Thomas Quick was, for a time, Sweden’s most notorious serial killer. He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to many more, producing a list of almost forty victims. By his own account he murdered children and adults, including a Dutch couple sleeping in a tent in northern Sweden, but was never able to pinpoint the places where he claimed to have concealed the bodies.

Quick was a fraud, in other words, and all his convictions were later overturned. He wasn’t even called Thomas Quick, which was the name he adopted shortly before he began making his sensational confessions. Quick was actually a petty criminal called Sture Bergwall, born in 1950, who had a long history of disturbed behaviour and drug abuse. In 1991, after taking part in an amateurish robbery, he was sent to