The Reykjavik Confessions Page 12

  Erla repeated her story about the events at Keflavik. She knew that ‘it was a ridiculous story. This far into the case when they are talking about how we got rid of Geirfinnur’s body, I was feeling whatever hope I had was gone. . . if this is how they wanted to tie loose ends I was never going to get out.’

  Kristjan did the same, apparently accepting Erla’s new role in the murder. Erla broke down and in tears asked Saevar what had happened the night Geirfinnur went missing. She was looking for affirmation and guidance from the man who had controlled her life for two years. Saevar had listened, incredulous at what he was hearing. He felt like the only sane person locked up in an asylum. Could no one else see through Erla’s story, that it was patently nonsense? He thought the police had played on Erla and Kristjan’s damaged psyches and they had been turned against him. They were prepared to lie about anything to gain the confidence and trust of the police. Saevar told Erla she was lying, she knew exactly where they were and it wasn’t in Keflavik. Erla seemed to have taken on the role of the interviewer, and repeatedly shouted at him about their young child who was without her parents.

  Having retracted his confession there was no way Saevar was being party to a fiction that Erla was the killer. He addressed Erla directly, asking how she had held the gun and how she had fired it. The detectives intervened trying to get him to stop, but he turned on them, bringing up the violence that they had used on him to get him to comply. Everyone in the room was convinced Saevar was guilty and that he was holding out, taunting them. The atmosphere was getting more heated as Saevar refused to agree with the fiction Erla had concocted.

  Watching the lanky, long-haired, cocky rebel remain defiant was proving too much for Gunnar Gudmunsson. He couldn’t bear it any longer and he lashed out at Saevar and hit him. He had clearly stepped over the line and in front of several witnesses. Although he had bravado, Saevar wasn’t able to tolerate violence and was so distressed that he was brought back to his cell, but Erla’s torture wasn’t over. She was interviewed for another hour and a half, alone in a room with six other men, one of whom she had seen was willing to assault a prisoner if he didn’t like their answers.

  Erla’s confession had thrown the Geirfinnur investigation into further turmoil. The woman who had drawn the Klubburin suspects into the case was now saying she was responsible for Geirfinnur’s murder. Despite their struggles inside the jail, Einar, Magnus, Valdimar and Eric refused to budge. They had alibis which the detectives had spent months trying to disprove but couldn’t.

  The press sensed the police’s uncertainty. Weeks earlier, the Visir newspaper felt emboldened enough to run a front-page story speculating that the four men connected to Klubburin would soon be released.

  A week after Erla’s confession they came before the court and were released. These men had spent 105 days in solitary confinement, and although they had access to lawyers and gifts from their families, the isolation had a profound effect on them.

  When he arrived home, Einar’s wife, Sigrun Ingolfsdottir, told waiting journalists: ‘I was always convinced of Einar’s innocence and I’ve tried not to be bitter. I’ve also tried to ignore all the gossip that’s surrounded the investigation, and it’s become clear these last few months which of the people we know are our real friends.’ They had already faced hardship: Einar had been fired from his civil service job shortly after he was arrested and she said that ‘if it hadn’t been for many kind and helpful men assisting me we would’ve lost our house.’

  The suspicions about Klubburin and smuggling, which went back to 1972, meant Magnus Leopoldsson had been the police’s principal target from the beginning. On release, he moved away from running Klubburin and set up a successful property business. The other two Klubburin suspects kept their heads down and tried to get on with their lives but they found it was hard to escape being tainted by the case, although their lawyers launched a successful compensation claim against the state for false imprisonment. Eventually, years later, they were paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for their incarceration.

  After the release of the men, the police issued a press release appealing for information. It said Einar and his fellow suspects would be monitored and their movements restricted, which brought condemnation from the left-wing newspaper, Althydubladid. The press release smacked of desperation and the newspapers saw it as a sign of weakness. Althydubladid pointed out Erla may have confessed to Geirfinnur’s murder, but, ‘Nothing is however said of where the body is or who disposed of it. Erla’s story of dropping a rifle into the hands of her lover after the terrible act also seems a bit like a fairytale.’

