The Night Out that Ended in Murder | True Crime Documentary

When thinking about what makes somewhere a great place to live, we often consider the safety, the community, the friendliness of the locals, and there is one country that ticks all the boxes. Located off the east coast of Greenland, Iceland has been consistently voted one of the best countries in the world to live in. With a population of just over 340,000—one of the world’s smallest—its breathtaking natural beauty packs a big punch. Natural springs and rolling hills attract tourists from all over the world. People travel from far and wide to experience the riches this small country has to offer, from the incredible architecture to the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis. Harsh winters mean sunlight can be scarce, but this merely adds to the intrigue of Iceland, a place so far removed from what most of us know and understand.

One of the most appealing things about Iceland is the friendliness, openness, and kindness of its people. Due to the tough terrain and harsh winters, people rely on each other, value community, and take care of their neighbors. There are strong social attitudes against crime; they have no army and their police officers do not carry guns. People often leave their doors unlocked and get lifts with strangers. One Friday night in 2017, the peace and tranquility of Iceland would be shattered, and a nation would be left reeling by a seemingly random, motiveless, and brutal murder. This is the story of Birna Brjánsdóttir.

Birna Brjánsdóttir lived in the southeast of Reykjavik. While her parents were no longer together, they remained on friendly terms, and she was the center of their world. She was bright and spirited, with her fiery personality reflected in her striking auburn hair. She was incredibly witty with a sharp sense of humor, which made her popular amongst her friends. She was carefree and whimsical but always responsible, with this maturity reflected in her relationship with her family and her mature attitude to work. Music was a big passion, and Birna wasn’t picky; she would listen to anything from rap to pop, and from rock to folk. It was this openness and free spirit that made so many people love her.

Birna had a close-knit circle of friends and would enjoy the nightlife of Reykjavik. She worked in the fashion section of a busy department store and would unwind after work by going to the local bar for drinks before heading out to really let her hair down. And on the 13th of January 2017, this is exactly what Birna did. That night she closed up the shop and went for drinks and a few rounds of cards before heading into the center of the capital for a night of laughing, drinking, and dancing. They went to Húrra, where the up-and-coming bands would play, and before long Birna was dancing on the stage. Her friends were ready to leave by 2:00 a.m., but Birna wasn’t; she wanted to carry on enjoying herself.

Just before 5:00 a.m., she left the club and walked out into the -9° weather before heading for a falafel and walking in the direction of her home. A woman walking alone in Reykjavik was not rare; people trusted each other and looked out for each other. Due to her intoxication, she dropped coins and stumbled into a stranger on the side of the road. As she carried on walking, she turned a corner and walked down a narrow lane towards the sea. Then she vanished.

Her punctual reputation meant that when she failed to turn up for work, people were immediately concerned. One of her friends from school, Maria, who worked with Birna, was instantly unsettled by her absence. This was only made worse when she tried to call her mobile; it wouldn’t connect, and Birna never turned off her phone. People suspected she had just gone back to her father’s house to nurse her hangover. This is also what her friends thought who had been out with her that night, but she wasn’t there. Birna’s mother, Silla, was called and she too was concerned over her daughter’s whereabouts. She knew Birna and she knew this was out of character. Her family wasted no time; they went straight to the police and reported her missing. Realizing the power of social media, Silla posted to her Facebook page:

“Dear friends, it’s not like her that we can’t reach her, please share and let’s find her.”

Iceland is a small community, and before long Silla’s desperate pleas on Facebook were being shared, and news of Birna’s disappearance began to circulate. The stress and worry of having a child go missing is unimaginable. Her parents couldn’t sleep; they persistently made calls to all the emergency services, desperately seeking any new information on Birna’s whereabouts.

The following day, the police were able to trace her last known mobile interaction before it went dead or was turned off. Just before 6:00 a.m., her phone pinged off a mobile tower in a port town, Hafnarfjörður, 6 miles outside of the capital. Silla wasted no time and drove there, calling out to her daughter and searching the area. She was helped by a team of family and friends who were determined to bring Birna home.

Before long, 36 hours had passed since Birna had disappeared into the Reykjavik night. Her family and friends were adamant that something terrible had happened to her; she was a reliable young woman, and this was completely out of character. The police, however, had little to go on. They had no evidence of a murder or abduction, so there was not much they could do. As news of her disappearance carried on spreading, it quickly became headline news. Birna’s face was plastered over newspapers and her name was in the mouth of every news anchor in Iceland.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, her parents went to the police and begged them to search for her. They said she would not have gone off of her own accord, much less not told anyone where she was going. She had no money troubles or relationship problems; everyone who knew Birna adored her.

