The Reykjavik Confessions

by Simon Cox

  She told them about a scheme, more of a prank, that Einar had carried out that had been discussed at some of the parties thrown by Hulda’s brother, Valdimar. When he was younger, Einar had set up a chain letter where each person who received it would send a bottle of whisky to the name at the top. Einar and his friends ended up with so much whisky they embarked on what Erla called a ‘1,000 day party’. For Erla, it was a throwaway remark, but it planted the seed in her interogators’ minds that Einar was someone who could get access to illegal alcohol and could therefore be involved in smuggling.

  Einar was friends with Valdimar, who in turn knew Magnus Leopoldsson, the manager of Klubburin. This was important information for the police. Magnus was the spitting image of the infamous clay head the police had commissioned in 1975 of the man in the cafe who had supposedly summoned Geirfinnur to his death. The police had long suspected Klubburin of selling smuggled alcohol and, despite his best efforts, the fevered speculation that Magnus was involved in Geirfinnur’s disappearance had never quite gone away. Now, a year later, through Erla’s conversation about booze and her brother’s attempts to get alcohol, Magnus was being drawn back into the police’s orbit. At midnight they let Erla go, ready to move on to her boyfriend.

  Saevar was the one inmate who wasn’t buckling from the strictures of solitary confinement. Although he had confessed to involvement in the Gudmundur case, he would then go for days refusing to answer any more questions, which outraged the detectives. ‘It was like a tension in the air every time the investigators entered the cell,’ Saevar said. ‘It was like they thought I was behind all the major crimes committed in the country.’

  One of their tactics was to leave late at night and return the next morning to ask the same questions. If they didn’t like Saevar’s response the police would resort to tough measures. Saevar said during the first few weeks in custody they had twisted the collar of his shirt to strangle him until he lost consciousness.

  When the investigators presented Saevar with Erla’s testimony on 22 January he said he knew about the Geirfinnur disappearance, because everyone did. He had watched the case on the television and read about it. Then, remarkably, he opened up:

  A few days before Geirfinnur went missing, Saevar was walking on Laugavegur, the wide road that starts out at the edge of Reykjavik and turns into the city’s main shopping street. It was late, between ten and eleven in the evening, when a man in a blue Mercedes called Saevar over. He knew him straight away as Einar Bollason, Erla’s half brother. He asked Saevar into his car for a chat. There were two others in the car. Saevar recognised the driver as Magnus Leopoldsson, the manager of Klubburin. The other man he didn’t know, but he later found out this was Geirfinnur Einarsson. They took a drive around the city; it was November when the cold and thrusting wind drove people off the streets and into the warmth of home or one of the few bars. The men knew Saevar had connections who knew how to move on illicit goods. They knew he was importing drugs and selling them, and so they had a propostion for him; they wanted to use his skills to sell on smuggled alcohol.

  They stopped outside Klubburin, the hub of the city’s nightlife, where they told Saevar they were expecting a big shipment of vodka and other spirits. They asked him to explore potential ways to distribute the alcohol without being discovered. Einar and Magnus did the talking while Geirfinnur stayed quiet.

  Einar followed this up a few days later by calling at Saevar’s mother’s house to take him for another late-night drive. As Saevar got into the red Fiat he saw Magnus was there again along with party boy Valdimar Olsen, brother of Saevar’s ex-girlfriend, Hulda. As the four men drove around Reykjavik past closed shops, the men wanted to know if Saevar had figured out where he might sell the smuggled alcohol. They were heading to Keflavik and asked Saevar to join them.

  They drove along the Reykjavikvegur through the desolate, silent, black lava fields, with the background howl and beat of the wind. The men talked about the alcohol scheme, and Saevar’s involvement in the drugs trade.

  When the Fiat reached Keflavik they made for the harbour where they were to meet Geirfinnur. They weren’t the only ones there; a second group had arrived in another car. The plan was for Valdimar and Magnus to go out to sea in a small boat to retrieve the alcohol which had been dumped from one of the cargo boats that Iceland was dependent upon to bring in almost everything the country needed. Saevar and Einar killed time by driving around Keflavik and Njardvik waiting for the smugglers to return. Saevar talked to Einar about his trips abroad and his disastrous attempt to smuggle drugs from Rotterdam.

