Transcripts of the Death in Ice Valley podcast (Episodes 1 to 12)

These transcripts were created by Glasp/ChatGPT. I have trawled for some obvious errors by there are quite a lot of errors remaining. It often understands Isdal as Easton.

AI created image

Death in Ice Valley — Episode 1: The Isdal Woman — @BBCWorldService

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGshhAuy5BA

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:

(00:03) from the BBC World Service and NRK this is death in ice Valley [Music] [Applause] some people take their secrets with them to the grave when they die and some graves hold more secrets than others there’s one in particular in the main cemetery in Bergen a city on the west coast of Norway it’s hidden under a rhododendron bush you could walk right past it on the gravel path and you wouldn’t know it was there. There is no headstone no cross no sign at all identifying who lies beneath one morning in February 1971 a small group

(00:58) of people working for the Bergen police huddle together in the icy rain they watch as a white coffin is slowly lowered into the ground on this spot the coffin is decorated with tulips and carnations and lined with sink none of the funeral guests know that that person inside there are no relatives of the deceased at the graveside the priest opens his Bible and reads from the verse about the unknown woman saying that the woman before them is also unknown he adds as the coffin disappears from view in all probability she is also

(01:43) buried in a land unknown to her the zinc lined coffin wouldn’t disintegrate it was chosen in case her family were ever found and she could be returned home when people go missing they’re usually missed someone must have missed her somewhere when she was gone somebody must know something this is the story of a woman travelling in Norway in 1970 who died a terrible death left behind a trail of strange Clues her real identity has remained unknown for almost 50 years and it’s one of the world’s most intriguing unsolved

(02:28) mysteries [Music] kind of a novel and especially at this time 1970 the Cold War she was laying good head down there and her legs why was she traveling around with all this identities was she a spy it was like cover on it was like a layer of protection around this whole question about this lady episode 1 the Isdal woman I’m Marit Higraf I’m an investigative reporter from Norway’s NRK than the region public broadcaster and I’m Neil McCarthy a radio documentary maker from the BBC together we are trying to unravel the

(03:30) mystery of an unidentified woman known in Norway as the Isdal woman a mystery that has haunted my country for 47 years still today nobody knows who this woman was where she was from and what she was doing in Norway on the North Atlantic coast of Scandinavia that’s what we would like to find out in this podcast series we’re gonna find out whatever we can about her life her death and the world she was living in and it’s about using new technology and the power of podcasting to do that so listen closely

(04:03) you never know you might be able to help us solve this true crime [Music] we begin where the Isdal woman was found on the 29th of November in 1970 she gets this name from a beautiful but desolate Valley called Isdalen meaning ice valley it’s next to the port city of Bergen ??invest?? in Norway and that’s where the body was found a large black lake fills the bottom of ice valley pine forests give way to scree and bear Rock halfway up the mountain in winter there are few hours of daylight here and it gets very

(04:46) cold and wet so this is all just broken trees chopped down forest this trunks logs branches broken up in the path which is completely sodden there’s been a lot of rain already and more rain coming in in this valley on the outskirts of the wettest with Norwegian towns Marit’s been working on the case since she got the Norwegian police to reopen it a couple of years ago unlike me she knows it well she’s actually probably the world or authority on it but there are still many unanswered questions even

(05:38) for her I mean the story itself it’s real often riddle there are a lot of people as I’ve been trying to solve this mystery for years policeman private investigators author’s John lists a lot of people have been reading documents and trying to solve this mystery mum nobody came anywhere so why should we yes because we thought what can modern technology and methods done by the police like DNA what can methods like that give us of possibilities today to come further in this mystery so the scientific methods

(06:21) used in detecting crime known as forensics have come a long way in 47 years DNA for instance our unique genetic code is now a key to unlocking many crime mysteries anyway back to the valley it’s not a well-worn path but then who would come up here spits a grass to hold on to there’s a fast flowing river to the side because it’s been raining all night so this is Isdal Valley this is definitely Isdal Valley and ??howl howl willows you’re back again after 47 years I’ve never been here since and kala

(07:08) halwa?? is actually the only person still alive from the crew of police officers who went out there on that particular day [Note: Turid Halvorsen was/is alive 4/5/2024 so not true!] when the message came yes somebody had found a dead body in his town that’s right so you were the first one on the scene is it strange to be back yes it is it is and I’m getting some few memories but we’re still not there we’re heading towards that do you remember when the call came in yes it was Sunday morning involved 9, 10 o’clock and I was at home on duty there had been a fire she was

