The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  Over many hours she began telling a very different version of events that took place on the night in January 1974 when Gudmundur Einarsson disappeared:

  Erla returned to the apartment from a night at a disco and party, no one was there. She went to bed but woke later when she heard voices in the apartment. She got up and made her way to the storage room where she saw Saevar, Kristjan and a third man with something heavy between them, covered in a sheet. Kristjan and Saevar tied each end of the sheet with a knot. Erla hadn’t seen what was inside but she thought it was a body. There was also a foul smell in the room and a strange wet patch on the floor. By this point Kristjan had noticed her in the doorway and angrily asked what was she doing there. Erla was rooted to the spot and freezing, despite the fact that her hair was covered in sweat. The three men picked up the body, pushing past her in the doorway, knocking her over. She lay there a while unable to move until Saevar reappeared, picked her up and put her into bed. When he asked if she had seen anything she didn’t reply, what could she say? He told her never to say a word about it if she was ever asked. Saevar left and she somehow managed to fall asleep until the morning.

  When she woke, she went to the garbage bins, she wasn’t sure why. Out there in the frosty morning, she found a bed sheet covered in human faeces which she hurriedly put back into the bin. She had tried as hard as possible not to think about this and had felt ill for days after. When she saw the reports about the disappearance of Gudmundur Einarsson, she hadn’t put this together with the body in the sheet. She never talked to Saevar about the events of that night again.

  It had taken many hours to construct the details of this story. It was a patchwork with many holes but it managed to implicate her lover and his friend Kristjan in a murder. All the time the police were encouraging her, telling her she was doing the right thing by solving this mystery and not to worry about it. They knew that she had several weaknesses; her relationship with Saevar was crumbling and she was making the smart move by separating from him, they told her. Just as they had in the embezzlement case, the detectives also played on her separation from her baby.

  Erla had told a long and elaborate story. When she was stuck for details, she said, ‘They would explain that we needed to get it done or I was risking that I would lose my child and they didn’t want to see that happen.’ However, ‘somewhere I always knew it didn’t happen. So I really needed to believe that it had happened and they kept throwing me something to help me believe it.’ If she faltered the detectives would remind her of the trouble she would be in that they couldn’t prevent, if she did not co-operate.

  After going through the story for six hours she signed a statement which she desperately needed to believe. ‘The entire communication between me and police was about it having happened,’ she said. ‘By the time I’m signing some sort of incrimination, someone else is not in the picture. It’s all about how did it happen.’ She signed her statement and was released; finally she could see Julia. The police told her she had ‘contributed to justice and should now be able to sleep peacefully’. But Erla knew that was a lie. Afterwards, she said, ‘It was my soul that went. They didn’t have to be very technical, I was very vulnerable. By cracking me, which was so easy, they could sweep up the others.’

  5

  December 1975

  Like Erla, Saevar was already in custody for the post office embezzlement scheme. After years of petty crime, stretching back to his early teens, Saevar was used to dealing with the police. He didn’t fear them and hated them for harassing him over the years.

  The detectives knew he was guilty of the embezzlement but he had lied about it. The die was cast. If he had lied once, he could do it again, and for an even more serious crime. The tactics the investigators used on Erla wouldn’t work on her boyfriend. He had previously been held in solitary confinement for a month, accused of a drugs offence he hadn’t committed.

  They needed a different approach. Orn Hoskuldsson, the smooth talking Sigurbjorn and the solid, tougher Eggert Bjarnasson all questioned Saevar throughout the day and into the early morning for over ten hours in total. It was tough going, but Saevar didn’t crack.

  The next day Saevar was interrogated again, and in the afternoon the investigators had a surprise for him. They told him about Erla’s testimony and the body in the sheet. Saevar denied any knowledge of it. As the police confronted him with more of Erla’s statement, though, his tone changed. He was used to tough questioning but he knew Erla was vulnerable; he had exploited this himself repeatedly to get her back into his life. He worried how she would cope after a week of intensive questioning. Presented with Erla’s statement in full, Saevar conceded he knew something about Gudmundur’s fate, but didn’t want to say any more. His lawyer, Jon Oddsson, was called and Saevar was read Erla’s statement. Saevar was now faced with the mother of his child implicating him in a murder.

