Part 1: Inside the asylum

Sture Bergwall woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, as he does every morning, and at 6 a.m. he walked for an hour in the interior yard of the secure psychiatric unit at Säter hospital, his home for the past twenty-three years. He likes to do this every day, pacing a figure eight over and over again. Sometimes he listens to music, but more often to the morning news, eavesdropping on a world he was separated from more than two decades ago.

Sweden is the kind of country where being a convicted murderer in a secure psychiatric unit is not necessarily an impediment to having a Twitter feed, and Bergwall often tweets about these endless morning circuits. "Ercise yard reflections," he titles them. Small wistful poems about what you can see when this is your only physical access to the world beyond: the budding of a branch, the way fresh snow sits on top of the courtyard walls, the glow against the underside of the sky that he knows is from the lights of the waking town to the east. On a good day, he sees a nightingale.

Sture Bergwall is better known to most people in Sweden as Thomas Quick, the name he took not long after he arrived at this institution in 1991. Quick is his mother’s family name. Thomas, he liked to explain, was the name of his first victim, a 14-year-old boy whose body was found in a bicycle shed, belt undone, trouser button ripped off, and face bloody. Bergwall was never prosecuted for that murder, because he was 14 years old when it happened, and by the time he confessed to it, the statute of limitations had expired. But he was later convicted in six separate trials for eight other murders, and the full number of murders he has claimed responsibility for is around thirty. That is how he became Sweden’s most famous serial killer. "Sweden’s answer," as he himself would later put it, "to Hannibal Lecter."

For a time it was a role he seemed to revel in, but then in 2001, after his eighth murder conviction, Bergwall announced that he was no longer going to cooperate with prosecutors and he was no longer going to speak with the media. He reclaimed the name Sture Bergwall and went silent. As his reputation swirled, the man at its center kept his own counsel. But recently he has decided to start talking again, and he has agreed to see me. I have come here to try and understand his story—an awful story about what human beings can do, and about responsibility and guilt, and about deceit and retribution, one that has lessons for us all.

To reach the secure psychiatric unit’s visitors room, which is where Bergwall and I will talk, this is what you must do: walk through the security entrance, put your passport in a tray where it is kept by a man in a secure booth, go through a heavy metal door that is opened remotely, walk through a metal detector, go through another remotely opened heavy metal door, sit in a waiting room where a coffee table is littered with Swedish women’s magazines, then go through two more locked doors, each opened with keypads. And there, at the end of this, is Sture Bergwall, waiting, smiling a little unsurely, a 63-year-old man with a short gray beard, barely a wisp of hair on his head, thick glasses.

Here, five doors from the free world, it is hard not to feel a little apprehension. There is an odd moment after I first arrive when the translator has gone to the bathroom and the two people from the hospital who will sit by the door as we talk are not yet in place, and so it is just myself and Bergwall, meeting for the first time, exchanging stilted pleasantries. He takes a seat on one side of a low coffee table—a position chosen, I later discover, because he doesn’t like to see the staff who are monitoring him. I move toward the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. But then he overrules me. He gently taps on the chair right next to him. Okay.