by Simon Cox
Gudjon had started asking for his lawyer and questioning whether he should speak to the detectives. Gisli realised that the lie detector test must have had more of an effect than he recognised at the time. Being asked the questions without any pressure or coercion had given Gudjon the space and time to pause and think, ‘what did actually happen?’
Schutz demanded that Gisli disclose all of the material from the test and he went through the Icelandic Ministry of Justice to demand this. Gisli had to comply, but he only sent the questions, not the answers. They would remain in his care, locked away with his other papers for many decades. Schutz made his anger and annoyance with the test clear in his weekly update to the Justice Minister, Olafur Johannesson, on 7 January 1977. He said it had been done in an ‘amateurish manner that was to hinder the progress of the investigation’. He complained that it was ‘diametrically opposed to the previous successful direction of the inquiry’, which was ‘to convince the accused that it would be best to tell the whole truth and that his supposed “memory gaps” are not at all credible’. He made it clear that he thought the intervention was what had lead Gudjon to doubt his role in Geirfinnur’s death. Schutz gave examples of the questions Gudjon had been asked, such as ‘Did you go to Keflavik on 19/11/1974?’ and ‘Did you take part in the murder?’
Schutz told the minister it was his duty to point out the obstacles that the investigation faced. It had been expected that Gudjon would confess about the last area of doubt, the location of the body. This intervention could now compromise the progress of the whole investigation. Under the title ‘Further Measures’, Schutz wrote they would start to identify witnesses who would strengthen the ‘facts’ in the confessions. The police would spend the next few weeks going through a multitude of tasks trying to firm up the confessions: asking each of the suspects about Geirfinnur’s clothing to see if their descriptions matched; interviewing witnesses who were in the harbour cafe; retracing the route from Reykjavik to Keflavik and timing it to see whether the suspects could have got there in time to meet Geirfinnur; examining the house in Keflavik where Erla said she had spent the night after running away from the harbour.
Without Gudjon’s full co-operation, the whole Geirfinnur investigation could collapse. Gudjon felt the pressure on him when he wrote, ‘They are going to be hard with me. They are going to break me down by not speaking to me and by banning the priest and delaying or losing my parcels. I’m getting suspicious and hateful being in isolation.’
A few days later, Gudjon was brought for another interview about the case and the police notes show his refusal to engage was hardening:
He did not know who Geirfinnur was and had never heard of him. He said he was not able to tell whether the person who entered into the vehicle in Keflavik was Geirfinnur. He said he had not heard his name mentioned. He couldn’t describe the clothing of the man who came into the vehicle. He had previously reported that he was unclear about the events in the harbour and he was not clear that some devastating event had happened. The only description he had of clothing was what he had read in Morgunbladid already in a report about the disappearance of Geirfinnur. He remembered the talk was that Geirfinnur was dressed in a winter coat; Gudjon thought that it has been described as a grey-blue. He dared not say whether this description was made from the newspaper or if he was the person who entered into the vehicle on that occasion.
Gudjon refused to sign the statement. The detectives were getting increasingly frustrated with his intransigence. Schutz had one final ace up his sleeve. He was working towards a big last push to bring together all of the suspects for one final showdown.
There was a soft dusting of crunchy, frozen snow on the ground as Kristjan, Erla, Saevar and Gudjon set out from Sidumuli on a strange mission on the morning of 23 January. They were all in a fraught state: as the detectives’ primary target, Saevar was still facing daily interviews and trips outside with the police; Erla had been released from prison but was living in a hostile Reykjavik where she was openly despised; Kristjan’s mental health was still frazzled after his suicide attempts weeks earlier and Gudjon was also in a black space having experienced his own suicidal thoughts. The detectives accompanying them were wrapped up in thick woollen coats with Russian bearskin hats, making them look like the Politburo on a day out.
Gudjon’s testimony was crucial; the police needed him back on board, engaging with them. He was the older, educated suspect who believed for a long time that he needed to help the police. They needed him to think like this again.
