The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  My journey to the Reykjavik Confessions began in spring 2014 with the forensic psychologist, Gisli Gudjonsson. He was being interviewed for a programme about memory and had told a colleague of mine, Helen, about a strange series of events in Iceland that happened 40 years ago, a story little known outside the island nation. Six people had been convicted of two murders they didn’t remember. There were no bodies, no forensic evidence, just their confessions. It was unlike any story I had come across before.

  The BBC commissioned a long, in-depth online piece and a radio documentary telling the story in detail and I became an integral part of the project. It was a complex and difficult case to understand, and I had the job of writing this story and helping our readers make sense of it. (One of my editors warned me, ‘This has to be the best thing you have ever written.’) It wasn’t just about the facts; I had to get into the minds of some of the key characters, to find out why they would confess to two murders they hadn’t committed. I began having phone conversations with Erla, Gisli, Gudjon, and the children of Saevar and Tryggvi, feeling my way into the story.

  Weeks later, I arrived in Iceland to investigate with my colleagues, Helen and Andy. Stepping out into that dark winter night the snow was stinging as the flinty wind that forced it under my coat hood and into the soft folds of my scarf. This was the Iceland I had experienced before, raw and uncompromising. I hurried into the warmth of the hire car. The snow began to settle as the car drove along the deserted highway 41 that cuts through the Reykjanes peninsula and the vast petrified ocean that held a secret which continued to haunt Iceland.

  A few days later, when Erla took us into these lava fields near her old home in Hafnarfjordur, and we clambered over the cracked, blackened earth where the spring moss was starting to bloom, stretching out to the horizon, I began to realise the frustration of the suspects trying to pinpoint a location they didn’t know, and of the police, who could never hope to find a body in such a vast monotonous landscape without help. This was where they all became lost, wandering both literally and metaphorically as the police grasped for any tangible evidence.

  Erla was also our guide at the Raudholar where the police believed she had watched Geirfinnur’s remains being burned and buried under the hard, red rock. It was important to see the Raudholar, a place I would return to again, to realise the impossibility of digging a grave in freezing temperatures and how the burned remains were never discovered in a place that is always filled with visitors.

  Perhaps the biggest challenge was finding witnesses, 40 years after the event, who had been in Sidumuli jail at the time and could provide some insight into what went on. The former prison guard, Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson, was one of these. I had barely arrived at my ugly concrete hotel with its smeared windows when my mobile phone vibrated. It was a text message from an Icelandic number I didn’t recognise.

  ‘Is this Simon Cox?’ the message asked.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ I warily replied.

  ‘l want to meet, to talk about the case,’ came the neutral reply.

  Almost immediately the mystery texter pinged a follow-up message: ‘It’s something I haven’t told anyone before.’

  I’d never gotten a break like this so quickly. When I met Gudmundur a few days later, he wanted to talk about the torture Saevar had experienced and the mistreatment of the other suspects. And he wasn’t the only guard who wanted to express his anger at the suspects’ treatment. Hlynur Magnusson told me a similar tale when I drove out to the lonely Westfjords where he lived at the end of a steep valley looking over a silvery inlet. Their memories would help me piece together the scattered fragments of the story, even if at times they couldn’t remember, or it was too painful or shameful to recall particular events.

  I needed to see the documents and diaries that recorded the scrambled memories of the suspects to track how they had been distorted by the repeated interviews and in some cases, years of isolation. I needed to see these tangible remnants from the case, to read through some of the entries and see what effect they still had on the suspects.

  One of the most important of these was the brown plastic folder that had been stored away by Gudjon for years in his remote house on a wind blasted plain in Stadurstudur, an hour’s drive from the nearest hamlet. It contained the yellowed lined pages of the diary he had written inside Sidumuli prison, painfully charting his time in solitary confinement. Gudjon was clearly uncomfortable looking through the pages and pages of neatly written entries that charted the corrupting of his memory. ‘It reminds me of something I don’t want to remember or want to think about. This is not a diary about great things happening… There is some desperation and moments of collapse,’ he said.

  Tryggvi’s surviving diaries, kept secret for so long by his daughter, Kristin, were also important to see. Their discovery had propelled the case forward and brought in Gisli Gudjonsson. Gisli too had kept the lie detector test he had conducted on Gudjon – the test that had first given him doubts over his guilt and that Karl Schutz had wanted to get his hands on.

  Much of the interaction between the police and suspects was not recorded at all and on the occasions when it was, it would be the briefest precis of the interviews. There was one exception to this, a series of photos that had truly shocked me. I wasn’t sure what I would find in the neat automated stacks of the Icelandic National Archive, stored inside a cavernous former cattleshed. Inside one of the many boxes from the investigations was an astonishing set of black and white photos from 23 January 1977: Karl Schutz’s infamous reconstruction in Keflavik. Seeing Kristjan re-enact his purported crimes was jaw dropping. As I went through the images of him posing next to the makeshift dummy of Geirfinnur’s body and then holding one of the detectives around the neck in the way he had supposedly strangled Geirfinnur, I could almost see how his memory had been polluted and tainted. This had occurred after a year of interrogations, interviews with the other suspects and visits out to the lava fields, the Raudholar and Keflavik. How could anyone retain a clear sense of their past in such circumstances? All of the suspects had attempted to find a narrative that the detectives would believe, and had turned their fantasies into realty. These became so deeply embedded that even now Albert has doubts about whether or not he took part in the disposal of Gudmundur Einarsson’s body, which is why he didn’t want to talk to me about it. Gudjon still has doubts too, particularly at night, when he worries that he knows where Geirfinnur Einarsson is buried. Although their prison sentences ended decades ago but what happened to them inside Sidumuli has blighted their lives.

