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"Part 1: Inside the asylum\n\nSture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at S\u00E4ter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure eight over and over again. Sometimes he listens to music, but more often to the morning news, eavesdropping on a world he was separated from more than two decades ago.\n\nSweden is the kind of country where being a convicted murderer in a secure psychiatric unit is not necessarily an impediment to having a Twitter feed, and Bergwall often tweets about these endless morning circuits. \"Ercise yard reflections,\" he titles them. Small wistful poems about what you can see when this is your only physical access to the world beyond: the budding of a branch, the way fresh snow sits on top of the courtyard walls, the glow against the underside of the sky that he knows is from the lights of the waking town to the east. On a good day, he sees a nightingale.\n\nSture Bergwall is better known to most people in Sweden as Thomas Quick, the name he took not long after he arrived at this institution in 1991. Quick is his mother's family name. Thomas, he liked to explain, was the name of his first victim, a 14-year-old boy whose body was found in a bicycle shed, belt undone, trouser button ripped off, and face bloody. Bergwall was never prosecuted for that murder, because he was 14 years old when it happened, and by the time he confessed to it, the statute of limitations had expired. But he was later convicted in six separate trials for eight other murders, and the full number of murders he has claimed responsibility for is around thirty. That is how he became Sweden's most famous serial killer. \"Sweden's answer,\" as he himself would later put it, \"to Hannibal Lecter.\"\n\nFor a time it was a role he seemed to revel in, but then in 2001, after his eighth murder conviction, Bergwall announced that he was no longer going to cooperate with prosecutors and he was no longer going to speak with the media. He reclaimed the name Sture Bergwall and went silent. As his reputation swirled, the man at its center kept his own counsel. But recently he has decided to start talking again, and he has agreed to see me. I have come here to try and understand his story\u2014an awful story about what human beings can do, and about responsibility and guilt, and about deceit and retribution, one that has lessons for us all.\n\nTo reach the secure psychiatric unit's visitors room, which is where Bergwall and I will talk, this is what you must do: walk through the security entrance, put your passport in a tray where it is kept by a man in a secure booth, go through a heavy metal door that is opened remotely, walk through a metal detector, go through another remotely opened heavy metal door, sit in a waiting room where a coffee table is littered with Swedish women's magazines, then go through two more locked doors, each opened with keypads. And there, at the end of this, is Sture Bergwall, waiting, smiling a little unsurely, a 63-year-old man with a short gray beard, barely a wisp of hair on his head, thick glasses.\n\nHere, five doors from the free world, it is hard not to feel a little apprehension. There is an odd moment after I first arrive when the translator has gone to the bathroom and the two people from the hospital who will sit by the door as we talk are not yet in place, and so it is just myself and Bergwall, meeting for the first time, exchanging stilted pleasantries. He takes a seat on one side of a low coffee table\u2014a position chosen, I later discover, because he doesn't like to see the staff who are monitoring him. I move toward the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. But then he overrules me. He gently taps on the chair right next to him. Okay.\n\nSo that's where I'll sit for the next three hours, my right knee a couple of inches from his left. Bergwall's lawyer, Thomas Olsson, will tell me later about his first visit here: He and his future client were ushered into a kitchen, and the door was locked behind them. \"Having your first meeting with a cannibal in a kitchen,\" Olsson will note, \"that's something to remember.\"\n\nToday I have brought pastries, and Bergwall seems pleased about this.\n\n\"Ooooh,\" he says, and smiles. And then he begins to talk.\n\nPart 2: Eight murders\n\nTo understand who this man is\u2014the man who was once Thomas Quick and is now Sture Bergwall\u2014one unavoidable place to start is by looking at exactly what the person I am now sitting knee-to-knee with was convicted for. The accounts that follow are drawn from transcripts of police interrogations with Quick, and from trial testimony and written verdicts, and from his own writing in the garrulous Thomas Quick years, and from media interviews he gave to explain himself before his period of silence. Many of the details are very difficult to bear.\n\nThe first murder that came to trial, in 1994, was of a 15-year-old boy called Charles Zelmanovits. Quick explained how he and a friend, on the lookout for a suitable boy in November 1976, spotted Zelmanovits walking along the road late one evening, visibly distressed. (Friends would explain that he had become upset after things had turned out weirdly with a girl at a school dance.) Quick pulled over to offer him sympathy and a ride home. He asked to feel Zelmanovits's hands, and so Zelmanovits took off his gloves, and then Quick said he persuaded the boy that they should masturbate each other. They stopped at a logging yard\u2014Quick's driver friend wanted to join in\u2014but then Quick became angered enough at something Zelmanovits said that he held the boy around the neck until he was dead. After Quick played further sexual games with the dead body, they carried it into a forest. Quick had a knife and a saw. \"He is controlled by a sexuality where specific parts of the body have a certain symbolic value,\" the trial verdict would explain, \"and he knew which body parts he wanted.\" Quick would describe the way the body seemed to groan as he cut it, and the sweet odor that was released. He explained how he took one leg and at least one hand away with him in a gray plastic bag and covered the rest of the body with moss. A short time later the accomplice came to Quick and said that he was having suicidal thoughts. \"Do it,\" Quick told him, advice the accomplice followed.\n\nFacebookPinterestBergwall with his twin sister on the weekend of his confirmation in 1964.\n\nThe second and third convictions were for a husband and wife, Dutch tourists Marinus and Janny Stegehuis, who were murdered at a secluded lakeside campsite in 1984. Quick explained how he stabbed the husband through the tent canvas, then made his way inside. His full description goes on for some time, and the forensic testimony at the trial showed that the observed wounds\u2014twenty-five on the man, twenty on the woman\u2014bore out Quick's account to a remarkable degree for such a frenzied attack.\n\nThe fourth murder, in 1988, was of a 24-year-old Israeli student, Yenon Levi, who was visiting family and sightseeing. Quick told how he and an accomplice kidnapped Levi at a train station and took him to a holiday home used by his accomplice's family. Once there, Levi tried to escape into the yard, but Quick soon recaptured and killed him.\n\nThe fifth murder was of a 9-year-old Norwegian girl, Therese Johannesen, in 1988. Quick described how he spotted her near her home, where she had just bought some Coke and some chocolate while she waited for a downpour to finish, and pulled her down a slope, where he then smashed her head against a rock until she was unconscious. Her last words, he reported, were \"Mommy, Mommy.