A true story of false memories.
‘Over decades and decades in Iceland people have gone missing without anyone finding anything out. They just sort of disappear…’
In 1974, 18-year-old Gudmundur disappears after a boozy night in a fishing town near Reykjavik. Eleven months later Geirfinnur, a quiet family man, goes missing from Keflavik harbour in the southwest of Iceland after being summoned by a mysterious phone call from home. Both men are eventually presumed dead, but their bodies are never found.
This quiet island is in an uproar – two disappearances with no forensics, no leads, no clue what has happened. Soon, the vanishings set in motion an almost surreal series of events, a remarkable tale of corruption, forced confession, false memory and madness that stretches over 40 years.
Based on author Simon Cox’s celebrated BBC News investigation, The Reykjavik Confessions is a chilling journey of discovery into a dark corner of Icelandic history, and a riveting true-crime thriller that will have you gripped until the very last page.
Simon Cox is the chief investigative reporter at BBC radio current affairs, writing and presenting for a range of Radio 4 programmes. He has reported from over 30 countries covering stories ranging from Ebola in DR Congo to the Oklahoma Bombing in the USA. His original investigation into The Reykjavik Confessions was read by over a million people on the BBC News website, and he is consultant on an upcoming dramatization of the story. This is his first book.
Gudmundur Einarsson. The 18-year-old went missing in January 1974 after leaving a nightclub in Hafnarfjordur. He was assumed to have been killed. His body has never been found.
Geirfinnur Einarsson. The 32-year-old disappeared after going to a meeting at a café in Keflavik in November 1974. He was assumed to have been killed. His body has never been found.
Saevar Marino Cieselski. The first suspect to be arrested and supposed ringleader of the gang. He spent 741 days in solitary confinement and was questioned at least 180 times. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the murders of Gudmundur Einarsson and Geirfinnur Einarsson. He died in 2011.
Erla Bolladottir. Saevar’s girlfriend. She spent 241 days in solitary confinement and was questioned at least 105 times. She was sentenced to 3 years in prison for making false accusations and obstructing the investigation.
Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson. Childhood friend of Saevar’s. He was questioned over 160 times and spent 682 days in solitary confinement. He was found guilty of the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson and jailed for 16 years.
Gudjon Skarphedinsson. Saevar’s former teacher who tried to import drugs into Iceland with him. He spent 412 days in solitary confinement and was questioned at least 75 times. He was jailed for 10 years for the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Tryggvi Runar Leifsson. Teenage friend of Kristjan and Saevar. He spent 627 days in solitary confinement and was questioned at least 95 times. He was jailed for 13 years for the murder of Gudmundur Einarsson. He died in 2009.
Albert Klahn Skaftason. Childhood friend of Saevar. He was in solitary confinement for 88 days and questioned 26 times. He was convicted of obstructing the investigation into Gudmundur Einarsson and jailed for 12 months.
Magnus Leopoldsson. Manager of Klubburin. Arrested in January 1976 over the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson and held for 105 days in solitary confinement before being released without charge.
Einar Bollason. Erla’s half brother. Arrested in January 1976 over the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson and held for 105 days in solitary confinement before being released without charge.
Valdimar Olsen. Friend of Erla’s half brother Einar. Arrested in January 1976 over the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson and held for 105 days before being released without charge.
Sigurbjorn Eriksson. Owner of Klubburin. Arrested in February 1976 over the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson and held for 90 days before being released without charge.
Njordur Snaeholm. Veteran detective who investigated the disappearance of Gudmundur Einarsson in Hafnarfjordur in January 1974.
Valtyr Sigurdsson. A magistrate who investigated the disappearance of Geirfinnur Einarsson from November 1974 until June 1975.
Haukur Gudmundsson. A detective who investigated the disappearance of Geirfinnur Einarsson from November 1974 until June 1975.
Orn Hoskuldsson. The Reykjavik magistrate who investigated the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson in 1975 until 1977.
Karl Schutz. A German detective hired by the Icelandic government in July 1976 until January 1977 to help solve the murder of Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Sigurbjorn Eggertsson. Detective who investigated the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Eggert Bjarnasson. Detective who investigated the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Gretar Saemundsson. Detective who investigated the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Gisli Gudmundsson. Detective who investigated the murders of Gudmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson.
Hallvardur Einvardsson. Deputy prosecutor who prepared the cases to bring to court.
Gunnlaugur Briem. Judge who investigated and passed judgement on the cases in 1977.
Gisli Gudjonsson. Former detective who became renowned forensic psychologist.
Gunnar Gudmundsson. Chief prison warden at Sidumuli jail.
Hlynur Thor Magnussson. Warden who worked at Sidumuli jail and befriended Erla Bolladottir.
Gudmundur Gudbjarnarson. Warden who worked at Sidumuli jail.
Rev Jon Bjarman. Prison chaplain who regularly visited the suspects in Sidumuli jail.