  When they returned to collect Magnus, he was alone and he had bad news: as they were going to collect the alcohol, there was an accident and Geirfinnur had fallen overboard. He had drowned. Magnus didn’t go into detail about how the accident happened or even if they had got Geirfinnur back into the boat. But he warned Saevar not to mention the accident to anyone. The three men drove back towards Reykjavik and dropped Saevar at his mum’s house at about three in the morning.

  Saevar had found the perfect way to get back at Einar, who he knew despised him and who had thrown him and Erla out of her dad’s apartment in Hafnarfjordur.

  The detectives started playing the suspects off against one another. Having got Saevar’s statement they immediately brought Erla back to the prison so she could hear what he had told them. She couldn’t believe it, ‘I was aware the whole time this was totally crazy,’ she thought. ‘It was so far-fetched and absurd it would never fly with anyone.’ But it soared with the police. After months of effort and a chaotic and flawed early investigation, they finally had an idea of what had happened to Geirfinnur.

  Erla was informed her testimony could affect her closest relatives as they were closing in on her half-brother, Einar. With Gudmundur her mind had been hazy; she thought the events she described at her appartment could have happened. This time she was certain that what Saevar had told the police was fantasy. She was lost, caught up in a world where she said the police were no longer interested in reality. They came up with a theory and found ‘facts’ to match it.

  When Erla had received threatening calls at her mum’s house she had contacted the police. The detectives who visited her to investigate had stated that she was afraid of her brother Einar, Sigurbjorn Eriksson (the owner of Klubburin) and one of his friends. There had been tension with Einar over her relationship with Saevar but she had looked up to him. So what had made her fear him? When the detectives asked why was afraid of these men, she answered ‘because of the Geirfinnur case’. Having listened to Saevar’s account it was Erla’s turn to pour out a remarkable and vivid story about the night Geirfinnur went missing and the men she now thought of as friends could barely keep up, filling pages of script:

  On the night of 19 November 1974, Erla and Saevar had been at Klubburin and they were not having much fun. They decided to leave, and got into a blue Mercedes with two others, taking off without a planned destination. They headed out of Reykjavik, past the Straumsvik aluminium plant. She remembered that the speedometer of the car was a strange shape. It was square and stood out on the dashboard and as they went faster the speedometer went up vertically.

  They drove past her home in Hafnarfjordur, and on towards the airport at Keflavik. Saevar held onto her hand the whole time, even when she tried to release his grip. He spoke to the driver, she couldn’t remember the exact conversation, but she knew they were plotting, just like Saevar’s friends had at the window in her dream. They were talking about killing someone by taking him out to sea, pretending they were going to get something. It was a last resort, they had tried to offer this man money but he wouldn’t listen, they would have to make him disappear. They were on a mission to murder.

  When they reached Keflavik they stopped by the foreshore. It was a spooky place at night, littered with battered trawlers propped up on blocks waiting to be repaired before being thrust back into the sea. When they got out of the car Erla saw the face of the driver who had been
speaking to Saevar. It was Magnus Leopoldsson from Klubburin. There were other men there and other cars, too. She remembered a red sedan, which could have been her dad’s car, and there was a large van that she thought might be a Volkswagen, that stood by the shore. She thought it was a light colour but she couldn’t be sure. There was a boat by the pier, a pretty big one, and near it she saw seven men. In front of the car, Magnus and Saevar were talking to someone she didn’t know (but would later conclude was Geirfinnur Einarsson). Geirfinnur had promised the men he could get hold of smuggled alcohol being dropped from a boat out at sea.

  Erla recognised her half-brother Einar, who was standing to the right of the car, and a bit further away was Saevar’s friend and familiar partner in crime, Kristjan Vidar. Geirfinnur was talking to Saevar and Magnus when a fight broke out. Erla was scared and got out of the car, hoping no one would notice her. The others were preoccupied and didn’t see her inching away and then she ran, she wanted to get away and hide. She found an abandoned house which was either still being built or used for storage. She hid there in a corner, she couldn’t remember for exactly for how long. As she waited, she felt so bad that she threw up.

