May 28, 2025 • 50 mins
She was young, poor, and alone in a harsh, unforgiving Icelandic landscape — and then she was sentenced to die. In 1830, Agnes Magnúsdóttir became the last person executed in Iceland, beheaded by axe for the murder of a powerful man.
Nearly 200 years later, her story still lingers. Was she a cold-blooded killer, or a woman trapped by circumstance?
In this episode, we speak to author Hannah Kent, whose bestselling novel Burial Rites reimagines Agnes’s final days. We explore how one woman’s life — and death — became legend, and why capital punishment remains a reality for half the world’s population today.
You can read Burial Rites here. You can also find Always Home, Always Homesick here.
CREDITS
Guest: Hannah Kent
Host: Claire Murphy
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. For those of
us who live down here in Australia, we don't have
to consider a life with the threat of capital punishment
hanging over our heads for crimes that we may potentially
commit or are wrongfully accused of. If we do commit
(00:28):
a crime, we'll spend time behind bars, sometimes for the
rest of our lives, but we will never be in
a prison cell awaiting our end at a predetermined date
and time. In fact, the last person to be put
to death here was a man called Ronald Ryan, and
it was much closer in the past than you might think.
He was found guilty of shooting and killing a warden
(00:49):
on attempting to escape Pentridge Prison in nineteen sixty five.
He was hanged at that very same jail in Victoria
on February third, nineteen sixty seven. But that wasn't when
capital punishment was outlawed here in Australia. That didn't happen
until nineteen eighty five. But we know for some of
you listening to this right now, you might not be
(01:10):
so lucky. Amnesty International recorded Oney one hundred and fifty
three executions across sixteen countries in twenty twenty three. The
majority of those were in China, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia,
and the US.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
And the US executed.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Sixteen people in twenty twenty four, all of the men
and almost all in the Southern States, but the exact
numbers of those put to death by their country's justice
system aren't even fully known, and that's mostly due to
the secrecy surrounding just how many people China puts to
death every year. Australia also almost exclusively hanged its criminals.
(01:47):
We didn't behead them, as was tradition in French history.
They're Guiartine, famously removing the heads of people like King
Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. Or in Iceland, where
today's story is centered, where in a rare case, a
special acts was brought in from the ruling kingdom of
Denmark to end the lives of those who done wrong.
(02:07):
Mostly they sent them back to Denmark to die, but
they stopped the practice of killing criminals more than one
hundred and thirty years before Australia did. Back in the
early eighteen hundreds, capital punishment was still very much an
option for those Icelandic folk who broke the law in
the small island country, and for a young woman trying
to make her way in the world. At that time,
(02:29):
it was a brutal and harsh environment to exist in.
It was into that world that Agnes Magnustote arrived. Her
young life was scarred by the loss of every person
she loved. She worked tirelessly just to survive. So when
a wealthy man came into her life with promises that
he wouldn't keep, she made a decision that will ultimately
(02:52):
see her death be set at a predetermined date and
time and become the very last person to die at
the hand of an executioner in her country. I'm Claire
Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring
(03:14):
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. More than half of
the world's population currently lives in a country that has
corporal punishment. The US, China, many Middle Eastern and African
countries still choosing to punish crimes with death, from lethal
injections to electric chairs and firing squads. It's a practice
(03:37):
that sees thousands of human lives ended in what those
in their justice system believe is a punishment befitting the crime.
Agnes Magnoestotia is now legend in Iceland as the last person,
the last woman to be put to death after she
was found guilty of killing a man who was much
more powerful and influential than she could ever be. But
(04:00):
Agnes's story didn't end with the fall of the acts.
Did she return from the other side to ensure her
final wishes were carried out. Who was responsible for a
part of her going missing for more than one hundred years,
and how did they find her again. Agnes's legacy has
been helped in part by Australian author Hannah Kent, who
took her journey and turned it into a book called
(04:22):
Burial Rights, imagining what the final days of Agnes's existence
would have looked like and the conversation she may have
had with those around her as she awaited her fate.
Enjoy this chat with Hannah, whose obsession with this Icelandic
woman might just prove that the murderess's power continues to
influence us. Nearly two hundred years after her physical body
(04:44):
was committed back to the earth, Hannah thank you so
much for joining us. Before we get into Agnes's incredible story,
I'd like to get a bit of background on your
story first. Can you take me to when you were seventeen.
You're trying to figure out what you want to do
with your life, and then you somehow end up in Iceland.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I know it was as much probably as a surprise
to me as to anyone else. I had never planned
on going to Iceland. All I knew was that I
wanted some kind of adventure before I decided what to
do with my life. At seventeen, like I think many
people are at that age, I was overwhelmed by the
sense that I needed to decide on a certain career path,
(05:26):
that I needed to choose a vocation, and not really
knowing what that should be, I grabbed the opportunity to
spend twelve months overseas when the local Rotary club was
accepting applications. And with rotary you don't actually get to
choose where you're sent. Instead, the country is selected for you,
and I ended up being the only person being sent
to Iceland, whereas everyone else, you know, went off to
the US and France. But yeah, and so that then
(05:49):
began twelve months living in a very small fishing village
in the north of Iceland as Shy of the Arctic Circle,
called soThe Crocker.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Do you remember the first time you heard Agnes's name.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I do. I don't think I'll ever forget it. I
was with my first host family, and it was a
strange home to be in. They were not particularly warm.
Certainly they didn't really speak to me. My host brother
never spoke to me at all, and so that probably
also heightened my feelings of homesickness and alienation in this
small community. But I remember they did take me with
(06:22):
them on a trip down south, and we were traveling
through the north country of Iceland, and we rounded the
corner of the mountain and suddenly were in this area
a valley mouth, which was everywhere you could see there
were hundreds, even thousands of these small hillocks. It looked
completely bizarre, something like out of a dream. And I
remember sort of broaching the silence and the car to say,
(06:44):
you know, are these are these Viking burial mounds? Because
I knew Iistin had some history with Vikings, and I
just could not, for the life of me think what
else they could be, and I was told that no, no,
they were caused by an avalanche. But then three as
we were driving through three hills were pointed out to
me and I was told that they were called Thristepa
and that it was there that the last execution occurred
(07:06):
in Iceland. And I was immediately interested, as I think
anyone would be, on hearing this snippet, and asked, you know,
who was it and what had happened? And I wasn't
told too much then, but I was told that the
last person to be beheaded by broad acts, as is
what happened on those three heels was a woman called
Agnes Magnus doot Did, And that, I think is what
(07:28):
I found immediately interesting, that this was a woman, and
not a particularly old woman. She was in her thirties.
And when I asked them why, I was told something
which I found immediately dissatisfying. I was told that, oh, well,
you know, we don't really know why she did it.
She you know, we know that she stabbed the man
that she worked for, this farmer, to death in bed
(07:49):
as he lay asleep, and then she tried to burn
down the house, this turf farm as Iceland has lived
in back then, and we think that she did it
because you know, she wasn't a good person. There was
some sort of mutterings about maybe she had been in
love with the farmer and he hadn't reciprocated her feelings.
But mostly I was told, well, you know, was she
just you know, she was just bad. She was just
(08:09):
a bad person. And that was kind of left it there.
And I remember thinking of her as we continue driving
for the rest of the three hours or whatever however
long it took, and then that night too, trying to
go to sleep and listening to this winter wind just
howling outside the house and thinking of her and wondering,
(08:30):
wondering about her, wondering who she had been really, because
I think even then I had this very strong sense
that no one is unequivocally evil, no one is all bad.
I just desperately wanted to know more about her story
and why she had ended up on those three hills
in January in eighteen thirty, which is when she died.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You return home to Australia, and I'm going to get
into the supernaturalness of Agnes's story a little bit later on,
but you returned to Australia in her presence in your
mind never truly goes away. She's still with you. Why
do you think her story stuck with you?
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Like?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
What is it about her? And do you feel like this?
And I'm not a woo woo person, not a big
believer in ghosts, but do you feel it all like
Agnes guided you at all to write the book Burial
Rights about her final days?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Like how do you see that process?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Because we all learn bits of history as we travel
around the world, and not many of us end up
writing books about one woman they happen to hear about
on a car ride one day.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, it's true, and it's a question I've asked myself many,
many times, and I still don't think I have a
firm answer for it. I know that there are people
who have come to me, readers particularly, who say, you know,
I think that she was there, and I think that she,
you know, she guided you towards writing this book, And
I think that's that's a lovely interpretation, and I'm open
to that. I think I have to be open to
(09:57):
the mystery of it all, honestly, and honestly, I quite
like that. It is a mystery that I ended up
becoming so obsessed with this case. I still can't quite
explain it, and I don't have a dif a answer,
And I don't mind that. I don't mind that that's
something of this is still inexplicable.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
All right, Well, let's learn a little bit about Agnes then,
from the research that you did, because, as you said,
the idea of Agnes to the people around her in
the community after this crime was committed, that she was
just this awful, evil human being.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
But what did you.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Find out about who she was as a person like
her character in your research?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Well, the first thing I found out was that no
one really knew very much at all. I remember throughout
the rest of my exchange, even as it became a
lot better, and certainly as I learned the language, asking
people about her and being frustrated at how little was
known about her early life, particularly, which is what I
was interested in. I think even then I was trying
to get a sense of context for what happened. I
(10:52):
wasn't necessarily looking to find innocence in any explanations of
her character, but I just wanted to understand her. And
I realized that while people were very familiar with the case,
but then not everyone knows the exact details of what happened.
I was frustrated by that, which probably heightened my curiosity.
And then when I did go back to Australia, I
(11:13):
still hadn't decided that I was going to write a book,
but I still had this burning desire to find out
more about her, and so I ended up finding the
resources which were available to me as a unique student
in Adelaide, which was using the resources in the library
trying to find online articles, and I soon realized that
I was not able to access any primary resources, but
(11:35):
I was able to find several I guess you would
describe them as local histories or several accounts of the
murders and the execution, and in them, again my frustration
just multiplied. There were so many accounts which suggested I
remember one of them suggested that yes, Agnes Magnustotti had
fallen in love with a farmer, not Tom Kettelsen, who
(11:57):
was an extraordinary man in his own right. You know,
he was known. He seemed to be very complex, very contradictory.
