by Simon Cox
Gudjonsson’s own role in the affair didn’t go unnoticed. He knew the police officers who had investigated the case, he liked and trusted them – he had been one at the time. ‘What shocked me was what had actually happened to these individuals; that I had been there but oblivious to what was going on really – you know that I was naïve, I was idealistic. How did I fail to notice what was going on and the enormity of it all?’
He went through the diaries kept by Tryggvi Runar and the committee also discovered the existence of Gudjon’s diary. This was even more revealing to Gisli than Tryggvi Runar’s writing. ‘I never ever worked on a case where I’ve seen such detailed, informative diaries of everyday living. I’m absolutely convinced these diaries were not written so they could be used as a defence later on. They were used to kill time.’ Gudjon’s diary also charted in forensic detail how his memory had been distorted. ‘It tells you how an intelligent individual who knows he is innocent at the beginning gradually began to think that he is wrong and that he had been involved in a murder of which he has absolutely no memory.’
Having gone through all of the records and files, the committee found glaring problems with the investigation. ‘Nobody could provide any solitary, tangible evidence to support their confessions,’ Gisli Gudjonsson found, ‘You would have thought, two bodies – out of these individuals somebody could say, “You know, I know exactly where their bodies are”.’ He had seen this before in previous miscarriages of justice, where the people convicted had no knowledge of what had happened, and he thought this was the case with the Reykjavik Six: ‘They were just trying to appease the police; they were trying to be cooperative because they knew if they were not cooperative they would be given more solitary confinement.’
In March 2013, the working group issued a report almost 500 pages long, concluding the confessions were unreliable and the case should go back to the Icelandic Supreme Court. Gudjonsson had looked at all of the evidence and felt that the lengthy solitary confinement had led five of the suspects to suffer from false memory syndrome. ‘It completely damaged the confidence in their own memory, so the impact is actually to disturb the whole memory process. You are getting people to distrust their own memories. Some of these people had alibis, had good alibis, but the alibis were kind of ignored.’
After two years of investigations there were no bodies, no forensic evidence, no real eyewitnesses, and all the investigators had were the confessions. These admissions had been extracted from the six young suspects during periods of solitary confinement that Gisli Gudjonsson said has only one contemporary comparison. ‘I have not seen a case where the time in isolation has been for so long. The only thing I can think of is Guantanamo Bay.’
This working group had established that the investigation had been appallingly run and that the suspects had been subject to mistreatment and torture, but it didn’t have the power to send the case back to the Supreme Court to quash the convictions. A second, specific committee was convened for this and again spent several more years deciding whether this should happen. In 2017, it recommended the cases related to the murders should be re-examined by the country’s highest court. The one exception was Erla. She hadn’t been convicted of any part in the killings but of making false accusations against the Klubburin men. The court had not accepted the mitigation of the mental torture she had endured. This was a massive blow to her and for days after she shut herself away, shunning the many calls from journalists. She vowed to fight on and to get her lawyer to appeal the decision, although the chances of success are slim.
Among the younger generation of Icelanders, the Gudmundur/Geirfinnur cases are an aberration, an embarrassment for a country lauded for its commitment to human rights. But for some of the generation who lived through the 1970s, who read the newspaper headlines and saw the photos of Saevar, Kristjan, Tryggvi and Erla being escorted into court, doubt remains about the innocence of the Reykjavik Six.
The one constant throughout the 40 years has been the silence of the majority of the investigators. Privately, they tell friends they are still convinced of the guilt of the young people they locked in solitary confinement and questioned hundreds of times, going over the same ground again and again. But none of the key Reykjavik detectives has spoken publicly about the case since. They all carried on as detectives and many prospered. Sigurbjorn Eggertsson ended up as the second highest-ranking police officer in Iceland. When the investigators were called to give evidence to a committee in 2016, three officers attended but said they couldn’t remember why the most important case in Iceland’s history had started.
One group of investigators has been willing to talk: the Keflavik team who first investigated Geirfinnur Einarsson’s disappearance. The detective Haukur Gudmundsson wrote a book about the case and now believes the police got it wrong. His old boss, the investigating magistrate Valtyr Sigurdsson who went on to become Iceland’s state prosecutor and still practices law, doesn’t share this view. Sigurdsson’s face is more weathered but has retained some of the boyish good looks from his youth. He admitted that the investigators ‘broke every rule, but when we did, it was a development of the criminal courts – it’s like saying to doctor you should have used other methods on a patient 40 years ago’. Having read about the torture, solitary confinement and distortion of the suspects’ memories, he is still convinced that they got the right people. He wasn’t convinced about Erla’s insistence that she gave her first statements as she was desperate to be reunited with her daughter. ‘She had a young child, a lot of people have young kids – to my mind I just find it unthinkable how you can say the police made up the story.’ He has visited Gudjon, his former schoolmate, and the two old men chatted amicably but avoided talking about the case. It was probably for the best, as Valtyr said when he saw Gudjon discussing his conviction on Icelandic TV he thought of him as ‘the guiltiest man you’ve ever seen, his answers didn’t make sense’.
