RedHanded - Episode 179 - The Reykjavík Confessions: Memories of Murder

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

This is the bizarre story of 2 mysterious disappearances, 1 strange dream and 6 people who ended up confessing to murders they couldn't even remember...What happened on the treacherous lava fields of Iceland back in 1974 that ruined the lives of so many, and crept its way so deep into the Icelandic culture, that this story still makes headlines today? Book: Out of Thin Air by Anthony Adeane Sources: www.redhandedpodcast.com   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And welcome to your very first episode of Red Handed in 2021. The mythical year? Can we call it that now? Oh, I'm too scared after what I said about 2020. You know what? Maybe I'll be like, 2021 is going to be the most outrageous year that ever happened and everything's going to be awful. And maybe the opposite will happen and we'll all have a lovely time and get married.

That's what I'm hoping. I think if the past year's record is anything to go by, I think that's it. Or you guys are listening to this in 2021 because we're still recording this in December 2020. Yeah, we're in the past. And the aliens are here and they're now the kings and're in the past. And the aliens are here. And they're now the kings. And all hail the aliens. All hail Xenu. It's now law that you have to be a Scientologist.

The murder hornets have taken over. The aliens are here. And we are all Scientologists. Who knows? Tom Cruise is the king of Earth. Couldn't pick a better man. Couldn't pick a better man. But yes, who knows what the hell is going on in 2021. We are still in the confines of 2020 coming to you, as Hannah said, from the past. But it doesn't matter because we've got quite the case for you to kick things off over here at Red Handed HQ. We really have. You know that we like to cover things that you might not have heard about and take you to places you may never have been. And we're certainly doing that this week with Iceland, somewhere we've never been before on the show, despite my obsession with CrossFit stars who are all Icelandic. Why is that Iceland? Icelanders, let me know why. You know, CrossFit Reykjavik is the second most requested taxi destination at the airport.

What? What, Iceland? What does that mean? I'm confused by you. You confuse me. I was going to say, at Reykjavik Airport, right? Obviously not at Heathrow Airport. They're just like, Reykjavik, Reykjavik, CrossFit, please.

Take me to Reykjavik. No, like when you get to Reykjavik Airport, apparently. Second most popular. I don't know what the most popular is. Welcome to Iceland. And it's a mystery this week, I'm afraid. No real answers. No, just more questions.

But send in your theories. Yes, please. Theories. Theories galore to be had, especially you Icelanders, because we know you are listening. We know that some of you are listening. Yeah, we've got loads of dotters and sons in the Patreon list. There's tons of you that pop up and give me major stress about pronouncing your names, which brings us on to the fact that I am filled with fear about these names.

I have tried. I have sat. I have Googled. I have listened. I have sat. I have Googled. I have listened. We're going to try. So bear with us. The trick to it is just loud, confident and wrong. Got it.

As I would often get told when I sang in a choir. Hannah McGuire, loud, confident and wrong. Try harder. Amazing. Well, I will take on your advice then, Hannah, and I will attempt to follow those rules. I think that's how we should live 2021. Loud, confident and wrong. And whatever happens can just happen. So if you guys haven't heard of this particular case, which I guess is kind of known as like the Reykjavik confessions, that's kind of what the BBC calls it all over the

place. Yes. I'd heard rumblings of this case for a couple of years and that's how I've always heard it referred to. Maybe it's because everyone's too scared to say the names of the people. Possibly. Possibly. And the only Icelandic name or word we can all say is Reykjavik because, yeah, that's the only one. But if you guys haven't heard of this, there is a book out there called Out of Thin Air by a man named Anthony Edane. Oh, Anthony Aideen even, sorry. Already getting it wrong. Very, very simple name.

Even the Anglo names are throwing you off today. I can't, guys. How it starts is how this is probably going to end. So forgive me. There is also a Netflix documentary out there of the same name. So Out of Thin Air. So check those out. A lot of the information comes from the book

and also just other sources that we found. So it's a good one. We definitely recommend it. Go check it out. We'll leave the link to where you can buy it in the episode description. So shall we kick off? Shall we see what's going on in Iceland? I can't wait.

Let's do it. I'm on the edge of my seat. Good. So the disappearances of Gudmundur and Geirfinna are probably the most famous criminal cases in recent Icelandic history. And we say criminal, but we don't really know what happened to these two men. Spoilers. So I guess we'd say the most famous missing persons cases in Icelandic history

and apparently you'd be hard-pressed to find any Icelander who doesn't know what happened. I can't vouch for this I've only been to Iceland once and I didn't spend any time talking to anybody about missing persons but this is the word on the street and while they all know of this case, no one really knows what actually happened. These disappearances took place almost 50 years ago. And yet young people born much later still know the details of these cases as well as their parents who actually lived through it did. The disappearances of these two men have since penetrated Icelandic culture, to the extent that they're still commonly referenced in Icelandic movies, TV shows, cartoons, and even by comedians. Apparently, you might even hear an Icelander reference the case in idioms

and sayings by saying something like, he spent so long looking for his keys that I thought he would find Gyrfinnur. Jokes. Bants. Bants from the Icelandic comedian. Love it. And so these cases have become almost mythical, if you will. Except, of course, they really did happen. Lives really were destroyed. And many of the people involved are still alive today and living with the trauma. It all began on the 26th of January 1974 when 18 year old Gudmundur

Inarsen along with three of his mates went to a nightclub in Hafnarfjörður. This was a port town about 10 kilometers south of Reykjavik and this club had earned itself a bit of a reputation for being a pretty rough place due to the fact that young men from surrounding towns would often meet up there for quote, organised brawls. Vikings like to fight each other, I suppose. Yeah. Are those the like roots of CrossFit? Organised brawls in nightclubs in Iceland, maybe? Who knows? Probably somebody who knows things about CrossFit. It's me, I'm a CrossFit historian. That night, Goodmunder drank quite a lot

and after a few hours of dancing, he decided to call it a night. So he stepped out of the club into the blistering cold and unwisely decided that he would walk the 10km back to Reykjavik. A good 10k time if you are running is an hour. Yeah, that's just... It it has bad news bad news bears bad news decisions all round bad news freezing your tits off bears exactly it's fucking january i was in iceland for my birthday a few years ago so it was in end of october time fuck me i was so cold we were literally like okay let's just be on the bus.

Then when we're not on the bus, take some photos, quickly have a look at everything, then get back on the bus. I've never been so cold in my fucking life. Walking 10 kilometres at night, drunk, in January. Bad news. Yeah. It didn't take long for Gudmundur himself to realise that he had made a terrible decision. And he started to try and flag down passing cars to get a lift home.

This was when he was spotted by two of his female friends who just so happened to be driving past. It was about 2am by this point. These friends slowed down for Gudmundur but soon realised that he wasn't alone. A man in a yellow jacket was standing behind him. This yellow-jacketed man was also very drunk and threw himself on the hood of the woman's car and then fell over onto the other side. Alarmed, the women sped up and drove off, leaving Gudmundur and the man in the yellow jacket on the side of the road still.

At some point between 2am and 3am, Gudmundur was spotted again. This time, however, he was alone and barely able to walk in a straight line, though apparently he was still attempting to flag down passing vehicles. A man named Svein Verhamsen was waiting at some traffic lights when Gudmundur suddenly appeared, stumbled towards his car and then fell flat on his face. Apparently

Gudmundur stayed down for a few moments before shakily picking himself up and stumbling away. The lights turned green and Svein drove off, not knowing that he most likely could have been the last person to ever see Gudmundur Einarsson alive again.

So this will be absolutely no surprise, but Iceland is no stranger to everything from severe earthquakes, landslides, fierce snowstorms, volcanic activity and of course gale force winds. The weather can change so quickly that you could walk into a cafe on a clear sunny morning and step out again just an hour later to find the whole place covered in a blanket of fresh snow. And this is exactly what happened the night that Gudmundur went missing. When he was in the club and when he started walking home, the skies were fairly clear,

but by the following morning, Hafnerfjorda was totally covered with thick white snow. Even the 30-foot crevices in the expanses of the nearby lava fields were filled in and completely hidden. Gudmund had never stayed out all night before without telling his parents where he would be. And so, understandablyably they were very concerned. So much so that the very next day after he fell to turn up, his mother posted an advert in all the local papers asking for anybody with information on his whereabouts to contact her.