  Eventually she came out and managed to hitch a lift in an old Moskvitch car. The driver was an elderly man who chatted to her about how he was forced to move from the Westmann islands in 1973 after a violent volcanic eruption engulfed them in ash and boiling lava. She then hitched another lift with a lorry that was on its way to Reykjavik and finally reached Hafnarfjordur. When she got home, Saevar wasn’t there.

  When he arrived later he never explicitly talked about the trip to Keflavik or what had happened. However, he discussed going to Copenhagen, to get away from the police for the post office fraud. Erla had heard there was a warrant out for her arrest so getting out of Iceland for a while seemed a sensible idea.

  Erla had now been talking for three hours. She told them that when she saw the news about Geirfinnur’s disappearance she hadn’t connected it to the night in Keflavik. She couldn’t identify Geirfinnur from the pictures of him she had seen in the media. She said it well may be that Geirfinnur was one of the men there, but it was dark so she couldn’t say for sure. Now she thought about it, she concluded that Geirfinnur was the man who the Klubburin men decided should disappear.

  Sigurbjorn took Erla home in the afternoon. On the drive to her apartment the detective assured her that she was doing the right thing by helping them. She was now in so deep that she would later forget what she had told them and change her story many times. It didn’t matter to the police, what was important was the essential truth that Erla knew about Geirfinnur, just as she had known about Gudmundur. Erla and Saevar had both confessed to being there when Geirfinnur was killed. The only one left in the trio was Kristjan Vidar.

  He was stewing in his cell, just metres from Saevar, waiting for his next interrogation. He would spend hours staring at the walls thinking what he should say next. When Kristjan was next brought into the interrogation room, it was the evening of 23 January. The inmates had eaten the food that had to be brought in from outside and a long night stretched out ahead of them. Kristjan began recounting his version of the night in Keflavik:

  Initially he thought he hadn’t been involved in the disappearance of Geirfinnur, nor did he know about it. He had only been to Keflavik twice in his life. The first time was when he was about 13 years old, but the other time might have been around the time Geirfinnur vanished. At the time he was normally under the influence of various drugs – stimulants (LSD or amphetamines) or more soothing (cannabis). His memory from the second half of 1974 was very unclear at times due to excessive smoking of dope. He remembered at some time that night they went in a big vehicle, the kind used for goods or passengers. It might have been a Mercedes Benz van with windows on the sides and was probably a dark colour. He couldn’t remember why he had gone in this car, but he was sure that he knew someone who was in the vehicle otherwise he wouldn’t have got into it.

  They had driven out of the city to the airport. He was a stranger in Keflavik and couldn’t say where they have been driven exactly, but he remembered that the vehicle stopped right next to the sea by the side of a big building which was commercial or office buildings. In front of the building was a concrete dock but the lighting wasn’t good there, the only light came from lights on the side of the building. He saw the back of a fairly large boat, he thought it was a steel vessel but he couldn’t be sure whether it was in the sea or on the land. There was one other very small boat at the pier. There were at least two other vehicles there, both cars. He wasn’t sure what colour they were but he thought they were Volga, Datsun or Mercedes Benz models. There were several men there and one woman. Some of the men were older than him and he recognised Saevar who he knew well and Einar who he had only seen in photos, he didn’t know him personally. He had also seen Einar’s sister, Erla Bolladottir. The men seemed to be discussing something together. Kristjan didn’t remember getting out of the vehicle but he recalled the ground being gravel, there was no concrete or asphalt. He couldn’t express himself any more on this, at least not for the time being, but he said he may be able to recall more about the incident later.

  It was 1.20am. Kristjan went back to his cell, the three-by-two metres where he spent all day and night, to try to recall more of that night in November 1974. He had told the detectives that his memory of this time was vague as he had been drinking and taking drugs to excess. This was no impediment to the detectives, they would do what they had done in the Gudmundur case, they would help him to remember – and in doing so, would shape his memories.

  Kristjan, Saevar, Tryggvi and Albert weren’t only in solitary confinement. They were accompanied by guards at all times and never allowed to be alone with the other inmates or to have any visits from friends and family. Their relations would come with food or clothes, books and magazines but were never allowed to see their loved ones. It was often left to Hlynur Thor Magnusson to provide the empathetic human contact the suspets craved.

