Show Notes
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Pharmacist Poisons Himself and His Family
One cold Thursday morning, a family is found dead in their home at Suðurgata 2. Sigurður Magnússon, a pharmacist, had taken his own life with cyanide. His wife, Hulda Karen Larsen, and their young children Magnús, Sigríður Dúa and Ingibjörg Stefanía, were found lying side by side after Sigurður had also given them cyanide. This case is the first and only of its kind in Iceland, when a perpetrator commits a family murder and takes his own life. The house at Suðurgata 2 is known as Dillonshús, or Dillon's House, and was moved Árbæjarsafn Museum for preservation due to its story and antiquity, but its story is not only of Sigurður and his family.
The Sunnefa Cases
In the first part of The Sunnefa Cases, I tell you about the siblings Sunnefa Jónsdóttir and Jón Jónsson, who at the age of 16 and 14 had a child together. According to an order of the Grand Judgment, this was an incestuous crime, and therefore, they were sentenced to death; Sunnefa was to be drowned and Jón to be beheaded. But then there‘s a turning point in their case when Sunnefa gives birth to another child in the custody of the magistrate Hans Wium, and she accuses her brother of being the child‘s father, but then she declares Hans Wium is the real father, who had forced her and Jón to confess to committing yet another incest. This causes a commotion at Alþingi the Icelandic Parliament, and a 20-year legal proceeding ensues which looks like it‘s never going to end.
The Brother Murder
November 13th, 1913, a man by the name of Eyjólfur Jónsson died, after 13 days of suffering. His death indicated poisoning, and immediately suspicions rose that his sister Júlíana Silfá Jónsdóttir was responsible. She got the death sentence, which became the last in Iceland‘s history.