by Simon Cox
On 11 December detectives spent four hours questioning Kristjan. Neither the police nor the prison kept a detailed record of what was said, but he was asked about his friendship with Erla and Saevar when the embezzlement took place. Kristjan told them Saevar had mentioned that his girlfriend Erla had talked about how to carry out fraud at the post and telephone company.
The next day Sigurd was released from prison and flown to the east of the country for Christmas with his family. The police now had enough to get to Saevar.
4
December 1975
It was early in the morning. Erla hadn’t long finished feeding her baby daughter, Julia, when the police arrived in force at her apartment in Kopavagur, in one of the tower blocks that had sprung up around Reykjavik. She lived here with Saevar, who had been taken in the previous day for questioning. So Erla knew it was only a matter of time before they came for her too.
Erla frantically called her sister to take her baby before she was driven to Sidumuli prison. The police let Erla stew for days in her cell and she tried to play the hardened criminal, determined she wouldn’t give in, sticking two fingers up at people she thought of as ‘assholes’. The chief asshole was the investigating magistrate, Orn Hoskuldsson. He looked like he had walked straight out of a TV crime drama, with his leather jacket, thatch of curly hair, thick moustache and imposing, forceful manner. Those who knew him said he was taciturn, rarely cracking a smile. Rookie cop Sigurbjorn Eggertsson was his sidekick. He had only been in the service a few years but was a smooth-talking communicator who could get suspects to open up and was predicted to go far.
The police had collected plenty of incriminating evidence, including eyewitnesses who had seen Erla signing for money with a forged ID, but for some reason they had sat on this evidence for months. It was only after Sigurd Almarsson’s prison tip off that they acted. Erla wasn’t going to give in easily. She may have been small but she was feisty too. If anything, she was proud of her crime. ‘I never felt shame about it,’ she admitted, ‘It’s mischief that you get up to when you’re younger to show those assholes, we had all this stuff against the system and it really pissed off a lot of people.’
In the early 1970s, Iceland had become consumed with fear about drugs and what they might do to the tiny nation. A special drugs police and drugs court had been set up, mostly handing out fines. This was a time when policing was like the Wild West. Iceland had tried to curb this with strict rules and procedures on how suspects should be questioned. Detectives were supposed to have an open mind, not to ask leading questions and to make sure suspects weren’t interrogated for longer than six hours. But the investigators questioned Erla repeatedly about the post office embezzlement. She was interrogated seven times in two days for over 25 hours in total. They were slowly grinding her down. What worried her most was that if she confessed she would be sent to prison and taken away from Julia. For Erla her baby daughter was ‘the best thing that had ever happened to me, the only thing that had meaning in my life’. Saevar paled in comparison to the tiny being she was still breastfeeding. Julia was an affirming, empowering force that gave her the strength to stand up to Saevar. When he had threatened to hit Erla she had flipped, grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. She could feel she had more strength than Saevar, when he fell to the floor. He lay there and gave Erla the smile that always melted her heart and sheepishly conceded, ‘now my woman can beat me’.
Erla was from a successful, high-profile family. Her dad, Bolli was working for Icelandair at JFK airport when her mum, also named Erla, fell for the older handsome man in his airline uniform. Bolli already had two children, Einar and his namesake Bolli from a previous marriage, who had been raised by his sister. Erla was only 18 at the time and was soon pregnant with Bolli’s child. Days before the baby was due, Bolli was on a Loftleider flight from Luxembourg to the US which was scheduled to make a refuelling stop in Reykjavik. An hour before the plane was due to land it flew into a snowstorm and all contact with the crew was lost. A search was launched but it was assumed the plane had crashed into the sea and the six crew had perished. Their obituaries appeared in the newspapers and Erla was heartbroken; barely an adult, she was facing life as a widow with a new baby.