He was a very gifted healer, but he was also
were a womanizer. He always seemed to have a lot
of money and people there were rumors at the time
that he had stolen it, which it was. You know,
he had been accused of thievery before, and other people
thought he was just a sorcerer, and he did really
(12:18):
nothing to deny these claims. So people thought, well, you know,
he was an enigmatic and charismatic man, and Agnes fell
in love with him. She was a servant woman. She
went to go work for him, and then sometime during
that year that she worked with him, he spurned her,
and one source literally described her as then going insane,
that you know that, you know, being spurned made her
(12:40):
go mad, and then she killed him. There were two
other people involved in the murders. One was another maid
at the house, a woman called Sigare fut And who
was very young at the time. Was she was not
yet an adult. I believe she was sixteen years old.
And there was another young man from the area called
Fridrik Sigerson who ended up being beheaded before Agnes, and
he was only seventeen. He was a farmer's son, quite poor,
(13:03):
and people thought, you know, very envious of Utan's supposed wealth.
In every account that I came across, or every sort
of document I was able to have delivered to me
the same idea of Agnes being the one who really
created a gang out of the three, and who incited
Fludrich to be, you know, to be violent towards Natan.
(13:24):
It was her. She was the manipulator. She was the
one behind the scenes, sort of rubbing her hands together.
I was again, I just wanted something which suggested otherwise.
I wanted to find out about her early life. I
wanted to know why Agnes was then working at a
lucastar there Natan's farm, which is very far away from
many other settlements. It's very remote, very isolated. And yes,
(13:46):
and I couldn't. I couldn't really find much at all.
So I knew then that for me and ordered by
that stage to find out about any wider context as
to why she went there, whether she was in love
with this man, how the murder might have happened, might
have unfolded, I would need to return to Iceland.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
So what do you find on your return?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I understand that we know that Agnes's early life wasn't pleasant,
that she was growing up in a time in Iceland
that was only just a decade past a major volcanic eruption,
and they were living in this time called the mist time,
which meant that their primary source of income, which was agriculture.
Farming was being very heavily tested, and so poverty was
(14:29):
widespread and it was difficult. It was a difficult life.
I mean, you've already discussed what the weather conditions are
like in Iceland. It's not an easy place to live
at the best of times. So what world was Agnes
growing up in and what was her family life like
with her parents.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I was able to discover some of this before I
went back to Iceland, and again that had fueled my
curiosity about her life because I had learned that it
was exactly as you say that Iceland really we're experiencing
incredible poverty. At this time, Iceland was still a Danish colony.
Danish merchants set all the prices. They very much kept
(15:05):
the Icelandic people. You know, in subjugation, everyone lived in
turf houses, you know, houses literally made out of earth
and grass that became very damp in the winter, that
were often very smoky. There were lots of illnesses, and
even when you had people who held land such as
nat On, a better class of farmers. I guess you
(15:26):
might say most people were in a serving sort of
a laboring class, and for men this meant that they
were paid a pittance, so for some women they might
not be paid anything at all. And what would happen
is that you would go into work as a venomrther
or a vender corner, you know, a maid or a servant,
and you would work from a very early age, you know,
(15:49):
possibly six, sometimes seven. You were sent out ideally to
people who you knew, often to people who you didn't,
and then you had to stay at the farm. You
were not permitted to leave the farm until this time
called the flitting days, which is when you could change
your place of employment. But there was also wider infrastructure
in Iceland at this time. I mean, there was one
school in the south Bessasta there which is now the
(16:11):
President's Residents. But there were no you know, it's not
like there were really there were no hospitals, there were
no schools up north, there were no sort of social
services whatsoever. And most of that came down to the
priests involvement in their parishes' lives and their community's lives.
So for example, there was quite a lot of problems
(16:33):
regarding children who were illegitimate or children who were born
to people who were servants themselves, and in this case
they would often try to split up the families. So
you had many, many children who were born illegitimate or
born to people who couldn't properly support them. You were
unable to get married if you didn't own land, so
a lot of these children were illegitimate, and you would
(16:53):
be farmed out to other families where you would essentially
start your life of labor. And particularly if you were
a woman, there were very little means available to you
outside of you know, marriage or you know, slightly elevated
working position where you could better your conditions. You're essentially,
in many ways kind of in working for life in
(17:13):
very very difficult, very hostile environment. So absolutely not a
place where it was possible to easily get by without
a wide range of supportive kinship networks. That was something
that I was very aware of.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So for Agnes, she's born into that exact situation. So
her parents are both working and are unable to get married.
Their father abandons the family quite early. Well that's the story.
He may have been sent to work somewhere else. We
don't fully know his motives for leaving his partner and children,
and so the children, Agnes and her brother are farmed
(17:51):
out to other families and they start their working life
very very young. So wouldn't have been unusual for Agnes,
because I guess from a Western perspective, when we look
at history, we expect young women to be married off
very young. But it wouldn't have been on usual for
Agnes because she would have been a laborer and unable
to marry anyway. But when she meets Natan, he's a
(18:13):
landowner and so he potentially would have seemed quite a
lovely prospect for her, and from all reports he was
quite smitten with her when they did meet. And we're
piecing things together from the very little information that we
have about this, So it could have been very possible
that she saw him as a way out of her situation,
(18:35):
a way out of poverty at that time. I think
that's a valid interpretation, and that's certainly supported by the
many anecdotes which suggest that they had an affair. Naton
at the time was also having an affair with a
married woman who was married to another landowner. She was
sort of in a class above Agnes She's quite well
known as poet Rosa's she wrote incredible poetry, and Natonto
(18:58):
was known as a poet. And then when I went
to Iceland, I discovered Agnes also was someone who was
described as a very good poet and someone who sort
of had held all these literary ambitions, who was highly literate,
who was seemed very intelligent, even by the people who
were you writing anecdotes or recounting the events, and you know,
calling her a devil in the same word, they were
(19:19):
at least acknowledging that she was incredibly smart. And I've
often thought about this because I do think Agnes is
someone who was illegitimate.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
You know. The first account I found of her was
in a census when she was six years old. She
already had a half brother, her mother was in service.
She had been named after a man who turned out
not to be her father at all. In fact, her
father was another married farmer. That she was someone who
from an early age was probably incredibly aware of how
unfair her lot was. I think it would be hard
(19:49):
not to imagine her thinking of the injustice of her situation.
And certainly Natan, with his intelligence, his love of literature
and poetry, his education would have been an interesting man
for her, you know, to strike up a friendship or
to strike up any kind of relationship with part of
me is still uncertain as to whether or not she
(20:10):
was in love with him, and whether he spurned her
to a certain extent. These are the stories that have
been passed down by people with very you know, all
sorts of skin in the game. It's very hard to
know exactly what their early connection looked like. But one
thing is known that after living with Natan for a
certain amount of time that things soured between them. That
(20:32):
is known, and it's also known and has been shown
and has been proven throughout the court documents that Agnes
started to run away from a luga star there and
this is extraordinary. It sounds, you know, like she just
had enough that she went out. But this was something
which was illegal for her to do. So it was
it was not permitted for servants to leave without the
permission of the farmer. So I start to think then that,
(20:54):
you know, what was it like for her being stuck
in a tiny turf house in a winter with a
man with whom perhaps she had a very who knows
what kind of relationship, who knows what kind of connection
they were having, then who knows what kind of abuse
that she was also subjected to. Who was willing to
sort of face discipline, face fines, face punishment, and physically
(21:14):
run away from this very isolated farm over several distance
in that weather to try and seek support.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Well, that then kind of brings us to the next
part of the story, because, as you mentioned, Natan was
known as a bit of a womanizer, and there was
a young maid who you've mentioned Sigur, she's known for short.
She's sixteen years old, and the story goes that he's
actually taking her to bed as well as having an
affair with this married lady the poet and had at
(21:41):
some stage had a relationship with Agnes, And that's the
way the story kind of unfolds. But what can we
read into there is you say, perhaps there was some
abuse because this young girl has no choice but to
go to bed with the wealthy farmer who is essentially
her lord and master, as Agnes would have had to
have done she was told as well, So we don't
(22:02):
know whether he was just a womanizer who was you know,
had access to women that he could deal with as
he pleased, or whether there was some abuse going on.
What do we know about this sort of quadruple relationship
going on? And then Frederick who you've mentioned, also comes
in as well as supposedly being in love with Sigar,
this young maid, and this is what has set off
(22:24):
the chain of events that eventually leads to them being executed.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, this is something that I have thought so
long about. And you know, when I wrote Burial Rights,
my knowledge was incomplete. I only had access to the
sources that I had access to. Something quite extraordinary happened
in twenty nineteen. This case, which I think has long
had a held of sort of the Icelandic Nations imagination,
(22:48):
was retried. A modern trial was held by the Icelandic
Legal Association, but they held it according to contemporary Icelandic law.
It was extraordinary. I was able to access the transcript
and I was so fascinated finally getting additional insight into
the nature of the relationships between Natan and Siga.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Because they used the primary source documents from that original
trial to do this right.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yes, and a few things were pointed out that seemed
to both be a miscarriage of justice and also more
than anything, I mean it's very interesting what is in
the trial transcripts, but it's also very interesting as to
what has been omitted and also was not picked up
as a point of further inquiry. And one of the
things that really struck me reading the transcript was that Agnes,
(23:33):
in running away and in the trial had alluded to
had actually used a word which I think has highly
euphimistic meaning. It's not actually an Icelandic word at all,
and there was some consternation amongst the lawyers as to
what she might have intended, or whether she was alluding
to a French word, being again a very educated and
literary person despite her low station, and the word basically translates,
(23:56):
or it's approximation is that she was being scolded by
Natan and Siger was being scolded. Now, I found it
very interesting that several male academics have taken that at
literal value, suggesting verbal abuse eventually between Natan and Siga.
There are several other linguists, and there are several other
female historians who have taken a different view and say
(24:16):
that no, no, no, she was clearly alluding to sexual abuse,
that this was a way where she could speak to
that at a time where you could not speak very
you know, explicitly about these sorts of things. That Agnes,
in running away and seeking help from the priest, had
probably been in a situation where both she and Sega
were being sexually abused by Natan, and that no longer
(24:37):
was a place where they felt safe, that she was
willing to risk punishment in order to tell people about
what was happening. And in both instances she was simply
returned back home to a lucas da there and was
also made she was forced to apologize to Natan. What
the modern Icelandic lawyers pointed out was that no one
ever asked the priests what she had come to him about.
