The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  With the third and final Cod War now over, for Peter it was time for another important mission. He had been told by Olafur to use his extensive contacts to find someone who could get the Geirfinnur investigation back on track. Outside of one of the interminable meetings, Peter buttonholed one of his contacts at the German interior ministry, Siegfried Frohlich. He explained that Iceland needed help, an expert who could get the country out of the mess the two cases had caused. Peter was in luck, Siegfried told him, he had just the man for the job. He knew a veteran, hardened detective who had worked on major cases and was now retired. His name was Karl Schutz. ‘Karl Schutz is the talent,’ Frohlich told him, ‘if he can’t solve this issue, it is insoluble.’

  12

  August 1976

  When Karl Schutz got the phone call from Peter Eggerz, he had no particular desire to leave the mellow, calm canals of Holland, especially for the bitter chill of Iceland, a country he knew nothing about. For the last six months, Schutz had been living a blissful life. He had retired in 1975 and was on his boat pottering around on the placid canals, stopping off whenever he wished for a long lunch with a beer or a glass of wine. There were museums to visit, cafes to relax in – although he avoided the hash cafes in Amsterdam.

  He’d had a glittering police career, with a highly demanding final post, running three different departments in Bonn where he was responsible for over a thousand staff, two thirds of them investigators. And yet Schutz was a cop above all else and was finding it hard to resist the challenge of taking on a case in a whole new country. But if he did, it would have to be on his terms. Schutz was a pioneer of criminal investigative techniques still used by the police today. He sent the Icelanders a book he had written about his most notable investigation where he had developed what, at the time, were novel techniques during a complex inquiry.

  The crime took place in January 1969 in the small town of Lebach in the north west of Germany. In the dead of night an ammunitions depot belonging to the Parachute Regiment was raided. Four young conscripts were killed and another was seriously injured. The attackers got away with a few weapons, some ammunition and the books the soldiers were reading. The crime was shocking for a country that was relatively peaceful and yet to experience the emerging menace of terrorism. The police were baffled, wondering if it might be politically motivated. Karl Schutz was put in charge of the case, which developed into the biggest operation mounted by the German federal police with a team of over a hundred officers. Schutz was methodical and systematic, using the latest technology available at the forensics laboratory at Wiesbaden to examine the bullets and cartridge cases found at the scene.

  While the police were trying to track down the killers, the case took an unexpected twist. The gang who had carried out the attack tried to blackmail a series of high profile wealthy Germans. Schutz and his special commission succeeded in tracking them down and arresting them. They were not career criminals or politically motivated activists, but three young gay men who wanted the money in order to lead a life away from the bourgeois society they despised. Two of the killers were eventually jailed for life. During the trial, it became clear the trigger for the killing and their crime spree was that they were outcasts living on the margins and had been shunned by West German society.

  Schutz rose to be head of the Federal criminal police in the capital Bonn where he faced an even bigger challenge, playing a key role in the fight against a new scourge of terrorism that struck West Germany in the 1970s. The Baader-Meinhoff gang was a militant left-wing terrorist group that wanted to undermine the West German state though a campaign of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and robberies. The group had grown out of the student protest movement of the 1960s and the younger generation who were angry with the positions former Nazis held in positions of power in West Germany. They decided the only way to strike back was with violence. They formed the Red Army Faction, training with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Jordan.

  In 1972, his team were able to capture the key figures in the movement: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhoff and two of the other leaders. They had gone to check on a lock up garage in Frankfurt where they kept bomb making materials. The police had a tip-off and were waiting for them and the men surrendered. Two of the gang subsequently killed themselves while awaiting trial – one on hunger strike and Ulrike Meinhoff was found hanged in her cell.