For Jo, Luli and Biba
From the moment I came across this case, it struck me as one of the highest public interest, exposing as it does the many failings of the Icelandic justice system. In order to write this book I interviewed many people, including some of the key players in the story. I also contacted all of the main investigators who were involved in the case and conducted extensive research on the material that had been revealed through the two official enquiries into the case. These enquiries and the interview testimonies showed repeated mistreatment of the suspects during their time in Sidumuli. Despite repeated attempts to speak to the investigators involved in the case, they did not want to talk generally about the case, nor did they answer specific allegations that had emerged from the official reports and interview testimonies about how the suspects had been treated while they were held in Sidumuli prison.
A dark Arctic wind howled along Skolavordustigur, funnelling the icy cold of the Atlantic in an unrelenting wave, until at the Hegningarhusid – Reykjavik’s old prison – it met an immovable force. The squat, black basalt building had withstood the buffeting of Iceland’s harsh tundra climate for over a century. The jail normally housed a mixture of drunkards and petty thieves but in one part, isolated from the others, was a special prisoner: Iceland’s most notorious female inmate.
Erla Bolladottir didn’t look scary or dangerous. She was a 20-year-old elfin figure, her big rimmed glasses framing her deep brown eyes and hair, which was burnt orange in colour. Erla sat in the interrogation room at the back of the jail. Occasionally voices would float up from the prisoners below, having a smoke and stretching their legs in the tiny black asphalt yard, but there was little to distract her in the stark and functional white room, with its few hard chairs and barred window. The room was dominated by the big wooden desk, its fine grain stained black with smoke and grime and the occasional light circle left by a scalding cup. Erla had created many of these rings, with the coffee and cigarettes she had been living on during her time in isolation.
Sitting across from her was the detective she thought of as a friend, Sigurbjorn Eggertsson – a young inexperienced cop, he had been assigned to befriend Erla and extract information from her. He was part of the biggest police task force Iceland had ever assembled, charged with cracking a complex murder case that the country’s small, fledgling force was struggling to solve.
Erla had been arrested in May as the summer was approaching, a time of long white nights when the azure blue skies only dim. That was months ago, and she had lost count of the number of times she had been brought in for interviews – again and again, for hours on end, facing the same set of interrogators. Time started to become fuzzy, blurred around the edges, which was not helped when the perpetual nighttime of Iceland’s winter began to descend. She hadn’t been charged with any crime but every 30 days, the big, imposing investigating magistrate, Orn Hoskuldsson, would extend her detention by another month. For five months she had been held in solitary confinement, alone in a tiny cell with a bed, a desk and a stool bolted to the floor. Hazy light came in through the windows at the top of the cell.
Erla was not allowed any communication with family and friends; the detectives and prison wardens were her only human contact. Their incessant and interminable interviews became her sole connection with the outside world. For Erla, ‘These were the only people I ever spoke to. A lot of the time they were very friendly and I was in such a desperate need for human contact they were never the monsters – just guys I knew well.’
On this particular day, as Erla sat in the stale smoke-filled air, Sigurbjorn sat forward, a smile softening his features. ‘We are close to finishing the case and you will soon be released,’ he told her. This was what she had been waiting to hear; finally she could be reunited with her baby daughter, Julia, who she had not seen for months. There were just a few things to clear up first. All he needed was for Erla to tell him how she had helped dispose of the body.
The police believed that on a freezing November night, when the temperature dipped down to minus 7 degrees, Erla had driven this body out of Reykjavik to the Raudholar, the red lava landscape the colour of dried blood. Formed five thousand years ago, the area was a network of red volcanic hills and deep craters filled with dark, icy water. The police thought Erla had watched her accomplices put the body in a shallow grave, pour petrol on it and burn it.
Sigurbjorn leaned back in his chair, watching this sink in and gauging Erla’s reaction. Erla felt trapped, she couldn’t understand how a man she thought understood her could actually believe that she was capable of such a callous act. She knew from her previous encounters with the detective running the investigation, Karl Schutz, that he couldn’t decide if she was ‘an innocent country girl or a hardened and devious criminal’. Her denials were of no use; the statement had been prepared for her. Erla was told if she signed it, ‘your testimony is complete. Then there is nothing to keep you here’. She would be free to return to her baby.
Erla did as she was told but the police didn’t keep their promise, she wasn’t to be released. She flew into a rage, lashing out, throwing ashtrays, coffee cups, anything, until the police officers held her down.
Erla was returned to her tiny cell. She realised that no matter what she said, she would never be released. She tried to search back through her mind – but reality and fantasy had merged so she was no longer certain which of her memories were real. She needed to piece together how she had ended up here, in this hell that would never end.
In the early hours of the morning, 18-year-old Gudmundur Einarsson stumbled out of the one nightclub in Hafnarfjordur into a taut, flinty gale that drove fat snowflakes onto his long, wavy, dark hair. The weather was so bad even the town’s taxi drivers had decided to call it a night, convinced they wouldn’t get very far on the roads.
The club wasn’t much to talk about – ‘a crummy hillbilly place’ was the glowing description from one regular – but nightlife was in short supply in Iceland. Party goers would drive long distances, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from Reykjavik, to a dance in the countryside, just to have a different experience.
