by Simon Cox
He told the investigators his previous statements weren’t true and that ‘he has now decided to make a clean break and tell the whole truth of the matter’. This was a phrase the detectives were used to hearing as the suspect grasped for a reality and a truth the police would believe.
Albert’s account was significantly different to his previous testimony and made him a key eyewitness to the events that unfolded on the January night in 1974 when Gudmundur was killed:
He was with Kristjan and Tryggvi and sometime between 21:00 and 22:00 they decided to go and buy LSD tablets. They all went in his dad’s Volkswagen. They didn’t have any money and Kristjan and Tryggvi suggested they go to some clubs and get in touch with a guy who has been stealing money or wallets. Albert took them to various places in the capital but it wasn’t successful. He drove to Saevar who was in an apartment in Kopavogur in the suburbs of Reykjavik, but Saevar didn’t want to lend them any money. They drove to Hafnarfjordur at a time when the discos were finished and people were milling around. He stopped near the bottom of the slope on the main road to Reykjavik and Kristjan and Tryggvi got out. When they came back they were with another man Albert didn’t know, but later he found out was Gudmundur Einarsson. He described Gudmundur but couldn’t remember how he was dressed. He thought Kristjan had suggested driving to Hamarsbraut 11. It was dark at the apartment when they got there. They discussed buying a bottle of liquor and soon Saevar arrived and was annoyed at their presence at the apartment but he didn’t ask them to leave. Kristjan and Tryggvi tried to get Gudmundur to give them money to buy alcohol but Gudmundur was not willing to. A fight broke out between them, he said he never saw Saevar hit or kick Gudmundur. He hid behind a couch in the front room while this went on and hadn’t seen Gudmundur being hit and couldn’t bear to see who did it, but he believed Kristjan and Tryggvi had both been involved. He looked into the room after the fight and Gudmundur was lying motionless on his back on the floor. He hadn’t seen any blood on him and hadn’t seen any kind of knife used on him.
Albert drove back to Reykjavik and then came back to Hamarsbraut and knocked on the door but Saevar told him to move the car to the stairs and wait in the car. He didn’t go in the house again. They drove the body to the lava and he was not aware of any blood stains in the car or on the canvas that the body was wrapped in. He didn’t remember the body smelling bad either. After they dumped the body, he described how Tryggvi had grabbed him around the neck on the way back in the car and Albert thought he would suffocate until Kristjan intervened and Tryggvi released his grip. He drove Saevar back to Hamarsbraut 11 and then Kristjan to Grettisgata 82 and finally got back to his house at about four o’clock in the morning.
The judges decided to act quickly and brought Albert to the court. His lawyer wasn’t present when Albert agreed with the statement he had given, stating Saevar, Kristjan and Tryggvi had killed Gudmundur.
The investigators weren’t finished with him. They brought him back for a further round of questioning. This would focus on events later that year in August 1974, a time of year when the land has thawed, the moss blooms on the lava and it’s warm enough to wear a shirt in the day. It was the time when the country undid a button or two, and everything went on a holiday slowdown.
Saevar had taken Albert to Kristjan’s apartment in Grettisgata. Albert knew it well, he had grown up in the narrow streets of east Reykjavik and had attended Austurbaejar school, the austere Soviet-style Politburo building in the shadow of the towering white Hallgrimskirkja cathedral. A discussion took place, with Tryggvi joining in too, about moving Gudmundur’s corpse from the lava. The police didn’t mention the reasons; it was likely to be paranoia the body would be discovered, not helped by their copious drugs intake. They needed to move it somewhere it would never be discovered. This conversation took place as many of them did, with one of them rolling a joint to help gather their thoughts. They needed Albert for transport and he agreed to it.
In the evening they had smoked a lot and were in no fit state to find and move a cadaver. But still they headed out to the lava near Hafnarfjordur with a black plastic bag for the remains. Saevar and Tryggvi had been given this grim task and struggled to find the burial spot. Kristjan had warned Albert not to pay too much attention to where they were going and not to monitor their movements. Seven months after his death, after the frozen winter, Gudmundur’s body would have been in such a state it would leave a deep scar on those who had to handle him and deal with the stench of death. But Albert had supposedly told the police he ‘didn’t find any smell coming up in the car from the body’.