Four days after the plane went missing, though, when all hope seemed lost, a coastguard vessel picked up a faint radio signal: ‘Location unknown – all alive’. It was the aeroplane crew; they had survived and were transmitting from a life raft. They were on Bardarbunga, high on the Vatnajokull glacier, a vast expanse of ice 8,000-kilometre square reaching up to Iceland’s highest peak, Hvannadalshnjukur. A perilous rescue mission brought the entire crew back home, in time for the birth of Bolli and Erla’s son Arthur.
Baby Erla arrived five years later. She was one of her father’s seven children and they were high achievers. Her half-brother Einar was the most famous, becoming a huge basketball star in Iceland, inducted into the nation’s basketball hall of fame. Her brother Arthur would follow his dad into the airline industry, working for Icelandair in Germany while her other brother, Bolli, worked for the Icelandic government. One of her sisters married into one of Iceland’s wealthiest families, and another emigrated to Hawaii. But from a young age Erla felt different to her siblings. ‘I had nothing in common with them, I started stealing and smoking cigarettes and always looking for my own space.’ She felt so alienated from her family that she had a fantasy she dreamed up: ‘a doorbell would ring and a husband and wife with the same age kids say “you were swapped accidentally and you have our daughter” and I would go with them.’
Saevar was the ultimate embodiment of this rebellious nature and her choice hadn’t gone down well. A rift developed long before her arrest which led her mother to vow never to have Saevar under her roof again. Erla had chosen her young boyfriend over her family. The wound was so deep that when Julia was born in September 1975, Erla told the nurses not to let her mum visit and see the young baby. ‘I didn’t want to talk to my mum, she hurt me so much,’ Erla recalled, ‘she started calling me after I had given birth I said leave me alone, stay away from me.’ Her mum persuaded the nurses to let her sneak in and see her granddaughter without Erla’s permission. When Erla found out, she threw a fit.
It seemed they would remain estranged but they were brought together again in unusual circumstances on a sunny day in the autumn of 1975. Iceland was still firmly stuck in the macho, sexist culture of the 1970s: men did all the hard jobs – politics, business, teaching – while a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the bed. The country’s nascent feminist movement decided to fight back, and on 24 October they organised a day of protest. Thousands of women went on strike for the day, refusing to work, cook or clean. Banks, schools, nurseries and factories all had to close. Men were forced to bring their children to work while 25,000 women, over a tenth of the population, gathered in Reykjavik to listen to speeches, sing and discuss their place in society. Erla was among them with Julia, now a month old, in her arms. Erla was not part of the feminist movement in Iceland – groups like the Red Stockings who had helped organise the protest – but she loved what they had achieved. ‘I was such an outsider,’ she remembered, ‘I liked the feeling in the air of female empowerment and the comments of men indicated they were scared and I liked that.’ As she worked her way through the crowd she bumped into her mother. There amidst the crowds, banners, speeches, singing and air of rebellion they had an emotional reunion. Erla agreed her mum could come and visit and see her new granddaughter.
Erla had hoped the birth of Julia would change Saevar’s behaviour but he was incapable of living a normal life. In the two years Erla had been with Saevar, he was always dodging the police. When Saevar was arrested for smuggling three kilos of hash from Rotterdam hidden in Gudjon Skarphinsson’s car, it was only two months after Julia’s birth. Erla’s patience had been exhausted: ‘We can’t live like this anymore, we have to hide away, we can’t even have our name on the doorbell.’ Saevar had tried to reassure her th
at he would make some money and they could move to South America and start afresh. Erla knew it was a hollow promise that would never happen.
A few days after this conversation, Saevar arrived home in shock, dripping wet. On his way back to their apartment in Kopavagur, on the outskirts of Reykjavik, he had been walking through a valley when something whizzed past him. He realised it was a bullet, meant for him. He fell into the water and scrambled up a bank, running away as fast as he could. He was highly agitated. ‘Someone tried to shoot me,’ he told Erla as they stood in their tiny kitchen. He threw off his sodden clothes into the wash room, blocking a tap, managing to flood the apartment. It had all become too much for Erla. She told him, ‘That’s it, it’s over, I can’t live like this.’ She felt Saevar finally understood her unhappiness. Erla was emphatic, she was going to leave him and take everything, as she had bought all of the possessions they had. She didn’t want any misunderstandings later so she drew up a note stating this, which she got him to sign.
