by Simon Cox
After the smuggled letter, the chief warden wanted to make sure there was no exchange of information between the suspects at any time. The only time Saevar got to see Erla and his friends was when he sat across the table from them in the interrogation room, when they would be accusing each other of involvement in a murder.
Hlynur strongly disagreed with this harsh treatment. He could see after a few months at the jail, that the investigation was out of control: ‘This case had its own life somehow and everyone participated in it, without wanting to.’ In Hlynur’s view, the police had stopped asking one key question: ‘If I were asked to use one word about this case it would be the word “why”, the question “why?”. That is the whole case.’ Why would a group of young people join up with established members of Icelandic society to smuggle alcohol and then kill someone?
11
July 1976
It was in the evenings when the sun’s amber glow slid below the horizon that the visits to Erla’s cell would happen. Time had become stretched in Sidumuli, it ceased to have the same meaning as outside. Erla was entering her third month in custody but Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi were facing their eighth month in solitary confinement. They had all been charged with attacking and killing Gudmundur Einarsson. Erla had confessed to shooting Geirfinnur but, as yet, hadn’t been charged with killing him.
Days and evenings were all the same, just periods in between food and interrogations. For the suspects, most of the day was spent alone, staring at the blank walls and, during these endless hours, the minds of these young people would tease them, turning thoughts and fragments from the interviews into memories. Real memories stay with you, dipping in and out of your consciousness, emerging when you least expect them, triggered by an image, a smell or a sound. The memories that Erla and the others were dredging up were different, they would warp and bend so that something they were certain of one week would have morphed into a totally different recollection a short time later. These memories were infected by the discussions with the police; names would crop up like characters in a play suddenly entering the scene. They had gone over the same event, the same night, hundreds of times so it was a struggle to keep hold of that original thought from years ago of what actually happened. Originally Erla, Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi were certain they hadn’t seen or participated in a murder, but this began to evaporate. And the prison doctor was prescribing powerful drugs to them, which further hindered their ability to distinguish between what was real and imagined.
During the time she had been in solitary confinement, Erla’s mental and physical health had started to deteriorate. Her thoughts would often turn to her baby daughter, Julia. She would be given paper and pencils which she would use to write poems and draw pictures, but these would be taken away at a moment’s notice.
Sleeping was always a problem – there was the drone of the air pumped into the cell which the guards never seemed able to control properly, switching between freezing and sweltering. The medication provided only a temporary reprieve.
There were no visitors allowed, but then again she wasn’t sure how many of her family would make the trip to see her. Having dragged her brother Einar into the case, the rift with her relatives had deepened. But Erla did have one regular visitor to her cell, a detective who would often come at night.
‘We wardens found it rather curious,’ Hlynur recalled, how this detective came to interrogate Erla at night. ‘Not in the interrogation room but in her cell. He was not visiting other prisoners that way.’ Hlynur and the other wardens kept their mouth shut, though – the policemen were above the prison’s chief warden in the hierarchy.
Inside Erla’s cell there were only two places to sit, the bed and the stool which was within touching distance. The detective would sit and talk for hours with her about how difficult it must be for her alone in the cell, that she must be lonely and needy. He assured Erla that she could always rely on him. The tone of his voice shifted and the conversation became more personal. ‘I was not sure what he was doing,’ Erla recalled, ‘but his voice became awkward.’ He promised to stay over in the cell when he had the means to.
Erla was disturbed by this new development. She liked his friendship, but she didn’t like the idea of their communication going beyond a friendly chat. Erla hoped that he would forget this conversation, that it was an aberration. A few evenings later, she was lying down reading when the detective appeared in the door and sat down on the bed next to her. She could tell straight away from his manner that he wasn’t there for a chat. He had a sense of purpose and she didn’t like it, ‘I sat up while my heart was beating rapidly, I was feeling insecure.’
The detective wanted to make sure they were undisturbed. He stood up and checked whether any guards were walking along the corridor. Sidumuli was small and at night there were only two wardens on duty. They wanted an easy time of it in the evening; they would take it in turns to sleep and most of the time they would stay in their office, unless the inmates rang their bells asking to be taken to the toilet. There were no guards near the cell so the detective decided it was time to act. Erla said, ‘He slipped down his trousers and took out his penis. I was terrified.’ She couldn’t believe this was happening here in the prison just yards from the wardens.
The detective began putting on a condom. Erla was alone and trapped in her cell, ‘I pressed myself against the wall as far from him as I could. He reached for me and told me to lie down on the bed.’ She was paralyzed with fear and had no one to help her. ‘I dared not ask for help but obeyed. He had my life in his hands and I didn’t know where it might end if he disapproved of me.’
She did as she was told, lying there staring at the greasy walls and ceiling while he raped her. He was on top of her, putting his hand over her mouth to prevent her shouting. At one point he thought he heard a noise in the corridor and jumped up to check what it was, telling Erla to lie still. After what seemed like an eternity, he finished and put his trousers back on. Erla recalled his parting words were that ‘he was taking great risks to do this for me’ and she should be grateful.
