Sweden’s Hannibal Lecter

It takes the police seven weeks to dredge through 5.5m gallons of lake water, before searching the silt in minute detail — twice. But the dismembered segments of Johannessen’s body, which Quick, whose real name is Sture Bergwall, said he had sunk there are never found.

Two years later, he is convicted of her murder: one of eight that condemned Sweden’s most famous serial killer to life in a secure mental institution.

The tabloids call him “The Cannibal”. As more gruesome details of his crimes filter out — late-night feasts on human flesh, necrophilia and ritual dismemberment — he becomes an almost mythically evil figure. In a land obsessed with dark thrillers, his crimes are the story of the century.

I had been terrified of him as a child. Like me, he had an English-sounding name. I knew he had killed children — one of them a little Norwegian girl he had abducted from outside her house and chopped into pieces; another a schoolboy he had dissected and eaten. Across Scandinavia, he was a nightmarish bogeyman whose stories made parents afraid to let their children walk home alone from school.

But 12 years later, Sture Bergwall came out with a confession that rocked Swedish society to its core, resulting in the biggest judicial crisis in the country’s history. He hadn’t killed anyone. He had made it all up.

In 2014, after 23 years in closed psychiatric care, he was released — again to roam the mountains of a land he had not seen for decades.

The man who was once known as Sweden’s Hannibal Lecter now lives in a small flat inside a honey-coloured pebbledash building facing a mountain. In the winter it will be a ski slope, frequented by the crowds of moneyed Stockholmers who flock to Are, a resort town 220 miles south of the Arctic Circle, every winter for champagne, schnapps and fine-dining restaurants. But for now, in the autumn gloom, it’s a tiny mountain village populated by laconic locals and a few Norwegian tourists.

False trail: police search in vain for the body of Therese Johannessen, Ostfold, 1996

TOR RICHARDSEN/PATOR RICHARDSEN/PA

I meet Bergwall in the lobby of a hotel near his house. He is tall, extraordinarily friendly and speaks in the deep, growling dialect of the central province of Dalarna. He is, he says, excited to see me.

The meeting has been a long time in the making. I first contacted Bergwall two years ago, when I emailed to ask for an interview. He was about to be released, and I wanted to understand his transition from serial killer to free man.

He replied, telling me that he was writing a book and wouldn’t be doing any more interviews. But this autumn, when I saw it had been released, I got an email from his publisher. I could come to Sweden and see him. We would walk across the harsh crags of the northern mountains together, and talk about murder.

“That’s what we’re walking up,” he says, pointing up the steep slope into the clouds and laughing. “Hope you don’t mind.”

After 23 years of confinement, he’s drawn to the vast open spaces of northern Sweden. Each morning, he stalks the mountains for hours, trailing the fir-lined paths of vildmarken — the wild country. The near-frozen ground is still carpeted with yellowing grass, but granite shows through everywhere. Soon it will be slick with ice, before being covered in snow until March.

I show him how to take a panoramic picture on his phone. He’s very happy with the result. The years he spent inside are noticeable. Bergwall, now 66, barely speaks English — unusual for Swedes even of his generation. His teeth, tiny split yellow things that look like bruises in his mouth, are ruined by heavy prescription-drug use.

This is hard country. The wind bites as it sweeps down the hillside. But Bergwall, wrapped in the local’s uniform of patterned wool jumper and enormous Puffa jacket, looks beside himself with joy.

“Look at this,” he exclaims, gesturing towards the blue-grey valley below. “I’m so free here.”

Bergwall lives off a state pension that, he hopes, will soon be supplemented with income from the book he has written exculpating himself. The title translates as “Only I know who I am”.

He has quickly adapted to the outside world: setting up an Instagram account where he posts daily updates on the weather in Are, and starting a WhatsApp group with his siblings. It’s almost as if he didn’t falsely claim that one of them had helped him as he murdered, raped, dismembered and buried a child.

As we speak, I’m acutely aware of how easily he has lied to and manipulated those around him. In his years as Sweden’s most famous serial killer, he dreamt up scenarios so horrific they make Fritzl and Hindley pale into comparison. Therapists, lawyers, police, the highest courts in Sweden and some of the country’s best known journalists were all taken in.

Was I — like so many others before me — wrong to believe what Bergwall said?

