by Simon Cox
The concern for his welfare didn’t last long. The next morning Albert was brought to the detective’s offices at Borgutun 7 for further questioning. He had come with a reason why he couldn’t tell them where the body was: ‘I believe that there has been a main reason, that I feared punishment.’ He said he had ‘tried to hide this inside me’, but he could no longer keep it in: ‘I feel now at this last hearing that something is in my head. I know I was involved in this and I should be able to say clearly everything, but if I try to put myself in that I find it difficult to distinguish between fantasies and reality. From childhood I have taken various drugs and narcotics. It may have contributed to obscure these issues.’
Albert’s version of the trip to the cemetery was broadly similar to Saevar’s but a lot vaguer about the details. He had driven his dad’s yellow Toyotafn1 to Kristjan’s apartment where some black plastic bags and shovels were placed inside it. He couldn’t remember where he had driven to and whether he had helped to dig up the ‘bags’ containing Gudmundur’s corpse.
He had driven to a cemetery, where he and Kristjan had taken the bags from the boot and carried them into the cemetery grounds. He definitely saw Saevar and Kristjan dig a grave. Albert said he was not drunk or on drugs and thought it was the same for the others, that for once they had clear heads that night. There was one important difference in his account, though – he thought Tryggvi had been there.
Throughout his interviews Albert had constantly stressed to his interrogators that he only vaguely recalled these events. His memory was starting to degrade like a negative of a photo left out in the sun, where the image starts to lose its shape and focus – eventually it would be a ghostly blur. Having given this new testimony, he was taken out to the cemetery several times in the following days with different detectives, each time seeming to remember more. After several visits the police notes said his hesitation had gone. They wrote that he said, ‘After having to recall this I am absolutely sure that we have gone to Fossvogskirkjur park, but in the past this has completely been wiped from my memory.’
Albert’s testimony about the cemetery brought Tryggvi back into the picture after months of no contact from the police. ‘It was a long nightmare,’ he recalled later when reflecting on the effects of the solitary confinement, ‘I began to think it was a way to destroy me both spiritually and physically… I realised I was on my way to the grave.’ But in October, with this new information, the police started to take notice of him again and interrogate him in his cell, although never for much longer than an hour.
Tryvvgi was still exercising, often for hours each day, sculpting his body and writing down all of the various physical tasks he had gone through in his cell: squat thrusts, star jumps, press-ups, pull-ups. His inspiration had been a body-building book his mother had sent him and this had transformed his life inside Sidumuli. He said of its influence on him, ‘I practised three times a day. This book was kind of my bible. Suddenly I began to think about caring for my body.’ Tryggvi had tried to take control over his life; by getting power over his body he hoped it would improve his confidence and his mental state.
He needed a way to keep himself sane, so he had started a diary. It was filled with the details of his daily life in Sidumuli: his meals; the weather and descriptions of the guards, the police, as well as his exercise regime. This wasn’t for anyone else to read, it was a way to voice the thoughts that were swirling around in his head. The writing burns with a righteous anger. On the front of his diary from October 1976 is scribbled in green pen: ‘This is a diary that an innocent man is keeping in here regarding a big case that he is wrongly accused of, but the truth will always come out, even if it is late.’
On 26 October he reflected on his long time in custody: ‘The time is pretty long in isolation 10½ months in a cell. Yes it is a long time in the life of one man and for that person to be innocent.’
As the case reached a particular juncture, he would be brought for corroboration interviews with the other suspects. He found it deeply frustrating being in the same room as the people who had implicated him in the first place. After one of these with Erla, when the police were again trying to get their stories to match, he wrote, ‘It’s not easy to lie about something that I have no knowledge of. For example, that house in Hamarsbraut. And secondly, I don’t know Erla. Why would I have been at her house?’
Tryggvi could improve his body through exercise, but he couldn’t hold off the drugs that he was prescribed for his moods and sleep. He wrote how this was turning him into a zombie: ‘I’ve got so many drugs, so much medication that I can’t remember my name. I wake up and I can’t remember if my mother passed away or I was dreaming it.’
He was allowed to see his lawyer, Hilmar, who was urging the police to transfer Tryggvi to the old prison in the centre of town, as the food was better and the cells had better air quality and there was more room for him to exercise.
While the Gudmundur investigation was focused on the inmates in Sidumuli, the focus of the parallel Geirfinnur investigation had shifted to the Hegningarhusid in the centre of Reykjavik where Erla had been transferred in September. It was a hundred years old, but it had been built as a prison, unlike Sidumuli which was still very much a makeshift prison. Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson had worked in both jails and found the old one a better atmosphere for guards and inmates. For the wardens, there was a kitchen where they could prepare meals, whereas in Sidumuli food was brought in from outside. The inmates in the old prison, a mixture of homeless strays and more serious criminals, had one big advantage over those in Sidumuli, as Gudbjarnarson recalled: ‘The cells were bigger and there were humans working there.’ The well-behaved inmates got the chance to have a taste of normality by being allowed to wash dishes after meals which earned them extra coffee and a sandwich. Instead of the hated malfunctioning air conditioning at Sidumuli, the old prison cells had geothermal radiators, powered by the vast underground reservoirs trapped deep beneath the lava.