A case as baffling and unusual as this required Iceland’s best detectives, one of which was Grímur Grímsson. He had 30 years of investigative experience. He was even part of a special team who spent more than 5 years building a case against those whose misconduct and corruption contributed to the financial crash of 2008. After this, he returned to his roots as a police officer, saying he missed the fast-paced work. Like his colleagues, he too wasn’t initially that concerned about Birna. There were many other factors that he had to consider; people do go missing in Iceland, anything from mental health problems to simply staying at a friend’s house and not telling people. Most missing people would eventually turn up.

Capital cities throughout the world are laden with CCTV, but Reykjavik isn’t like most capital cities. The Icelandic population have negative attitudes towards surveillance and, due to the low rates of crime, the population tends to police itself. They take care of each other and look out for strangers. But she was spotted on the night of her disappearance. CCTV showed her leaving the club, dropping her coins, and walking into the stranger.

When Grímsson checked the next camera less than a block away, she was gone. There were two options: either she had gone down the side road off the corner or got into a car. Grímsson had a keen eye for detail and was sure that there was a clue in that grainy CCTV that would eventually lead them to Birna. He noticed a car, a red Kia Rio, going on the opposite side of the road to Birna. He watched as it drove past the Lebowski bar seconds after Birna had been seen there. This was a lead the officers had to pursue. Then came the next problem: they couldn’t make out the license plate, who was driving, or how many were in the car. There were more than 100 cars of that make and model in Iceland. This did nothing to calm the fears of her parents. Silla was incandescent when they explained the quality of the tape was too poor to extract any more details from.

 

“Can’t you find it like in the movies?” Silla said.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Grímsson replied.

The police knew that while they didn’t have enough in terms of CCTV, they did have a community with a spirit of hope. They appealed to the people of Iceland for their help. They held a rare press conference. Grímsson and Birna’s distraught family went before the cameras and begged Iceland for its assistance in finding her. Silla showed the media what kind of person her daughter was, explaining she was extremely intelligent, bilingual, with a love of other cultures and a passion for exploring.

The police hunch that the press conference would lead to a breakthrough proved right, and before long they had their first lead. A pair of brothers decided to search Hafnarfjörður, where her phone had pinged off of the tower, and when there they headed towards the harbor. After searching in a fenced-off area, they found a pair of boots—black Doc Martens identical to the pair that Birna had last been seen wearing. Using the power of social media, they posted a picture of them to Facebook, and before long the officers arrived. They confirmed the shoes were Birna’s.

Finally, the police felt like they were getting somewhere. Grímsson demanded officers scour through the CCTV with a fine-toothed comb, and soon they saw a familiar picture. At 6:00 a.m. on the morning Birna vanished, a red Kia Rio pulled into the harbor. A man climbed out of the car and staggered off in a drunken state towards a fishing trawler that had docked there. The car then drove off. Finally, they could make out a number plate. The car had been rented by a 25-year-old fisherman from Greenland, Thomas Møller Olsen.

The car had since been rented by a family who complained of a stench of chemicals coming from the back. After impounding the car, officers were determined to find any trace of Birna, and soon they had a clue: blood spots in the back seat. Samples were quickly gathered and sent off to Sweden for analysis in a desperate bid to see if it matched Birna.

For Grímsson and his team, it was now a race against time. They needed to find the trawler and their only suspects, Thomas Møller Olsen and Nikolaj Olsen. Thomas and Nikolaj weren’t related but were crewmates on the trawler. Thomas was considered easygoing, approachable, and generally likable.

Whilst on board, his phone pinged. Thomas went pale. It was a news article saying that the ship he was on was linked to the disappearance of Birna. A journalist had contacted a Facebook group used by the men on board and asked who had rented the car and who was seen on the CCTV. Thomas was visibly shaken.

“If you are innocent, you will be fine,” his captain assured him.

The challenge for Grímsson and his team was huge. The longer his suspects were on that boat, the longer they had to align their stories and get rid of anything incriminating. He needn’t have worried because the ship’s captain had already formed a plan. He had read of the link between the ship and Birna, so he turned it around and headed back towards Iceland. He and his high-ranking officers agreed they would say engine problems had forced the turnaround, and the Wi-Fi was disabled so that the suspects could not read anything about the case.

The police were keen to use the element of surprise and so used members of their elite counterterrorism squad, also known as the Viking Squad, to board the ship as soon as it came back into Icelandic territory. Officers were dropped onto the ship from a helicopter, and finally the police had their two suspects in custody.

The reaction of the public to the case was massive and the whole country was waiting on tenterhooks for any news of what had happened to Birna. The case seemed to take over all aspects of Icelandic life. Although their intentions were good, online sleuths only added to the confusion, and it became hard to distinguish rumor from fact. Stories ranged from a body being found in a lake to Birna and other women being found alive on the trawler swirled around social media. Grímsson remained calm and called for the same, stating that however well-intentioned people were, it wasn’t helping in the search for Birna.