When Erla was arrested a month later, the police found this note and used it to drive a wedge further between Erla and Saevar. ‘Look at this guy,’ Orn Hoskuldsson told her, ‘he’s selling drugs and you have a new born baby. He doesn’t care about this baby and it’s always going to be trouble.’ Orn told Erla stories about her boyfriend and his links to crime, which she had not heard before and added to her doubts about him.
During questioning, the police repeatedly raised her absence from her daughter, tugging at the guilt of her being away from a young baby, barely three months old. She said Orn Hoskuldsson told her, ‘The child will grow up to respect the mother who co-operated, but if you do not co-operate, you will never see your baby until it’s an adult.’ Erla believed that if she owned up to the fraud she would be released and be re-united with her daughter, able to hold her close and breathe in the milky scent of her skin.
Erla was alone, a young mother barely out of her teens, with no one to lean on and ask for help. Although she hated the idea of giving in to the police, she said ‘motherhood got the better of me’.
After days of intensive questioning, she told her interrogators, ‘I’m gonna come clean, so whatever I tell you now will be the last thing I say and I’ll walk out of here, I’m finished.’ She confessed to the embezzlement and signed a statement admitting the crime. She felt relieved; at last she would be released and could see her baby. After a week in solitary confinement she was emotionally drained and ready to go home.
As she got up to leave, Orn Hoskuldsson pulled out a photo of a handsome young man with long dark hair. ‘Do you know this guy?’ he asked. Erla recognised him straightaway as Gudmundur Einarsson. She had met him four years earlier at a school disco, when she was sixteen, and had seen his picture in the paper after he disappeared. ‘I remembered him as he liked me that evening,’ she told the police, ‘he was good looking. We had a pleasant chat, I was flattered and I had seen him one more time downtown.’
Orn couldn’t remember why he chose this point to ask her about this, but the police had heard rumours thought to be from Sigurd Almarsson, the prisoner who had informed on Saevar, that Saevar might know something about the unsolved disappearance of Gudmundur Einarsson.
Now Erla had to face a whole new set of questions from Orn Hoskuldsson: ‘What were you doing in January 1974? Where was Saevar?’ As soon as he starting pursuing this, Erla felt extremely uncomfortable. ‘This was a time in my life that I didn’t want to discuss with anyone,’ she recalled, ‘It had been a really bad time.’ It was unlikely anyone could remember the specifics of one evening two years later, but Erla knew exactly what happened that night. She remembered the nightmare, the one involving Saevar’s friends outside the window trying to get into the apartment. It was the incident after this that had scarred her and that she did not want to revisit.
When she had woken the morning after her nightmare, Erla was covered in excrement, having soiled herself. She couldn’t believe she had been so depressed, with so little self-esteem that she could let this happen. Her immediate response was to dispose of the evidence before anyone else saw it. She yanked the sheet from her bed and took it outside to the rubbish bin, but to her dismay there was nothing else in there to cover it. She panicked, ‘I thought the neighbours are going to see this and that was my biggest shame at the age of 18.’ She put the sheet in anyway, and then hurried back to her apartment, hoping no one noticed her. The ignominy was overwhelming. She had tried to bury it so deep that she was scared to acknowledge it, even to herself.
In the interrogation room filled with a cloudy fug of smoke, Erla felt the investigators were getting close to her shame. She told them about the dream and that when she had woken she had gone outside to the rubbish bin where she saw a sheet that had been thrown in at the bottom of it. Orn pushed further, asking Erla to tell him more about the nightmare. Why she had gone to the bin and why was the sheet there? Erla didn’t have a plausible answer and she sounded evasive. The police began to pull at this thread. Erla recalled, ‘Everything became about this bed sheet.’ The questioning went on and on for hours. But still Erla held on to her secret. ‘I never told them. I was never going to tell a living soul,’ she said. Her shame and embarrassment would cost her dearly.