Shall we talk about the lava fields quickly? What are they? What's going on? I was literally just going to say, can we please discuss the lava fields quickly what are they what's going on i was literally just gonna say can we please discuss the lava fields yes so i did visit the lava fields when i was in iceland and they're not like active lava basically what it is is the lava's like come out of the ground and then it's pushed up almost like geysers out of the ground and then it's set and frozen so it's almost like a city when you're standing in the middle of the ground and then it's set and frozen. So it's almost like a city. When you're standing in the middle of the lava fields, it almost looks like there are all these skyscrapers and people and sculptures,

but it's all just lava that forced its way out of the ground and then froze. If you see what I mean. So it's like black, craggy rock everywhere. See, I was picturing just like a fire lake. So it's not that. I mean, maybe there are places like that definitely in Iceland. But I think what they're maybe talking about here with the crevices and stuff is like, where there's been loads of volcanic activity, and then it's hardened, and just turned into rock. And it's quite scary to walk on because if you fall,

you are gonna cut yourself like you've fallen on a bunch of knives because it is so sharp and uneven and there's loads of ravines and it's just like it's dangerous land to be navigating in the daytime when you're sober let's just say that the following day goodman's parents had still heard nothing so his his father, Ina Balderson, officially reported his son missing. On the 30th of January 1974, the inspector in charge of Goodmunder's missing persons case, a man named Sniholm, received a phone call from a lady. She was one of the women who had stopped for Goodmunder that night, before the man in the yellow jacket had frightened her off. God, you'd feel terrible, wouldn't you? Yeah, oh my God. If you'd left your mate on the side of the road in the middle of the night

and the next day they're missing. Fuck. Yeah. Oh God. Terrible. The guilt. But in her defence, I would also be scared by a man I didn't know jumping on my car. Definitely.

So this lady told Inspector Snehalhal about this unknown man in yellow. And the police then questioned the three friends who Goodminder was at the club with that night, but none of them, it turned out, had been wearing yellow. It's a strong look. It's an acquired taste. But also useful if you're going to be walking places at night and you want to be seen. 100%. 100%. This is very morbid, but from my childhood,

this is how risk-averse my father is. When I used to do a lot of swimming, I started swimming lessons quite young and I did it for like a lot of my teenage years. My dad would insist that I wasn't allowed to wear a black or navy swimming costume like everyone else did. I had to wear a yellow one in case I drowned

and they could find me at the bottom of the pool. Oh my God. I know. Like you're swimming in like a lake of squid ink. Yeah. Like what? It's a genuine memory that I have from my childhood is being told that. A girl I went to uni with grew up in Dubai and she's very pale.

So her mum would make her wear like a full burkini like the Muslim girls at school. So she didn't get burned. Smart. Smart thinking, man. Fuck the sun. And all of the other white girls could wear swimming costumes. I love it. I love it.

Just cultural assimilation and skin protection. I'm here for it. Yeah, exactly. I think she listens to the show, actually. So does my dad. Hi, dad. So sorry if I've bastardised that story in any way. I don't think I have. Goodminder, who had just recently finished school, wanted to be a mechanic

and was known as a happy-go-lucky kind of guy who enjoyed a drink and never lost an arm wrestle. And apparently, it wasn't unusual to see him challenging men on nights out to test their strength against his. And needless to say, sometimes these friendly arm wrestles would escalate to alcohol-fuelled fistfights. So this is exactly what his friends had assumed had happened when Goodmunder hadn't shown up the following morning. They figured that either he'd gone and had a fight and was off licking his wounds or maybe he'd gone home with a woman. But soon enough, they began to fear that he might actually have been killed in a drunken fight. And there was always another possibility, equally as tragic.

Maybe Gudmundur had stumbled off into the surrounding lava fields and got lost. I actually did watch an episode of I Shouldn't Be Alive where a man got lost in some lava fields. It's terrifying. Guys, if you still haven't watched it, go check it out. So the walk from the nightclub that night towards the town of Blesugrov, where Gudmundur lived, would be challenging enough today in 2020.

But in 1974, it would have been 10 times worse. Especially drunk and especially in the middle of the night. Hafnifjorda is situated on top of a 7,000-year-old lava field with the houses and buildings just built wherever the solidified magma allowed them to stand. Iceland. Yeah. Guys. I thought you were going to be like, Iceland.

No. Iceland. No. Just thought you were going to be like, Iceland. No. Iceland. No. Just stop. Stop building things on lava. No. They can't. They won't. I know. I know. I know. That's very culturally imperialist is it that I've got cell signal literally everywhere I go, even though I'm in like some remote mountainous area and I can only see one like creepy looking farmhouse in the corner. And this guy who had taken us out on the tour that we were on was like, oh, yeah, we have cell signal everywhere because that's the only way the government can contact all the people that are just sporadically dotted around the country to be like a volcano is going to erupt. Get your fucking arse in gear. I was like, that's so cool.

Not the volcanoes like killing people, but the cell coverage. Well, they do that in Korea. Like they send you emergency weather warnings to your phone as like a text message, which were no good for me because obviously I can't read Korean. So it was just this low level anxiety of like something's happening. I don't know what it is. It could be an earthquake. It could something's happening I don't know what it is it could be an earthquake it could be wind I don't know so not only were you being haunted by a dead cat in your career yes but you were also just being fucking trolled by the government with messages you couldn't read outstanding no wonder you left there without paying your phone bills

I approve yeah anyway if you don't know what the hell we're talking about you definitely should come sign up to under the duvet head on over to Patreon to do that because it'll change your life in 2021. I'm a criminal. I'm not allowed back in Korea. These are facts. These are facts. So, yeah, like we were saying, these lava fields are covered in incredibly deep trenches. And if Gudmundur hadn't managed to hitchhike a lift home, then he might have tried to take a shortcut and found himself at the bottom of one of these ravines. So over the next few days, the police organized multiple rescue teams searching for any trace of him. But the ground was covered under almost a meter of snow. That is like so much snow I can't even comprehend. I've never even seen that much snow.

That's a lot of fucking snow. And so, despite an extensive search, they found nothing. Even when the snow melted a few days later and the rescue teams headed out again, this time even abseiling down into every crevice of the lava field that they could, they still found no clues about Gudmundur's whereabouts. But this case, as we mentioned at the start, isn't about only the disappearance of Gudmundur's whereabouts. But this case, as we mentioned at the start, isn't about only the disappearance of Gudmundur. It revolves around the separate disappearances of two men, and the second vanishing took place near the end of the same year, on the 19th of November 1974. This man was called Geirfinna Einarsson. So yes, he has the same surname as Gudmundur.

But this is just a coincidence. They weren't related. They were as unrelated as any two people are on Iceland. Because I think we've talked about it before, where like all their dating apps have to have like something that tells them if they're related to somebody else they're matching with, because everyone's so closely related there maybe it's the population so small yeah yeah yeah yeah speaking about potential inbreeding did you know that both diana and camilla are charles's cousins both of them oh for god's sake well that's fabulous. Thank you so much. Yeah, so basically, like we said, it's just a complete coincidence that their surnames are both Ineson. Because in Iceland, they use what's known as a patronomic naming system.

Meaning that the surnames are made from the father's first name, followed by either son or dotter, depending on whether the child is a boy or a girl. So for example, if there's a man named John who had a son named Alex, Alex's full name would be Alex Johnson. Johnson's son, so Don's son. But if John had a daughter named Alex, then her full name would be Alex, John's daughter. With me? Good. Yeah. So like I'd be Hannah, John's daughter. You'd be Suriti, Murili's daughter. Exactly. Just to keep it super confusing. But no, it makes sense. It's just confusing to us because we do it in a different way. And in India, especially in South India, where I'm from, you don't even have surnames. So when I came here, just like what's my surname I don't know so yeah it's just it's just everyone does it differently and that's why in Iceland first names are actually more important than surnames in fact even the

phone book back when you know people actually use them they're ordered in Iceland by first name. Isn't that interesting? That is interesting. Good facts from you. So let's wiggle on back to Geirfinnur, I think. Is that Geirfinnur? Is that what we're saying? Geirfinnur. Although he had the same surname as Gudmundur, that's about the only thing they had in common. It just means that their dad had the same first name. In 1974, the two men were at very different stages of their lives. Gudmundur was just 18, fresh out of school and doing all of the things an 18-year-old does, like drunken arm wrestling and going to clubs and fighting people. Girfinnur, however, was a 32-year-old man with a wife and two small children. He worked as a labourer at power plants and construction sites across Iceland. On the day of his disappearance, Geirfinnur had finished work at the construction site.

