by Simon Cox
Tryggvi confessed because Orn Hoskuldsson said all of the other suspects had done so and he warned that if Tryggvi didn’t, he could be held for two years in solitary confinement. Tryggvi couldn’t see another way out so he confessed in the hope that the truth would be revealed later. In spite of this, he had been held in solitary confinement for 655 days. During this time, he was a model prisoner and had turned his life around. He had engaged in education and was training as a welder and had married on Christmas Day. On his release he planned to become a new member of society. ‘I believe I have shown that my client is not guilty of the crime he has been accused of,’ Hilmar concluded.
Albert’s defence was short – if there was no crime then of course he couldn’t have been there, but it wasn’t that simple. His lawyer didn’t seek to disprove the case but he appealed to the judges’ sympathy, saying it had a hugely detrimental effect on Albert’s life.
Gudjon was the one suspect who stood out in the Geirfinnur case, the only one who had not retracted his confession. His lawyer, Benedikt Blondal, repeated some of the deficiencies in the case highlighted by others: statements taken late at night; the impossibility of getting to Keflavik in the time the police stated; lawyers being unable to see the documents the police had. He also raised the spectre of a missing suspect: ‘I think we probably haven’t yet found all those who participated,’ he told the court. He presented Gudjon as being duped and under Saevar’s spell. ‘It was more likely that Saevar would be the mentor and Gudjon the student,’ he said.
Gudjon was the only one of the suspects who admitted he had been present when Geirfinnur died. He said he had tried to lead him away but Geirfinnur misunderstood what he was trying to do, reacted badly and then the fight began. Gudjon’s account ‘is not a confession’, Benedikt said, but ‘a record of an accident. This is not intentional.’ Gudjon was willing to stand up and let the court decide. He had already been punished, he had been well-behaved, and Benedikt demanded the lowest sentence possible under the law.
The suspects also had their chance to finally have their say, four years after they had been arrested. Gudjon didn’t want to return to the court as it meant being held in Sidumuli rather than returning to Kviabryggja. ‘If you leave that cell for a few days or weeks then it’s not good to come back – after I went to west Iceland I couldn’t come back to Sidumuli as I couldn’t keep my cool anymore.’
Kristjan had been in the court listening, waiting for his chance to say his piece. The thick-set man with a moustache and collar length hair in a suit and open necked shirt who stood at the witness stand was unrecognisable from the pasty looking young boy in his original mug shot. Kristjan made a simple heartfelt plea: ‘I want to declare that I am innocent of the charges.’ He had falsely accused the Klubburin men because, he said, ‘I was forced to mention the names as the police were threatening me.’ He didn’t know anything about them and they had never done anything. He hoped that having listened to all of the evidence and the years of prejudicial coverage ‘the Supreme Court will be fair in these cases’.
Erla Bolladottir didn’t look very different from the elfin little girl in big glasses who had been arrested in 1975. She had sat at the front of the court listening to the days of prosecution evidence and then the far shorter defence testimony. Now she stood on the witness stand, her arms stretched out in her white jumper, to address the five judges. One of them would have trouble seeing her properly as he was hidden behind voluminous legal documents. She carried on regardless: ‘This issue has had a profound effect on me. I was a very different person than I am today, She said throughout the time in custody ‘we tried to tell the truth but we were not believed’. She recounted the threats she had faced during her interrogations, she said the police didn’t want to listen, they were deaf to what the suspects were telling them. ‘I sincerely hope the truth is revealed,’ she told the judges, before leaving with hope, ‘I trust the system to be just.’
Saevar Cieselski still looked like a rock star, now more haggard, but still the front man in his dark velvet corduroy jacket with his long, straight black hair. Saevar had been fighting the prosecution for years and this was his final chance to get justice. Whatever the outcome, he would make sure the judges and the public knew what had gone on inside Sidumuli in those dark years when he had been forced to confess at all costs. ‘I want to have the opportunity to object to the prosecution,’ he told the packed court. ‘I have never known the men that I’m blamed for their disappearance. Their names are as far away to me now as they were at the beginning.’ Few people outside of the prison knew what the suspects had endured inside the makeshift jail but Saevar would make sure everyone knew the hardship they had suffered. He had spent two years in solitary confinement without reading or writing material or tobacco, making do with two woollen blankets. ‘I don’t know the reason for this feeling towards me, I haven’t got any explanation.’
