When someone goes missing, their family does not experience grief but a unique form of trauma known as ambiguous loss.
Ambiguous loss manifests similarly for all families of missing people: What if they never find out what happened to somebody, and they have to live the rest of their days with that ambiguity?
In some ways it's more traumatic than grief. They can’t hold a funeral or fully move on, because there’s always that sliver of hope - what if they come back?
On 9 February 2019, Jón Jónsson left the Bonnington Hotel on the Swords Road, Co Dublin. The Icelandic man had been attending the Dublin Poker Festival with his partner Kristiana Guðjónsdóttir.
Six years later, he has never been seen again.
RTÉ and RÚV, the public service broadcaster in Iceland, have been working on a seven-part podcast entitled Where is Jón? They want to find answers for the Jónsson family, who fully cooperated with the series.
In this week's episode, mysteries that have plagued the series will be solved, from missing passports to unlocked phones.
There are also rumours about murder, criminal activity, and a potential suspect will finally emerge...
Keep reading, or listen above to learn more...
Unlocked
When Mr Jónsson was reported missing, the gardaí never searched his hotel room. They never even took his computer or phone, said his sister Anna Hildur.
According to Ms Hildur, the day after housekeeping cleaned the room, the authorities asked for her brother's DNA.
Eventually, Ms Hildur and Mr Jónsson’s partner Kristiana Guðjónsdóttir convinced the authorities to take his electronics, but they dismissed the suggestion they might need a translator for Mr Jónsson’s Facebook page or email.
Ms Hildur said when she got the computer back, she was convinced the gardaí never looked through the device.
When she went through his inbox, it looked like he had not received any emails between August 2019 and February 2019, which begs the question, had everything been deleted?
Now, Mr Jónsson did not work a desk job, so likely did not receive many emails, but by the time Mr Hildur asked the authorities to check with the hosts of Gmail, it was too late to access deleted emails.
So, that question can never be answered.
If you’re wondering what about the mobile phone, well the gardaí said they tried and failed to crack open the device.
Luckily for them, when Ms Hildur got it back, she gave it to a female friend, who magically opened it.
Because of the work of Ms Hildur, the podcast creators learned about the last digital activity carried out by her missing brother, including his browser history, which had the final three addresses he searched…
The first was the Bonnington hotel, which is not surprising; the second was the well-known Dublin eatery, Mr Fox, again not too suspicious, but the final search was a private address in the Dublin mountains…
They don't search his room, or take his equipment, like computer and phone, day after housecleaning has come cleaned the room and then they are like - oh do you have like DNA of Jón…
- Anna Hildur, sister
Passport
Now, loyal listeners are probably still wondering what really happened to Ms Guðjónsdóttir’s passport. If you’re unfamiliar with this topic, please stream episode one, but to quickly recap, the night before the couple were supposed to travel to Dublin in 2019, Ms Guðjónsdóttir’s passport went missing from their shared safe.
Because of this, she was a day late going to Dublin. People often mislay their passports, but on this occasion, she said Mr Jónsson had checked the safe the day before and never flagged the missing document.
So, was this an accident, or did he purposely want to travel to Dublin alone? Well, in episode five, this mystery is solved.
Six months after her partner went missing she found the lost passport… where was it, you ask, and why? For that, you’ll have to stream episode five of Where is Jón?
I really hope that he just disappeared by himself… is having a great life somewhere
- Kristiana Guðjónsdóttir, partner
Loss
Like with any trauma, when someone goes missing, family members cope differently.
In a gut-wrenching interview, Mr Jónsson’s youngest daughter Helena Rán Jónsdóttir explained to the podcast that she packed a lot of memories away.
Her mother Nina, enrolled her and her older sister Júlía Sif Jónsdóttir, in group therapy for children with deceased parents, but when people asked how their father died, they had no response.
As part of a grief exercise, the girls wrote a message to their father on a stone they shared with the producers.
"It says in Icelandic, it’s a grey flat stone and so she’s painted it white, covered it with little crosses and it says … oh it's stars… it says Jón Þröstur Jónsson I miss you more than anything come home."
Mr Jónsson’s brother, Daniel Willem was the last person to leave Ireland after his brother went missing.
He returned to Iceland to finish his law exams at University but was so preoccupied that after his final exam, he left and returned once more to Dublin.