He’s extraordinarily easy to get along with: booming an affirmative ja at almost everything I say and laughing warmly in recognition when I mention passages from his book. I start understanding why, throughout his time in secure mental care, his therapists did things that seemed to put them — and the public — in extraordinary danger: taking him on trips to the beach with their children, or to restaurants. Within minutes, I’ve forgotten who I’m talking to, and am happily swapping notes with him about the weather, skiing season and the odd habits of Stockholmers. He really doesn’t seem like a serial killer, but I suppose by definition the best ones don’t.

As we’re talking, I remember my grandmother, who worked as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in southern Sweden, saying that if she were to hold a cocktail party for her former patients, she would invite the psychopaths, because they were the best company. Before I left for Norrland from Istanbul, where I live, she had called to warn me to be careful.

Her concern reflects the prevailing opinion among Swedes; that while Bergwall might not have murdered all the people he said he did, there is something profoundly disturbed, manipulative and, well, dangerous about his character.

According to the doctors and psychotherapists who assessed his mental health prior to his release from closed psychiatric care in 2014, though, Bergwall is sane except for a “personality disturbance” that is manageable provided he stays sober, which he has for decades. The serial killer has become a model citizen.

Sture Ragnar Bergwall was born on April 26, 1950, in Falun, a small town 100 miles northwest of Stockholm. He was the youngest and sickliest of seven siblings, and spent long spells in a sanatorium after contracting tuberculosis as a toddler. Around him, friends died. But he lived — branded, he says, with a gaping loneliness.

Empty handed: Bergwall, flanked by police and therapists, on a hunt for bodies, 1996

SVEN ERIK/PA

This grew in his teenage years, as he realised he was gay and embarked on a series of disastrous attempts to tell other boys of his feelings for them. As a “cure” he was given electric-shock therapy and put into an induced coma with insulin injections. Of course, these treatments did nothing other than make him feel even more alone. At 16 he started sniffing solvents and drinking heavily in an attempt, he says, to numb the pain of being an outsider.

At 19, a petty criminal with a drug problem, Bergwall was taken to the Sater psychiatric institution, 20 miles from his home town, for the first time. His case description notes that he was attracted to boys aged between 12 and 14 and had acted on his desires several times — grabbing children on the street and, once, assaulting a sleeping child on the hospital ward where he worked as a night porter.

He was treated, after a fashion, and released. For well over a decade he stayed relatively sober and sane, running a kiosk with his older brother, Sten-Ove, and having relationships with adult men.

Then came the fall that would turn this troubled, mild-mannered man into Sweden’s most-feared criminal. A boyfriend, Tom, hanged himself, and Bergwall began drinking heavily and taking solvents again. Lonely, high and desperate for money, he attempted to rob a bank by taking the manager’s wife hostage while dressed as Santa Claus. The amateurish heist failed and he was again taken to Sater. But this time he wouldn’t leave for 23 years.

The institute lies in a sprawling yellow building in the town of Sater, on the borders of the mountains and fir forests of Norrland — the north land. It housed more than 80 patients, most of whom were kept under high-security guard. But the star inmates were in ward 36, where — rumour went — the staff were creating miracles that had never been seen before: turning violent, mentally disturbed criminals into decent citizens.

Their secret lay in using long therapy sessions to uncover repressed childhood memories of sexual assault — usually by a patient’s parents or siblings — which, they claimed, were the driving factors behind violence and mental illness in later life. Put simply: murderers, rapists and other violent criminals were simply recreating acts that had been done to them as children. If they could remember these assaults, and accept their significance, they would stop. They would be cured.

Recovered-memory therapy (RMT), as it is known, is based on Sigmund Freud’s “seduction theory” — the idea that female “hysteria” was caused by the repression of painful memories of childhood sexual experience. In 1897, beset by criticism from the medical establishment and from his subjects, Freud renounced the theory.

In the 1970s, though, it began to gain traction again among a subset of, largely, second-wave feminist psychologists — partly as a reaction to the male-centric view of psychiatry as trauma treatment that had risen from the Second World War.

“RMT has absolutely no basis in evidence,” sighs Dan Josefsson, a journalist who has authored two books on psychology and one on Bergwall. “Once you start thinking this way, there are absolutely no barriers. It’s almost like all the world’s problems can be solved with RMT.”

The chief architect behind the widespread use of the technique at Sater was Margit Norell, a psychologist and psychoanalyst. She believed fundamentally that almost all psychological disorders could be explained as manifestations of childhood sexual assault. Around her, she gathered a group of “believers” — young practitioners who were as passionate as she was that they could use this theory for good.

“It was a cult,” says Josefsson. “And it just became more obsessive over time.”

