The Reykjavik Confessions Read online

  The detectives in Reykjavik were watching, aghast at what was unfolding. ‘It was terrible as everyone was a bit afraid as it was TV,’ recalled Arnprudur Karlsdottir. ‘If it was on TV you had to believe it – it put pressure to find someone.’ Haukur added to this pressure when he confidently told journalists, ‘It’s just a matter of time until we find the man. It could be the next few hours or it could take weeks.’ But his boss, Valtyr, sounded more circumspect when interviewed by Icelandic television: ‘We believe this, we hope this accurately represents the man,’ he said, before predicting, ‘We’ll find this man, there’s no doubt about it.’

  Watching at home, and seeing it for the first time on television, Gudlaug thought the bust was better than the drawings that had been made. But it looked identical to the photos she had been shown of Magnus Leopoldsson, who was not the man she had seen come into the cafe that night.

  The next day, the Keflavik office was inundated with phone calls giving hundreds of names of potential suspects. Valtyr and Haukur were manning the phones and typing up a list. Not surprisingly, Magnus Leopoldsson’s name cropped up a few times. He was a well-known face in Reykjavik, but Valtyr’s jurisdiction didn’t go beyond Keflavik, so he couldn’t question anyone who lived outside of his area. He sent Magnus’ name to the police in Reykjavik, along with dozens of others. Valtyr then took the lonely road from Keflavik to Reykjavik, slicing through the gloomy lava plains which flowed down to the ocean. He was heading to Borgutun 7, to see the veteran detective Njordur Snaeholm.

  When he arrived, Valtyr noticed files in Snaeholm’s office with the names he had phoned through. But the Reykjavik team still didn’t seem that interested in the case. They had better things to do than chase up a list of random people. The view in Reykjavik was that Geirfinnur had most likely committed suicide. Valtyr’s sense from his visit and from Njordur was that, ‘When people went missing they jump in the sea or hang themselves.’ As Valtyr headed back to Keflavik, he concluded, ‘It was one of these cases, nobody wants to come near it.’ The fiasco over the clay head and the inexperience of the Keflavik team meant that picking up the case could be a poisoned chalice, with the embarrassing prospect of Gierfinnur suddenly reappearing at any time.

  The police in Reykjavik may not have been interested in the case but the media couldn’t get enough of it. This was a country with very little violent crime – only one or two murders on average each year – which were normally pretty straightforward cases and quickly solved, so-called ‘domestic crimes’.

  In a small town, indeed in a small country, rumours take on a life of their own. The resemblance of the clay head, ‘Leirfinnur’, to Klubburin’s manager, Magnus Leopoldsson, led to rumours about his suspected links to the case. Erla was at Saevar’s mother’s house in Reykjavik where they were discussing the rumours. Saevar listened for a while to their conversation, barely concealing his annoyance at the women he thought were being so stupid. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it’s so obvious this guy was shooting his mouth off at the wrong moment in the wrong place, he only has himself to blame.’ This was typical Saevar, trying to sound like he knew it all, even when he didn’t.

  Erla and Saevar had been feeling the heat after their post office caper. Erla had heard there was a warrant out for their arrest, so in December 1974 they fled to Copenhagen. Saevar went first, with Erla to follow later. She took the dwindling stash from the post office embezzlement, changed it into 100 kronor bills and smuggled it out of the country by stuffing it in her boots.

  When she arrived in Copenhagen, Erla was given strict instructions by Saevar to stay with Icelanders he knew and wait for him to contact her. Erla did as she was told and headed to the address he had given her. She became good friends with the Icelandic girl who rented the apartment, a young student with a baby that Erla would look after. Saevar showed up weeks later and within a few months their post office loot had run out. They were scared to return to Iceland as they thought they would be arrested for the embezzlement, so they stayed in Copenhagen into the spring with little money. They stole a fox fur coat so they could sell it, but they never got around to it.

  To add to her woes, Erla found out she was pregnant. She was throwing up all the time and, with no cash, resorted to stealing tomatoes as it was the only food she could hold down. They were living a miserable existence and Saevar decided to call an acquaintance of his in Iceland, Gudjon Skarphedinsson, to check the lay of the land back home.

