "is he really human?"

The first trial was in all media.

Everyone was there. It was very, very dramatic,

and you felt...

..you felt, you know, contempt for this person.

And the competing tabloid said,

"The man is a serial killer,

"he's a paedophile, he is a cannibal, he's a sadist -

"he's a very, very sick man."

When you saw him in the trials, he was like, you know,

he was low key and he was well-spoken, and you couldn't

believe really that this guy could have done all these things.

That was also very intriguing and amazing.

He was...

..soft spoken, intelligent...

..as most criminals aren't.

There are a couple of...

..a couple of those I've met

who are more intelligent than others,

and he was one of the tops.

Whilst out doing reconstructions and things like that,

he suddenly started to say, "Nomis, nomis,"

and then you know that he made

a journey in time,

so now he was close

to something very essential,

or very important during the reconstruction.

And "nomis", that is Simon backwards.

The story goes that Thomas Quick was repeatedly

abused by his father from the age of four,

and during one of these assaults,

his mum steps into the room

and she panics and gets into acute labour.

She came into the bedroom with this child hanging

between her legs on this cord,

and still he was at that time being raped by his father.

A violent feast breaks out in the bedroom,

and they start chopping Simon up,

dismembering his body,

forcing Thomas Quick to eat the dead flesh of his brother.

The first lunge of the knife stabs into the right-hand

side of the torso and is delivered by the mother,

thereafter the father takes the knife.

Sture repeatedly says, "Not the throat, not the throat."

This knife stabs and cuts up the torso,

and then right leg is removed.

Mother takes flesh from Simon and puts it into Sture's gaping mouth.

Sture, says, "I am not hungry."

Sture says that mother and father embrace and it gives him

an unpleasant feeling.

Then he reaches out to take Simon's hand, realises that it's loose,

it is unattached, says,

"I have broken off my little brother's hand."

JENNY KUTTIM: Before wrapping him in a newspaper and actually putting him

on the bicycle, rushing him off to the woods to bury him.

In connection with the death and cutting up of Simon's foetus,

Sture divides his image of the father into two parts,

P and Ellington,

where Ellington represents the terrifying evil part of his father.

There and then, he decides,

when he grows up, that he's going to mend Simon.

So actually, he becomes a serial killer -

he has to collect body parts

to someday mend his own kid brother, Simon.

Wow. Here we have the re-enactment theory confirmed.

You had this terrible abuse in childhood

and he has re-enacted it as murders,

but he can't remember the murders because the abuse was repressed,

so he repressed the murders as well.

That was sort of, well, that's even more interesting

than the theory that they had to begin with.

They could develop the theory and show up,

"The proof."

That's when he became the number one patient at Sater.

Being the star patient meant that, whenever the police took him

on a crime reconstruction, there was also a team of therapists

and other clinical staff in attendance.

It was the therapists at Sater, it was the police investigators,

Seppo Penttinen and Christer van der Kwast,

and it was the memory expert,

Sven Christianson.

He was brought into the investigation

because Christer van der Kwast, the prosecutor,

needed a memory expert.

He needed somebody who could explain this mental patient's

strange memories.

And he was very curious to talk to a real serial killer

in order to understand what other serial killers were doing.

Two tourists from Holland who were travelling up

in the north part of Sweden during a summer,

and when they had stayed

at the place called Appojaure,

to spend the night

in the tent at the lake,

they were murdered

during their sleep.

In the case of the Dutch couple, Birgitta Stahle was very

impressed by his ability to recover his memories.

The first day went very well, and Thomas was able to carry out

the reconstruction in a very satisfactory way.

With an initial regression,

he came into contact with the event in its entirety, and thereby,

he was able to put out a complete memory sequence.

HEAVY BREATHING

THUD

THUDS

HE SPEAKS IN SWEDISH

BIRGITTA STAHLE: Thomas made two suicide attempts in the autumn,

when intense anxiety awakened and decided to die

and avoid the suffering caused by the psychotherapy

and police questioning.

New memories where violence is being directed at adults

have started coming up.

Thomas had now been arrested for the so-called tent murder

in 1984.

STRIDENT OVERLAPPING NOISES

JENNY KUTTIM: The Therese Johannessen case,

Thomas Quick confessed of going to Norway,

praying for a young boy,

but ended up

finding this little girl on her way to the store.

HE STAMMERS

DAN JOSEFSSON: One side effect of his therapy

was that he needed a lot of medications

in order to handle the psychological pain the story telling caused him.

