by Simon Cox
There were other privations preserved solely for Saevar. Inmates were allowed books which arrived every two weeks but Saevar was deprived of anything to keep him occupied – no books, newspapers, pens or tobacco – so he could focus solely on his guilt. Hlynur said whenever he called on Saevar in his cell, ‘He had nothing except light, day and night.’
Journalists were desperate to find out what was going on inside Sidumuli. They’d had leaks that Saevar and Kristjan were definitely involved in both cases and that, despite a lack of bodies or clear forensic evidence, Geirfinnur Einarsson and Gudmundur Einarsson had been murdered. Problems within the investigation also began to filter through to the press, with articles appearing suggesting widespread difficulties with the inmates. Inside the offices at Borgutun 7, Orn Hoskuldsson had tried to remain above this, keeping his distance from the media, but the pressure was building each day. He wasn’t playing ball with the press and they continued to complain that few details were being released about the course of the inquiry.
After weeks of sniping from the media, at the end of March Orn Hoskuldson decided to hold a press conference to dispel some of the myths and misinformation that had sprung up about the investigation. It was also to announce that, after laying the ground work, a full judicial investigation would start in a few days’ time while the police continued their work gathering more evidence. The previously taciturn Orn led the briefing. This was to be no short précis of the investigation. It was a thorough warts-and-all account of what the suspects had been telling them in the three months they had been kept in solitary confinement.
In that time there had been much speculation about how the investigation had gone from a simple one of embezzlement to a double murder case. Orn spelled out the importance of Erla to the case, how she had first revealed information about the disappearance of Gudmundur Einarsson and how the investigation into Geirfinnur emerged because of threatening and intimidating phone calls she had been receiving in January.
Orn said Erla named three people, all of whom had been arrested: Saevar, Trygvvi and Kristjan. They had been questioned extensively, alone and together. For the first time, Orn and his team set out what they believed had happened on 19 November 1974.
Erla, Saevar and Kristjan had driven to Keflavik harbour along with an unknown driver where they met Geirfinnur and the three other men who were also in custody – Magnus, Einar and Valdimar – although the police didn’t name them at this point. They went out on the boat, although the police said they didn’t know what it was called or who owned it. Erla, meanwhile, had crept out of the car and hidden in a deserted house nearby and she later hitched a ride back to Reykjavik.
The detectives told the eager press corps they had been told differing, conflicting accounts about what happened on the boat. Saevar and Kristjan couldn’t agree on how Geirfinnur died and whether his body was thrown into the sea or buried in the lava. The police were leaning towards the lava fields.
The journalists asked about the earlier enquiry into Geirfinnur’s disappearance, led by Valtyr Sigurdsson. This had produced numerous leads: the calls to Geirfinnur’s home; the clay head. What had happened to all of these lines of enquiry? Orn Hoskuldsson couldn’t have been any more explicit: these were not part of the current investigation. In one fell swoop the Reykjavik team belittled six months’ work by Valtyr and his detectives. None of the leads the Keflavik team pursued with such vigour was now being considered seriously. It was a humbling blow for Valtyr and his detective Haukur Gudmundsson.
Though the Klubburin suspects weren’t named during the briefing, it was known that they had been arrested and what became clear during the briefing was that the only evidence keeping them in prison were the statements from Saevar, Erla and Kristjan. The obvious question asked by Morgunbladid newspaper the next day was what if Saevar, Kristjan and Erla were lying about the Klubburin suspects to get revenge or draw attention away from their own involvement? The police had admitted this was a possibility, but Saevar, Kristjan and Erla had all told similar stories and they had not had any contact with one another since December 1975, lending credence to their accounts.