Trying to restore lost memories was also an important part of the Geirfinnur inquiry. The investigators were willing to take increasingly desperate measures to improve the recollections of the suspects. Erla had already been subject to psychiatric assessments but on 12 October the detectives went one step further, getting a doctor to give her an injection to help her recall events. This was moving into new darker, uncharted territory: giving drugs to get her to unearth memories that she had struggled to piece together for the the past ten months. Erla said that, after a long and balanced deliberation, she would tell the whole truth about Geirfinnur. This time she had one condition: first she got to see her child. Schutz agreed – although in reality this would not happen for a long while. So Erla said she was willing to write down what she knew and the paper that was normally rationed was freely granted.
Sigurbjorn and several prison guards watched as Erla was given an injection by a therapist to try to help her remember. Then, on 15 October, three days after her ‘memory’ injection, Erla was led along the corridor, through the clanking metal door and up the creaking wooden stairs. She walked past the old courthouse chamber, remembering when she first stood in front of the judge back in May and was told she would be remanded for months, unable to see her child.
She entered a small, stark white room, dominated by a huge wooden desk. Across from her sat Karl Schutz, immaculately turned out in a crisp white shirt, his thick white hair neatly combed. His piercing blue eyes seem friendlier than normal, but he was sceptical that she would tell the truth. Next to him was Peter Eggerz and the detective, Sigurbjorn. Although it was early afternoon there was already a sharp chill in the air, the days were getting shorter and the temperatures at night closer to freezing. Esjan, the mountains guarding the city, would be a ghostly silhouette in a few hours time.
Schutz began questioning Erla about her conflicting testimony. She wanted to see her daughter and was becoming increasingly agitated. The police believed she had received direct instructions from Saevar but she denie
d this and said she was certain she had not been in Keflavik. She said she had made up what had happened and had put it together from what she had read in the newspapers and presented it as facts. Much of what she said had been fantasy and her imagination. She admitted making up details but said, ‘I have received information from various sources’ and set out how she had done this:
She had been staying in Copenhagen with Saevar and some others but she didn’t remember who they were. There was talk about alcohol smuggling and speculation that an accident with Geirfinnur could have happened while he was transporting alcohol. Saevar said there were serious consequences for people who might not behave as they should and referred to Geirfinnur. Erla said in February the same year, when they were still in Copenhagen, Saevar read about the Geirfinnur case in Morgunbladid newspaper. A Dutch psychic claimed to know where the body was but Saevar said the body would not be found there. Saevar said men like Geirfinnur should be bound with something heavy and discarded on the sea bed. In April when they had returned to Iceland they were having a conversation with Saevar’s sister and her husband. She heard them speculating the clay head the police had made was in fact of Magnus Leopoldsson. She also speculated that Magnus, Sigurbjorn Eric and Valdimar Olsen were all acquaintances of her brother, Einar and she would not be surprised if they were implicated in smuggling.
Schutz dismissed this as yet another attempt to deflect attention from the truth. She was caught twisting in the wind by Schutz, unsure what she should say to make him believe her. The atmosphere inside the cramped room became more heated. Schutz thought she was still protecting Saevar, but she was adamant, ‘I’m not protecting him. I have to protect myself.’ Schutz probed further, maybe she was afraid of Saevar that’s why she was shielding him? A touch of her defiance returned: ‘No,’ she maintained, ‘I’m not afraid of anyone.’
Schutz’s tone shifted. He had some good news, ‘We are close to finishing the case and you will soon be released.’ This was what she had been waiting to hear for the past four months she had been in solitary confinement. As cigarette smoke swirled around the room, Karl Schutz sat forward, a smile softening his features. All they needed, he said, leaning in closer, was for her to tell them how she had helped dispose of Geirfinnur’s body. Erla lit another cigarette, trying to compose her tiny frame and stop herself from shaking.
Now it was Schutz’s turn to set out what he believed had really happened to Geirfinnur’s body:
They had brought Geirfinnur’s body from Keflavik to Kristjan’s house in Grettisgata. For several days it had lain in the basement and then on a freezing November night they loaded it into Erla’s Land Rover. They drove out of Reykjavik, stopping at a petrol station to buy a jerry can of petrol. They carried on out of the city to the Raudholar, the red lava hills lit by the moonlight, casting strange shadows on the deep frozen pools covered in ice. Erla drove the Land Rover along the rough tracks, over the footsteps of the walkers and the hoofmarks of riders who travelled the hills on Icelandic ponies.
The tyres crunched on the hard stone path. Erla leaned against the car, coolly smoking a cigarette as she watched Saevar and Kristjan take Geirfinnur’s body from the back of her car. They knew they had to make it as hard as possible to find him, so they poured petrol over the body, lit a match and watched as the orange flames took hold and consumed his remains. They took the shovel and dug a shallow grave for what was left.
Schutz sent the detectives out of the room so it was just the two of them and his interpreter. He leaned back in his chair, watching his tale sink in and gauging Erla’s reaction. He had told her in their previous encounters he couldn’t decide if she was ‘an innocent country girl or a hardened and devious criminal’ but he seemed to have reached a conclusion.
