The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  That summer, the court started to hear evidence about Gudmundur Einarsson’s final hours. The judges heard from friends of Gudmundur, eyewitnesses, relatives of the accused and then the suspects themselves. Kristjan had provided an exhaustive account of the night to the judges. Much of this had already been set out before but he reiterated what Albert Klahn had stated – that Gudmundur’s murder had happened during an argument about buying alcohol. The knife that had supposedly been used to stab Gudmundur was missing from the account. The investigators had spent many months trying to find the knife but Kristjan’s lawyers told the court the story of the knife had been pulled out of thin air. ‘He told the police this because he was confused by the constant questioning, both on this issue and in the Geirfinnur case and told the story to speed up the case.’

  Throughout the summer, all of the suspects were brought before the judges to go through their testimony. They told the court of mistreatment by guards and police intimidation, and how their memories had been distorted so they started to believe things they knew weren’t true. All of the suspects had changed their original statements, and when they presented their new version of events the court would read back earlier statements they had signed, which confirmed their guilt.

  There were occasional leaks from behind the closed doors of the court, such as the news that the Raudholar may not have been the final resting place for Geirfinnur. According to the latest statements from the suspects, Geirfinnur had been buried in a rubbish dump. He had never been brought to Reykjavik but taken straight to the dump, where the body of Gudmundur Einarsson had also been deposited. This was no more believable than any of the other dozen locations that the police had searched. Gudjon acknowledged there was almost a kind of competition between the suspects to come up with new burial sites – not because they were trying to fool the police, but because they didn’t have a clue.

  As they entered their second summer in prison, Saevar and Tryggvi kept up the pressure on the court, maintaining that their statements were a fabrication. Outside the stale environment of Sidumuli, the Icelandic summer stretched ahead. Saevar and Tryggvi were at least allowed outside for a few minutes each day to get some vitamin D into their system, feeling the weak sun on their faces. They both had a renewed vigour to prove their innocence.

  In July, Tryggvi stopped taking all of the medications offered to him. ‘I am a better man since I quit. I knew that I had to take some action,’ he wrote. It took immense effort to maintain his innocence, while all around him the wardens and police were certain of his guilt. He had the support of his family, particularly his brothers Omar and Hilmar who would bring food and supplies. And there was his daily exercise regime that had helped turned him into a Charles Atlas with his ‘beautiful muscles’. In his final entry of his last surviving diary in November 1977, Tryggvi reflected of the journey he had taken in the past two years. Whatever problems he still faced, he reflected, ‘I’m completely clean and straight’.

  Tryggvi’s lawyer was also asking more questions, sending a letter to the court asking why his client had been interrogated repeatedly and why there were no notes of the conversations that took place in his cell. The detective Eggert Bjarnason was called to the court to explain this: ‘The conversations took place, as best I remember, often at the request of Tryggvi Runar himself, not because I wanted to speak to him.’ The reason for a lack of detailed reports about these conversations, he said, was that Tryggvi had asked for the meeting so he didn’t feel the need to make any lengthy record.

  Saevar was pushing for recognition of his mistreatment and there was an investigation into his beating and torture. None of the wardens or police however would admit to witnessing any cruel treatment. Orn Hoskuldsson made his feelings clear on Saevar’s retraction and his claim that he had been forced to confess: ‘I ignore this testimony of his, as I know better, I was present when he first said it and so was his lawyer, Jon Oddsson. He was convinced ‘the Rat’ was guilty and there was no way he was gnawing his way out of the trap.

  Undeterred, Saevar pressed on; in September he sent his letters to the court stating that all of his previous statements about the Geirfinnur killing were incorrect and based on rumours.

  Gudjon had considered retracting his confession when he went before the court in the summer of 1977 to give his testimony, but he concluded, ‘There was nothing to retract – you simply couldn’t retract something that was nothing.’ When he was called to give his evidence to the judges, his testimony remained vague, especially on the actual murder of Geirfinnur. He couldn’t recall Kristjan and Saevar’s role in the fight: ‘I cannot describe the events that occurred there… In our past discussions Karl Schutz told me of certain aspects of the conflict that had taken place, but I have not seen these.’ He remembered Geirfinnur falling to the ground but he didn’t know how this happened, he didn’t remember having seen any of it. He didn’t know how Geirfinnur was killed and couldn’t say whether this had been during the fight with the three suspects. There was clearly a lot he didn’t remember.