BIRGITTA STAHLE: Today, Thomas had

a severe panic attack in the afternoon.

Approached the staff and said, "I'm going mad, help me."

He was given a Xanax pill and was helped to the music room,

where he lay on the floor screaming.

YELLING

Thomas had another attack at about 13.00 hours,

when we found him in the therapy room.

As more and more confessions came, I thought,

this is one of the greatest criminal cases in Swedish history.

JENNY KUTTIM: Trine Jensen was 17 years old.

She was found naked from the waist down.

Her head was cut off and she was missing soft body

parts from her torso.

I thought that serial killers always choose a certain kind of victim,

but when you read about it, it's not like that.

A lot of serial killers choose victims from different groups,

different kinds of victims,

and when you hear him tell about the stories,

about these murders that he says that he committed,

then it takes perfect sense.

Gry Storvik was a prostitute and a drug addict.

She was raped, beaten and probably strangled.

They said that he was extremely brave

doing all this therapeutic work,

getting up all these terrible memories of all his murders.

He was a brave, brave man,

who would help science,

who would help future generations to be able to spot serial killers

at an early stage, to stop them.

He was told that he was saving lives,

he lives in the future.

Thomas Quick would be the great example, you know?

If you somehow could link

the criminal acts

back to the childhood,

then you could also prevent criminality.

He became almost like a Jesus figure.

Thomas Quick got convicted for eight murders during the '90s

and the beginning of 2000. And then he stopped talking to the police.

Something happened.

There was a disciple of Margit Norell,

the man who actually started

this progressive new clinic in 1989,

Goran Kjellberg, a doctor.

He left the clinic pretty soon after Sture Bergwall

had started to admit murderers.

And as soon as Sture was drug-free,

he quit therapy and he stopped cooperating with the police.

No-one was really interested in Sture Bergwall in Sweden.

Very few people thought about him.

It was a very strange thing, this serial killer.

There was this time when I saw him on TV.

He had something over his head, but I saw his hands,

and his hands was exactly like Sten-Ove's.

And I said to Sten-Ove, "That is your brother, your blood.

"No matter what he has done to other people or to us,

"but reach out and give him a chance."

JENNY KUTTIM: I had been working as a journalist for almost one year

and I came across Hannes Rastam.

Hannes Rastam was a very famous investigative journalist.

He needed a researcher.

He was one of the first to actually read all the interrogations

and systematically went through the entire process,

what has actually happened.

What did they say to each other in that interrogation room?

What did they do when they were out looking for the body parts?

Hannes Rastam confronted Sture Bergwall

with his drug addiction.

There were critics that, by that time, had actually said that they

didn't believe at all that this guy was a murderer,

but most of us, of course, thought that that's not possible.

I mean, it might be something wrong with one or

two of the trials, but it's not possible that the Swedish

system could actually wrongfully convict a man in trial after trial.

That's impossible.

Hannes asked him

if he still stood by his confessions.

And he answered him, by saying,

"What if...

"What if I don't? What would happen to me?

"What if I never did all of these crimes, who would believe me?"

So then we had to work day and night

to check, double check his story,

and we also told him that he needed to be absolutely true with us,

truthful, otherwise we could not do this story.

For the first time,

Sture Bergwall, Thomas Quick's real name, stopped lying

and he withdrew his confessions.

19th of September, 2008,

I went to Sater to meet with Sture Bergwall.

And he told me that he was going to retract his confessions

and that he wanted to have contact with a lawyer,

and I had handled cases like this before where you had to

quash a verdict and get a new trial.

So on the train up to the clinic, I read the verdict.

I confronted Sture Bergwall

with the fact that the verdict contained

several details that only the perpetrator could know about.

And Sture Bergwall's response to that was, "That's right,

"but I have never told the police those things,

"they have been either put in my mouth

"or put to the court by the police."

50,000 pages.

I read everything.

I examined everything.

And I can see it's pure lies.

He did not do any of these murders.

I didn't buy him.

HE CHUCKLES

Nobody with their mind intact

would buy a figure like that.

I've been working this story for so long, five years.

In the beginning,

we aimed to look at the police investigations like generalists do.

What's wrong and how could it happen?

But it was not until recently we could understand

why it all happened.

The loneliness is the key to understanding everything

Sture has done in his entire life, I would say.

That's... That's the key.

He has always been extremely lonely.

So, to him, his only way of actually getting

some kind of relationship

going with anyone was to get psychotherapy.

