For most of the 1990s Sture Bergwall, a patient at a secure psychiatric hospital in central Sweden who had renamed himself Thomas Quick, was presented to the Swedish public as a multiple murderer. In therapy sessions and police interviews he claimed responsibility for dozens of deaths in Sweden, Norway and Finland, and between 1994 and 2001 six Swedish district courts convicted him of eight murders. Much of the evidence consisted of his own statements.
In 2008 he withdrew every confession. Over the next five years courts granted retrials in all eight cases, prosecutors dropped every charge, and the district courts entered acquittals. The last became final on November 26, 2013. No conviction against him for any killing stands. A government commission, reporting in 2015, found serious failures by the investigators, the prosecutor, the courts and the hospital that treated him, and a Norwegian review reached similar conclusions about Norway's part.
Sture Ragnar Bergwall was born on April 26, 1950, in Falun, in the province of Dalarna, according to the Store norske leksikon. He grew up in a large family; a 2013 review of Hannes Råstam's book on the case, published in the London Review of Books blog, says he had six siblings, and that they called the abusive childhood later described in his therapy "entirely incredible."
His youth was marked by crime. The TT news agency reported in 2013 that he had been convicted in 1970 of offenses against boys; the Store norske leksikon dates that conviction to 1969 and records later convictions for violence and hostage-taking. A 2016 TT report added that he had earlier been committed to psychiatric care after violent crimes and offenses against children.
The case that brought him to Säter was a robbery. The Associated Press, reporting in 2013, described a 1990 bank robbery after which he was found mentally unfit for prison; TT described him taking a family hostage during a robbery. The Bergwall Commission records that in 1991 he was sentenced for theft, aggravated theft and aggravated robbery to closed forensic psychiatric care, and that he was then held at Säters sjukhus, the forensic hospital at Säter in Dalarna. The Chancellor of Justice later dated his detention there from April 29, 1991.
At Säter, Bergwall began to speak in therapy about killings he said he had committed. The Bergwall Commission describes how he gave accounts of several murders, first in psychotherapy, then to other staff and finally in police interviews. His first psychotherapist was Kjell Långberg, then named Kjell Persson. From the spring of 1994 he had a second psychotherapist, whom the commission discusses as one of the central figures in the case.
The Chancellor of Justice dates his first claims to 1992. The first case he took up concerned Johan Asplund, an 11-year-old boy who had disappeared in Sundsvall on November 7, 1980. SVT later noted that this was the first murder he confessed to and the last of which he was convicted.
Throughout the years of confession he was treated with benzodiazepines. The commission found that there was limited awareness at the time of the disinhibiting effects of these drugs and of how addictive they are, and that he developed a severe drug dependence. Bergwall later said he understood that confessing in therapy brought him more of the drug, The Local reported in 2013. He told the Associated Press that the sedatives "only fuelled his morbid fantasies."
One aim of the therapy, the commission wrote, was to bring forgotten memories to the surface. Theories of repressed memory were debated and partly controversial even then, and the commission concluded that the risk of false memories was not taken seriously enough.
In the early 1990s Bergwall took the name Thomas Quick. He said the first name came from Thomas Blomgren, whose 1964 death he claimed as his first killing, and the surname from his mother's maiden name. The press called him Sätermannen, the Säter Man. A police compilation presented at one of his trials listed 29 killings in Sweden, Norway and Finland between 1964 and 1993 that he had claimed. Some were time-barred, some were dropped when he later stopped cooperating, and some lacked enough detail to investigate. Other counts of his confessions range from more than 20 (TT and AFP) and more than 30 (the Associated Press) to 39 (the Store norske leksikon and TT in 2016).
David Lindén, writing in The Local in 2013, pointed out that on the date of the Blomgren death Bergwall was reported to have been attending his own church confirmation.
A small group handled the investigations. Christer van der Kwast was the prosecutor in the Quick trials, and Seppo Penttinen, a detective inspector with the Västernorrland police, led the interviews. Anders Perklev, the prosecutor general, said in 2013 that the investigations had been handled by "a fairly small circle of people," and Bergwall later stressed that there had been one prosecutor and one investigator.