He said he had been banned from talking to his lawyer for two months and there was no one listening to his complaints. He had an alibi for the night Gudmundur disappeared but the police said Albert and Kristjan had given statements that put him in the apartment and that he had killed Gudmundur. He had confessed because, ‘I had become exhausted – because of fatigue and the interrogations and I gave up.’
As for Geirfinnur Einarsson, the first he knew of it was when the police came to his cell saying he had gone to Keflavik with Erla’s brother, Einar. He said his mother was threatened and he feared for Erla’s life, so he had given statements about the Klubburin men so they would be arrested and ‘so that Erla would not be murdered’. When Erla and Kristjan gave statements that he had been in Keflavik, he realised it had gone too far and withdrew his confession.
He refuted the prosecution claims that he tried to influence witnesses and that his friends had intimidated the woman he claimed to have been with on the night Gudmundur disappeared. He called it ‘disgusting’ that the prosecutor made this claim. ‘I’ve lost all my friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost them all because of these cases,’ he stated as he wound to an impassioned conclusion. He told the judges if the Supreme Court found him guilty, to quote Socrates, ‘I to die and you to live, which of these two is the better journey only God knows.’
A month later, the judges came back with their decision. The lawyers crowded into the Supreme Court, their long black gowns over their suits. They began scouring through the 380-page ruling, which went through the whole case in detail. The judges had listened to the pleas of the suspects and the reasoned arguments of their lawyers, but they weren’t convinced by them. The convictions were upheld. The court did reduce the length of the sentences: Saevar’s was reduced from life imprisonment to 17 years and Kristjan’s was also cut to 16 years. Tryggvi’s was reduced to 13 years and Gudjon to 10 years. Albert would have to serve 12 months and Erla’s sentence remained at three years. It meant Erla and Albert would now have to go to jail to serve out their sentences with time taken off for their spell in jail on remand. The reduced sentences didn’t matter, the damage was done. The Reykjavik Six would forever be guilty of Iceland’s worst murder case.
Epilogue
Saevar Cieselski left prison in 1984, nine years after his arrest, but the case, and his 741 days in solitary confinement, left a deep wound that wouldn’t heal. Throughout his time in prison, Saevar had been working out how to get the case re-opened. He would need new evidence and would do all he could to get it. Being the most notorious prisoner in a tiny country meant that rehabilitation was tough. On release, he found it difficult to get a job. Who wanted to employ a double murderer? He faced the same difficulties finding somewhere to live, but he did meet a new love.
He had two sons, Hafthor and Sigurdor. Sigurdor looked more like his dad; taller than Saevar but lean with dark hair and deep set eyes. Hafthor had the more Icelandic blond colourings and was less angular. Saevar didn’t talk to his sons about his time in jail, he wanted to shield them from it, but it was impossible to in such a small country.
Hafthor remembers as a young boy being told by his mother about the great injustice his father had suffered.
Saevar initially tried moving to the United States for a new life, living in Colorado, working as a carpenter but he returned to Iceland after a year. He didn’t want to hide in the shadows, he wanted to bring the case back to the Supreme Court, but in order to do so he would need fresh evidence. He made his first attempt in 1997, but the prosecutor turned him down. He tried again a few years later after several witnesses came forward highlighting his torture and mistreatment.
Working on his case was a defence mechanism for him, a way of coping with life outside. There was another reason too: ‘He wanted to marry my mother,’ Hafthor said, ‘but he didn’t want to do it until he had cleansed his reputation officially. He didn’t want this dirt on his name; it would affect his family, so he wanted to cleanse his name out of this ridiculous case, just so we could move on.’