The night had started out well for Gudmundur. First it was a party in the Reykjavik suburbs with his friend Gretar Haraldsson, who had known Gudmundur since they were seven years old. He remembered, ‘He liked to fish, play football; he liked the Beatles and he liked to go bowling.’ Gudmundur also liked mischief, stealing copper with his friends to melt it down, using the money to buy booze. Gudmundur and his friends would head into Reykjavik to watch bands or try and pick up girls at one of the nightclubs. When they were in town, Gretar said his friend would never be pushed around: ‘He was a good fighter, he was strong, he would stand up for himself.’
On this night, Gudmundur was going further afield to Hafnarfjordur, a fishing town six miles outside of Reykjavik. The club was on the main street, across from the harbour, where the hulking fishing boats prepared to venture out into the turbulent Atlantic to harvest the cod and haddock that were the lifeblood of the town.
Gudmundur had a bottle of brandy to get through with his friends before hitting the club’s sweaty mosh pit, filled with other drunken teenagers. One of the barmaids, Kristrun Steindorsdottir, had noticed how Gudmundur stood out. In his drunken haze, Gudmundur had been separated from his buddies, who were off chasing girls, but it didn’t matter, he picked up another companion. The barmaid remembered later how Gudmundur’s tall frame had to be supported by a shorter, older friend.
When the club closed, Gudmundur faced a three hour walk back to his home in Blesugrof, on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The safest way was along the long and winding Reykjavikvegur, while the more perilous route was across the lava fields of the Reykjanes peninsula. Only a crazy person or a young drunk one would dare to think of this. In the daytime you could spot the potential dangers in this sullen, blasted landscape of charcoal, grey and brown, but the snow had turned the lava fields into a soft cotton-wool pixie land, a place of beauty but also menace. Lurking beneath the snow were gaping fissures, big enough to swallow a man whole. Gudmundur and his companion thought they would chance their luck and thumb a lift home to escape the gnawing, raw wind that bit into their chafed hands.
Elinborg Rafnsdottir was driving through Hafnarfjordur with her friend Sigridur when she spotted Gudmundur. Sigridur had a crush on the boy with deep set eyes and long dark hair, so Elinborg slowed down to offer him a lift. As she stopped, Gudmundur’s companion threw himself onto the bonnet of her car. ‘We got scared when we saw how drunk he was,’ Elinborg later recalled, and so they decided to let the drunken boys find another way home. She drove on, leaving Gudmundur with his angry friend.
Several hours later, Gudmundur was seen again, this time alone, walking out of Hafnarfjordur on the main road to Reykjavik. He wasn’t very steady on his feet and almost fell in front of a car, but once the driver saw he hadn’t hurt the swaying young man, he left him on the road, dismissing him as another foolish drunk. As the snow fell thick and fast, turning the brightly painted roofs a soft white, silence fell on the town.
By Monday morning, Gudmundur hadn’t returned home from his weekend revelry. His friends assumed he had hooked up with a girl but his father, Einar, knew something was wrong, so he reported his son missing. The case was assigned to Njordur Snaeholm, a veteran detective, and on 29 January the police and rescue organisation, the Life Saving Association mobilised an extensive search for the young man. His friends gathered at his family’s house, one of a group on a stretch by the river, and Gudmundur’s brother, Baldur organised 200 people into teams to scour the lava fields around Hafnarfjordur, while overhead a coast guard helicopter looked for any trace. Gudmundur’s disappearance had become front-page news in the island’s main newspaper, Morgunbladid.
Iceland’s treacherous winter was doing the search teams no favours: 60cm of snow had fallen in the area in a few days and Arctic gusts had blown it into drifts, so in some places volunteers had to wade waist deep through the snow. The police thought Gudmundur may have tried to make it to a friend’s house, so they asked for the teams to search in sheds and outhouses where he might have taken shelter. There were appeals for people to keep an eye out for the handsome teenager in a polka dot jacket, green pants and brown shoes.
For several days, his parents and three brothers waited anxiously for any news, but less than a week after he went missing, on 3 February, the search was wound down. His disappearance drew a phlegmatic response from Icelanders. In this volcanic, muscular land, people disappear all the time. Some are consumed by the dark, thrashing waves of the Atlantic while others perish falling from cliffs or, like Gudmundur, it was thought, are hidden somewhere deep in the lava.
There were no tearful, emotional appeals from his dad Einar or brother Baldur, indeed there was no public comment from his family at all. They were left to grieve in peace. It wasn’t the practice of Icelandic journalists to intrude upon families who had suffered such a tragedy.
Gudmundur’s body was never found; the most likely assumption was that he had been swallowed beneath the lava, forever in the long shadows, where the Huldufolk dwell, the mythical hidden elves of Icelandic folklore.
