This entry records a miscarriage of justice, not a series of murders.
Sture Bergwall was born in Korsnas in Sweden in 1950. In 1991, after a bungled bank robbery, he was committed to the Sater psychiatric hospital, where he was held under a regime of heavy benzodiazepine medication and given recovered-memory therapy. He took the name Thomas Quick. Swedish reporting called him Satermannen, the Sater Man, after the hospital he was held in.
Between 1992 and 2001 he confessed to more than thirty murders committed across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland over three decades. Between 1994 and 2001 he was convicted of eight of them, in trials at which he pleaded guilty, in which no forensic evidence connected him to any scene, in which no witness placed him there, and in which his accounts of the killings were initially wrong in almost every detail and became correct only after repeated interviews.
He was Sweden's most notorious criminal for a decade and was described in the press as the country's only serial killer.
In 2001 he stopped talking, and in 2008 he told a journalist, Hannes Rastam, that he had invented all of it: for the attention, for the standing it gave him in the hospital, and to keep the supply of medication coming. Rastam's investigation, and the work of Bergwall's later lawyer Thomas Olsson, established that he had alibis for several of the killings, that investigators had fed him information, and that the therapy had constructed the memories.
All eight convictions were quashed between 2010 and 2013. He was discharged from Sater in 2013 and lives under his own name. The Swedish government commissioned an inquiry into how it had happened, which reported in 2015 and was critical of the police, the prosecutors, the courts and the treating clinicians alike.
He is retained in this archive because he is in every reference work as a serial killer. He is not one, and the entry exists to say so.