  As they had done with the other suspects, the court read back previous statements he had made. ‘It was clear from the beginning that I was in a dangerous position to have confessed or denied any of these events,’ he replied. He said the statements he had signed were only a basis for discussion, but not for use as a court exhibit. He had given many similar statements to the detective Gretar Saemundsson.

  By December, Kristjan, Saevar and Tryggvi were facing their third Christmas in prison. This was one of the toughest times for them, and the time when their continued absence was most keenly felt by their families. There would be the presents, the family gatherings and the bonfires and fireworks they would hear as the country celebrated moving into yet another a new year.

  A week before the holiday the court delivered its judgement on the cases: all six of the suspects were found guilty. Albert Klahn received the most lenient sentence, convicted of drugs offences and obstruction of the investigation and given a 15-month sentence. Erla Bolladottir was found guilty of making false charges against the Klubburin men and also obstruction of the investigation and sentenced to three years in jail. Gudjon Skarphedinsson was found guilty of killing Geirfinnur Einarsson and received a 12-year sentence. Tryggvi Runar Leifsson was found guilty of Gudmundur Einarsson’s murder and separate rape and arson cases and given a 16-year sentence. The heaviest punishments were for Saevar Cieselski and Kristjan Vidarsson who were both given the maximum – life sentences for the murders of Geirfinnur and Gudmundur Einarsson.

  Like the other suspects, Gudjon had not been in court to hear the verdicts. He read about the sentences in the newspaper the next day. ‘I was astonished in a way. I thought the judge didn’t have much to go on and didn’t see what crime he had on me.’ The final verdict would come from the higher Supreme Court, but they would have to wait for that case for some time.

  After the torments of the past year, though, Gudjon felt he had to get on with it and tried to see the positive side. ‘What matters is that you were going to live it, there is no death penalty, you’re not going to hang.’ Though condemned to 12 years in prison, surprisingly he had fond memories of Christmas 1977: ‘It was very nice, fine food. The Salvation Army came and I never had so many socks,’ he said, with his customary sardonic grin.

  On 2 January 1978, Gudjon was put inside a big American car and driven away from Sidumuli to his new home. It was chafing cold, with snow covering Reykjavik, cloaking its grey monotony. He was leaving the city he despised, heading south west across the Snaefellsness peninsula, a landscape steeped in Icelandic mythology with its scarred lava fields and the brooding, dormant Snæfellsjökull volcano blanketed by a glacier, but with the power to unleash a torrent of sulphur and ash.

  His destination was Kviabryggja, an open prison of low rise buildings at the end of a single-track road, bounded by the North Atlantic and the snow-flecked lava fields. Towering over it was Kirkjufell, the church shaped mountain sitting across the limp
id fjord. Kviabryggja was like a holiday camp compared to the harsh strictures of Sidumuli. There were around a dozen inmates, each with their own room in a relaxed environment.

  The other suspects would not have the same pleasures. Tryggvi, Kristjan and Saevar were just desperate to get out of solitary confinement. In the public’s mind they were all condemned and Saevar and Kristjan became the first people in Iceland in over a century to be convicted of a double murder.

  19

  January 1980

  In the two years since the original conviction, the suspects had been scattered to jails around the country. Gudjon was still in Kviabryggja open prison enjoying the relative freedom. Kristjan, Saevar and Tryggvi were in Litla Hraun. They were no longer in solitary confinement but between them they had spent the equivalent of almost five years in isolation. Erla and Albert Klahn had also been sentenced to prison terms but had been out of jail waiting for the final judgement from the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. Since the first judgement in 1977, the Reykjavik Six had taken different approaches to their sentences.

