Out of Thin Air Media Evaluation by tpr media consultants

Coverage Evaluation August 2017

tpr media consultants

Out of Thin Air Coverage Key Quotes

FINANCIAL TIMES: 'A tautly constructed documentary that combines all the thrills of Scandi noir with the frisson of reality.' ★★★★★

DAILY MAIL: 'A riveting real life story.' 'Documentary of the week' ★★★★ '

THE SUNDAY TIMES: 'A dreamy, drug-laced story of a youthquake in volcano country.'

THE TIMES: 'Fascinating twists and turns.'

MAIL ON SUNDAY: 'We're used to European crime dramas, but here the chilling story is all too real.'

DAILY TELEGRAPH: 'Gripping true crime documentary.'

THE GUARDIAN: 'The first-hand testimony...is especially harrowing.'

OBSERVER: 'Masterful.'

INDEPENDENT: 'Straight out of Scandi-noir.'

iNEWS: ‘Intriguing.’

RADIO TIMES: 'Superbly done.'

Out of Thin Air

Mosaic Films, BBC Storyville, August 2017, Netflix, September 2017 tpr media consultants were engaged from May to August 2017 by Mosaic Films to create and deliver a PR strategy for the documentary Out of Thin Air. We positioned the featurelength film as a compelling true crime story, a successor to Making a Murderer with stylish, Nordic Noir appeal. The campaign tied in with its broadcast on BBC Storyville in August and Netflix from September. The first challenge was to make this story accessible in words and images. With the support of Mosaic Films, tpr media spent a lot of time researching the background to the case and creating a press pack and website which told the story, painting a picture of 1970s Iceland, the backstory of the contributors and an understanding of Memory Distrust Syndrome, a rare condition where people lose trust in their own memories. We felt this this was essential groundwork in helping an already overstretched media to understand the complex but fascinating case. We also focused on the stylised look and feel of the documentary and the trailer was very helpful here. Using these finely-tuned media materials as a starting point, we created different pitches for different outlets, carefully briefing contributors – especially Erla Bolladottir and Dr Gisli Gudjonsson – and the production team, who we were in regular contact with. Knowing that Out of Thin Air would appeal to a younger-than-usual Storyville audience, we aimed for coverage in a broad range of outlets that included the Guardian, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and The World Tonight as well as Vice – where it was one of their most shared stories of the week – film website Little White Lies and the Huffington Post. BBC Newsnight were keen to cover the story but cancelled it twice due to a busy news agenda. We had blanket previews, many four and five stars, from the Financial Times to the Observer. It was the Mail's documentary of the week. The listings magazines also lapped it up and Broadcastnow ran a behind-the-scenes feature written by the production team. Overall there were 60 pieces of coverage with a total reach of 13.3million people. The total news value for the campaign was £404, 850.

Out of Thin Air Media Coverage Figures Total News Value:

404.85k Total News Reach:

13.38m Total Volume of Items:

59 Total Unique Sources:

UK Nationals Regionals

Internet

Irish Nationals

Top 20 Sources by Value

Source Name The Guardian.Com (Web)

Value 115,886.00

The Sunday Times

65,226.24

Yahoo! Uk And Ireland (Web)

27,668.00

Vice Uk (Web)

26,964.00

Huffington Post Uk (Blog)

24,510.00

The Sunday Telegraph

20,523.36

The Guardian

18,161.00

Irish Independent (Web)

13,605.00

Daily Mail

12,623.76

Radio Times

11,783.52

The Daily Telegraph

7,906.44

Financial Times

7,104.24

Top 20 Sources by Reach

Source Name

Article Reach

The Guardian.Com (Web)

2,158,706

Daily Mail

1,511,357

The Mail On Sunday

1,238,512

Yahoo! Uk And Ireland (Web)

1,030,766

Huffington Post Uk (Blog)

913,143

Evening Standard

878,290

The Sunday Times

792,324

Radio Times

668,526

Irish Independent (Web)

