The Reykjavik Confessions Page 15
Despite this, Erla immediately poured out her heart to Schutz. ‘It was really difficult and I broke down and cried in humiliation,’ she recalled, as she confessed to lying about her own brother Einar. She admitted making other false statements but her excuse was that she thought by telling the police what she thought they wanted to hear she would be released and allowed to go home.
As he listened, Erla could see Schutz had a quiet poise and confidence that was markedly different to the more jumpy Icelandic detectives. He stared at her, trying to figure out what was true and what was fantasy. The months of stories, retractions and breakdowns had blurred this for all of them, but Erla was sure Schutz would be the man to forge a new path through this fog. He never changed his expression or showed any emotion. He let her speak and say how sorry she was: ‘He let me talk until I finished and I really had to get the courage to say “it’s all my fault”.’ She felt she was to blame and her weakness had allowed her to be led by the police into a situation where there was no backing out. She told him it had all been lies, that she knew nothing about Geirfinnur or what had happened to him. She hadn’t officially withdrawn her confession about Geirfinnur Einarsson’s death but she had effectively taken it back.
Schutz waited until she had finished and then he replied, ‘Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I’m here to play games with you?’ Erla sunk lower into her chair. She had opened up and come clean but it was of no use. Schutz didn’t believe her. He told her she had to tell the truth if she wanted to keep up their dialogue and sent her away.
Erla felt a profound sense of disappointment after meeting Schutz. He didn’t want to re-examine the case, he just wanted the confessions to be consistent. After a few days languishing in her cell as the air duct pumped out dry, hot air, she decided that she wouldn’t be used any longer. She was going to fight back. Erla wanted to get her point across without being bullied or cowed by the police. She still had paper and a pen so sat down at the desk on the hard stool in the early hours and wrote a letter to Orn Hoskuldsson, the man who, on paper at least, was still in charge of the investigation. When Orn opened the letter he wasn’t sure what to expect, but he soon realised it wasn’t good news.
‘I ask you above all to take my words at face value, because they are true,’ Erla wrote. ‘To begin with, I raised this issue to draw attention to myself. Then I saw in my mind’s eye the image of the event and I was in it. I told you about it again and again and it became increasingly trapped in my head. My existence, or presence in this night is a fabrication. A myth which started when you asked me if I had been there.’
She also apologised for implicating her brother Einar – her imagination had dreamed up a link between him and Saevar. She started to see Saevar in a new light, suspecting him of more crimes. She was wrong to mention his potential involvement in the Geirfinnur case. As for her shooting dead Geirfinnur she was adamant: ‘My confession was deliberately fabricated’ and she wanted to retract it. She had tried to do this with Schutz, but he was having none of it. She was willing to be punished for making up these stories, but it was time to put an end to the nonsense. She wanted to talk to Orn in person so she could repair the damage and pleaded, ‘Orn, would you stoop so low as to talk to a girl who has led you astray in your work and in public, although I am hardly worthy? Your sincere and excited, Erla Bolladottir.’
A pattern of retractions had started. First Kristjan, then Saevar and now Erla had all withdrawn their confessions in Geirfinnur’s death. The police suspected that the suspects must be communicating somehow, this would explain Erla’s sudden retraction, so the next day, Schutz, accompanied by Orn Hoskuldsson and Eggert Bjarnasson entered Erla’s cell and watched as the prison guards searched it. They were looking for any evidence of communication with Saevar to explain the withdrawl of her confession. This prompted her to write a second letter to Orn admitting what she called ‘a mistake on my part’. She was now retracting her retraction. The letter shows her confused state and how, in 24 hours, she could shift from withdrawing her confession to apologising for daring to do so She wrote:
I sit here and think, I think incredible thoughts about these things and why no one talks to me. I do not know what happens and I am desperate and angry with life and think I wrote this letter (14.8) as a continuation of such thoughts. I take it back, in the hope that you forgive me and I can imagine how much this letter has angered you […] I hope for your forgiveness and even conversation, in connection with my child who I live for.