Erla Bolladottir would never forget the events of that long January night. She had reluctantly agreed to go into Reykjavik with her friend Hulda, to the throbbing excess of Klubburin, Iceland’s prime nightspot. She had been spending a lot of time by herself lately and feeling very depressed, and hadn’t felt up to socialising. Plus it wasn’t really Erla’s scene – way too straight, more disco than the hippy vibe she liked. At least there were three floors in the club, so when the pulsing beats became too much she could head up the spiral staircase to the banging rock floor at the top. There wasn’t much choice; there were only a handful of nightclubs to cater for the young who were increasingly keen to kick back against the Lutheran shackles of their parents’ generation. Erla drank a little but wasn’t in the mood to party and succumb to the sweet, mellow aroma of hash wafting through the club. By the time she left, she had missed the last bus but managed to hitch a lift back to her apartment in Hafnarfjordur with some boys she knew.
As she walked up to her apartment at number 11 Hamarsbraut, Erla was enveloped by the thick, dark folds of night. It was still hours before the thinning of the darkness, signalling morning during this beginning of winter. The tiny apartment was pitch black. As her boyfriend, Saevar, had the only key Erla had to get in by crawling through the basement window of the laundry room. Exhausted she crashed out in bed.
Later she woke, hearing something outside her window. It took her a moment to figure out that it was men’s voices, whispering in low, hushed tones. They sounded menacing and conspiratorial and Erla was alone in the apartment. Saevar was nowhere to be seen.
As she listened, not daring to breathe, she could hear that the men were checking whether she was awake or asleep. The apartment was so small that if these men could have reached in through the window they could almost touch Erla who was frozen with fear on her bed. She heard the group walk around to the front of the apartment, their footsteps cushioned by the generous carpet of snow that covered the town. The men seemed intent on getting inside, but why did they want to come into her home in the dead of night, when she was alone and vulnerable?
She recognised their voices, they were friends of Saevar’s: Kristjan, Tryggvi and Albert. Saevar had warned her that he didn’t want Erla ever to be alone with them. Albert was laid back and harmless but Tryggvi and Kristjan could turn nasty when they were drunk. They were part of the petty crime scene in Reykjavik, making money from doing whatever manual jobs they could, so that they could buy booze or hash. They had appeared at the apartment a week before. Erla remembered, ‘I was watching The Late Late Show and I turned and saw the three of them standing in the hall and I thought, “Why are they inside?”’ Saevar had been annoyed; he didn’t want them there, as, Erla said, ‘If they got drunk they could make trouble.’
Here they were, back again and she knew that she didn’t want them in her home.
Then she woke up, hot and confused, her hair slick with sweat. It was still dark and she sat up to listen to see if the men were still outside. There was no sound, just the numbing silence of winter. She realised it must have been a dream, purging her troubled thoughts of the day.
She felt marooned in Hafnarfjordur, hemmed in by the lava fields of the Reykjanes peninsula. She could guess where Saevar was, probably with another woman. He had cheated on her in the past and she was sure he was up to it again.
Last winter had been a rough time for her. Her Dad, Bolli, had suffered a stroke and was in rehabilitation in hospital. Much of the time she was alone in her little apartment. During the day she worked at the Icelandic Post and Telephone company and she would return home for interminable evenings with coal black star-filled skies.
She looked at the packet of Viceroy cigarettes next to her bed. She only had to reach across and light a cigarette and, as the smoke filled her lungs, it would calm her down. But she couldn’t rouse herself, she thought, ‘What difference does it make whether I smoke a cigarette or not?’ A cigarette couldn’t alter her miserable life. She would have to move though as she needed the toilet. It was hardly far, but she just didn’t have the energy to do it. She could feel her bowels loosening, she knew she had to leave the bed but she had no will for this most basic human task. The bed would become her toilet. How had she ended up living like this, in a tiny flat with Saevar, her boyfriend who cheated on her, was never here and yet tried to control her life?
As the Douglas DC-8 banked, climbing through the clouds, away from Keflavik airport out across the swirling grey Atlantic, Erla sat back in her seat, excited. She was on a Loftleider flight, Iceland’s self-proclaimed ‘hippy airline’, cheap, cheerful and taking her away from the, murky, bleak Icelandic winter for the crisp, winter skies of New York state. For the 18-year-old Erla, America offered freedom; a chance to escape from the conservative constraints of Iceland and enjoy the freewheeling counter-culture vibe.
It was December 1973, and Erla would have almost a month away in the country where she had spent the first seven years of her life. There was just one problem and he was sitting in the seat next to her: Saevar Cieselski. Erla was not a fan of the slight, cocky young man with his straight black hair and the dark complexion that made him stand out among the Icelandic Celts. She said later, ‘He always had an air about him that he knew everything.’ She had seen him around town when he would flash his winning smile. He had boasted that he knew about Erla and her family; so much so that she wondered if he was stalking her. The answer was far more straightforward. With a population then of just over 200,000, there are often only a few degrees of separation between people in Iceland. That was the case with Erla and Saevar, who had first met many years before.
Erla’s brother Arthur had spent summers working at a farm owned by Saevar’s grandparents. Arthur shared a room with the young Saevar and liked his manner. Erla remembered the sweet ten-year-old Saevar who didn’t say much to Erla and her sisters when they visited the farm, but smiled a lot and took them to the barn where he showed them how to jump into the hay.