  Morgunbladid interviewed Geirfinnur Einarsson’s wife, Gudni. She was adamant that she didn’t recognise any of the names of the people being held and they had never come to her house. She didn’t believe Geirfinnur had anything to do with them. The only rational explanation for his disappearance was that something must have happened in Klubburin a few days before he went missing.

  The police had to get the case back on track. For months the police thought Magnus Leopoldsson had been the driver on the trip to Keflavik. Now he was out of custody and effectively out of the picture, the detectives had to find a new driver who had taken the three suspects to meet Geirfinnur Einarsson. Kristjan had mentioned a ‘foreign looking man’ during the intensive questioning he had been subjected to in the preceding weeks. The police wondered whether this man had been the driver all along. They knew exactly where to find him.

  From the beginning of 1976, Gudjon Skarphedinsson had the strange feeling he was under surveillance. As an associate of Saevar’s and an accomplice in the failed drugs scam, he was a marked man. Officers would call in at his apartment for a coffee and a ‘friendly chat’. Chats like this, unrecorded with no notes taken or lawyer present, were common practice as officers fished for leads. He was uneasy about this but thought it was best to co-operate.

  Separated from his wife and young children, Gudjon was now living with his mother in her apartment in Reykjavik, a city he had always despised. His mother had seen how his low self esteem was eating away at him. She had become so worried about his mental health that she had sent him to a doctor who found Gudjon was ‘hyperactive’, or manic. Gudjon admitted at times he could talk continuously all day without a break. His behaviour had become so erratic that Gudjon’s brother, also a doctor, intervened and prescribed the antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine.

  He was still drifting. He had left his job as a book-keeper and for a while escaped from life in the monochrome urban environment by working as a deckhand on a trawler. Out in the natural world was where he felt at home and he loved the biting tang of the Atlantic. He was soon promoted to a cook.

  In winter, the Atlantic could be a frightening place. This was when the brooding slate blue sea would fight to keep its precious bounty of gleaming haddock, cod and flat, brown halibut. Even though the trawler was sturdy with a steel hull, the sea was a ferocious opponent. In storms the bow would be pitched deep into the water as the boat disappeared into the ocean troughs before rising again on a wave which arced into a foaming white cloud engulfing the vessel. This could go on for hours as the boat battled its way through the waves. Gudjon wasn’t scared by this, though. To him, it was an escape from the rigours and pressures of daily life on shore. But he couldn’t stay at sea forever, this was only a temporary reprieve. He saw himself as lazy, easily bored and that he gave in easily to others. That made him a perfect target for the police. Days after the Klubburin men were released, the stolid detective, Eggert Bjarnasson, was despatched to bring Gudjon in for an interview.

  The detectives’ small offices were spread out along the narrow corridor at the team’s headquarters at Borgutun 7. Holed up in these rooms for the past five months, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, the small team had built up a picture of Geirfinnur’s final night and wanted to find out what Gudjon knew. But rather than bring him here for an interview, Gudjon was taken to the more oppressive ‘Corner’ in Sidumuli.


  They took him through the wooden main door and the clanking white barred gates, along the faceless corridor with its shiny linoleum floor, bright strip lighting and windowless cell doors. Behind these doors the suspects spent their days in a space just wide enough for a bed. They were like the animals at the moribund zoo in Hafnarfjordur, caged in tiny enclosures, with only brief respite when their keepers brought food or let them out to stretch their legs by walking to the toilet. Gudjon knew what it was like inside these cells; he had spent five nights locked up for his drugs arrest and it had spooked him. He didn’t want to go back in there again.

  Sat inside the interrogation room, Eggert began probing Gudjon about where he was in November 1974. Was he with Erla, Saevar and Kristjan on the night when they had driven from Reykjavik out to Keflavik? Gudjon was not threatened by Eggert, he thought he was pleasant enough, but a bit slow and no match for him intellectually. Gudjon replied in his acerbic manner that he had no idea what Eggert was talking about as he had not been there. Gudjon was willing, though, to share what he knew about the young suspects who were waiting for the next round of interviews.

