surveillance cameras are very much a double-edged sword in almost every modernized town and city they are everywhere it uneases the nerves to know that in public every move you make is being monitored everywhere you go but it can also be comforting to know that should you ever go missing savanna's cameras may be the single thing that helps find you or explains why my name's adrian and welcome back to coffee house crime today we're looking at the case of berna who in the early hours of a cold january morning vanished and surveillance cameras that would help
solve her disappearance but before we get into our case today i wanted to take a small moment to thank those of you that have subscribed to coffee house crime when i started my channel just over a few weeks ago i had no idea that i would connect to over a thousand of you in such a short period of time i feel so lucky to share my stories with so many of you already so thank you i won't hammer on but i thought this milestone deserved a new shirt and an updated coffee house okay without the
way i have an interesting story to share with you today so sit back and grab a coffee this is the case of berna branstation [Music] deep in the north atlantic ocean lies a sleepy and often forgotten island called iceland iceland as a country has an entire population of only 357 000 inhabitants while characterized for its snow waterfalls northern lights and more modernly for its blue lagoon iceland is also a country with a population focused on simplicity honesty and togetherness iceland's capital reykjavik is home to roughly one-third of the country's population and one of those inhabitants
her name was berna bradstatier berna was a 20 year old woman and to the usual passerby she was just a sales assistant to one of the city's several fashion shops in 2017 berna was living with her father in the suburb of breoholt and reykjavik although her mother and father would split up she was still in good terms of both of them and talked to both them on a daily basis she loved music dancing and having fun she was bright responsible and nurturing and described by her friends as a kind fun-loving redhead with a great sense
of humor other than enjoying a good time with her friends she also loved music and with that she would often frequent the city's bars and nightclubs every friday evening and an evening of friday the 13th of january 2017 it was the same as all other fridays berna she had a busy day at work full of its stresses and she was ready to let loose at a local bar with friends they hit a local bar after work and shared a few games of cards as they drank and as the evening progressed so did their spirits they
soon after headed to europe a local nightclub in the centre of the city here is one of the city's most vibrant venues offering premier live music and a great night out both local and famous bands frequently perform here to the city's nighttime punters and shortly after they got there lively and carefree berna was one of the first people to get up on the stage and start dancing away and their time in here with all the dancing and partying and drinking quickly turned the hours over by the time the clock had struck 2 am while berna
was still enjoying her evening her friends were growing tired they told her they wanted to leave but burner she decided that she'd stay at the nightclub the club hammered on and so did burner right through to the end in fact at 5am the club's lights switched on it was closing time and with the end to the night vernon decided it was time to go back home to her father's house to catch some sleep shortly after leaving the club she bought a flaffle pitter from a local takeaway before making her way through to laugh figure a
brightly lit street with glowing store fronts and illuminating lamp posts she was walking alone and this was not unusual in reykjavik even for a young woman with the country's crime rate extremely low the place is considered safe for all it was minus 9 degrees celsius that early morning though with wind chill giving the air a particularly strong bite as she walked home berna was seen on cctv wearing the outfit that she'd had on since finishing her shift the evening before blackdoc martin boots black jeans a grey jumper and a black hoodie her hair hung loose
and a pair of white earbuds dangled around her neck and following her enjoyable night verna was drunk savannah's cameras captured her accidentally bumping into strangers on the pavements and dropping coins outside of shop [Music] she embled past the yellow and red awning of the lebowski bar and a coffee shop which backed onto a street corner where a narrow lane then leads down to the sea but after appearing on the footage of this camera nestled on lagfigar street at 5 25 am bernard bradshawtier she vanished this would actually be the last time she was ever seen
alive again berna never showed up for work the next morning she was actually supposed to be working with one of her long-term best friends maria the two had met in primary school and had also been working at the same shop for quite some time it was unlike berna to miss a day at work or at least if she ever did should call in advance to let everyone know maria tried to call burner's mobile phone but it went straight through to voicemail it was also unlike berna to have her phone switched off this raised maria's suspicion
so she contacted one of burner's friends who'd went out there the night before she too hadn't seen her since 2 am the two contacted berna's mother cilla and cilla she too hadn't heard from her daughter she started to grow concerned pretty quickly and by the afternoon she'd contacted the police to file a missing person's report since was a very strange and unusual case police they were very quick to pick up on burner's case and in the first 24 hours under their initial investigation is when they found the surveillance footage of burner roaming the streets that
