CW: Very dark themes

One of my absolute favourite subjects to write about is the haunting - yet absolutely hilarious - story about Swedens worst and most notorius serial killer Thomas Quick. The serial killer that didn't actually kill anyone. Also known by his real name Sture Bergwall.
It is one of those stories where you would go "nah, that can't be true, you're making that up". But it is all true.

I am talking about the crime case rather than the person, because that is far more sad is not why it is funny.
That is in itself a tradegy how it all went down. Everything was set right in the end, so happy(ish) endings do exist in real life. Justice prevailed in the end. The person is controversial and problematic for a few reasons, but the story about the case is what makes it funny - that is what I am saying.

It is hard knowing where to start. You have a gloriously fantstic bonkers mess of idiocy that comes from
pseudo psychology and belief systems in conjuncture with hubris, benzodiazepine dependency, carreer opportunies, exploitation and the zeitgeist of early 1990's media culture. All mixed into an sardonic coctail of absolute insanity seen from the outside perspective. The case is actually a world first (and only). Never has there been a person willingly admitting to a crime, sentenced to said crime without any evidence and then doing the same thing 7 more times. 
 
It is really hard to grasp unless you see how all these pieces connect. There are so many details and things that happened, it would take me a carreer choice in writing to make it all justice. I won't cover the whole thing obviously but am very tempted to take the tastiest slices out of the pie and present them for anyone to read. Chances are slim anyone outside of Scandinavia even knowns about this and I would love to entertain you as much as it did for me.

So I am going to attempt to write fanfiction and post on here when feeling up to it, even though it will be a true story. So.. fan.. story?
Trust me, it is going to be a fun ride. Hop on if you like! We're going to the carnival. 

Oh, you wanted a sample right away? Ok, let me give you a short and sweet one.

(severly abridged version)

Tomas admitted to commiting a well known and highly publizied disappearance (possibly kidnap or murder) of a young girl in Norway. It has been speculated she were kidnapped among other things. But here comes the "truth" a decade later.
Describing the girl as blond and living in a small wood house town. Committing the crime on a sunny summer day.
Except the girl had black hair, lived in a concrete structure suburb to the capital of Norway and it was one of the most rainy days in recent years when she disappeared.
None of that mattered at all. Because retrieving traumatic repressed memories in black and white happens sometimes. It works just like an old negative film and the dark is actually the light parts before the mind develops the image into full color. Just like a photo lab, can you imagine? Not always, but some times this unheard of phenomenon happens. Like in this case. Hence the girl being described as blonde. Process was simply not done in his mind yet. No futher questions asked. Here is what the girl looked like.

Yes, there is a major flaw in this explaination beyond the absurditiy of it - tell me if you found it.

Tomas said "I buried the full body in a sand pit". 

So the police takes him there to the location he pointed out on a map and makes him show where she is. It wasn't a sand pit where he pointed but they did find something similiar to one pretty close by.
When arriving to the scene, our hero suddenly remembers he actually put the body in a lake nearby that he never mentioned before. Because he spotted it right there and memories were so traumatic. 

Sooo...
The Swedish and Norwegian police emptied an entire lake (millons of liters, yeah..) in pursuit of this claimed victim. Fine combed every inch of the bottom of the lake after filtering all of the water through a raster mesh. Twice. Digging through 10.000 years of sediment layers. Nothing found.
Weeks of work and many millions of tax payers money.

(I wanted an image of this but I can't find it online any longer..)

"We didn't find anything there" said the police.
"Oh, I misremembered, memories are so traumatic, the bones must have been buried in the forest near by. Only the organs and eyes were put in the lake". 
So the police went back again.
They returned to dig in the forest nearby. They searched for weeks. Nothing found. 

"We didn't find anything there except for a rusty old saw and a blanket" said the police.
"Oh, I misremembered, memories are super traumatic, I cut the body up in smaller pieces with that saw you found and scattered them in a large area in the forest".
So the police went back again.
Huge areas were fine combed and dug up to find evidence and they searched for months. Nothing found. 

"We didn't find anything there." said the police.
"Oh, I misremembered. Memories are super-super traumatic. I think I might have cut the body up into tiny pieces with that saw you found, burnt the remains and it should be at some sort of camp fire setting if even existing at all all these years later". 

So.... the police went back. Again.

Eventually they found a tiny piece of burnt plastic with glue on it and said it was probably maybe sorta possibly the remains of a young victim of some kind and BAM - that's another murder right there. Skeptics wanted to DNA test the evidence but the prosecutor said no. Just.. "no". Questions were raised about it being an animal skeleton fragment to which the prosecutor said, and I quote, "the place were this were found is deep in the woods and not somewhere you would have a barbecue and thusly must be human remains". 

(I wanted an image of this fragment but I can't find it online any longer..)

Tomas was sentenced for commiting this crime based on strong evidence and a believable story where he remembered what happened in great detail.

Yeah, this is the level of insane we're dealing with.