(24:57):
No one ever in the original trial interrogated the reasons
for her running away. If anything, it was probably just
pointed to, you know, general kind of strict streak of disobedience,
I guess, And I find that so interesting. I feel
like there is this whole thread of interrogation which was
neglected in the original trials, which didn't at all question
(25:19):
the conditions that the women were living under. And one
of the very interesting things was that they also pointed
out what sentence Nataan would have received for sexual abuse
of a minor. In terms of saying that, I find
that very good telling.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Claire Murphy,
I'm speaking with Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rights, a
novel inspired by the true story of Agnes Martistotia, the
last woman to be executed in Northern Iceland.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Next, we head back to March.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Fourteen, eighteen twenty eight to piece together what really led
to the plan to kill Natan Kettelsen. Let's go back
to March fourteen, eighteen twenty eight. There is a lot
of conjecture about what happened that night and what led
(26:12):
up to happening that night, because as far as Agnes
has been painted, she was the one, as you mentioned,
who kind of banded Frederic and Siga together with her
to take down Natan. But then there's also some commentary
about Frederick's mother being involved in this as well. Or
was it Frederick who was in love with Siga who
wanted to kill Natan in order to take her as
(26:35):
his bride if he was allowed to at that time.
I imagine his father owned a farm he would have
been allowed to. So what's your understanding of who was
the one who set this plan in motion, Who was
the one who was the motivator for all of these
people to become entangled in Natan's death.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
It's a very good question, and to a certain degree
we will never know. Let me take you through the
events of March fourteenth, as then known and generally proved
to be correct. That in the middle of the night,
Agnes woke up the neighboring farm at Stapoko. It was
a considerable distance away. She would have had to travel
throughout the night to reach there, and she woke up
the family, and she said that at Lucasta there was
(27:14):
on fire, and that Natan and another guest he had
had over for the night, a man called Pieta, were
trapped inside, and the family came running back with her.
She had said that she thought the fire started from
the kitchen, that it was accidental, and in the early
hours of the morning the bodies of the two men
were found in their beds. However, as it grew lighter,
it was realized by the farmer of Stappocote that perhaps
(27:37):
not all was as it seemed, because on closer examination
of the corps's blood was found on remnants of unbird clothing,
and both seemed to also have stab wounds. This then
led the farmer to contact the district commissioner, who was
a man called Bion Blundell. He was sort of like
the local sheriff in the area, and then he questioned
Agnes and Cigareta. Apparently there were some discrepancies in what
(27:59):
they said, and then both of them eventually said that yes,
the men had been murdered, and they both said it
had been done by Fredrik Sigerson, the local farmer. Now,
Friedrich and Natan had had some very public disputes in
the past, so there was enmity between the two men.
The enmity increased when it became known to people that
(28:19):
Fridrich wished to marry Sigritha. Naton at this time was probably,
I believe, abusing Sigritha. He Friedrich would have needed Natan's
permission to marry Siga, and he refused to give it.
So these are all sort of the various threads of
conflict which I think came together to the point where
Friedrich said that Agnes had suggested that he killed Natan
(28:43):
and that they all take a share of his money
that was supposedly somewhere again in the house, and that
was Frithric's story. Sigritha too seemed to say that both
she and Friedrich and Agnes were hopeful to get their
hands on Naton's wealth and that was the motivation for
the murder. However, Agnes, whose testimony, as I said, was
not transcribed, did not say that that was the reason why.
(29:06):
She instead indicated that it was Natan's behavior towards her
and Sigrotha, and also Friedrich in his sort of powermongering
and you know, abusing the whole that he had as
farmer over you know, Sigretha and Agnes, and that she
wanted to be rid of him in the sense that
she wanted her misery and her suffering to end. We
(29:26):
don't know if she ever said anything explicitly. In a
very strange turn of events, Sigrotha was permitted to speak
with Agnes before Agnes came up and testified during the courts,
and then it was never written down what she said,
so we actually don't know. We only have anecdotal evidence.
So then from that point onwards, it was decided that
the three had been a gang, and whether it was
through public opinion or because people took pity on Siga
(29:48):
because she was young and also believed to be quite
simple minded. People really thought Friedrich and Agnes were the
ones to blame, and that it had been Agnes who
had prodded Friedrich to you know, essentially with a hammer
and a knife kill not done. Pieta, who was also murdered,
was thought to be just simply in the wrong place time.
So that is what is thought to be happened. Beyond Lundell,
(30:09):
who was the man who investigated the crime, who then
you know also you know, ran the trial and then
also judge them and sentence these people, something which you
cannot actually do under contemporary you know, humanitarian law. He
actually was the person a Sigretha was originally also condemned
to death, but he later then ran a petition on
her behalf and had her sentence commuted. And certainly there
(30:32):
was a lot of warm feeling towards Sigatha as someone
who was considered to be again quite simple minded, again
probably in the wrong place at the wrong time, but
that sympathy was not extended to Agnes, who was you know,
she was in her early thirties, she was much older
than Fredric and Cigaretha, and so the trial was then
supported in Regumik. That I mean that the original verdict,
(30:52):
and the verdict was then also supported in Copenhagen, and
it was decided that Agnes and Fridrich would be beheaded
by broad acts, and interestingly, that it would occur in
the district in which the murders occurred, something which just
simply did not happen in Iceland at that time. At
the time, and this is supported by many sources I read.
When someone had committed a very very you know, a
(31:15):
heinous crime and received capital punishment, they were sent to
Copenhagen where it was carried out. And many sources that
I read, including diaries from foreign travelers, said that the
reason for this was because no Icelander was willing to
kill another Icelander. They just couldn't find anyone to be executioner. Now,
in a really I find fascinating sort of twist on this,
(31:38):
beyond Blundell, the district commissioner, the same man who investigated
the case, the same man whose own wife had been
saved by Natan when she was very unwell, decided that
the execution was going to occur not very far away
at all, from the site of the murders, from where
all these people lived. He also said that I think
it was one hundred and fifty men from the local
community had to attend. His orders were engen mawun danlita,
(32:02):
which translates to no one may look away, and that
people who did not attend be fined. And now, in
my mind, this is a man who is attempting to
seize control and re establish his dominance over a district.
So we basically that's where we end up on the
twelfth of January in eighteen thirty, where first Prutik was
beheaded and then Agnes and surrounded by one hundred and
(32:23):
fifty local farmers who were told that they could they
could not look away.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
We touched on earlier that there wasn't a lot of
infrastructure in Iceland outside of reykievic really, so where do
Frederick and Agnes stay? I imagine there's no prisons in
the area where they're going to be executed.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's farming land. So what happens to them?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And this is really where your book where a rights
kind of picks up, is this time between being found
guilty and getting sentenced to then the execution.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
So what happens to them. It's extraordinary. I remember I
had done all this research about Iceland in the nineteenth century,
had researched as much as I could about Agnes's life,
which by that stage wasn't a great deal. But when
I finally arrived in Iceland, i think it was in
twenty ten, to find out as much as I could.
One of the things I discovered was exactly this that
I had always assumed that Agnes would have been sent out,
(33:20):
whether it sent down south where there was a prison,
but she wasn't. She was essentially she was essentially billeted
out because there were no local sort of services. But also,
you know, I don't know whether it was Blondell talked
a lot about having His reasons for having the execution
in Iceland was to save money, something which I think
(33:42):
can be easily disproven by his many letters apologizing for
overdrawn States of funds for feeding and clothing the prisoners.
But Agnes was sent to a family. She was sent
to a family who lived basically in the house next
door to where she was born, people that she probably knew,
it being a very very small community, and she lived
with them, or I think it was approximately six months
(34:05):
until the time her execution was arranged, and that was
where I think, particularly as a novelist, I really wanted
to go in and look at what that would have
been like, both for the family but also for Agnes,
because I do really think that it is impossible to
spend a considerable amount of time with someone in close
proximity without reaching a kind of intimacy, whether that's for
(34:30):
good or bad. And that's where I guess, you know,
my role as a storyteller, my interest in the human
face of history, really came to the fore and in
wanting to write the book in that way. So Barriya
Wrightes is set in the last six months of Agnes's
life as she is sent for this family. But I
mean the family existed. I've heard from relatives. I found
all their names and the soul registers, which is when
(34:52):
the priests would come around every winter and write down
everyone who was living in every farm and what their
position to the head was and how well they could read,
and what their behavior was like. And I found the
last entry in Agnes's life where she was living with
this family at Cornsa. It was said that she was
highly literate. She gave her name as Agnes Jomstoty, which
proved my suspicion that she was aware that the father,
(35:15):
you know, Icelanic having a patronymic naming system, was not
Magnus Magnus stot did at all, but was in fact
this married farmer. And then, in a very interesting sort
of discovery, the priest had provided one word to describe
her behavior since living with the family, and that was mixed.
That she had a lot of mixed behavior, And that,
to me, was all I needed to know, because at
(35:36):
this stage, all I had been hearing was that she
was terrible, she was bad, she was argumentative, she had
a very sharp tongue. And then there's this word, which
is like, you know, she was complex, she was good
and bad, she was a bit of everything, which is
really what I had been striving to find. I wasn't
trying to find her innocence at all. I was simply
trying to find evidence of her humanity. And I took
(35:57):
a great deal from that word, and then really sort
of ib speculated and imagined what the relationship she might
have had with the individual members of that family would
have been like.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
After the break, I asked Hannah, what the people witnessed
on the day of Agnes's execution and who was told
they had to watch. So she spent six months living
with this family on this rather isolated farm, and then
she's taken to the execution site, which is the place
that you saw that first brought this story to you.
(36:32):
What would have been like for the people who were
told that they could not look away?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Like, what are they seeing on these hillicks on.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
The day that this execution happens, Because Agnes isn't the
only one. Frederick is also executed on the same day,
So what is it that they're seeing.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It's so interesting. I've read many accounts of the execution
and they're all a little bit different. But some things
we do know. We know that a platform was built
upon the three hills and that it was dressed with
red cloth. We know that an axe had been specially
commissioned for this event, and we also know that a
block of wood, an oak block, had been imported again
specifically for the execution, which again kind of flies in
(37:12):
the face of Blundell's assertion that this was an inexpensive operation.
All of these things cost a lot of money, and
there's many letters where again he's talking about how expensive
it was to procure these items in Iceland. We also
know that very interestingly enough, Gwydmund de Kettlsen, who was
Nutton's brother, was asked by Blundall to execute Agnes and Fridrich,
(37:33):
which I find extraordinary. Can you imagine that in a
modern day going to the brother and saying, will you
take off their heads? It was something that he did do.