  After the online article was published and the documentary aired, I knew the story well but there were still so many unanswered questions about the case. I knew this story was bigger than just an article. I continued wading through the hundreds and hundreds of pages of official documents about the case that recorded the relentless interviews and pressure placed on the young suspects. I spoke to as many people as possible who were there at the time and were willing to share their experiences. I contacted the original investigators, who continued to rebuff my approaches and refused to meet or communicate. Perhaps to admit they were wrong after so long was obviously too much for them, though I heard through third parties that they were still convinced they got the right people.

  The evidence, however, does not support this. Whenever I tell people about the Reykjavik Confessions they always ask me ‘Are they guilty?’ Most people in Iceland, certainly the younger generations, don’t doubt the innocence of the Reykjavik Six, while among the older generation there are those who still consider them guilty. They can’t or don’t want to believe that the police could have gotten it so wrong. It seems, though, that Erla, Saevar and their friends were condemned not for a crime they committed, but for existing on the fringes of mainstream society. Their confessions have long been deemed unreliable, and no evidence of a crime has ever been found. Who knows what the six of them could have done if their lives hadn’t been wrecked by their convictions?


  At the time of writing, the case is far from complete. The Supreme Court has not decided yet whether to quash the convictions of the five suspects whose cases have been referred to them. The book, for the first time, brings together all of the disparate strands, hearing from witnesses who have never spoken publicly before and laying out how an investigation went out of control and damaged six young people’s lives. I hope it serves as a cautionary tale for those who support the use of solitary confinement.

  There are so many people to thank who have helped me on this long journey. The two who stand out are Erla and Gisli. Erla was always generous with her time, willing to answer questions and to open up about what is still a very painful wound. Gisli has answered more emails and questions than I can dare to count, and I am deeply indebted to him for his invaluable insight. I also want to thank him for telling my colleague, Helen Grady, about the story in the first place, and starting me on this three-year journey to understand the Reykjavik Confessions. I want to thank Helen for her support and Andy Brownstone who came and filmed some of the haunting landscapes which were so integral to this. Gudjon was the only other surviving suspect willing to give up lots of his time to go back over the minutiae of his isolation in prison and his life before and since the case, over many cups of tea and cake. Saevar’s friend Sigurdor Staffsson has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the case that he was willing to share and was always on hand to answer questions. Even in ill health, Hlynur, the former prison guard, was willing to talk or answer messages and Gudmundur – the mystery texter – wanted to tell me of his concerns when he was a prison guard at Sidumuli. Tryggvi’s daughter, Kristin, also generously gave her time and energy. I hope the conclusion of the Supreme Court case will bring them all some peace and closure.

  Simon Cox

  London, November 2017

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473531024

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  Copyright © Simon Cox 2018

  Simon Cox has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by BBC Books in 2018

  www.penguin.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781785942884

  Cover image is used with the kind permission of the National Archives of Iceland.

  Chapter 2

  fn1 The detectives in Reykjavik saw their Keflavik cousins as rural inferiors dealing with nickel and dime problems, while they investigated the more serious crimes from their office in Borgutun 7, in the centre of the capital.

  Chapter 5

  fn1 He didn’t tell them how he managed to do this during a heavy snow storm which had been so bad that taxi drivers had gone home.

  fn2 This was a different car to the yellow Toyota that Albert said he had driven. It was late and dark and Saevar did not drive so his knowledge of cars was probably limited. This contradiction would become more important later on.

  Chapter 12

  fn1 Schutz’s career had not been without controversy. In 1962 he had led a police operation that stormed the headquarters of the magazine, Der Spiegel. It was the height of the Cold War and the magazine’s founder and two reporters were accused of publishing West German military secrets. The operation was a disaster from the very start. The police had staged a car chase across Hamburg trying to arrest Spiegel’s publisher but it was an innocent pensioner they had wrongly identified.

  This was a time when the news magazine had huge power and a vast staff, with 117 separate offices. The police occupied the building for a month scouring every one of the offices. They soon reached a dead end as they realised they would have to examine millions of documents and papers to find the evidence they needed. There was a huge backlash from the German public who felt that the state was suppressing freedom of speech. The scandal would lead to the resignation of the country’s defence minister and the downfall of the West German government. Schutz escaped from this without a blemish.

  Chapter 13

  fn1 Even among the prison guards there was unease about this. Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson, then a gangly 20-year-old warden said, ‘There wasn’t a week when we didn’t have to handcuff people’ in this way. This had been sanctioned from the very top and was a favoured tactic of the chief warden on Saevar. Hlynur Magnusson, one of the other prison guards who still worried about their conscience, wasn’t willing to sit by and let it happen. When he came on shift, he saw the man whom Saevar had passed notes with cuffed on the floor and he took immediate action: ‘I freed him and that never happened again when I was on watch.’

  Chapter 14

  fn1 Albert’s father had bought the car in the summer of 1974.