  During a five-hour interrogation, Saevar told the police his version of what had happened. On the night of 26 January 1974 he had just returned from a trip to buy cannabis abroad. He was with his sidekick, Kristjan, a friend named Tryggvi Runar Leifsson and Gudmundur Einarsson at the apartment in Hamarsbraut. They wanted alcohol and started arguing with Gudmundur, asking him to pay for it. A fight broke out. It soon turned into three against one and in the melee Gudmundur was hit and killed. They didn’t call the police or a doctor but instead phoned another of Saevar’s friends, Albert Klahn Skaftason. Albert had one thing none of them possessed, access to a car. When Albert arrived they shifted the body out of the apartment, put it in the boot and drove out to the lava fields south of Hafnarfjordur. There, amid the crepuscular darkness with squally winds blowing snow into their faces, they dumped Gudmundur into a crevasse.

  The apartment in Hamarsbraut was more a bedsit – two rooms for Saevar and Erla in a peaceful cul-de-sac. At night the only sounds were the incessant wind driving the soft snow falling onto the brightly coloured roofs. There were neighbours upstairs, so close it felt like they were sharing an apartment with them. What did they see or hear? The police never asked them. The mystery surrounding Gudmundur’s disappearance was finally being solved.

  Soon a whole set of suspects would be in custody accused of his murder.

  Armed with Erla and Saevar’s testimony the police moved swiftly. On 23 December 1975 they arrested Albert Klahn and Tryggvi Runar. Kristjan Vidar was brought to Sidumuli jail from the bigger Litla Hraun prison where he was serving a sentence for theft. The questioning of Kristjan didn’t take very long. He had been at school with Gudmundur Einarsson in Austurbaejar, but he didn’t have a clue how he went missing or what had happened to him. He refused to sign any statement without his lawyer being present. Despite Kristjan’s denials, the damning testimony from Erla and Saevar led the court to decide he could be held for 90 days and that he should have a psychiatric evaluation.

  Tryggvi Runar was in a daze as he was led into the prison, and it wasn’t just the drugs. Tryggvi was stocky and pugnacious, with long wavy ginger hair and a cropped beard and moustache. At 24, he was older than the other suspects and had a two-year-old son with his girlfriend. He was a well known to the police and had been in trouble from the age of 16. He recalled how at that age, ‘I met a group of kids that I found exciting to be with… when I was in their company it was as if something was pushing me.’ It drove him towards trouble; drinking, stealing and faking cheques. He was always caught and had been in and out of prison since his late teens for theft and fighting.

  One of the young prison guards, Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson, knew Tryggvi well as they had grown up near each other in the centre of Reykjavik near Hallgrimskirkja, the towering Lutheran church. The streets that fanned out from the church were filled with functional apartment blocks and terraced houses clad in corrugated iron to protect them from the wind and rain. He knew Tryggvi as a fighter: ‘He liked to hit people but when I met him he was always fine, he was no trouble.’ That could change, however, after a few drinks.

  Try
ggvi had been in trouble with the police before so wasn’t easily intimidated by them. The older generation that had lived through the Second World War and the threat of the Nazis were worried and afraid for this new generation of young Icelanders. Tryggvi started drinking when he was 14, did badly at school and when he got into his twenties began to hit the bottle and pills hard. He had been hospitalised three times because of drugs. The last time had been a year before when he was brought in unconscious having taken sleeping tablets. The doctors were worried he was in imminent danger because of drug toxicity and he was put on an infusion in the intensive care unit.

  When Tryggvi arrived at Sidumuli, Gudbjarnason said he had not fully grasped what was happening. ‘He was quite confused, he was saying “They are accusing me of having something to do with Gudmundur”.’ Such denials were pretty common among new inmates, but the young guard found Tryggvi’s convincing. Tryggvi was brought before the court where he continued to deny any involvement in Gudmundur’s disappearance and was held for 90 days and placed in solitary confinement.