(07:51) burned these girls had found dead body and the rest of the fire that was the message so then climbing up this hill you knew nothing the faintest idea we didn’t know anything it was a dead person that’s all being [Music] so Marit call ?Howell? the retired policeman is talking about some girls who are they they were then 10 and 12 years old two young girls out for a walk with their father a professor they had a terrible shock when they found her they had to get out of the valley as quickly as they could and call the police and remember

(08:42) back then in 1970 there were no mobile phones so they had to walk the long way around that lake and back to Bergen city where they managed to call the police they must have been very scared yeah they must have been at that age you just telling me that story reminds me of something that happened to me at a similar age I would have only been about 12 and I went out fishing with a friend this is out from where I grew up we were out on a sandbank we saw something we didn’t know what it was there was a seagull on it we thought it was a sea

(09:13) lion that had washed up probably dead and on the way back from fishing we went to investigate and we realized that it wasn’t a sea lion we saw a body laid out on the sand facedown with clothes on but the clothes were all ripped and I thought my first impression was always has to be a shop dummy of some kind that’s been afloat and washed up but then you realize you saw the flesh you saw the the whole waste that had gone on after body been in the sea for a long time you realized it was a corpse it was a dead person and I was very

(09:46) thankful that I couldn’t see the face as well because that might have led to real nightmares but our first reaction as two young boys was to just run to flee that scene and run back to shore and call for help and not look back and I that’s that’s just triggered the similar, similar memory of what those girls went through it must have been a traumatic experience for you as a child and I guess it tells a lot about also how those two girls were feeling because actually they never want to speak about what happened back then

(10:19) I’ve been speaking to one of them off record and she says it’s something they’re determined to keep within the family [Music] we’ve been to clambering of hell on this very very rainy day in begging in fact it was rainy before but now it’s coming down thick in swells you can’t get a yeah I mean wind you can’t really get away from it look into the valley and it’s almost like we’re inside a cloud I guess it’s hanging so low and the the lake is sort of black below what’s the

(10:59) name of the lake yeah black the black Dyke or something in English all right this part of the valley actually is called ??touchstone death Wally?? Death Valley yeah yes the whole mayor called that do you know why a surprising know that it has been quite a lot of stories and myths about people found dead here suicides and children found out here and our woman is the lumen is one of them [Applause] the story of the Isdal woman captured the public imagination in 1970 when it hit the headlines who was this mysterious woman what could she have

(11:45) been doing in that desolate Valley and how did she die and storytellers are still captivated by her like one of Norway’s most famous crime writers also from Bergen ??Gunnar Stahlesen?? he’s used to creating situations riddles and solutions our story is real life but because it reads like a novel I think we should talk to him Harry is with grey hair swept back in glasses wearing a raincoat and holding an umbrella of course we call it the ice valley but the colloquial name of that Potter well is the Death Valley the valley of death

(12:22) because I was been some accidents there because of a very steep hills and there was a place where people in the medieval age went to commit suicide if it was a suicide I think that she did it on a very very curious way in a place that it’s impossible to understand how she could find if she wasn’t very well know in Bergen that’s why I think she must have had an appointment with someone who was locally known because if I would have a secret appointment with someone I could suggest that we meet in that valley because in November it was

(13:01) not many people going there [Music] so according to his theory this woman whoever she was must have known somebody and met them appear in the valley or being taken here Gunnar obviously believes her death whatever it was wasn’t a suicide keep that in mind there are plenty more theories about this still to come how does it start to look familiar yes I know I’ve been here before birth date is a long time since it’s like a collection of bold is here or jumbled up and it’s almost like they rolled down from the mountain and

(13:59) they’re covered in moss at most of them was she and amongst the rocks she was laying with her head down there and her legs up there [Applause] it was burned in all in the front and it was sunburned wood from earlier fire place and it smells a little burnt flesh I felt it Monday right here you said the possible okay we are here now Carl Voss our only living police witness says there were remnants of a small fire but I’ve read all the police reports from the scene and there is no