Schutz wanted all of the accused to stage a reconstruction of Geirfinnur’s death at the slipway in Keflavik. He had set out his reasons for this in his notes: to investigate their testimonies on the ground and most importantly to work on the areas where their stories were not the same. He wrote of clear ‘inconsistencies in the detailed accounts of the events’, in particular the final moments of Geirfinnur Einarsson’s life, and ‘for that reason it was only right to stage a plausible reconstruction of the location of the vehicles, and Geirfinnur and the defendants’.
Schutz was feeling tense about this judging by his manner when he interviewed Gudjon a few days before the reconstruction. Gudjon was still questioning his involvement and tried to row back on his earlier confession. He said Schutz had lost his temper and started screaming at him, which was highly unusual. At one point, Gudjon thought he was so angry Schutz might attack him, but the detective was too professional to go this far and managed to maintain control.
Though the suspects had been out to the lava many times, and sometimes in pairs, this was the first time they had been there all together. During these previous trips the discussions had focused on possible burial locations, but today would be different. This time they would go through the parts they played on the night, in detail, marking out where they were and what they were doing.
They set off late in the morning, which would give them a few hours before the sun started to drift down into the horizon. They headed out along the Reykjavikurvegur under a flat sky, covered in thick billowy clouds which blocked out the winter sun.
In Keflavik, the police vehicles parked next to a set of shabby, mournful, dark warehouses with rusting corrugated roofs, surrounded by discarded metal and rotten wood. At the end of the slipway two seemingly abandoned trawlers were perched on wooden rests, waiting to be repaired. The police brought props with them to make the event as realistic as possible. At the harbour the police had parked a Mercedes van and a VW car. It was time to knit together the disparate versions of that night.
Saevar was first. Dressed in a black polo neck, trousers and coat and with his long slick, dark hair, he looked more like a rock star on a photo shoot than a criminal suspected of Iceland’s worst ever crime spree. At the slipway, the investigators wanted Saevar to mark the exact spot where the VW had been parked. The police had brought numbered markers which they used to record these locations and a photographer who would capture the whole bizarre event.
Saevar marked the spot, pointing down towards the sea, near the trawlers. He told them that during the argument with Geirfinnur, Kristjan had put the man in a choke hold and strangled him. The police brought a stopwatch to help time how long this had taken – Saevar estimated about seven seconds. He had gone back to check on Erla but when she saw the fight she’d run off between two buildings at the harbour. When Saevar got back to Kristjan, Geirfinnur was lying on the ground on his front. Kristjan had turned him over and listened to his heart and announced: ‘He is dead.’ Saevar tried his pulse and couldn’t find one.
Schutz wasn’t content with the suspects telling them what happened, though – he wanted to see it. Kristjan stood in the spot where the fight had apparently taken place. He wasn’t dressed for the winter cold, he had on a white zipped cardigan with a bright flowery shirt and dark trousers. He stood awkwardly, arms by his side his feet pointed out, like a schoolboy posing for a class photo. Behind him was the VW pulled up at an angle and markers with the numbers 2, 3, 4 a
nd 6. The police wanted to see how he had killed Geirfinnur.
Kristjan described how Gudjon had grabbed hold of Geirfinnur and then he had also grabbed Geirfinnur from behind, pushing his knee into the man’s leg, knocking him off balance. With the aid of the stopwatch, Kristjan said thought he had held onto his neck for about ten seconds. Saevar had then started hitting Geirfinnur with a stick and Kristjan said that Geirfinnur had then fallen on his side. The police had brought a dummy, hastily outfitted with a coat, trousers and boots, so the suspects could mark out the location and demonstrate how Geirfinnur was lying. This spot was also marked with a number.
Kristjan had long struggled with which of his memories were real and which were false, implanted into his psyche by the conversations he had with the detectives. These had been augmented by his repeated visits to the locations where the killings were supposed to have taken place. This move into a more tangible, physical re-enactment was bound to exacerbate this further. He was being forced to go through these motions in real life, in the present, that he had started to believe had taken place two years ago, but until this point were still shadowy impressions in his mind.