  Saevar was focused on proving his innocence and that the police and the judges had fitted him up. He was determined to have his moment in court. Tryggvi, who had been equally passionate about his innocence, had mellowed in Litla Hraun. ‘I have personally learned something. This prison is nothing. It’s more like a big rural home… I am beginning to get an understanding because life has a purpose,’ he later told a journalist who interviewed him in jail.

  Kristjan was also trying to use his time in prison to get his life in order and had started studying. Albert Klahn tried to keep a low profile, shunning any publicity about the case, wary of the public vilification of him and his friends as deranged, dangerous killers.

  Erla too felt the hostility and reproach when she was out in the streets of Reykjavik. ‘I went through a lot of image issues, it was very difficult for me to be seen in public,’ she recalled.

  Gudjon had taken a phlegmatic view of the case. He felt his time in Kviabryggja prison wasn’t so bad. ‘We would lie in the bath and smoke weed, you could listen to music whenever you want.’ The inmates would make hay for the surrounding farms or work on boats for the fishermen in the town nearby. ‘The doors were never locked, there was never any fighting,’ Gudjon recalled.

  On the wood-panelled walls of the Supreme Court hung the portraits of the august men who had previously held the offices of the highest court in Iceland. The current incumbents sat in an arc facing the courtroom with the lawyers and defendants called to present their testimony at a wooden lectern only a few feet away. To the side were long white-framed windows with thick drapes; at the back of the court were half a dozen rows of hard wooden benches, as comfortable as church pews, for the witnesses and observers. The Supreme Court had the power to quash the original conviction, to extend the sentences for those who hadn’t received a life sentence or to reduce the jail terms. They would have the final word, after this there would be no further appeal.

  The prosecution got the first bite of the cherry. Over four days, the prosecutor Thordur Bjornsson spent 15 hours presenting the state’s case. The Gudmundur case was fairly straightforward; there was Erla and Albert’s testimony and the confessions. Geirfinnur’s murder was much more tricky. Again he went through the key confessions of Kristjan, Saevar, Erla and Gudjon at different points throughout 1976. He believed there was no difference between Saevar, Kristjan and Gudjon; they were all jointly responsible for the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson. He rejected all of the points the suspects’ defence had made. The defence’s argument that they had been mentally traumatised by their treatment didn’t hold up. He read out the doctors’ reports, which stated the suspects were all mentally capable. There was no forensic evidence or bodies but Icelandic law stretched back many centuries and Thordur found three convictions from the nineteenth century that occurred without a body being found, so there was legal precedent for this. He thundered that what was most galling was that four years after the first arrest there had been no repentance from any of the suspects. He told the judges, ‘It’s my sincere hope that you believe you can find the truth and I hope come to the same conclusion as me’ – that the six were all guilty. He delivered a final warning: ‘These are dangerous people,’ he concluded, ‘and the country is entitled to protection from them.’

  The six defence lawyers were given far less time to present their cases. Kristjan Vidarsson’s lawyer was first: the fresh faced, dimple chinned, Paul Palsson. He delivered a forceful denunciation of the investigation and the subsequent prosecution. The case rested on the strength of the confessions which he contended had been obtained illegally. Kristjan had been given four different kinds of anti-depressants. He said the effects of these drugs were that you could get suspects ‘to confess to almost anything’. For long periods Palsson had not been allowed to see his client. Palsson contended that the state had not provided any ‘legitimate proof’ of guilt. ‘The body has not been found. There was no clear motive.’ He rejected the prosecution claim that Kristjan had killed Gudmundur Einarsson after an argument about getting money for alcohol: ‘Who kills a man for this?’ he asked the judges sitting impassively in front of him.

  The Geirfinnur case, he said, was even more flawed. Kristjan had retracted his confession, as had all of the accused, apart from Gudjon Skarphedinsson, but his recollection was very cloudy. ‘There was no evidence found out in this matter, despite comprehensive research, the most comprehensive which has been undertaken in an Icelandic criminal case,’ Palsson reminded the judges.