  Gudjon couldn’t have been more different from Saevar and his friends. Ten years older than them, he was educated and a former teacher. But the past year of his life had been a mess. He had dropped out of university and a few months later his father, a Lutheran minister, had been killed in a car crash. This plunged Gudjon into a depression which, combined with increasing financial troubles, had taken a toll on his marriage. He didn’t care about work, drifting in and out of professions and having trouble sticking to anything. Gudjon was a country boy at heart, brought up in the Westfjords by his grandparents. It was a rural idyll; Gudjon would ride to school on horseback, surrounded by mountains and the cold blue waters that turned burnished silver when the sun shone. He hated Reykjavik from the moment he arrived in the early sixties, after he had been expelled from his grammar school in Akureyi, in Northern Iceland. Gudjon found the capital, ‘the ugliest, sickest little town I’ve ever seen in my life’. He found the weather far more depressing than up north and the food even worse. He couldn’t wait to leave and he relished the opportunity to become a teacher back in the Icelandic wilderness where there were more cows and horses than people.

  It was here that he would meet a pupil who would change his life forever. One morning as he called out names in the big green register, one name stood out: Saevar Cieselski, a Polish/Jewish name rare among the Celts. There was something in Gudjon’s laconic manner that separated him from the other teachers so that when the young Cieselski was threatened with expulsion for making alcohol, it was Gudjon he turned to. He accosted him one day after school, grabbing the teacher and asking if he could stop the expulsion. But there was nothing Gudjon could do and he thought no more of the boy until years later when Saevar introduced himself again at a party in Reykjavik.

  By then, Gudjon had returned to the capital to study theology at the University of Iceland. He eventually switched his studies to Icelandic, which he found ‘boring’, then medicine for which he admitted he ‘didn’t have the energy’, before dropping out. It wasn’t hard to bump into an acquaintance; there weren’t many places where you could hang out. Mokka was one of the favourite haunts, a 1950s style, low-lit cafe where artists, musicians and wannabe revolutionaries would squeeze into booths for a coffee and a smoke. They would discuss how they’d take over the country from the controlling, stodgy politicians in their dark suits with their binary view of the world.

  Gudjon and Saevar had mutual friends and Gudjon was soon drawn into the network of people Saevar would call upon. They weren’t close, however, as Gudjon knew Saevar had a reputation around town as a petty thief ‘who would take your money if you weren’t looking’. Gudjon thought of the boy as nothing more than a passing acquaintance, albeit a very persistent one who would show up at his work or house unannounced.

  Gudjon was at home with his young daughter in March 1975 when he received a collect call from Copenhagen. ‘I didn’t know who was calling and I thought it was a friend in trouble,’ he recalled. When he accepted the call, it was Saevar. They didn’t speak for long, ‘He was asking about news from Iceland. I said there was nothing new, nothing more to add,’ Gudjon recalled.

  Saevar was checking if it was safe to return to Iceland, but Erla had already decided she had tired of their listless existence in Copenhagen and was going home. Saevar couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving and flew into a rage and the black mood Erla had experienced once before. He tried to kick her. ‘He aimed for my stomach and I was pregnant and he missed,’ Erla recalled, ‘but I said I know what you tried to do, you’re dang
erous.’ She didn’t want to be anywhere near him so she packed and left. Pregnant and vulnerable and having burned her bridges with her family she had to stay with Saevar’s mother, Sigurbjorg. She was delighted to take her in and excited about the baby.

  The police were already on to the embezzlement. It hadn’t taken them long to figure it out, but they didn’t arrest Erla when she returned. They would wait and bide their time.

  3

  January–November 1975

  Inside the pokey office that served as the hub of the Keflavik investigation, they were getting nowhere fast. Within weeks of starting the enquiry, Valtyr Sigurdsson was already sick of it. At Christmas he went on a skiing holiday, handing over the day-to-day running to his detective, Haukur Gudmundsson, and the ever-present customs chief, Kristjan Petursson. Petursson had helped out by going through all of the passenger lists to find out who had left the country at the time of Geirfinnur’s disappearance. He now saw his brief as beyond merely policing the customs unit at the airport. He wanted to be part of the action.