506,838

The Daily Telegraph

472,258

The Times

451,261

Daily Star

443,452

Out of Thin Air Radio

Erla Bolladottir, Clothes for zero gravity, Katharine Welby-Roberts Erla Bolladottir has been described as Iceland's most notorious woman. That's because of what she told police about a double-murder in the 1970s which led to 5 young men, including her boyfriend, being found guilty of the crimes. She was later jailed for perjury. But was there a miscarriage of justice, and did Erla experience "memory distrust syndrome", with her mind playing tricks on her? The police investigation was found to be deeply flawed, and the men's murder convictions could be reopened. Jane speaks to Erla and to journalist, Helga Arnardottir ahead of the BBC Documentary Out of Thin Air. Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Caroline Donne

BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight Thu 10 Aug 2017, 22:00 Interview with Professor Gisli Gudjonsson

BBC World Service, Newshour Thu 10 Aug 2017, 21:00

Out of Thin Air Features

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

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Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

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Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

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Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

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Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

TPR Media Yellow News The Source: Guardian.com Client:

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'Deep down, I knew it didn't happen': The woman who imagined a murder When two men disappeared in 1974, Erla Bolladottir’s testimony put her boyfriend and his friends in prison for murder. She tells us how the case made her the most notorious woman in Iceland – and why they may be innocent after all

‘I just waited and waited for something to confirm for me that I didn’t imagine it’ … Erla Bolladottir. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Paula Cocozza Friday 4 August 2017 15.46 BST

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n 1974, two men vanished in Iceland within the space of 10 months. The country’s population was only 220,000, small enough for people to feel they knew each other. Crime was scant. But neither man was found. There were no witnesses, no forensic evidence – no bodies. After an intensive police investigation, six young men confessed to their part in the murders. Their confessions were spurred in part by the testimony of Erla Bolladottir, girlfriend of the group’s alleged ringleader, Sævar Ciesielski. Despite retracting their confessions, Ciesielski and four friends were convicted of murder; Bolladottir was convicted of perjury for attempting to implicate four other innocent men. The case, and Bolladottir’s name, remain notorious in Iceland – at the time of the trial, she says that Ciesielski was painted by the media as a Charles Manson figure, and her as one of his devoted Family members. But over the decades, horror at the supposed crimes has been replaced with fears that an atrocious miscarriage of justice occurred. Now, more than 40 years later, with the special prosecutor in Iceland recommending that the case be reopened, Bolladottir has turned chief witness in Out of Thin Air, a featurelength documentary for BBC Storyville. The film, directed by Dylan Howitt, has a noirish feel, appropriately for a mystery which in Iceland is regarded as “a black hole”. But this is no whodunnit. The film raises many more questions than answers, and even talking to Bolladottir – during her visit to the UK to view the documentary – takes the story further into uncertainty. Bolladottir’s part in the murder investigation began on 13 December 1975 when, aged 20, she was arrested for embezzlement. She confessed to the crime, which she had committed with Ciesielski. As the interview concluded she felt relieved to have got the story off her chest. She was also looking forward to going home; she and Ciesielski had an 11weekold girl. But instead of letting her leave, the police officers threw her a question about Guðmundur Einarsson, the first of the two men to have gone missing 11 months earlier. “I was really tired. I was trying to accommodate them, but I didn’t know anything,” Bolladottir says. She told the police about a nightmare she had had on the night of Einarsson’s disappearance. She dreamt that she lay in bed listening to voices outside the window. “They were whispering, ‘Is she awake? Is she asleep?’” From those fragments, Bolladottir says, the police began to Erla Bolladottir in construct an alternate reality: “They tried to convince me that 1976. Photograph: this had not been a nightmare.” She was sent back to her cell, National Archive/BBC Four where over the next nine days, the questioning continued. “They really went into details. ‘Why was a bedsheet in the bin? Had it been used to wrap the body?’ I was trying to picture everything they told me.” At a certain point, the effort to visualise the details described by the police produced in her mind a picture that was vivid enough to seem real. Now the bedsheet, which hadn’t previously figured in Bolladottir’s dream, was not only imaginable but memorable too. When the police asked, “Could it have been like this?” suddenly all things seemed possible. “I couldn’t deny that it could have been,” she says. “Somehow, between me and them, this story formed. And I never knew, did it come from me, or did it come from them?”

