The Reykjavik Confessions: Why Admit to a Murder that Never Happened?

Some truly strange goings-on up in Iceland ...

In 1974, two men in Iceland went missing, ten months apart. Eventually six people would confess to their murder, receiving long prison sentences for their crimes.

However, there is a problem with the above in that, in the years since, it has become clear that the six most likely did not commit the murders at all. In September 2018, 44 years after the murders, five of the six were acquitted. They were innocent of all the crimes they had been accused of.

It doesn’t seem likely now that these murders ever happened. But how did six people end up signing confessions to murders they didn’t commit, that they knew nothing about, and that were not even murders in the first place.

What caused the so-called Reykjavik Confessions?