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Thomas Quick performed with great concentration and in accordance with the known facts. He calmly described to Penttinen every lunge he made with the knife, while also outlining his collaboration with his accomplice, Johnny Farebrink. He demonstrated how the long tear had been made in the short end of the tent, through which he had made his way inside.
    Seven hours later, when the reconstruction was over, both the investigators and the prosecutor expressed their satisfaction with the outcome. Van der Kwast was quoted in Expressen on 12 July saying, ‘It’s gone very, very well.’ He now held the view that Thomas Quick had convincingly shown in the reconstruction that he really had murdered the Dutch couple: ‘He was both willing and able to show in great detail how the murders happened.’
    An increasing number of real and self-proclaimed experts set out to explain the experiences and circumstances that had turned the boy, Sture Bergwall, into the sadistic serial killer known as ThomasQuick. Kerstin Vinterhed, a highly respected journalist who wrote for Dagens Nyheter , described his childhood home as a place ‘entirely silent and cut off from the outside world. It was a home where no one visited, where no children were ever seen playing nearby.’
    Again, Quick’s childhood was covered – including his father’s rapes, his mother’s cruelty and the two murder attempts against him. His transformation into a murderer was thought to have happened after his father’s last assault, which took place in the forest when Thomas Quick was thirteen. Thomas wanted to kill his father, but changed his mind when he saw how pathetic he looked with his trousers around his ankles.
    ‘And then I ran away. And it’s like a single, giant step from that moment to the murder I committed in Växjö six months later when I was fourteen,’ Quick explained.
    ‘So it was as if you were killing yourself, was it?’ Kerstin Vinterhed wondered.
    ‘Yes, I was killing myself,’ Quick confirmed.
    There was a belief that during this murder, just as with all the others, Thomas Quick was both the assailant and the victim. The murders were in actual fact a sort of re-enactment of the assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood. This was the theoretical model used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Quick and was also a method approved by the investigators.
    Thomas Quick’s siblings, nephews and nieces responded with powerless shame to the horrifying accounts in the media of the parents’ dreadful cruelty. The Bergwall family no longer talked about Sture. If necessary, he was referred to as ‘TQ’. Sture Bergwall did not exist.
    They maintained their silence for a long time. But in 1995 the oldest son, Sten-Ove Bergwall, stepped forward as the family’s spokesman. In the book Min bror Thomas Quick (‘My Brother, Thomas Quick’)he gave his version of what it was like to grow up in their family home. He spoke for the whole family when he called into question his brother’s traumatic childhood memories.
    ‘I don’t doubt that it seems true to him. It’s a known tendency for people to be encouraged to produce false memories in therapy,’he said to Expressen , with firm assurances that his parents could not have been guilty of what Thomas Quick was alleging.
    Sten-Ove explained that his purpose in writing the book was not to make money, but rather to reclaim the childhood that Thomas Quick had taken from him by the statements he had made. He also wanted to clear the names of his late parents, as they weren’t able to defend themselves against Quick’s accusations.
    ‘I’m not suggesting that we grew up in a perfect family, but none of us siblings have memories that back up his story. We were not a bunch of people living in isolation, we were not rejected and mysterious. We socialised with people, we travelled a lot and visited relatives at weekends, at Christmas and on birthdays.’
    However, when it came to the murders