We Fooled Them.

by Erla Bolladóttir

(excerpt for the 2nd edition of Sugar Paper Theories, 2019)

We fooled them all. We were nineteen. We showed the authorities how stupid they were and how smart we were. We got away with the perfect crime. So we thought.

They came knocking a year later.

Our baby was asleep. The weather outside was as hostile as they were. We were taken in for questioning, knowing we could face criminal charges, maybe a suspended sentence for embezzlement. Little did we know.

They had waited this long. Our fraud was the least of their interests, an excuse to get us where they wanted us and set their plan in motion. A plan that goes unquestioned to this day.

Our lives as we knew them were gone. Our peace has not returned.

They demanded we tell them all that had happened to a nineteen-year-old boy who had disappeared two years earlier. He was listed as a missing person with no suspicion of foul play. None of us knew the boy but we two had been living in the area where he was last seen, stumbling drunk through a blizzard in the wee morning hours towards wide open lava fields.

We, ten, bewildered, became intimately acquainted with the lime-tinted concrete walls of four-metre-square isolation cells, with their inbuilt concrete beds, rubber mattresses, table and stool bolted to the floor, with the echoes of voices, rattling keys, slamming doors, occasional screams and clinking leg irons. No human contact, save with the prison guards who were hard as stone. Interrogations heavy with the threat of violence, sometimes realised. No lawyers present.

Solitary confinement lasted between 90 and 1,533 days. For me, 241 days. All this time a gross miscarriage of justice was unfolding at multiple levels while investigators selectively spoon-fed the media to satiate a ravenous public.

Six of us succumbed to the torture, confessing to two counts of murder and testifying against four further people. The Four, from higher social strata, escaped with monetary compensation and lasting trauma.

After 43 years living in the shadow of this case, an infamous face in a small, naive community, with unattended post traumatic stress disorder and a seemingly hopeless fight for justice, I saw the Supreme Court backed into a corner. With its miscarriage of justice now proven, it was forced to acquit the five convicted of killing two missing men.

The acquittal was rendered without explanation by the court. And they still had their hook in us. The Supreme Court chose not to acquit the three of us convicted of perjury against The Four. The law still holds us guilty of colluding to implicate innocent men in a killing that never took place.

The morning after the Supreme Court ruling, the government convened and decided to publicly apologise to the acquitted and their families, announcing that there would be compensation. Almost a year on, this is the extent of their regret. There has been no sign of recompense, no move to hold anyone accountable, no lesson learned.

The grief is no longer ours alone but that of an entire community. Having believed in our guilt for decades, the public is now faced with the deception and needs expiation. But no honour is to be found among those in authority, be it within the government, parliament or the judicial system.

I cannot understand what motivates the leaders of a nation to stand before the cameras and promise restitution for such shameful treatment of its citizens, and then sling the rest of our lives in the trash as they walk away.

It has been 44 years. I have survived the ghosts that thrive in the darkness cast by this case, ghosts that leap out at every turn. I am still here fighting, still holding out hope for justice.

*Since Sugar Paper Theories was first release in 2016, all of the victims (except Erla Bolladóttir) had their wrongful convictions overturned. Erla’s conviction was eventually overturned in 2020.