(15:02) mention of the fire on the contrary the reports specifically say there was not fireplace it was the woman herself that was on fire and do we know anything about how long she’d been up in the valley or the time of death no we don’t know how long she was there before she died we don’t know how long she had been dead before her body was found actually that’s some of many unanswered questions because in the CSI ??drums?? they always seem to be able to tell how long the body’s been lifeless that’s

(15:34) unfortunately only in the movies according to forensic pathologist I’ve spoken to they can’t [Music] it was burned a hole in front and she was laying like that does as far as a member with her arms like that it’s called a boxer grip I think in police or it was called it means if the person having their arms crossed in front of your humour or her in this case and I was told it’s a thing that happens by people who are severely burned that the skin contracts and the arms crossing and going up

(16:19) we thought perhaps she had been sitting over a fire and fire burned her and she had thrown herself back and like that but we don’t know more like an accident no nobody knows nearly 50 years later and still nobody knows if it’s an accident that’s right look these are the photos of the crime scene taken by the police photographer the body is in between the boulders just as Carl Oliver described the body itself is in a very burned State down to the sort of scene you intend and it’s gone through the skin all the clothes have

(17:08) gone it must have been a horrific ly painful way to die and you can see there’s a team of about five or six forensic investigators here in amongst the trees what does the crime scene report from the police say tells us she was a young woman height 164 centimetres slim with broad hips well-built colour of hair is brownish black she has a small round face brown eyes and small ears so she doesn’t have the stereotypically Scandinavian blue eyes and fair hair no she doesn’t it also talks about different objects

(17:47) led out around her there was two bottles small bottles with something water perhaps and some piece of clothes and one rubber boot not on her besides her one one of them burned that rubber boot is going to be a key piece of evidence so keep that in mind also laid out was a watch with the hands showing ten minutes past 10:00 that’s the time that watches are usually set to in the shop window you know before they are sold so was the watch never used yeah there was a picture here of the in amongst all the different photos and

(18:36) some quite beautiful jewellery here some earrings and a ring and also found you can see here some plastic bottles and the interesting most interesting thing about these bottles was they were the content was water they’ve got signs of being partially melted one isn’t almost entirely melted so they had water and not fuel interestingly not few so besides these things they found a tiny ring probably used to hold a passport photo in place besides the ring with some burnt pieces of paper so we can imagine maybe she

(19:13) burned the passport up there or somebody did but the most significant and interesting thing on this scene was actually that all the labels on the clothes and on the items had been cut off her clothes and rubbed off the bottles isn’t that interesting well that sort of confirms the passport theory somehow she is trying to yeah just scratch away her their existence their identity or somebody else did somebody else did I remember we wondered if somebody wanted to do suicide why on earth climb up here and make a

(20:02) fire that doesn’t make sense and if somebody want to kill her why take her up here I guess she must have been forced to walk up here there was a lot of questions but not no answers but you’ve seen many crime scenes before not like this no came into my mind from time to time and I wonder what on earth happened that day so I don’t think I forget it no not before I get armed sir [Applause] would you like a solution on this mystery case yes but I don’t do nothing ??daddy??

(21:07) having dissolution I’m not optimistic [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] so we’re in a chilly Oslo the sun’s quite low in the sky you can just see it

(22:11) through the clouds although it’s it’s early afternoon outside a very well fortified looking building with the word KRIPOS or the letters K R.I.P O. S on the side big silver letters you know well we are in that industrial area in the northeastern part of Oslo and Kripos means the national or the Norwegian Criminal Investigation service so this is their main building and we’re going in here to meet some of our partners so this brings the case up to present day these are the current some serving or

(22:49) some recently retired officers who’ve taken another look at the cold case of the Isdal woman yes actually it all began here with they have a unit for identification and it’s the leader of that unit he was the one I spoke to first in the very beginning of this investigation to ask how can we do this what can we do with an old case like this there are experts on it so let’s go in and ask them our questions I think I’m rare more yeah peered angle recently retired as head of the Norwegian police’s identification team

(23:34) at Kripos he and his colleagues travelled the world especially after disasters trying to identify dead bodies they were in Thailand after the tsunami in 2004 when thousands of people were washed away and searched for by their loved ones they also did the grim work identifying the bodies of so many young people after the terrible massacre in Norway in 2011 DNA our individual genetic code is a vital tool in their toolbox it wasn’t used in Criminal Investigations until the mid-1980s so it was no use when the Isdal woman was

