Iceland review - 2017, Síða 12

10 ICELAND REVIEW
News Roundup
At the end of February, a dec-
ades-old Icelandic murder case
was revived, when the Rehearing
Commission in Iceland approved the
requests of five men, or their heirs,
sentenced in the so-called Guðmundur
and Geirfinnur murder cases, who asked
for a rehearing. Only one request for
the rehearing of false accusations was
denied.
The cases involved two unrelated
and unconnected men who vanished in
1974. Eighteen-year-old Guðmundur
Einarsson disappeared after attending a
dance in Hafnarfjörður on January 27,
1974. On November 19 that same year,
Geirfinnur Einarsson, 32, a father of
two, disappeared after going out to meet
an unnamed man at a Keflavík store.
Their disappearances resulted in one of
the most extensive police investigations
in Icelandic history.
In December of 1975, the investiga-
tion resulted in the arrest of a young
couple, and following interrogations,
the police concluded that the two cases
were connected. In the end, six people,
aged 20-32 at the time, were sentenced
for their role in the men’s disappearance
and death. The two cases were tried
simultaneously. The accused were sen-
tenced to 17, 16, 13, ten, three, and one
year in prison. In addition to the young
OLD MURDER CASE REVIVED
couple, three young men were arrested
in December of 1975 for their alleged
involvement in the disappearance of
Guðmundur. Three of the men who
were arrested that month later con-
fessed to having caused Guðmundur’s
death, but later retracted their confes-
sions. They were held in police custo-
dy and isolation for an unprecedented
length of time.
After the Icelandic government had
brought in a ‘supercop’ from Germany,
Karl Schütz, in August of 1976, to head
the investigation, a 32 year-old teacher,
Guðjón Skarphéðinsson, was arrested.
He spent 14 months in isolation, during
which he kept a diary.
Gísli Guðjónsson, one of the police
officers involved in the case, is now pro-
fessor emeritus of forensic psychology
at King’s College London. An inter-
nationally recognized expert on false
memory syndrome, he told the BBC
in 2014 that Guðjón’s diary is one of
the clearest examples of that syndrome
he has ever seen. In that interview, he
stated that during his career, involving
hundreds of cases of miscarriages of
justice in many countries, he had never
come across a case with such intense
interrogation, so many interrogations
and such lengthy solitary confinement
as this one.
One of the men imprisoned, Tryggvi
Leifsson, died in 2009. He spent 655 days
in isolation and, just like Guðjón, he kept
a diary detailing, among other things,
the sedatives, known to cause amnesia,
he was given daily. Another of the sen-
tenced, Sævar Ciesielski, died in 2011.
He spent 1,533 days in police custody,
615 thereof in solitary confinement.
Among the methods used by the police
was getting the suspects to re-enact
offences they could not remember com-
mitting. Some suspects were allegedly
presumed guilty from the start and sub-
jected to ill treatment by the police.
A report was published in 2013, writ-
ten by a task force appointed by the then
interior minister, Ögmundur Jónasson.
It concluded there was ample reason to
rehear the cases.
The missing men’s bodies were never
found; a crime scene was never discov-
ered; no tangible pieces of evidence were
found; and the testimony of witnesses
and suspects was unreliable, according
to the report. Its authors concluded that
“the basis for the police investigation
relied on a questionable premise.”
Now, all these years later, the accused—
or in some cases their heirs—hope that
their names might finally be cleared. u
Some of the accused.