  There had been massive inconsistencies in the statements of the suspects until Karl Schutz arrived. His press conference at the conclusion of the investigation had been massively prejudicial and Palsson said he believed ‘this would have had a very big impact’ on the public perception of the suspects. ‘The case does not contain any evidence,’ he stated. ‘All the prosecution had come up with is an ancient case from Iceland in the 1800s where someone had been tried without a body being found.’

  Saevar’s lawyer, Jon Oddsson, spent six hours setting out Saevar’s defence to the court. The Gudmundur investigation had been badly run and he listed some of the evidence that had not been pursued. There were the threatening phone calls Gudmundur’s mother told police her son had been receiving from an older man. Who was he and could he have been involved in the disappearance? There was Saevar’s alibi for the night of the murder that he had been with another woman in Reykjavik. The detective Gisli Gudmundsson had wanted to investigate this further but he had been told by the judges not to pursue it. There was the phone not working at the apartment in Hamarsbraut, so how did they call Albert to transport the body? Important witnesses had not been interviewed, specifically Erla’s neighbours, who had not been asked about the obvious disturbance as Gudmundur was beaten to death and then loaded into a car in the dead of night to be driven to a cold, rocky grave in the lava. There were other uncomfortable truths the police had glossed over: Saevar’s arrests for a drugs offence by the customs chief Kristjan Petursson, a week after Gudmundur went missing. This was in the apartment where Gudmundur had supposedly been killed but Petursson didn’t see any blood on the blanket, which then, miraculously two years later, investigators had managed to find but which didn’t match Gudmundur’s blood type anyway and had been another red herring.

  Oddsson went through the assaults and torture he said Saevar had suffered. The prison chaplain Jon Bjarman had complained about this and Saevar had been denied access to his lawyer for many months. Saevar also had an alibi for the Geirfinnur case; he had been to the cinema with Erla and his mother. The police claimed that there had been enough time for Saevar and Erla to have dropped his mother home and then driven to Keflavik. This was a point picked up by Gudjon’s defence who had worked out the VW they had driven to Keflavik would have needed to go at almost 100km an hour in order to have reached Keflavik in time to have rung Geirfinnur at 10:30pm, summoning him to his death. To do this wi
th four people inside stretched credulity.

  Erla’s lawyer, Gudmundur Ingvi Sigurdsson, took a different tack. He presented Erla as a vulnerable young woman, controlled by Saevar. She’d had a hard childhood, rarely in the same house for long, moving 21 times in her short life. Her parents divorced when she was 16 and Saevar had huge influence over her. She was afraid of him, he had been violent towards her and she repeatedly tried to get away from him, but he would always find her and play on her compassion and persuade her to let him back into her life. Sigurdsson pointed to the evidence from the psychiatric assessment, that Erla was vulnerable to being influenced by others. There was great uncertainty in the case, he emphasised, and asked, ‘Is there sufficient proof that these young people are responsible for the disappearance of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur?’ He said Erla wanted to live for her child, but a shadow hovered over her life: a prison sentence that would make everything even worse for her.

  Tryggvi’s defence was emphatic: he was not at Hamarsbraut on the night of 26 January and there had been no fight between him and Gudmundur. Initially there had been some doubt about the identity of the third man who had been with Kristjan and Saevar when Gudmundur was killed. Tryggvi’s lawyer, Hilmar, argued that Erla didn’t know Tryggvi and the first time she gave a clear description of a man that matched his description was in March 1977, over a year after her first statement. She had drawn a picture of the third man involved in the Gudmundur attack but it was not in the police file – was it Tryggvi or was she guilty of falsely accusing someone, as she had done with the Klubburin men? Unfortunately, he said, Tryggvi didn’t have the same means to defend himself as the Klubburin suspects. His lawyer said that Tryggvi had been mistreated, and had his mouth taped over. ‘It is amazing something like that should be possible in an Icelandic prison,’ his lawyer told the court. He went through the many inconsistencies about where Gudmundur’s body was said to have been buried. It had been in Alftanes where the lava flows down to a peaceful beach and months later it was in Fossvogur cemetery, but crucially it was in neither of these places and still hadn’t been found.