  Initially the inquiry had focused on going through Geirfinnur’s background and the search for the mystery caller. In January 1975 they changed tack. Haukur and Kristjan investigated the smuggling of alcohol from the merchant ships that docked at Keflavik. Valtyr is clear: ‘It was not connected to the case though we tried to make it look that way.’ The idea was that it paid for Haukur’s time and stopped him being pulled onto other work.

  Haukur, however, viewed things slightly differently to his boss, always looking to see if he could identify a link between Geirfinnur and smuggling, and early in 1975 he received a tip that Geirfinnur Einarsson had been asked if he knew anyone who could smuggle alcohol into the country. On its own this wasn’t that significant, but it was out of character for Geirfinnur who kept his head down and never caused a fuss. More significant to Haukur was the fact that a few days before he went missing, Geirfinnur had gone to Klubburin with some friends. He wasn’t a regular visitor to Klubburin or clubs generally. Inside, helped by some overpriced alcohol, it seemed that Geirfinnur got chatting to some men. The suspicion was that these men were involved in smuggling and wanted to get Geirfinnur involved. The Keflavik investigators had to find them, but they didn’t know who they were. The police couldn’t find these men or anything to substantiate the tip-off that Geirfinnur was a smuggler but Haukur still had a hunch he was. It was these ‘hunches’ and ‘gut feelings’ that would be the fuel that drove this inquiry to its doomed conclusion.

  By February, after a month investigating Geirfinnur’s possible involvement in smuggling, Haukur Gudmundsson told journalists they hadn’t excluded the fact that it could be related to him going missing. ‘We’re checking it now as this is the only possible motive we’ve come across yet,’ he said. His boss Valtyr Sigurdsson, however, was emphatic: ‘Yes, he tried to make alcohol at home, but there was no evidence he was involved in smuggling.’

  Without any further indication that Geirfinnur was a smuggler, the main focus of the Keflavik team returned to tracking down the man who had phoned him. By now there were only a few names left on the list of possible suspects. One of them was Magnus Leopoldsson. A drip feed of allegations had continued about the Klubburin nightclub and its boss. Magnus had hoped these rumours would fade away but they only got louder. The gossip about him became so persistent that eventually he wrote to the Ministry of Justice asking officials to put up or shut up – arrest him or issue a statement quashing these rumours. This was particularly tricky for Olafur Johannesson, the Justice Minister. Johannesson was a giant of Icelandic politics, a former prime minister who had fought off the troublesome British in the ‘Cod War’ dispute over rights to fish in Iceland’s bountiful waters. For Olafur’s ruling Progressive party, Klubburin was no ordinary venue: its premises were rented from the Progressive party. This supposedly gave Klubburin some political clout as it gave them direct contact with the ruling party machinery. However, it was also potentially embarrassing for a conservative right-of-centre party that had been founded to represent Iceland’s farmers and drew much of its support from less liberal rural areas. It was impossible to totally quash the gossip but the rumours about Magnus died down and he assumed the police had moved on to other leads.

  By June 1975 the Ministry of Justice’s patience had run out with the Keflavik investigators. Haukur Gudmundsson was pulled off the case and the investigation was put on the shelf. Geirfinnur’s body hadn’t been found and there were still no suspects – just gossip and hunches. Haukur and Valtyr’s confident assertions about the case now looked a little foolish. They knew almost as little about Geirfinnur and what had happened to him as the day he went missing.

  The anniversary of Geirfinnur’s disappearance in November 1975 passed with no new developments in the case. However, it did provide a chance for the press to return to the story. Haukur Gudmundsson told Morgunbladid that he was convinced it would be solved in time, though not by him as he was back to the daily grind in Keflavik.