Saevar always tackled life with intensity and his struggles with authority left him frustrated and angry. This lead to the breakdown of his relationship and he started drinking, something he had avoided all through the drugs heyday of the 1970s. In 1999 he got a final rejection: his case would not be going back to the Supreme Court. After this he went on a downward spiral. His son Hafthor would still see him regularly, ‘There were a lot of moments that should have brought him down to the floor but he kept standing up again.’
Saevar moved to Denmark and ended up on the streets, the once-beautiful young man, still with his trademark long hair, now a battered-looking alcoholic. In 2009 a bloated, dishevelled Saevar was shown on Icelandic TV berating the press who had maligned him, ‘Why did you attack me like that when I was a boy?’ He died in 2011 outside on a freezing street in Copenhagen and was buried at the cathedral in Reykjavik. The case had eaten away at him and destroyed his life. His death gave his family new impetus to clear his name and those of the other suspects. It was helped by a strange turn of events.
Kristin Tryggvadottir had never told any of her family the secret that she had found hidden in the basement of her house when she was a teenager. She had kept it locked away for twenty years. Tryggvi Runar’s daughter had lived with the case for as long as she could remember. As a small child at school, she said, ‘One teacher called me the daughter of a murderer. I didn’t know what she was talking about but I probably did. It stings but you get used to it.’
On Sundays, she would take the long bus ride with her mother the 50km from Reykjavik down to Eyrarbakki in the south to Litla Hraun jail at the end of a single track road. ‘This was another home for me, at least on Sundays,’ she recalled. ‘It was probably not the typical way to grow up, but it was our life and we made the best of it.’ Tryggvi would try to make his prison cell look as much like a home as was possible with pictures on the wall and his football trophies on display. ‘When I came, we didn’t see bars on the windows, he put black plastic bags over them and pulled the curtains so I could not see.’
Kristin would play outside with the other inmates’ children, feed the horses and they would have dinner with ice cream. When Tryggvi was released, just before Christmas in 1981, he felt like a new man. He had spent almost two years in solitary confinement. The world had changed in the years he had been in jail: Iceland had won the Cod Wars; it had a new prime minister; there was colour TV.
In prison, Tryggvi had trained to be a welder and he was determined to find work and put the past behind him. He was interviewed shortly before he left jail and reflected on how the previous 10 years had been wasted. He said when he had been arrested for the Gudmundur murder, ‘I was searching for something, some sort of lifestyle, but I didn’t wake up until I hit a brick wall.’ He was optimistic, ‘I am clean and determined to make a future for myself,’ he declared.
Tryggvi wanted a normal family life, but Kristin could see the case still lingered for her father. ‘He was worried people would recognise him. He didn’t want to go out. I didn’t talk about it with kids at school.’ She was used to keeping secrets about her dad; she didn’t tell her friends about him, because everyone would know his name. Tryggvi never discussed the case much, but Kristin could see the effect on him was profound. ‘He had demons in him, a lot of anger even though he was trying to leave this behind him. It was really hard for him.’ He would try and shed this through exercise or sometimes drinking.
By her teenage years, Kristin was feeling hard done by. ‘I thought it was really unfair that I didn’t have a normal family and a normal dad and we got into fights… so I thought maybe he’s guilty, maybe he did this. But somehow I knew that this was not a possibility that he could do something like that.’
Down in the basement, Kristin found his diaries from prison. There were dozens of them and ‘as a curious teenager I started reading them. I took two or three at a time up to my room, kept them under my mattress and I didn’t tell anybody about them.’ She knew that it was wrong, she was reading her dad’s innermost thoughts, staring into his soul, but she couldn’t help herself. A few years later, Tryggvi cleared out the basement and got rid of the diaries. He didn’t notice three were missing. Kristin kept them secret, looking at them every now and then, scared that if the police found out about their existence they would be taken away from her.