  Albert Klahn was a different matter; he was a quiet, laidback pothead who kept out of trouble. He had been friends with Saevar since they were young kids and spent a great deal of time with him. Albert Klahn was different to the rest of Saevar’s group of friends. His background had been more cultured than the others’; his father had played with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Albert went to Austerburbaejar school in east Reykjavik where he started hanging out with the ‘alley cats’, Saevar and Kristjan. He was a smoker not a fighter, always on the look out for drugs. When he was arrested he was clearly stoned; in one mug shot he stares half-dazed into the camera with a tag hung around his neck.

  Under scrutiny in the interrogation room the investigators could see Albert was the weak link. He was easily intimidated and willing to co-operate. He began telling them his version of events of the night Gudmundur went missing:

  Saevar had phoned Albert really late at night, sometime between midnight and five in the morning. (It was a wide time frame but he couldn’t be more precise.) Saevar asked him if he would drive over to Hafnarfjordur in his dad’s yellow Toyota. Albert did as he was told and made his way through the compacting snow that crunched softly under the wheels as he drove out of Reykjavik. When he arrived, Saevar emerged from his apartment and asked Albert to open the boot. Albert couldn’t see much as there was poor street lighting; he could only really see through his rearview mirror.

  After a while, Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi emerged with a big bag. The car ‘was rocking a bit and it seemed they were putting something heavy in the boot’. All this had happened in the dead of night in a narrow street where homes stood cheek by jowl.

  Kristjan and Tryggvi got in the back seat while Saevar sat in the front and directed Albert out of Hafnarfjordur. He wasn’t sure how far they had got but he noticed they went past the aluminium plant at Straumsvik with its distinctive red and white towers. They then pulled off the main road into the silent opacity of the lava fields.fn1

  While Albert waited in the driver’s seat, Saevar, Tryggvi and Kristjan took the heavy bag out of the car past the glare of the headlights, the only lights for miles around. They returned after about half an hour without the bag. Albert drove them back – he wasn’t sure where, probably to Kristjan’s apartment in Reykjavik. He asked Saevar what was in the bag. Saevar told him it was a body.

  The case was starting to take shape. Albert’s account tallied with Saevar’s and they had Erla’s story of what happened inside the apartment. The detectives decided to strike while they could. Albert had not seen a lawyer and in the few hours he had been questioned he had already told detectives that he helped dispose of a body. Before he had to chance to speak to anyone else, he was taken out of Sidumuli for a drive to see if he could locate the burial spot. This went against normal rules and protocols but the police were sure that by acting swiftly they could find Gudmundur’s body and clear up the mystery of his disappearance.

  The detectives spent hours driving Albert around the Reykjanes peninsula through the craggy, ashen wasteland trying to locate the spot where Gudmundur had been dumped. It was wishful thinking that Albert could pinpoint, within the hundreds of square miles of lava fields, the place where almost two years before they had left Gudmundur. It was early evening and dark when Albert returned to the prison. He had been helpful but Orn Hoskuldsson had heard enough to detain him for 45 days; plenty of time for the detectives to keep probing him about the case.

  Christmas 1975 was one that Albert Klahn would never forget. On Christmas Day his treat was a second drive out to the desolate lava fields with Orn Hoskuldsson to look for the body of Gudmundur. Each time he went he chose a different location where he thought the body might be. He was stranded, hopelessly lost, trying to restore his fractured memory of that night. After three hours they returned with no success. The detectives had told Albert he would get a lighter sentence if he incriminated the others and warned that if he didn’t help and kept quiet about what he had witnessed, he would never see the light of day.

  By 27 December, after four days in custody, Albert and the others began to unravel. Fifteen minutes into Sigurbjorn and Eggert’s questioning in the interrogation room, Albert had smashed up a chair in a rage. Placed in leg irons and handcuffs, he was taken back to his cell.