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It seems unthinkable that Bolladottir, on the basis of such unstable recollections, would provide the testimony that helped to convict her boyfriend and his friends of murder. At one point, she claimed that she herself had killed Geirfinnur Einarsson with a shotgun. At another, she implicated her halfbrother Einar along with three other men, all of whom were held for 105 days before being released without charge. It is the instability of memory itself that Howitt investigates. The film has the Convicted … Sævar atmosphere of a thriller – it opens in darkness, a gun fires, snow Ciesielski in 1976. Photograph: National falls, a door thunks shut on a green cell. And the softly spoken Archive/BBC Four Bolladottir, reliving it all with undisguised bewilderment, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Even now, she finds it hard to know what she knew. How much does she really remember of that night? She knows that she had the nightmare; and that she never had it again. And that the mental pictures of the murder have stayed in her head, “as if it happened, you know? But it didn’t happen.” She now views these images as symptomatic of memory distrust syndrome, a condition originally identified by Gísli Guðjónsson, a professor of forensic psychology whose expert testimony helped overturn the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. Central to the case is the amount of time Bolladottir, Ciesielski and his associates spent in solitary confinement. One of the group, Tryggvi Rúnar Leifsson, spent 655 days in solitary, the longest recorded stint outside Guantánamo Bay, while Bolladottir herself spent 135 days alone. All had infrequent access to lawyers. “It’s almost like you’re a split personality,” she says. “Deep down I knew it didn’t happen. But somehow I wasn’t sure at the same time.” “Time is so difficult to talk about [in detention]. It’s all just one big universal time,” she says. She became so distrusting of her own memory that she began to doubt she had even given birth. “I tried to see my daughter’s face, and I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to ask anybody.” She was scared if she did that she would never see her daughter again. “I just waited and waited for something to confirm for me that I didn’t imagine it.”

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‘Somehow, between me and the police, a story formed’ … a reconstruction of the crime scene. Photograph: National Archive/BBC Four

These days Bolladottir works as a project manager for an adult education centre that helps immigrants integrate in Reykjavik. But it took decades to integrate herself. “There was no life for me in the community,” she says. People spat at her on the street. She struggled to find work. She lived for a while in Hawaii, with her sister, then after getting married she spent a few years in South Africa. She had two more daughters, now aged 27 and 21. When Bolladottir came back to Iceland in 1998, Ciesielski had been out of prison for more than a decade, fighting to clear his name. He had become homeless, and alcoholic, but before his death in 2011, the two managed to talk. So did Bolladottir apologise to Ciesielski for her part in his conviction? “I did, I did,” she says. “For a long time, no matter how drunk he was, that man … would come to my house and I couldn’t take him inside because I had a family there. So we had an arrangement. He would ring the bell and I would go down to where we kept the bicycles. We had total peace there. We would just sit on the floor and talk for hours.” It was during these conversations, she says, that she “came out of all uncertainty” about his innocence. She is crying now. Life “never went back to normal”, she says. Nor can it. Julia, her eldest daughter, is now 41 and, Bolladottir says, in touch with her halfsiblings, Ciesielski’s other children, who are also hoping to prove their father’s innocence. But even if Ciesielski’s conviction is overturned, along with that of his friends, Bolladottir will not be found innocent. Her own perjury conviction is unlikely to be reexamined. She plans to take her case to a private court. In the meantime, she hopes the film will tell the story of a miscarriage of justice for younger generations. “Because it’s always going to surface,” she says. “The film is my hope.” Out of Thin Air will be broadcast on BBC Four on Monday 14 August and available on Netflix from September.

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‘Every Icelander knows about this case.’ In 1974 two men vanished several months apart. At the time, Iceland had a population

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of just over 200,000 and was a close, tight knit community, where crime was relatively rare. This infamous case which soon became a double murder investigation shook the country and the police were under intense pressure to find the people responsible. Advertisement

But the police got nowhere: there were no bodies, no witnesses and no forensic evidence. Then six suspects were arrested and confessed to the murders and faced long, harsh sentences. It appeared that justice had been done. Nothing could be further from the truth...

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Erla Bolladottir and her boyfriend, Saevar Ciesielski were the first to be arrested. They were two hippies riding the crest of the small, antiestablishment wave in Reykjavík. They had originally been convicted for petty fraud but were suddenly confessing to double murder. Erla, was terrified, she was only 20 at the time and had been separated from her small baby. Under intense pressure, she gave the police names of other people who were allegedly involved. Before long six people confessed to the murders. But something didn’t add up their stories didn’t match.