The sweet boy had grown into a troublesome teenager with a reputation for pilfering and petty drug dealing. He was sleeping with Erla’s good friend, Hulda, and she was bemused: ‘I couldn’t understand her choice, I really didn’t like him.’ Erla was supposed to be making the trip to the United States with Hulda but when she pulled out at the last minute, Saevar took her place.
At least they wouldn’t have to spend long together as the plan was for them to part as soon as they reached JFK airport in New York. Saevar was heading to his family in Massachusetts to sort out an inheritance from his estranged father, Michael, who had been killed in a car crash. Saevar had a complicated relationship with his father who’d believed in the old school parenting of ‘my way or the belt’. And yet his death was a massive blow to Saevar who was adrift with no strong role model to draw him back.
As they chatted on the flight, cocooned alone above the clouds, miles above the real world, Saevar started to work his magic on her, persuading Erla to let him come and stay with her in Buffalo, New York where she was staying with friends.
Buffalo was a city dominated by steel and grain mills, the General Motors car factory and the football stadium where tens of thousands of people would gather in freezing conditions to watch the Buffalo Bills and their star running back OJ Simpson. To Erla, it was beautiful; a welcome respite from Iceland. She had a strong affection for America from her time there as a child when her dad worked as a manager for Icelandair at JFK and the family lived in Long Island. She had fond memories of days at the beach playing with her siblings.
Erla had missed the sprawling American suburbs with their wide, tree-lined streets, full of detached houses with clipped lawns and expansive back gardens. Saevar was not the ideal house guest, though; he had nightmares and would wake, shouting in his sleep. These were the dreams he never discussed with anyone, remnants from a dark chapter in his childhood. This disturbed Erla’s friends and after a few days she decided his behaviour was too much to take. She dispatched her awkward travelling companion to his relatives in Massachusetts while she stayed on in Buffalo, soaking up opportunities she would never get in her provincial hometown.
Buffalo was on the touring circuit so the city’s football stadium would often shake with a different roar, as mega bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd played there. There was also the chance to hang out with musicians, who Erla would never get to see in Iceland, like famous jazz pianist, Chick Corea, who she chatted to at a friend’s college gig.
There was more fun to be had in Washington DC where she stayed with her friend, Steve, whose father was a professor in Icelandic literature. Steve had a mane of black curly hair and a penchant for high leather boots. Saevar had soon tired of his family in Massachusetts, though, and he called Erla every day until she agreed to let him stay with her. It was an early indication of his persistence and growing obsession with Erla.
The three of them would hang out at Georgetown University, lying on the grass smoking joints and planning how to change the world. Saevar never joined in with the smoking or drinking. He had started indulging at a young age; he was 9 years old when he gave up drinking, 16 when he stopped taking hard drugs like LSD – the drug of choice in Iceland at this time, along with cannabis. For Erla, though, this was the life; she could happily stay here forever. She had hitch-hiked from Providence to Maine that summer and was already planning her next trip. America held endless possibilities.
When Steve threw a leaving party for Erla, it seemed like the whole neighbourhood turned up. It was the biggest party she had ever been to, there were people everywhere and the booze was flowing. Erla stuck to Coca-Cola, but after a while and a long, particularly dull chat with a Vietnam vet, she began to feel trippy, in a way she hadn’t experienced before and didn’t like. She had tried LSD and thought she might be having a flashback.
She needed to be alone, somewhere quiet. She made her way upstairs looking for a place to lie down and get herself together. She stumbled into an empty bedroom, pitch black except for a tiny red light in the corner. Fumbling her way towards the light, she tripped over Saevar. He was in a mess too, and suspected someone had slipped LSD into his drink. They lay down side by side, listening to Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd and talked for most of the night. ‘We opened our hearts about everything,’ Erla remembered, ‘it was the most we ever talked, he told me everything.’
There was a lot to tell about Saevar’s first 18 years. He had grown up in the east of Reykjavik, in one of the capital’s poorer neighbourhoods. His dad, Michael, was an American who worked at the air base at Keflavik as a meteorologist. He had fallen for Sigurbjorg, a beautiful blonde Icelandic girl who was the opposite of the swarthy Polish-American.
The couple moved to America but it was short lived and they returned to Iceland several years later where Saevar was born. His sister, Anna, remembers a fun-loving, happy child who loved playing with his siblings and friends. As theirs was the only house on their street with a television there was a constant throng of children who would come to the Cieselskis’ house to watch the TV and Saevar’s father, Michael, would make popcorn and brownies. The Cieselski children would create home-made theatres and put on elaborate shows for their friends with costumes and magic tricks. But behind this happy front, there was a darkness. Saevar’s father believed in firm punishment, that the best way to instil discipline was to use his belt, and he handed out this treatment to Saevar on a regular basis. It was a well-known secret among his friends who grew up alongside him in the narrow warren of streets and anodyne apartment blocks.