He'd gone home, had dinner with his wife, read a book, and by 9pm was sat in front of the television drinking coffee with Thordur, a friend of his who'd come over for a visit. Around 10pm, he said he'd had to go and meet some people and asked Thordur if he would give him a lift to the Keflavik docks in Hafnarberden. On the way there to the docks, Gerfinner told Thordur, his mate,

that he probably should be armed for this meeting. But his friends simply thought that he was joking and dropped him off at the Hafnarberden cafe next to the docks and drove home. That's quite a strong joke, but maybe Icelandic humour's lost on me. Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of like the woman who didn't stop to pick up Gurmundur. You might be like the next day, oh shit, maybe he was being serious and I should have asked him what that joke was about.

But no, everyone's like, okay, cool. Not going to ask you too much about that. Yeah. The streets were empty and the night was freezing. After waiting a while, Giffner seemed to realise that the people he was meant to be meeting weren't coming, so he decided to walk back home. He arrived about 15 minutes later, but not long after, he sat back down in front of the television and the phone rang. And his son answered it. A deep voice asked him to put his father on the line, so he did. And Gerfner's son heard his father saying,

I already came, and then, OK, I'm coming. Gerfner grabbed his keys and his jacket, jumped in his red Ford Cortina and headed back to the docks. And he never came home. The following morning, his car was found unlocked with the keys in the ignition parked next to the cafe. Just like Gudmundur, ten months earlier, Gerfiner had disappeared without a trace.

The difference here, of course, was that Gudmundur's disappearance could easily be put down to a drunken misadventure. But the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Giffenor had the signs of something more nefarious. Something criminal, even. There were just far too many unanswered questions about the night that Giffenor had gone to the docks. Who was on the phone?

Who was he meeting? Why did he say that he should be armed? And of course, where was he now? In 1974, serious crimes was something Icelanders only really read about in books, watched on TV and in movies. Murder was almost unheard of on the small island nation. In fact, the last murder in recent memory at the time the two men went missing would have been the killing of a taxi driver in 1967, so like a decade before. And this taxi driver had been shot in the head and left in his car and the murder had never been solved. Apart from that though, murders were extremely rare, especially in a tiny town like Klefavik,

where everybody pretty much knew everyone else. Most untimely deaths on the island were caused by suicides or accidents. But both of these options seemed unlikely with the case of Gierfner, because everything about that night was just so strange. And during their initial investigation, police thought that perhaps they had hit upon a lead. They spoke to a man who claimed that he had asked Gierfana to brew 60 litres of moonshine for him. Because at the time, in Iceland, you could only sell beer if it was

less than 2.2% proof. And there was a total state monopoly on licensed alcohol sales 2.2 2.25 proof what's that that's like a fucking shandy it's not worth the calories that's for sure no it's definitely not and i just feel like people in iceland probably like a drink it's so cold i can't believe that that was all that was allowed. So obviously people were just like cooking up their own fucking moonshine and whatever. I think it's similar in Finland. So maybe there's something to do with like places where it's dark a lot of the time. Maybe. The government are like, maybe we shouldn't give them alcohol as well as it being dark. Possibly. That's possibly a very good explanation for why.

That obviously isn't still the case now in Iceland. However, interestingly, the state monopoly on alcohol in Iceland still exists today. And this is why alcohol is so fucking expensive there. I think I've said this on the show before. I was there for my birthday with my friend and we were like, right, let's have some alcohol tonight because it's your birthday. Fuck, it was like, honestly, it was like 15 quid for a glass of wine. It was outrageous. And would you like to know a couple of other weird, archaic laws that they had in Iceland at the time, as well as this whole, you can only drink 2.25% proof alcohol?

Yes, I would love to. That's my favourite type of information. Excellent. Well, I've got some. This comes directly from Anthony's book, Anthony Aideen's book. So, at the time in Iceland, it was illegal to own a dog as a pet or to own a lizard or to watch TV on Thursdays. Facts. Why? I don't know. So do you were you allowed to own like a wolf to hunt with or like pull your sleigh? I think maybe if you could say like your dog was like a working dog on your farm or like a hunting dog but apparently it says you weren't allowed to have

a dog just like as a pet and you weren't allowed to own a dog just like as a pet. And you weren't allowed to own a lizard. Why? Was there an issue with that? I don't know. I can't imagine lizards being particularly happy in the Icelandic climate though. Maybe that's why. Maybe you weren't allowed to bring them in. I don't know.

Bob Bardella would be pissed. Yeah, maybe one guy was just like, I'm not having this, has stormed into Parliament, was like, save those lizards. They're freezing. Very likely. But yes, that's basically some weird laws that were there at the time. The police hear from this guy. He tells them that he had, like, been working with Giffen to make this alcohol.

And at the time, this was quite, like, a popular thing for people to do. Apparently, in the 70s, many nightclub owners in Reykjavik would either brew their own high-strength moonshine in like bathtubs or they would collect illegal imports that Norwegian sailors would throw from their ships into the water. So the police now suspected Geirfinna was possibly involved in a local bootlegging slash smuggling operation. But further investigations didn't lead anywhere. So on the 5th of June 1975, the police formally closed the case on Girfiner's disappearance.

It had been about one and a half years since Goodmunder had disappeared from the nightclub and over six months since Girfiner had driven to the cafe never to be seen again. The police had no real clue about what had happened to either man and both of their cases would most likely have remained closed forever. Unless that is if it wasn't for the arrest of a young woman and her boyfriend on charges of a completely unrelated embezzlement scam around six months later. If you thought it was already confusing, strap in your Iceland listening ears because here it's going to get complicated. Concentrate. This woman was about 20 years old and her name was Erla Bollardottir.

Erla was born in Reykjavik on the 15th of July 1955, a middle child with three sisters and a brother. Her father was a station manager for Icelandic Airlines at Idyllwild Airport, which today is Kennedy Airport in New York. Erla had lived in America with her dad for five years as a child and then returned to Iceland when she was seven years old. It was a tradition at that time for young children to spend their summers on rural farms in Iceland as a sort of cultural experience that sounds very midsummery doesn't it? It really

does. And the point of this summer away was to witness how the farmers kept the nation supplied with meat and wool for centuries. And so one summer Erla was sent to stay at a farm in a village in the northwest of Iceland. Only three families lived there and there was nothing else for miles around. It was so remote you could only access the place by boat or air, literally like Jonestown. Those were your only options to get to Jonestown, a 19-hour boat or a tiny weeny plane. Hate it, hate it, no thanks. And one day when Erla's on this farm having her midsummer experience millions of miles away from anybody, she was helping the farmer in the chicken shed and he forcibly kissed her and molested Erla. I think it's important to say she hasn't been sent to stay with family members.

It's like an evacuee program. You just get sent to like a farm. Yeah. You don't really get to pick which one. Yeah, that's very much what it sounds like. So after this happened, Erla told the man's wife, who said that she would speak to her husband, but that Erla should never speak of this incident to anybody. The classic. I'll deal with it, but just keep your mouth shut. Obviously, this didn't help Erla at all, and she was left changed by this experience. When she returned home after the summer,

she felt unable to speak to her family about what had happened, and she grew increasingly alienated from them. She started spending hours on her own in her room, and over time even convinced herself that she had been accidentally swapped at birth at the hospital. She'd constantly daydream about maybe one day reuniting with her real parents, and she began to blame her mother for what had happened to her on the farm. And she also began to rebel in her own small ways, like stealing money from her dad to buy cigarettes. This, she says, gave her a feeling of control over her life, something which she felt she had lost at that farm. When she was still young,

Erla's father began embezzling money from the Pan American Airlines sales office where he was now working. At first, this went unnoticed, but in 1966, he started to steal larger amounts until they noticed that they were missing around 400,000 kroner, which is about 60,000000. And this I found interesting. Apparently, the company just liked him, just liked him so much that they didn't press charges and decided to simply fire him instead. Oh, he's a good guy, that massive embezzler. I wouldn't want him to go into any trouble with any sort of lasting record or anything. Nah, it's only £60,000, whatever. And so Erla's dad lost his job, and it had been a good job.