It didn’t get dark until late in the evening so they had to wait around to take the body to the cemetery at Hafnarfjordur, where they had been directed by Saevar. He told the judges the story he had previously mentioned to the police, that he’d seen the others dig a shallow grave for the body, only about 50 to 70cm deep. He said he wasn’t there when the remains were actually buried. It was very late, between two and three in the morning by the time they finished, and he drove them home after this macabre evening. Albert said he had ‘told the whole truth of the matter as best as he could remember’, and that he was ‘willing to do everything in his power to clarify the situation’.
What could he remember clearly at this point? His interrogation had lasted 13 hours, finishing at two in the morning. This was more than double the maximum limit for police interviews.
Albert was willing to take the police to the cemetery to find the body. The next day he went to Hafnarfjordur graveyard with a police officer. The cemetery was not especially peaceful, located on a busy road behind a low grey wall shielded by conifers and thick green shrubs. Albert had wandered around the simple graves with crosses or stones with their names and dates, but he couldn’t find any likely burial site. When questioned that same day at the criminal court he was quite sure Gudmundur’s remains had been placed in the graveyard by Kristjan, Saevar and Tryggvi.
All of these conversations had taken place without his lawyer being present.
As Albert was succumbing to police pressure and implicating himself further in the Gudmundur murder, a few kilometres away Saevar was staging a fightback against the police. A pen and pencil can be a powerful weapon, especially in testing circumstances. The prison wardens and police had realised this, and throughout his time in Sidumuli Saevar had been deprived of even this most basic tool. Perhaps the detectives didn’t want him to be able to record his memories and his recollections of 1974. After all, if he wasn’t able to write them down, it made it easier to manipulate and distort what had actually happened.
Now Saevar was in the more relaxed Hegninarhusid where he started typing a series of letters starting on 4 March that tore apart the case. He wrote that the statements about the events inside the Hamarsbraut apartment were ‘ridiculous in every way’. Kristjan and Tryggvi only said what they had been told by the detectives, that Saevar had kicked Gudmundur to death. The keys on Saevar’s typewriter spelled out this was a ‘100 per cent lie’. Saevar had been made to confess to the crime after Erla had lied. When they had tried to look for the body out in the lava with Kristjan, Albert and Tryggvi, nothing had been found. His conclusion was that there had been a high-level conspiracy to bring them into the jail and let them stay for so long.
He went through some of the major flaws in the Gudmundur case, which the police were trying to clear up. The first was the phone call he had supposedly made to Albert to summon him to Erla’s apartment at Hamarsbraut. The phone had been disconnected as the bill hadn’t been paid so this was impossible. This had been confirmed by the Icelandic Telephone company.
He said the police had played on Erla and Kristjan’s psyches and they had been turned against him so they were prepared to lie about anything to gain the confidence and trust of the police.
Erla had been a key witness, implicating Saevar and the others, but when he had been brought together with her he asked why she was lying. She knew exactly where he had been in the early h
ours of 27 January 1974. He was with another woman in Kopavagur. He had repeatedly told the police about this and had written it down weeks into his custody, but these papers had been taken from his cell and he hadn’t seen them since.
Saevar said that during some of the corroboration interviews in the summer of 1976, Erla seemed to take on the role of the interviewer, asking if he was going to tell her what had happened. She would smile, take his hand and ask what happened in Hamarsbraut. Saevar thought they were trying to soften him up so that he would confess. He recalled a specific conversation with Erla when she said: ‘You who wanted to marry me at Christmas and then lied to me,’ and she began to cry. She said Saevar’s actions meant, ‘I could not bathe the baby at Christmas or go to a Christmas dinner.’ The detectives tried to play on the guilt Saevar felt, that he was keeping Erla in prison even though he claimed to love her. The pressure had been on him to confess to the murder of Gudmundur Einarsson in the interests of Erla and their child. He said the detectives had violated the law and that ‘the country has committed the worst crime to us that I know of’. The people who were supposed ‘to uphold the law and right in our country are guilty of a crime’.