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Trump’s Quick Response To Barcelona Attack Makes His Charlottesville Reactions Look Even Worse In order to convict them for murder, the confessions would have to be consistent.

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Enter Karl Shultz. A German ‘supercop’ who had cracked the infamous Baader Meinhof gang. He was brought to Iceland to solve the case, and he oversaw the interrogations to ‘harmonise’ these conflicting and often contradictory stories. The confessions had to be aligned. The suspects were kept in solitary confinement for long stretches. One of the accused Trggvi Leifsson spent the longest recorded stint outside Guantanamo Bay 655 days in solitary confinement. The suspects were also given powerful drugs and subjected to water torture and sleep deprivation. Police

Spanish Police Foil Terror Attack Just Hours After Pedestrians Mown enact the crimes again and again. They were denied legal counsel and assumed to be Down In Barcelona spent weeks taking them out to search the vast lava fields for the bodies and to re guilty. Forty years later this notorious murder case was reopened when new evidence brought into question everything that had gone before. This led to a major government inquiry which exposed the great incompetence and abuses of the police investigation. This inquiry triggered a process which will be heard this autumn by Iceland’s Supreme Court who will consider whether to acquit all those convicted of murder.

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What makes this case so unique, is that five out of the six were said to suffer from Memory Distrust Syndrome. They started to distrust of their own minds and furthermore what was suggested to them during interrogation became more real than their own recollections. Memory Distrust Syndrome can create confusion so extreme that people may confess to crimes they didn’t commit even something as a serious as murder. Today, most of the Icelandic population now believe them to be innocent. According to the former Minister of the Interior, Ogmundur Jonasson, the case will be a black mark upon Iceland’s ‘collective conscience’ until ‘justice [is] done’. But the defendants have had their lives and their very sense of self shattered by the experience. Even today, some of them still harbour doubts about whether they did it or not... Outofthinairfilm.com Out of Thin Air is on BBC Storyville, BBC Four on 14 August at 10pm and BBC

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

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CRIME

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit AMELIA ABRAHAM Aug 11 2017, 9:00am

Mugshots of the six suspects

In 1974, a group of innocent people mysteriously admitted to a double homicide they had nothing to do with. They weren't covering for anyone or seeking attention; they truly believed they'd done it. SHARE

here's a famous criminal case in Icelandic history, still unresolved, that every Icelander knows. It involves the disappearance and suspected murder of two men, Gudmundur Einarsson, in January of 1974, and Geirfinnur Einarsson in November

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

of the same year.

The first, Gudmundur, was heading home from a nightclub when, drunk, he decided to walk the freezing 10km journey back to his house. He was seen by a few drivers, stumbling about or failing to hitch a ride. It's not known when he disappeared into the landscape, but he never made it home, his body was never discovered. Icelandic authorities searched for him for a few weeks, but disappearances are quite common in Iceland, and after a month they just wrote it off as a mystery.

Gudmundur would have likely been forgotten if it wasn't for the disappearance, that November, of Geirfinnur. One night he got a phone call and left his home to drive to a harbour cafe. He was never seen again. The police began to search for both men, wondering if the deaths were linked. The men weren't related, but the fact they had the same surname is an indicator of how close-knit Icelandic society is. At the time, Iceland had a population of just 200,000 people and a very low rate of crime: murders almost never happened. Despite this, the Icelandic police became convinced they were dealing with a double homicide, and came under pressure from the media to come up with answers.

The mysterious case is the subject of a new documentary, coming to BBC Four and Netflix this month, called Out of Thin Air. It's the first feature length film to tell the story of the Icelandic disappearances in detail, and like all good recent true crime thrillers – the Amanda Knox documentary, Making a Murderer, Serial – it takes as its heart a fascinating miscarriage of justice. What's different about the Icelandic case is that the people who were sent down for the murders confessed to the crime, even though they were innocent.

All six of the people charged, to a varying degree, suffered from what's called memory distrust syndrome – a phenomenon whereby you doubt your own memories so deeply that your mind starts to fabricate new ones, a type of "source amnesia", where the source of learnt information somehow becomes confused or replaced entirely.