  Gudjon traced his relationship with Saevar from its beginnings through to December 1975 when it had fallen apart over the botched attempt to bring drugs into Iceland using Gudjon’s car. When he was asked about Geirfinnur he drew a blank, he had never met him. He had heard of him of course, everyone had, and he recounted a conversation he had with Saevar in the summer of 1975. Saevar said ‘he knew everything’ about Geirfinnur, although he didn’t say what exactly. He had said to Gudjon, ‘In this country, it would be very easy to get rid of someone permanently. All that was needed was to kill them and bury them south in the lava where they would never be found.’ Gudjon saw it as nothing more than Saevar shooting his mouth off, Saevar being Saevar.

  Gudjon said he knew Erla less well. She had come with Saevar to Gudjon’s house once in a Land Rover she had recently bought. He said he didn’t know the other member of the ‘gang’, Kristjan, but the police didn’t believe him. Before bringing him into the prison, they had moved Kristjan so he could see the swarthy man with his short dark hair and thick moustache. Kristjan got a good look at Gudjon and identified him as ‘the foreigner’ who he had seen in Reykjavik before they set off on that fateful drive out to Keflavik. The police didn’t have enough evidence to hold Gudjon, so after a few hours he was let go. But ‘the foreign looking guy’ was now in the picture.

  Erla and Saevar were still the principal focus of the police investigation. Erla’s testimony put the detectives in a bind. She had confessed to shooting Geirfinnur but her earlier statements about her brother and the Klubburin men hadn’t stacked up. They enlisted a psychologist to help them. He visited Erla in the week after her arrest and provided affirmation to the detectives’ theory, finding her to have ‘major gaps in her memory of many events that have clearly been hard for her and created emotional tension’. He went on to state she was intelligent but neurotic and demonstrated ‘the need to be controlled by others, and almost masochistic behaviour’.

  The police would exploit this knowledge to their own ends. By this point, Erla said, ‘They knew so much already, they asked me about everything.’ The detectives had gone through her relationships with her family, her mum, her friends. Erla was an open book and would always talk freely about these relationships. They were constantly trying to drive a wedge between her and Saevar by taking her back to the time of the disappearances, when after a few months with her new boyfriend she was isolated. ‘I didn’t want to answer how lonely I was and had no friends. I didn’t want anyone talking to me about that time, that was so humiliating and they sensed that.’ The police knew from the bond Erla had formed with the detective Sigurbjorn that Erla would always respond well to someone who was kind to her and treated her well. Now she was in jail they needed an insider, a warden who could befriend her.

  Hlynur Magnusson was different to the other wardens – by his own admission ‘rather nice’. When he went to work each morning he would wear a coat to hide his uniform. The other guards wore the black uniform with pride and would even put on their caps when they were going outside to fetch food to display their status. Hlynur would never do this – this was a job for him, not a vocation. The other guards were mostly simple men from the countryside who had second jobs as carpenters or builders; they saw the world in black and white. Hlynur preferred his lifestyle at the prison to his former life as a lonely academic. He was well paid, only worked four days a week and it was so quiet he could often get a decent sleep. He was also proud to play an important role solving the most important criminal case in Iceland’s history.

  When Erla was first brought into the jail, Hlynur remembered her as meek: ‘She was like a terrified mouse in the corner’. Erla saw herself this way too. She remembered when she had briefly worked in a bakery and a mouse had been found in the flour and she saw it with a bright light shining on it and wanted to let it escape and run free. ‘That was me in the prison – all you had to do was pick me up and let me go.’ Hlynur responded to this trait in Erla. He would be the person to gain her confidence. Hlynur knew that the best way to get more information from Erla was to make her believe she was helping herself and her daughter. His orders were simple, he was told to ‘bring Erla coffee or a Coke in the evening and sit there and talk to her and try to see if she would open up’.