  Having tackled these major crimes, Schutz was certain he could solve a murder case in Iceland. He was known for his boundless energy – one of his favourite phrases was ‘the clock is ticking’. He had earned the nickname Kommisar Kugelblitz after a popular German cartoon character – an elderly white-haired policeman who went around the world solving crimes.fn1

  In July, the news of Schutz’s imminent arrival was leaked to the press, who questioned what a German expert could do 18 months after Geirfinnur disappeared. Yet when Karl Schutz arrived in August there was huge expectation from the public: here was the super cop who would lift Iceland out of its darkness.

  Schutz could see the difficulties he faced from the air as he approached Keflavik airport. Stretched out in front of him was a vista of ashen lava, as far as he could see. There were wide craters and the only vegetation was thin, mustard-yellow bracken. Huddled by the ocean was Keflavik, hemmed in next to the sea where granite coloured waves rolled in, turning to a white and brown froth as they crashed on the rocks. Somewhere out there beneath the lava were the bodies of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson. ‘It would be difficult to get to the bottom of it,’ Schutz thought, ‘but it was not too late.’

  He knew that Reykjavik would not be the same as Bonn, but when Schutz walked into the detectives’ offices at Borgutun 7, he was struck by how primitive and basic it was. Where were the computers? All he could see was typewriters and carbon paper. At the German Federal Police lab in Wiesbaden they were using new forensic techniques to test blood stains and hair fibres. In Iceland forensics were always secondary to confessions.

  He had a task force of ten detectives, which represented a third of the country’s force. He thought they seemed diligent and committed, but their methods were old fashioned. There weren’t the processes and systematic approach that he was used to at home. He could see immediately that getting things done here would take an awful lot longer than it did back in Germany.

  Schutz’s arrival meant that the investigating magistrate Orn Hoskuldsson was no longer running the show. He was now second in command to a man who, although vastly experienced, knew nothing about Icelandic law and didn’t speak a word of Icelandic. Peter Eggerz had accompanied Schutz back to Iceland to become his interpreter and would be by his side throughout all of his interactions with the suspects.

  Schutz wanted to go back to the beginning of the Geirfinnur case to see how much the original investigators had found out, which meant a trip to Keflavik. His first meeting was with Kristjan Petursson, the domineering head of customs at the airport. Petursson had been an active participant in the early stages of the case and had been obsessed with getting Saevar. Schutz was not impressed by what he heard. Petursson boasted that he had conducted intensive criminal investigations outside of working hours, much of it directed at Saevar. Schutz later summed up the meeting, saying Kristjan Petursson ‘was polite but very slow’. He spat out ‘some hypotheses that he could not substantiate’, and was unable to provide ‘any realistic evidence in the Geirfinnur case’. Schutz was so dismissive of the Petursson that he felt the prosecutor should have taken action against him for neglecting his actual job.

  He was less harsh about Haukur Gudmundsson, the Keflavik detective who had first investigated Geirfinnur’s disappearnce and his boss Valtyr Sigurdsson. Haukur had been guarded when he first met Schutz but slowly opened up and became friendly. They complained to Schutz that they had not received much help from their superiors. When they asked for more money, it fell on deaf ears and after a while they were told to focus on other cases. They were able to tell him what kind of man Geirfinnur w
as, and that it was impossible that he lived some kind of double life.

  The Reykjavik team had built up countless potential leads. There were hundreds of pages of statements and notes they had collected that had to be translated from Icelandic. Schutz had a choice: should he build on this or start the investigation again, using his experience and ability to get whatever resources he needed? A year and a half into an enquiry, it was too late to go backwards. This was a paid assignment and Schutz decided he had two main tasks: to find the bodies and to make the conflicting statements of the suspects all match. Schutz would interview the suspects himself and use his contacts at the lab in Wiesbaden to try to get vital forensics evidence linking the suspects to Gudmundur and Geirfinnur.