After her rapist had left, Erla remained frozen on the bed, debased and trapped. She couldn’t even wash herself to get rid of his smell as she was only allowed to shower once a week. She stared at the walls thinking where she might get help, but there was none. There was only one way to cope with it, Erla would have to bury it deep inside her, another secret that she would keep hidden. It would be years before she publicly talked about it and decades until she tried to bring her attacker to court, but by then it would be too late. The statute of limitations meant he would never be prosecuted.
Hlynur and the other guards had noticed that this officer often visited Erla late in the evening and they would discuss it in their office while they waited for a bell summoning them to a prisoner’s cell. Afterwards, they professed ignorance, but there was an awkward detail they couldn’t hide. After the attack, the morning after pill was ordered for Erla. Hlynur Magnusson said he was not aware of this. He did notice, however, the change in Erla’s demeanour. It was impossible to ignore. Her mental health plummeted and there were fears that she might be suicidal. For Erla, her treatment by the authorities ‘was like a rape from the beginning to end at different levels. That physical rape was symbolic of the whole thing’. Her attacker could walk out into that bright night relieved that he had got away with it, undetected. The guards would never speak up against a detective when there was no definitive proof. Her attacker could carry on without any fear of discovery. Who would believe her?
This betrayal dented Erla’s already shaky confidence. She still had one ‘friend’ and confidante, Hlynur. He would come with drinks in the evenings when it was quiet, a gentle presence, bringing in the outside world through his discussions of ancient Rome and the noble history of Iceland. Of course, Hlynur was betraying her too, constantly feeding information back to the police. Then according to Erla his close proximity to her began to get to him too; he started to misread
the signals from the vulnerable ‘little mouse’ he first encountered. One evening after one of their long conversations he leaned over and kissed her. Once again Erla felt that her vulnerability had been exploited and Hlynur had stepped over the line. He doesn’t remember this, but it is etched on Erla’s memory. ‘He was the only one who wasn’t the enemy, but after this everything crumbled. He was just one of them.’ To Erla he was like a soldier who had become caught up in the febrile atmosphere which leads good men to do bad things.
Saevar had been subject to repeated mistreatment from the police and wardens. Hlynur’s collegues had grown increasingly frustrated at their inability to break him and get him to tell them where the bodies were buried. They gathered with detectives in the prison cafeteria to discuss effective methods to get Saevar to tell them more They knew Saevar had a fear of water. Hlynur was there when they mentioned it. So too was the deputy prosecutor, Hallvardur Einvardsson, the man who was responsible for bringing a fair case against Saevar and the others. He said if Saevar ended up falling into the water to ‘let the bastard drown’. It was a throwaway comment but one that the guards remembered.
In July they seized the opportunity to strike. There were three guards on duty when Saevar went to wash in the tiny bathroom. It was a small pleasure for him, as he only got to do this once a week. He would stand for a moment and let the water cascade over him, breathing in the sulphurous smell from the liquid that had travelled from deep underground caverns up through the lava and ash to the surface, still containing the heat of the lava. It was part of Iceland’s geothermal network that provided hot water across the country. Washing was a brief chance for Saevar to feel connected to the land.
Saevar noticed right away the guards were on edge. He was no physical match for any of the wardens – a cocky seven-stone weakling who would crumple at the first big punch. ‘When I got to the shower cubicle [the guard] asks me to wait and then he grabs the neck of my shirt and attacks me.’ Saevar’s head was pushed down into a sink full of water. He thrashed around, struggling to break free and breathe, the water filling his mouth. This was the moment that all of the pent-up tension among the guards was released. As he gasped for breath, Saevar’s head was lifted out of the sink, and he sucked in lung fulls of air but his reprieve was short lived. His head was thrust back into the water. The second time was worse as he tried to stop himself from swallowing the water. He thought it was only a matter of time before he was going to die. The guard was shouting at him, ‘Who did you bring to Keflavik? Where did you go with Gudmundur Einarsson in Hafnarfjordur?’ Even if Saevar wanted to respond he couldn’t. The guards’ anger had been unleashed, like a volcano that had exploded and could no longer be contained. The torture only stopped when a more senior guard intervened, realising that any longer under the water and Saevar would be dead. They returned Saevar to his cell a soaking wreck. There was also an implicit threat that any time he went to the bathroom that this could happen again. One of the few reminaing acts that he could carry out in peace was now tainted too.
The guards had crossed a line where torture was now acceptable. They no longer saw Saevar as a prisoner on remand but as a manipulative monster. These guards who had worked as farmers, carpenters and electricians, were not intrinsically bad men. They were simple, straightforward and scared of what Saevar represented: a darker side of Iceland that they couldn’t control. They felt no shame in what they had done. When he was back on shift shortly after, Hlynur recalled the wardens being proud. ‘They boasted of it. They knew he was afraid of water, they took his head and put it in the sink and tried to drown him.’ Hlynur was appalled; he knew that it was wrong but said nothing. ‘It is a tasteless comparison,’ he conceded, but ‘like Nazi Germany, I just obeyed orders.’