Having heard the police version of events, the lawyers for the Klubburin men struck back. Their clients had been held for 62 days in solitary confinement and they said nothing had been discovered that backed up the claims made by Saevar, Erla and Kristjan. The lawyers accused the police of failing to disclose important details about the case. Journalists began calling the prison and the detectives’ offices trying to get Orn Hoskuldsson to clarify some of these issues, but he remained elusive. There was no similar outburst from the lawyers for Saevar and Erla. Their clients had effectively been tried in front of the media but their silence was deafening.
Orn Hoskuldsson may have sounded confident about the case at his press briefing, but the formal judicial enquiry had barely started when it suffered another significant setback.
The deputy prosecutor Hallvardur Einvardsson was in charge of the case. He had receding hair, thick brows, big glasses and the slow, thoughtful demeanour of an academic. He was assisted by the veteran cop, Njordur Snaeholm, who was head of the detective department. Njordur was tall and handsome, square jawed with a thick grey streak in his neatly parted black hair. He wanted to hear from the key witnesses to confirm what they had previously told the police in their interviews.
This was a big moment for Saevar, one that he had been mulling over inside his cell for weeks. It was his chance to strike back at the police and wardens after months of cruel treatment and unrelenting pressure. As he stood inside the bland, functional courtroom with enough of his swagger still intact he said the statements he had previously given were false and he had no knowledge of Geirfinnur Einarsson. He explained how he first heard about Geirfinnur when he was away in Copenhagen in early 1975. He had gone with Erla as she was being threatened and was afraid her brother and his friends would kill her. Saevar wanted to protect her from harm and thought that by implicating her brother and the other Klubburin suspects they would be investigated for the threats to Erla.
This was a huge embarrassment for the investigation team. Saevar was the second suspect to withdraw his confession about Geirfinnur. The immediate suspicion of the detectives was the suspects must be communicating with each other, despite never being alone in the same room together.
The police weren’t used to running one murder case, let alone two. The investigation team was being pulled in different directions and their limited resources were stretched. Most of their effort was focussed on the Geirfinnur case but they still wanted to find Gudmundur Einarsson.
10
May 1976
The fraught winter had given way to early summer and the mellow long days when the sun would burst through the clouds like a celestial beam, casting a silver light on the water below, rising at four in the morning and not setting until after well after ten. It wasn’t hot, it never was this far north, but it was milder; the battering wind easing off and temperatures could rise to the high teens. It was the ideal time to be outside in the robust, muscular beauty of the Icelandic countryside.
On 2 May, the Reykjavik detective Njordur Snaeholm set off in a coach from the capital with 18 students from the police college. They were in good spirits. They passed around flasks of coffee, making barbed, dark jokes about the task ahead, which masked their apprehension about what they might find. They were on their way to the aquarium at Hafnarfjordur, which had come up frequently in the suspects’ testimonies as a burial site for Gudmundur. Despite its name, it was more than a home for marine animals. It was a moribund place where lions, monkeys and polar bears paced around in their small enclosures, slowly going insane.
The team changed into boiler suits and long leather boots. They also wore their regulation caps, similar to the natty ones worn by the pilots in Thunderbirds. Some of them had long pitchforks and shovels, or poles to poke the hard, unyielding ground. They were on a mission to find Gudmundur’s remains. Spreading out in o
ne long line, they slowly made their way across the jagged, lunar landscape, covered with soft green moss and rough grass. The recruits were dots of colour as they went along, stopping to peer under rocks, delving down into fissures and hollows. They went back and forth three times but even with this many people spread out in a line they only covered a tiny section of the lava, a pinprick of the hundreds of square kilometres. All they found was rubbish and sheep bones.
Undeterred, days later they tried again. This time they sent 50 trained officers out into the petrified ocean of lava. They had some new locations suggested by Kristjan. He had told the detectives that he had taken Gudmundur’s body and dumped it in a fissure so deep that it was towering over his head and formed a kind of cave. Tryggvi had rolled a large stone over the corpse, but this didn’t cover it completely, so Kristjan added some rocks. The search achieved the same result as all the others: a day out for the search party, some black comedy, but no remains.