There is considerable amount of speculation as to whether he
was forced to do it or whether he asked to
do it. In fact, Gwydmund de Kettelsen's family have long
argued that no, no, no, he absolutely did not want
to do it. He was made to do it. He
(37:54):
was paid I think, you know, silver dollars. I think
is described, and he gave it all the way, so
you know, you can understand why they're at pains to
stress his reluctance. But it's true that he first of all,
Fritri was let out, Agnes was kept out of sight.
He had by that stage apparently recognized his guilt and
he saw the acts as a blessed branch of justice,
(38:16):
which is my English translation of what it was thought
he said. And he seemed to be. He seemed to
have accepted his execution, He seemed to have accepted his sentence. However,
when it came to Agnes, the various anecdotes, you know,
whether this is just ancestors relating accounts that they had
heard and what had been passed down the family to
(38:39):
more formal letters, you know, they varied so wildly. The
formal report was that they both went contentedly and peacefully
to their deaths. That was that. But then I also,
when I was in Iceland, started to find out that no,
there was lots of people who thought that Agnes had
actually fainted, that she was hysterical, that she had wet herself,
that she had to have her hair held to bring
(39:02):
her head down, that she had faced the wrong way.
All these accounts, again not official and not formal in
any way, and all differing from one another, but all
having a similar truth in the sense of her emotional state.
And I think I would absolutely put money on the
fact that she did not go contentedly to her death,
that she was incredibly distraught. We also know that she
was accompanied by a priest who she had specifically requested
(39:25):
attend her in the last months of her life. In
one account, he was holding her shawl about her and
offered to take it off her himself as she went
to go put her head on the block, and Beyondale
chastised him and called him her serving lady. There's another
account which says that he put his arms around her
as she knelt down. There is another account that she
(39:46):
reached out and took his hand and he held it
while she was beheaded. And so when you put all
these various local stories together, you start to get a
very kind of harrowing and incredibly move being seen of
what their execution was like. And in the very interesting
thing was that, in the years after Barry Arts was published,
I have been tacted by several descendants of this truce
(40:08):
thought far their consent, and all of them agreed and
said that they had heard from their grandmothers that he
was forever changed after this event, and that it had
affected him very deeply, and that there had absolutely been
a sympathy between him and Agnes. So that too, is
something that I think I felt intuitively or had gleaned
(40:30):
from the resources that I was reading, and wanted to
put in the book. But it's also something which has
then belatedly sort of stood up to the local anecdotes
and the family histories. I haven't encountered.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
That must have been just awful for those who were
forced to watch that. But the horror doesn't end there.
Because Frederic and Agnes are denied Christian burials, and in
fact their heads are separated from burial from their bodies
and placed on pikes on the side of the road.
What message was being sent to the community by them
(41:02):
doing this.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
I think it's very clear. I think that it was
very clear that Bien Blondeau was basically bidding to regain
quite strict control over the people in his jurisdiction. It's
also backed up by the fact that this area there
had been a rise, a documented rise of petty theft.
There was you know, behavior that wasn't you know, possibly illegal,
and you know, in a multitude of ways, we do
(41:26):
know that theft was a real issue, particularly sheep stealing,
and I really do think that this is further evidence,
like the barbarity of sticking heads on pikes and leaving
them for everyone was further evidence that he was really
trying to set an example. You know that he was
not a district commissioner to be messed with that he
was really going to lay down the law. And I
think this is further supported by the reaction of the
local communities to the fact that their heads were set
(41:47):
on spikes. Everyone was against it. Everyone thought it was horrible,
and they disappeared during the night, and it was thought,
or there was whispered about that there was one woman,
in particular, a house mistress of a local farm, who
was dead set against it. Thought it was absolutely, you know,
a terrible thing to do, and she ordered her serving boy,
(42:09):
a servant who lived with her, to go in the
night to take the heads off the spikes and bury
them in the Thingata churchyard, which is near where her
farm was. And every account I read said that this
is what they thought happened. So it was probably like
a very well known secret. It was something that people
were sort of aware of, and this was sort of
accepted as why the heads disappeared during the night, that
(42:30):
they were buried by local farmers who thought it apparent.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
It's interesting, though, because in the records of the aftermath
of this execution, there's this idea that the heads have disappeared,
even though you say that it was kind of common
knowledge as to where they might be. But then like
one hundred years later, a woman comes forward and says,
she's come to me in a dream, I know where
the heads are, and is able to point them to
(42:55):
exactly where those heads are buried. Do we presume that
maybe some law had been passed down to her over
the years that she kind of knew where this was.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
This is the extraordinary thing. Yeah. The story as it's known,
and it is quite famous because it is extraordinary, is
that there was a psychic we know. Her name was Cecelia.
She asked that her name not be made known until
after her death. But for some years she was aware
of her own psychic abilities, but she she lardly kept secret.
But for some years she had found herself engaged in
(43:25):
automatic writing. You know where you sort of enter estate
and the words are not yours that are coming out
on the paper. And she realized after a time that
this was the voice of Agnes Magness dotted, and that
Agnes had come to her with a very specific request,
which was that her body be moved to consecrated ground. Now,
as you say, the directions were essentially to bury them
without market in very simple coffins. You know, not what
(43:48):
is it not facing west or east or you know,
the proper direction that people had that the ground absolutely
could not be consecrated, and no one by this stage
knew where they were buried. She ignored the letters, which
I think is really interesting. She thought, no, no, I'm good,
but they kept coming. So eventually she reached out, this
is after two or three years, and contacted someone and said, look,
(44:09):
I think I think we need to I think we
need to find the bodies, and we need to move
them to a church yard, probably thing it out, because
that's where everyone assumes at the headsone. So this other
man goes up north and with the directions of the
psychic and people and went to a local farmer, which
Agnes had said would be helpful in finding the bodies.
(44:32):
The farm was basically right next to the execution site,
if not the land on which it occurred, and he
was called old Magnus by Agnes. His name was in
fact Magnus fains Starre. There a man who went north
was very surprised to find that, yes, there was a
man worth living on this farm, and he basically said
to the emissary of the psychics, look, I don't believe
that she's been contacted by Agnes. But I do think
(44:54):
that it's probably right to move them to consecrated ground,
that we probably shouldn't just have bodies lying out in
this field, And so he agreed to help search for them,
and the man said, well, the psychic actually ended up
asking Agnes where the bodies were, and she had given
a very sort of poetic series of directions, which is
sort of lucky at high summer's sunset next to a
(45:14):
boar of gravel. And so they followed the instructions and
within fifteen minutes they found the heads, which Agnes had
also said were not buried in the Thing Gada churchyard,
but had in fact been buried on the site her
and the man thought, well, no, everyone knows they're in
Thing Gata. I don't think that's true when the psychic
had originally told him, but that's what they found. They
(45:35):
found the heads buried there, and it was then thought
that the servant who had been sent to get them
had been too spooked and simply buried them on the
ground just underneath where they lay. The most extraordinary thing
about this discovery, too, was that Agnes, in denying that
they were in Thing Gata through the psychic had said
that a remnant of the steak still remained in her head,
And when they unburied the skulls they found ten centimeters
(45:57):
of wood inside one of them, and that's kind of extraordinary.
And then following the rest of her directions in a
bar of gravel, they found two coffins buried, and that
was the way that the bodies ended up being discovered.
And then later latterly, I think, after a week or so,
moved up to the church at at Turn, where again
Agnes had requested that they be buried. It's extraordinary story.
(46:19):
It's one of those things where lots of people have
tried to find I think there were some distant relations
or the psychic had married into people from the area,
and people said, well, surely she knew all this time.
But there are some facts which I think are really curious,
such as the fact that she had refused to do
anything about it for a very long time, the fact
that even the farming family who had lived on the
site still didn't know where they were buried. This is
(46:40):
an extraordinarily kind of spooky, paranormal epilogue to this incredibly
sad story.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Seems Agnes has a habit of reaching out from beyond
the grave, if your book is any marker of that too.
But it's interesting now to look back at because there's
a lot of Icelandic people who've read your book who
really have then rethought about what they've known about this story.
(47:07):
And do you think her legacy has changed somewhat over
the years from that immediate aftermath where she was considered
to be this monster? Do you think people have rethought
about her motivations and perhaps the injustices that she was
experiencing at that time.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
I think people are undoubtedly curious, and I don't think
this is necessarily because of burial rights. I think it's
a contemporary concern. But I also think that there have
been many people who with whom it never sat easy.
This depiction of Agnes is evil. I think that the
execution particularly was a very widely traumatic event for many
people in this area. And I mean, you have to
(47:46):
appreciate too, I think that Icelanders are very close to
the past. They're very sort of genealogically aware. The past
is not as far away as perhaps it is in
other cultures, and many people are able to sort of,
you know, trace their descendancy from times in the Sagas,
and I think that what has been so apparent is
(48:07):
to me particularly is that people still are connected to
this case, not simply because they might live in the area,
but because they're related to people who were involved. So
everyone's viewpoints, I think, are colored by you know, family stories,
their own connection. I think that Agnes is someone who
has mystified people for many years, probably because not a
(48:30):
great deal has been about her, and all the accounts
of the execution and the murders, they're all sort of
titled the story of Nartan Kettelsen, and Agnes being a
maligned figure kind of works in his story. You know,
she's just kind of the cooked up, stereotypical evil woman,
like she's Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands together behind the scenes.
And I think people have always, maybe quietly or you know,
(48:51):
been troubled by that. There was a really interesting film
which came out in nineteen ninety five in Iceland called Agnes,
and in that they made her incredibly sympathetic, they made
her someone who was almost angelic, and I'd seen it
and was interested in the reasons for doing that. But
in my mind, particularly as a novelist, and what I
was interested in. I felt that, you know, good and
(49:13):
bad at the same dichomic dichotomy, right. I wanted to,
you know, I wanted to muddy the waters a little bit.
I wanted to get some more complexity and contradiction. But
I think even the fact that that was made shows
a lingering desire to understand more about her. A farmer
once said to me, there's a great uneasiness he has
with this story and that it really doesn't leave people alone.
(49:34):
And I think that's very true. And I think it's
because there is so much about it which is mysterious.
There is so much about it which is you know,
filled with conflict or you know, things that we don't know.