He'd been earning good money with the airline. And after this firing, it meant that he couldn't hold down work. He moved from job to job, gradually earning less and less, which meant that the family had to downsize their home a few times. Until finally, Erla and her siblings all found themselves sharing a single, tiny room. The financial strain proved to be too much for her parents, and by the time that Erla was 14, they had separated. At first, Erla lived with her mum, who was incredibly strict. And when Erla turned 16, their relationship grew increasingly problematic. Until one day her mother snapped and slapped Erla.

Erla slapped her back. And that was the end of their time living together. Soon after this, in 1971, Erla moved to Reykjavik to live with her father. This was an exciting time to be a young person in Reykjavik. Lofgladir Airlines was apparently known as the hippie airline. They made travel to Europe and America much more affordable and the number of Icelanders who traveled abroad went up sixfold during this particular time in history. Young Icelanders traveled to London and San Francisco

and brought back with them the culture, the fashion and the music. Led Zeppelin played Reykjavik in June 1970 and that was just the start of the hippie movement there. Young people began adopting the lifestyle of the socially conscious hippie taking drugs and embracing the ideas of free love, a far cry from the conservative beliefs of their parents' generation. Hippie communes popped up around Reykjavik,

where long-haired political science and sociology students would go to do drugs and do big talk. And then I guarantee go and work in their dad's company for the rest of their lives but it is it's funny though isn't it because Reykjavik or Iceland in itself and Reykjavik particularly is quite an interesting place because it is actually home to like quite a lot of conferences because I obviously used to work in the glamorous world of corporate conferences and I was was like, why Iceland? It's so expensive. But it's because it's almost exactly the same amount of time to fly there from like London as it is to fly there from New York.

So it's like perfectly central, which makes it like great if you want to have a European slash American event. And I was like obviously reading about this and Iceland's like music scene. And when I was there, there was like this big festival on called the Airways Festival. There was people playing in like fucking upturned shipping containers. It was all kicking off. It's very like wild. And I do think that Iceland does have like quite a disproportionate impact on culture, musically speaking. Look at Bjork.

They've got it going on. Name one other Icelandic artist go on but I will give it Bjork has had an astounding impact on music in general so I'll give you that yeah let's just say that Bjork was like the big impact and then she influenced lots of other people and that's the impact. Let's go with that. Also, I think I've thought of one. It's whoever wrote Gollum's song for Lord of the Rings.

She's Icelandic, I'm sure of it. Okay, well that is very culturally relevant. Thank you, Anna, for that. So, Erla would regularly pop into these hippie commune type situations and she'd smoke hash and talk about how capitalists are swine and how authority thugged.

And it was at one of these parties she laid eyes on Saevar Sileski and she found herself captivated by him. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up.

But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and

its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.

They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into

the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Saeva was born on the 6th of July 1955 to an American-Polish father and an Icelandic mother. His Polish surname immediately made him stand out in Iceland. Saevar grew up in a poor neighbourhood in Reykjavik.

He was small and he was different in almost every sense from his classmates. So, of course, young Saevar was bullied by the other students. And the teachers didn't much care for his opinionated nature either. At home, things weren't much better. Saevar's father was a drunk who would beat him on an almost daily basis. And as he grew up, Saiva began committing petty crimes like shoplifting,

and he found himself kicked out of multiple schools. A psychiatrist saw him at the age of 14 and deduced that he had a hard time adapting and recommended that he was sent to a place called Bredevik, which was an institute for delinquent boys. The institute was known as a place that would straighten out your child and return him to you a man, which is just the most fucking menacing thing you can ever hear.

And it was quite like a well-renowned place because parents across Iceland would use it in empty threats to their kids to get them to behave. Things like, if you don't do your homework, you'll be sent off to Bredevik. Kind of like Borstal here, I guess? Yeah. Yeah, Borstal. But the Institute was eventually shut down in 1979 when it was revealed that the kids there were being subjected to rape and ritual humiliation at the hands of the head director. My nanny, as in Irish Grandma, not Mary Poppins, she used to tell me that she would send me to Oliver Cromwell

if I didn't behave myself. To Oliver Cromwell, the person? Yeah. I mean, the population of Ireland never Cromwell, the person? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the population of Ireland never recovered after his invasion, like complete genocide. So yeah, so it stuck through the hundreds of years. Wow. Fuck.

I know. Nanny Maguire coming in with the cultural stuff. I don't know. So Gisley Gudjonsson. Remember this name because we're going to come back to him later on. So Gisli Gudjonsson is a forensic psychology professor and he conducted a study that found that 75% of the boys who attended Brodovic between 1953 and 1970

went on to become convicted criminals later in life. 75%. It's like that one seminary. Yeah. Which I think is in upstate New York, New Jersey or something, and like 13% of the priests who train there go on to be convicted sex offenders. It's like you can't ignore that the institution is doing something. No, no. And that's the thing here is they're like, oh, stick these delinquent kids in here for like doing petty things like shoplifting.

And then we're going to rape and humiliate and beat them and torture them and traumatize them until they come out quote unquote men who go on to become convicted criminals it's like like carl pansram or something you know they were just like creating the monsters they were trying to prevent i was just gonna say yeah it's the like well they wouldn't be in here if they weren't already bad. So it's not on us. So they deserve everything they get, basically, is the idea. Saevar returned to Reykjavik from Breidevik in his late teens, more hardened to life and particularly more hateful of authority. He began selling drugs at parties to get by. He was slim with shoulder-length brown hair

and always wore an oversized leather jacket everywhere, which made him stand out even more. It was because of this, however, that people found themselves drawn to him, and Erla was no different. At a party one night in December 1973, Erla's drink was spiked with LSD. She stumbled around as the drug took effect, hoping to find a dimly lit corner to ride out the trip. And on her way,

she tripped over someone lying on the floor. It was Saiva, and his drink had also been spiked. The two spent the rest of the night talking and listening to Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa. Erla went on to say, quote, I felt I had met one of the most incredible human beings ever, and he felt the same way. Maybe that's where we've been going wrong. We just need to drop acid on dates. I was going to say, maybe we just go. And then we'll feel this unshakable connection and we'll be fine. I think that's it.

I think we just take some LSD and then we drop a bit of it into their drink. Not so much that we can technically be called as like doing something nefarious maybe. And then we just fall in love with them. And then we just stay high forever. Maybe that's how we can make this work, Hannah. is the year i feel it this is the year i mean straight out of the charles manson playbook but uh we'll overlook it worked didn't it work it worked yeah yeah it did consistently work after this led fueled conversation the two fell in love and spent all their time together painting and making amateur films on a Super 8 camera.

Erla's family didn't approve of Saevar at all, unsurprisingly, I think. And when Erla's mother found out that he had attended the Bredevik Institute, she banned him from her home, at which point Erla cut off all contact with her mother entirely. In December 1973, Erla moved out of her friend's place that she'd been living in in Reykjavik and moved into her father's new place in Hafnifjorda, which if you remember was where Gudmundur had gone out to that nightclub and where he had gone missing. And she moved there about one month before Gudmundur vanished. So this is obviously December and during the winter months the sun would rise at 11am and set by 4pm. And also on top of this, Erla's father's place was a basement flat. So like, she's not getting any fucking sunlight. So these winter months proved to be incredibly difficult for Erla.

It was also a particularly brutal winter that year. And also, her father was in hospital, having suffered a stroke. So Erla was living alone, missing her friends and family, looking after her father in hospital, and she found herself slipping into a depression. She dropped about 50 kilos in weight during this time, which if you don't know what 50 kilos is, that's like blue is just a bit less than that. Like, that's a fucking lot of weight to lose. It's like a whole small person. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. So during this time, Erla worked as a telegraph clerk at the state-run telegraph service, a job which she would have to muster up considerable effort to drag herself to and from every day. Besides her

struggles with mental health, she was also having problems in her relationship with Saivar. She found him overbearing at times, and she'd also grown suspicious that he was cheating on her because he would disappear for days at a time and not tell her where he'd been. She was also growing bored of his chat. All he spoke about these days was how much he wanted to commit the perfect crime and leave the police scratching their heads. Saevar idolised Al Capone

and talked about robbing banks on horseback and spiking Reykjavik's water supply with LSD to give them an experience that they would never forget. He also stole constantly, everything from candlesticks to once even stealing a 100kg halibut from the local fish market. He'd sell drugs at the communes that he'd smuggled into Iceland in film canisters. He was up to all sorts. But in the end, funnily enough, it would be Erla

who came up with their master plan to fool the authorities. If you wanted to steal a lot of money from a post office in Iceland 50 years ago, you would have needed two things. A fake ID and an unusually in-depth knowledge of Iceland's telegram service. Erla had the knowledge and Saevar had the stolen ID. So on the 23rd of August 1974, the couple put Erla's plan into action. Erla called the National Phone Company's Telegram Reception Centre and claimed to be a post office employee from Grindavik in southwest Iceland.