Chief Warden Gunnar Gudmundsson had been watching these events with increasing frustration. The day after Erla wrote her begging letter, Gunnar took it upon himself to try to clear up the confusion around Erla’s testimony. He wanted one of the wardens to help him, one who he thought Erla trusted. Hlynur was the natural choice, he had been specifically selected to befriend Erla, but Gunnar didn’t know he had stepped over the line by kissing her. ‘I could not talk to him, I had to pretend to be nice to him,’ she said. Gunnar may have thought he was helping the case but he just created more problems.
Gunnar and Hlynur questioned Erla in her cell in one long interview, although Gunnar never kept note of exactly how long they were in her cell. During the interview Erla’s story took a significant turn. For the first time she said she was there when they had dumped Gudmundur’s body. They also discussed Geirfinnur’s murder. Erla was now clear that Gudjon Skarphedinsson had been there with them that night in Keflavik.
It was exactly this kind of amateurish meddling that was the reason Karl Schutz had been brought in to run the investigation. With his arrival, the tempo of the investigation had changed, taking on a shape and structure that hadn’t been there before. Each of the detectives was assigned to a particular suspect, though Saevar was so important he had three officers investigating him. Each morning there was a team meeting and Schutz would assign tasks to the detectives. The other detectives working along the corridor would hear his refrain, ‘schnell, schnell’. The trainee psychologist, Gisli Gudjonsson, could see that the German detective was well organised: ‘He was very firm, a very domineering individual and he would sometimes lose his temper with people. He became very impatient when police officers were not doing what he wanted them to do.’ Schutz saw his role not just as an investigator but as a teacher too, who could bring the Icelandic police force into the twentieth century.
And yet the detectives continued to blame the investigation’s stalemate on the obstructiveness of the suspects. Repeatedly during his time at Borgutun 7, Gisli heard the bemoaning of the stubbornness of the suspects who were refusing to give the police what they wanted. According to Gisli, the detectives remained adamant that it was the suspects’ fault as ‘they were not basically doing what they should be doing, and that means opening up, helping them to find the bodies and help them to incriminate themselves more’.
Gisli couldn’t have picked a more hectic time to have a placement as a detective in the police and he was really enjoying being in the thick of it. He had flirted with becoming a permanent copper like his twin brother, but in training to becoming a psychologist he had chosen a different path. He wanted to develop his skills in the UK and bring them back to Iceland to help his nation. He felt that being able to watch a complex case being run would help his studies: ‘My motivation was to learn about this case to understand what makes people commit murder, what makes people confess to police.’
At the end of August, the chief superintendent called him into his office and asked if he would like to be part of a new murder squad. Gisli didn’t miss a beat before saying yes. They already had their first case.
As Gisli approached the house on Miklabraut – the noisy, wide road that connects Reykjavik to the suburbs and the countryside beyond – he was apprehensive. He had never been to the scene of a murder before. Outside the row of houses there was no indication of the horror that lay within. When Gisli stepped into the house he was overwhelmed: ‘There were blood scatters, brain scatters all over the place,
’ he recalled, the killer ‘had been running after the victim hitting her on the head, it was an absolutely horrendous crime scene. He completely lost his temper and had gone berserk.’ Lovisa Kristjansdottir, a 57-year-old housewife, had been brutally killed inside the house. She didn’t live there but was a neighbour of the owner who was away on holiday. There was no forced entry so the killer must have been inside when she had surprised them.
Gisli could only imagine the terror Lovisa had gone through as the killer beat her with such force. It looked to the detectives that she had been chased around the house. It was ‘extremely messy, it was overkill by someone who had completely lost control’. It was a busy residential area and with any luck there would be eyewitnesses who could have seen the killer entering or leaving the house.
Gisli was assigned to interview a witness, Asgeir Ingolfsson. Anyone who watched television knew him straight away. A former newspaper reporter, he was a regular presence on TV as a newsreader for the state broadcaster. Slim, with a square chin, dark set eyes and neatly parted hair, Asgeir had the bland, unthreatening air of a TV personality. The police knew he had previously had an affair with the house owner’s daughter so they naturally wanted to speak to him so he could be eliminated from the inquiry. Gisli took Asgeir’s statement about where he was at the time of the killing: ‘He said he had a problem with his car and then went to the cinema,’ but to Gisli, ‘his alibi looked very suspicious.’ Gisli felt something wasn’t right.