Kristjan and Albert continue to shun any publicity about their ordeal. Kristjan spent 682 days in solitary confinement, over 17,000 hours in isolation. He served the longest time in jail, being released in 1987. He married and had two children but his life has been turbulent ever since. He was the one suspect who didn’t ask for his case to be brought back to the Supreme Court.
Albert Klahn has never talked about the case publicly since his release in 1981. He spent the least time in solitary confinement – 88 days – but it had a profound effect on him. He is married with children and leads a quiet life in Reykjavik, working as a carpenter and doing charity work in his spare time. Gisli Gudjonsson is one of the few people who Albert has spoken to about the Gudmundur inquiry. Even now it haunts him. ‘The sad thing is after almost 40 years, Albert Klahn doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know whether he is guilty or innocent. Can you imagine? After 40 years, you’re living in the dread that perhaps you were involved and you can’t remember anything.’
Gudjon Skarphedinsson knows how that feels. He was the last suspect to be arrested and spent 412 days in solitary confinement. When he left prison in 1981 he was scared. ‘I didn’t want to be released. I was afraid but I had no reason to be afraid of anything, so I just went to Copenhagen, which we have always done for 500 years. When everything has gone to pieces, we go to Denmark.’ He made a new life there, marrying and getting ordained as a Lutheran minister. He returned to Iceland in 1996, after 15 years abroad, to oversee a parish in Stadurstudur, as far away from civilization as it’s possible to get. The village is a smattering of houses and farms stretched across a wide, flat plain between slate black mountains and the foaming ocean. Across the Snaefellsness plain you can see the church for miles, its red roof and spire bold splashes of colour against the thin white covering of snow. It is Gudjon’s sanctuary, where he delivers services to the few hundred farmers in his parish under a curved roof painted a deep blue filled with golden stars. When he first arrived, there had been fierce opposition to a convicted murderer taking over the spiritual guidance of the local
s. There were several votes to topple Gudjon but he took it all in his stride. As the tide of public opinion turned in the Six’s favour he still found opposition among his friends with one convinced he was guilty. ‘He wouldn’t give it up, he was completely sure of it.’
Stadurstudur was a chance for Gudjon to return to his country roots. Inside his house, though, in a box, lay a brown folder, dust gathering on its spine. Gudjon hasn’t looked at the lined yellow pages for decades. It sits on the table in front of him, waiting to be opened but he doesn’t like reading it. ‘Very soon it reminds me of something I don’t want to remember or want to think about.’ The man inside this diary is one he doesn’t recognise, or doesn’t want to. It’s a painful reminder that he still has doubts. ‘The case never came to an end, it was never cleared up and sometimes it appears to you that it really could have happened.’
In 2015 he retired and left his rural hideout to return to Reykjavik. Gudjon is not looking for redemption, he said the case had made him tough. ‘I don’t care what people say,’ he claims. His memory hasn’t mended. So, it remains, the nagging thought that maybe he is a killer. ‘It’s just one of those things that haunts you, that suddenly appears in your dreams, something from your younger days that you did wrong in your life and you can’t do anything about.’ Since he has been back in Iceland, Gudjon has never revisited the moribund slipway in Keflavik where he was supposed to have killed Geirfinnur, nor the lava fields where the man’s remains may be. But the drives that he took all those years ago to the Straumsvik aluminium plant; the zoo at Hafnarfjordur and the countless craters and crevasses in the lava fields, still penetrate his thoughts and make him feel like a guilty man. ‘Sometimes I still think he is there in those places I was talking about in 1976. I still feel like he is there, that we buried him there. I sometimes wake up or start thinking like that, I think I always will.’
Erla didn’t have the same doubts about the Geirfinnur case but when it came to Gudmundur it was a different matter. ‘I was never sure with Gudmundur and that’s how Albert is still – he knows it didn’t happen, but then I knew it didn’t happen… it sort of gradually became clear.’
After years of trying to get the police to look at the case again, to investigate who did kill Gudmundur and Geirfinnur, Erla never thought it would happen, but then out of the blue, it did. In June 2016, more than 40 years after Gudmundur Einarsson went missing on a freezing January night, the police arrested two men for his murder. They had received a tip off and it was significant enough that they searched the home of one of the men’s partners looking for evidence.
A new witness had come forward who told the police she had been in a VW car driving out of Hafnarfjordur with two men when they had hit Gudmundur by mistake. They put him in the backseat of the car and drove to Reykjavik. The woman remembered Gudmundur saying he was grateful they were taking him home. She saw blood coming out of his ear and it was clear he was hurt badly. The witness got out and wasn’t sure if Gudmundur was still alive and never knew what finally happened to him.
With no forensic evidence and only one witness with a recollection 40 years old, the police were unlikely to secure a conviction and, a few months after the arrests, the case was dropped.
After her release, Erla didn’t talk to any of the other Reykjavik Six, there was too much pain and bitterness. Slowly over the years that changed. Erla got in touch with Saevar – after all, they had a daughter together who was growing up. When Saevar moved to Denmark on his slow inexorable decline, Erla would visit him and talk to his social worker, though they couldn’t stop him sleeping out on the streets, where he spent much of his final years.