The police eventually gave up on the investigations around both disappearances. But two years later, when they were questioning a 20-year-old woman named Erla Bolladottir on an unrelated fraud charge, they showed her a picture of Gudmundur and asked if she knew him. She told investigators she'd met him at a party and that she could recall a dream from the

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

night he went missing, in which her boyfriend, Saevar Ciesielski, an LSD-taking petty criminal, was outside her room with what looked like a body. Saevar and four of his closest friends were quickly brought into the station, and along with Erla questioned intensively. Their stories kept changing, and details didn't all match up, but one by one they each admitted to their suspected crimes, and were eventually charged. Saevar got a life sentence, Erla three years, and the rest around 12 years each.

Crime reconstruction, Credit: Icelandic National Archive

isli Gudjonsson, a world-renowned expert in forensic pathology, is one of the leading researchers on memory distrust syndrome, and became interested in the phenomenon while working for the Icelandic CID in the 1970s, just as the case

of the Icelandic Six was unfolding. He's since dedicated his career to explaining false memories in courts of law, as well as writing papers on its causes and effects.

"Memory distrust syndrome is a profound distrust of your own memory," he explains, "particularly during lengthy interrogation, where you begin to accept you've been involved in

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

a crime which you have nothing to do with. It can happen when people fail to remember what they were doing at the time â&#x20AC;&#x201C; if it was a long time ago, say, and they don't have their diary, or if drinking or substance misuse has made the memory weaker."

"They were given drugs like benzodiazepines and antipsychotics, allegedly to calm them down or because they couldn't sleep. The conditions were terrible, it was a perfect storm for those people to not know what's real and what's not real."

Gisli has worked on over 500 cases of memory distrust syndrome since the 1980s, when research on the topic started to emerge. He testified in the case of the Guildford Four, for example, the high profile false-conviction of four people who were suspected of an IRA bombing. Gisli's work has found that memory distrust syndrome tends to occur when a person is for some reason already vulnerable, or more prone to police compliance. They might have been kept in solitary confinement for a long time, they might be grieving, or mentally unwell, or they might have low self esteem and be overly willing to accept that they did something they shouldn't have. Then, the idea that they are guilty is usually impressed upon them by the police.

The concept is not to be confused with voluntary confessions, says Gisli, whereby people go to the police and say they did something because they're seeking attention or notoriety, or because they're taking on a case for a friend. Rather, it's a deep seated internal belief that you actually committed a crime you were not present for.

Gisli was brought in to testify in the Iceland Six case when it was reopened in 2011, after prison diaries of one of the men who had been charged with the murders were passed from the man's daughter to a reporter and showed serious signs of memory distrust syndrome, as well as foul play, such as the police drugging the suspects. For Gisli, it was emotional to return to a case he knew so well.

"The advantage of the fact I was there 40 years ago is that I knew what the atmosphere was

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

like in the holding prison, how uncomfortable those small, solitary cells with just a bed were, how you couldn't even go to the toilet without ringing a bell," he says. In the documentary, he explains that the Icelandic Six's confessions were unreliable because they'd each been extensively interrogated for hundreds of hours, longer than in any other case he's ever worked on. "In Britain, it's three days, and if you're not charged you're out. But there it was endless: what to do with yourself?"

Erla Bolladottir's mugshot

ndy Glynne is the producer of Out of Thin Air, as well as a trained clinical psychologist. He was fascinated by the story of the Icelandic Six for what he calls the awe factor. "Those six people's lives were turned totally upside down,"

he says. "They had no idea when they were going to get out, had their loved ones taken away, and had no judiciary arm backing them up, because the police and the courts were run by the same people in Iceland back then. On top of that, the six were given drugs like benzodiazepines and antipsychotics, allegedly to calm them down or because they couldn't sleep. The conditions were terrible â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was a perfect storm for those people to not know what's real and what's not real." The other reason the story interested him, he says, was because, while in many ways it was extraordinary, it could happen to anyone.