Erla’s memory of the night Geirfinnur was killed had shifted so much that it was if it had been written on tracing paper. As the other suspects’ stories changed, her imagination went on new flights of fancy, writing a whole different version of the night. Her idea that she had shot Geirfinnur had now long since faded away.
She said she no longer remembered how the killing happened, but she recalled seeing Geirfinnur lying on his stomach and she could see Saevar, Gudjon and Kristjan standing over him. She had run away to a distinctive red house standing on its own on a corner, a few hundred yards from the harbour. It was the same colour as the rocks at the Raudholar, a muddy red stained with iron from the earth. It had once been a fisherman’s hut, but in 1974 it was used for storage and normally left unlocked.
The police used the descriptions the suspects had given to make drawings of the crime scene. Saevar’s was the most detailed, with a series of trawlers on props in descending sizes. His drawing was then filled with an indistinguishable blur of dots as he tried to map the attack on Geirfinnur as he fought and struggled with Kristjan, Saevar and Gudjon. It looked like the plan for an elaborate dance sequence.
The drawings produced by Erla and Kristjan’s descriptions were far more rudimentary – there was the slipway with three boats in the harbour and dots marking the positions of the various participants in relation to the car. They each put the location of the attack in a different position in the harbour, but from the detectives’ point of view they were acknowledging their presence there and they had each been able to map out the setting that night.
Gudjon was reluctant to play any part in what he considered a charade. He remembered how at the time, ‘The reality it all gets mixed up, that’s why I think Erla was always ready to make up stories and get it away from herself. That’s why I took part in that silly happening in Keflavik with Schutz.’ He refused to do as Kristjan had done and physically re-enact the killing. From the outset he couldn’t remember where certain people stood. He pointed out it was very dark and if he said something now, ‘it could be crap’. When asked where the fight took place he refused to give a definitive answer. ‘I have to think more about it,’ he said, ‘and I think it will be more reliable.’ He was trying to placate the detectives as he now knew he didn’t know what had happened that night. He couldn’t describe how Geirfinnur died. He didn’t check for any signs of life and didn’t know who had. He couldn’t remember whether the body was carried to the car or whether the car had been driven to the body.
They returned back in separate cars in the afternoon, cold and in need of food and warmth. Kristjan, Erla and Saevar had all engaged with the reconstruction, Kristjan most of all – there were countless photos taken of him standing by the cars and the macabre fake body. Gudjon was the exception, he had not delivered what they hoped. After the lie detector test in December he was still proving less co-operative.
After dinner, Gretar took him for an interview in the Corner. Gretar – the detective he thought of as his ‘friend’ – was the one who could still get through to him. He told Gudjon of the urgency in the investigation. ‘We are pressed for time,’ he said, as Schutz would be returning to Germany soon and he wanted the case wrapped up. They spent three and a half hours talking, but Gudjon no longer felt he was guilty. ‘It dawned on me that this is impossible, but then the police said you have said too much, you must stick to it, don’t let him off the hook. Even if they can’t make the case work and find out how it all hangs together, nevertheless he is likely to have done something.’
Gudjon knew he had said too much and there was no going back. He felt trapped in a nightmare. ‘You think you have been driving somewhere in the dark. It’s just a dream. And if you have been telling someone for a while where he has been, what he has done, and tell him that other people were involved, in the end you can sway him. He doesn’t have his memory any more or the power to say no all the time. After a whole night you will get him to say “enough”, and then you keep on.’ That was exactly what the police had done with him. As soon as he said he had taken hold of Geirfinnur and held him by the neck, he was sunk. He could never take it back.
For Schutz, the reconstruction had worked out as he had wanted. The suspects had all placed themselves in the harbour on the night Geirfinnur was killed. The scene that they had talked about for over a year, originally blurry and imprecise, had become clearer in the crisp daylight with all of the props helpfully supplied by the police. The visit was all that Schutz needed to close the Geirfinnur case. He was ready to make a big statement to show the government and the jittery Icelandic public that they could rest easy, the killers had been caught.