They even stuffed the mouthpiece of the phone with cloth in order to make Erla's voice sound muffled like it was a long distance call. Then Erla went on to read out the details for five different telephone money transactions, totalling to about 475,000 kroner, which is about 22,500 pounds today. Then Erla sent a female friend of Saevar who looked similar to the woman whose ID card they were using to collect the money. And the scheme worked perfectly. They totally pulled it off and paid the friend 100,000 kroner and kept the rest for themselves. Buzzing that their plan had worked, they did it again on the 18th of October 1974.

But this time, they didn't want to split the money with anybody else, so Erla went in to collect the money herself. She wore some of her mother's clothes and put on heavy makeup as a disguise. It's like those kids at the beginning of lockdown who dressed up as grannies with face masks on to buy alcohol. Fucking genius. I'm not even going to apologise for encouraging underage drinking there because it was absolutely great. Like knight them. Knight and dame those teenagers. And once again, the plan worked completely perfectly and nobody was any the wiser. So they'd made just over half a million kroner and they decided to enjoy themselves. Over the next few weeks, they checked into a fancy hotel,

ate and drank whatever they wanted and even put down a payment for a Mustang. Mistakes. They're immediately making mistakes. I can't imagine a Mustang is the most sensible car for Iceland. No, that too. That's a mistake. The other mistake is just like stealing a bunch of money and not laying low and then immediately being two incredibly young people

who are suddenly like flashing the fucking cash all over town. In a town where like everyone already fucking knows each other. It is a pretty basic error. And they do get their comeuppance. The authorities were hot on their tail. Erla found out that the police had been to the post office where she worked, asking questions about the embezzlement. And when the police found out that Erla was in a relationship with Saivar,

who at this point had made quite a name for himself in the criminal community, they knew that they were on the right track. And so, in December 1974, just before Giafina vanished from the docks, Erla and Saivar decided to go on the run, and they headed to Copenhagen. They converted the money into Danish kroner and taped as much of the cash as they could to Erla's body to get through customs. This is just how fucking easy it is in the 70s to smuggle money. You just tape it to your body. Can you imagine? And when they were heading to Copenhagen, they decided that Christiana, the self-governing society in Copenhagen, would be the perfect place for them to make a new life. I haven't been to Copenhagen or to this particular place, Christiana, but I've seen lots of pictures of it and it is just hipster

anarchist heaven. It looks like, looks like fun for a weekend. That's all I could probably manage. But they got there and as you can probably imagine, pretty soon they had managed to squander all of the money that they had. And they found themselves eventually having to steal food just to eat. Erla started working as a cleaner in a hotel. But when she began throwing up one day and found out that she was pregnant with Saevar's baby, the couple decided that they wanted to move back to Reykjavik. And they decided that by this point it would be safe as long as they moved back and just sort of lived on the outskirts. So they did this just a couple of

weeks before the baby was born. Spoilers, this was not a good idea. Erla gave birth on the 24th of September 1974 and Saivar, desperate to provide for his new family, decided to embark on a big smuggling mission. So during autumn that year, he managed to smuggle 3.75 kilograms of cannabis from Rotterdam on an ocean liner into Reykjavik, whilst Erla settled into the life of domesticity and motherhood. And she found that she actually really enjoyed it. She felt a sort of peace with her newborn baby that she hadn't felt for a very long time. But sadly, it wasn't to last. On the 12th of December 1975, Seva was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, and then they came for Erla the following day. They were both taken to Sidmuli prison in Reykjavik and put

in separate cells to await questioning. But the couple had already planned on what they'd say if this kind of thing happened. They had agreed that they would just deny everything. Erla was sure that far too much time had passed since they had stolen that money from the post office for the police to have any real evidence on them and all she could think about was how much she wanted to get back to her baby. She was taken into an interrogation room the following day and found herself sitting across the table from three men. There's lots of names coming up guys, everyone prepare yourselves, okay. So firstly there was Orn Hoskaldsson, a representative of the criminal judge and then there was Sigurður Vidur Egilsten and then Egetn Barnsson, two policemen. Nailed it. Now the important thing to know about the Icelandic system

and why there is a representative of the criminal judge present is because in the UK and the US and many other countries, the justice system is accusatorial, meaning that there is a defence and a prosecution. Both sides build their cases and then present them to the judge and the jury. But in Iceland, the legal system is an inquisitorial system, where the judges themselves actively gather evidence and are able to

interrogate witnesses and suspects. So when Erla was being interrogated by Orin Hoskaldsson, she was being interrogated by a man who had the power to decide how long to keep her in custody for. Erla held strong and stuck to the plan, denying everything about the embezzlement for a total of six days. But on 18 December 1975, she broke. During a gruelling six-and-a-half-hour interview, she told them everything about the scam and she signed a written confession the following day.

All she wanted was a fresh start and to be reunited with her baby. Usually, when a suspect confessed to a crime like this, they would be released and then await trial. But just as Erla was putting on her coat about to leave, the police asked her one more thing. They showed her a photo of Gudmundur and asked her if she'd ever seen him before. And instead of just taking the money and running, which is probably what she should have done, Erla said that she had seen him. She'd actually met him a few times. Once in Reykjavik, she'd got a lift from a friend and Gudmundur happened to be in the back seat of that car. And she met him another time at a party. Iceland is small, guys. I don't think this is

that outrageous. No, I just wish so much knowing what happens in the rest of this case that Erla had just put her coat on, said she had no idea who that man was and fucking left and gone home to her baby. The police became suspicious when Erla told them that she didn't know he was missing. After all, it had been huge news. But the truth was, Erla really didn't. She'd been in such a state of depression at the time. She was living in a basement apartment on her own, working at the post office, and she didn't pay any attention to her own health, let alone the

local news. But the police were suspicious enough that they decided to extend her custody for another 30 days, and they kept her in solitary confinement. The interrogations went on for hours at a time, with three men questioning Erla about every detail of her life during January 1974 when Gudmundur went missing and then finally Erla told them about a nightmare she'd had one night. One of the odd things here is the distinction Erla makes between a bad dream and a nightmare. To her a bad dream is when you wake up and know it's just a dream. But according to Erla, a nightmare is when you wake up convinced it's still happening. She told them that on the evening she'd had the nightmare, she'd gone to a nightclub and the

weather had been particularly brutal that night and Saevar was in Denmark. When she got home about 3am, she went to sleep and dreamt that she woke up to three silhouettes outside her window. It was Saevar and two of his friends who she believed to be dangerous. And in this nightmare, she heard them saying, Is she awake? She remembered again that she felt that they were dangerous and then she woke up. She woke up, stood up, pulled her pyjama bottoms down and then defecated on her bed and fell

back asleep. Not a well woman, I think we can conclude from that story. No, definitely. And the following morning, when she saw what she had done, Erla said that she felt full of shame and she recalled how it was something to do with the immense depression that she was in at the time. So she threw the sheets in the bin outside. And later that day, she found out that Seyvar had actually returned from Denmark the night before without telling her, and that he had been attending to some secret business

in Reykjavik before coming home. Her interrogators fixated on this nightmare and Orn Hoskildsen, the representative of the criminal judge, leaned over the desk until his face was just inches from Erla's and said, quote, Something really bad happened that night and you need to go back to your cell and think about it. How fucking intimidating.

