Bokus
Strange Case of Thomas Quick

Häftad, Engelska, 2015

Strange Case of Thomas Quick

Av Dan Josefsson

176 kr

Skickas tisdag 13/10

Beskrivning
In 1991 Sture Bergwall, a petty criminal and drug addict, botched an armed robbery so badly that he was deemed to be more in need of therapy than punishment. He was committed to Säter, Sweden's equivalent of Broadmoor, and began a course of psychotherapy and psychoactive drugs. During the therapy, he began to recover memories so vicious and traumatic that he had repressed them: sickening scenes of childhood abuse, incest and torture, which led to a series of brutal murders in his adult years. He eventually confessed to raping, killing and even eating more than 30 victims. Embracing the process of self-discovery, he took on a new name: Thomas Quick. He was brought to trial and convicted of eight of the murders.In 2008, his confessions were proven to be entirely fabricated, and every single conviction was overturned.In this gripping book, Dan Josefsson uncovers the tangled web of deceptions and delusions that emerged within the Quick team. He reveals how a sick prisoner and mental patient, addled with prescription drugs and desperate for validation, allowed himself to become a case study for a sect-like group of therapists who practiced the controversial method of 'recovered' memory therapy. The group's leader, psychoanalyst Margit Norell, hoped that her vast study of Thomas Quick would make history... And the more lies Quick told, the better he was treated: the supposedly most dangerous serial killer and sexual predator in Sweden was practically free to come and go as he wanted. This is a study of psychoanalytic ambition and delusion, and the scandalous miscarriage of justice that it led to, written by one of Sweden's foremost investigative journalists.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2015-09-03
  • Mått: 153 x 234 x 35 mm
  • Vikt: 594 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 528
  • Förlag: Granta Books
  • ISBN: 9781846275760
Utforska kategorier
Betyg & recensioner

1 recensioner, genomsnitt 5/5

  1. 5/5 Max

    This book is available in English and Swedish, and will soon also be published in German and Danish. The writer (DJ) received the highest award for a reporter, The Golden Spade. But he literally deserves also to be appointed a doctor of honour at a department of jurisprudence. The defendant Thomas Quick knew literally nothing about any of the 8 murders for which he was convicted by 6 courts (each consisting of several judges). But a large team of prosecutor, policemen, psychiatrists, psychologists, PLUS THE DEFENCE COUNSEL, spent years in fabricating false evidence. There is no jury in Sweden. But there is no excuse for those many judges who believed the unanimous claim by the prosecutor team that TQ had proved himself to know things which only the murderer could know. Today TQ is acquitted of all murders, but only due to the immense contributions of DJ (and Hannes Råstam, another muckraking reporter). The book is exciting as a thriller. And this remains true even though DJ has examined the total body of documents, audio- and video-tapes. He has also done much wallraffing. It turned out that all clinicians at one psychiatric institution for mentally ill criminals were former patients of one single psychoanalyst in Stockholm, Margit Norell. There TQ was given recovered memory therapy in order to make him "recall" that he had committed all unsolved child murders in Scandinavia. His special therapist would once a week take a journey to Stockholm and get secret instructions from Norell about how to proceed next. - Another aspect. In Sweden it is not thought that legal evidence evaluation should be based on ordinary lay thinking, but on specific jurisprudential methods which are presented in books by experts. Students must learn these doctrines; and many of them will eventually be judges and prosecutors. But during half a century none of the experts has shown that these methods can be applied to real cases. In fact, the former president of the Supreme Court said at a semi-public meeting that judges would not be able to agree about what is a correct and an incorrect evidence evaluation. Here is another merit of DJ's book. By reading it students would learn much more about valid evidence evaluation than by all the present textbooks. - A little inside information. Elizabeth Loftus (the greatest expert in this area) has read the English manuscript before it was printed.

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