The reporters filed in to the court offices. Karl Schutz was sat at the head of a long table. Next to him was Orn Hoskuldsson, whose leather coat, skinny tie and check shirt was a stark contrast to the crisp white shirt of Schutz and his interpreter, Peter Eggerz, in a dark suit with pocket square. Around the room sat the detectives from the task force. Behind Schutz on the wall was a two-metre long aerial photo of the lava fields dissected by the thin white line of the Reykjavikurvegur. There were other aerial photos of Keflavik and the diagrams of the harbour that had been drawn from the suspects’ recollections following the reconstruction. In the centre of the table sat the infamous clay head of the mystery caller.
Schutz had called the press conference for a momentous announcement: the Geirfinnur case was at last at an end, the evidence was being passed to the state prosecutor to prepare for the suspects to be tried. When this had happened in the Gudmundur case there had been an official acknowledgement but no major press gathering like this.
Such press conferences would be expected at the end of a trial when the defendant’s guilt had been decided and their case couldn’t be prejudiced. However, Schutz decided to brief the media on all aspects of the case long before the trial had begun and the three judges heard the evidence.
As the journalists hunched over their notepads scribbling shorthand as fast as they could, Schutz set out the ‘definitive’ account of what the police believed had happened and the evidence they would be taking to court. He started by taking them back to two days before Geirfinnur disappeared.
It was 17 November 1974 and inside Klubburin it was throbbing. Geirfinnur was on a rare night out with his friends and Saevar saw him as a target for pickpocketing. But as Saevar approached him, Geirfinnur noticed him and introduced himself. Saevar said he was Magnus Leopoldsson, the manager of Klubburin. Struggling to hear themselves amid the chatter and blaring music, Saevar told Geirfinnur he was interested in buying some cheap booze, as he assumed the man from Keflavik was some kind of salesman for illicit alcohol. Geirfinnur wasn’t a smuggler or even much of a drinker and was in no fit state to talk. They agreed to meet a few days later. Geirfinnur went back to his boozy night, Saevar started to hatch a plan.
On 19 November Saevar and Erla rented a car for 5,000 kronor – a cash transaction, no contract and no questions asked. They met with Kristjan and drove to Keflavik to meet Geirfinnur. At this point, Schutz revealed the identity of the mystery caller who summoned Geirfinnur to his death. During one of his drives with Saevar, Schutz said he was told, ‘There was a phone call made to Geirfinnur from a cafe in Keflavik and this as we say, got the ball rolling.’ It wasn’t Saevar who made the call, though, it was Kristjan. He had gone into the Hafnarbudin cafe with Saevar and while Saevar bought cigarettes and chocolate for Erla, Kristjan had phoned Geirfinnur. ‘Are you Geirfinnur?’ he asked when the man answered. ‘We are here,’ he told him, ‘you should come on foot and alone.’ (Despite the police’s certainty, neither Elin Gretarsdottir nor Gudlaug Jonssdottir, the two women who had been working in the cafe that night, were able to definitively identify Kristjan as the man who had come in to make the call.)
The cause of Geirfinnur’s death had gone through a remarkable set of changes over the previous two years. First he had drowned after trying to retrieve smuggled alcohol. Then he had been shot by Erla. Finally the police had settled on him being strangled and beaten to death by Kristjan, Saevar and Gudjon. In these later versions his death had been the result of an argument that got out of hand. But now a darker version was presented. The investigators believed the suspects’ intention had been to kill all along; they had told Erla from the outset she would need to hitch-hike back to Reykjavik to make space for the body.
As to the Klubburin men, who had been held for over three months in solitary confinement before being released without charge, Schutz explained that Kristjan, Erla and Saevar had decided they would implicate others if they were ever caught. The rumours about Klubburin and their use of smuggled alcohol was the perfect cover. They had met three times to coordinate their statements and to fabricate a story.