By the time Bergwall arrived at Sater in 1991, RMT was barely used in the US. One by one, patients had begun to complain that the “memories” they fought so hard to dredge up were fake. They had been brainwashed, they said, by their well-meaning therapists into creating elaborate fantasies of childhood sexual assault in order to explain issues in their adult life. Insurance bills were sky high, and the lawsuits costly. But in Sweden, with its extensive, highly regionalised and well-funded public-health system, there were no such restrictions.

“Sater was like a little playground for people who supported this theory,” Josefsson says. “They truly, truly believed that this was how the mind worked.”

In the therapy sessions on ward 36, an astonishing number of patients started to remember being sexually and physically assaulted as children.

The poster child for the technique was Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt, a psychopathic career criminal who, therapists at Sater announced in 1992, had been cured, and was ready to come back into society.

“I was impressed by him,” Bergwall says, as we took a pause to catch our breath during the mountain hike. A certain wonder at the famous criminal still lights his eyes. “Everyone was so interested in him. He seemed so intelligent.”

In June that year, Svartenbrandt was released. Days later, he robbed a bank dressed in a woman’s wig and a fake moustache.

It should have been portentous for Bergwall. But instead, he remembered a conversation he had with Svartenbrandt before he was released. They had been smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee on the balcony of ward 36 when, feeling pale and boring compared with his exotic co-patient, Bergwall — at this point simply a paedophile who had barely offended — raised a question that would come to define the rest of his life.

“What if I’ve killed?”

It began with a craving for attention. Locked up in Sater with nothing to do, Bergwall campaigned for weekly therapy.

“I just wanted to understand myself,” he says, forlornly, as we walk up a thin gravel path. “Then I would speak to my therapist and he would almost look bored.”

Soon, egged on by the pervasive belief in RMT on the ward, he began to invent childhood memories of sexual assault by his father to hold the attention of his therapist, Kjell Persson.

Bergwall, a lonely, spineless character, was — and remains — hopelessly eager to please. As we talk, he agrees enthusiastically with absolutely everything I say. I get the feeling that if I lay down on the frozen ground and refused to carry on, he would lie down with me. Anything to get the approval of those around him.

As the visions began to come more easily — and turn more grotesque — he was given more prescription drugs. Through the haze of ultra-strong tranquillisers such as Rohypnol, benzodiazepam and Valium, there flowed stories of elaborate torture at the hands of his parents. They sexually assaulted him while he lay sleeping. His mother tried to push him under a train.

Persson, and the other staff at the institution, drank it in — ladling attention on the desperately lonely Bergwall and creating a destructive feedback loop where horror stories were swapped for support and encouragement. However, as he reached further for stories of violence, Bergwall began to stray far outside the bounds of childhood sexual assault.

In 1992, during a routine therapy session, he confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, an 11-year-old boy who had disappeared without a trace in 1980 on his way to school. It was one of Sweden’s greatest unsolved mysteries. He barely knew anything about the boy’s disappearance, except for a vague understanding of the circumstances gleaned from TV and radio reports at the time.

Despite this, he carried on the lie with the expectation that someone would soon find him out. With a writer’s eye for detail, he painted a visceral picture of how he had raped, murdered and dissected the boy after luring him into his car.

With a now-familiar beseeching note in his voice, Bergwall tells me, as we reach the brow of the hill, that he was so delusional from the drugs that he didn’t think his confession would have any repercussions outside the therapy room.

It sounds unlikely, until you consider that he was taking enough tranquillisers to knock a normal person unconscious. When taken in high quantities, these drugs can peel away all inhibitions. His treatment was driving him mad.

As the therapy sessions continued, more victims surfaced. In an attempt to deflect attention from his lack of knowledge of the Johan Asplund murder, he confessed to another killing, that of Thomas Blomgren, a 14-year-old boy who had disappeared almost 30 years earlier. His body had never been found despite a huge manhunt.

The name had stuck in Bergwall’s mind because Blomgren had disappeared on the weekend of his confirmation. Despite this cast-iron alibi for the murder — Bergwall, his family and the entire local Pentecostal congregation had been at church at the time of the killing — his gory confession was taken with the utmost seriousness.

According to his account, Bergwall, then 14, had been driving around southern Sweden that weekend with an older accomplice, who had a car. The pair had gone looking for a boy to rape — and soon came across Blomberg outside an amusement park. After luring him into a cluster of trees, Bergwall had strangled him to death, molested him and left his body to rot.