The memory researcher Sven Å. Christianson, a psychology professor, was hired by police to help Bergwall recall events as fully and accurately as possible, held research conversations with him and later gave expert evidence at the trials. Christianson has said that he never testified about repressed memories in the case and that the convictions did not rest on psychological explanations. The journalist Dan Josefsson, in his book Mannen som slutade ljuga, argued the opposite: that the theory of repressed memories was central to the trials, that Christianson helped persuade police, prosecutors and courts to accept it, and that the psychotherapist Margit Norell, who had supervised Christianson, had great influence over the case. Josefsson quoted Christianson's testimony in the Therese Johannessen trial that protective mechanisms could unconsciously push memory images away.
The Bergwall Commission found that when Bergwall gave incomplete or wrong answers, investigators accepted the explanation that he struggled to recall the killings or was deliberately departing from the truth, and that this explanation was not questioned. The cognitive interview method promoted by the advising psychologist was not adapted to keep investigative findings from Bergwall, so that what he learned shaped what he said. Reconstructions at the sites, which followed a 1994 National Police Board report, were carried out in ways that gave him guidance.
Råstam's later work, as summarized in the London Review of Books blog, found that Bergwall's information came from newspapers, from hints during police contacts and from cues given while he was driven to sites; that on leave from Säter he had read press coverage in public libraries; and that many of his statements were wrong.
Charles Zelmanovits was 15 and lived in Piteå, in Norrbotten. He disappeared after a school dance in November 1976. He was found in September 1993, and Bergwall claimed responsibility soon afterward. Piteå District Court convicted him of murder in 1994, the first of the eight convictions.
The Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland granted a retrial in February 2013. On July 31, 2013, chief prosecutor Håkan Nyman dropped the charge. He said the conviction had rested mainly on Bergwall's confession and his wish to be convicted, that there was no technical evidence, and that no one knew whether Charles had been killed at all. Luleå District Court then entered the acquittal, which became final on November 26, 2013.
Marinus Stegehuis, 39, and Janny Stegehuis, 34, were Dutch citizens on a camping holiday in Lapland when they were killed at Appojaure in the summer of 1984. Gällivare District Court convicted Bergwall of both murders in January 1996.
The Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland ordered a retrial on February 1, 2013. In May 2013 prosecutors announced that there was "not sufficient evidence" that Bergwall had committed the crime and dropped both charges, AFP reported. Gällivare District Court then entered acquittals in the autumn of 2013.
Yenon Levi was a 24-year-old Israeli who came to Sweden in the summer of 1988 to visit relatives. He was found dead near Rörshyttan, in Dalarna, on June 11, 1988. Bergwall was convicted of his murder in May 1997. The Bergwall Commission lists the trial court as Falu District Court; TT reports of 2010 and 2011 name Hedemora District Court. According to TT, the conviction rested partly on Bergwall pointing out the site and describing the weapon and Levi's clothing.
Levi's case became the first test of the retractions. In April 2009 Bergwall's lawyers asked for a retrial. Their petition argued that police had made errors, that the conviction rested on the confession of a "mentally ill and drugged person," that material had been kept from the court, and that witnesses had pointed to another man with links to Levi. Svea Court of Appeal granted the retrial in December 2009. On May 28, 2010, chief prosecutor Eva Finné dropped the charge. Claes Borgström, who had defended Bergwall at the original trial, said it was fortunate for him that the indictment had been withdrawn, while noting that he had once admitted the crime. Van der Kwast told TT he was disappointed and that "media pressure has had its part to play." Falu District Court formally acquitted Bergwall in September 2010. Dalarna police resumed the investigation of Levi's death at once and in 2012 said they planned new interviews and new DNA work on old material.
Therese Johannessen was nine years old and lived in Drammen, near Oslo. She disappeared in Drammen on July 3, 1988, and she has not been found. Norwegian police set up their first investigation group on Bergwall in the spring of 1996, and on March 9, 1998, Norway transferred the case to the Swedish authorities. Hedemora District Court convicted Bergwall of her murder in 1998.
The case turned in part on a small number of burned fragments that two professors had concluded were most likely human, probably from a young person. In 2010 an analysis by the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science found that the fragments came from neither a human nor an animal; TT later reported that they were wood and glue, and Råstam's account describes them as fibreboard. Van der Kwast, speaking on television in March 2010, said it was too early to take a final position and that the district court had given the fragments almost no weight.
