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that Thomas Quick had confessed to, Sten-Ove had no doubts: ‘When I heard that a man had confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.’
    The trial for the Appojaure murders began in January 1996 at Gällivare District Court. At the trial in Piteå, Thomas Quick had insisted on closed doors while he was being cross-examined, but in Gällivare he conducted himself with great confidence in the courtroom. In front of an audience he accounted for the murder of the Dutch couple in a convincing manner. He described how he had taken a train to Jokkmokk, wanting to find a teenage boy, and there he met a group of German youths and selected one of the boys as his victim.
    On a stolen women’s bicycle he had cycled to Domus supermarket, where he met Johnny Farebrink, a ‘gruesome and deeply depressed knife-lunatic’. After a drinking session they had gone together to Appojaure, where the Stegehuises were camping. According to Quick, their reason for going was that Johnny Farebrink had ‘aversions’ to the Dutch couple, while Quick was keen to target the German boy he had met in Jokkmokk, and got the impression that the boy was the Dutch couple’s son.
    ‘When I asked her directly, the woman denied her own son. I was furious,’ Quick told the court.
    The murder of the couple, which had earlier seemed inexplicable, was now revealing a certain underlying logic, though a crazily contorted one.
    ‘I tried to lift her up so her face was right in front of mine. I wanted to see her fear before she died,’ Quick went on. ‘But I didn’t really have the strength, so I just stabbed and stabbed.’
    Counsel Claes Borgström asked Quick what had turned him against the woman.
    ‘Because of her denial, I identified her with M , and there was also a physical resemblance,’ answered Quick.
    M was Quick’s name for his mother. The murder was thus a murder of his own mother.
    A relative of the Stegehuises, with whom the couple stayed in the first few days of their holiday, had come to Gällivare in order to try and understand why Janny and Marinus had been killed. After listening to Quick’s account of the double murder, the relative made a statement to Expressen : ‘Quick is a pig, he doesn’t deserve to live.’
    The outcome of the trial for the murders in Appojaure was hardly a foregone conclusion. There were questions about a number of aspects of Thomas Quick’s story, especially concerning the information about an accomplice. The investigators had not found anything or anyone to back up Quick’s information about Johnny Farebrink: no one had seen them together and the drinking session they allegedly indulged in was denied by everyone who was present. For these reasons he was not a co-defendant in the case.
    A local artist who had been a student at the same high school as Quick in the 1970s did testify that she was almost sure she had seen him at the train station in Gällivare at the time of the murders in Appojaure.
    The district court also believed that Quick’s presence in Jokkmokk on the day before the murder was confirmed by the testimony of the owner of a stolen bicycle. She said that the bicycle’s gears were broken in precisely the way that Quick had described.
    Seppo Penttinen, who had conducted all the interviews withQuick, testified in court as to the reasons why Quick had constantly changed his story over the course of the investigation. It was because Quick ‘had to protect his inner self by inventing something that verged on the truth’. Yet the central aspects of Quick’s memories were clear and distinct, according to Penttinen.
    Sven Åke Christianson explained Quick’s difficulties in remembering his murders and described two contradictory mechanisms in the function of human memory. Remembering what harms us is, on the one hand, an important survival mechanism. On the other hand, we cannot constantly ‘go round