(24:15) found in 1970 but it is now criminal active case but it’s still an unsolved identification case this was like you say it was a sleeping case then we spoke together and what made you and the police to reopen this 47 year old case well it’s always interesting for us to look at cases with new eyes normally it should be easy to identify her but the main thing actually somebody have to report missing we have to something to compare with and so far in this case we haven’t found that information so we really hope that the

(24:56) focus that NRK and BBC are putting in to this case absolutely I have a hope for identification that some persons in the world or Europe think maybe this could be my out or some kind of family relationship so how do you go about the next day actually we are fishing in the big sea but the media’s interests in this case could actually help us a lot because we need to build up the interest for the case in some areas and maybe some persons are going to report that girl lady missing again within you informations that we could have today

(25:36) I’m not this DNA first of all if we have some kind of breakthrough through family DNA the DNA profile should be some kind of family relation so then we have to figure out is it correct connection here we all have someone we have friends we have relatives we have an aunt a neighbour somebody is or was missing her or knew that she was gone so it’s all about reaching out there with the correct information about this woman to see somebody who knows oh there were a woman here around 1978 didn’t see her

(26:16) after that now let’s get back to 1970 the police have an unidentified female body on a mountainside so presumably they sent her for an autopsy yes to the Gades Institute at a university hospital in Bergen to determine cause of death did the police keep her secrets to keep a lid on this thing or did they put out an appeal to the public because they had no obvious leads on who she was they quickly got the media to report the discovery of the Isdal woman as the newspapers called her can we have a look at some of those first reports yes this

(26:56) is the on the first day after the finding of the dead body you see here this is the biggest local newspaper in Bergen against Edina and you see a small article down here young girl found that in Isdalen so there’s no idea of age at this at this stage not that this you know these are the first newspaper articles about the body being found in Isdalen the next day it says who is the young dead girl in Isdalen then there’s a picture of a grainy picture of the valley in an arrow where she was found

(27:32) the woman was burnt but no fire in Isdalen no fire was found so this is gonna start catching people’s imagination pretty quickly isn’t it because it’s already a mystery the journalists obviously got leaks from the police already here on the first couple of days this is one of the national newspapers in Oslo dog bra saying on the 2nd of December the dead body in Bergen is a mystery and still after 47 years still a mystery let’s hope less of a mystery by the end of this podcast series what the police

(28:06) must have been trying to do is to track her movements backwards as well as to try and find out who she was because if they find out where she’d been then they could start to fill in who she might have been yes the first major breakthrough happened in Bergen railway station three days after her body was found what happened there the police found two suitcases containing lots of very curious clues they had been left there by the Isdal woman [Music] [Music] [Music]

(29:31) next time in death in ice Valley she was not talking very loud she had a silent voice but I didn’t feel she was shy I just felt she has an agenda and she doesn’t want to talk about it to anybody [Music] episode 2 of death in ice valley will be released next Monday we’re still making these podcasts and will react when we find any new development in the story if you think you have any specific leads on this case please e-mail Meriton me directly at death in Isdal Valley at BBC calm that’s death in ice Valley one word at

(30:18) bbc.com if wherever you get your podcasts allows you to do this please do rate the podcast and leave comments and we’d like to invite you to be part of our death in ice Valley Facebook group anyone can join and we’ll be sharing as many photographs and documents as we can we’ll be adding more after each episode go to facebook.

(30:40) com slash groups slush death in ice valley we’re also putting documents pictures and videos on our website that’s BBC World Service comm slash definitaly thanks for listening Decimus Valley is an original podcast series made by the BBC World Service and Aniki it’s presented by neil mccarthy and me molotov song designed and original music is by phil channel additional investigation by stoller hanson and even be she left from anarchy the series editor is Phillips Ellis the BBC World Service editor is John Mandel the podcast is studio mix by Donald

(31:24) MacDonald the producer of death in ice valley is Neil McCarthy [Music]

A case of clues about the Isdal Woman, Death in Ice Valley, Episode 2 — BBC World Service

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swcoeKOJrwU

Transcript from Glasp/ChatGPT:

(00:12) This is Death in Ice Valley — an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. I’m Marit Higraff — and I’m Neil McCarthy, and this is episode 2 — A Case of Clues. We’ve been looking through police files, reports and documents from the end of November 1970, to piece together the Isdal Women’s movements, and the last thing we were talking about was that the police had made an important discovery in the railway station in Bergen — so I think we should go there.