Away from the US base at Keflavik foreigners were a rarity – strange beings from other more exotic or scary worlds. Saevar’s surname, Cieselski, a mixture of Jewish and Polish, stood out in the ethnically homogeneous Iceland of the 1960s. Combined with his short stature and slight build it made Saevar an easy target for bullies at school. He began to truant, and then found a protector – a big, beefy kid named Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson. This worried his older sister, Anna, who thought his friends were ‘very intimidating and had a bad reputation among the other students’. Saevar also befriended Albert Klahn Skaftason, who was small, quiet and well-liked because he didn’t cause trouble. The network of streets in east Reykjavik, crammed with pebble-dashed apartment blocks and houses clad in corrugated iron to protect from the never-ending wind, became their playground.
Sigurdor Stefansson, who grew up in the same neighbourhood and would later become a close friend of Saevar, said, ‘There were very many young guys like them in that neighbourhood who were sort of alley cats – stealing from shops and so on.’
Michael had never truly settled in Iceland. After leaving the airbase at Keflavik he worked as an accountant at a supermarket but he couldn’t speak Icelandic so remained an outsider. His drinking and temper got worse and, unable to cope any longer, Sigurbjorg decided they should split. With Saevar increasingly out of control, she turned to social services for help. Aged just 14, Saevar was sent away to Breidavik, a boarding school for ‘troubled youngsters’.
Breidavik was out in the Westfjords, 300 miles and a day’s drive from the capital. It was a sprawling residential school and farm, set in total isolation 28 miles from the nearest town. When the winter weather closed in it was totally cut off. The only company was the migrating birds who flocked to the dramatic Latrabjarg cliffs and the stunning beach with soft golden sand. The school’s remoteness was a deliberate attempt to return its students to a simpler, rural lifestyle, intended to end their offending behaviour.
Breidavik had been opened by the government in the 1950s under pressure from people in Reykjavik to do something about the surge in anti-social behaviour amoung young boys who were under the age of 15 and so couldn’t be prosecuted. The school was run as a family unit with a housemaster, cook and teacher to look after the seven or so boys who lived there. In the summer, the children helped on the farm, looking after the sheep and cows and preparing hay bales for the winter. The troubled young boys were expected to stay there for up to two years to curb their problem behaviour. It was seen as a huge success story with many boys sent there supposedly cured of their delinquency. When Saevar returned from Breidavik his family were pleased with his academic progress, as his school work had significantly improved.
Breidavik, however, had a dark secret: it was a brutal and horrific place where boys were sexually and physically abused by the staff and other pupils, far away from any prying eyes of family and friends. It would be many years and many scarred lives before this horrific abuse was exposed. Saevar never revealed the indignity and humiliation meted out by the sadistic teachers and older pupils to his family or friends.
Now, years later, Saevar was lying on the floor of a bedroom in America with Erla next to him and something felt different. In his altered, vulnerable state, Saevar opened up to Erla about the gruesome years he spent at Breidavik. It was during his time there that his brutal yet still beloved father was killed in a car crash. His pain and hurt was compounded when Saevar wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. Erla would never tell anyone exactly what Saevar revealed to her in that room (‘He would turn in his grave’), but it’s clear he was violently abused by the staff and older boys. As the bright moon melted into a watery sun, Erla began to warm to the difficult, vulnerable young man. They had ‘bonded to the point I could never leave him after that, no matter how hard I tried’.
Saevar and Erla returned to Keflavik airport in time for Christmas 1973. It wasn’t like other airports; it was a huge US naval airbase where fighter planes would be lined up in the hangars waiting to fly off to guard the Atlantic from Soviet warplanes. In the arrivals lounge, Erla’s relatives were waiting to welcome her sister who was visiting from her home in Hawaii.
Erla and Saevar had a less pleasant reception party, lead by the pugnacious head of customs, Kristjan Petursson. A thick-set former policeman built like a rugby player, Petursson was fixated with Saevar. He had been looking for an opportunity to collar the cocksure young man who he was certain was a key figure in the local drugs trade. Petursson believed drugs were swamping Iceland and had successfully lobbied the government to set up a special drugs court. Petursson’s obsession wasn’t shared by the small detective force in Reykjavik, though. Arnprudur Karlsdottir, a no-nonsense, chain smoking detective – and one of the first women to enter this macho world – thought Petursson was on a wild goose chase, and that he had ‘an agenda to find drugs everywhere. It was very strange to me and we would talk a lot about it, why is he always after Saevar?’ Petursson seemed convinced if he could get Saevar he would punch a hole in the growing market for cannabis and LSD. He would also make a name for himself.
At the airport, Petursson made sure Erla and Saevar faced the indignity of being strip searched, but while Erla was released, Saevar was taken away for further questioning. Back home, Erla called everywhere trying to find Saevar but he had been swallowed up by the criminal justice system. A week later she was at a party with friends when Saevar showed up. He took hold of her hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ They went straight to her apartment and Saevar told her about his week in custody.
Petursson had accused Saevar of having a kilo of morphine stashed away somewhere in Reykjavik. He had been placed in solitary confinement in the basic facilities of Sidumuli prison. This was common practice in Iceland at the time, a way of making suspects more amenable during the interrogation. Saevar maintained his innocence, but this only served to further antagonise the customs chief and Saevar was knocked about a bit, to soften him up. After a week of getting nowhere, Saevar had been released. Although free from custody he was a marked man. The police were biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to catch him and take him off the streets for a long, long time.