  In the minds of other guards, Erla was a black widow, a deadly, manipulative killer. (The police had fed this view with a remarkable press release issued a few days after her confession. It described how she had used a rifle on Saevar’s instructions, given the gun back to him and run away and hid.) Erla felt this resentment and needed some positive affirmation; she was ‘so completely vulnerable and easily abused I’d do anything you wanted if you were nice to me’.

  Just as he had been instructed, Hlynur would bring Erla a drink and they would sit and chat, him on the hard stool close to her on the bed. Erla said, ‘He was the only friendly thing – there was someone in prison that is there and listening.’ They chatted about history, Rome and the beginning of civilization. Hlynur fed Erla’s intelligence and desire to learn by smuggling in several volumes of Will Durant’s multi-volume The Story of Civilization. Erla lapped it up, devouring the books, and grateful to Hlynur for allowing her mind to escape from the grey walls and to soar back to the time of Caesar and the beginnings of Christianity.

  In the evenings, Hlynur would make the short walk from the guard’s office to Erla’s cell. They moved on from small talk and began discussing the case. He would write down her fantastic accounts of the night in November 1974 when Geirfinnur Einarsson disappeared.

  Erla had very different views of the two cases she was caught up in. With Gudmundur her memory was clouded, she thought she may have indeed witnessed a murder. Geirfinnur was a different matter. She knew deep in her heart that she hadn’t been there, but she was trying to please the detectives. Her imagination was running wild and each time she told her story it would change. She would name different people who had been in Keflavik and who were part of the smuggling scam and there to witness Geirfinnur’s murder: there was the owner of a famous fashion shop, even a government minister cropped up at one point. Hlynur would get Erla to sign these statements and then hand them over to the police. He thought the statements were ‘absolute bullshit’ but the police saw it differently. There were still important elements that the police didn’t know: who the driver was who brought Erla, Saevar and Kristjan to Keflavik; who else was in Keflavik with them; when and how Geirfinnur was killed, as this kept changing. And, most importantly, where the bodies were buried.

  Hlynur saw in the detectives that, ‘They believed everything at first, it seemed. It was like a Salvador Dali picture somehow, this case – abstract, abnormal.’ Hlynur wasn’t a detective but he had spoken to lots of prisoners, both innocent and guilty. He had worked at the old jail in Reykjavik, full of drunkards and petty criminals who would be fed and sheltere
d and even played chess with the guards. He could see Erla was caught in a vicious circle where she had to keep the police happy, and to do this she would give them more and more names. Erla’s erratic testimony was a huge red flag, a warning to treat what she said with extreme caution. But the police couldn’t afford to, she was too valuable to them. None of Erla’s conversations were private, even those with the psychiatrist and psychologist who assessed her in April before she confessed, and prepared a report on her mental state for the police. She knew that the police and guards were listening to her conversations too. This wasn’t just the paranoia of a prisoner with too much time on their hands.

  She had made contact with a prisoner in an adjoining cell. They had read the same book from the prison library; they found a hollow spot in the wall and by propping a glass against the wall they could hear each other speaking. Erla said, ‘We became so in tune with each other we could talk.’ These snatched conversations continued for a few days until the wardens burst into her cell with noise and fury. They ordered her to strip and cover herself with a blanket while they searched her cell. ‘They had a microphone in the air conditioning in my cell and they heard everything and were hoping I would say something that they could use.’ When, after a few days, this hadn’t happened, the wardens decided to move in anyway.

  Saevar had also managed to make contact with another prisoner. He had been moved from the cell on his own to the corridor with the other inmates. He had been given a pencil and some paper by a psychologist to write down his thoughts. He started writing about the mistreatment he suffered and wanted the information to be smuggled out and published by the press. He folded the notes over a comb and slid it under the door to the cell opposite. After several days the guards discovered the clandestine communication and when they searched Saevar’s cell they found letters and tobacco that his inmate pen pal had hidden in the toilet for him. As a punishment the guards removed Saevar’s blanket and placed him in leg irons for the next ten days.