\" He later recalled how disappointed he was, taking her body in the car, that she wasn't a boy. After dismembering her, something he recounted in particularly gruesome detail, he then hid different body parts in different places around the landscape; he returned to where they were buried the following year and burned the remains. At one of the sites he identified, the investigators found a bone fragment and sent it off for analysis. Just a small piece, too degraded for DNA analysis, but an expert confirmed for the court not only that it was human bone from a child aged 5 to 15 but that it showed signs of having been cut with a sharp instrument.\n\nThe sixth and seventh murders, which were tried together, also took place in Norway\u201423-year-old female prostitute Gry Storvik in 1985 (he made her strip and tortured her, and he described how she vomited as he throttled her) and 17-year-old Trine Jensen in 1981. (After various violent and sexual degradations, he strangled her with the strap of her handbag.)\n\nHis last murder conviction was for the 11-year-old boy Johan Asplund in 1980. Quick had spotted another target, swarthy with long hair and a gray knitted sweater, but that boy slipped out of sight and another boy came along. This was Asplund. Quick spoke to him, saying that he had hit a cat with his car and could he help him? When Asplund bent over to look, Quick struck his head against the car and pulled him inside\u2014angry, he explained, that this boy wasn't as much to his taste as the long-haired one. He drove Asplund into the countryside, where he sexually assaulted him then strangled him. Quick buried some of the internal organs, put the hands on the car's front seat, the head and legs in a plastic bag, and the remains of the torso in a third. He disposed of one hand along the roadside. He buried the other hand in a stream. He kept the legs in his attic for a while. Other parts he ate.\n\nFrederick Zelmanovits was at the first trial in 1994, for the murder of his brother Charles, and sat with his mother as every depraved detail was laid out in front of them. \"Horrendous,\" he remembers. \"That's all I can say: horrendous. Horrendous.\" The court reporter from Sweden's biggest tabloid, Aftonbladet, described how it had almost seemed impossible that a man could have done all this, but how the actual sound of Thomas Quick's confession was plenty to make it real. \"When Thomas Quick cries,\" she wrote, \"the sound is not human\u2014it is a dull and senseless lamentation. A kind of lowing. As from a tormented animal.\" The writer compared the banal figure before her\u2014\"a pale and unremarkable man in jeans with a shiny bald head\"\u2014with his actions: \"The man is a serial killer, pedophile, necrophiliac, cannibal and sadist. He is very, very sick.\"\n\nThe article's headline was THIS IS BEYOND ALL UNDERSTANDING.\n\nPart 3: A killer explains himself\n\nBut there is always a reason. Isn't there?\n\nThomas Quick's explanation for all the horrors he had described was rooted in his childhood. The overall arc\u2014the sins of the parents begat the sins of the child\u2014is a familiar one, but the details he offered were horrifying in ways that were almost inconceivable. \"It is my belief,\" he wrote, \"that every detail of my Killing contained its exact counterpart in what M and Dad subjected me to, every detail and each shade.\"\n\nQuick identified the defining moment of his childhood as happening when he was 4. He is lying on his back, naked, and his father is sucking his penis. Then his mother, seven months pregnant, comes through the door and sees what is taking place between her husband and her son. And that is when she miscarries. Quick lies there watching as his brother-to-be\u2014who, he is told, would have been called Simon\u2014falls to the floor, dead, a death his mother will forever blame on Thomas. He remembered how the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck and how, in cutting it, his father also severs the dead baby's head.\n\nThe next day his father tells Quick that they are going on a bicycle ride together, and Quick sees that his father is bringing with him a parcel wrapped in newspaper. With horror, Quick realizes that the parcel is the body of his dead baby brother. Far away from their house on a forested headland, he watches as his father disposes of the body.\n\nFacebookPinterestBergwall as an infant, on his father's lap, with five of his siblings.\n\nSoon afterward, blaming Quick for what has happened, his mother tries to drown him in a hole in the winter ice of nearby Lake Runn\u2014he is saved only by his father's intervention\u2014and the following year she also tries to push him in front of a bus. Meanwhile the attentions of his father sink into a predictable pattern. After climaxing, his father becomes kind again, pats his son on his stomach, and gets him some kind of token of love or reward\u2014lingonberries and milk\u2014from the kitchen.\n\nThroughout his childhood, Quick explained, he fantasized about finding his stillborn brother's burial site, disinterring the remains. Sometimes he fantasized about getting closer to his lost brother, about being reunited with Simon, by eating him. It is all of this\u2014but in particular his search for Simon as an adult, and his doomed attempts to find him in others\u2014that Quick linked to his serial killing. \"This is so clear,\" he said. \"When I kill, I am looking for a victim that I can identify with.\"\n\nMuch of this is laid out in a book Quick wrote, and published, midway through his series of murder trials. It will probably come as no surprise that, even by the standard of serial-killer reminiscences, this book, Kvarblivelse, is one of the strangest works of literature you could ever read. There are innocent childhood poems, longer poems detailing moments of awful horror, occasional incongruous bursts of musical criticism (\"Even though Al Green's voice is light, it exists in the dark. Al Green can tell you about pain, inner pain\") and also of literary criticism (Joyce Carol Oates's Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is \"a very good picture of how guilt shapes people\"), his plans for a follow-up publication (its working title is a pun on the word monologue best translated as Murderlogue), musings on his pain and loneliness and suicidal thoughts, meditations on forgiveness and its limits (\"I cannot ask or get my victims' relatives' understanding\u2014I have killed, defiled and dismembered their children\"), and accounts of his therapeutic progress.\n\nBefore the book's publication, when people suggested that it should be banned, Quick wrote a newspaper editorial defending his purpose. He said it was his duty to the families of those he killed: \"I understand that the certainty of what has happened is more important than anything else for the relatives.\"\n\nWhen journalists came calling, he happily regaled them for their articles and books. One of them dug out a poem published in Quick's school magazine when he was 15, offering a sinister list of things the narrator will do to the object of his unrequited love:\n\nI pluck your feathers\n\n You cannot fly\n\nI crush your eyes\n\nYou cannot see\n\nI bite your tongue\n\nYou cannot eat\n\nDie with me!\n\nI swallow you\n\nI can feel you slowly slipping into death\n\nI kill you\n\nYou kill me\n\nAmong the other books that came out in that period was one by his eldest brother, Sten-Ove, already a published author and poet. Although Sten-Ove was partly writing in defense of their parents' reputation, My Brother Thomas Quick includes a moment when the media announces that an unnamed man at S\u00E4ter mental hospital had claimed responsibility for the murder of a missing boy: \"I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.\"\n\nThomas Quick was incensed by this\u2014not by his brother's ready acceptance that he was a killer but by what Quick saw as a denial of the truth about their family. Quick says he and his therapist went through the book together with a marker pen, highlighting all the lies. And then he retaliated. God, did he retaliate. The worst wasn't the slanderous letter he wrote to Sten-Ove's new wife in which he accused his brother of child abuse: \"Do you know what Sten-Ove has done to his daughter? Do you know what a terrible person you are married to? Eventually you will be aware of it, and I feel sorry that you are married to such a beast of a man.