Gisli Gudjonsson was plunged into this febrile atmosphere that summer when he bounded into the detectives’ headquarters. Short and stocky with dark blonde hair and a dimpled chin, Gisli looked a bit like Kirk Douglas and, though he wasn’t a swashbuckler, he was brave. He had shown during a previous stint as a temporary uniformed police officer that he would be the first person to chase a suspect, determined to take them down no matter how big they were.
He was eager to get into the cramped space that would double as his office and interrogation room. He was not working on the Geirfinnur case but knew the officers who were. ‘They were competent, good people, these investigators. I knew them, I had to work with them. I liked them, I respected them.’ The detective’s department wasn’t big, there were only 30 officers covering the whole country, so it was easy to pick up on the frustration within the Geirfinnur inquiry. ‘They were angry and frustrated that they were not getting anywhere, the general impression I perceived was that [the suspects] were not co-operating. They were being awkward.’ He could see that the police, the investigating judges and the prosecutor were having problems because there were such inconsistencies in the stories. They felt, ‘These people are all guilty, all we had to do was prove how they did it, find the bodies and prove they did it. I got caught in that, I accepted the police assumption that they were guilty.’ This thinking had permeated all levels of the case; Gisli saw it as ‘like a runaway train’.
Gisli was on a placement as part of his psychology degree, as he was interested in finding out more about offending behaviour. He had previously been a beat bobby during his university summer holidays, when the regular officers went on holiday. His police work so far had been mostly clearing the streets, breaking up fights and arresting drunks. This was the closest he got to the few nightclubs in Reykjavik, like Klubburin, which were exciting for many of his friends but which he preferred to keep at arm’s length. Gisli was a serious student and had big ambitions, preferring studying and athletics to smoking and drugs.
As a student, Gisli had already made waves in Iceland. He had been fascinated by the Breidavik boys’ home, where Saevar had been sent years earlier. Gisli had made the long drive out to the isolated school and worked his way through the boys’ files. He also spoke to the staff to get a clearer picture of the home, which was seen by the Reykjavik social services as successfully rehabilitating delinquent children. When Gisli published his findings, they were devastating. The young student concluded that the home was far from a success story; if anything it was a breeding ground for criminals. Three quarters of the boys who went there committed crimes after they had left, often alongside other boys they had met at Breidavik. For Reykjavik social services Gisli’s report was highly damaging. It was marked ‘strictly confidential’ and its findings buried until years later when it was leaked to the press. But it made Gisli into someone willing to challenge the status quo.
The nightmare of the Cod War was at last coming to an end for Justice Minister Olafur Johannesson. But now he had a new headache that wouldn’t go away: the Gudmundur/Geirfinnur investigation. Sat at his desk, feet up, Olafur was considering how he didn’t like the way the investigation was going. It was taking far too long and becoming an embarrassment to the country and to his government. His patience was wearing thin but Olafur was not one to rush anything; he liked to weigh up the options and then take a decision. He would read the most recent twist in the case in Morgunbladid or later in Visir. He was troubled by his name and that of his party being linked to the case, through the Klubburin men. Their release had been splashed all over the newspapers and questions asked again about why the police had based so much on the testimony of Erla, Saevar and Kristjan.
The political ramifications of the case were becoming more pronounced. The influence of America and the air base they ran for NATO on the island had led to suspicions among the growing leftist movement of spies in their midst and CIA moles. In the newspapers’ letters pages readers speculated, ‘It is highly likely that the CIA has for years had their officials here in the country to follow events and try to manipulate it to their advantage.’ Head of Customs Kristjan Petursson had received training in America and this led to lurid suspicion that he worked for the CIA. When Olafur
lead opposition to the US base and threatended to shut it down during the Cod Wars, the rumour went that Petursson then manufactured the allegation about links between Klubburin and Olafur’s party as a way of smearing the minister.
Olafur found all this unseemly and wanted to put a stop to such speculation. A stickler for procedure, he knew that he couldn’t interfere directly. He needed someone from outside with proven experience in big, complex cases to come in and rescue what had become a shambles. The investigation had become too big for Iceland’s inexperienced police force. They needed a saviour and the opportunity came from an unlikely source.
A colleague of Olafur’s, Peter Eggerz, was a career diplomat who had spent his life in anonymous, stuffy conference rooms, discussing the minutiae of treaties and trade deals. He had been based in the anaemic West German capital, Bonn, for years. It was a dull place but it was the ideal setting for Peter to indulge his hobby of researching the Second World War and the Holocaust. As Ambassador to Germany, Eggerz had been embroiled in the negotiations to find a solution to the increasingly fraught battle over fishing rights with the UK, Germany and other European nations.
The Cod Wars had been a regular feature at NATO meetings, especially after Iceland had threatened to pull out of the alliance. The Americans were never going to let that happen; Iceland was strategically too important, a bulwark against a possible Soviet fleet sailing south to attack Europe. The loss of the latest Cod War to Iceland was a humiliation for Britain, and a hard-fought victory for the plucky underdogs who had stood up to a much bigger, better armed navy. Inside Iceland, however, it had opened up divisions between the older generation who fully supported NATO and the post war baby boomers who wanted to re-shape their nation and forge a new, independent identity, free of American imperialism.