INDISTINCT RAMBLING SPEECH

SHOUTS: Nomis!

Birgitta Stahle was one of the persons who were most

dependent on Margit Norell.

She wanted to impress Margit.

She felt good when Margit was proud of her.

JENNY KUTTIM: To understand the Thomas Quick story,

you need to be aware of the group thinking,

like every other group thinking, if it's a sect or a cult.

When you look at it afterwards, it's often completely unbelievable

how this group could actually do what they did,

but in the group, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And I would say that the Quick scandal,

that is one of the most fantastic examples of group think

that I have ever stumbled upon.

INDISTINCT SPEECH

Well, a sect must have a strong leader, I think.

And he or she doesn't have to be present.

And the leader of this sect, as far as I can understand,

was Margit Norell.

She was a very powerful influence.

We didn't listen to much about what came from the outside.

I mean, there were doubts in those days about repressed memories

or about this kind of therapy, etc,

but we preferred not to listen to that.

SHE REPRIMANDS IN SWEDISH

SHE SHOUTS

JENNY KUTTIM: Who would listen to a mentally unstable person

incarcerated in a mental hospital?

Nobody would listen to him if it wasn't a place where you were

longing for a person like Sture Bergwall.

And they were at Sater. He was the perfect patient for them.

DAN JOSEFSSON: The doctors at Sater got to the police first,

and that's very unfortunate.

Had they just done

a regular interrogation with Sture Bergwall,

they would most probably have talked to him once or twice,

and then they would have just left him alone.

But the doctors said...

They explained to the police that what you're going to see here is

not your regular suspect.

This is a very special person

and he goes through a very special treatment that is very advanced

and not very well known anywhere,

so this is not going to look as you expect it to look.

The story is not going to be very clear, maybe.

Maybe he's going to contradict himself.

He won't remember a lot of things.

But that's because the memories are coming back right now,

so you to bear with him and bear with us,

because we're working with this guy,

and this is going to be a revolution.

It's going to be fantastic.

And if you just, you know, turn away and say, "This clown..."

You know, "This story doesn't make sense," you're going to regret it.

They also had this professor, Sven Christianson,

a professor of psychology,

a memory expert, testifying that the notion of repression is

actually valid, that this is a scientific concept.

Well, the notion that Sture Bergwall would have killed all these people

and not been aware of it in 1991, when he got to Sater,

is idiotic.

Laughable.

The man in lead of the investigation,

who was a Swedish prosecutor, van der Kwast,

he wrote me a letter.

I was, at that time, head of the department

for research at the National Police,

so he wrote me a kind invitation

and said,

"We have a very interesting serial killer here,

"if you want to have a look at him."

Then I spent I think it was a couple of days going through the material,

and after that,

I gave him my opinion, I said, "This guy is bogus.

"He is a megalomaniac."

And he wasn't too pleased with that.

All the time, they got new convictions

while we were saying, "This is bogus, stop it,

"for Christ's sake," but they just went on.

JENNY KUTTIM: I'm sure the police officers

and the prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast,

was very pleased that they had this notorious

serial killer. And, conveniently, he confessed to all

unresolved murders in Sweden,

so they could just pinpoint down one person.

They gave him a lot of advantages.

He got all the medicine that he wanted.

He was a rather heavy drug addict

and he got that legally at the hospital.

And if he wanted some extra steak, grilled steak,

with a bearnaise sauce, he could just order it like that.

He had a very comfortable living at the institution.

He had one study and one bedroom,

and he was connected on the net

and all that stuff.

And he wouldn't have been that

if he hadn't been piece de resistance of that institution.

And all the people around him - psychologists, psychiatrists,

police officers, prosecutors -

they made careers on him.

DAN JOSEFSSON: Sture Bergwall was very influenced

by this serial killer craze

that was going over the world in the beginning of the '90s.

You had Silence Of Lambs, but you also had American Psycho.

Sture told me that he read it.

And he...

He took a lot of material from that book

and put it into his grotesque murder stories.

For example, he has a very terrible story

about what he did to Therese Johannessen.

He said that, "Well, I took her hair and I cut her up

"and I took out all her insides

"because I wanted to get to her spine from the front in."

And I asked, "So, what was that business

"about getting to the spine?"

"Well, yeah, in American psycho," he said,

that he actually wrote something very similar.

They had a very small experience

of murders and murder investigations,

and their experience of serial killers, especially this type -

a sadistic, sexually oriented predator -

they had no experience whatsoever.

