The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  Erla had not seen her brother since she had accused him of taking part in a murder but the police thought it was about time they brought the siblings together for a joint interview. It lasted barely five minutes with both of them sticking to their stories.

  The Klubburin men all had stronger alibis for the evening of 19 November than the original suspects and these had to be checked out. Einar had been at basketball training and then watched a sports movie on TV. The police even went as far as bringing him to the TV station to watch a tape of some of the sports programme to see how much of it he remembered. Magnus had been at a function and witnesses were questioned to see if they could identify him. They also had regular contact with their lawyers who were far more aggressive than the lawyers representing Saevar and his friends. Einar’s lawyer complained about his treatment and Erla’s constantly changing testimony. Regardless of this, and the fact that the detectives still hadn’t found any evidence to back up her statement, in March Einar and the other Klubburin suspects were remanded for another month.

  9

  March 1976

  The Reykjavik team still had no bodies, but they did have confessions. Then on 2 March there was a potentially devastating blow to the investigation. It had been a typical day for Kristjan – four separate interviews with Eggert and Sigurbjorn. By the evening, he had had enough. Sitting inside the Corner, he informed the detectives he wanted to change his previous testimony. This had happened before, adding or removing details, such as the fight that had happened that had killed Geirfinnur. Today Kristjan wanted to go much further. He wanted to retract his confession for Geirfinnur Einarsson’s death entirely. He had thought it through in those lonely hours inside his cell and went through his previous admissions, one by one.

  He said the previous statements he had given about the case were not true. He hadn’t been in Keflavik on the night Geirfinnur went missing. He had also been lying about the Klubburin people he said were at the docks and who he claimed to have recognised from photos he had been shown. The fight he described when Geirfinnur had been hit and died had also not happened. He had constructed this story using information gleaned from the media and the rumours he had heard.

  Sat across from him, a stunned Eggert and Sigurbjorn searched for some explanation as to why he had done this. When the detectives pushed him, he couldn’t explain what his motivation had been, but he was fully aware of the serious offence he had committed by making up this story.

  Having withdrawn his confession for Geirfinnur’s murder, the worry was that it was only a matter of time before Kristjan did the same with the Gudmundur case. This could create a domino effect with the other suspects. By the time the officers left the prison it was after midnight and they shivered as they hurried to their cars. They had lost a confession, and a vital one at that.

  The detectives let Kristjan stew for a few days in his cell before they returned on 5 March. They questioned him and during the next four days went over his story again and again. Kristjan tried to explan why he had constructed the story about Geirfinnur. The constant interrogations had frayed his nerves, particularly after the interviews where he had confessed to involvement in the death of Gudmundur Einarsson. He was on regular medication and struggling to cope with life in solitary confinement. The confession had been a way of getting the police and prisons guards off his back.

  The police weren’t going to let him off that easily. The detectives planted the seed in Kristjan’s mind that he had really been in Keflavik and he needed to go to the harbour to refresh his memory. For Kristjan this would be a chance to see the world outside – the changing sky, flat white clouds blocking out the light pressing down onto the land – and smell the sweet, clean air unlike the dusty concoction pumped into their cells. As spring came, thin shards of blue were appearing in the sky, the brown grass emerging from the snow covering the lava. He could feel the crunch of his feet on the hard ground, relishing the chance to walk longer than the few paces in his cell.

  Kristjan had been out on these drives before, accompanied by the guard Hlynur Magnusson. Hlynur noticed on these trips, ‘He was so willing to help when we were searching in the lava. He tried and tried to remember. It’s like he had found a little thread and tried to remember and perhaps he believed himself that what came out when he was trying hard, were the facts.’ At the beginning of the case, the confessions seemed solid, like the crust that the lava had formed over the island. But when you looked closer, cracks began to appear in the stories that quickly grew into wide fissures, through which the lava rose and spread, expanding the testimonies until they couldn’t be controlled. After a few of these trips Hlynur decided, ‘It was obvious those suspects had no idea where they were going; it was obvious, especially with Kristjan Vidar, as he was so wasted.’

  Hlynur’s doubts weren’t shared by the detectives.

  On 8 March, almost a week after retracting his statement, Kristjan visited Keflavik again. He was taken at night to the same deserted harbour filled with battered boats propped on wooden platforms waiting to be repaired, looking just as it did on that November night two years earlier. He had discussed this night so much with the detectives that Kristjan could shut his eyes and picture the car and the van waiting to take away the booze which was being brought to them in a little boat moored at the pier.

  This visit did the trick. When Eggert and Sigurbjorn returned the next day, Kristjan wanted to offer yet another version of that doomed night in November 1974:

  He said he had been picked up in the centre of Reykjavik. He could even name the street, Vatnsstigur. He sat in the back seat with Erla, with Saevar in the front and someone he didn’t know driving. They made their way out of the city towards Keflavik. Once he was there, though, the clouds closed in; there were some other men there, he wasn’t sure how many, probably three; he couldn’t remember whether he had been taken out on a boat and what else happened there. When it was all finished, they returned to Reykjavik but he couldn’t say who was in the car with him; he didn’t know what they intended to do there, but it was definitely illegal.