I think there are just so many gaps still in
the story, and I think that's one of the reasons
why it continues to hold people's curiosity.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Hannah, thank you so much for sharing your insights on
Agnes with us today. We really appreciate it for you
sharing some time with us and talking about this.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Thank you, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Thanks to Hannah for helping us tell this story.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
You can find her book Burial Rights and her memoir
Always Home, Always Homesick at the link in our show notes.
True Crime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy. The
producer is Charlie Blackman, with audio designed by Jacob Brown.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week
with another True Crime Conversation
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. For those of
us who live down here in Australia, we don't have
to consider a life with the threat of capital punishment
hanging over our heads for crimes that we may potentially
commit or are wrongfully accused of. If we do commit
(00:28):
a crime, we'll spend time behind bars, sometimes for the
rest of our lives, but we will never be in
a prison cell awaiting our end at a predetermined date
and time. In fact, the last person to be put
to death here was a man called Ronald Ryan, and
it was much closer in the past than you might think.
He was found guilty of shooting and killing a warden
(00:49):
on attempting to escape Pentridge Prison in nineteen sixty five.
He was hanged at that very same jail in Victoria
on February third, nineteen sixty seven. But that wasn't when
capital punishment was outlawed here in Australia. That didn't happen
until nineteen eighty five. But we know for some of
you listening to this right now, you might not be
(01:10):
so lucky. Amnesty International recorded Oney one hundred and fifty
three executions across sixteen countries in twenty twenty three. The
majority of those were in China, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia,
and the US.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
And the US executed.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Sixteen people in twenty twenty four, all of the men
and almost all in the Southern States, but the exact
numbers of those put to death by their country's justice
system aren't even fully known, and that's mostly due to
the secrecy surrounding just how many people China puts to
death every year. Australia also almost exclusively hanged its criminals.
(01:47):
We didn't behead them, as was tradition in French history.
They're Guiartine, famously removing the heads of people like King
Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. Or in Iceland, where
today's story is centered, where in a rare case, a
special acts was brought in from the ruling kingdom of
Denmark to end the lives of those who done wrong.
(02:07):
Mostly they sent them back to Denmark to die, but
they stopped the practice of killing criminals more than one
hundred and thirty years before Australia did. Back in the
early eighteen hundreds, capital punishment was still very much an
option for those Icelandic folk who broke the law in
the small island country, and for a young woman trying
to make her way in the world. At that time,
(02:29):
it was a brutal and harsh environment to exist in.
It was into that world that Agnes Magnustote arrived. Her
young life was scarred by the loss of every person
she loved. She worked tirelessly just to survive. So when
a wealthy man came into her life with promises that
he wouldn't keep, she made a decision that will ultimately
(02:52):
see her death be set at a predetermined date and
time and become the very last person to die at
the hand of an executioner in her country. I'm Claire
Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring
(03:14):
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. More than half of
the world's population currently lives in a country that has
corporal punishment. The US, China, many Middle Eastern and African
countries still choosing to punish crimes with death, from lethal
injections to electric chairs and firing squads. It's a practice
(03:37):
that sees thousands of human lives ended in what those
in their justice system believe is a punishment befitting the crime.
Agnes Magnoestotia is now legend in Iceland as the last person,
the last woman to be put to death after she
was found guilty of killing a man who was much
more powerful and influential than she could ever be. But
(04:00):
Agnes's story didn't end with the fall of the acts.
Did she return from the other side to ensure her
final wishes were carried out. Who was responsible for a
part of her going missing for more than one hundred years,
and how did they find her again. Agnes's legacy has
been helped in part by Australian author Hannah Kent, who
took her journey and turned it into a book called
(04:22):
Burial Rights, imagining what the final days of Agnes's existence
would have looked like and the conversation she may have
had with those around her as she awaited her fate.
Enjoy this chat with Hannah, whose obsession with this Icelandic
woman might just prove that the murderess's power continues to
influence us. Nearly two hundred years after her physical body
(04:44):
was committed back to the earth, Hannah thank you so
much for joining us. Before we get into Agnes's incredible story,
I'd like to get a bit of background on your
story first. Can you take me to when you were seventeen.
You're trying to figure out what you want to do
with your life, and then you somehow end up in Iceland.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I know it was as much probably as a surprise
to me as to anyone else. I had never planned
on going to Iceland. All I knew was that I
wanted some kind of adventure before I decided what to
do with my life. At seventeen, like I think many
people are at that age, I was overwhelmed by the
sense that I needed to decide on a certain career path,
(05:26):
that I needed to choose a vocation, and not really
knowing what that should be, I grabbed the opportunity to
spend twelve months overseas when the local Rotary club was
accepting applications. And with rotary you don't actually get to
choose where you're sent. Instead, the country is selected for you,
and I ended up being the only person being sent
to Iceland, whereas everyone else, you know, went off to
the US and France. But yeah, and so that then
(05:49):
began twelve months living in a very small fishing village
in the north of Iceland as Shy of the Arctic Circle,
called soThe Crocker.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Do you remember the first time you heard Agnes's name.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I do. I don't think I'll ever forget it. I
was with my first host family, and it was a
strange home to be in. They were not particularly warm.
Certainly they didn't really speak to me. My host brother
never spoke to me at all, and so that probably
also heightened my feelings of homesickness and alienation in this
small community. But I remember they did take me with
(06:22):
them on a trip down south, and we were traveling
through the north country of Iceland, and we rounded the
corner of the mountain and suddenly were in this area
a valley mouth, which was everywhere you could see there
were hundreds, even thousands of these small hillocks. It looked
completely bizarre, something like out of a dream. And I
remember sort of broaching the silence and the car to say,
(06:44):
you know, are these are these Viking burial mounds? Because
I knew Iistin had some history with Vikings, and I
just could not, for the life of me think what
else they could be, and I was told that no, no,
they were caused by an avalanche. But then three as
we were driving through three hills were pointed out to
me and I was told that they were called Thristepa
and that it was there that the last execution occurred
(07:06):
in Iceland. And I was immediately interested, as I think
anyone would be, on hearing this snippet, and asked, you know,
who was it and what had happened? And I wasn't
told too much then, but I was told that the
last person to be beheaded by broad acts, as is
what happened on those three heels was a woman called
Agnes Magnus doot Did, And that, I think is what
(07:28):
I found immediately interesting, that this was a woman, and
not a particularly old woman. She was in her thirties.
And when I asked them why, I was told something
which I found immediately dissatisfying. I was told that, oh, well,
you know, we don't really know why she did it.
She you know, we know that she stabbed the man
that she worked for, this farmer, to death in bed
(07:49):
as he lay asleep, and then she tried to burn
down the house, this turf farm as Iceland has lived
in back then, and we think that she did it
because you know, she wasn't a good person. There was
some sort of mutterings about maybe she had been in
love with the farmer and he hadn't reciprocated her feelings.
But mostly I was told, well, you know, was she
just you know, she was just bad. She was just
(08:09):
a bad person. And that was kind of left it there.
And I remember thinking of her as we continue driving
for the rest of the three hours or whatever however
long it took, and then that night too, trying to
go to sleep and listening to this winter wind just
howling outside the house and thinking of her and wondering,
(08:30):
wondering about her, wondering who she had been really, because
I think even then I had this very strong sense
that no one is unequivocally evil, no one is all bad.
I just desperately wanted to know more about her story
and why she had ended up on those three hills
in January in eighteen thirty, which is when she died.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You return home to Australia, and I'm going to get
into the supernaturalness of Agnes's story a little bit later on,
but you returned to Australia in her presence in your
mind never truly goes away. She's still with you. Why
do you think her story stuck with you?
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Like?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
What is it about her? And do you feel like this?
And I'm not a woo woo person, not a big
believer in ghosts, but do you feel it all like
Agnes guided you at all to write the book Burial
Rights about her final days?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Like how do you see that process?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Because we all learn bits of history as we travel
around the world, and not many of us end up
writing books about one woman they happen to hear about
on a car ride one day.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, it's true, and it's a question I've asked myself many,
many times, and I still don't think I have a
firm answer for it. I know that there are people
who have come to me, readers particularly, who say, you know,
I think that she was there, and I think that she,
you know, she guided you towards writing this book, And
I think that's that's a lovely interpretation, and I'm open
to that. I think I have to be open to
(09:57):
the mystery of it all, honestly, and honestly, I quite
like that. It is a mystery that I ended up
becoming so obsessed with this case. I still can't quite
explain it, and I don't have a dif a answer,
And I don't mind that. I don't mind that that's
something of this is still inexplicable.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
All right, Well, let's learn a little bit about Agnes then,
from the research that you did, because, as you said,
the idea of Agnes to the people around her in
the community after this crime was committed, that she was
just this awful, evil human being.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
But what did you.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Find out about who she was as a person like
her character in your research?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Well, the first thing I found out was that no
one really knew very much at all. I remember throughout
the rest of my exchange, even as it became a
lot better, and certainly as I learned the language, asking
people about her and being frustrated at how little was
known about her early life, particularly, which is what I
was interested in. I think even then I was trying
to get a sense of context for what happened. I
(10:52):
wasn't necessarily looking to find innocence in any explanations of
her character, but I just wanted to understand her. And
I realized that while people were very familiar with the case,
but then not everyone knows the exact details of what happened.
I was frustrated by that, which probably heightened my curiosity.
And then when I did go back to Australia, I
(11:13):
still hadn't decided that I was going to write a book,
but I still had this burning desire to find out
more about her, and so I ended up finding the
resources which were available to me as a unique student
in Adelaide, which was using the resources in the library
trying to find online articles, and I soon realized that
I was not able to access any primary resources, but
(11:35):
I was able to find several I guess you would
describe them as local histories or several accounts of the
murders and the execution, and in them, again my frustration
just multiplied. There were so many accounts which suggested I
remember one of them suggested that yes, Agnes Magnustotti had
fallen in love with a farmer, not Tom Kettelsen, who
(11:57):
was an extraordinary man in his own right. You know,
he was known. He seemed to be very complex, very contradictory.
He was a very gifted healer, but he was also
were a womanizer. He always seemed to have a lot
of money and people there were rumors at the time
that he had stolen it, which it was. You know,
he had been accused of thievery before, and other people
thought he was just a sorcerer, and he did really
(12:18):
nothing to deny these claims. So people thought, well, you know,
he was an enigmatic and charismatic man, and Agnes fell
in love with him. She was a servant woman. She
went to go work for him, and then sometime during
that year that she worked with him, he spurned her,
and one source literally described her as then going insane,
that you know that, you know, being spurned made her
(12:40):
go mad, and then she killed him. There were two
other people involved in the murders. One was another maid
at the house, a woman called Sigare fut And who
was very young at the time. Was she was not
yet an adult. I believe she was sixteen years old.
