Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Fake Santa Claus Serial Killer - The Sture Bergwall Story

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Sture Bergwall, formerly known as Thomas Quick, was a Swedish man who, in the 1990s, confessed to over 30 murders across Scandinavia, leading to his conviction for eight of them. These confessions were obtained during therapy sessions at a psychiatric institution, where he was treated for personality disorders and heavily medicated.

So this guy is going to pretend to be a serial killer so he can get high on some drugs. Now the guy's name is Stur, and Stur is about 40 years old when the story starts, and he's living in Sweden. But here's the thing about Stur. He really, really loves anphetamines. But that kind of habit, it can be expensive, and, you know, he doesn't have a lot of money. So one day in 1990, he figures out a way to make some money. He's going to rob a bank, and he's going to do it dressed as Santa Claus. for some reason. And so he goes to a local bank dressed as Santa Claus, and his disguise is so

terrible that the clerk recognizes him. Like, hey, are you, Stur? And so, bam, he gets arrested. Now, instead of going to prison, he actually gets committed to a psychiatric institution for treatment. Now, this institution is actually a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. However, after living there a while, Sturr, he kind of likes it there. I mean, there are lots of of prescription drugs available like benzodiazepines which Stur really enjoys having access to. But unfortunately in 1991, not long after he gets there, Stur gets some really bad news. He's about to be released.

And he doesn't want to get released. He likes it here. Lots of free prescription drugs. And plus there are always people around him so that he's no longer lonely. And so Stur starts looking around at the other patients that are being held there. And he notices the ones being held there longer are people who have committed serious and often violent crimes. And so he's like, well, I'll just say I committed some violent crimes.

So he goes and he sees the psychiatrist working there. And Stur knows that this psychiatrist is always very focused on repressed childhood traumas. So he's in a therapy session with her and he just starts making up some past childhood traumas saying that he was like essayed by his own parents and all kind of. kinds of stuff. So Stirr is going to these therapy sessions and he's making shit up about his past and in one of the sessions he drops a bomb on the psychiatrist. He claims that he murdered someone. A real person, a kid who has known to have gone missing more than a decade before. He's just like, yep, I murdered that person. So now the psychiatric staff and the police are all very interested

in what he has to say because this case is one of Sweden's most famous unsolved mysteries. So he ultimately doesn't end up getting evicted from the psychiatric hospital and instead he starts getting a lot more attention. And they think he's crazier than what he is. So they start giving him lots more prescription pills, which is making him super happy because he's like way overmedicated at this point. And by the way, during all this, he ends up changing his name to Thomas Quick for some reason. But you know, I'm still going to call him stir. So stir, he wants this to go on forever, but he knows that in order for that to happen, he needs to keep bullshitting these doctors and telling them that he's committed more violent

crimes. So now he's going to therapy at least three times a week and he's dropping confession after confession saying, I murdered this person and I murdered that person, all of which are total lies. He's just attaching himself to a bunch of unsolved crimes that he's heard about. But he's confess to so many random murders at this point that now he has made himself out to be a serial killer. And soon, he becomes the hospital star patient. And the medical staff there loves him, and they believe the therapy they're doing is working. And it's not only helping these crimes come to light, but it's also successfully rehabilitating Stur, this supposed serial killer. And of course, Stur is loving the attention right back. I mean, he feels like a celebrity in this little world.

And this is around the time that silence of the lambs comes out, so Sturr starts calling himself Sweden's Hannibal Lecter. Oh, and he doesn't stop there. And at one point, he gets a copy of American Psycho from the hospital library, and he starts reading it. And pretty soon after, his fake confessions get wilder and more elaborate. So it seems like he might be just copying details of murders from this novel. And he, like, starts adding in details of,

dismembering people and eating people and all kinds of crazy stuff. And these doctors, they're hanging on his every word, everything he says, and they're prescribing him more and more drugs, and he's probably never felt more powerful or interesting in his life. Now, at the same time, police, they're investigating all the murders and any other crimes that Sturr is confessing to. And as you can imagine, they're having a hard time finding any sort of pattern in his criminal behavior. Most serial killers follow some kind of pattern or they have a specific type of victim that they go after. But Stur's pattern, it's all over the place. He claims to murder adults and kids and men and women and he uses all kinds of different weapons. And this is just not the way serial killers usually roll. Usually they

have a pattern. And because Sturr didn't actually commit any of these brutal crimes, he gets a lot of details wrong in his confessions, like big details. Like he'll get descriptions of of the events wrong or he'll get the murder weapon wrong. One time he even says the victim is blonde when really her hair was black. And anytime he's told he got something wrong, he's just like, oh well, the trauma of remembering made me reverse the colors.

And I guess the police just like believe him. So he keeps going, confessing to murder after murder after murder for years. And the psychiatrists and the police, they continue to believe him. And Sturr is living his best life. life through all this. He even gets to travel by private jet a couple of times to go to murder scenes to do reconstructions of what allegedly happened. And by 2001, Stur has confessed to

39 different murders. And he's been convicted of eight of them. And he becomes known as Sweden's most notorious serial killer, even though he's never actually killed anyone. And it seems like Sturr's just going to go on forever confessing to a bunch of shit he didn't do. Until... Until that same year in 2001, the psychiatric hospital gets a new clinical director. And this director starts looking at Stur's medical charts, and he's kind of shocked at the dosage of benzos this guy's been prescribed. Like, it's way too much.

So he starts reducing Stur's access to the drugs. And as soon as he does that, suddenly, Stur's... stops confessing to murders. Then Stur tells local journalists that he's no longer interested in cooperating with them or police and he withdraws from public view. And that's it. No one has access to him anymore. He goes into hiding.

And so he just chills in the hospital and serves his time. And seven years go by. And it's now 2008. And Sturr, he's in his late 50s. And a journalist, this guy, Hannes, Hannis decides he wants to revisit the crimes of Sweden's most notorious serial killer. And so this guy gets access to Stur's therapy notes, and he reads through 50,000 pages of them, and court docs and police interrogations, and anything he can find on Sturr.

And pretty quickly, he realizes that in all eight of his murder convictions, there is zero evidence against him. The only thing tying Stur to those crimes are his confession. And he sees that basically all of Stur's confessions were given while he was wasted on Benzos and other prescription drugs and being treated like a rock star by his therapist for being a serial killer. Now at this point, Stur has been locked up in the psych institution for over 20 years. So Hannes decides to go to the institution and pay him a little visit and he's like, hey, this is all a little suspect, right? And so after all these years,

Stur finally decides to tell the truth. He's like, yep, you're right. I didn't commit any of those crimes. I made it all up for attention and prescription drugs. And so all of Stur's cases go back to court and they review all eight murders he was convicted of and in all eight of them they find no real evidence against him so all eight are overturned.

And in 2014, Sturr is finally released and he changes his name from Thomas Quick back to his original name. Stir.