\" The worst wasn't when Quick came to suspect that his brother might no longer be opening his letters and started scrawling their abusive contents on the outside of the envelopes, making sure there was plenty for his brother's postman to read: \"I am your serial killer brother. This is a letter from S\u00E4ter nuthouse.\" The worst wasn't even when he told the police that his brother had been his accomplice in the Johan Asplund murder.\n\nNo, the worst came when Quick phoned their home, pretending to be a TV producer needing to speak to Sten-Ove about the Quick case, and found out from Sten-Ove's wife that he was in the hospital just about to have heart surgery.\n\n\"I was lying on my bed, shaved, on tranquilizers,\" Sten-Ove remembers, \"and the nurse came with a telephone in her hand. I took the phone because I thought, Somebody must want to wish me luck.\"\n\nEven though they had not spoken in years, Sten-Ove knew immediately who it was. Sten-Ove has forgotten his brother's first words, but he will never forget the second thing his brother said that evening:\n\n\"I hope your rotten heart will implode so that you die.\"\n\nSten-Ove couldn't quite believe what he thought he'd heard.\n\n\"What did you say?\" he asked.\n\nAnd his brother simply repeated the same words one more time.\n\n\"I hope your rotten heart will implode so that you die.\"\n\nFacebookPinterestDalarna Province in middle Sweden, where Yenon Levi's body was found.\n\nThis is the man I am sitting next to at S\u00E4ter mental hospital, the man who made that telephone call. He knows full well that he did so, and later we will discuss it at some length. He knows he did many other terrible things, and we will discuss those too. He knows he was that man.\n\nAnd yet, in the most important ways of all, perhaps he also wasn't.\n\nPart 4: But...\n\nIt had been seven years since Sture Bergwall had retreated into a self-imposed silence when in 2008 he agreed to a visit from a Swedish filmmaker called Hannes R\u00E5stam. They had two meetings in which R\u00E5stam found Bergwall surprisingly smart and agreeable, but noncommittal. In the meantime, R\u00E5stam started to immerse himself in the story of the Thomas Quick murders, reading the police interrogations, speaking to people involved in the investigation, and watching hours of videotape reconstructions where Quick was taken to a crime scene to jog his memory and allow him to reveal further information that would confirm he was the culprit.\n\nR\u00E5stam visited Bergwall for the third time on September 17, 2008. On this visit, he mentioned how drugged Bergwall seemed in the reconstruction videos, and how\u2014while the camera was still rolling but in footage never shown in court\u2014Bergwall would sometimes be fed Xanax before continuing. He also observed that if one studied the videos closely, Bergwall never really seemed to know the important details himself.\n\n\"It was the magic moment,\" Bergwall tells me. \"I get very moved, thinking about it. He said, 'I see in the reenactment videos that you're high as a kite.' Nobody had ever mentioned the drugs before. Ever. That moment, I knew I could tell the truth. And I threw all caution to the wind.\"\n\nThat was when Bergwall said something he had not said through six murder trials. Something he had not said to a single person in all the long years of his incarceration. Something he found so impossible to explain that he thought he might never find a way to tell anyone.\n\n\"But...,\" he began hesitantly,\"...if it was true that I haven't committed any of these murders...if it was true\u2014then what can I do?\"\n\nAnd they sat there in silence for a moment, both letting the shock of this sink in. R\u00E5stam said if that was so, Bergwall had the chance of a lifetime in front of him. But it was only when R\u00E5stam returned to the clinic the following day that Bergwall finally spelled it out.\n\n\"I haven't committed any of the murders I've been convicted of, and none of the murders I've confessed to, either. That's the way it is.\"\n\nPart 5: How to invent a serial killer\n\nCould anyone really be expected to believe this? All those stories. All those terrible, wretched, and unbearably specific stories of deeds done. And now he had a different story?\n\nBut strangely, Sture Bergwall was far from the first to suggest that there might be a problem with the official accounts of what he had done. Doubting Thomas Quick had been a cottage industry in Sweden for years. A handful of well-known newspaper columnists had long been voicing their suspicions. There had even been a book written called Thomas Quick: Mythomaniac. And the parents of Johan Asplund, who had been skeptics from the start (largely because they felt they have always known who was actually responsible for the death of their son), had put considerable energy into debunking Quick. In 2006 the Asplunds had a lawyer compile a fifty-three-page document on the weaknesses in the Thomas Quick story. Some were already well-known\u2014for instance, that he had once claimed to have killed two missing Somali refugees, before it turned out they were both alive and living in other countries; that before he named the correct murder weapon in the Levi murder, he had previously mentioned using over half a dozen other implements. \"It was obvious,\" says Bjrn Asplund, \"he was not the guy.\"\n\nAs a result of the Asplunds' pressure, the Swedish chancellor of justice reexamined the written verdicts of the six murder trials, but he swiftly announced that it was clear Bergwall was guilty.\n\nIn all these years of talk and controversy, I don't get the sense that anyone seriously expected Bergwall's fate to change. It was more like a diverting Swedish parlor game: Let's debate the guilt of that weird madman in S\u00E4ter. There were probably two reasons why no one expected anything to happen. The first: For all the apparent flaws in the Thomas Quick testimony, he still seemed to have known far too much that only the killer could have known\u2014never mind physical evidence like the child's bone fragment found at the site where he said he had cut and burned parts of Therese Johannesen's body. The second: Quick's own steadfast insistence on his guilt.\n\nIn fact, it was Quick's frustration with this media debate that he gave as his reason for his self-imposed silence in 2001. He announced in a newspaper article that he was taking \"a time out\u2014maybe for the rest of my life.\" No more confessions, no more police cooperation, no more trials. In the article, he decried the doubters as attention seekers whose shameless lies were being treated uncritically by the mass media, while he had always \"fought for accuracy in describing the crimes I committed.\" (He might be a serial killer, the implication was, but at least he was a man of principle.)\n\nIn other words, when Sture Bergwall withdrew himself from the debate and let the walls of S\u00E4ter hospital close around him like a muzzle, it was not to protest his innocence but to protest his guilt.\n\n\n\nBut now he feels differently. That is why we are eating pastries together. I am here so that Sture Bergwall can explain his story of how he is not Sweden's most notorious serial killer but is actually, through a series of surreal and improbable events, the subject of Sweden's greatest miscarriage of justice.\n\nAnyone who has read this far surely won't need reminding\u2014given how Sture Bergwall's credibility now depends on us believing that he has been one of modern history's most successful liars\u2014that he should face a fairly high bar to convince us of anything. But he knows that.