Psychiatric experts are now trying to assess whether Sture Bergwall should be freed, after he was cleared of the final case he was imprisoned for.
The 63-year-old has now revealed that he had invented alter ego Thomas Quick as a cry for help. He claims that his mind was foggy through medication, and he was led to inventing a serial killer past by therapists.
Bergwall previously confessed to committing 30 crimes over three decades, and was charged with eight murders.
‘I wanted to be this interesting person. I wanted to be something else.’
However the convictions were all on the strength of his confessions alone, and were not backed up by any forensic evidence.
Yesterday prosecutors overturned the final conviction, the murder of a 15-year-old who disappeared in northern Sweden in 1976.
When Charles Zelmanovits’ remains were finally found in 1993, it was too late to determine the cause of death, making the sole cause for conviction, Bergwall’s confession.
‘That a person has been convicted of eight murders and later been declared innocent, that is unique in Swedish legal history,” said the attorney general, Anders Perklev.
‘It has to be considered as a big failure for the justice system.’
Confessing that his reasons for creating an alter ego were to seek attention and boost his low self-worth, Bergwall explained in a recent interview:
‘I had burned so many bridges, and I was plunged into this profound loneliness.
‘I wanted to be this interesting person. I didn’t want to be this grey bad person. I wanted to be something else.’
‘The next step is that I, with my lawyers, take actions for my release,’ he said.