early saturday morning and through tracking her mobile phone's gps police then managed to find that she'd made it to a location near a mobile tower in hafnafige an industrial area in a port town six miles south of reykjavik but other than this initial boost of data nothing else stood out to police officers bernard she was still missing and police were nonetheless to figure out where she'd gone zillah was starting to grow very concerned so she reached out to facebook and the news of burner's disappearance there spread like wildfire across the country by the time three
days had passed huge amounts of attention was focused on burner police were so fired up about the case that they assigned their top officer to investigate his name was grimmer grimson grimmer was a private person but he was by no means unnoticed in his 30 years in the police force as a detective he'd almost seen at all this included investigations into petty crimes right through to enduring multiple avalanches while posted in the northern wedfields only in november 2016 had he returned to reykjavik's police force missing the faster pace of life scrutinizing the surveillance footage of
burner shortly after she left the bar grimson and his colleagues noticed a small red car travelling in the opposite direction to burner it drove past the lebowski bar less than 30 seconds after she'd appeared on camera there it was insignificant but it stood out to officers the license plate on the car however was illegible and when police checked the national vehicle database they found more than 100 cars of the same make model and color in the early morning hours of january the 16th two brothers who were part of the search team to find burner were
down at the docks of hafnafioda this was the place that bona's mobile phone was last located they had been searching for quite some time and they hadn't found anything of interest they decided to check the harbour one last time so they decided to walk towards it going past an open patch of land next to atlanta solely supply station that is when they came across a pair of boots and upon closer inspection they were doc martens they believed it belonged to berna and police would later confirm this too this was the first real piece of evidence
to link bernard to this harbour and the prognosis didn't look too promising for her either back in the city detectives were also making their own progress too they'd been analyzing additional cctv footage and when they checked the harbour that's when they saw the red keyer again on saturday morning at 6 00 am the car parked along a 65 meter trawler called the polo nanok it was a ship owned by greenland the footage isn't publicly available but what it shows is a man leaving the red keyer from the passenger side and slowly drunkenly walking back towards
the ship the car then drives off this time though the license plate was legible after a quick investigation grimson was able to locate the car back to a rental vehicle company the car had been rented out by a crewmate on the poland nanak and that guy's name was thomas moeller olsen thomas mueller olsen was a fisherman from greenland he was visiting the island as part of work and he arrived via the polar nanok and honestly that's all there really is to him he's a fisherman and he did have a small criminal record for buying and
selling hashish but otherwise he's a pretty boring guy at around lunch time on saturday thomas had returned to side red kia to the rental company and since crimson's discovery it had been hired out again to another family police located and impounded the car but by the time they got there it was pretty obvious that the car had been recently cleaned the new owners of the rented vehicle had complained about the smell in the back seat and upon closer inspection police would also find traces of blood on the back seat they'll take a sample of that
along with burner's dna and send both to a laboratory for forensic analysis police also confirmed that there was damage to the underside of the car suggesting it was probably driven off-road on trails where small compact cars shouldn't be driven there was also over 300 kilometers racked up on the pedometer while in thomas's hands something that couldn't be explained with the ever-growing suspicion luring its head towards thomas olsen the hunt for him was now on it wasn't difficult to locate him though he was on a boat it's just that boat had already left and it was
over 100 miles away in greenland's waters this was a bit of a challenge for iceland's police thomas he was a greenland citizen on a boat owned by greenland which was now in the territorial waters of greenland they couldn't really do much to stop him and had a lot of reliance on the neighbouring country to help but on the boat gossip started to spread about the red kia and apparently thomas when he heard the news he went pale he was so panicked in fact that he needed to be sedated yeah you can't really run away from
this one mate this is where we meet another hero to the story though the captain of the polo nanok he'd heard the news too about the red kia and he also understood the diplomatic challenges that iceland's police would face so what did he do he told the crew that the boat had a motor problem and so he turned the boat around and started sailing back the other way towards iceland's harbour he also turned the wi-fi off so no one on the ship could gather news or gossip about the case what a guy as soon as
the poland entered icelandic waters six of iceland's viking squad the country's top police officers rappelled onto the polar nanok via helicopter and arrested thomas they also arrested his drunken friend nikolai who had accompanied him in the red kia that friday night by the time the two were in custody forensic analysis results on the blood found in the back of the car had returned and unfortunately to add to the other unfolding evidence it was confirmed to belong to burner both thomas and nikolai denied causing any harm to burner according to their statements they'd both gone for