On September 24, 2010, Svea Court of Appeal ordered a retrial. It found that supporting evidence, such as witness testimony or technical evidence, was entirely missing, so that the conviction could not be said to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Bergwall wrote on Twitter that the decision "came like a bolt of lightning." In March 2011 the prosecutor Olle Sohlberg dropped the case, saying, "There is no evidence which directly links Bergwall to the crime." Falu District Court entered the acquittal in the summer of 2011. Therese's disappearance is not time-barred, and SVT reported in 2019 that it was being investigated as a cold case.
Trine Jensen was 17 and lived in Oslo; she was found dead near Oslo in October 1981. Gry Storvik, 23, also of Oslo, was found dead in Oslo in the summer of 1985. Norway transferred both cases to Sweden on May 3, 2000. They were tried together, and in June 2000 Falu District Court convicted Bergwall of both murders.
After the Levi and Johannessen decisions his lawyers turned to these two cases. Svea Court of Appeal granted retrials, the charges were dropped, and Falu District Court acquitted him of both murders in the autumn and winter of 2012; SVT dates the formal acquittal in the Jensen case to November 2012. Gry Storvik's death, like Therese's disappearance, was being treated as a cold case in 2019.
Johan Asplund was 11 when he disappeared in Sundsvall on November 7, 1980. He has not been found, and he has not been officially declared dead.
Long before Bergwall's name entered the case, a man had already been tried over Johan's disappearance. The Chancellor of Justice records that a former partner of Johan's mother was suspected of unlawful deprivation of liberty and that the prosecutor dropped the case for lack of proof. Johan's parents then brought a private prosecution. In April 1985 Sundsvall District Court sentenced the man to two years in prison for unlawful deprivation of liberty, but on April 9, 1986, the Court of Appeal for Lower Norrland dismissed the charge, which by then had been extended to include murder.
Bergwall's confession followed in the 1990s, and the investigation ran from 1993 to 2001. Johan's parents doubted it from the start. They pointed to the lack of technical evidence and criticized the interviewer's work, and they joined the prosecution as injured parties so that they could take part in the trial and challenge the evidence. Their counsel argued that Quick had "no story of his own" because he was a victim of his therapy.
On June 21, 2001, Sundsvall District Court convicted Bergwall of Johan's murder. The court noted that no technical evidence tied him to Sundsvall at the time, but found his guilt proven, giving most weight to details he was said to have given. It ordered him to pay 150,000 kronor in damages to each parent. Johan's father called it a complete scandal, saying the judges and he had not attended the same trial. Van der Kwast called the judgment exceptionally well written. The parents appealed, but on December 17, 2001, the Court of Appeal for Lower Norrland dismissed the appeal on the ground that the verdict was, in law, in their favor. SVT noted that neither this conviction nor any of the other seven was ever examined by a higher court.
In 2006 the parents and others complained to the Chancellor of Justice about misconduct in the case; the Chancellor decided not to investigate. On a day in January 2012, the Court of Appeal for Lower Norrland unanimously granted a retrial, finding exceptional reasons and saying the material raised doubt about Bergwall's guilt. Penttinen, the detective who had led the interviews, said the application and the prosecutor's supporting submission contained "many outright errors." Johan's mother said only: "At last!" Sundsvall District Court acquitted Bergwall in August 2012.
Doubts were raised while the convictions were still being handed down. The criminologist Leif G. W. Persson argued that no one man could have moved around Scandinavia killing in the way the confessions described, and the psychologist Ulf Åsgård, who had helped police in the case of John Ausonius, also questioned the case, Lindén wrote in The Local. Johan Asplund's parents criticized the investigation openly.
Inside the courtroom there was little contest. The Bergwall Commission found that the adversarial safeguards of a trial were weak because the prosecutor and the defense both argued for conviction. Porter and Ohrlander, in the London Review of Books blog, wrote that the verdicts were unanimous and that the defense lawyer Claes Borgström did not challenge the prosecution evidence. The commission found that the court-appointed experts had, to varying degrees, already been engaged by the prosecutor during the investigations, creating a risk of bias, and it questioned the advising psychologist's role as a court expert.
In November 2001, in an opinion article in Dagens Nyheter, Bergwall announced a "time out." He said he felt betrayed, after heavy press criticism that had called him a fantasist, and that he would no longer take part in police investigations. He ended his psychotherapy in 2002, took back his birth name, Sture Bergwall, and entered what he later called "the seven silent years."