And there was another young man from the area called
Fridrik Sigerson who ended up being beheaded before Agnes, and
he was only seventeen. He was a farmer's son, quite poor,
(13:03):
and people thought, you know, very envious of Utan's supposed wealth.
In every account that I came across, or every sort
of document I was able to have delivered to me
the same idea of Agnes being the one who really
created a gang out of the three, and who incited
Fludrich to be, you know, to be violent towards Natan.
(13:24):
It was her. She was the manipulator. She was the
one behind the scenes, sort of rubbing her hands together.
I was again, I just wanted something which suggested otherwise.
I wanted to find out about her early life. I
wanted to know why Agnes was then working at a
lucastar there Natan's farm, which is very far away from
many other settlements. It's very remote, very isolated. And yes,
(13:46):
and I couldn't. I couldn't really find much at all.
So I knew then that for me and ordered by
that stage to find out about any wider context as
to why she went there, whether she was in love
with this man, how the murder might have happened, might
have unfolded, I would need to return to Iceland.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
So what do you find on your return?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I understand that we know that Agnes's early life wasn't pleasant,
that she was growing up in a time in Iceland
that was only just a decade past a major volcanic eruption,
and they were living in this time called the mist time,
which meant that their primary source of income, which was agriculture.
Farming was being very heavily tested, and so poverty was
(14:29):
widespread and it was difficult. It was a difficult life.
I mean, you've already discussed what the weather conditions are
like in Iceland. It's not an easy place to live
at the best of times. So what world was Agnes
growing up in and what was her family life like
with her parents.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I was able to discover some of this before I
went back to Iceland, and again that had fueled my
curiosity about her life because I had learned that it
was exactly as you say that Iceland really we're experiencing
incredible poverty. At this time, Iceland was still a Danish colony.
Danish merchants set all the prices. They very much kept
(15:05):
the Icelandic people. You know, in subjugation, everyone lived in
turf houses, you know, houses literally made out of earth
and grass that became very damp in the winter, that
were often very smoky. There were lots of illnesses, and
even when you had people who held land such as
nat On, a better class of farmers. I guess you
(15:26):
might say most people were in a serving sort of
a laboring class, and for men this meant that they
were paid a pittance, so for some women they might
not be paid anything at all. And what would happen
is that you would go into work as a venomrther
or a vender corner, you know, a maid or a servant,
and you would work from a very early age, you know,
(15:49):
possibly six, sometimes seven. You were sent out ideally to
people who you knew, often to people who you didn't,
and then you had to stay at the farm. You
were not permitted to leave the farm until this time
called the flitting days, which is when you could change
your place of employment. But there was also wider infrastructure
in Iceland at this time. I mean, there was one
school in the south Bessasta there which is now the
(16:11):
President's Residents. But there were no you know, it's not
like there were really there were no hospitals, there were
no schools up north, there were no sort of social
services whatsoever. And most of that came down to the
priests involvement in their parishes' lives and their community's lives.
So for example, there was quite a lot of problems
(16:33):
regarding children who were illegitimate or children who were born
to people who were servants themselves, and in this case
they would often try to split up the families. So
you had many, many children who were born illegitimate or
born to people who couldn't properly support them. You were
unable to get married if you didn't own land, so
a lot of these children were illegitimate, and you would
(16:53):
be farmed out to other families where you would essentially
start your life of labor. And particularly if you were
a woman, there were very little means available to you
outside of you know, marriage or you know, slightly elevated
working position where you could better your conditions. You're essentially,
in many ways kind of in working for life in
(17:13):
very very difficult, very hostile environment. So absolutely not a
place where it was possible to easily get by without
a wide range of supportive kinship networks. That was something
that I was very aware of.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So for Agnes, she's born into that exact situation. So
her parents are both working and are unable to get married.
Their father abandons the family quite early. Well that's the story.
He may have been sent to work somewhere else. We
don't fully know his motives for leaving his partner and children,
and so the children, Agnes and her brother are farmed
(17:51):
out to other families and they start their working life
very very young. So wouldn't have been unusual for Agnes,
because I guess from a Western perspective, when we look
at history, we expect young women to be married off
very young. But it wouldn't have been on usual for
Agnes because she would have been a laborer and unable
to marry anyway. But when she meets Natan, he's a
(18:13):
landowner and so he potentially would have seemed quite a
lovely prospect for her, and from all reports he was
quite smitten with her when they did meet. And we're
piecing things together from the very little information that we
have about this, So it could have been very possible
that she saw him as a way out of her situation,
(18:35):
a way out of poverty at that time. I think
that's a valid interpretation, and that's certainly supported by the
many anecdotes which suggest that they had an affair. Naton
at the time was also having an affair with a
married woman who was married to another landowner. She was
sort of in a class above Agnes She's quite well
known as poet Rosa's she wrote incredible poetry, and Natonto
(18:58):
was known as a poet. And then when I went
to Iceland, I discovered Agnes also was someone who was
described as a very good poet and someone who sort
of had held all these literary ambitions, who was highly literate,
who was seemed very intelligent, even by the people who
were you writing anecdotes or recounting the events, and you know,
calling her a devil in the same word, they were
(19:19):
at least acknowledging that she was incredibly smart. And I've
often thought about this because I do think Agnes is
someone who was illegitimate.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
You know. The first account I found of her was
in a census when she was six years old. She
already had a half brother, her mother was in service.
She had been named after a man who turned out
not to be her father at all. In fact, her
father was another married farmer. That she was someone who
from an early age was probably incredibly aware of how
unfair her lot was. I think it would be hard
(19:49):
not to imagine her thinking of the injustice of her situation.
And certainly Natan, with his intelligence, his love of literature
and poetry, his education would have been an interesting man
for her, you know, to strike up a friendship or
to strike up any kind of relationship with part of
me is still uncertain as to whether or not she
(20:10):
was in love with him, and whether he spurned her
to a certain extent. These are the stories that have
been passed down by people with very you know, all
sorts of skin in the game. It's very hard to
know exactly what their early connection looked like. But one
thing is known that after living with Natan for a
certain amount of time that things soured between them. That
(20:32):
is known, and it's also known and has been shown
and has been proven throughout the court documents that Agnes
started to run away from a luga star there and
this is extraordinary. It sounds, you know, like she just
had enough that she went out. But this was something
which was illegal for her to do. So it was
it was not permitted for servants to leave without the
permission of the farmer. So I start to think then that,
(20:54):
you know, what was it like for her being stuck
in a tiny turf house in a winter with a
man with whom perhaps she had a very who knows
what kind of relationship, who knows what kind of connection
they were having, then who knows what kind of abuse
that she was also subjected to. Who was willing to
sort of face discipline, face fines, face punishment, and physically
(21:14):
run away from this very isolated farm over several distance
in that weather to try and seek support.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Well, that then kind of brings us to the next
part of the story, because, as you mentioned, Natan was
known as a bit of a womanizer, and there was
a young maid who you've mentioned Sigur, she's known for short.
She's sixteen years old, and the story goes that he's
actually taking her to bed as well as having an
affair with this married lady the poet and had at
(21:41):
some stage had a relationship with Agnes, And that's the
way the story kind of unfolds. But what can we
read into there is you say, perhaps there was some
abuse because this young girl has no choice but to
go to bed with the wealthy farmer who is essentially
her lord and master, as Agnes would have had to
have done she was told as well, So we don't
(22:02):
know whether he was just a womanizer who was you know,
had access to women that he could deal with as
he pleased, or whether there was some abuse going on.
What do we know about this sort of quadruple relationship
going on? And then Frederick who you've mentioned, also comes
in as well as supposedly being in love with Sigar,
this young maid, and this is what has set off
(22:24):
the chain of events that eventually leads to them being executed.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, this is something that I have thought so
long about. And you know, when I wrote Burial Rights,
my knowledge was incomplete. I only had access to the
sources that I had access to. Something quite extraordinary happened
in twenty nineteen. This case, which I think has long
had a held of sort of the Icelandic Nations imagination,
(22:48):
was retried. A modern trial was held by the Icelandic
Legal Association, but they held it according to contemporary Icelandic law.
It was extraordinary. I was able to access the transcript
and I was so fascinated finally getting additional insight into
the nature of the relationships between Natan and Siga.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Because they used the primary source documents from that original
trial to do this right.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yes, and a few things were pointed out that seemed
to both be a miscarriage of justice and also more
than anything, I mean it's very interesting what is in
the trial transcripts, but it's also very interesting as to
what has been omitted and also was not picked up
as a point of further inquiry. And one of the
things that really struck me reading the transcript was that Agnes,
(23:33):
in running away and in the trial had alluded to
had actually used a word which I think has highly
euphimistic meaning. It's not actually an Icelandic word at all,
and there was some consternation amongst the lawyers as to
what she might have intended, or whether she was alluding
to a French word, being again a very educated and
literary person despite her low station, and the word basically translates,
(23:56):
or it's approximation is that she was being scolded by
Natan and Siger was being scolded. Now, I found it
very interesting that several male academics have taken that at
literal value, suggesting verbal abuse eventually between Natan and Siga.
There are several other linguists, and there are several other
female historians who have taken a different view and say
(24:16):
that no, no, no, she was clearly alluding to sexual abuse,
that this was a way where she could speak to
that at a time where you could not speak very
you know, explicitly about these sorts of things. That Agnes,
in running away and seeking help from the priest, had
probably been in a situation where both she and Sega
were being sexually abused by Natan, and that no longer
(24:37):
was a place where they felt safe, that she was
willing to risk punishment in order to tell people about
what was happening. And in both instances she was simply
returned back home to a lucas da there and was
also made she was forced to apologize to Natan. What
the modern Icelandic lawyers pointed out was that no one
ever asked the priests what she had come to him about.
