A mock court will revisit a chilling 189-year-old case Saturday, due to the sheer horror and intense intrigue that it provoked in the small farm town of Stapakot, Iceland.
Icelanders still have not forgotten the brutal double-murder case from March 14, 1828, which led to two executions, Bloomberg reported Friday.
The unique case was brought to the attention of the townspeople when two maids, Agnes Magnusdottir, 32, and Sigridur Gudmundsdottir, 16, notified their neighbor of a fire trapping two men inside a building. Their claim proved to be false, however, since the men were already dead, having been brutally attacked by a hammer, stabbed 12 times and set on fire, presumably by the housemaids.
While the maids’ motives are unclear, the act was allegedly masterminded by Fridrik Sigurdsson, 17. Both Sigurdsson and Magnusdottir was later executed in a public display. The other maid was sentenced to life imprisonment in Denmark.
The retrial will be presented before a three-judge panel and will attempt to offer more insight into the background of the two murderous maids, specifically with regard to whether they were abused by the two men they later killed. The case will take place in Hvammstangi, near the murder scene.
“No one cared about the motivation behind the murders — that wouldn’t happen in a modern court,” said David Thor, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights. “Today we would try to understand the motivation behind the murders and particularly how the two women, who had no other place to live, were treated by their master.”
The grim case holds still holds popular appeal, with author Hannah Kent’s book “Burial Rites” portraying the murder through the perspective of Magnusdottir, the convicted killer and executed maid.
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