We already know she's not well she has tendency towards depression and these men are just badgering her bullying her by the sounds of some of this and keeping her in fucking solitary confinement i think people really underestimate the power of being isolated and intimidated like that's what makes cult members kill each other it really is all that's needed to completely disassemble someone's capacity to know what's real and what's not is just to isolate them and make them feel scared it could happen to absolutely anyone it's something that's very important I think often when we talk about false confession cases there's some people will be like oh well I never I would never I would never, how weak-minded would you have to be

to not know what your own memories are? But under the right conditions, it could happen to anybody. Absolutely. Enough isolation and enough intimidation. It just causes you to disassociate, almost, with reality. And that's what we see happening in this case, for sure. So after this little incident, Erla was alone in her cell that night and she began to question whether she was actually being interrogated

about the secret business that Saevar had been up to. She thought back to her nightmare. One of the two figures with Saevar was a man named Christian Weider Weidersen, who she knew to be a turpentine sniffer, and she also knew that he could be violent, and he was much bigger than Saivar. Erla began questioning her own memories, thinking maybe she was repressing something that had happened that night. And the following day, she was interrogated again,

and the three men honed in on the nightmare one more time. They questioned her whether it was possible Saevar had actually come to her apartment with his two friends that night and whether it was possible that it had been the night of the 26th of January 1974, so the night that Gudmundur had gone missing. Again, Erla found herself questioning her own memories and after a few more hours of intense interrogation, she signed a witness statement on the 20th of December 1975, implicating Saevar and his friend Christian with the

disappearance of Gudmundur. And I think everyone has misremembered and everyone has questioned what they actually remember. I think it's a very human thing. Absolutely. And I have done that when no one's even questioning me. No one's even telling me that you're remembering that wrong. It's just my own recollection. Now imagine three men in authority telling you that you are wrong, telling you that you are misremembering. When you've been separated from your child,

you've already been severely depressed and you've been on your own in a tiny room for 30 days. It's just the perfect storm for what's about to happen. Oh, sorry, what is happening? Erla told the three men that on the night in question, she'd woken up to see Saevar, Christian and another man carrying something large and heavy through the apartment. Whatever they were carrying was wrapped in a bed sheet and it looked a lot like a body. She said that when she woke up the next morning, she didn't ever speak of what

she saw to Saevar, ever. Erla signed the witness statement and the investigators commended her for her bravery and they dropped her off at her mother's house where she was reunited with her baby. Two days later, the police got a statement from Saevar which implicated two other men that Erla hadn't mentioned. One called Turekvi Runa Leifersen and another one called Albert Klan Skaftersen. According to this statement from Saevar, he and these two men and Gudmundur Einarsson had come to Erla's father's basement apartment on the night in question.

They were drunk, a fight broke out and Gudmundur was accidentally killed. So they put his body in Albert's car and drove it out to the lava fields just south of Hafnarfjorda where they buried it. The day after Saevar gave this statement on the 23rd of December 1975, the police brought in Christian, Teregvi and Albert. Christian was already serving a six-month sentence at the time for theft which he denied and he denied any involvement although he did say that he knew Gudmundur from school. Teregvi also denied knowing anything about Gudmundur's disappearance. Albert on the other hand who was a childhood friend of Saevar and by all accounts a sleepy-eyed stoner, told the police that he

remembered waiting in his car outside Erla's flat on the night in question and he remembers Saivar, Christian and Treyagvi loading a large bag into the trunk. Then he went on to say how Saivar instructed him to drive to the lava fields and when they got there he was told to wait in the car. He said that Saivar, Christian and Treyagvi then took a large bag further out into the lava fields and when they returned, they no longer had it with them. A few days later, during a six-hour interrogation, Christian also confessed to the police on the 28th of December 1975. He said how on the night in question he had gone to the basement apartment

with Saivar and a man he didn't know, who the police presumed to be Gudmundur. His recollection was hazy as he was blind drunk that night, even though he was on doctor's orders not to drink. Christian told them how a fight had broken out when Gudmundur called them junkies, and somehow Gudmundur had been killed. The next thing he remembers was heading to the lava fields in a car after Tyregvi had loaded something heavy into the trunk. In Albert's version of events, he waited alone in the car while Saivar, Tyregvi and Christian had taken the body away. But in Christian's statement, he made it clear that he was the one who waited in the car

and that it was Saivar and Tyrengvi who had disposed of the body. So basically these men are confessing, saying they all did the same things, but that it was always them that waited in the car and it was the other men who had gone and disposed of the body. And this wasn't the only issue. The timelines were full of holes and there was no explanation from any of them as to why an 18-year-old kid like Gudmundur, who had no criminal past, would have been hanging out

with the three of them in the first place. Christian was interrogated multiple times after this, and every time he added more and more details to the events of the fight, until he concluded that Saivar had lost a fight to Gudmundur. So he and Tyregvi held him down while Saivar kicked him in the head until he died. On the 9th of January 1976, Tyregvi changed his statement, saying that he had spent a lot of time thinking about the night since he had been arrested the previous year. And he confirmed that he had been at the apartment on the night in question with Christian, Saivar and another man.

Tyregvi was the eldest of the lot and his younger years were also fraught with Christian, Saiva and another man. Tyragvy was the eldest of the lot and his younger years were also fraught with criminality and plenty of substance abuse. What had begun as a simple fraud investigation had now developed into a string of confessions involving the disappearance of a man that nobody had ever even suspected had been murdered in the first place. The police told Erla that the men had all corroborated her version of events and this caused her to begin questioning everything she knew about Saevar. Could the man she'd fallen in love with truly be a cold-blooded killer? She ruminated on all the infidelities and all the lies he'd told her during their relationship

and she began to question her reality more and more. Feeling as though they had pretty much solved the disappearance of Gudmundur Einarsson, the investigators wondered whether, perhaps, this murderous group of youngsters might be able to solve their other problem, the disappearance of Giffenur Einarsson as well. I mean, when they start to connect this, they don't have anything. They've never even connected these two murders or disappearances previously they just suddenly think oh well maybe we can pin this on them too i think it's one of those you

know violent crime being such a and disappearances and stuff like that being such a rarity in that community and we have seen it before where like there's one bad egg and they get pinned for absolutely everything that nobody else can explain. Erla had been the key to the first string of confessions, so surely there was their best bet for the case of Gerfina Einerson as well. And so one day, out of the blue, the police paid Erla a visit and told her, quote, we have reason to believe you have experienced something traumatic concerning Gerfina's disappearance and we're going to help you remember experienced something traumatic concerning Giffen's disappearance and we're going to help you remember. Literally that's what happens in every satanic panic interview.

Like that's how you implant memories in someone who is already extremely vulnerable and traumatised. Absolutely. Erla believed that helping the police would get her out of trouble but she couldn't have been more wrong. She gave the police some names of individuals involved in Reykjavik's nightclub scene, which today she claims she was coerced to do. But of course, the police say that she gave these names of her own volition. Investigators then questioned Saevar and his friends the following day about Gjofenir's disappearance, and soon enough, Erla became a suspect too. But again, all of their stories kept changing. At first, Gjofenir had died during a fight on a boat where he'd fallen off the side.

Eventually, the final story became that Gerfner had promised the group that he would deliver them a large amount of smuggled alcohol. But when he couldn't make good, Saeva and his friends got angry, beat him up, and they accidentally killed him. I mean, is it a coincidence that at first they're like, we just had a fight on a boat because he disappeared at the dock and then he died and they accidentally killed him. I mean, is it a coincidence that at first they're like, we just had a fight on a boat because he disappeared at the dock and then he died and then the police, suspecting that Girfiner had been involved in bootlegging and smuggling alcohol,

now they're like, oh, actually, no, he promised to sell us some alcohol and that's why we killed him because he didn't. Like, fuck off. To be honest, I think it's more likely they were involved in the disappearance of Girfina than it is Gudmundur, to be honest. Yeah, if they're involved in either, it is. But it's how they get there. It's like, it makes absolutely no fucking sense. Yeah. So the police said that Erla and the men had transported Girfina's body to Christian's mother's cellar before chopping it up, taking it

out to the lava fields, where they first burned burned it and then buried it in a shallow grave. Where are they coming up with all these fucking stories? It's just like totally pulled out of thin air. Is that why the book and the documentary are called that? Likely. So the police accepted this story from this group of people that they kept in solitary and just interrogated regularly, even though the ground would have been so frozen

at the time that it would have required machinery to dig a hole. Not only are the lava fields like rock incredibly hard, it was also seven degrees below zero when they would have had to do this. Like, how? By this point, though, in the summer of 1976, the four suspects had been held in their tiny cramped cells in solitary confinement for around 180 days. Erla was now back in custody and being treated as an accessory to the murder. In Christian and Saiva's statements on the murder of Giffen, they both also kept mentioning a mysterious foreigner whose name they said they couldn't remember. A young detective who was also working on this case at the time called, and this name will be familiar to you if you were paying

attention earlier, Gisley Goodjohnson, noticed how his colleagues were happy with the confessions but were increasingly frustrated with a complete lack of hard evidence. And so in August 1976 the Icelandic government decided to employ the services of a man named Karl Schutz, a renowned supercop from Germany. And Karl had made his name in bringing down some members of the infamous group known as the Red Army Faction, or the Baader-Meinhof Group, a far-left militant organization from West Germany. So Carl came over and he began by setting up a task force of 10 officers, which was about a third of the entire detective squad of the whole of Iceland at the time.