The silence ended with a television journalist. In December 2008 Sveriges Television broadcast two documentaries by Hannes Råstam in which Bergwall said he had committed none of the murders he had been convicted of or had confessed to. He later said he had confessed out of loneliness and a need for attention, while heavily medicated. "I didn't know anything. That's the simple truth," he told the Associated Press in 2013.
In February 2009 the prosecutor general decided not to open a criminal investigation into the prosecutor and the interviewer, because any offenses would be time-barred, and passed the question of retrials to the national unit for police cases in Malmö. Råstam went on to write a book on the case. He died of cancer in January 2012, the day after he finished it, according to Porter and Ohrlander; it appeared in English in 2013 as Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer.
Bergwall's lawyers, Thomas Olsson and later also Martin Cullberg, filed for retrials case by case, starting with Yenon Levi in April 2009. Retrials were granted in every case. In each, the prosecutor dropped the charge before the new trial and the district court entered an acquittal.
By the time the Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland ordered new trials in the last two cases on February 1, 2013, Bergwall called the affair "the justice scandal of the century." Olsson said: "This is the end of a four-year retrial process, but the start of a process to make him a free man." The justice minister, Beatrice Ask, announced a review of the case in July 2013.
On July 31, 2013, when the Zelmanovits charge was dropped, Bergwall wrote on his blog that it was "a day of joy and a day for reflection," and told TT that the outcome was mainly a relief. The prosecutor general, Anders Perklev, said it was plainly damaging to public trust in the justice system that a person had been wrongly convicted of eight murders, and proposed that more than one prosecutor should handle such cases in future. Any misconduct by officials, he said, was time-barred.
The acquittals did not by themselves end his detention, because his care rested on psychiatric findings as well as on the convictions. In March 2013 he was still locked in at Säter although retrials had been granted in all of his cases, and he was asking for an independent assessment at another clinic, TV4's Kalla fakta reported. Säter's management held that he still suffered from a serious mental disorder and should stay in closed care. In the autumn of 2013 he underwent a new forensic psychiatric examination. After court hearings that October he wanted to leave quickly, but Säter's chief physician, Vladislav Ruchkin, said he did not think there should be an immediate discharge.
On March 19, 2014, after almost six months of proceedings, the Administrative Court in Falun ruled that he could leave Säter at once for forensic psychiatric outpatient care. It followed the recommendation of the National Board of Forensic Medicine, whose Marianne Kristiansson said, "We recommend forensic psychiatric outpatient care." The court found that he still had a personality disorder, but not to a degree that required him to be held. He had to stay away from alcohol and drugs and submit to testing. He had spent almost 23 years at Säter. Bergwall said the ruling showed that the case had been a scandal of care, as the acquittals had shown it to be a legal scandal, and wrote on his blog that his writing room was ready and his pens sharpened.
He moved to Jämtland. In October 2014 the same court kept him in open care on Ruchkin's advice; Ruchkin assessed a medium-high risk of relapse into serious crime, TV4 reported, and Bergwall was then living in a community outside Östersund and giving a weekly urine sample. In April 2015 the court ended the care altogether, and the Bergwall Commission dates the end of his forensic psychiatric care with special discharge review to April 16, 2015. "Free! Really free!" he wrote on Twitter.
On November 28, 2013, the government appointed a commission under Daniel Tarschys, an emeritus professor of political science, to examine how the justice system, the lawyers, the experts and the health service had acted in the cases that led to the eight convictions, and whether the failings were structural. It did not judge individual criminal liability or retry the courts' decisions. Its members went through the files of the six original trials and the retrial cases, the medical records from Säter, and interviews with Bergwall, the prosecutor, the interviewers, experts, judges, lawyers, relatives of the victims and both psychotherapists. Its report, SOU 2015:52, was published on June 5, 2015.
The commission wrote that a mentally ill person's confession to murder is not, by itself, enough for a conviction. It found that the prosecutor had not presented the investigations in a sufficiently objective and fair way, and it attributed this partly to groupthink among the interviewer, the prosecutor, the psychotherapist who treated Bergwall from 1994 and the advising psychologist. The district courts, it said, had accepted a weaker evidential basis than they should have, waived parts of the safeguards of a criminal trial and failed to test how complete the investigations were.
It recommended writing the principle of objectivity into law at more stages of a case, ending the practice of letting a single prosecutor take charge of several large murder investigations against the same suspect, updating police guidance on reconstructions and interviews, building a system of quality checks for expert evidence, and strengthening research in forensic psychiatry. It attributed many failings to "the approach and assessments of individual actors," and noted how much society and the spirit of the times had changed since the investigations.