The confessions flew thick and fast: some pertaining to famous cold cases, others completely invented by Bergwall. The latter were always so lacking in detail that investigators gave up almost immediately. But all had one thing in common: the bodies of the supposed victims were never found.

A nine-year-old girl, abducted and dismembered. A young boy, raped and executed. A couple on a hike, stabbed through the fabric of their tent and butchered. Soon Bergwall, in his alter ego of Thomas Quick, had confessed to more than 30 murders. Amid his confessions, he changed his name to Quick in what he claims was a quiet way of disassociating himself from his actions. That was the name he became better known by in Sweden.

The lack of evidence and specifics was made up for by the orgiastic depictions of their — usually drawn-out — deaths that Bergwall provided. There was such detail in the descriptions that the therapists seemed to have their hands so full analysing the significance of the violence that they didn’t question its unlikeliness.

Their continued belief in his stories defied all logic. In 1996, Bergwall claimed that he had killed two boys 12 years earlier in Norway after luring them away from the asylum-seekers’ accommodation where they lived. When he was taken to the area where he claimed to have killed them, a cursory investigation by local police found the boys were both alive and well: one living in Sweden and one in Canada.

Antihero: Christian Bale in American Psycho, a book Bergwall was advised to read

LIONS GATE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

“That’s the only time I’ve been close to saying, ‘This is completely insane,’ ” said Seppo Penttinen, the police officer in charge of the case, in an interview years later. “I sat there with him, eye to eye, and told him the result. I wanted to look into his eyes and ask, ‘What happens now?’ He became very confused and couldn’t really explain it. He didn’t give an alternative explanation either.”

Incredibly, Bergwall wasn’t asked to account for why two of the people he said he had murdered turned out to be alive. “No one really asked me about it again afterwards,” he says. “They just let it be and carried on with the other investigations.”

At every turn, Bergwall tells me, he expected to be found out. His face, ruddy and sprinkled with a white beard, is open and seemingly incredulous at the way his lies were eaten up by the police and medical professionals. His posture and his soft voice project a deep vulnerability and crawling need for attention. As the cold light illuminates his doughy, smiling features, he looks pitiful and — almost — pathetic. A man who would agree to anything.

In case Bergwall should run out of inspiration, his therapists recommended that he read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis to get inside the mind of the serial killer he was. One evening, he watched The Silence of the Lambs with one of the carers.

It would later form the inspiration for one of Bergwall’s more elaborate stories — that his mother had given birth to a boy called Simon, whom his father had immediately chopped into pieces, wrapping the body parts in newspaper. He and the young Bergwall then strapped the package to the back of his father’s bike and cycled it to a secluded area, where they buried it under a mossy mound.

In the world of ward 36, everything worked backwards. The more murders Bergwall confessed to, his therapists reasoned, the better a person he became. By confronting these violent acts as his repressed memories returned, it became less likely that he would reoffend.

“I would see their faces light up,” says Bergwall, gazing out over the craggy mountainside as I shiver beside him, our breath crystallising in clouds. “I just wanted them to be happy. I told them stories and they repaid me in the things I craved: benzodiazepam and love.”

They offered him incentives to “remember” more vividly. Taking long walks around the nearby lake would, his therapists reasoned, help him with his recollections. Whenever he told them how he had raped, killed and dismembered a child, he was told how brave he was to face up to these difficult memories.

“I often wished my stories were true,” he says, his face contorting into an embarrassed grimace. “I felt there was an expectation for more, and I didn’t want to let them down. And lying is easy when you’re saying the things people want to hear.”

Sometimes, usually late at night when the drugs had cleared, Bergwall would be consumed by guilt over his lies. But each time he tried to recant, he would break under pressure — real or perceived — from his therapists.

“I didn’t murder Johan,” he remembers telling Persson in the book. “I understand this makes you anxious,” was the only reply.

Eventually, of course, the police were told. But instead of holding an objective distance, they were drawn in to the “Sater cult”. The narrative the therapists presented was irresistible: a chance to solve all of Sweden’s most horrific murders with one simple explanation. To be part of groundbreaking research where every revelation was splashed all over the papers.

The “cult”, as it was termed in the Swedish press, seemed awestruck by their own power. Margit Norell, the psychotherapist who was the architect of Sater’s approach, was writing a book largely based on Bergwall’s case. It would, she told him, be more important than all of Freud’s books together. It would completely revolutionise psychotherapy.

Week by week, as the confessions rolled in, a collective madness descended upon those involved in the Thomas Quick case.

“It couldn’t have happened in another country,” says Bergwall, laughing to himself. “This groupthink. It couldn’t have.”