  Crucially he said the name Geirfinnur meant nothing to him, that he hadn’t heard any stories about how he vanished. His story was almost unrecognisable from his original testimony in January.

  Kristjan had made clear throughout his evidence that his memory was like a room full of locked doors; occasionally he would find a key but then as soon as he had seen inside it would shut again. By taking him out to Keflavik the police were trying to unlock new doors, but when he opened them he would see these new images suggested by the police that he didn’t recognise and this added to his confusion. He would blink, unsure whether this was a real memory or a false one suggested by his interaction with the investigators.

  At the time of his arrest, Kristjan was rarely sober and taking drugs regularly to escape from the drudgery of manual work and the long grey winter that suffocates the land. He had a fragile hold on reality and his lifestyle had been so chaotic and troubled that the boundaries had started to blur. This made him vulnerable to the prodding and suggestions from Orn, Sigurbjorn and Eggert. He began to struggle with what was real and what he had imagined.

  But to the detectives, Kristjan was back in the game. He was remanded for another 90 days in custody. The crisis had been averted.

  While this had been taking place, another team of detectives had been focusing on the parallel investigation into Gudmundur Einarsson and the search for his body. Their big hope was Albert Klahn. He had driven Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi from Hafnarfjordur at the dead of night to the craggy expanse of the silent lava plains, where they said they had dumped the body. As the driver, the police hoped Albert would have been less distracted than the others and had paid more attention to where he was going.

  From the first day he had been arrested back in December 1975, Albert had been put into the back of the police department’s chunky American imported cars and driven out with the detectives, trying to find Gudmundur. In February
1976 he told the police he had returned to the lava with Saevar, Tryggvi and Kristjan to move Gudmundur’s body to another spot where they thought it was less likely to be discovered. On this second occasion it was clear to him this wasn’t a package, it was a body, but he couldn’t recall where this location was. He was lost in the grey cloud that hung low over the city on many winter days, reaching down to the ocean, a slate blanket obscuring the land. The investigation team was trying to penetrate the mist that had enveloped the memories of Albert Klahn. As hard as they blew, they could never part the mist for very long.

  The police would record the different places where they went in the lava fields: the aluminium plant at Straumsvik, the green ancient grazing land of Kuagerdi, the rubbish tip south of Hafnarfjordur, and countless other nameless pits and craters. The police would be hopeful when Albert would point to spots that other suspects had picked out too, but there was never any sign of a body.

  Albert shied away from violence and the police thought that, like Erla, he would have been traumatised by what he saw on that freezing January night. It wasn’t a surprise his mind was trying to block this out. Orn Hoskuldsson wanted to find a way to release the memories buried deep in Albert’s psyche.

  The police’s limited techniques weren’t working, so in early March the investigators got a psychologist, Geir Vilhjalmsson, to work with Albert. Maybe he could break through the barrier that was holding him back. Rather than using a conventional dialogue in an office, though, Dr Vilhjalmsson took Albert back out to the field to explore some of the locations he had visited before. The police hoped with his professional expertise the psychologist could get Albert to be more specific about where he had gone with Gudmundur’s body.

  From 11 March, Albert went on four separate drives with the psychologist. At first Albert was very vague, he had difficulty remembering the route he had taken and where they had parked. Then he would have moments of clarity, recalling details of roads or pits that he might have visited. These were brief slithers of light peeking out from the cracks and fissures, but still Albert’s memory continued to shift and twist.

  The intervention of the psychologist proved fruitless, so the police engaged a psychiatrist, Jakob Jonasson, to hypnotise Albert. Jonasson was even less successful than the psychologist; he found Albert wasn’t very receptive, so the experiment stopped.

  When the two experts failed to make any progress the investigation team paused and took stock. The team had tried everything in their power to get Albert to remember where he had gone, but his memory wasn’t budging, it refused to give up the ghost of Gudmundur. By now he was at one with the spirits trapped beneath Iceland’s dark crust.

  After discussions with the psychologist, the detectives decided Albert was spent, there was no point holding him any longer. On 19 March, he was released from custody. He had been in solitary confinement for 87 days. He was free but not out of the police’s grasp. He could still be called on to try and to fill in the many gaps in the case and find the body of Gudmundur Einarsson.

  Tryggvi Runar had only experienced a taste of the outside and the fresh tang of the salty air once during his confinement. After his confession in January, Tryggvi had rarely been troubled by the detectives, who were struggling to deal with the multiple suspects in the Geirfinnur murder. But the police still considered Tryggvi highly dangerous. At the beginning of March, Orn Hoskuldsson had received reports that Tryggvi was getting messages out of the jail and issuing death threats to potential witnesses. It wasn’t clear how this was possible as Tryggvi had no visitors apart from the police, prison guards and the doctor, but nevertheless, Orn ordered the guards to keep a close watch on him.