Erla had been living with her dad, Bolli, in his apartment in Hafnarfjordur. There wasn’t much to it, two interconnecting living/bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room. Erla asked her dad if Saevar could stay with them, which would mean Saevar sharing Erla’s single bed. Her Dad agreed but had one condition, ‘that Saevar needed to do some honest work and get a proper job’. Saevar did occasionally try to enter the world of normal work but it never lasted. He did a stint in the fishing trade out in the Westfjords, but he couldn’t stick it. Saevar was not going to follow a conventional path.
In February 1974 Saevar was arrested again by Kristjan Petursson. Rather than taking him to the police station or prison, Petursson brought him to his home where he offered him a drink. He wanted Saevar to confess to the biggest jewellery robbery that had ever been committed in Iceland. Saevar said he knew nothing about it but Erla said he later told her, ‘He was frustrated that someone else had gotten away with it. It was a crime he would have liked to get away with, he was always very curious who had done it.’ When this soft approach didn’t work Saevar was taken to Sidumuli for another stint in solitary confinement, this time for a month. Saevar got out of trouble by informing on his fellow small-time dealer and friend, Sigurbor Stefansson, who surprisingly stood by him. (‘I told him I would never do any business with him but I would be his friend.’)
In the 1970s Iceland was still a land of prohibition. There were only three government-run off licences in Reykjavik where you could get expensive spirits but no beer, which was banned, and remained illegal until 1989. This created the ideal environment for cheap smuggled booze and for petty criminals like Saevar to make some money.
Saevar had the gift of the gab and a charm that enabled him to enlist his friends in his criminal schemes. One of these involved exploiting a friend working at the docks where the legal alcohol was shipped in. Saevar would visit him for a chat to distract him so his friends Kristjan and Albert could steal whatever alcohol they could get their hands on. It was hardly a master criminal enterprise but it worked. Over several trips they built up a hoard of whisky, cognac and vodka. Erla was their ‘fence’ who would sell it to her co-workers at the Icelandic Post and Telephone company. As Friday approached, she became popular for being able to get alcohol to get the weekend started.
Saevar needed a longer term regular source of income, however, and he went for the other big vice in 1970s Iceland, drugs. Kristjan Vidar was always at his side; after all, it didn’t hurt to have a well built, tall friend with a reputation for violence to look out for you. Saevar didn’t fit in with the prevailing hippy vibe of the drug dealing community. ‘He was a stranger when he came into the hash business,’ his friend Sigurdor observed, ‘and not many people liked him or Kristjan because they were from the other side, they were not hippies.’
Saevar’s drug dealing meant leaving Erla alone for days whilst he went overseas to buy hashish. Erla was the only one working and bringing in a regular wage and by July 1974 she had had enough of her wayward boyfriend. Erla found out he was cheating on her. It was the final straw and she told him it was over, this time for good. Saevar could see she was serious and he lashed out, kicking her in the stomach with his steel toe-capped boots. The blow meant Erla couldn’t walk properly for several days.
With Saevar out of her life, Erla had a new freedom. She headed to the Westmann islands for their annual music festival. There she met a new man. He was French and, unlike Saevar, he respected her. She could see a future without the chaos and instability of Saevar, but her time apart from him wasn’t to last very long.
Erla’s relationship with Saevar had created a rift with her family. In her early life she hadn’t known her half brother Einar, but after her parents split she got to know him. She was in awe of the basketball legend and the two became close. But Einar couldn’t stand Saevar and had persuaded her dad to sell the apartment in Hafnarfjordur, forcing Erla to move. With no one else to turn to, she had to ask Saevar to help her. He used his forceful charm to manoeuvre himself back into her life, promising her this time things would be different. He had developed in interest in filmmaking and he told her he would direct a film and transform their lives, but he needed money to finance his project. He had no intention of working to earn it, instead he came up with a scheme to steal it from Erla’s employers, the Icelandic Post and Telephone company. It was this scam that would be his undoing.
Saevar and Erla had found a flaw in the system for wiring money. Erla used her insider knowledge of the post office codes to pretend they were wiring money from abroad and then Erla would go and collect it using a fake identity. On their first attempt they got away with almost half a million kronor, but for Erla it wasn’t about cash: ‘I never really thought about what I would do with the money. It was to piss off the system and show them they were stupid.’ Although she had a false ID and forged a signature, Erla was nervous that as an employee of the phone and telegraph company she would be spotted.
In total they embezzled a million kronor – around $10,000 – a sizeable sum at the time, enough to put down a deposit on a house. Saevar wanted to pull off the perfect crime, one that couldn’t be solved. It would be his way to get back at the authorities who he felt had bullied and harassed him since he was a child. Erla was also driven by a similar desire to hit back at the establishment: ‘It was all about getting away with it and laughing at them, to get back at all of them. All who were stupid and mean and unjust and all these rich people were assholes. I was really angry.’