The bulk of his statements, however, focused on the brutality he said he had faced over the 15 months he had been held in solitary confinement. In May 1976, the detectives had been pushing hard for a breakthrough in the case as the Klubburin suspects were about to be released and Orn Hoskuldsson knew this would bring intense criticism of the investigation. Saevar set out mistreatment during interviews by Orn Hoskuldsson, Sigurbjorn and Hallavadur Einvardsson. They always denied this was the case. He went through specific events: the assault on 5 May 1976 by the chief prison warden; the beating by Tryggvi that the detectives had allowed and the waterboarding incident.
The letters were Saevar’s opening salvo. Several weeks later, on 29 March 1977, he was brought into the court house early in the morning. Saevar wasn’t intimidated by this; he had been here before for remand hearings to be told he would be facing another 30, 60 or 90 days in custody. Today would be different though, today he would have his say.
In the presence of his lawyer, Saevar stood tall as he told the judge, ‘I was not in Hamarsbraut that night.’ He spelled out in detail what he had previously told the detectives, how he had been at another woman’s house all night and had met Erla the next morning. He had confessed for one simple reason, ‘Because I was subjected to physical violence by the police and also by the wardens.’ He told the judges of an assault in his cell by the detective Sigurbjorn that had been witnessed by one of the prison wardens. He said that Sigurbjorn had threatened ‘If I didn’t confess to having been in Hamarsbraut 11 that night, I would get a lifetime of detention.’ Sigurbjorn was also the one to make the threat that Saevar ‘would get lost in an American prison, if I didn’t confess in the Gudmundur and Geirfinnur cases’.
Saevar went through the attack on him by Tryggvi in June 1976. He was determined to tell the judge about all of the injustices he had suffered. He told the judges about the attempted drowning by the wardens in July 1976. There was also the psychological pressure placed on Erla. ‘Erla threatened to commit suicide in July 1976 during corroboration in Sidumuli prison when the questioning lasted for eight days, for periods more than the maximum six hours at a time’. The investigators had goaded him to end his life. He said the investigating magistrate Orn Hoskuldsson had been urging him to hang himself, and another officer had said ‘Give him the rope’.
Saevar then had to listen as the court was read in full the statements he had given in December 1975 and January, September and October 1976. In these he admitted his guilt. Saevar conceded that he had signed all of these statements but asked that they should apply the same measure to the interview he had given to the detective Gisli Gudmundsson in January 1977, when he had issued a robust denial. After seven hours in the witness box the hearing adjourned.
Tryggvi too was gearing himself up to challenge his role in Gudmundur’s killing. As his body had hardened and he could see his muscles growing and tightening, his mind got tougher too. After all this time in solitary confinement, staring at the sludgy green walls and the thin layer of glass that let in light, being given endless tranquilisers, there was little else the police could throw at him. He steeled himself for his appearance in court. He wrote in his diary: ‘The final goal is reached, to tell the truth for justice’. It had been a long, hard 15 months. He had only confessed because he had been threatened by Orn Hoskuldsson that he would be kept for years in isolation if he didn’t admit his guilt. Orn and the police have always denied this was the case. He had gained strength from the support of his brothers and his mother. ‘I always thought of my family,’ he wrote, ‘I knew it would come to this end and now is the time to rise in the morning… Then I get to express myself.’
At just after ten o’clock in the morning he repeated what Saevar had done the previous day. He told the judges he denied attacking Gudmundur Einarsson and beating him to death. He said he never been to the apartment in Hamarsbraut, he had been shown it by the police but he didn’t know the house. He said since he was first arrested at his home back in December 1975 he had suffered a lot and he was innocent. He had insomnia and had been injected so that he could rest and this would make him delirious. There were normally three people in his interrogations: Orn Hoskuldsson, Sigurbjorn Eggertsson and Eggert Bjarnason. They said that he would be convicted because the others had confessed and had identified him. He saw no alternative but to confess to his involvement in the killing.