At around 11 p.m. on Wednesday night, the ship came back into port, and the two suspects were brought back onto Icelandic soil in handcuffs. Then came the news that nobody wanted to hear: the blood in the rental car was Birna’s.

The police wasted no time in questioning the two men. Nikolaj and Thomas were sure that they had done nothing to Birna and gave similar accounts of the events of that fateful night. They had both separated and gone to different drinking spots before meeting up again as the night began to wind down. Nikolaj was already incredibly drunk and his account was hazy. Although Nikolaj could remember nothing about them, they said they had picked up two girls on the high street, one of which was Birna. Thomas said he dropped Nikolaj off at the ship before driving away. He then claimed he climbed into the back with the two girls where they kissed before he dropped them off an hour later.

The police were inclined to believe Nikolaj; he had been seen walking away and was clearly in no fit state to do anything. However, when it came to Thomas, they had a bad feeling, and the evidence against him was stacking up. He was examined by a doctor who determined the wounds on his chest were signs of a struggle or fight. When searching the ship, the police found a driver’s license in the bin; it belonged to Birna. They also found drugs with a street value of nearly 1.5 million.

Thomas claimed to have slept in the car, but the police checked the odometer, which showed that the car had been taken for a long drive. CCTV would prove to be their friend also, as he was seen in a shop buying plastic bags and cleaning fluid before scrubbing the inside of the car. Police didn’t believe his excuse that he had been sick and was simply trying to clean it. They knew the blood spots in the car were Birna’s, and when they used luminol to highlight any blood not seen with the naked eye, the back of the car lit up—it was absolutely covered in blood.

4 days after she vanished, Iceland launched the biggest search in its history. The search and rescue project manager said:

“Today she is our sister, our daughter.”

That became the mantra. We don’t live in a society where we tolerate a 20-year-old woman being abducted in the night.

It wouldn’t be long before the police found what they were looking for. A Coast Guard helicopter noticed something floating in the water near a local lighthouse. It was a body. They had found Birna, and with this announcement, Iceland plunged into mourning. The shock and disbelief was palpable; this was the kind of thing that happened in movies and other countries, it didn’t happen in Iceland. Citizens of Greenland were also appalled and grieved alongside their Nordic neighbor. The high street in Reykjavik from which Birna had disappeared became a shrine lit up by candles. Birna’s funeral was held at the biggest church in the country, the Hallgrímskirkja, and over 2,000 people attended, including the president and the prime minister.

The public wanted answers, and the police needed to provide them. First, they had to ascertain the cause of death. Birna had been found naked, but they could find no evidence of a sexual assault. The examiner found that she had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and had been strangled as well. However, the official cause of death was ruled as drowning. She had survived the initial attack and was alive when she was put into the water.

Grímsson and his team examined the evidence in front of them. They could find no link between Birna’s murder and Nikolaj, and they did not believe he was involved. After two weeks in custody and hours of interrogation, he was freed.

Their attention now turned back to Thomas. His story remained the same, and he wasn’t changing it. Over the course of nine interviews with police, he maintained his innocence. While the police had their crime scene and suspect, they could find no reason or motive as to why Thomas would murder Birna. But the evidence continued to mount. They had been able to find his DNA on a lace of Birna’s Doc Martens, and his fingerprints were found on her discarded driving license.

On the 30th of March 2017, breaking news alerts were spreading all over Iceland. The police had charged Thomas Møller Olsen with drug possession and murder. Media interest in the story reached a fever pitch as his trial began in August of that year. It was during his trial that he sensationally changed his story. He said that there were not two girls, only one—Birna. He said that he had left the car to go to the bathroom, and Nikolaj had driven off with Birna in the back seat, and when he returned, she wasn’t with him. The court was stunned; he was now trying to pin the murder on his crewmate.

With a low voice and a face covered, he admitted to the drug possession but denied murder. In September, the three judges had reached their verdict: guilty on all counts, and he was led away to begin his 19-year prison sentence. Thomas Møller Olsen has appealed his conviction, but the high court upheld it, and the following year, the high court refused to consider another appeal.

The murder of Birna Brjánsdóttir was a crime that shook Iceland. The chaplain who presided over Birna’s funeral said:

“This case will be remembered. It changed us a bit, our feeling of security.”

CCTV around Reykjavik was increased and women became more wary of strangers. For Grímur Grímsson, despite 30 years of service, this had been his first murder case. His calm and coordinated approach made him a hero in Iceland. He now proudly represents his country in the European Union’s Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation based in The Hague.

Despite the tragic events surrounding the murder of Birna Brjánsdóttir, her memory continues to be kept alive, and the people of Iceland are determined that she will never be forgotten.