Her denials were of no use. Schutz had told her before: ‘I’m not here to play games, the government brought me here to solve this case.’ He leaned over the desk, so close she could feel his breath on her. ‘If you sign the report you have a chance of being released,’ he told her. If she didn’t co-operate, she would never leave the prison. The rage and hurt that had been building in her could be contained no longer. Erla maintained the only thing she knew about Geirfinnur was through the conversations she had heard Saevar having. ‘The rest was my fabrication,’ she said. ‘This is the truth.’ Schutz decided to end the hearing and Erla became upset; she went berserk, throwing ashtrays, coffee cups, books, anything she could get hold of, crying out in a wail of pain, ‘No one believes me here!’. The police came back in the room and held her down. After she calmed down, she saw there was only one way out. The confession had already been typed up for her to sign.
Erla saw it ‘as a deal, a transaction’. If she signed the statement she would be released. This was what had happened in the Gudmundur case, when she was released after implicating Saevar and his friends. She thought by signing the document her isolation would finally be over – that was what Eggert and Schutz had told her. ‘I was trying to stop it, but nothing happened. I was not released and I knew I would never come out of prison.’ No one there believed a word she said, most of all Karl Schutz. She was taken back to her cell in the old prison. Whatever she said or did she could see no end to her incarceration.
It had been a dramatic day but Schutz still had to write his regular progress report to the minister, Olafur Johannesson. He told the minister:
The work of the investigation commission in the last two weeks has focused on the discovery of Gudmundur’s body. The investigation had become necessary after Saevar had said that in August 1974 he had moved the corpse from the lava fields to Fossovgur with the help of Albert and Kristjan. The site had been found to be empty after opening with a few probes at other possible disturbances. Evidence will be sought in other potential sites in the cemetery this weekend.
In his reports, Schutz was keen to show how he was trying to modernise the police force: ‘I have reached agreement with the president of the German Federal Police for a licence for a computer for research programmes to be made available to Iceland.’ He saw trying to improve the expertise within the police as an important part of his role. He had raised this issue the previous week in a letter to the Icelandic Attorney General:
The police have only received the education intended for general policing in Iceland. It’s absolutely essential to train investigators in collecting evidence. They need more expertise in the techniques and methods used to deal with offenders. Reasonably intelligent offenders can get one over on the police and the police can’t succeed in difficult interrogations.
He said the samples from the Gudmundur case had been sent to the German forensics lab and the team would hand over all the evidence in the case to the prosecutor on 19 October 1976. In reality, that would consist of just the suspects’ confessions, as the lab failed to return any forensic evidence linking the suspects to the crime. After that, the investigation would focus solely on Geirfinnur, where they were already making very good progress.
15
November 1976
By November, the gloom and murk of winter had stripped Reykjavik of the little beauty it possessed. It was a time to hunker down with friends and family with some alcohol to take the edge off the long winter nights. The dour weather reflected Gudjon Skarphedinsson’s bleak mood. He had retreated into himself, spending long, quiet hours in introspection. He was like a boat cut from its anchor, out in the turbulent Atlantic battered by the roiling waves, taking on water and struggling to stay afloat.
After his previous police interview in May, Gudjon’s name began to feature prominently in the interviews with Saevar and Erla. After the doomed attempt to smuggle drugs in Gudjon’s car, the police saw Saevar and Gudjon as having form together. Then, at the end of October, during a nine-hour interview, Saevar went through a vivid account of that night which placed Gudjon front and centre in Geirfinnur’s death. In his new version of events, Gudjon, the older man, was the person very much in control. He said Gudjon had made contact with Geirfinnur
and agreed they would meet in Keflavik:
When they reached the port cafe, Gudjon had given Kristjan the phone number to call Geirfinnur and summon him to the harbour. Soon after, Geirfinnur had come to the car and sat in the back seat. They drove to the harbour and on the way there they discussed the alcohol. When they got to the harbour Saevar overheard a conversation between Gudjon and Geirfinnur, where Gudjon was asked if he was not going to ‘take this’, but Geirfinnur had no answer. Gudjon asked, ‘What nonsense is this?’ Kristjan joined in the conversation and told Geirfinnur, ‘Were we not ready to discuss this at the club?’ Geirfinnur said he wanted nothing to do with this and he was told that he should keep quiet. Saevar said Geirfinnur had pushed Kristjan and he had punched him in the face. Geirfinnur began fighting with Kristjan and that Gudjon joined in and hit Geirfinnur in the head with a long wooden plank. Geirfinnur fell to the ground and Kristjan hit him again while he was on the ground. Saevar said it was difficult to describe this as it happened in a very short time. He and Kristjan discussed how Geirfinnur was unconscious and Saevar realised he was dead. Saevar went back to the car with Gudjon and realised that Erla was gone.
They went back to Kristjan’s apartment and stored the body in the laundry room. Two days later they wrapped the body in black bags and drove it out of the city. Gudjon brought a crowbar so they could loosen some stones and hide the body under rocks. He thought it had been about 400 metres from the road and they had later discussed moving the body as they thought the bags would be spotted.