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

Andy explains: "In the 1990s, one of the biggest studies on memory not related to forensic settings was psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Jim Coan's experiment 'Lost in the Mall', where they asked a group of adults to remember childhood memories and got their family to help construct what those memories were: their favourite holidays, the clothes they wore. Loftus sat down with all of the participants, gave them five memories to remember, and in amongst the real memories she gave them a fake one: 'Remember the time you were lost in a mall?' None of them ever had been, but with prompts, not only did a percentage go 'oh yeah', but they started to fill out the gaps; how long their mum was looking for them, how great it was when they were found again. Twenty-five percent recalled a memory that never happened. So it's a normal thing. And that's a terrifying proposition."

Gisli has worked on a range of high profile cases where memory distrust syndrome has affected regular people, like a soldier whose friend fell off a cliff when they were walking home from a bar. Suspected of pushing the friend, ridden with grief and drunk at the time of the incident, the soldier failed a polygraph test and then confessed to the murder, later to retract his confession when the true memory returned. Gisli has also worked on a number of cases on death row in America that have helped to stop executions. "As an expert witness I work closely with the police, defence, prosecution and police to look at the vulnerabilities of people in the context they were questioned to try to help the court," he explains. "And what I and my colleagues have shown over the years is that, if you're genuinely innocent, you're surprised you're being arrested, you're not prepared and you basically want to get out. Even normal individuals, given the right circumstances, can make a false confession to murder and remember doing it as well."

Countries and law systems, however, aren't quick to agree that their systems are prone to false confessions, says Gisli. "When I was testifying in the USA, the view expressed to my colleagues and I was that false confessions don't happen in America. Then I go to other countries and hear exactly the same – 'We don't have those in Italy,' they say. There's a resistance; people have an inherent trust that nobody would confess to a crime like murder unless they'd done it because the consequences are so severe. But that's not true." Especially not, he adds, under governments around the world – including the latest Republican government in the US – which condone torture and rendition. "Confessions alone did, historically, lead to convictions. Today, theoretically, they shouldn't, but they do."

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

WATCH: Giants of Iceland

ases like the Icelandic Six and the Guildford Four have shaped research on the topic, and since the 90s police and judges have become more aware that they need to be more careful in the police interviews to have a firm case in court, says

Gisli. "The British police started using formal interviewing techniques – what's called the Peace Model, which is based on being open minded and transparent and searching for the truth, rather than assuming people were guilty," he says. His research has helped dictate what these guidelines are. "There should be clear questions, not leading questions – they shouldn't question people for more than six hours, and they should record from the start to the end." England is so ahead of the game on these interrogation policies, Gisli explains proudly, that Norway, New Zealand and Australia are now using adaptations of the Peace Model.

Still, the expert urges things not to stagnate. His worry is that while England is leading the field, police funding cuts could affect the interview training that police officers here receive. "Courts require details of what a person did, and I worry that another risk with cuts is that police rapport is cut down, trying to make it quicker with, 'Did you do it or didn't you do it?' Elsewhere, countries like America need to change their practice, Gisli says. "They've had https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

around 350 DNA exonerations since 1989, proving confessions unreliableâ&#x20AC;Ś but still, their tactics don't change."

Gisli believes that if the rules of the Peace Model were followed in the Iceland case, the false imprisonments would not have happened. "The courts were colluding with the police, turning a blind eye to the breach of codes of practice," he sighs. "There was a presumption that they got the right people, and the lack of bodies made them panic."

The fallout for those convicted has been severe as a consequence. In Out of Thin Air, Erla tells the cameras how fickle a thing she now understands memory to be, and that the moment you acknowledge your memories might not reflect your experiences; it can play havoc with your sense of self. After Saevar served his sentence he began to campaign for his innocence, but died before he was able to clear his name. The other men, says Gisli, still had to live with the confusion of why they confessed to a crime they did not commit.

"Imagine the anxiety of that, 40 years on."

Out of Thin Air will be broadcast on Storyville, BBC Four, on Monday the 14th of August, and will be available on Netflix from September.

@millyabraham

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https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

Realscreen » Archive » Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”

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Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air” By Selina Chignall

May 1, 2017

http://realscreen.com/2017/05/01/hot-docs-17-memory-questioned-in-out-of-thin-air/[24/08/2017 09:51:26]

Realscreen » Archive » Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”