Three of the eight convictions concerned girls and young women from Norway. In 2014 Norwegian authorities set up their own working group, led by the Kripos police prosecutor Anne Cecilie Dessarud. Its unanimous report, delivered on October 15, 2015, to the director of public prosecutions, Tor-Aksel Busch, concluded that Norwegian police and prosecutors had not been critical enough and had not met the duty of objectivity. Norwegian investigators had worked from what the group called "the Swedish key," a set of notes on how Bergwall's statements were to be read, and had accepted Swedish methods without being able to question him themselves. The Store norske leksikon summarizes the finding as one of system failure at every level involved. In a report of July 6, 2017, the Norwegian director of public prosecutions set out follow-up measures, among them stronger investigation planning, documented decision logs, independent expert review and training.
Johan Asplund's parents asked the state for damages and an apology, citing more than 35 years of suffering. On April 26, 2017, the Chancellor of Justice rejected the claim. The Chancellor accepted that the commission had found shortcomings, but held that criticism alone did not make the state liable, that no crime or breach of the European Convention on Human Rights had been shown, and that the claim was in any case time-barred. Johan's mother said there would be "no damages and no apology," and that the family would write to the government. "We have fought for Johan for so many years," she said.
Bergwall himself sought 15 million kronor for his detention from April 29, 1991, to March 3, 2014. The prosecutor general had said in February 2018 that he should receive compensation, but on June 25, 2018, the Chancellor of Justice, Anna Skarhed, refused. The claim for the years up to October 19, 2007, was time-barred, and for the later years there was too little to show that the overturned convictions, rather than his assessed mental disorder, had caused his detention. "The care he received would have continued even if these judgments had not existed," Skarhed told TT.
The case produced a shelf of books. Råstam's account and Josefsson's Mannen som slutade ljuga argued that the convictions were a product of therapy, medication and investigative failure. Josefsson also made the SVT documentary Kvinnan bakom Quick (The Woman Behind Quick), shown in the autumn of 2013. Christianson rejected Josefsson's account in 2014, calling it a hunt for a witch.
Others defended the convictions. Christer van der Kwast, the former prosecutor, announced in November 2014 a book, Bortom rimligt tvivel (Beyond Reasonable Doubt), from the publisher Bladh by Bladh, due out on January 19, asking whether it was reasonable for "a convicted serial killer" to go free without a new examination of guilt by a court. Göran Lambertz, a former Chancellor of Justice who sat on the Supreme Court, wrote Quickologi, in which he listed 40 points on which he said Råstam had been wrong. Jenny Küttim, a researcher who had worked with Råstam and Josefsson on the case, called his speculation about Råstam's motives "repugnant and immoral."
Bergwall gave his own account in Bara jag vet vem jag är, published in 2016. He told TT that he now saw himself as a victim of strange psychiatric and psychological ideas, that others had closed their eyes to whether his confessions were true, and that it had been prestigious to lead a "serial killer" to confess. He wrote that when he first confessed he had been unable to tell truth from falsehood, and that he had knowingly lied. After finishing the manuscript he burned his Säter medical records, the police files and his notes from the Quick years; he called it "a liberation." In September 2016 he was living freely in Jämtland and posting nature photographs from the mountains.
In May 2018 SVT reported that the director Mikael Håfström would film the story as Fallet Thomas Quick, with David Dencik as Quick, Jonas Karlsson as Hannes Råstam and Alba August as Küttim, who had worked with Råstam on three documentaries about the case. Filming was to begin that autumn, with a cinema release planned for the autumn of 2019.
Final and binding: Bergwall stands acquitted of all eight murders of which he was once convicted. Each conviction was set aside on retrial, each charge was dropped by the prosecutor, and each district court entered an acquittal. No standing judgment holds him responsible for any killing.
Withdrawn: every confession he made at Säter, to therapists, staff and police, including the other killings he claimed, none of which went to trial. Some of those cases were time-barred, some were dropped when he stopped cooperating and some never reached a formal investigation.
Still unresolved: what happened to Johan Asplund, Therese Johannessen and Charles Zelmanovits, and who killed Yenon Levi, Marinus and Janny Stegehuis, Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik. Dalarna police resumed the Levi investigation in 2010, and in 2019 the Johannessen and Storvik cases were being treated as cold cases.