(24:57):
No one ever in the original trial interrogated the reasons
for her running away. If anything, it was probably just
pointed to, you know, general kind of strict streak of disobedience,
I guess, And I find that so interesting. I feel
like there is this whole thread of interrogation which was
neglected in the original trials, which didn't at all question
(25:19):
the conditions that the women were living under. And one
of the very interesting things was that they also pointed
out what sentence Nataan would have received for sexual abuse
of a minor. In terms of saying that, I find
that very good telling.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Claire Murphy,
I'm speaking with Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rights, a
novel inspired by the true story of Agnes Martistotia, the
last woman to be executed in Northern Iceland.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Next, we head back to March.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Fourteen, eighteen twenty eight to piece together what really led
to the plan to kill Natan Kettelsen. Let's go back
to March fourteen, eighteen twenty eight. There is a lot
of conjecture about what happened that night and what led
(26:12):
up to happening that night, because as far as Agnes
has been painted, she was the one, as you mentioned,
who kind of banded Frederic and Siga together with her
to take down Natan. But then there's also some commentary
about Frederick's mother being involved in this as well. Or
was it Frederick who was in love with Siga who
wanted to kill Natan in order to take her as
(26:35):
his bride if he was allowed to at that time.
I imagine his father owned a farm he would have
been allowed to. So what's your understanding of who was
the one who set this plan in motion, Who was
the one who was the motivator for all of these
people to become entangled in Natan's death.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
It's a very good question, and to a certain degree
we will never know. Let me take you through the
events of March fourteenth, as then known and generally proved
to be correct. That in the middle of the night,
Agnes woke up the neighboring farm at Stapoko. It was
a considerable distance away. She would have had to travel
throughout the night to reach there, and she woke up
the family, and she said that at Lucasta there was
(27:14):
on fire, and that Natan and another guest he had
had over for the night, a man called Pieta, were
trapped inside, and the family came running back with her.
She had said that she thought the fire started from
the kitchen, that it was accidental, and in the early
hours of the morning the bodies of the two men
were found in their beds. However, as it grew lighter,
it was realized by the farmer of Stappocote that perhaps
(27:37):
not all was as it seemed, because on closer examination
of the corps's blood was found on remnants of unbird clothing,
and both seemed to also have stab wounds. This then
led the farmer to contact the district commissioner, who was
a man called Bion Blundell. He was sort of like
the local sheriff in the area, and then he questioned
Agnes and Cigareta. Apparently there were some discrepancies in what
(27:59):
they said, and then both of them eventually said that yes,
the men had been murdered, and they both said it
had been done by Fredrik Sigerson, the local farmer. Now,
Friedrich and Natan had had some very public disputes in
the past, so there was enmity between the two men.
The enmity increased when it became known to people that
(28:19):
Fridrich wished to marry Sigritha. Naton at this time was probably,
I believe, abusing Sigritha. He Friedrich would have needed Natan's
permission to marry Siga, and he refused to give it.
So these are all sort of the various threads of
conflict which I think came together to the point where
Friedrich said that Agnes had suggested that he killed Natan
(28:43):
and that they all take a share of his money
that was supposedly somewhere again in the house, and that
was Frithric's story. Sigritha too seemed to say that both
she and Friedrich and Agnes were hopeful to get their
hands on Naton's wealth and that was the motivation for
the murder. However, Agnes, whose testimony, as I said, was
not transcribed, did not say that that was the reason why.
(29:06):
She instead indicated that it was Natan's behavior towards her
and Sigrotha, and also Friedrich in his sort of powermongering
and you know, abusing the whole that he had as
farmer over you know, Sigretha and Agnes, and that she
wanted to be rid of him in the sense that
she wanted her misery and her suffering to end. We
(29:26):
don't know if she ever said anything explicitly. In a
very strange turn of events, Sigrotha was permitted to speak
with Agnes before Agnes came up and testified during the courts,
and then it was never written down what she said,
so we actually don't know. We only have anecdotal evidence.
So then from that point onwards, it was decided that
the three had been a gang, and whether it was
through public opinion or because people took pity on Siga
(29:48):
because she was young and also believed to be quite
simple minded. People really thought Friedrich and Agnes were the
ones to blame, and that it had been Agnes who
had prodded Friedrich to you know, essentially with a hammer
and a knife kill not done. Pieta, who was also murdered,
was thought to be just simply in the wrong place time.
So that is what is thought to be happened. Beyond Lundell,
(30:09):
who was the man who investigated the crime, who then
you know also you know, ran the trial and then
also judge them and sentence these people, something which you
cannot actually do under contemporary you know, humanitarian law. He
actually was the person a Sigretha was originally also condemned
to death, but he later then ran a petition on
her behalf and had her sentence commuted. And certainly there
(30:32):
was a lot of warm feeling towards Sigatha as someone
who was considered to be again quite simple minded, again
probably in the wrong place at the wrong time, but
that sympathy was not extended to Agnes, who was you know,
she was in her early thirties, she was much older
than Fredric and Cigaretha, and so the trial was then
supported in Regumik. That I mean that the original verdict,
(30:52):
and the verdict was then also supported in Copenhagen, and
it was decided that Agnes and Fridrich would be beheaded
by broad acts, and interestingly, that it would occur in
the district in which the murders occurred, something which just
simply did not happen in Iceland at that time. At
the time, and this is supported by many sources I read.
When someone had committed a very very you know, a
(31:15):
heinous crime and received capital punishment, they were sent to
Copenhagen where it was carried out. And many sources that
I read, including diaries from foreign travelers, said that the
reason for this was because no Icelander was willing to
kill another Icelander. They just couldn't find anyone to be executioner. Now,
in a really I find fascinating sort of twist on this,
(31:38):
beyond Blundell, the district commissioner, the same man who investigated
the case, the same man whose own wife had been
saved by Natan when she was very unwell, decided that
the execution was going to occur not very far away
at all, from the site of the murders, from where
all these people lived. He also said that I think
it was one hundred and fifty men from the local
community had to attend. His orders were engen mawun danlita,
(32:02):
which translates to no one may look away, and that
people who did not attend be fined. And now, in
my mind, this is a man who is attempting to
seize control and re establish his dominance over a district.
So we basically that's where we end up on the
twelfth of January in eighteen thirty, where first Prutik was
beheaded and then Agnes and surrounded by one hundred and
(32:23):
fifty local farmers who were told that they could they
could not look away.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
We touched on earlier that there wasn't a lot of
infrastructure in Iceland outside of reykievic really, so where do
Frederick and Agnes stay? I imagine there's no prisons in
the area where they're going to be executed.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's farming land. So what happens to them?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And this is really where your book where a rights
kind of picks up, is this time between being found
guilty and getting sentenced to then the execution.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
So what happens to them. It's extraordinary. I remember I
had done all this research about Iceland in the nineteenth century,
had researched as much as I could about Agnes's life,
which by that stage wasn't a great deal. But when
I finally arrived in Iceland, i think it was in
twenty ten, to find out as much as I could.
One of the things I discovered was exactly this that
I had always assumed that Agnes would have been sent out,
(33:20):
whether it sent down south where there was a prison,
but she wasn't. She was essentially she was essentially billeted
out because there were no local sort of services. But also,
you know, I don't know whether it was Blondell talked
a lot about having His reasons for having the execution
in Iceland was to save money, something which I think
(33:42):
can be easily disproven by his many letters apologizing for
overdrawn States of funds for feeding and clothing the prisoners.
But Agnes was sent to a family. She was sent
to a family who lived basically in the house next
door to where she was born, people that she probably knew,
it being a very very small community, and she lived
with them, or I think it was approximately six months
(34:05):
until the time her execution was arranged, and that was
where I think, particularly as a novelist, I really wanted
to go in and look at what that would have
been like, both for the family but also for Agnes,
because I do really think that it is impossible to
spend a considerable amount of time with someone in close
proximity without reaching a kind of intimacy, whether that's for
(34:30):
good or bad. And that's where I guess, you know,
my role as a storyteller, my interest in the human
face of history, really came to the fore and in
wanting to write the book in that way. So Barriya
Wrightes is set in the last six months of Agnes's
life as she is sent for this family. But I
mean the family existed. I've heard from relatives. I found
all their names and the soul registers, which is when
(34:52):
the priests would come around every winter and write down
everyone who was living in every farm and what their
position to the head was and how well they could read,
and what their behavior was like. And I found the
last entry in Agnes's life where she was living with
this family at Cornsa. It was said that she was
highly literate. She gave her name as Agnes Jomstoty, which
proved my suspicion that she was aware that the father,
(35:15):
you know, Icelanic having a patronymic naming system, was not
Magnus Magnus stot did at all, but was in fact
this married farmer. And then, in a very interesting sort
of discovery, the priest had provided one word to describe
her behavior since living with the family, and that was mixed.
That she had a lot of mixed behavior, And that,
to me, was all I needed to know, because at
(35:36):
this stage, all I had been hearing was that she
was terrible, she was bad, she was argumentative, she had
a very sharp tongue. And then there's this word, which
is like, you know, she was complex, she was good
and bad, she was a bit of everything, which is
really what I had been striving to find. I wasn't
trying to find her innocence at all. I was simply
trying to find evidence of her humanity. And I took
(35:57):
a great deal from that word, and then really sort
of ib speculated and imagined what the relationship she might
have had with the individual members of that family would
have been like.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
After the break, I asked Hannah, what the people witnessed
on the day of Agnes's execution and who was told
they had to watch. So she spent six months living
with this family on this rather isolated farm, and then
she's taken to the execution site, which is the place
that you saw that first brought this story to you.
(36:32):
What would have been like for the people who were
told that they could not look away?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Like, what are they seeing on these hillicks on.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
The day that this execution happens, Because Agnes isn't the
only one. Frederick is also executed on the same day,
So what is it that they're seeing.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It's so interesting. I've read many accounts of the execution
and they're all a little bit different. But some things
we do know. We know that a platform was built
upon the three hills and that it was dressed with
red cloth. We know that an axe had been specially
commissioned for this event, and we also know that a
block of wood, an oak block, had been imported again
specifically for the execution, which again kind of flies in
(37:12):
the face of Blundell's assertion that this was an inexpensive operation.
All of these things cost a lot of money, and
there's many letters where again he's talking about how expensive
it was to procure these items in Iceland. We also
know that very interestingly enough, Gwydmund de Kettlsen, who was
Nutton's brother, was asked by Blundall to execute Agnes and Fridrich,
(37:33):
which I find extraordinary. Can you imagine that in a
modern day going to the brother and saying, will you
take off their heads? It was something that he did do.
There is considerable amount of speculation as to whether he
was forced to do it or whether he asked to
do it. In fact, Gwydmund de Kettelsen's family have long
argued that no, no, no, he absolutely did not want
to do it. He was made to do it. He
(37:54):
was paid I think, you know, silver dollars. I think
is described, and he gave it all the way, so
you know, you can understand why they're at pains to
stress his reluctance. But it's true that he first of all,
Fritri was let out, Agnes was kept out of sight.