  Karl Schutz had chosen the best time to arrive in Iceland – the white nights when the bleached sun would not set until close to midnight. As the winter mellowed it was a time to trek and explore the inner wilderness, the Highlands, the Brennisteinsalda volcano, its sides stained red, green and blue from sulphur, iron and mosses, with fumaroles, holes where steam would rise up from the earth. From the Blue Mountain he could see five glaciers and the folded earth below a vista of dormant volcanoes, brown, green and black shadow. The temperature rarely got above 15 degrees. But the heat in Iceland didn’t come from the sun, it was found beneath the earth. The country straddles two tectonic plates, the Eurasian and North American plates creating the Mid Atlantic ridge. It is mostly on the ocean floor but in Iceland it rises above sea level and can be seen on the land. This was the Reykjanes ridge where steam would creep along the cracks and faults and burst out in hissing plumes. The summer brought a change to the glacial landscape with a bloom on the face of the lava fields.

  You could roam in Asbyrgi, the horseshoe shaped canyon created in Norse mythology by Odin’s eight-legged horse, Slepinir, leaving its hoofmark on the world. Below the steep rocky face was a radiant green landscape and above, crystal blue skies with thin filaments of cloud stretching out like elegant fingers. Asbyrgi was the capital of the Huldufolk, the hidden elves whose queen would emerge from the rocks when the waterfall flowed. At the ocean’s edge, puffins nestled in the rocks, while out beyond the black sand, seals bobbed lazily in the ocean.

  Schutz’s home wasn’t in this rural idyll but in Reykjavik. The city looked the same as it had for decades but the young post-war generation was changing Iceland. They wanted more than to be fishermen or farmers, working with their hands. They watched the American TV piped in for the thousands of servicemen at the Keflavik air base. This new generation learned English and travelled to the US and Europe and wanted to reshape their agrarian, conservative nation.

  This was Erla, Saevar and Kristjan’s generation, anti-establishment and at the edges of the social movements sweeping through Europe. Saevar and Erla’s links to the US meant they had seen and felt this new wave, and they scared the Icelandic establishment who wanted to preserve their island nation, to protect it from the corrupting influences of the US and the West. Icelandic state TV had only started a decade earlier but it shut down on Thursdays and during August to encourage families to come together and escape the interference of the new box in the corner of the room.

  Schutz read through the investigator’s reports before he arrived in Iceland but he wanted to meet the suspects himself as soon as possible. His principal focus would be on the more complicated Geirfinnur disappearance, but first he wanted to put the Gudmundur case to bed and tie up any loose ends. That meant finding the body and any forensic evidence which linked Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi to the killing. He would start with the most co-operative witness.

  Albert Klahn had been freed in January 1976, but he was still subject to continued police interviews and journeys out to the lava. Albert was glad he didn’t have to face the Corner, which still held dark memories for him. Instead, he was brought to Orn Hoskuldsson’s far more comfortable office at the court. His interview also began at a reasonable hour, 10.30 in the morning. He still had to go over the same story but there was no need for a lawyer to be present, the police reassured him he was just helping with their enquiries.

  Albert was always susceptible to being dominated by stronger more forceful characters and Schutz certainly fitted the bill. He had faced down terrorists who had bombed and killed at will, so Albert and his friends were a much easier target. Schutz saw no need for the physical violence of the past, but he let the threat of it linger, always in the back of the suspects’ minds.

  Schutz didn’t need to lean on Albert; he re-assured him that he wasn’t a felon but that he knew he hadn’t always told the truth. Months after his first interview, Albert still wasn’t clear about the events on the night Gudmundur went missing or what he had done and where he had been. Schutz watched in his quiet, thoughtful manner as Albert nervously told him he didn’t know where the body of Gudmundur was buried. There had been endless attempts to jog his memory: repeated trips, endless questioning by the detectives and even a psychiatric assessment, but they had all come up with nothing. Schutz calmly told Albert he didn’t believe him, that he must know where the body was.