  A linguist who spoke five languages and loved classical music and quiet contemplation, Hlynur was not your typical prison guard. In the early 1970s he had been a high school teacher and in the summer months during the holidays he would work as a temporary prison guard while the full-time wardens took their holidays. He moved on to be a history researcher at the University of Iceland in 1973, studying abandoned Nordic farms, but after a few years had found it less than inspiring. ‘It was absolutely boring,’ he recalled. ‘I was working on my own and when you are on your own you must have discipline, especially when the work is boring.’ He had previously worked with the prison’s chief warden, Gunnar Gudmundsson, at the Hegningarhusid prison. After he left to pursue his university studies, Hlynur would drop by every once in a while for a coffee and a chat. The arrival of Saevar and his friends at Sidumuli meant the chief warden needed to recruit more guards to deal with these dangerous young men. When he asked if Hlynur would like a temporary post at the jail, Hlynur jumped at the chance to chuck in his job in academia.

  Hlynur found himself as an outlet for the inmates he was guarding. They were desperate to have a normal conversation that didn’t involve going over the events of 1974 again and again. The guards were meant to have limited contact with the inmates but Hlynur didn’t stick to the rules. He treated Saevar with respect and found that he caused no trouble. They would chat about Saevar’s favourite topics of film or literature and Hlynur would smuggle books in for him. Kristjan was less forthcoming but always compliant. For some of these suspects, barely out of their teens and still living at home, he became a kind of surrogate parent.

  Tryggvi was out of the picture for Geirfinnur’s murder; he had a cast iron alibi as he was away on a trawler at the time which had been logged, so the police couldn’t ignore it. But he was firmly implicated in Gudmundur’s murder. He had a violent past and a long criminal record so the police weren’t letting him go anywhere. The focus on the Geirfinnur case meant Tr
yggvi was left alone for days and weeks at a time with no one to talk to. He tried to cope with his isolation by exercising and recording his daily progress. Whenever he rang his bell asking for a guard to bring him to the toilet, he would present Hlynur Magnusson with news of his daily routines. ‘He was like a son,’ Hlynur recalled. ‘He showed me how he wrote down how many exercises he had done and he was so proud to show me.’ The man with a reputation for violence would recite rhyming couplets to Hlynur (‘They were not great poetry but it was very amusing’) as well as draw – not figures but decorations and flowers which he would present to the guard. They were ‘happy flowers, he was coming to me like a little child with pictures saying, “See this, mummy?”.’

  Tryggvi was definitely not happy, though. His increasingly fragile mental state was managed with daily doses of medication Hlynur helped to distribute four times a day: Mogadon, Diazepam, and Chlorpromazine were given to Tryggvi and the others to help them sleep and calm them down. The guards had been instructed to make sure all the inmates took their drugs. ‘They were crushed up so they couldn’t hide it in their mouth,’ Hlynur recalled. ‘We knew that they would pretend to swallow so we watched them take it and drink the water and if they were capsules we opened them up.’

  Some of the guards saw their role as going beyond looking after the inmates – they took it upon themselves to interrogate them. One of the most active was Hogni Einarsson, one of the senior guards at Sidumuli prison. He would question the suspects in their cells at all times of the night and day – an unconventional practice, though no one was going to question such an experienced guard. On 25 January, days after Saevar had given his intitial statement about the Geirfinnur case, Hogni thought he had made a breakthrough. He had an urgent request from Saevar who wanted to talk to the detectives.

  It was just after two o’clock on Sunday morning when the phone went at Eggert Bjarnasson’s house. In the past he would have been worried it was an emergency, but before he even picked up the receiver he knew it would be about the case. The team were working day and night; interviews that started in the tepid winter daylight would go on and on, ending when the only sound outside was the wind whipping across the flat land and the ocean crashing onto the rocks. A month into the investigation they had the confessions but these were confused and conflicting and there was little other evidence to show for their efforts: two suspected murders, but no bodies or forensic evidence linking the suspects to Gudmundur or Geirfinnur.