And they set out to find this mysterious foreigner who Saevar and Christian claimed was complicit in the murder of Geirfinnur. Their search led them to a man named Gudjon Skarpensen. And this guy, as you can tell by the name, is Icelandic. He's not a foreigner, quote unquote, as they say. He just had a slight tan and dark hair, which apparently in Iceland at the time was enough to land him the nickname foreigner, which I thought was quite funny.

And Gudjon, he was a 32-year-old former teacher, and Saevar had actually been one of his pupils. The two had even worked together once before smuggling drugs into the country. The police believed that Saivar had once again called on his old teacher, but this time it was to help him kill Gierfener at the docks. Karl Schütz was already convinced all five suspects and Gudjon were guilty of murder. All he had to do was get them to give consistent and detailed confessions of exactly what had happened. Gudjon was different from the

other suspects because he actually liked the police and wanted to help them with their investigation. But he simply had no memory of where he was in the night in question. Carl Schutz told Gudjon during one of the interrogations, you should confess because you'll feel better afterwards. There's a burden taken off your shoulder if you confess. Tell us the truth and you will feel better forever and God will look upon you with a blessing. This is the super cop of the 70s apparently, all flown in from Germany. Out of interest, do we know if he was from East or West Germany? Do we know if he was a bit communist, maybe?

A bit Soviet in his interrogation techniques? Good question. I'm going to say possibly quite Soviet in the way he's behaving, but then also talking about God, not very Soviet. So I don't know. Oh, yeah, good point, good point. During this time, Erla, who had been in solitary confinement again for months, was told by Schultz, if you sign the report, you have a chance of being released.

She'd been suffering from postnatal depression since the time of her arrest and was at breaking point when she signed a detailed report claiming that she had been present when disposing of Giffen's body. She would have said her name was Susan and that she was actually an upside-down elephant at this point. Like, she would have said absolutely anything. Absolutely. It's just all so farcical when you break it down this way. All Erla wanted was to get back to her child who is now a toddler and of course she wanted to never ever in a million years be put in solitary confinement ever again. The police just

needed to find the bodies. Over a two-year period, the suspects were taken out separately around 60 times to the lava fields to find where they had supposedly buried the bodies of Gudmundur and Gerfner. Gudjon enjoyed being allowed outside of his cell during these trips. Anything was better than solitary confinement. You would long it out, wouldn't you? Be like, oh no, I think actually I need another six hours. Exactly. They can't just be like, I don't know because I didn't do it, blah, blah, blah, take me back because they're like, I'm just happy to be outside.

Let's just keep looking. And I think 2020 has taught us all how important outside is. Oh my God, you're so right. If you feel like you've been losing it in 2020 while you've been locked in your house, imagine what this is. Unfortunately for Gudjon, he had absolutely no memory of where he was that night and the prison doctors started to give him drugs involuntarily to try and relax him for questioning and to help him sleep. I guarantee you that was sodium penthanol. I would stake my life on it. I agree. It's the truth serum that everyone talks about. You know, like when you're drunk and you'll just give the game away a bit more? That's what it does.

It just depresses your brain function. So you're less likely to lie, but it's not a secret key to everyone's inner working. It just removes your inhibitions like alcohol, but to a more extent. On the 8th of December 1976, Gudjon was the final suspect to confess to the killing of Gerfner

when he answered yes to the question, were you at the dockyard of Keflavik the night Gerfner was killed? He said yes, and that was his confession. That was enough. Jesus. So now the investigators had all the confessions they wanted. The Minister of Justice decided that, quote, the nation's nightmare was over. And Karl Schutz announced at a press conference that the killers of Gierfner and Gudmund had been found. He said that they were killed by a group of petty criminals who would do anything to make some money. Even with a complete lack of hard evidence, he had the audacity to announce, and this is the super cop from Germany, remember, to announce, quote,

it is beyond reasonable doubt, as we criminal experts like to put it, that it's safe to assume it's an open and shut case. I fucking hate this guy. Even if every word of those confessions is true, this is far from an open and shut case. But something had happened a few weeks earlier. The young detective, Gisley Goodjohnson, had left the police shortly after to become the forensic psychologist

that we mentioned earlier in the show. It's all come in full circle, people. Oh, story circles. I know. I love them. I know. I feel like I don't know enough. What's the snake that eats his own tail in,

is it called Ragnarok in the like Icelandic stuff? Viking stuff? I don't know. It's like that. Sounds, sounds correct. It's like that. Anyway, everyone Scandinavian hates me. Iceland is also Scandi. You know what I mean. So Gisli Goodjohnson had gone off to become a forensic psychologist and he conducted a lie detector test on good john on new year's eve 1976 before we go into this obviously we have said this many many times on this show lie detectors are bullshit they don't work obviously they don't work because there is no universal physiological reaction or response to deception you're just detecting someone who's stressed.

And these people are stressed already because they're in fucking solitary confinement being interrogated by the police on a daily basis. But after he saw the results of the lie detector test, Gisley Goodjohnson started to wonder whether he was actually guilty. And it wasn't just him. The other suspects also began retracting their statements and claimed that all of them had been coerced into signing the confessions. But it was all just too little too late by this point. Their fates were basically sealed. A media whirlwind around the group of youngsters and the murder cases had the entirety of Iceland convinced of their guilt.

And the police obviously vehemently denied the accusations of coercion. If you watch a documentary on this case that's on Netflix, you'll see that almost within like the first few minutes they're talking about this, that at the time in Iceland, people just trusted the police. They believed the police. They had no reason in their minds not to. So if the police are telling you that these kids did it, these kids did it. There was no suspicion in people's minds. And I also think there's kind of an element of like the Memphis Three case, where these kids are a bit different. They're hippies, they're like smoking hash, they're doing drugs, they're doing all these things. It's probably them. So in December

1977, two years after the first arrests had taken place, Saevar was sentenced to life in prison for two murders. And the other five suspects were given sentences ranging from 12 years for Gudjon to three years for Erla. For the next 40 years, everybody in Iceland believed that Erla, Saevar, Christian, Turgi, Albert and Gudjon were cold-blooded killers, and this group lived their lives after prison as the most infamous criminals in Iceland, hated by everybody. That is until the re-emergence of both Turgavy and Goodjohn's diaries in 2011.

The diaries that had been kept whilst they had been in solitary confinement for all those months. Strap on your twisty pants because we're not done yet by now we're in 2011 and gisley goodjinson was a renowned forensic psychologist and the world's leading expert on false memory syndrome of all the things in fact it was due to his expert testimony at the convictions of the birmingham six and the guilford Four were overturned. Ding, ding, ding. Those cases and the Maguire Seven, let's not forget, are the reason that the police in this country cannot lie to you if they are interrogating you. It is illegal for them to lie because of those cases, because coerced confessions happened.

I didn't know that an Icelander was involved in that. That's very interesting. Yeah, Mr. Gisley Goodjohnson, the main man, the MVP. He is the real MVP. So Goodjohnson's interest in the topic of false confessions had started when he was doing a degree in social sciences at Brunel University in London. He was on a work placement as a detective in Reykjavik when he was interrogating a man with a history of alcohol-fuelled memory blackouts about a case of a stolen purse in 1975. The man confessed, but a year later the police found out that no purse had ever been stolen. So why did this man confess?

Gisley went on to reflect on how his suggestive questioning was likely the reason the suspect's memory was influenced into wrongfully believing he was guilty. And so he went on to become a forensic psychologist and worked on hundreds of cases of false confessions spanning the globe. Gisley had conducted lie detector tests on many of the suspects of the Gerfner and Goodmunder cases before this, but at the time he believed that they were simply repressing their memories in a Michelle remembers type way is that what it's called Michelle remembers I think so I can't remember exactly but that's the the Paul Ingram case that we did some point last year I think this year I don't know something oh no it was last year because I'm pretty sure I put it on the um reel for the British Podcast Awards that we weren't nominated for. No bitter resentment here.