It’s hard to keep secrets in a small city like Reykjavik, where a distant relative or a friend, or a friend’s friend is bound to spot you. It was the charm of the city but it could also be claustrophobic, especially for anyone who craved anonymity. When the police started knocking on the doors of the other grey and white pebbledash houses, neighbours told them they had seen Asgeir Ingolfsson’s car in the area before Lovisa was killed. No longer a witness, he was now a suspect. He was taken to Sidumuli, where the detectives called on the expertise of Karl Schutz in interviewing and extracting information from suspects. Gisli was dispatched to drive Schutz to the crime scene, accompanied by Peter Eggerz and a forensic scientist from Germany who was helping with the Geirfinnur case.
For a few days Asgeir played dumb and stuck to his story of being at the cinema. Then he asked to speak to the German detective. As the youngest member of the detective team, Gisli was sent to collect Asgeir from Sidumuli and bring him to the detectives’ offices in Borgutun 7. Gisli was allowed to sit in as Asgeir was interviewed. He could see how the renowned detective worked, up close.
Gisli watched, fascinated, as Asgeir started to talk. (Asgeir spoke German so he could speak directly to Schutz.) Beneath his bland, calm exterior, Asgeir revealed a dark side: during the course of his affair with the young daughter who lived in the Miklabraut house, he had noticed a valuable stamp collection stored in a glass cabinet. The delicate, thin squares in magentas, blues and greens were carefully laid out underneath crisp sheets of protective paper, keeping them from being damaged. Asgeir had formed a plan to steal them in order to make some money. He had even gone to the trouble of making a copy of his mistress’ door key so he could let himself in when no one was there.
Asgeir knew the owner was away on holiday with her daughter in London, so he could enter the apartment and go about his business undisturbed. He had gone in the late morning when most people were at work, making it less likely he would be spotted. His copied key had worked perfectly and he had come prepared with a crowbar to prise open the cabinet where the stamps were stored. He also took some jewellery. It was all going exactly to plan when he heard the front door open.
Lovisa Kristjansdottir, being a good neighbour, was popping in to water the plants and make sure everything was OK in the house. She was surprised when she saw the stranger inside, but recognised Asgeir immediately. He had been caught red-handed, and it was pointless trying to pretend he was there for legitimate reasons. He decided to come clean and appealed to Lovisa: if he put everything back, would she forget about what she had seen?
Iceland was an honest country; the crime rate was so low because people were expected to stand up and admit their crimes. This was one of the reasons the police depended so heavily on confessions – guilty people were expected to confess. Asgeir had done just this but he wasn’t willing to pay the price. Lovisa could never live with herself, she was a principled woman, she couldn’t just let Asgeir get away with it and betray her friend’s trust. She wouldn’t hear of it, she would have to tell the owners. It was a decision that cost her her life.
Inside the interview room, Gisli studied Asgeir’s demeanour as he calmly described how he flew into a rage, chasing Lovisa before hitting her with the crowbar. After he had finished, he washed the blood off his hands and dumped the murder weapon in a rubbish tip nearby. The police had their confession; now they needed the murder weapon and Asgeir led them straight to it.
It was Gisli’s job to shovel through the detritus on the rubbish tip searching for the bloodied crowbar. It was grim work but he didn’t mind. ‘It was my first murder case and I was in at the deep end. I believed in justice and fairness.’ As for Schutz, his celebrity status was enhanced. He had solved the brutal murder of a woman because he got the confession and this had solved this case. Gisli said it was ‘a perfect confession, he confesses and tells you where the murder weapon is and we go and find it – there is perfect corroborative evidence’.