  Schutz wanted Albert to correct some details in his testimony that he had got wrong previously. First and foremost was the car he had driven to move Gudmundur’s body. In all of his interviews Albert had been very clear that he drove his dad’s yellow Toyota. But when the police checked, they found out his father didn’t own the yellow Toyota at the time of Gudmundur’s disappearance. Instead, he had a battered old Volkswagen Beetle, a common sight in Reykjavik. When the Reykjavik detectives had discovered this, they didn’t worry about this detail, but Schutz saw it as a problem. Albert had been clear that he had watched events through his rearview mirror and seen Gudmundur’s body placed in the boot. The Beetle had its boot in the front, however, so this couldn’t have happened. What’s more, his dad’s Beetle was in terrible condition and they would have to convince the judges that the car could have navigated the roads in dense snow.

  As they discussed this, Schutz switched from good cop to bad cop, fixing Albert with a cold stare. He warned Albert that if he found out he was hiding something he would prosecute him for complicity in the crime. As he so often had been in the past, after Albert’s interview he was taken out to ‘refresh’ his memory. Schutz, his interpreter Peter, a detective and Albert squeezed into a white police Volvo and took the familiar route south to the Aquarium. Albert said on that January night in 1974 they had tried to get in to but had failed, so Kristjan, Tryggvi and Saevar had gone off into the lava with the body and returned about half an hour later and Albert had driven them home. So Albert couldn’t tell the police where the body was buried.

  After this frustrating trip Schutz had concluded the suspects were refusing to disclose where Gudmundur was hidden because it was likely Geirfinnur was buried in the same place. If he could get the Geirfinnur suspects to reveal the location of the body, Schutz believed he would find Gudmundur’s remains there too.

  Schutz spoke first to the most compliant of the Geirfinnur suspects, Erla, who felt more optimistic than she had for months. She was about to see Karl Schutz for the first time and she thought it could bring clarity to the investigation. ‘I had this hope, about someone new, an expert from another country.’ It had been months since she had seen her daughter. At her remand hearing in July 1976, when her detention was extended for another 60 days, the judge said she would have to wait to speak to Schutz in order to see her baby. So this was her opportunity to come clean and convince Schutz that, after all of the previous lies, this time she was telling the truth. She hoped he would see through the madness that had taken hold of the country and infected the minds of the investigators, that he could coolly assess the statements and see the lack of forensics and the glaring inconsistencies in the testimonies.

  Schutz indeed saw the confessions as a mess of conflicting accounts. According to the numerous statements collected about Gudmundur Einarsson, he had been beaten to death, then it had changed to a stabbing, t
hen back to a beating. His body had been dumped in a variety of locations in the lava fields. Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi had at various times each delivered the fatal blows. But Gudmundur’s case was straightforward compared to Geirfinnur’s. There, the statements varied wildly on the cause of death; first it had been an accident, then a fight and then he was shot by Erla. There was a changing cast list present, although Erla, Saevar and Kristjan were always there. The fiasco of the false imprisonment of the Klubburin men was still a sore point, as well as the smearing of politicians and prominent businessmen, all roped in through rumour and gossip. Schutz saw his primary task, though, as making sure the confessions were consistent. Erla would be integral to this as it was her testimony that had started both investigations.

  Erla’s first interview with Schutz was not as she had hoped. Her optimism was snuffed out before he even walked in when she was thrown a blanket and told to strip naked, the heavy-handed tactic the guards used when they searched the cells. Erla waited in the Corner in this vulnerable state for a long time, the blanket hard and itchy against her skin. She then heard footsteps and the door opened. It was Orn Hoskuldsson, and with him was a short, smart, well fed man and his well dressed shadow, Peter Eggerz. Erla was immediately struck by her new interrogator’s appearance, particularly his ‘beautiful white hair, really sparkly eyes, they were so bright blue. His eyes were amazing, like a child’s’.

  Schutz offered to shake Erla’s hand but even accepting this small gesture of apparent decency was difficult for her as the blanket was heavy and stiff and she had to hold onto it tightly to stop it falling and revealing her nakedness. It was a tactic Schutz had brought with him from Germany, a way to strip away even the most basic protection and meted out to the terrorists and gangsters that Schutz specialised in.