Saevar gave 300,000 kronor to his friend Vilhjalmur Knudsen who was a filmmaker, who in return let Saevar borrow his film equipment. That still left hundreds of thousands of kronor spare. Erla splashed out on a sporty white 1968 Mustang with green stripes down the sides. They weren’t sure what else to do with the money. They couldn’t suddenly buy a property as that would attract too much attention. There was nothing else they particularly desired, so they stashed it away in a wardrobe, raiding it when they needed money for food. Their only extravagance was a night in the upmarket Icelandair hotel complete with room service.
As the months rolled on, Saevar thought he had got away with the crime, that he had fooled the police. But Iceland is a small place and Saevar had a big mouth. The police were watching and listening waiting to make their move. Then, in November 1974, the police had a new case land on their desk, one which would dominate the work of the small detective force for years.
Geirfinnur Einarsson lived an ordinary life but his name would be remembered for decades in Iceland. He lived in the industrial town of Keflavik, 30 miles from the capital. As well as being home to the sprawling US airbase, Keflavik is a port from where fishing boats set out to harvest cod from the cold waters of the Atlantic, processing them in the plants surrounding the harbour. Geirfinnur made his living doing manual labour and often had to work away from home, leaving his wife Gudni and young children, Sigridur and Anna Birgitta.
Geirfinnur was a man of simple pleasures and didn’t go out much. His life revolved around work and his family and the occasional evening out with friends. On the evening of 19 November, he was planning to relax after a hard day at work by seeing a movie with a friend, Thordur Ingimarsson. But when Thordur arrived at the wide, grey, pebble-dashed house on Brekkubraut, his friend had some bad news, he had to cancel their evening out. Geirfinnur had been called to a meeting with some men in the Hafnarbudin, the simple cafe in Keflavik harbour where fishermen would gather for a smoke, a decent cup of coffee and bearable food. Thordur offered his friend a lift to his rendezvous.
It was a short drive through the quiet roads towards the Hafnarbudin, looking out over a jetty to the thrashing Atlantic Ocean. Geirfinnur told his friend about the strange nature of the meeting, that he had been asked to come alone and on foot. Geirfinnur was not his usual self; he seemed edgy, even suggesting he should be armed, which was so out of keeping with his friend’s usual character that Thordur was sure he was joking – or at least he hoped he was. As they drove towards the harbour, Geirfinnur speculated that the meeting might be a hoax, a cheap joke played by one of his workmates. Thordur had no idea who his friend was meeting or why.
Sure enough, when Geirfinnur reached the cafe there was no mysterious person there to meet him. Gudlaug Jonssdottir had worked at the harbour cafe long enough to know her regulars and immediately recognised the quietly spoken and unassuming Geirfinnur, as he would often stop by late in the evening and buy some cigarettes. He did the same this night and, frustrated at what he thought was a prank, he returned home.
Shortly after walking in his front door, the phone rang at Geirfinnur’s house. During the short conversation his wife overheard Geirfinnur clearly say, annoyed, ‘I’ve already been there’. It sounded like the person Geirfinnur was supposed to meet at Hafnarbudin was summoning him back there. Although it was now after ten, he headed out once again, this time driving there himself in his red Ford Cortina. He parked it 200 metres from the cafe with the keys still in the ignition, traipsing across the muddy ground and the narrow road to the cafe, one of a group of sturdy low rise buildings facing out to sea.
When he hadn’t returned home the next morning his wife, Gudni was in a panic. This was out of character for Geirfinnur and she phoned the police to check if there had been accidents reported overnight. A friend came over to keep Gudni company while she waited, but still Geirfinnur failed to show up or phone her. A day later Geirfinnur’s boss reported him missing.
Valtyr Sigurdsson was in his cramped office in Keflavik trying to get through the usual mountain of paperwork when detective Haukur Gudmundsson walked in and told him, ‘Boss, we have a strange case.’
The two couldn’t have looked more different; Haukur was every inch the bull-headed cop while Valtyr, with his long dark hair, suede jacket and white cheesecloth shirt, looked more like the manager of a rock band than an investigating magistrate. Valtyr had only been in the job for three years and was used to boring fare: thefts, drink driving or fines.
Valtyr was ambitious, though, and maybe this could be the case that would get him out of this backwater and into Reykjavik, where everything happened. He decided early on he wasn’t going to rely on a pack of beagles roaming around the harbour and the lava fields. The Gudmundur Einarsson disappearance at the beginning of the year had been discussed a lot within police ranks. The force had been criticised for their decision to close down the investigation after less than a week, based on the assumption that Gudmundur had been lost in the carpet of lava.
Valtyr felt this new case was different: ‘This was something special, I didn’t know if it was criminal, just strange.’
He moved down to the Keflavik police station from his office, just him and two detectives – Haukur and another officer, John Hill – in an office not much bigger than a broom cupboard, with a sofa and a low desk. Valtyr told his small team, ‘This time we will do some real investigating.’
A few days later, the first story appeared in the daily tabloid newspaper, Visir. There was a picture of the Hafnarbudin cafe and another of Geirfinnur, looking like a fifties throwback with a fine quiff. Geirfinnur looked nothing like this now but it was better than nothing.