a night out in the town on friday nikolai took a taxi from the harbor to reykjavik and went for a drink in the english pub just off laugh figure he then paid 2500 kroner for a spin of the lucky wheel and won the grand prize of eight beers by the time thomas had driven the rental car to the capital and joined nikolai nikolai was already very drunk they later moved to another bar before going for a drive and a roughly 5 am during that time of that drive is when burner and another woman they'd both
entered the car nikolai though he was so drunk that he didn't remember any other details after that he passed out on the way to the harbour thomas told police that after dropping nikolai off at the poland nanak he then drove the car to the end of the harbour and got into the back seats with both women he apparently then started making out with berna before dropping them both off at a local roundabout and apparently that was it but you can probably tell by now that that's not actually what's happened we know this because police caught
thomas on surveillance footage leaving the harbour at around 7am and then again in a shop buying cleaning products other evidence was also weighing against thomas too the doctor who examined him had noted scratches on his chest and officers searching his cabin in the polar nanak would also find 23 kilograms of hashish with a street value of roughly 1.4 million pounds and more notably police also found burner's driver's license it was located in the ship's rubbish tip pieces of evidence were finally starting to come together around thomas and bernard around 11 45 am on the 22nd
of january just nine days after bernard disappeared search efforts were still going strong for her around 830 volunteers were active that day and that's when a coast guard helicopter flying low over the coastline by sellswog's fitty lighthouse spotted something near the water's edge there was no typical beach there only cliffs and beams of black stones in contrast to the rock was a large pale object there they would find a body and to everyone's biggest fears that body would belong to burner autopsy reports found that she had been struck in the face and strangled near to
the point of death there were no signs of sexual assault only of grievous bodily harm but the hardest revelation was that she'd not died in the car but from drowning most likely in the sea's freezing temperatures iceland grieved for burner back in reykjavik thousands of people walked together down the streets leaving candles and flowers in the areas berna was last seen on camera her funeral was held at the biggest church in the country and had over two thousand attendees including both of iceland's president and prime minister her discovery and funeral seems to do no less
than ignites and add further pressure to thomas trial with evidence ever unfolding both to him and to the public's eyes it was very clear that he was responsible for bernie's murder investigations also concluded that nikolai had no part to this crime apart from being horrendously drunk that morning he was dropped off at the harbour before the attack started he was then later discharged from police two days after her funeral so on march 30th 2017 thomas was charged with bernard's murder and also for drug possession when his trial began in august the prosecution's case was even
stronger thomas's dna was found on the laces of one of burner's boots and norwegian forensic scientists had identified his fingerprints on her driver's license he confessed to drug possession but not to murder and to everyone's surprise while he was being trialled he spoke to the court in a low voice with no emotion spinning a completely new story to the judge and jury instead of two goals in the car it was now only one berna who he had said suddenly climbed into the kia rio as he drove along laugh vega thomas said he had stopped the
car and got out to have a pee at which point nikolai drove off with burner returning sometime later without her to the astonishment of everyone in the court thomas was now at this late stage in the process trying to pin the murder on his fellow crewmates this didn't work however because in november 2018 thomas was found guilty of bernard's murder and also of drug smuggling he was sentenced to 19 years in prison in addition to the repayment of 29 million kroner in costs and compensation i'm really starting to see a pattern here in my videos
you know first new zealand and then the united kingdom and then japan and now iceland why these murderers getting away with such short sentences in america most of these cases there'd be life sentences without the possibility of parole burna was an outgoing courageous fun-loving free spirit she lived life to the full and for entire life to be taken away for just 19 years of this scumbag it doesn't seem right bernar's killer to the state still hasn't revealed a motive in fact he still pleads not guilty and to the residents of iceland and their way of
life it's unfathomable to understand anyway despite this case i've never visited iceland but it's definitely on my list the country's way of life and natural beauty sounds too good to miss with its waterfalls lava fields and spectacular night skies i can see why its native population are amongst one of the happiest out there burner lived and loved every second of her life and i think that's quite a resounding ambition that iceland's folk have thank you so much for watching another video of mine today i hope you enjoyed the case and thank you to those that
have subscribed to coffee house crime already if you haven't yet then please do it really does mean a lot to me what do you think about bernie's case and what do you think about thomas olsen and why do you think he did it please let me know in the comments below and i'll get back to you and if you have any suggestions for cases in the future please feel free to leave them there too thank you once again folks and i'll see you real soon in the next one until then please take care of each
other goodbye you
