The murder that shook Iceland

(Just for context, I am Icelandic, but have no other connection to this story.)

> They don't mention if the autopsy revealed when during the course of these events the girl died.

It does, she drowned after she was put in the water.

> It seems remarkable that despite a perceived lack of sufficient surveillance, they have an extremely likely killer convicted

The point is that without that tiny bit of surveillance, it would have been extremely hard to get on the track that led to discovery of incriminating evidence. Without linking the red KIA to Polar Nanooq, it is possible that nothing would have come of it. The perpetrator had left the country with almost all the available evidence, and such a large search would likely not have been launched so her body might have never been discovered.

It was by the skin of their teeth that the police managed to link the car in the first video to the boat. Had the first video been better (or more from the same area), they would have been able to identify the license plates right away.

A second thing to realize is in Iceland, the arguments against surveillance haven't been "we don't want to be watched" nor "it will get abused" -- but rather "we don't need it". It is obvious why this case changed that sentiment.

I live in Iceland perhaps no more than 200m away from where Birna got in the car. My understanding is that people feel more CCTV would have answered the question of what happened to her sooner. People were very shocked that someone could vanish from Laugavegur (if you’ve never visited, downtown Reykjavik doesn’t have a big city vibe) and there were substantial searches conducted through the downtown area. Were it not for some civic minded people coming across crucial evidence in an unlikely spot the red car involved may not have been identified at all. In short a lot of people empathise with the pain of their loved ones vanishing and not knowing why and in this case lack of CCTV almost played a part in that.

Criminals always follow the path of least resistance.

Like how they steal bicycles because they know police don't have resources to bother with that.

Or how the steal phones from your hand in London for the same reason.

Now imagine if an AI would trace their path through thousands of CCTV cameras. It could even automatically dispatch a squad to arrest them from home. Surely that would deter many of them, since now crime would send you to jail instead of giving you a free phone.

It's a long game, adding surveillance. Surely more surveillance would not have prevented this senseless murder. No one knows why it happened; it seems to have occurred without any reason. We can surmise momentary insanity or a drug-induced psychotic episode. The apparent perpetrator refuses to confess, so maybe he doesn't even remember how it happened, though obviously he remembers scrubbing the car.

But CCTV footage wouldn't have stopped this madness. It would have helped find her body a little more quickly.

In the long term, I guess surveillance would discourage violent crime, as the idea that "they'll see us, the police will catch us" gradually becomes well accepted among people who have the potential to commit crimes. This is probably already true in London, and maybe in other closely-surveilled capital cities.

But even if everyone sane shares the knowledge that "they're watching us", psychotic actors will still do psychotic things.

Two danish sailors picked her up while drunk in a rental car, one of them got off to the ship and the other drove away with her and was not seen until the next morning when he returned the car with a large odometer reading.

Her body was eventually found naked and battered in a distant location, and the rental had forensic sings of having been cleaned of her blood. The sailor was recorded buying cleaning products at the same time, his DNA was found on her discarded clothes and her driving license was found in his cabin on the ship (along with a few pounds of hashish). A truly disturbed individual that tried to pin the murder on his colleague up until the very end.