Contested: the role of recovered-memory theory and of the advising psychologist, which Josefsson and Christianson describe in opposite terms; and whether the original convictions were sound, which van der Kwast and Lambertz continued to argue after the acquittals.
Details on which accounts differ: the number of killings he claimed (more than 20, about 30, 39); whether he was convicted in 1969 or 1970 of the earlier offenses against boys; whether his 1990s committal is dated 1990 or 1991; the trial court in the Levi case (Falu or Hedemora); and the spelling of the names Janny or Janni Stegehuis and Therese Johannessen or Johannesen.
April 26, 1950: Sture Ragnar Bergwall is born in Falun, Sweden.
1964: Thomas Blomgren dies; Bergwall later claims the death as his first killing and takes the name Thomas from him.
1969 or 1970: convicted of offenses against boys.
November 1976: Charles Zelmanovits, 15, disappears in Piteå.
November 7, 1980: Johan Asplund, 11, disappears in Sundsvall.
October 1981: Trine Jensen, 17, is found dead near Oslo.
Summer 1984: Marinus and Janny Stegehuis are killed at Appojaure, Lapland.
April 1985: Sundsvall District Court sentences a former partner of Johan's mother for unlawful deprivation of liberty; the Court of Appeal dismisses the charge on April 9, 1986.
Summer 1985: Gry Storvik, 23, is found dead in Oslo.
June 11, 1988: Yenon Levi, 24, is found dead near Rörshyttan, Dalarna.
July 3, 1988: Therese Johannessen, 9, disappears in Drammen, Norway.
1990: bank robbery and hostage-taking.
1991: sentenced to closed forensic psychiatric care and held at Säter Hospital.
1992: first claims, at Säter, to have killed.
September 1993: Charles Zelmanovits is found.
1994: convicted of the murder of Charles Zelmanovits (Piteå District Court).
Spring 1994: a second psychotherapist begins treating him.
January 1996: convicted of the murders of Marinus and Janny Stegehuis (Gällivare District Court).
Spring 1996: Norway's first investigation group on the case is set up.
May 1997: convicted of the murder of Yenon Levi.
1998: convicted of the murder of Therese Johannessen (Hedemora District Court).
June 2000: convicted of the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik (Falu District Court).
June 21, 2001: convicted of the murder of Johan Asplund (Sundsvall District Court), his eighth conviction.
November 2001: announces a "time out" from the investigations.
2002: ends therapy and takes back the name Sture Bergwall.
December 2008: withdraws all confessions in SVT documentaries by Hannes Råstam.
April 2009: first retrial petition (Levi); granted by Svea Court of Appeal in December 2009.
March 2010: laboratory analysis finds the fragments in the Johannessen case are not human or animal.
May 28, 2010: Levi charge dropped; acquitted in September 2010.
September 24, 2010: Svea Court of Appeal grants a retrial in the Johannessen case.
March 2011: Johannessen charge dropped; acquitted in summer 2011.
January 2012: Hannes Råstam dies; Court of Appeal for Lower Norrland grants a retrial in the Asplund case.
August 2012: acquitted of Johan Asplund's murder.
Late 2012: acquitted of the murders of Trine Jensen and Gry Storvik.
February 1, 2013: Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland orders retrials in the Zelmanovits and Stegehuis cases.
May 2013: Stegehuis charges dropped; acquitted in autumn 2013.
July 31, 2013: Zelmanovits charge dropped.
November 26, 2013: the last acquittal becomes final.
November 28, 2013: government appoints the Bergwall Commission under Daniel Tarschys.
March 19, 2014: Administrative Court in Falun releases him from Säter to outpatient care.
April 2015: forensic psychiatric care ends.
June 5, 2015: SOU 2015:52, the Bergwall Commission report, is published.
October 15, 2015: Norwegian working group reports.
September 2016: Bara jag vet vem jag är is published; he is living in Jämtland.
April 26, 2017: Chancellor of Justice rejects the Asplund parents' damages claim.
July 6, 2017: Norwegian director of public prosecutions issues follow-up report.
June 25, 2018: Chancellor of Justice refuses Bergwall's claim for 15 million kronor.
2019: a feature film on the case, announced in 2018 as Fallet Thomas Quick, is planned for release.