  On 22 March Tryggvi was brought before the court when he said he had nothing to add to his previous statements and was remanded for a further 90 days. That evening he sat in his sickly green cell and wrote a long letter to Orn Hoskuldsson listing his previous crimes stretching back to the early 1970s. They consisted of thefts and fights, so many that he couldn’t remember, but none that he considered particularly serious. He was trying to show the investigators that he was willing to co-operate and own up to his previous misdemeanours, and by doing this he hoped it might make the police engage with him and no longer leave him rotting in his cell.

  Saevar was at the other extreme. He was never allowed such periods of inactivity and, unlike Tryggvi, he positively didn’t want to co-operate with the investigators. He had also been remanded in March for a further three months and remained the police’s top target with three detectives specifically assigned to him. He was the smallest of the suspects, with a skinny boy’s body but he was also the most mentally robust. He was clean – he didn’t take drugs or drink – and had experienced solitary confinement in the tiny cells at Sidumuli before. He claimed that he had only confessed in the first place because of the police threats. Among other things, they had told him that if he didn’t he could be deported to the US on account of his American father, where he would be incarcerated and die in a grim American prison. However, the detectives couldn’t pull the same trick they had used with the others, of helping them to release their trapped memories. To engage with this you had to have faith in the police, to believe that they were trying to help you. Saevar didn’t trust them one iota and he was determined to oppose them whenever he could, even mounting a desperate attempt to flee.

  It happened in mid February, on one of the trips out of the prison with Orn Hoskuldsson and Eggert Bjarnasson. Erla had witnessed his frustration on these trips when she had accompanied him on a few occasions – she thought as a presence to calm him down. ‘Saevar was constantly trying to tell them to stop this nonsense, I don’t know anything, I can’t tell you anything.’ On this occasion, Saevar hit Orn and sprinted off as fast as he could across the uneven lava, but he didn’t get very far before he was caught.

  The police weren’t going to let his escape attempt go unpunished. When they got back to Sidumuli, Saevar was placed in leg irons. He remained shackled when he was taken to the toilet and other prisoners would hear him walking, the iron chains banging against the floor. When they heard this noise, the inmates would bang on their doors, knowing this was all they could do to show their support.

  To the investigation team Saevar was a ruthless drug dealer intent on corrupting Icelandic society. They even had a nickname for him, the Rat. They thought the Rat was capable of murder, but getting him to co-operate was a different matter. He had confessed but he hadn’t led the police to the bodies, and his inability or unwillingness to say where the bodies were buried was seen by the police as deliberately obstructive. They were sure he was holding back he was frustrating them, and they would need the prison wardens to help break his spirit.

  The guards had set out to make his life as uncomfortable as possible. The order had come from the very top from the chief warden, Gunnar Gudmundsson. ‘He believed these people are criminals and we must do anything to solve this and a confession squeeze out of them,’ Hlynur remembered.

  Early on in his custody, Saevar had been moved from his cell on the narrow, brightly lit corridor. He was put in cell 22, which was on its own in a corner next to the guards’ office. It was from here that the guards monitored the inmates through a system of bells which prisoners would ring inside their cells to ask for food, toilet breaks or just simple human contact. Having Saevar next to their office meant the wardens could target him without disturbing the others.

  March may be a time of year when Iceland is still subsumed by darkness most of the time, but this was not the case for Saevar. The guards tampered with the light in his cell, making it permanently bright and impossible for him to get proper sleep. He tried to cover the light, but the guards would remove whatever he used to block it out. If he did manage to sleep, they would bang on his cell door or the wall with their fists or with stones, night and day. It unnerved Saevar and kept him under constant pressure, but it was also a way for the guards to pass the long 12-hour shifts, where at night there was v
ery little to do. Hlynur Magnusson would see his fellow guards smashing the walls of Saevar’s cell, and they were bemused when he didn’t join in.

  Saevar’s mother and sister regularly visited the jail but were never allowed to see him. They would bring clean clothes and food, which were examined to make sure his relatives weren’t smuggling anything in for him. His reputation as a drugs kingpin led them to suspect even the most benign gifts: ‘They wouldn’t let him have oranges as they thought they had been injected with dope,’ Hlynur remembered. (Strangely, in order to make sure the oranges weren’t suspect, they would sometimes eat them.) The paranoia about Saevar reached such fervour that it seemed any major crime was connected to him in some way.

  Warden Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson had seen this for himself when he drew the short straw for the night shift on New Year’s Eve. His colleague was on edge, as some dynamite had been stolen and rumour spread that it was to be used to stage a jail break at Sidumuli. He told Gudbjamarson he was worried that ‘somebody is on a revenge mission and planning to bomb the cells where the guys are’. The guard spent the night walking around the perimeter of the prison checking there wasn’t a stash of dynamite being assembled next to the walls.

  Gudbjarnarson was tall and gentle, though he could look after himself. He always had a problem with bullies and thought the slightly built Saevar was harshly targeted by the far bigger police and wardens. He would hear the other guards laughing and discussing what they did to keep Saevar awake. When they boasted about this in front of detective Eggertsson, Gudmundur expected a reprimand from a professional cop who knew the proper way to treat a suspect. Instead he remembered Sigurbjorn’s surprising reaction, ‘He said yes guys that’s nice, just keep it going. He was encouraging them to keep doing it.’