Back in his hotel room, with its chunky furniture and long windows looking out over the city bathed in warm evening sunshine, Schutz could feel pleasantly satisfied. He had only been in Iceland a month and had already wrapped up one murder. His reputation had clearly led Asgeir to seek him out and confess his crime. Schutz was like a missionary flown in from abroad to heal a bruised nation haunted by the ghosts of two young men trapped in cold, dark rocky tombs. Maybe it wouldn’t be as hard as Schutz had imagined when he first arrived. The ease with which he had obtained the confession cast the Geirfinnur suspects in an even more negative light. Asgeir had done what was expected, admitting his guilt and showing the police where the evidence was. Why couldn’t the others do the same?
13
September 1976
Karl Schutz wanted to show his paymasters in the Icelandic Government the professionalism and organisation he had brought to a previously chaotic inquiry. On 20 September he wrote the first of his weekly reports to Justice Minister Olafur Johannesson on the progress of the investigation.
In Germany, writing reports was a tiresome chore. Schutz would dictate them and get one of his secretaries to type it up. But in Iceland there was a pleasure in writing his regular update for the minister. It wasn’t just the soft, melodic clacking of the typewriter as the keys tapped against the carbon paper, imprinting their fading ink, it was that Schutz got to write in German.
Schutz went through the Gudmundur case first. He had organised a day long search for Gudmundur involving 25 police officers and a dozen other workers. They focused on an area west of the aluminium factory at Straumsvik, which kept cropping up in the suspects’ testimonies. The search had found a torn shirt and some cloth they thought might be a sheet. This could be important, he said. ‘Erla Bolladottir and some of the perpetrators claim that the corpse of Gudmundur had been wrapped and hidden in a bright sheet or blanket… If necessary, it will be examined at BKA [German federal police] forensics lab Wiesbaden.’
The police showed this cloth to Gudmundur’s parents to see if they recognised it, but they didn’t.
He went into other details of the forensic work they had been carrying out. They had tested a button which had been sewn back onto Kristjan’s coat (it was thought one had been ripped off in the fight with Gudmundur). Schutz had ordred a comparative study of the threads used to fix the button on the coat. No clue would be left untested – this was the kind of meticulous detail that was vital in cracking a murder case. He went on to list the other items that were being tested, and what he hoped the lab might find:
(b) Blood on the side wall of the car, in which the corpse of Gudmundur was transported.
(c) Blood on the floor carpet of the apartment [where Erla lived].
(d) Examination of Gudmundur’s hair [to see if it matched any of the blood on the suspects’ clothes].
This was just one half of the investigation. Schutz had a second section of his report for the work that was going on in the Geirfinnur case. They had seven defendants which included the Klubburin men (although officially they were out of the picture). There were numerous others under suspicion and Schutz had created a card index of 600 names of people of interest. Among them Schutz singled out Gudjon Skarphedinsson:
It is possible that he was the ‘foreigner’, who on 19.11.74 was at the shipyard in Keflavik and organised the use of a fishing boat to get alcohol from the sea. He was also said to have led a group of people and drove the van from Reykjavik to Keflavik and took part in the action. He is said to be known as a narcotics smuggler and friend of Saevar.
Schutz was trying to show the Justice Minister that with his expertise and access to one of the best criminal laboratories in the world, they could achieve a breakthrough. He signed off the three page report with his minimalist signature. Like Schutz, it was hard to read.
Schutz continued to assign tasks to the team of detectives in an attempt to gather more evidence and bolster the case. They were still searching for witnesses, the cars that had been driven to Keflavik and their drivers, and the boat that had been there bringing in the smuggled alcohol. Schutz was also trying to find clear links between the two missing men and the suspects.
But the extensive forensic testing at the laboratory in Wiesbaden in Germany was coming up with nothing. They tested clothing worn by Saevar, Tryggvi and Kristjan; the floormats, ashtray and door handles from Albert’s car; carpets from Erla’s apartment in Hamarsbraut looking for microscopic blood spots. There were none, except on a coat worn by Kristjan, and in the end they couldn’t prove it was from Gudmundur. They also tested bones they found on their searches of the lava, but this too came to nothing.