  Tryggvi Runar may have been physically far stronger than Albert but he was struggling too with the enforced isolation. His only human interaction was with the prison wardens and the police and being stuck in the three by two metre cell was crushing his spirit. Tryggvi was fit and loved being outdoors, but he was also used to a regular supply of drink and drugs and deprived of this he couldn’t sleep. His insomnia went on for four days, making him more anxious and agitated. He started hearing voices in his head; fragments of conversations. On 27 December at two o’clock in the morning, the prison guards heard Tryggvi talking to himself. They called the prison doctor Gudsteinn who injected him with Diazepam to help him sleep. It didn’t work and he was back several hours later to give Tryggvi another sedative. These drugs were the first of a cocktail of medication that would be prescribed to Tryggvi while he was in solitary confinement. Yet, despite his agitated state, Orn Hoskuldsson paid him a private visit in his cell. What he said remained a secret between him and Tryggvi; a pattern that would be repeated again and again by the police and prison wardens.

  The sensational arrests were splashed across the front page of the Morgunbladid newspaper on 30 December. It said four men were in custody suspected of the murder of Gudmundur Einarsson and the case was being investigated by Orn Hoskuldsson, Eggert Bjarnasson and Sigurbjorn Eggertsson. It was reported that the suspects were being interrogated every day and sometimes late into the night, and that there had been confessions which were being used in the investigation.

  A follow-up story the next day reported that the questioning of the four men had strengthened their connection to Gudmundur’s disappearance. Before the men had even been charged, there were leaks fed to journalists which implied that Saevar, Kristjan, Tryggvi and Albert were guilty. The trial would be just a formality.

  At the beginning of January, inside the offices of Borgutun 7, Orn Hoskuldsson and his team gathered to go over the statements they now had. The investigators needed to fill in the many blanks they had from the initial statements. They needed the suspects’ testimonies to be as detailed as possible; after all, this might be the only evidence the police had.

  Saevar faced almost daily interrogations, each one stretching for hours on end. After two weeks of this, on 6 January 1976, Saevar told them another more vivid version of that night:

  Saevar had returned to the apartment in Hamarsbraut to find Kristjan and Tryggvi waiting for him with a third man he didn’t know, someone named Gudmundur Einarsson. He was annoyed with his friends, he didn’t like them being at his apartment, his sanctuary with Erla. They followed him into the apartment. He couldn’t remember whether Erla was there or even how he had
got in, as they only had one key between them. When he went to check if Erla was there, the others followed him. He tried to complain about them being in the apartment, but they told him to keep quiet if he knew what was good for him. There was little he could do stand up to Kristjan and Tryggvi, both bigger and stronger than him.

  Kristjan attacked Gudmundur, punching him in the face, and Gudmundur ended up lying on the floor. Tryggvi and Kristjan shook Gudmundur but he didn’t respond. Saevar clearly heard Kristjan say the man was dead. He was scared that Kristjan was going to attack him too and Tryggvi warned him not to say anything about what he had seen.

  Kristjan and Tryggvi went into panic mode, pacing the floor and discussing what to do. Saevar stood in the living room, traumatised by what he had just witnessed – a young man being killed. He was really scared and went into the toilet to pull himself together and think what he should do next.

  He heard a strange sound, something dragged from the bedroom along the corridor and into the storage room. Kristjan was the dominant, driving force. He told Saevar to phone Albert and tell him to come over on the pretence he was going to give him some hash. That would get the pot head over straight away. Saevar did as he was told and Albert took the bait. Saevar could hear Kristjan and Tryggvi in the storage room through the thin walls of the apartment.

  Albert arrived in his dad’s Volkswagenfn2. They left the body in the apartment and went for a drive south out of Hafnarfjordur on the road to Keflavik, their headlights cutting through the blackness around them, illuminating the strange rocky shapes. The only other light was the twinkling of the airport far in the distance and the red from the towers at Straumsvik. They pulled over to smoke some weed. They then returned to Hamarsbraut and the apartment, and by this time they were all high. Saevar heard Erla arrive home and she saw them covering Gudmundur’s body in a sheet. Saevar could see from her expression she was clearly upset at what she saw. She was rooted to the spot in the doorway so Kristjan pushed her aside as they carried the body out. Saevar couldn’t remember exactly what was said to her, but Kristjan had warned her not to tell anyone what she had seen or heard. Distraught, Erla retreated to her bedroom while the men went out.