I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Sweden is a country plagued both by a deeply ingrained culture of unquestioning obedience to authority and an obsession with gruesome murder mysteries. It was never going to go well.

Therapy became police work. Police work became therapy. All the time, the self-reinforcing groupthink sent the implications of Bergwall’s confessions spiralling still further out of control.

Central to the process of extracting confessions were elaborate reconstructions of the supposed murders, where Bergwall would be shepherded around crime scenes and asked to re-enact the killings in the hope that “repressed” memories would re-emerge, leading the investigators to the bodies.

Videos of the reconstructions — many of which were shown on Swedish TV — show a visibly drugged Bergwall staggering around ranting reams of barely intelligible babble into the air. Every pronouncement is taken with extreme seriousness and examined in detail.

“I remember that feeling of psychosis,” says Bergwall, stopping in his tracks on a ridge above a sweeping row of pine trees. “It scares me endlessly. I remember walking through those woods and seeing an eagle flying above me. You can see me pointing in the video. But it wasn’t there.”

He looks shaken, terrified, even, when he talks about the unstoppable hallucinations that would stream through his mind. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him.

As he walks in those videos, he chews through drugs like they’re sweets. For his therapists, this made sense: they wanted to ease the anxiety that came with the flood of returning memories and help him see past the pain. But they left him seeing visions, falling, incapable of speaking clearly. Not, by most definitions, a reliable witness.

Of course, no bodies were ever found. But after every reconstruction, the police and analysts swirled the tea leaves of his ramblings and found — in their deliberate overgeneralisations and omissions — some grains of possibility.

A fragment of bone was found in a forest miles from a supposed burial site. A hacksaw in a clearing. Bergwall’s habit of dissecting his victims into tiny pieces and eating them must, the investigators surmised, be the reason why they could never find their remains.

After a successful reconstruction, Bergwall, his therapists and the police would celebrate: retiring to a restaurant to eat steak and smoke cigars. He was a murderer, but he was also a victim of a compulsion to reenact his childhood abuse — and thus worthy of pity and praise.

In the world of the Sater “cult”, anything could be turned into evidence. When Bergwall confessed to the murder of Therese Johannessen — a nine-year-old he claimed to have raped and dismembered — he told investigators she was chubby and blonde with big front teeth and lived in a rural village. The fact that she had dark- brown hair and lived in a built-up suburban neighbourhood presented no difficulties to his therapist, who blithely announced that he must be seeing the repressed memory as a photographic negative.

“It’s like that with difficult memories,” the therapist, Birgitta Stahle, is quoted as saying in Bergwall’s book. “You change them.” But Goran Fransson, a consultant psychiatrist who treated Bergwall, later told Swedish media: “This technique of bringing out repressed memories, I don’t believe in it at all. But one was dragged into it.” The other therapists appear to have gone to ground, and did not respond to our requests for contact.

The lack of detail in his confessions is striking. But it was Bergwall himself who provided the bare bones, which were then clad in horror too grotesque and delicious to discount. After confessing to a murder, he would ask for a day pass to travel to Stockholm, where he would go to a library to look up newspaper clippings from the time.

Should he ever feel that murders were a bit thin on the ground, his therapists, as well as visiting journalists, would “pitch” him cold cases.

“They’d ask, did you kill so and so?” he says. “I’d say maybe. Then I would try to read up on it. And probably say I did.”

Despite the resounding lack of evidence, the disarmingly patchy testimony and the existence of several cast-iron alibis, Bergwall was convicted of eight different murders over a period of several decades — and sentenced to live the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric institution.

In 2002, though, a new doctor came to Sater — one less taken with the idea that Valium could unearth buried memories. The amounts Bergwall was being given, he noted in his medical records, would have knocked a normal person unconscious. He recommended that Bergwall be weaned off all medication immediately.

Within a few weeks, Bergwall stopped lying — and fell silent for seven years.


Hannes Rastam had sent off the interview request without much hope of a reply. The Stockholm-born crime reporter, then 52, had become intrigued to the point of obsession with the Thomas Quick case — and had drawn some startling conclusions. It was all made up. Quick hadn’t committed any of the murders. In 2008, this was an incredibly unpopular opinion. Sweden is a small country, and the Quick case involved a lot of powerful people. No one — least of all the police, lawyers, prosecutors and journalists who had made their careers from Quick — wanted Rastam to be right. But Bergwall, who by then was bored, sober and tired of the lies, agreed to meet him. He confessed everything and Rastam made two tell-all documentaries that shocked Swedish society when they were broadcast that year. In them, Bergwall appeared as more of a victim than a criminal.

