Early in the morning on January 26, 1974, a man named Gudmundur Einarsson was out drinking at a bar a few miles south of Reykjavik. He left the bar, drunk, and was seen trying to hitchike home with a strange man, one his friends said they did not recognize. Gudmundur didn’t make it home that night, and was never heard from again.
Volunteer search parties looked for days, but turned up nothing. About ten months later, on November 19, 1974 another man went missing, a construction worker named Geirfinnur Einarsson (no relation). Geirfinnur was last seen at his house by his wife, making a suspicious phone call, before leaving to go into town, where he stopped outside a cafe, leaving his keys in the ignition, only to never return.
The second search party found no trace of Geirfinnur, making it two disappearances in less than a year with no leads. This led police to up their efforts, trying to find out who called Geirfinnur, to no avail, giving them the assumption the man was from out of town.
After a year, the police still had no suspects, no evidence, and no bodies, but gossip was beginning to swirl around the case, putting pressure on the authorities. This ended with the arrest of Saevar Ciesielski and his girlfriend Erla Bolladottir, two small time criminals and embezzlers. Erla and Saevar had moved to Copenhagen shortly after Geirfinnur’s disappearance, before heading back to Reykjavik the next year, when Erla got pregnant.
To support his growing family, Saevar decided to try and smuggle weed into Iceland, which caused Erla to leave him. Once back in Iceland, the authorities apprehended them for embezzlement, with Erla claiming she was innocent of all charges. After seven days of solitary confinement and interrogation, however, she confessed.
Right before she was allowed to leave, police showed Erla a picture of Gudmundur Einarsson, who she recognized from around town, telling the authorities that she remembered a few things from the night he disappeared.
Desperate for any progress on the case, police asked her if she was with Saevar that night, before placing her back in solitary confinement. After more days of solitary confinement, as well as threats of permanent detainment, Erla was doubting her memories, and ended up confessing to seeing Saevar and three of his friends carry the body of Gudmundur out of her apartment.
The next day, Saevar, who had been in solitary confinement since his arrest, was questioned as well, for sixteen hours over two days. After this time, he also signed the confession, implicating him in Gudmundur’s disappearance.
Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson, Tryggvi Runar Leifsson, as well as Albert Klahn Skaftason, three of the men Erla and Saevar mentioned, were then brought in, and kept in solitary for days before confessing as well.
With one disappearance solved, police turned to the same suspects for the other, throwing them all in solitary confinement until three of them confessed. Unfortunately for the police, the stories of the three people kept changing, with the murder’s location changing multiple times, from on a boat to taking place on land.
In one of the versions of these confessions, Vidarsson mentioned a “foriegn-looking man”, who was eventually suspected to be Gudjon Skarphedinsson, an old teacher of Saevar’s. When Gudjon was first arrested, he claimed he had no memory of that night, but after being kept in solitary confinement for seventeen days, Gudjon said otherwise, confessing to the murder of Geirfinnur.
This led to six confessions in the case of the murders, without any bodies or evidence that the two men had even been killed. Regardless, a court found all six of them guilty, sentencing them to prison for various amounts of time. All of the suspects had been detained in solitary confinement, for almost three months to over two years.
An expert on the case, as well as false confessions, at one point said “These individuals had absolutely no knowledge of what happenned. They were just trying to appease the police, they were trying to be cooperative because they knew if they were not cooperative they would be given solitary confinement.”
Reykjavik Confessions Theories
- The Police actually solved the case, and Gudmundur and Geirfinnur were murdered by the six suspects. The only evidence for this case, is Erla’s missing bedsheet, which she said had disappeared the day after Gudmunder disappeared, and the police suspected had been used to carry his body. However, no bodies turned up in either case.
- Niether Gudmundur or Gierfinnur Einarsson were actually murdered. Iceland was a country with a large ratio of empty space to people, and it was very common for people to go missing there, with it happening very often, and the missing people rarely ever found.
- Both men were murdered, but by someone else. In recent years, new evidence has led to the case being reopened, with a few new witnesses willing to say they saw a man being dragged into a boat the day Geirfinnur went missing.
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