\n\n\"Why?\" he says, anticipating what he expects I will be asking. \"Still a big question.\"\n\n\n\n When Sture Bergwall arrived at S\u00E4ter hospital in 1991, after being involved in a botched bank robbery, his life was at a low ebb. \"I had burned so many bridges, and I was plunged into this profound loneliness,\" he tells me. \"I wanted to be this interesting person. I didn't want to be this gray bad person. I wanted to be something else.\" He changed his name from Sture Bergwall to distance himself from the shame of what he had just done, to provide him anonymity and a new start. He now says that he chose \"Thomas\" because it sounded good with \"Quick\"\u2014no other reason.\n\nFacebookPinterestA portrait of Bergwall from 1985.\n\nBergwall says that he sought out therapy, but when he finally had some sessions, he felt like a failure even at this. He could remember little about his childhood, and certainly nothing that seemed too interesting to him or to the therapists. As Hannes R\u00E5stam would later write: \"His feeling of being an uninteresting patient solidified his sense of failure. It seemed that he was incapable even of being a successful lunatic.\"\n\nThis changed significantly when he began to suggest that things in his childhood may have been darker than they actually were. Eventually he \"remembered\" for the first time a sexual assault by his father. Now, all of a sudden, his therapist seemed engaged and interested, and the reaction made Bergwall feel important. At this time he was actually being prepared for release, but back then this opportunity didn't seem too enticing\u2014he had lost contact with almost everyone he had known, alienated his remaining family (both his parents were dead), and had few prospects. Anyway, he soon took a step that guaranteed he wouldn't be set free anytime soon.\n\nS\u00E4ter hospital is on the edge of a lake, and one day, on a supervised swimming trip, Bergwall said to one of the nurses chaperoning him: \"I wonder what you'd think of me if you found out that I'd done something really serious.\" In subsequent therapy sessions he explained what he meant. The Johan Asplund murder was famous in Sweden and remained officially unsolved. Bergwall now suggested that he had been responsible.\n\n\"Then,\" he tells me, \"I couldn't back down.\"\n\nBut it wasn't what he revealed about Asplund's death that convinced anyone he was a killer. (It would take eight more years for his account of that murder to cohere sufficiently for a prosecution.) It was what he soon said about the murder of the 14-year-old Thomas Blomgren. He seemed to know all kinds of details about what happened\u2014details that surely no one could know who hadn't been with Blomgren in that shed in 1964.\n\nNow, though, Bergwall says he can explain all of it. In those earliest years, he explains, he had the keys to his own accommodation and was also allowed to sign out on day trips unescorted. (Remember, they do things differently in Sweden.) In fact, unbelievably, when Bergwall first started confessing to murders, these freedoms continued, and indeed their continuation seems to have been considered some kind of well-earned reward for his fine work in remembering and confessing. It would only be when he had confessed to six murders that his freedom to travel was finally revoked.\n\nAs for how he unearthed all this information, his answer is so simple that it was probably too extraordinary for anyone to suspect:\n\nHe went to the library. \n\nOn day trips from S\u00E4ter he would travel down to the national library in Stockholm, call up the press reports of Blomgren's death, and take notes. He researched it. Back at S\u00E4ter, he would refashion what he had learned as painful memories of regret.\n\nEventually library visits became out of the question, but he had free access to newspapers inside S\u00E4ter, and he assiduously read them. Once his reputation as a killer grew, these newspapers would write articles speculating about old unsolved murders for which the famous new Swedish serial killer might be responsible. Uncannily, after a decent period of time had elapsed, they would often turn out to be right. Sometimes, Bergwall says, he simply asked journalists to send him articles or books that would provide material he later confessed to.\n\nFacebookPinterestHannes R\u00E5stam's best-selling 2012 book about the Thomas Quick murders.\n\nEven so, that alone is far from enough to explain what he appeared to know. Much more, he argues, came from the police investigations themselves. A clever person can pick up a lot from someone quizzing him about an event\u2014from the specific questions he's asked, and the ones he's not asked, and the ones he's asked over and over, and from the reactions his inquisitors betray at different answers. Likewise the reconstructions he took part in at murder sites and burial sites: Were these, as originally presumed, events where Bergwall revealed unique information about the murders? Or were they, as he now argues, actually the opposite\u2014did they become research trips where Bergwall was learning information that he would later represent as his own?\n\nI speak to a detective, Jan Olsson, who was present at two such reconstructions and was the first person involved in the police investigations to go public with his doubts. The first reconstruction was of the murders of the two Dutch tourists at a lakeside campsite. Olsson says that even the setup was irregular. Bergwall was not asked where the couple's tent and car were on that night\u2014instead they were already positioned in the correct place. Bergwall was given two tries to show what had happened. The first time, he did everything wrong. Then they took a break. Most people went down to the shoreline to have some food and coffee, but Olsson says that Bergwall and the chief investigator spent most of the break together, huddled, talking. \"It was all strange,\" says Olsson. After the break, the way Bergwall attacked the tent and the two people within it fitted the police crime-scene analysis perfectly. After Olsson was involved in a second reconstruction, of the murder of the Israeli student, that he considered equally flawed, he resigned from the investigation, appalled by the way it was being handled.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBergwall's initial accounts to police were usually both incomplete and substantially wrong, but over time they tended to improve, often remarkably so. Aside from how he managed this, a separate issue is why this drastic evolution of his accounts was ever seen as acceptable. This was partly because of the way his therapy was considered to be leading him, painfully and erratically, to the truth. Here is what Bergwall claims would happen, and there seems to be plenty of documentary evidence to back him up:\n\nIf he initially said something that was the opposite of the facts\u2014a victim's hair was blond, not dark; a road was to the right, not the left\u2014it was seen not as wrong but as a sign of how much torment his guilt was causing him and how hard it was for him to fully acknowledge the awful things he had done. (He was majestically slippery. One time he justified a wrong hair color by saying that he tended to see painful material as a photographic negative.) If he said something that was simply wrong, it could be explained away as him trying to throw off the investigators. But whenever he said something that fit the known evidence, it was habitually accepted as a true memory.\n\nMeanwhile, this very process also offered Bergwall one more way of learning what he needed to know. Every \"that's very brave of you\" told Bergwall that he had gotten something right. Every \"I understand this must be painful for you to face up to\" was a clear prompt for him to turn back and take a different path through the woods.