(00:52) — Yes, let’s go there with the crime novelist Gunnar Staalesen. He was a young man in Bergen when this was the country’s biggest story, and he’s still hungry for answers. You know, in the United States, nobody is 100% sure who killed President Kennedy, and it’s the same with, the Prime Minister Olof Palme in Sweden was killed, that is too very internationally known on some cases.

(01:34) In my head, even if it’s not that dramatic in the political world, then I would say that the Ice Valley Woman is in the same sort of unsolved mystery as the killing of Kennedy and Palme. I am sure that still after 47 years there is somebody living who knows more about this case, perhaps even in Bergen.

(02:03) Now we are in the railway station in Bergen. At that time, it was a little bit different. Where we stand now there was a kiosk where you could buy newspapers and all that and you had something, luggage, to deliver there was that part, but today it’s luggage lockers, but at that time you have to deliver it to a man who took them behind somewhere, in the shelves in there.

(02:29) Because when you delivered the luggage here it was for some days and if you’ve gone past that time you had to pay. And so I guess this was some luggage that nobody had picked up, and of course the people here could read about this woman in the newspaper, and they told the police, and the police came here, and they found the suitcases.

(02:48) — These suitcases were here, they were put in here on the 23rd of November. — But hang on, she put the suitcases here on the 23rd of November, her body was found in the valley on the 29th — what about those six days? — Nobody knows what happened during those days. No reported sightings. She just checked in her luggage and left, perhaps to the Isdal Valley, perhaps somewhere else.

(03:16) — So Marit, what did the police find in these suitcases? — Oh, they found a lot. So there were wigs, glasses without an actual correction in the glass, just just a zero glass — just for show — just for show, obviously pointing out that this was a woman trying to change her looks now and then. And sophisticated clothes, different kind of clothes, coats, bathrobes, cosmetic articles.

(03:44) — So lots of fine clothing, she dressed well, she had a wig, for fashion, or for disguise? — And again, all labels were taken off the clothes and rubbed off the items. — So just like the labels on her clothes, and on the objects around her dead body had all been removed. But I don’t know what really what to make of that.

(04:08) — Well, there were one or two exceptions. They found a matchbox with the label on it, and it came from an erotic underwear postal order service in Germany. It’s a well-known chain of sex shops today. — Interesting if she’s removing nearly all the labels she’d leave that one on. A place that sells erotic underwear in 1970 sounds quite uncommon and if she was a woman travelling around, possibly alone, could she have been involved in the sex industry in some way? — Well, we just don’t know that yet.

(04:41) — OK, what else did they find in the suitcases? — The most significant thing for the police what they found in the suitcases were a note book with these codes. So they had her handwriting then, and they had some codes which they had to find out. — A code book? I mean, not everyone travels around with a code book.

(05:02) — Of course they understood this is something significant, we need to know what does this mean, so they contacted a specialist in the military intelligence service in Norway to help them. Another very interesting and important finding was a plastic bag with the name of a shoe store in Stavanger, which led them to Stavanger because they understood, OK, this woman must have been in Stavanger.

(05:30) Anyway, to find the suitcases here at the train station was a very important thing for the police. That’s a real box of treats for an investigating police officer. We’ve got wigs, we’ve got glasses with artificial lenses, books with some kind of code written on them, and this identifiable shoe shop bag from Stavanger.

(06:02) Where is Stavanger? — Stavanger is a city in the southern part of Norway. — Is the shop still there? — Yes, actually the shoe shop still exists. It’s a family business, we can go there. — We should. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that here was a woman who changed her identity, and I don’t know, she could have been a spy.

(06:21) So many leads all of a sudden, but one thing, before we get carried away with this, how are the police so sure that these were her suitcases, her belongings? I mean I know they had the labels scratched out but what else? — What they found there was a very clear fingerprint on the lens of a pair of sunglasses, and it matched with the finger from the dead body.

(06:45) — So she left two suitcases, which turned out to be full of odd clues, in the left luggage office, either to be collected later by her, as she never expected to die, or to leave a series of riddles for the police in the event of her death. — This is one of them, one of the questions that we will have to solve, that only she, or perhaps some other, can tell us.

