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The strangest Icelandic saga

Anthony Adeane describes one of the 20th century’s great mysteries — in one of the strangest places on earth

issue 31 March 2018

Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten months and several miles apart. Gudmunder Einarsson was a teenage labourer who loved to arm-wrestle; Geirfinnur Einarsson a construction worker and family man. Other than shared national hysteria in a country where people rarely go missing, there was nothing to link these mysteries — until, one by one, a ragtag group of petty criminals started to confess to their murders.

The investigation was the biggest in Iceland’s history. It spanned decades, and saw ten people arrested in relation to the crimes, some of whom spent several years in prison. But as the fever for justice gradually gave way to journalistic scrutiny, the entire narrative began to unravel. Though everyone in Iceland may have heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur, still no one knows what really happened to them.

In 2014, Anthony Adeane, a British journalist and BBC producer, began investigating the disappearances for a documentary.

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