He went on the Irish crime appeal show Crimecall and did what he could to feel closer to his brother, then he fell in love and eventually married.
For Mr Jónsson’s family, everything became defined by his absence.
During that first year of his disappearance, Ms Guðjónsdóttir became stuck - emotionally, physically and psychologically. Her partner was in her every thought and even her dreams, where she said he remains to this day.
You always have that sliver of hope that he'll come back. I will always question how he went missing. Even though I know most of the story, you will never know the full story unless he gets found
- Aaron, stepson
A fresh start
The podcast has already investigated the possibility that Mr Jónsson died by suicide or due to an accident, but both scenarios seem very unlikely.
There is also the possibility maintained by some of his family that he could be alive somewhere. But is that feasible or merely a coping mechanism to handle the worst possible scenario imaginable?
According to Dr Sarah Wayland, an expert in missing persons investigations, it is very difficult to assume a new identity in a foreign land thanks to modern technology and identification methods.
It is very tricky to live a happy life without coming to the attention of someone, be it through CCTV or AI facial recognition, or passport control. If someone is missing long term, she said they likely have died through misadventure or due to suicide or homicide.
Besides, why didn’t Mr Jónsson just fly somewhere else when he landed in Ireland if he wanted to deliberately vanish?
And there is the tiny matter of him leaving his hotel room without his passport.
Privacy expert and New York Times best-selling author of How to Disappear Frank M. Ahearn told the podcast creators that to successfully disappear, a person needs several things, crucially they need to have been planning so far in advance their every move is calculated.
On top of this, they need to have plenty of money gathered before they disappear. But Mr Jónsson does not fit this model at all. All the information gathered in previous episodes suggests he was planning for the future back home in Iceland with his family, and there was no indication that he had stashed additional money anywhere.
There were no signs in the months before he disappeared that he was planning anything other than his normal life in Iceland - and there were no signs that he stashed money away. In all honesty, Jón couldn’t afford to disappear
- Anna Marsibil Clausen, series producer
The forgotten suspect
In the months following Mr Jónsson’s disappearance rumours swirled around the Icelandic poker world about what happened.
People said he was attacked, killed, and buried, but nobody would name a perpetrator.
But after a year, a name did emerge… for the purpose of the podcast, this individual will be called Alex.
Two separate sources have approached members of Mr Jónsson’s family implying he was murdered by this person.
The first is Mr Jónsson’s stepbrother Gunnar, who works as an addiction counsellor.
In 2020, Gunnar received a phone call from someone who claimed Mr Jónsson was murdered by an individual called Alex, who had been assigned to take out an Icelandic man, but he killed the wrong man.
He called a friend, an ex-addict who knew about the criminal underworld in Iceland, to see if they knew Alex.
The friend said Alex had been living in Iceland and had problems with the Albanian mafia, whom he owed money to.
Gunnar told his brothers, but the family had heard so many tall tales that this story did not stick out.
That is until Gunnar discovered that Mr Jónsson’s sister Anna Hildur had been told the same story by a separate source, who was very close to Alex…
Mr Hildur told the Icelandic police what had happened, and they passed the information on to the Irish authorities.
However, the podcast decided to track down one of the sources, the one closest to the alleged murderer. The person was too afraid to go on tape, but they did speak to the producers… To learn more, hit play.
Telling me the man who killed your brother called from Dublin hysterical because he killed the wrong guy…
- Anna Hildur, sister
The prisoner
There is another rumour around the murder of Mr Jónsson involving an Icelandic prisoner awaiting sentencing.
Before he went to jail, he was telling people at a poker table in Reykjavik that Mr Jónsson carried a package to Dublin but was late to a meeting place and was killed for that reason.
But in October 2020, an Irish newspaper published a story that seemed to reference the same prisoner, but this time, his story had changed…
He now claimed Mr Jónsson died by accident in a dispute over lost gambling money.
The now-former prisoner was contacted but declined to speak on the subject with the series.
So where does the truth lie? Where is Alex, the person named as Jón’s alleged killer? Has he been interviewed by police? Was he even in Dublin when Jón disappeared?
- Liam O'Brien, series producer
If you have any knowledge or information on the disappearance of Jón Jonsson, please contact us immediately and in confidence via documentaries@rte.ie
Þú getur líka sent okkur línu á hvarerjon@ruv.is
You can also send us anonymous information or tips via our website