“He’s surprisingly normal,” said Rastam, who died of cancer in 2012 just after completing a book on the case, in an interview with Swedish TV. “I understand that there are people now who believe I’m being manipulated by him. I think about that all the time. I try to see it from the outside. But he’s not looking for attention now.”

Soon, the cases were opened again. One by one, they fell as evidence crumbled to dust. A piece of bone that purportedly belonged to Therese Johannessen turned out to be a lump of wood, glue and plastic. Photos showing Bergwall at his confirmation at the time he was supposed to have murdered Johan Asplund were finally taken out of the family album.

Families who had sat through weeks of testimony in which Bergwall had detailed the ways in which he had dismembered, raped and eaten their husbands, mothers and children were told that it had all been for nothing. Justice hadn’t been served, and the real killers were still on the loose. For Anna-Clara Asplund — Johan’s mother — it meant that the search for the person who had murdered her son had been halted.

“He knew that everything was just made up. But he has put our family, friends and acquaintances through so much suffering. He told stories about having thrown Johan’s head here and his body there, and eating parts of him … It’s awful,” she said this autumn. Asplund was one of several relatives of Bergwall’s supposed victims who never believed his version of events. For decades, she has campaigned for her ex-partner — the person she believes is responsible for the murder — to be brought back to court. He had previously been heard and released, but Bergwall’s conviction blocked them from seeking a retrial.

Even now, Bergwall lacks empathy towards the families of the dead. When, during our walk, I mention that Asplund has criticised his book, he snaps at me: “But she hasn’t read it.” A normal person would be crushed with shame at how he had put those poor, grieving families through such terrible ordeals. But he is not normal.

Within five years of the retrials beginning, he was free. The eight murder cases were overturned. After more than two decades of living in a secure psychiatric institution as the most feared serial killer in Sweden’s history, Bergwall was allowed to walk out of the door at Sater.

This made a lot of people very unhappy. The Quick case broke as many high-profile careers as it made, and many can’t accept that it’s over. Goran Lambertz, a supreme court judge who conducted a review of Bergwall’s convictions, is one of a group of “Quick truthers” who still fervently believe that there is something to the allegations.

In a feverishly worded blog post this year, Lambertz claimed he used a “complicated” mathematical formula to demonstrate the likelihood of Bergwall being guilty lies at around 99.99999999%. “I don’t make statements on whether he’s guilty of the murders or not,” he tells me. “But I do say that he was correctly sentenced. The proof against him is very strong.”

“My case has driven a lot of people mad,” Bergwall laughs.

Now, technically, he is about as sane as a former serial killer can become. Though he is a paedophile — in Sweden, one offence leads to a lifetime classification — he says he has no desire to touch young boys. The attacks that he did commit were all within six months of each other, when he was 19 years old and in the midst of a drug haze. In the calm years that followed, he had several serious boyfriends his own age. In all of his crazed meanderings as Thomas Quick, he never dwelt on being a paedophile: murder and dismemberment was his crime of choice.

Walking down a steep mountain pathway, I reflect that he seems like a pathological attention seeker with a desperate need for human contact and understanding. It’s only when he pretends to cry when re-enacting a story that the shock hits me in the chest. There’s the wail — the one that I’ve heard on a dozen interrogation tapes. The kind, gentle man who I’ve been walking with is the same person who fabulated endless fantasies about killing and eating children.

For Bergwall, Thomas Quick and his stories are firmly in the past. He has moved on, and is quietly furious at the way he was treated. A case he has brought against the Swedish government will, he says, hopefully bring some restitution.

“I feel good,” he says, smiling shyly. “Before, I was so scared. So desperate. I didn’t have the power to stop what I had started. People think I must have been extremely manipulative, but you have to ask: who was manipulating who in this situation? They wanted to be famous. I wanted to be loved and understood.”

Now he doesn’t have much time for therapists. In July this year, he and a small group of friends took his patient records — hundreds of thousands of pages that lay out the deepest depravities of the human mind. The boxes made up more than a lorryload. As they poured themselves glasses of alcohol-free champagne, they covered the pile in petrol and set it alight.

“We cheered,” Bergwall says, grinning. “As it burnt I felt as if there was a release. Something was unknotted inside me.”

After 25 years, Thomas Quick was dead, and Sture Bergwall, finally, was free. But for the families of the missing children put through hell again by his false “confessions”, there is no such closure.