\n\n\n\nAnother key part of the puzzle, Bergwall claims, was his drug addiction. He had been hooked on benzodiazepines for years, and he swiftly learned that a good murder-confessor got all the drugs he ever wanted. (Not just drugs. If he fancied a steak, he got a steak. And on at least one of the reconstruction trips, he and the investigative team traveled by private jet.) Crucially, he says, the drugs didn't just give him a motive to confess. They made him capable of it. The more drugs, the easier the confessions, and the easier it was not to care about their truth or the damage they might cause.\n\nSometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming, and he says those moments were when he was closest to grasping what he was doing. But a pill or two later, the terror would recede. \"Early on there are several instances where I tried to get out of it,\" he explains to me. \"I sent letters to the prosecution saying that I'd stop cooperating, I tried to commit suicide several times, I was horrified at myself. At one time, I tried to hang myself on a radiator. I tried to suffocate myself by putting a plastic bag over my head, then tying it.\" But mostly he makes it sound like he was so caught up in the momentum of the Thomas Quick story, and so surrounded by believers, that all he could do was carry on. As for the effect it was having on real people in the outside world, as long as he had enough drugs, he was able to shut that out. \"The benzo made me ruthless,\" he says, \"and unaware of consequences.\"\n\nAnd it is the drugs, he says, that also explain why he went silent in 2001. A new head physician arrived at S\u00E4ter and was horrified to discover the drug regimens that some patients were receiving, Bergwall among them. (This, incidentally, is what Bergwall says was his daily intake, with extra top-ups when requested: six 5 mg. Valium, four 1 mg. Xanax, one 10 mg. prefill Valium, 1.5 mg. Halcion, two Rohypnol, six Treo comp, six Panocod.) It took eight months to wean him off completely, but long before that he lost the capacity to tell Thomas Quick stories. \"The lies,\" he discovered, \"were completely dependent on the benzo.\"\n\nBut the truth now seemed beyond reach, too. Bergwall knew how impossible it might be to convince people of his story, and there was one piece of evidence that even he couldn't explain: the bone fragment. To his mind, he had led investigators to a random piece of hillside and then made up a story about burning a young girl's bones there\u2014but then they found exactly what should have been there according to his story. \"Two professors said that it was a bone fragment from a young person where they found cuts like it had been dismembered,\" he explains to me. \"How could I refute that? The only explanation would be that someone had planted it there. And how could I, in my position, give that as an argument? I understood that I was completely stuck\u2014nobody would believe me.\"\n\nHe imagined he would die here in S\u00E4ter, now and forever a mass murderer.\n\n\n\nPart 6: How to un-invent a serial killer\n\n Less than three months after Bergwall recanted to R\u00E5stam, in December 2008, two one-hour documentaries were broadcast on Swedish TV. The contents were shocking. They appeared to show an unbelievable cavalcade of idiocies and mistakes as a man morphed from mental patient Sture Bergwall to mythical eight-time killer Thomas Quick, and they were persuasive in shifting public opinion in Bergwall's favor.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n\n\nBut for all the upheaval caused by R\u00E5stam's TV programs in late 2008, at the end of it all Bergwall was still just as much a convicted murderer as he'd ever been. To sway the public is one thing. To persuade a country's legal system that it has made a mistake this big, and then to compel it to undo that mistake, is quite another. (Three murder convictions had been overturned in Sweden in the previous century\u2014there would now need to be eight more.)\n\nTwo men set about the task in tandem and in quiet collaboration\u2014Hannes R\u00E5stam, for a book intended to blow apart the Thomas Quick fiction, and Thomas Olsson, in order to build the legal cases that might exonerate Bergwall. Bit by bit, they chipped away. Even the bone evidence that so troubled Bergwall eventually seemed to evaporate\u2014a new analysis by different experts insisted that it was, unequivocally, not bone at all but a composite of wood, plastic, and glue.\n\nR\u00E5stam's book on the affair was published in Sweden last summer. It has been a huge best-seller, swept just about every award going, and succeeded in convincing nearly everyone who has read it of Bergwall's innocence. But in a story where there seems to be damage of some kind wherever you look, R\u00E5stam was neither able to enjoy his triumph nor defend his findings. In fact, his book had to be finished off by others. After a short illness, he died of cancer in January 2012 at the age of 56.\n\n\n\n Shortly before R\u00E5stam's TV documentaries were broadcast, Sture Bergwall asked one of the staff at S\u00E4ter to visit the sanitarium shop for him and buy him some postcards. Just something simple. Flowers.\n\nHe sent one to each of his brothers and sisters. The message he wrote was only one word.\n\nFrl\u00E5t. \n\nForgive me.\n\nSten-Ove Bergwall, who had last spoken to his brother just before his heart operation twelve years earlier, did not answer immediately, though when he did it was with the appropriate minimalist affirmation. (Frl\u00E5ter. I forgive.) But still he didn't call. R\u00E5stam had spoken with him, encouraged him to call Sture, but he explained that he wasn't ready. Maybe one day. Not yet.\n\nThat Christmas Eve, 2008, Sten-Ove turned to his wife Ingegerd and announced that he was about to phone and wish his brother a happy Christmas. The conversation was short and maybe a little awkward. But they spoke again the next day, and also the day after that, and Sten-Ove says that they have spoken every day since.\n\n\n\n To have a murder conviction completely overturned in Sweden is a two-stage process. First, the original conviction must be voided and a retrial granted. Then a new prosecutor decides whether to retry the case or drop the charges. It is a slow process. Bergwall's first review was granted in 2009 and the charges dropped the following year. At the time of writing, seven of the original eight murder convictions have been overturned. The final conviction passed the first stage in March this year, and a final decision is expected any day now.\n\nEveryone I speak with about this case expects that Sture Bergwall will soon no longer be a convicted murderer, but not everyone sees this as a long overdue victory for truth. Everyone agrees that there has been an appalling miscarriage of justice, but there is some disagreement about timing. Those who still fervently believe in his guilt argue that the real miscarriage of justice didn't happen in the past, it is happening now: A man who truly is a murderer is being swept toward freedom by a flood of unthinking self-righteous media-fed hysteria.\n\nR\u00E5stam's documentaries focused on a cast of characters who, it was clearly implied, shared responsibility for what had happened, and at their center is Christer van der Kwast, the prosecutor. There would be much savage talk in the years to come implying that these people were well aware that Bergwall was innocent, that they had railroaded him on the back of his own false confessions for their own advancement, but these people are largely sticking to their guns.\n\nWhen I first contact van der Kwast, he e-mails to say he has no wish to speak with me, though he does signpost his attitude to recent events: \"The really interesting story is perhaps that a serial killer has been acquitted on murky grounds.