Shrunk Excerpt #2

“A Cat-and-Mouse Game”
by Dr. Sven Å. Christianson
From: Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind

The convicted serial killer Sture Ragnar Bergwall, alias Thomas Quick, whom the Swedish people had followed in the media for fifteen years as the personification of evil, suddenly declared himself innocent of eight murders he had been convicted of in six separate trials held between 1994 to 2001. He played a cat-and-mouse game with justice where he provided two versions of the truth. In the first version, he admitted to many murders, claiming at one time up to thirty. In the second version, he took back these confessions. No matter which version he represented, signs of a psychopathic personality, sexual deviation, and sadism were obvious in his makeup. The genesis of Bergwall’s retracted confessions was his association with Hannes Råstam, an investigative journalist whose specialty was tracking down false confessions of convicted offenders. Two to five years after Bergwall and Råstam first met, and with massive media support, decisions were made to refer each of the cases to the Swedish Court of Appeal. Prosecutors decided to withdraw public prosecution in all of these cases, and subsequently, in 2014, Bergwall was released from a high security clinic as a free man.

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Sven Å Christianson PhD is a Professor of Psychology, and Chartered Psychologist at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden. He has authored or co-authored over one hundred scientific papers and a number of books, for example Handbook of Emotion and Memory; Traumatic Memories; Advanced Interrogation and Interviewing Technique; Offenders’ Memories of Violent Crimes; Inside the Head of a Serial Killer; and Psychological Myths in the Legal System. The objective of his research programme is to gain an understanding of the relationship between emotion and memory, with a specific focus on victims’ and offenders’ memories of violent and sexual crimes. Dr. Christianson has been a consultant in numerous murder, rape, and child sexual abuse cases, and he is often used both as a speaker and as a psychological expert witness.