The detectives read Erla’s reticence as guilt. They told her they thought she had experienced something very traumatic. They explained to her, ‘We can see something terrible has happened to you, don’t worry, we’re going to help you remember, we know exactly how to do that.’ The imposing Orn Hoskuldsson came right up to Erla, ‘We will help you,’ he said, ‘but one thing is for certain: you are not leaving here until we have found out what happened to Gudmundur Einarsson.’
Under the Icelandic system, as the investigating magistrate, Orn Hoskuldsson had immense power. Iceland had an inquisitorial system, where the magistrate was in charge of the investigation. When cases came to trial there was no jury – district judges would hear the evidence from the prosecution and defence and then pass judgement. If found guilty, the accused could appeal to the Supreme Court where the five Supreme Court judges would pass final jugement. They could quash the original district court verdict or reduce the length of sentences.
Under this system, the detectives Eggert Bjarnasson and Sigurbjorn Eggertsson worked for the courts not the police, so in this case they answered to Orn. If suspects weren’t willing to play ball the magistrate could remand them for months at a time, until they admitted their guilt. Orn remanded Erla for a further 30 days and said he would be back for another interview the next day.
Erla was left in no doubt how serious the situation was. She was frightened that they would hold her indefinitely. She wasn’t going to be reunited with her baby. Instead she was sent her back to her cell with a desk, a thin mattress on the hard bed and a slim row of glass bricks instead of a window. She went ‘from being on the way to seeing my baby into a darkness that was indefinite. It was a complete shock.’
Alone in her cell, Erla couldn’t sleep. Outside the murky Icelandic winter had taken hold; a doleful darkness enveloped the island for months only allowing the anaemic winter sun a brief appearance. For a week she had held out against the police and denied her part in the embezzlement, scared that if she confessed, she would go to prison and be taken away from her baby. She had given in because they had promised she would be released, but now the police saw her as a deceiver and a liar. If she had lied about the fraud, she was probably lying about Gudmundur too. Her spirit was broken; she was vulnerable and knew they were not going to let her go until she told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Still in shock, she began replaying her memories from the night Gudmundur went missing.
The police’s questioning had started to get to Erla. Alone in the darkness, curled up on her thin mattress, she began to doubt her own memory as she relived the nightmare over and over again. ‘I had heard something in passing about how you can forget something if it is too painful. It sounded like they knew about that sort of stuff. But
still at this point in time it was very clear to me that nothing had happened because I remembered that night.’ She started to wonder if you could commit a crime and not remember it, even one as heinous as a murder. Was your mind powerful enough to suppress such a terrible memory? In the interview, the police had convinced Erla that it was possible. They said that they would help her to remember, to unlock those toxic memories – no matter how long it took. She was told to recall everything she could about that January night in 1974. She would help them, or she would never be freed.
Knowing that she had to offer the detectives something the next day, Erla went through, step by step, all of the memories she could dredge up from that time. Erla wondered, ‘Is it possible they killed someone in the apartment and I saw the whole thing and I can’t remember?’ Her apartment in Hafnarfjordur was extremely small and she wondered where a fight could have taken place without anything breaking or the neighbours upstairs being disturbed. She tried to imagine different scenarios, which she replayed in her mind over and over. By the time she was interrogated again the next morning she felt, ‘Half of me was trying to decide, “Oh, just tell them a story and get out of here”. The other half was saying, I can’t make something up, because innocent people could go to prison.’
The investigators were subtly leading Erla, asking if certain things were possible, if she could recall certain events. They kept returning to the nightmare of the men outside her apartment. ‘Was it possible Saevar’s friends were outside the window?’ they asked. ‘Do you remember anyone coming in?’ Erla tried to be helpful but her replies were vague: of course it was possible, they might really have been there and trying to get in, she couldn’t say for sure. Orn, Eggert and Sigurbjorn kept hammering home the fact that Saevar had brought these men to the house.