Alone in her apartment, desperate for company and affirmation, Erla too came up with new locations where she thought Gudmundur may be buried, and the police would take her out along the single lane highway to the lava fields. ‘I was just doing what I was told and being co-operative, but I didn’t have a clue,’ Erla recalled. She believed what she had been told by the detectives: ‘The police are saying that I just don’t remember and the way they led me they were using some kind of techniques that were working.’ Alone and isolated from her friends, Erla had begun to rely on the detectives and they convinced her she had suppressed her memories because she had been traumatised by what she had seen.
The detectives would wander from location to location with little strategy, hoping Erla would lead the way. ‘We would all be walking across these rocks and asking, “Could it have been here, what do you think?” I was just saying, maybe, might. It was really pointless.’ Sometimes she would persuade Orn Hoskuldsson and the detectives that this time she really had remembered where the body was. The police began digging at these locations, such as the lava pits at Krysuvík, a wild expanse of steaming volcanic vents and boiling springs framed by hills stained a multitude of blues, yellows and bright green moss. It was a futile exercise: the police would scrape away in the area for a while and find nothing. Mostly for Erla these trips were ‘a big state of confusion’.
These trips contributed to Erla’s diminishing ability to distinguish her real memories of 1974 from the false memories she was constructing. They were feeding Erla’s fertile imagination and on 3 May she would turn the Geirfinnur enquiry on its head.
It was 8.30 in the evening when Erla was brought into the Corner. She was accompanied by Sigurbjorn Eggertsson, but this time there was a new person in the room: Hallvardur Einvardsson, the deputy prosecutor overseeing the case.
For three hours they went over Erla’s story again and again, her guilt gnawing away at her, ready to burst out. When they finished the interview, it was 11.40 and Hallvardur decided Erla could harm herself if she was allowed to return home. She was a valuable witness and someone they had to protect. For her own safety it was decided she should be kept in the prison overnight. They phoned the chief warden who ordered that her cell be thoroughly searched to make sure there was nothing that she could use to harm herself with. He also assigned a female warden to keep a close eye on her. ‘She will be very well cared for,’ Hallvardur assured the police.
They called Jon Bjarman, the tall, bearded prison chaplain who looked like a basketball player with thick wavy hair and prominent buck teeth. Apart from the doctors he was the only outsider allowed to visit the suspects and the one person who saw them who wasn’t trying to get information out of them. He was there to listen. He spent two hours in the cell with Erla trying to calm her down. Eventually at three o’clock in the morning Bjarman left, but he told the guards that if Erla needed him he was available day or night. It had been a traumatic night and Erla was given a sedative to help her sleep.
Erla’s condition had unsettled the chaplain, who later phoned to check on her mental state and was reassured that she was much better. Einvardsson had checked in by phone too and was told that having taken some sleeping tablets Erla had slept that night. At lunchtime the next day she was once again taken into the interrogation room that had become so familiar. Erla was preparing to reveal a secret that would transform her role in the case from an observer to a killer.
Amid the smoky fug and coffee cups, Erla went over the Geirfinnur case once again. The setting was so vivid to them now that everyone in that room could picture the scene in Keflavik on that November night in 1974. The story began like the previous versions:
They drove the car down to the Drattarbraut, the deserted slipway with the empty warehouses casting long shadows in the sombre light over the junk strewn around the site. Within this setting were two cars and a group of men. The membership of this smuggling enterprise changed depending on who was telling the story. Erla arrived with Kristjan and Saevar, in a car driven by Magnus Leopoldsson. It was a cold starlit night, well below freezing and the roads were icy. On the drive Magnus and Saevar were talking about a man who had been causing them trouble and they needed to do something to sort it out. Magnus seemed more bothered about it; he and Einar had tried to reason with this man, but it hadn’t worked. Erla hadn’t picked up what they were planning to do about this man once they reached Keflavik. When they arrived, it was dim and poorly lit, exactly what they wanted as they didn’t want to be seen. Saevar and Magnus got out and began talking to a man Erla didn’t recognise: Geirfinnur Einarsson. She followed them out of the car.