Erla has slowly rebuilt her life in Iceland. Released from jail in 1981, for years she felt weighed down by her role. ‘I always thought I was guilty of all of it, I always felt solely responsible for everything that had happened. I was the first one who lied and incriminated innocent people, people I loved.’
Having examined the case in detail, Gisli Gudjonsson can see how even now there is a reluctance among the older Icelandic generation to see Erla as a victim. ‘Erla has been blamed for a lot – she is seen as this awful person who is a liar who set it off and implicated all of these people. I don’t think people have sufficiently looked at her and her circumstances and seen that she was in a no-win situation.’
Cut adrift from most of her family and reviled by the public, Erla felt compelled to leave Iceland as she was ‘persona non grata for years’. She lived in Hawaii with her sister and then moved to South Africa, where she married and adopted a daughter before returning to Iceland. The turning point for her was an Icelandic television documentary in 1997 which first questioned the validity of the convictions. This was the time when Saevar was trying to get the case heard again in the Supreme Court, which ultimately failed. The programme caused a huge stir in the country, setting out for the first time some of the glaring inconsistencies in the investigation. ‘I sensed people saw me differently after that. I had people coming up to me saying I was a hero.’
Erla went to university and now works as a manager at an adult education centre helping immigrants to settle in Iceland. The young mother has turned into a grandmother with long blonde hair and funky clothing. She still has her throaty laugh and spiky sense of humour, but behind her thin, steel rimmed glasses there is sadness in her eyes. When she talks she tugs at her jumper nervously, pulling the sleeves over her hands like children do when they are anxious. She has created a new life, and her anger towards the police and judges who subjected her to months of interrogations has subsided. ‘It’s over now, I don’t need to see them punished, these guys are decent people but incredibly misguided with a dark agenda serving their own interests and ruining lives. It doesn’t mean I don’t have moments when the ghosts get out of the room all of a sudden and I’m pissed at all of them.’
Her case was the only one not put forward to the Supreme Court to consider whether it should be quashed. She is trying to get this decision overturned as she wants her name cleared officially. ‘I would like the Supreme Court to recognise there is nothing to substantiate any of these stories that are supposed to have happened and conclude that as far as the judicial system is concerned we are innocent.’
It may be a long time before the Supreme Court hears the case and decides whether the convictions should be quashed. This will be the final vindication that they are innocent. Erla said it’s no longer about her, it’s important this happens for the future generations of her family. ‘This case is going to go down in history for a long time. They will say, “That was my great-grandmother and she was innocent.” If that doesn’t happen there will be a generation that doesn’t know the circumstances. I have grandchildren and want them to know Gran was innocent, that their grandma isn’t a killer.’
Final Thoughts
The lunchtime crowd thinned out, leaving only a smattering of loud international students and earnest hipsters when a small blonde woman stepped into the restaurant on Skolavordustigur in March 2014. Erla Bolladottir was in her late fifties, dressed in black leggings and a baggy jumper, her hair cut in a short bob. She glanced around to see if anyone recognised her, but they were all too pre-occupied to know that among them was a woman who had been at the centre of Iceland’s most gruesome and complex murder case.
We sat and drank coffee, chatting about her daughters. She was open and forthcoming as she had been when I had talked to her on the phone back in England. Her story was complex and layered and there were many parts I didn’t understand yet. I knew I would need patience to tease out all the small but important details.
Across the road from the cafe stood the old prison, the Hegningarhusid. In the years since she was incarcerated there, awaiting trial Erla had been to the old prison many times, teaching Icelandic to the foreign prisoners. We entered, and walked past a long row of cramped, ageing cells. As we climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the first floor, Erla looked tense. She was being drawn back to the time when this jail wa
s her home, where she lived a miserable, solitary existence. We made our way into a small, stark white room, dominated by a huge wooden desk. ‘This is how it was,’ she said, her voice starting to crack. Instinctively I reached across to touch her elbow, checking that she was fine to carry on.
‘It’s OK until you start asking me what it’s like. Then I’m emotional. I’ve cried a lot in here, and had a nervous breakdown in here. I started throwing things… I could not handle what was going on.’
During my first visit to Iceland, Erla took me to her old home in Hafnarfjordur where Gudmundur was supposed to have been killed; the mournful lava fields where the police believed his body was dumped; the Raudholar where she was accused of watching as Saevar and Kristjan burned and buried the remains of Geirfinnur Einarsson. Even after all these years it was difficult for her to visit these locations. As we stood looking at the frosty red craters she reflected on how tough it had been for her ‘living in this community with all the hatred towards us, the need for authorities to acknowledge what they did has only gotten stronger and it doesn’t get any better.’
In the four decades since Erla had been convicted, the case kept resurfacing like a bloated corpse that refuses to be weighed down. The solution wasn’t in this barren landscape, in the treacherous network of crevasses and fissures – some of them 30 metres deep, enough to swallow a man whole. The answer lay in the minds of the Reykjavik Six and the police and investigators who had placed them in solitary confinement and questioned them repeatedly. What had happened inside the prison and during the police interrogations that would make them confess to two murders they couldn’t remember and didn’t commit?