On July 31, 2013 a Swedish prosecutor announced that he had found nothing that could support a conviction for the murder of Charles Zelmanovits and was dropping the charge. It was the last of eight. Between 1994 and 2001 Sture Bergwall, under the name Thomas Quick, had been convicted of eight murders in Sweden and Norway, and he had now been cleared of them all. The prosecutor general, Anders Perklev, called it a great failure for the justice system. The final acquittal became legally binding on November 26, 2013.
Sture Ragnar Bergwall was born on April 26, 1950 in Korsnäs, outside Falun. In 1991, after a botched armed bank robbery, he was committed to the secure psychiatric hospital at Säter. He was abusing drugs, the hospital gave him easy access to more, and he had no wish to be discharged. In therapy he began to hint that he might once have killed someone, and in the autumn of 1992 he said that he was responsible for the disappearance of Johan Asplund, an eleven-year-old boy who had vanished without trace in Sundsvall on November 7, 1980. He took the name Thomas Quick: the first name, he said, from Thomas Blomgren, whom he claimed as his first victim, and the surname from his mother's maiden name. The press called him the Säter Man.
Over the next decade he confessed to more than thirty killings in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The eight that ended in conviction, and the dates of their overturning as the TT news agency later listed them, were these. Charles Zelmanovits, fifteen, of Piteå, disappeared after a school dance in November 1976; his remains were found in September 1993, Quick claimed him soon afterward, and he was convicted in 1994. Marinus and Janni Stegehuis, a Dutch couple, were killed at a campsite in 1984; conviction in 1996. Yenon Levi, twenty-four, an Israeli tourist, was found dead in 1988; conviction in 1997, acquittal in 2010. Therese Johannesen, nine, disappeared from her home in Drammen, outside Oslo, on July 3, 1988 and has never been found; conviction in 1998, acquittal in the summer of 2011. Trine Jensen, seventeen, found dead in 1981, and Gry Storvik, twenty-three, found dead in 1985, both in Norway; convictions in 2000, acquittals in 2012. Johan Asplund; conviction in 2001, acquittal in August 2012.
No forensic evidence and no eyewitness ever tied him to any of them. His first answers to questions about weapons and places were usually wrong; the interviews led him toward the right ones, and the wrong guesses were edited out of what the courts saw. The strongest physical evidence in the Johannesen case, fragments said to be the girl's burned bone, turned out on laboratory testing in 2012 to be wood and glue, probably hardboard. They had never been analyzed before they were put before the court.
He stopped cooperating in 2001, and in the spring of 2002 took back his own name. For seven years he said almost nothing. In 2008 the journalist Hannes Råstam came to see him, and Bergwall told him he had invented all of it, for attention, for the standing it gave him, and for the medication. Råstam's documentaries and book, the work of the journalist Dan Josefsson, and the retrial petitions brought by his lawyer Thomas Olsson dismantled the eight cases one at a time. When the appeal court for Upper Norrland granted a retrial for the last three murders in February 2013, it said that had the courts known what was now known, there would probably not have been enough evidence to convict, and it gave weight to evidence that he had been heavily under the influence of narcotic and other drugs.
The hospital's management still held that he suffered from a serious mental disorder and should stay in closed care. On March 19, 2014, after nearly six months of inquiry, the administrative court in Falun ruled that he could leave Säter for continued treatment in the community, after almost twenty-three years in the hospital. "It was not my mental health that was the basis for my detention," he wrote on his blog that day; "it was the murder convictions and the Säter clinic's honor." He was discharged from psychiatric outpatient care on April 16, 2015, and announced it on Twitter: "Free! Really free!"
In November 2013 the government appointed Daniel Tarschys, an emeritus professor of political science, to examine how the justice system and the psychiatric service had come to convict a man of eight murders he did not commit, and whether the failures were structural; the inquiry reported in 2015. Johan Asplund's parents sued for damages. The disappearances of Johan Asplund and Therese Johannesen are not time-barred and are still being investigated as cold cases.
Swedish Wikipedia records that Bergwall has since lived in Duved, in Jämtland, spending the winters on Mallorca. He appears in reference works as a serial killer because of the eight convictions. There is no evidence that he killed anyone.