He had by that stage apparently recognized his guilt and
he saw the acts as a blessed branch of justice,
(38:16):
which is my English translation of what it was thought
he said. And he seemed to be. He seemed to
have accepted his execution, He seemed to have accepted his sentence. However,
when it came to Agnes, the various anecdotes, you know,
whether this is just ancestors relating accounts that they had
heard and what had been passed down the family to
(38:39):
more formal letters, you know, they varied so wildly. The
formal report was that they both went contentedly and peacefully
to their deaths. That was that. But then I also,
when I was in Iceland, started to find out that no,
there was lots of people who thought that Agnes had
actually fainted, that she was hysterical, that she had wet herself,
that she had to have her hair held to bring
(39:02):
her head down, that she had faced the wrong way.
All these accounts, again not official and not formal in
any way, and all differing from one another, but all
having a similar truth in the sense of her emotional state.
And I think I would absolutely put money on the
fact that she did not go contentedly to her death,
that she was incredibly distraught. We also know that she
was accompanied by a priest who she had specifically requested
(39:25):
attend her in the last months of her life. In
one account, he was holding her shawl about her and
offered to take it off her himself as she went
to go put her head on the block, and Beyondale
chastised him and called him her serving lady. There's another
account which says that he put his arms around her
as she knelt down. There is another account that she
(39:46):
reached out and took his hand and he held it
while she was beheaded. And so when you put all
these various local stories together, you start to get a
very kind of harrowing and incredibly move being seen of
what their execution was like. And in the very interesting
thing was that, in the years after Barry Arts was published,
I have been tacted by several descendants of this truce
(40:08):
thought far their consent, and all of them agreed and
said that they had heard from their grandmothers that he
was forever changed after this event, and that it had
affected him very deeply, and that there had absolutely been
a sympathy between him and Agnes. So that too, is
something that I think I felt intuitively or had gleaned
(40:30):
from the resources that I was reading, and wanted to
put in the book. But it's also something which has
then belatedly sort of stood up to the local anecdotes
and the family histories. I haven't encountered.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
That must have been just awful for those who were
forced to watch that. But the horror doesn't end there.
Because Frederic and Agnes are denied Christian burials, and in
fact their heads are separated from burial from their bodies
and placed on pikes on the side of the road.
What message was being sent to the community by them
(41:02):
doing this.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
I think it's very clear. I think that it was
very clear that Bien Blondeau was basically bidding to regain
quite strict control over the people in his jurisdiction. It's
also backed up by the fact that this area there
had been a rise, a documented rise of petty theft.
There was you know, behavior that wasn't you know, possibly illegal,
and you know, in a multitude of ways, we do
(41:26):
know that theft was a real issue, particularly sheep stealing,
and I really do think that this is further evidence,
like the barbarity of sticking heads on pikes and leaving
them for everyone was further evidence that he was really
trying to set an example. You know that he was
not a district commissioner to be messed with that he
was really going to lay down the law. And I
think this is further supported by the reaction of the
local communities to the fact that their heads were set
(41:47):
on spikes. Everyone was against it. Everyone thought it was horrible,
and they disappeared during the night, and it was thought,
or there was whispered about that there was one woman,
in particular, a house mistress of a local farm, who
was dead set against it. Thought it was absolutely, you know,
a terrible thing to do, and she ordered her serving boy,
(42:09):
a servant who lived with her, to go in the
night to take the heads off the spikes and bury
them in the Thingata churchyard, which is near where her
farm was. And every account I read said that this
is what they thought happened. So it was probably like
a very well known secret. It was something that people
were sort of aware of, and this was sort of
accepted as why the heads disappeared during the night, that
(42:30):
they were buried by local farmers who thought it apparent.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
It's interesting, though, because in the records of the aftermath
of this execution, there's this idea that the heads have disappeared,
even though you say that it was kind of common
knowledge as to where they might be. But then like
one hundred years later, a woman comes forward and says,
she's come to me in a dream, I know where
the heads are, and is able to point them to
(42:55):
exactly where those heads are buried. Do we presume that
maybe some law had been passed down to her over
the years that she kind of knew where this was.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
This is the extraordinary thing. Yeah. The story as it's known,
and it is quite famous because it is extraordinary, is
that there was a psychic we know. Her name was Cecelia.
She asked that her name not be made known until
after her death. But for some years she was aware
of her own psychic abilities, but she she lardly kept secret.
But for some years she had found herself engaged in
(43:25):
automatic writing. You know where you sort of enter estate
and the words are not yours that are coming out
on the paper. And she realized after a time that
this was the voice of Agnes Magness dotted, and that
Agnes had come to her with a very specific request,
which was that her body be moved to consecrated ground. Now,
as you say, the directions were essentially to bury them
without market in very simple coffins. You know, not what
(43:48):
is it not facing west or east or you know,
the proper direction that people had that the ground absolutely
could not be consecrated, and no one by this stage
knew where they were buried. She ignored the letters, which
I think is really interesting. She thought, no, no, I'm good,
but they kept coming. So eventually she reached out, this
is after two or three years, and contacted someone and said, look,
(44:09):
I think I think we need to I think we
need to find the bodies, and we need to move
them to a church yard, probably thing it out, because
that's where everyone assumes at the headsone. So this other
man goes up north and with the directions of the
psychic and people and went to a local farmer, which
Agnes had said would be helpful in finding the bodies.
(44:32):
The farm was basically right next to the execution site,
if not the land on which it occurred, and he
was called old Magnus by Agnes. His name was in
fact Magnus fains Starre. There a man who went north
was very surprised to find that, yes, there was a
man worth living on this farm, and he basically said
to the emissary of the psychics, look, I don't believe
that she's been contacted by Agnes. But I do think
(44:54):
that it's probably right to move them to consecrated ground,
that we probably shouldn't just have bodies lying out in
this field, And so he agreed to help search for them,
and the man said, well, the psychic actually ended up
asking Agnes where the bodies were, and she had given
a very sort of poetic series of directions, which is
sort of lucky at high summer's sunset next to a
(45:14):
boar of gravel. And so they followed the instructions and
within fifteen minutes they found the heads, which Agnes had
also said were not buried in the Thing Gada churchyard,
but had in fact been buried on the site her
and the man thought, well, no, everyone knows they're in
Thing Gata. I don't think that's true when the psychic
had originally told him, but that's what they found. They
(45:35):
found the heads buried there, and it was then thought
that the servant who had been sent to get them
had been too spooked and simply buried them on the
ground just underneath where they lay. The most extraordinary thing
about this discovery, too, was that Agnes, in denying that
they were in Thing Gata through the psychic had said
that a remnant of the steak still remained in her head,
And when they unburied the skulls they found ten centimeters
(45:57):
of wood inside one of them, and that's kind of extraordinary.
And then following the rest of her directions in a
bar of gravel, they found two coffins buried, and that
was the way that the bodies ended up being discovered.
And then later latterly, I think, after a week or so,
moved up to the church at at Turn, where again
Agnes had requested that they be buried. It's extraordinary story.
(46:19):
It's one of those things where lots of people have
tried to find I think there were some distant relations
or the psychic had married into people from the area,
and people said, well, surely she knew all this time.
But there are some facts which I think are really curious,
such as the fact that she had refused to do
anything about it for a very long time, the fact
that even the farming family who had lived on the
site still didn't know where they were buried. This is
(46:40):
an extraordinarily kind of spooky, paranormal epilogue to this incredibly
sad story.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Seems Agnes has a habit of reaching out from beyond
the grave, if your book is any marker of that too.
But it's interesting now to look back at because there's
a lot of Icelandic people who've read your book who
really have then rethought about what they've known about this story.
(47:07):
And do you think her legacy has changed somewhat over
the years from that immediate aftermath where she was considered
to be this monster? Do you think people have rethought
about her motivations and perhaps the injustices that she was
experiencing at that time.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
I think people are undoubtedly curious, and I don't think
this is necessarily because of burial rights. I think it's
a contemporary concern. But I also think that there have
been many people who with whom it never sat easy.
This depiction of Agnes is evil. I think that the
execution particularly was a very widely traumatic event for many
people in this area. And I mean, you have to
(47:46):
appreciate too, I think that Icelanders are very close to
the past. They're very sort of genealogically aware. The past
is not as far away as perhaps it is in
other cultures, and many people are able to sort of,
you know, trace their descendancy from times in the Sagas,
and I think that what has been so apparent is
(48:07):
to me particularly is that people still are connected to
this case, not simply because they might live in the area,
but because they're related to people who were involved. So
everyone's viewpoints, I think, are colored by you know, family stories,
their own connection. I think that Agnes is someone who
has mystified people for many years, probably because not a
(48:30):
great deal has been about her, and all the accounts
of the execution and the murders, they're all sort of
titled the story of Nartan Kettelsen, and Agnes being a
maligned figure kind of works in his story. You know,
she's just kind of the cooked up, stereotypical evil woman,
like she's Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands together behind the scenes.
And I think people have always, maybe quietly or you know,
(48:51):
been troubled by that. There was a really interesting film
which came out in nineteen ninety five in Iceland called Agnes,
and in that they made her incredibly sympathetic, they made
her someone who was almost angelic, and I'd seen it
and was interested in the reasons for doing that. But
in my mind, particularly as a novelist, and what I
was interested in. I felt that, you know, good and
(49:13):
bad at the same dichomic dichotomy, right. I wanted to,
you know, I wanted to muddy the waters a little bit.
I wanted to get some more complexity and contradiction. But
I think even the fact that that was made shows
a lingering desire to understand more about her. A farmer
once said to me, there's a great uneasiness he has
with this story and that it really doesn't leave people alone.
(49:34):
And I think that's very true. And I think it's
because there is so much about it which is mysterious.
There is so much about it which is you know,
filled with conflict or you know, things that we don't know.
I think there are just so many gaps still in
the story, and I think that's one of the reasons
why it continues to hold people's curiosity.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Hannah, thank you so much for sharing your insights on
Agnes with us today. We really appreciate it for you
sharing some time with us and talking about this.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Thank you, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Thanks to Hannah for helping us tell this story.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
You can find her book Burial Rights and her memoir
Always Home, Always Homesick at the link in our show notes.
True Crime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy. The
producer is Charlie Blackman, with audio designed by Jacob Brown.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week
with another True Crime Conversation
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