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. Without speaking Icelandic or having extensive contacts on the ground, his only resource was the tiny country’s phone index. ‘There can be few easier places to make a documentary than Iceland,’ he writes, describing how every citizen, including the prime minister, has their telephone number listed online. And so, with an outsider’s eye, he began to ‘carve a path of sorts through the trees’ of the crimes.
Out of Thin Air’s dive into the disappearances might seem on the perfunctory side. Most of the ground has already been covered, even in English-language media, and no new suspects or witnesses are discovered. At one stage, Adeane admits to giving up on the idea of meeting one of the key suspects in deference to his mental state.
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