Tryggvi Runar tried to put the demons of the past behind him. He had two daughters and a son, and grandchildren, one of whom bears his name. In 2009, he was diagnosed with cancer and as his condition worsened, Kristin decided it was time to tell him about the diaries. ‘The first thing he asked was, “Did you read all of them?”. And I told him, yes, I did. I think he was just happy that I did.’ It was a relief after all those years of secrecy but Kristin was unsure what to do with them now. ‘He said, “You will know what to do with them when the time is right”.’ Tryggvi died later that year.
That time came in the autumn of 2011 following Saevar’s death, when a TV reporter named Helga Arnardottir was doing some research into the Gudmundur/Geirfinnur cases and came to see Kristin and her mother. As they sat chatting, Kristin remembered her father’s words, and brought out the diaries which, until then, her mother didn’t know still existed. As soon as she looked at them Helga thought they were significant and she knew just the man who should look at them, someone who had left Iceland a long time ago, for England.
Days later Kristin and Helga were in the living room of a large, welcoming house in south London, home to Professor Gisli Gudjonsson. The former young Icelandic detective had become a renowned forensic psychologist, noted for his pioneering work identifying false memory syndrome. His research had revealed how suspects might be induced into making confessions for crimes they hadn’t committed. He had identified a range of psychological factors such as compliance, personality disorders and suggestibility which made people make false confessions. In his long career he had worked on many miscarriages of justice, including the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six and even produced the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales (GSS), used around the world when false confessions are suspected.
Gisli had always been reluctant to get involved in the Geirfinnur and Gudmundur cases. Saevar had approached him in the late 1990s when he was trying to appeal his conviction. At the time, Gisli was too busy and he felt there was a clear conflict of interest because he was a detective at the time that the six were arrested. But more than a decade had passed since then, and he now felt less conflicted. He decided he would look at the diaries with an open mind, if Helga brought them to him. He took them away to his study, prepared to put the thoughts of the past out of his mind. ‘Even though as a young detective, I had had the view and assumed these people were guilty, I was prepared to look at the diaries with an open mind because a long time had passed and I didn’t know about the case and I promised myself I would be objective.’
Kristin waited anxiously as Gisli went through the diaries for several hours, poring over the entries where Tryggvi would go through his daily routine and his constant fight to prove his innoce
nce. When Gisli emerged he concluded, ‘I was absolutely convinced that these three diaries were of significance to the case. They were actually convincing to me. These diaries looked like genuinely somebody expressing his views at the time.’ The diaries on their own didn’t mean Tryggvi was innocent, but there was enough in them that Gisli felt needed further investigation. ‘It certainly raised in my mind the possibility that these were miscarriages of justice.’
In October 2011, Gisli did an interview for Icelandic TV stating this. Kristin knew that with Gisli on board this couldn’t be brushed aside.
Inside Iceland’s Ministry of Justice, they were listening. The fate of the six had been plaguing the thoughts of the interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson who remembered growing up with the case. ‘This has been with us all this time since the late 1970s. This was very much part of our lives… everybody knew about this.’ A week after Gisli’s interview, the minister announced the formation of a commission to investigate how the cases had been handled. This would be the first step to clearing the suspect’s names. Gisli Gudjonsson was asked to be one of the committee members. Thirty-five years after first coming across the case as a young detective, he would be delving back into the past.
The committee assembled a huge cache of evidence. They read through all of the police reports and prison diaries which showed what was happening to each of the suspects. What emerged was a consistently negative and harsh view of the six young suspects. What was particularly shocking to the seasoned psychologist was the extent of the interrogations and the length of the solitary confinement: ‘I was absolutely horrified because I’ve worked on miscarriages of justice in many different countries…. I’d never come across any case where there had been such intense interrogation, so many interrogations and such lengthy solitary confinement.’ He interviewed the four surviving suspects – Gudjon, Erla, Albert and Kristjan – and concluded ‘the effect of the solitary confinement was absolutely crucial to the way they were reacting’. Examining the case files over 18 months, it became clear to him that Gudjon, Erla and Albert were the most susceptible to making false confessions. ‘They were kind of yes people – wanting to help the police… if they have a good relationship with the police officer who is interviewing them and they trust that police officer, that makes them vulnerable.’