In the murky light Saevar handed her something heavy. It was a rifle, although she couldn’t say exactly what it looked like. He showed her how to hold it but it wasn’t there as a scare tactic; they intended to use it. Geirfinnur was brought over and she had been so close to him she could see his face, etched with fear and horror as he realised what was about to happen to him. They had come up with a solution for this annoying, unreasonable man. Erla closed her eyes as she pulled the trigger, the rifle jolted in her hands as the bullet flew from the barrel into Geirfinnur’s body. Saevar immediately took the rifle from her as they dealt with the man dying on the ground in front of them, his blood staining the snow.
It was only after the fact that Erla panicked and in the confusion she was able to sneak away and hide in a deserted house close by, where she spent the night. When she returned home the next morning Saevar was angry, he wanted to know where she had been all night. He never mentioned Geirfinnur again and refused to talk about that night. They would banish it from their minds, a secret they would keep from themselves. They would pretend it never happened.
After less than two hours, the interview ended. In that short time, Erla had changed from a bystander to an active participant. She confessed to being the killer. All of the months of informal chats the interviews at the prison, the trips to the lava fields; it had all led to this. Erla was now one of them. For the detectives, it was this that had brought on her trauma.
The way that her story was written down by the detectives made it seem like she was in some kind of trance, doing Saevar’s bidding. The police knew from Erla’s friends they had interviewed that she had a lively imagination and tendency to make things up. She had lied to them before, could they believe her now?
Erla was brought before the criminal court. Her statement was read out and she confirmed that it was her signature on the statement. In her heart Erla knew ‘it was painfully obvious we all knew nothing ever happened. That thing of recalling what happened was like a charade.’ But what else could she say? Those were her words on the pages, spelling out the story, confessing that she had fired the gun at Geirfinnur. She may have been pretending, drawn deep into ‘the game’ she was playing with the police, but they had stopped playing a long time ago. The prosecutor, Hallvardur, who had been in the interview and brought her to the court with Orn Hoskuldsson, now switched roles. Hallvardur decided that what Erla had told them was so serious
that she should be held for 60 days. She was in a daze, ‘I didn’t understand, I thought I had done what they wanted.’
Erla was in a parlous state, severely depressed and suicidal. Her thinking was so impaired that she thought by telling the police what they wanted to hear, it would all be over. There was no forensic evidence, no bodies, just the suspects’ fevered testimonies. The thing that Erla had feared the most had become a reality; she was to be taken from her beloved baby Julia. It would be a long time before she would see her again.
At 5.30 in the evening she was brought back to her cell. Erla’s statement clearly contradicted Saevar and Kristjan’s versions. The police would deal with that, but for now they let Erla get used to the surroundings. No matter how bad her interviews had been previously she had been allowed to leave. Now there was no escape. It didn’t take long for the press to get news of her arrest. They reported that Saevar’s partner had been taken into custody with information that could shed an entirely new light on Geirfinnur’s disappearance.
With Erla’s confession, Orn Hoskuldsson decided it was time they brought her together with Saevar and Kristjan. They waited until the evening to do this, when the suspects would be tired and waiting for the medication to help them sleep. One by one they were taken along the narrow corridor to the Corner. There Erla and Saevar would have one of their rare moments together. With the three suspects crammed into the space, having barely seen each other since they were arrested, the atmosphere was charged. Also in the room were the chief prison warden Gunnar Gudmundsson, Orn Hoskuldsson and the detectives Sigurbjorn and Eggert along with the prosecutor Hallvardur Einvardsson and the senior detective assisting him, Njordur Snaeholm. Now the main prosecutor, Hallvardur had been brought in too, participating in interviews and standing witness to mistreatment of the suspects.