  Haukur may have been off the investigation, but that didn’t stop him trying to find answers, and in the most unconventional places. Shortly before the case was shut down a man got in touch with the police with an intriguing but bizarre proposal: a psychic based in Jordan said he might be able to help find Geirfinnur. With no other leads, Haukur thought it might be worth a shot. Valtyr Sigurdsson agreed. ‘There were all sorts of possibilities, lots of people thought he had committed suicide, and we would try anything.’ They sent the psychic a tape with information about the case but this clearly wasn’t enough, he needed to see a relative of Geirfinnur’s, in person, so he could feel Geirfinnur’s psyche. The news leaked to the press that Haukur had taken Geirfinnur’s wife, Gudni, to Jordan to see the psychic at the Icelandic taxpayer’s expense. Dagbladid reported that Haukur had spent a week with Gudni on their trip to the psychic but it had been an expensive waste of time. The psychic had not been able to shed light on the whereabouts of Geirfinnur Einarsson and the caller who had summoned Geirfinnur to his last meeting at the cafe in Keflavik harbour remained unidentified. In the nightclubs and among the ranks of the petty criminals the rumours and speculation continued.

  Saevar Cieselski had returned to Iceland from Copenhagen and was continually trying to play the big shot. He was always painfully aware that he was different, that his foreign name and looks meant he stood out and made him an easy target. To compensate for this, he would boast to try to look important. One former policeman who knew him said he was seen as ‘a clever dick’ with a big mouth. ‘He would boast about things; people who bullshit, they talk big and want to look big. He would try to make himself more important – he would say “I know something about Geirfinnur”. People like him, they want others to think they know all the answers to compensate for their own inadequacies. He was a bit like that, so he was his own worst enemy.’

  Gudjon Skarphedinsson knew all about Saevar’s foibles. His former pupil liked to call in at Gudjon’s home or his office at the Cultural Fund in Reykjavik. Gudjon suspected he came to see ‘if he could pick pockets or use anything’ and joked to his colleagues that they were in the presence of a drug dealer and killer. Gudjon said, ‘I didn’t know what he wanted, he was somehow all over the old part of Reykjavik, dropping in wherever he wanted.’

  That summer, Gudjon had separated from his wife, though they were still on good terms. So much so that in November 1975 he went away with her and his daughter to escape the driving horizontal rain and unrelenting wind for a road trip through southern Europe. After his family had returned home, Gudjon carried on alone to the south of France, working in the fields, drifting, as he had been for the past decade. He ended up in Paris and found even there he couldn’t escape from Saevar, who was on a trip to buy hash. Knowing that the police and the customs chief were keeping tabs on him, Saevar needed a way to get the drugs back into Iceland and Gudjon was the ideal foil. Saevar had come up with a plan that, like all of his schemes, seemed smart but was bound to fail.
He wanted to stash the drugs in Gudjon’s car, which would then be shipped back to Iceland from Rotterdam. Saevar never liked taking no for an answer, Gudjon had no money and wasn’t much of a businessman so he agreed. Saevar ended up buying poor quality hash, which they discovered when they tested the product.

  While Gudjon and Saevar flew back to Iceland, the car made its slow passage 1,500 miles through the crowded North Sea and then through the convulsing Atlantic Ocean to Reykjavik. As soon as the car arrived, it was immediately impounded. ‘The police knew all about it,’ Gudjon said, ‘who had sold Saevar the hash and how it was put in the car.’ They arrested Saevar and Gudjon and brought them to Sidumuli.

  As a former garage, the makeshift jail was housed in a non-threatening, low-slung building with a thick wooden door and a clanking barred one behind. It was a soulless, desperate place to keep prisoners for a few days. After five days they were released, while the police looked for evidence to strengthen the case, but Gudjon, isolated and alone with his thoughts, left even more depressed and frightened. For Saevar, the net was closing in.

  It was now almost two years since Gudmundur Einarsson had disappeared in a blizzard of thick snow. The surfeit of decent leads provided a potentially valuable opening amongst Reykjavik’s small criminal community. Erla said that Sigurd Stefan Almarsson knew Saevar’s sidekick Kristjan. They were both inmates in Litla Hraun prison, Iceland’s newer purpose-built jail, located down on the south coast at the end of a single-track road, hours from Reykjavik. The prison looked out over the flat, dark landscape and was bordered by the ocean, which made escape an almost impossible prospect. Sigurd told the police that Kristjan had told him about Erla and Saevar’s embezzlement scheme.