The next day, the judges brought all the other defendants in, one by one, to undermine Tryggvi and Saevar’s retractions. Albert was the only one of them who stuck to the story of Gudmundur’s body being moved. None of the others said they had any recollection of this. Tryggvi thought Albert had lost his mind: ‘It is weird to say these things. I do not know what has happened to the head of this fool.’
Even if the murder had happened, Tryggvi was certain the body would not have been moved. It had never made much sense, but the detectives and judges had indulged Albert and taken him to the Hafnarfjordur cemetery repeatedly to find Gudmundur’s ‘grave’ among the hundreds of real plots.
After his court appearance, Tryggvi found the hope he had felt a few days earlier had dissipated. ‘I just hope this will end soon,’ he wrote. ‘They have to get me out of it this matter I have no part in it.’
The newspapers reported the significant changes in Saevar and Tryggvi’s statements. With the court starting to gather evidence, the suspects hoped the end was in sight. Then in May 1977 they were remanded for a further 150 days. Saevar, Kristjan, Tryggvi and Gudjon would be in solitary confinement for another five months.
Back in Germany the press were hailing the ‘success’ of Karl Schutz’s mission in Iceland with stories of how he had ‘rescued the Icelandic government’, which faced having to resign.
Gisli Gudmundsson was not part of the task force, but that was to his advantage, he had not been infected by the presumption of guilt about the suspects, particularly Saevar. He was brought in to work on this final leg of the Gudmundur Einarsson case. An experienced detective, he had been one of the lead investigators in the brutal murder carried out by the TV announcer Asgeir Ingolfsson the previous summer. Trainee psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson had bonded with his older namesake through their work on the case, and thought he was a solid man: ‘He had good values and integrity, I identified with him and saw him as an honest, upright person. He was a man who wanted to get to the truth.’
The truth. This had become a tarnished phrase during the tortured two years of the investigation. Gudmundsson brought a new eye and vigour to Gudmundur’s murder, chipping away at some of the inconsistencies. He tracked down people who the other investigators had ignored or discounted. Witnesses such as the police officer who had arrested Saevar for a drugs offence in February 1974, shortly after he had had supposedly murdered Gudmundur. The officer said he hadn’t seen or no
ticed anything about Saevar that day that was unusual. Orn Hoskuldsson and his team would see this as evidence that Saevar was indeed a cold-blooded killer, but Gisli Gudmundsson thought it might mean something else altogether.
By March 1977, all of the suspects had at some point withdrawn their statements, except Gudjon, whose account remained hazy. When Gisli Gudmundsson started interviewing Kristjan he told him his previous statements about the Gudmundur case were not true. Kristjan’s version of the incident had changed over the years; for over a year he claimed he had stabbed Gudmundur with a knife he had got in Copenhagen. The detectives had spent time trying to track down the knife but their efforts were wasted as in March 1977 Kristjan said the stabbing didn’t happen at all.
Other descriptions Kristjan had given about the murder were also patently false. Kristjan pondered why he had done this and thought that perhaps he wanted to take on all the blame for the case. The sounds and smells he had mentioned were ‘a fantasy’; the descriptions had probably come from Erla and the police.
Gudmundsson’s interviews with Saevar also revealed a significant change in his testimony about the events on 27 January 1974. Apart from the detail of the phone in Erla’s apartment not working, Saevar was still insisting that he remembered being at another apartment that night, and said Albert had come there too to buy some LSD. To a dogged detective like Gudmundsson there were too many messy loose ends that needed to be cleared up.
At the beginning of March 1977, the detective wrote a report recommending he continue with his work on the Gudmundur case. He took his findings to the judge, Gunnlaugur Briem, but he was told not to pursue it. ‘He was very bitter about this,’ his former colleague Gisli Gudjonsson said, ‘he had been stopped, he had a conscience, he was a man who wanted to get the truth.’