\" We eventually meet at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Van der Kwast has been retired since 2009 and says that he intends to stop talking on this subject after our interview. \"I don't think it's productive to discuss,\" he says, albeit midway through a conversation that goes on for over three hours. \"They think the whole thing is a miscarriage of justice,\" he tells me, \"in the sense that we manipulated the evidence in some way, we didn't present facts in court as they should have been presented. And I say: This is simply not true.\" He explains with some patience why and how he believes this to be so, defending his and his colleagues' integrity at great length and also detailing all the incriminatory evidence that he believes is now being ignored. (He later sends me a letter from the original Norwegian bone expert, insisting that his analysis is still correct.) But he also stops at one point to exclaim, rather cheerfully: \"Why should I convince you? I convinced six courts!\"\n\nI spend a great amount of time studying material supplied by van der Kwast and others still resolutely convinced of Bergwall's guilt\u2014hundred-point lists of \"errors\" in R\u00E5stam's book, discordant pieces of crime-scene evidence, and testimony and correspondence. Much of it is interesting, and some of it does chip away at the smoothness of the competing narrative. It also helps convince me that these people truly believe\u2014it simply doesn't make sense to me that they formed a self-aware cynical conspiracy in any straightforward way, the widespread accusation they often now face. But as hard as I dig, I still can't find a single fact that really seems to point clearly to Bergwall's guilt.\n\n\n\n I ask Bergwall who, ultimately, he blames for the whole Thomas Quick affair.\n\n\"Myself,\" he replies. \"It's me, it's the police, and it's the clinic. Those are the three important pieces that made this possible.\"\n\nThese days, as he waits to be fully exonerated for the crimes he once worked so hard to be convicted of, many of his routines are different. Tweeting, blogging, media interviews. He writes a lot about his case, and about his reestablished relationships with all his surviving siblings and their families, but he also writes about the past, rebuilding the story of his life. Meanwhile, some routines remain the same. Each morning Bergwall heads out early into the ercise yard and begins his first figure eight of the day.\n\nBack when he was Thomas Quick, the crimes he confessed to in therapy dovetailed with the childhood tales of abuse he would manage to remember\u2014it was a central tenet of the therapy that one could not exist without the other. (With, he says, great help\u2014he only had to mention a stick in a story of a childhood day out, he explains, and it was understood that he was referring to his father's penis.) Each\u2014the crimes, the childhood\u2014was taken as confirmation of the other, and every unearthed memory was seen as an act of bravery on Quick's part for which he should be congratulated. In this spirit, one day his therapist suggested that, to help him deal with the ever agonizing loss of his stillborn brother, Simon, they would plant a tree in Simon's honor. An apple tree. \"Simon would finally be commemorated,\" Bergwall recalls, \"and I would have a place to go grieve.\"\n\nIt is still there, within the walls of Bergwall's ercise yard\u2014a small stunted apple tree that has only ever borne a couple of scrawny apples. And so every morning Sture Bergwall walks by it, looping over and over\u2014a tree planted in commemoration of the brother who never was by a mass murderer who never should have been\u2014waiting for the day when he can walk in a straight line that heads only forward.\n\n\n\nPart 7: But...\n\nIf you believe in simple and happy endings, pure and righteous tales of an innocent betrayed and then redeemed, stop reading now. You probably have your story. Be happy with it.\n\nFor those who are staying...prepare to feel uncomfortable all over again. But also remember this: If Bergwall is innocent of murder, then that innocence remains indisputable regardless of whoever he has been or whatever else he may have done.\n\nStill, perhaps it's been nagging at you that part of Sture Bergwall's story has been missing until now. Perhaps you have been wondering how exactly it was that a bungled bank robbery led to a man being sent to a mental institution in the first place. Perhaps it has struck you that Sture Bergwall's alternative background\u2014the one without the incest and the miscarried babies and the multitude of murders\u2014might carry its own complications and its own troubled history. And it does.\n\nThe following account covers only events that came to the attention of the Swedish authorities at the time. Some of those I speak with believe they have evidence of many more. Perhaps they're right. But what I'm about to detail\u2014three key episodes\u2014seems plenty.\n\n\n\n Bergwall was born in 1950 with a twin sister, the fifth and sixth of the seven children his mother would bear. (There is no record of her being pregnant four years later or miscarrying near term that offers any support to the story of Simon.) His life began slipping off its rails when he was 14 as he began to understand that he was gay. He knew his parents would not approve, and even after everything that came later it would never be discussed. He began taking drugs around that time\u2014to deal with these feelings, he says. In his late teens he worked in an old-people's home, and he tells me that the home's manager, Tom, was his first love and that they were together for nearly a year. It remains, he says, the longest relationship of his life. \"I was in love, and overjoyed by the realization that two men could be together.\" But one day he came to work and was told that Tom, who he knew was troubled by his sexuality, had hung himself. \"I've thought about it a lot,\" he says. \"I try not to be a bitter person, but at times I can still get upset about certain moments that have led life in a more negative direction, and that's one of those.\"\n\nFew people will consider that any excuse for what happened next. Over the next few months Bergwall would be convicted of four sexual assaults on underage youths. He wrote about these in his blog a couple of years ago. \"I have committed atrocities,\" he wrote. \"I don't deny that I have done so.... It is not about murder and cannibalism, I'll tell you, but it is difficult, shameful and very sad.\" He explained how he would walk around the town of Falun in the evenings, taking trichloroethylene, looking for someone to love, and eventually taking the most incompetent, desperate, and despicable shortcuts. One evening, a few weeks before his nineteenth birthday in 1969, he started talking to an 11-year-old boy on his way home. In his blog he quotes the boy's court testimony: \"Almost at once he grabbed my neck and told me to go into the yard to the garage. There, he kissed me on the cheek and told me to pull down my pants. I dared not say no, so I did it. The man took out his penis and held mine. It went on for a few seconds.\" Two similar events followed, and then the worst one yet, at Falun hospital, where he sexually assaulted a 9-year-old patient, then put his hand over the boy's mouth to stifle his screams until blood was coming out of his nose. When Bergwall fled, he wrongly assumed that he had killed the boy. After this, he was sent to a local mental hospital, and he was in and out of residential treatment for the next couple of years, including his first spell at S\u00E4ter.\n\n \"The things that happened in 1969,\" he says now, \"have never been repeated.