So they bought everything that they could look at in film and TV

and reading fictional books and things like that,

where, of course, Thomas Quick had picked his knowledge up.

JENNY KUTTIM: There were no technical evidence,

there were no witnesses, the only thing they had was his confession...

..and some circumstantial evidence that he, from the start,

didn't know himself, that he snapped up from newspapers

or from other persons involved in investigations.

If you take the eight cases where he is convicted,

they follow the same procedure.

It starts in the therapy

where he gives some clues and some hints

about committing the murder,

and that information goes from the psychologists to the police,

and the police start an investigation

where they interview him.

And in each of the eight cases, you can see that,

in the first interview,

he don't know anything about the facts of the case.

I mean, he gives totally wrong information about the murder,

about the victim, about the place of the murder,

about the modus operandi of the murder,

and everything is wrong.

DAN JOSEFSSON: He was a narcotics police,

very, very low down in the ranks.

He was like the one who was sitting in a car watching

a door to see who goes into the pusher and who comes out.

He gave away some information, yes,

that's what police investigators should do sometimes.

That's part of the job.

Having met Seppo Penttinen now a couple of times, I th...

I shouldn't say this about people, but I am willing to say that he

is one - a perfectly honest person,

two - a very, very skilled policeman.

At one time, 1997, Sture very suddenly

wanted to get out of it all.

He wrote a letter and said, "I don't want to be part of this

"any more, because I'm afraid I'm going to die."

ANGRY SHOUTING

GROWLING

SHE CALMS HIM

What they did then was that they said that,

"Well, you're probably a little tense because we're going

"back to Norway to look for Therese Johannessen" - again.

They'd been there a year before

and they were going to go there again for one of these very

strange trips. "So we're going to help you,

"we're going to go to another forest,

"we're going to go to a Swedish forest that

"sort of looks like Norway so you can, in a little easier way,

"get into the feelings and the emotions," and they did.

And Seppo Penttinen, the police, he brought with him a camera.

Sture Bergwall is pretending that he is in Norway.

He is getting this regression to the murder day,

sort of talk to Therese Johannessen and stuff like that.

He claims that he can see where he has hidden Therese Johannessen,

even though, I mean, he's not even in the right country,

but he can see the grave,

and Seppo Penttinen is taking photographs

of everything he is looking at.

But they're not in the right country!

Sven Christianson was there, the professor.

Birgitta Stahle was at Sture's side.

The whole gang was there,

walking around in a wood in the wrong country,

taking pictures.

And Sture was telling,

"I can see the secret! I can see the secret!"

The secret being the burial place for Therese Johannessen in Norway.

When Sture Bergwall said, "I didn't do it,"

everybody jumped on that story,

so it became truth

very, very quickly.

And I think that the prosecutors that were handling

the extraordinary cases, they...

I think they decided at an early instance that,

"Let's just leave this.

"There is no reason to fight this any more."

The courts who convicted him, they were only deceived

because they didn't get the whole picture, they didn't get a clear...

..a clear picture of the facts,

and they were not told all those things

that show that he couldn't possibly have made and committed

any of these murders.

Ten new prosecutors and eight new judges have been through

the material in all eight murders,

and they have concluded that we have to free Sture Bergwall,

that he is not a murderer any more.

DOOR BUZZES

I believe that Sture Bergwall

is the only person inside a small group of people

that took the step to say the truth,

the first person to speak up

about what really happened during these years.

And if he hadn't done that back in 2008,

we could still have a serial killer in Sweden.

But what about the persons that were supposed to do their jobs?

The police, the therapists, the memory experts, the judges,

the courts in Sweden?

Why didn't any of them say, "No, this doesn't make sense, stop"?

I won't say I'm glad that I went through it,

but I'll say it was good I did.

I think I have got more respect for...

..how wrong it can be,

how people -

good, nice people - can do very stupid things.

JENNY KUTTIM: And today, we can never find the real killer

because almost all of these crimes are statute-buried.

The statute of limitations has run out on them,

so we will never know who killed them.

These are the real victims of this story.

And for that, Sture Bergwall has a tremendous responsibility.

Some people say that Sture did not have any empathy.

Towards me, he has, anyway.

He asks how I am and asks about my newborn child,

so we have some kind of relationship.

Cos I've seen something else...

..behind the headlines.

CAMERA CLICKS

HE SOBS

HE EXHALES

We don't know what will happen in the future,

neither does Sture Bergwall nor those involved.

It's definitely not the end.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media