So, for years since his sentencing, Saevar had pleaded with Gisley to reassess the evidence in his case, but Gisley has refused to do so unless new evidence came to light. The existence of the diaries only came to be known, though, in late 2011. And even though Gisley officially retired in January 2012, this inspired him to return to Reykjavik and begin working on the two cases later that same month. Gisli examined the diaries and was shocked to find that they were almost like textbook examples of memory distrust syndrome. It was a relatively new concept, however, in forensic psychology

and had only been studied properly for about 30 years at the time. memory distrust syndrome. It was a relatively new concept, however, in forensic psychology, and had only been studied properly for about 30 years at the time. Gisley spoke of the diaries and said, quote, it tells you about memory distrust. It tells you how an intelligent individual, highly intelligent, educated, who knows that he is innocent at the beginning, gradually began to think that he is wrong, and that he is involved in a murder that he has absolutely no memory of. The triggers for this are isolation, tick, persuasive police interrogations where they confront the suspects with false evidence, tick, and highly emotional intensity where the police highlight the futility of continual denials, again, tick. The Icelandic government had also set up a special

commission in 2011 to investigate the way the police handled these cases. Gisli's investigation found that the suspects had all been suffering from memory distrust, but it wasn't only because of the police interrogation tactics. A number of black and white photos also came to light, which showed the police making suspects re-enact the crimes they were being accused of. In one, you can see Christian with his arms around the neck of one of the detectives who was playing the role of Gierfner, pretending to strangle him. Gisley concluded that this played a huge role in explaining why none of them could remember what actually happened. These reenactments helped plant seeds of doubt in the suspects' minds. Crime reenactments aren't uncommon,

but these photos show just how desperate the police were to find any evidence at all. Another macabre photo shows Christian standing next to a mangled dummy lying in the snow. Gisley says, once you have enacted something, it then becomes a reality for the snow. Gisli says, once you have enacted something, it then becomes a reality for the individual. Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement was more acceptable in Iceland in 1970 than it is today. But the investigative committee found that Gudrun had spent 14 months

in solitary confinement and Erla was in isolation for 105 days away from her baby. During those 105 days, she was interrogated more than 100 times, and on only three of those occasions was her lawyer present. Sometimes these interrogations went on through the day and into the night. They also found that the police had recruited prison officers to essentially torture Saevar by repeatedly holding his head underwater and telling him, if you don't confess, we will drown you. That's torture. Yeah, yeah. Is what that is.

They also continuously kept the lights on in his room to deprive him of sleep like they do in Guantanamo Bay. More torture. Out of all the suspects, Turgavy had spent the longest in solitary confinement. He had spent a total of 655 days. My God, that's almost two years in solitary confinement. And in his diary, he had written, quote,

I confessed to this just to make everything stop and so I could get out of here and see my friends, see my family. The only reason his diaries survived were because a priest who visited him in prison actually believed that he was innocent and helped smuggle them out, and then he returned them to him after he had served his eight-year sentence. The diaries revealed that he was also given drugs by the prison doctor on a daily basis. And we know which drugs Taigavi was given because he was given diazepam and Mogadon to calm him down and help him sleep.

But these drugs can also cause amnesia. Sadly, Taigavi died in 2009 before his name could be cleared. It was his daughter who got the old diaries out of his basement and brought them to light. The committee spent 18 months assessing all the evidence and the diaries and came to the conclusion that the confessions were unreliable and therefore false. Gisley went on national television and stated, quote, these individuals had absolutely no knowledge of what happened. They were just trying to appease the police. They were trying to be cooperative because they knew if they were not, they would just be given more solitary confinement, which is torture.

The police officers involved in the original investigation have refused to speak to the media, as did the state prosecutor. Fantastically named Snorri Magnusson, who is now head of the Icelandic Police Union, joined the force 30 years ago. He concedes that the officers involved should have been investigated and punished, but now it's just too late.

Saevar spent years trying to fight for his innocence, but eventually he just moved to Copenhagen and lived on the streets where he died in 2011 at the age of just 56. Erla stayed in Iceland with her daughter, where she trained as a language teacher, and now she helps migrants learn Icelandic. Christian got married and had two children,

and now he lives alone in Reykjavik and rarely speaks of the case. Trygve went on to become a decorator. He had three children and died in 2009 at the age of 58 after developing cancer. Albert also became a family man and works with disadvantaged children. He hasn't ever spoken publicly about the case since his release. Gudrun also moved to Denmark, where he married and started a family, and then he went on to become a Lutheran minister. Today, he lives back in Iceland.

I wasn't expecting until we actually recorded it, how much it would make me think about lockdown and like how much that fucked with everyone. And that was just being in your house with your family or your housemates. I'm not afraid to say I think everyone, everyone's mental health took a pretty big blow from that. So I think it has not made me understand what fucking solitary confinement's like, but it's something to think on, that lockdown was bad enough. Think how much worse it would be.

And I think that obviously the people in this were innocent. They weren't involved in this and they were tortured and tormented and treated in the most horrendous ways. Even if someone is guilty, I think that we should take one thing, if nothing, from 2020 and think about how we treat our prisoners. And is excessive deprivation of everything really

necessary? They're already being deprived of their liberty. That's a conversation for a totally different day. And this has already been a very long episode. So welcome to 2021, people. That is your first red-handed episode of the year hopefully things only get better yeah the only way is up if they don't on the outside world they will get better here at red-handed because we've got some fucking killer cases they be clubbing in wuhan maybe maybe we're on the we're on the right road maybe maybe so everybody stay safe do whatever the current guidelines are telling you get vaccinated for the love of God. And become a patron of Red Handed because you will just get so much content and it's fucking awesome.

You'll get under the duvet immediately after this show and every single show every single week where we just talk about fun current affair things and whatever else is going on. And then you also get an in the news every single month if you are a $5 and up patron where we talk about more topical cases that, you know, there's just not enough to cover in the full episode yet. So go check that all out at patreon.com slash red handed. And here are some lovely people who did become patrons. So thank you, Amy Louise, Sina Hemenick, Chloe Passman, Samia Shilby, Laura Earhart, Ellie B, Erin Beard, S Jones, Crystal Diorage, Lauren Finden, Anton Wibberg, Tiffany, Martha Ryan, Emma Brown, Leonie Ray Parks, Natasha Meta, Rachel Aide, Thank you. Katie Edwards, Brittany Connors, Alyssa Haley-Ann, Rebecca Dealy, Gemma Petherbridge, Alexandra Smith, Niamh Defily, Lana Sophia, Jay Watkins, Laura Sully, Sharon Koop, Ryan Humphries, Kelly, Sarah McGovern, Karen Ann Chalupnik, Kristen, Dawn Day, Amy Wilkins, Jessica Friedman, Missing, is that Missing? Yeah. Deb, Doing It For The Duvet, Fali, Armani, Hussein, Ruben, McKinley, Swift, Minji, Kim, Georgina,

Middleton, Justine, Justin Lee, Kaomi, I don't know how to say that name i'm sorry kaomi kennedy alex priestley simon monroe daniel brown christina simmons genie cisneros cisneros maddie katherine champion joanna fidgiel nathan colette hamilton kate stephen shannon carrie cummings emma ryecraft brown No names start with X, guys. Next, Lali Estrada, Jodie Vinicombe, Felicity Emma, Gina Nobrega, Leanne Page, Charlotte Valens, Sydney Wymer, Kelly Canadian, with a K, Deborah Blakey, Alison Poirier, Megan Tanlil-West, Karen Gordon-Tamang, Maya Briggs, Kate Brown, Kelly Twight, Nikki Sims, Carly Vizard, Charlotte Deeru, Jennifer Rasmussen, Rebecca Johnson, Hannah Glover, Lisa, Kiri Le, Customer Service. I am so close to the edge, you have no idea. Erica, Drew Campbell, JT Taylor, Janie Snyder, McKenna Rule, Hannah Carina, Maddy Greer, Laura Talbot, Spencer Parks, Peter McFarlane, Larry David, Inna Nicker, Louise Keogh, I don't know, Ko, Nikki K. Drerahardy, Elise Perrin, Winter with a Y, Sarah Lindquist, Jessica Arene de Vaz,

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I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either. Until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness.

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