\"\n\n\n\n But other things did happen. The second major event took place when Bergwall was 23. He was in the town of Uppsala, and one night he went to a club called Agda, which was as close to being an acknowledged gay hangout as you could easily find in 1974 Sweden. There he met a student called Lennart Hglund, and they ended up back in Hglund's room. Even Bergwall's account of what took place next is horrifying. While Hglund was in the bathroom, Bergwall sniffed some trichloroethylene. He'd been abusing this drug for years, and he knew that sometimes you'd get hallucinations from it. \"I wanted to have hallucinations,\" he points out. \"But the hallucinations I wanted were more about being on a paradise island with all the flowers.\"\n\nThis time was different. When Hglund came out of the bathroom, what Bergwall says that he saw before him was not a man, but a monster coming to attack him. That is why\u2014to defend himself against a hallucinatory monster\u2014he stabbed Hglund over and over again. An experience so awful, says Bergwall, that he never touched trichloroethylene again after that night. (In the aftermath, he was returned to S\u00E4ter and was not fully discharged until 1977.)\n\nI visit Hglund, the object of his frenzied attack, in his Stockholm apartment. He is now a retired man of 71. For nearly forty years he didn't speak publicly about what happened that night, largely because he had never come out to his family as bisexual. But they are all dead now, and Hglund thinks his voice should be heard in the current debate: \"It makes me sick to see him on the TV when he sits there in his cell and blames the hospital for drugging him.... It's just a big act.... He started one show by saying, 'Thomas Quick is dead\u2014I am Sture Bergwall.' But when he attacked me, he was Sture Bergwall.\"\n\nHglund says there was no warning, no falling out. They talked and drank, and not much else happened. \"There might have been some fumbling around, some touching and stuff. He just came rushing toward me,\" says Hglund. \"Crazily stabbed me.\" He used Hglund's own bread knife. By the end, blood was everywhere, and Hglund remembers watching as Bergwall washed off the knife for fingerprints, tucked it into his leather jacket (it was found in a nearby canal), then left him there, almost bleeding to death: \"He just didn't give a fuck.\"\n\nHglund had been stabbed twelve times\u2014in the liver, the intestines, the back. His left lung was punctured, and he has had reduced lung capacity and breathing problems ever since. \"I will never, ever forget Sture Bergwall,\" he says. \"These scars will always be here\u2014both physically and mentally.... Every time I think of Sture, my heart starts pounding. He's destroyed my life and keeps on ruining my life.\"\n\n\"He has a right to be angry,\" says Bergwall.\n\nHglund claims that Bergwall denied guilt through several police interviews and then offered a bizarre confession that involved taking out his annoyance at a third person who left before the attack on Hglund. And he points out that Bergwall never mentioned the twin pillars of his modern account\u2014the drugs, the monster. \"Big liar, big liar,\" he says. \"He's been lying, and I've been keeping quiet for thirty-nine years, and he's still lying about it.\"\n\n\n\n The third terrible event that took place in Bergwall's life was the bank robbery of 1990. He had slipped back into using amphetamines, and there had already been warning signs\u2014a faked holdup at the bingo hall where he sometimes worked, a suspicious fire at the kiosk he co-owned. The bank robbery itself, which Bergwall says he did to get drug money, is sometimes described as a kind of harebrained, doomed-to-fail scheme involving Santa Claus masks. But that barely captures the intensity of what happened. Bergwall was 40, and his robbery partner was 18. They arrived at the bank manager's home at 5:45 a.m. and burst in with a gun and a knife. The bank manager, his wife, and their 10-year-old son were herded into a bedroom where Bergwall screamed, stamped on the floor, kicked furniture, stabbed the bed and the walls with his knife. \"He shouted,\" the wife later testified in court, \"that he was infected with AIDS and had only a short time left to live and that it didn't matter if we lived or died.\" The youth went off with the bank manager to get the money while Bergwall stayed guarding the terrified wife and son. He was caught later that day and sent back to S\u00E4ter, a decision he pushed for.\n\n\"I was scared to death of prison,\" he says, \"so I did everything I could to get psychiatric care.\"\n\n\n\nSven Christianson is a professor of psychology at Stockholm University, and I meet him in his office there. Waiting downstairs in the psychology department, I notice that Christianson's 2010 book\u2014I huvudet p\u00E5 en seriemrdare (Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer)\u2014is on this term's reading list. It is a book that not only has a substantial section on Thomas Quick but is packed with anonymous quotes from serial killers, many of which, for anyone well versed in particular details of the Thomas Quick story, are also from Bergwall.\n\nChristianson used to visit Bergwall regularly to talk about such matters. He also testified at many of the Thomas Quick trials and was instrumental in setting up many of the reconstructions that provided evidence for those trials. He has been subject to scathing criticism in recent times, but he professes a mixture of indifference and haughty disdain, pointing out that he is in more demand than ever for police work, lectures, and teaching. He presents what he offers as a scientific counterpoint to media hysteria. \"I looked at his background,\" Christianson says. \"If you look at literature on serial killers and rapists, they start early. He was very consistent, these attacks on young guys. And serial rapes. In the hospital he combined violence and rape, strangulation and rape.\" Christianson offers technical jargon I have read in his book\u2014that most rapists are non-increasers but that Bergwall was in the rare category of increasers, those whose sexual attacks grow in intensity. He asserts that it is impossible for this behavior to simply have gone away. \"When sex and violence has been twisted, how do you take that apart?... That sadistic behavior is still there.\"\n\nToward the end of our meeting, I ask Sven Christianson this: If Bergwall is an untreated sadistic sexual predator and if someone like him cannot stop himself from expressing it, where has this behavior manifested itself in recent years?\n\nChristianson almost seems to rejoice at this question, as though he has successfully trapped me into asking it. \"This!\" he exclaims. \"This whole pattern!\" To have successfully pulled so many people into his fight for freedom\u2014to have made a country's once proud legal system contort itself in knots\u2014is the pinnacle of the sadist's art.\n\n\n\n When I ask Sture Bergwall how he knew what serial killers were supposed to be like, I expect his answer might include facts he has shared before\u2014the extraordinary information, for instance, that he and his fellow patients were allowed to watch films like The Silence of the Lambs and read books like American Psycho, both of which he consumed eagerly. But instead he mentions the conversations he had with Sven Christianson. The grand irony here is that the conversations that he says were teaching him about serial killers were supposed to be doing the exact opposite. \"We had conversations for hours,\" remembers Bergwall.\n\nAnd what did he want to talk to you about?  \n\n\"Serial killers. He told me that it was his big interest. He wanted to know how Jeffrey Dahmer was thinking. So he would ask me, 'When Jeffrey Dahmer did this, what was in his mind?' and I was supposed to just explain to him.\"\n\nDid you know Jeffrey Dahmer?  \n\n\"No.\"\n\nI didn't think so. So why did he think you could know that? \n\n\"Because I was a serial killer. And we all think the same. But I was brave enough to talk\u2014that was the big difference between me and other serial killers.\"\n\nDid you enjoy telling him all this? \n\n\"Yes, in a strange way. That was a really special time.\"\n\nIt made you feel important? \n\n\"Absolutely. A professor from Stockholm came here to interview me.\"\n\n I met him last week. He says he's still convinced he was right about you. \n\n\"There's many people\u2014or at least some people\u2014trying to defend their honor. Not to lose face. I'm in the happy position that I don't have an honor to protect.\"\n\n\n\n It's easy to see how these awful incidents from his youth might superficially help convince someone that Sture Bergwall really was a serial killer. But in many ways, they're also exculpatory. One thing that all of these awful events have in common is how incompetently they were ecuted\u2014how messy a trail Bergwall always left behind him, how easily he got caught. Does it really make sense that the architect of such a poorly conceived bank heist, and a random attack on someone he was seen drinking with earlier that evening, and these impulsive teenage sexual assaults, might be the same person who\u2014in the same time period\u2014carried out murder after murder without leaving one indisputable piece of physical evidence?\n\nStill, I put it to Bergwall: People who still suspect you say you've always been very smart, always been very verbal, and have always been very good at manipulating, and they think that's what you're still doing.\n\n\"First of all,\" he answers, \"I'm not that smart. Thomas Quick's story shows that. People have to ask who manipulated who. And my verbality has been a curse. If I hadn't been able to say so much...\"\n\n\n\nPart 8: The future prospects of a former serial killer\n\n Once the battle over Bergwall's legal innocence is completed, the battle for his freedom will take over. Bergwall says that all he wants is two years of freedom. He turned 63 in April. His parents both died in their sixties. There is a medical hearing every six months to judge the issue, but while he is a convicted murderer it is little more than a formality. Soon the matter must be considered in earnest, and his supporters are clearly worried that the crimes of his youth may be used against him. They point out that he was already on the verge of release back in 1991 until the murder confessions began.\n\nBut in all this talk of guilt and innocence, it is easy to forget that there are other kinds of guilt, the kind no court decision can overturn. On the surface, in the conversation that follows, Bergwall seems perfectly able to express the appropriate regret. His words are suitably self-lacerating, even a little poetic, and toward the end he briefly starts weeping.\n\nIf you didn't commit these murders, what you did do is you stood there in a courtroom and made up stories where you described abducting, abusing, killing, dismembering, and sometimes eating people\u2014described it in front of their parents, their families. \n\n\"It's really, really sad. It's terrible. We're talking about that I'm going to be free. This I will never be free from.\"\n\nDid you have any thoughts of that at the time? \n\n\"No. During the Thomas Quick years I could do anything, I could say anything. I didn't care.\"\n\nAn even sadder aspect\u2014more than a little sick in retrospect\u2014is that you used to say that the reason you needed to confess to these murders was for these people. That you were doing good for the victim's families. \n\n\"Yes. Yes. [starts crying] It's really terrible. That's the worst part.\"\n\nBut this is one kind of conversation with Sture Bergwall that I do wonder about. I think, perhaps understandably, he is so consumed by the story of what was done to him that it may too easily eclipse what he did himself. Maybe it's just too hard to truly face. The best way I can describe my sense of him in these moments is that he means the answers but may not know how to truly feel them.\n\n\n\n On my last visit to see him at S\u00E4ter\u2014when I bombard Bergwall with awkward questions in a search for inconsistencies\u2014I mention the poem Bergwall wrote as a teenager that seemed to fit so well into Thomas Quick's life story. As soon as I quote one line in English\u2014\"I crush your eyes\"\u2014he immediately remembers it. \"A typical teenage poem, I would say. Existential. Over the years, I have written a lot of dark poems, darker than that.\" He also says that the author who found this poem surely found others but ignored them. \"He could have taken a story I wrote about a puppy,\" says Bergwall, \"but that doesn't fit the Thomas Quick character.\"\n\nAs I get up to leave, we talk about the nearby town, Falun, where he grew up, and I mention how I had earlier gone to look at his old family home, in a three-story apartment complex in a quiet suburb called Korsn\u00E4s.\n\n\"Did you go to Fr\u00E4mby Point?\" he asks.\n\nNot yet, I said.\n\n\"Do it,\" he suggests.\n\nFr\u00E4mby Point is a headland on the lake just southwest of his old hometown, and as it happens, I had been looking at a camping complex there as somewhere cheap and quiet to write for a few days. But I was slightly surprised Bergwall mentioned Fr\u00E4mby Point, because it is where he and his father were supposed to have buried the stillborn Simon, where his mother was supposed to have tried to drown him, and where Quick said he had buried parts of Johan Asplund's body. (The area was searched in September 2000. Nothing was found.) But I assume Bergwall must be thinking of real childhood memories\u2014the family did live close by until he was 5.\n\nIt's beautiful there. I take the most remote cabin, far at one edge, overlooking the frozen lake next to the pine forest. It's out of season, and I seem to be the only person staying on this side of the hill. One afternoon my e-mail pings. It's Bergwall. In my reply, as an afterthought, I ask him why Fr\u00E4mby Point had come to mind.\n\nHe answers immediately: \"You mentioned that you were in Korsn\u00E4s and then I wondered if you had also been in Fr\u00E4mby. The event when my mother would have drowned me would have occurred at Fr\u00E4mby cape (Fr\u00E4mby udde) and therefore also part of Johan Asplund be there. [The police] have searched and dug in the area.\"\n\nSomething about this slightly disconcerts me\u2014maybe that he so readily refers to his fictional history, rather than his real one. I reply that I am actually here right now, and then immediately feel a bit weird about it\u2014even more so when he e-mails back a photo from his blog that is almost exactly the view from my cabin. I realize that in a bad movie\u2014or in a Scandinavian crime novel\u2014I know exactly what is supposed to happen now: Convinced of the murderer's innocence, I write up my findings in a cabin on a deserted Swedish lakeside. Taking a break for a walk through the forest, I disturb something with my foot. Animal bones...? Later that night, I hear approaching footsteps on the frozen ground\u2014the accomplice Thomas Quick really did have after all....\n\nIt's so easy to think this way\u2014to let your mind wander into a dark undergrowth of what-if's. It also made me realize that Sture Bergwall's predicament may be even more inexorable than he yet realizes. Suppose his final torture comes not by the law or the public or the media but by the rigid and unrelenting demands of genre. Even if he can lift himself out of his own stories, he may have to spend the rest of his life escaping everyone else's.\n\n\n\n Toward the end of my final visit with Sture Bergwall, I realize that there's one question I haven't asked him. Foolish, maybe, to even think of it. After all, could anyone's story offer more ways of reminding you that in a search for the truth there is often nothing dumber than asking a question and believing the answer? But I might as well.\n\nHave you ever killed anyone? \n\n\"No,\" he replies. \"Never. Never.\"\n\n\n\nChris Heath is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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