(07:08) — We have to try to solve riddle upon riddle. The police were first on the scene in 1970 to try and solve all those riddles. And Marit, you’ve read pretty much all the police files from the time. — Yes, the woman we know as the Isdal Woman, the police traced all her movements around Norway. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves though.

(07:53) Let’s start with that shoe shop bag in her suitcase, and board a ferry. Well, we’re on the sun deck of an ocean-going vessel on a very established sea route between the city of Bergen in the west of Norway and Stavanger in the south, and it’s the first time in a few days that the rain has cleared and the sun has come out.

(08:32) I’m leaving the islands behind, the fractured landscape of the Norwegian archipelago, and coming out to more open sea. The low-lying islands with minimal vegetation, you can’t see a tree really until you go a bit further inland. There’s a lighthouse and a few scattered houses, but it’s pretty barren and pretty windswept and very exposed to the elements.

(08:55) But this route has a particular connection to our story and the Isdal Woman. — Yeah, it definitely has, because we know that the woman, the Isdal Woman, she was travelling this route at least two times. We know she left from Stavanger to Bergen once and she left from Bergen to Stavanger once, because we have seen the documentation in her tickets.

(09:20) — And she went by boat. — She went by boat. — Do we know what drew her to Stavanger? — No, we don’t know her motive for going there. What we know is that she was there several times. She stayed in hotels there, two hotels as far as we know. — Can you tell me a little bit more about Stavanger? — Well, it’s the oil capital of Norway where the oil industry with all the big companies have their main offices.

(09:51) And the workers of course, they live in and outside of Stavanger, or Bergen, going offshore to have their duty for a week, two weeks. Yeah, so let’s see what Stavanger can tell us. — Absolutely, yes. So it’s another city on the southern coast, but I have to say it’s just a beautiful journey, a very wild cruise we’re on here.

(10:14) There’s sea spray in the air, the waves are starting to break, we came out of the fjords with big mountains either side of us and now they’re lower islands and almost just bare rock. The waves are lashing against them, and the boat is starting to rock quite a lot now. Our hairdos are getting more and more messy by the minute.

(10:34) But you look like you’ve got good sea legs! I’m starting to feel a little bit queasy. — Well, I’m, as a good Norwegian, I have to survive this boat trip. — Yeah. — You too, actually. “We arrive in Stavanger in about 15 minutes. We kindly ask for our passengers…” We’re in the city centre of Stavanger on a cobbled street, next to Skoringen, the shoe shop.

(11:20) Just in front of the shoe shop is a trolley with a selection of rubber boots. So the rubber boots and this shop are key to what we know about her story. — Yes, because we’re not only following in the footsteps of the Isdal Woman, we know she was travelling from Bergen to Stavanger and back, but we’re also following in the footsteps of the police investigation in 1970, because when they found these suitcases in the railway station in Bergen, the only piece of evidence they found that actually led them

(11:55) somewhere outside of the railway station or outside of Bergen was this plastic bag with the name of a shoe shop here in Stavanger, and they linked that plastic bag to a pair of rubber boots which they found on the spot where the body was found. “You know this is where the wall, the back wall of the of the shop was, so we had stock i

(12:29) n there and down in the basement…” This is Rolf Rortvedt. In his late 60s, goatee beard and glasses, our first witness to actually see the Isdal Woman alive, as a young 22-year-old shopkeeper in 1970. The shop is called Oscar Rørtvedts skotøiforretning. — You’re getting there with your Norwegian! Maybe you should practice a bit more. The name was Oscar Rørtvedts skotøiforretning.

(12:58) — So when the Isdal Woman came in, I tried to sell her rubber boots, and they were standing over here in this corner. So we stood quite a long time just here you know, trying to sell it, and she was so, you know, used so much time, you know, trying to decide whether to to try to buy them or not, and she was walking to and from, and looking in the mirror, she didn’t seem worried or anything, just she couldn’t make up her mind sort of, and she came back next day and bought them.

(13:29) — You remember her? — Oh I do, yes, because it’s not every day that you sell a pair of rubber boots and a couple of days later, you know, police turn up and asking about this happening, and this person, so that was the reason I keep on remembering I think. — That was the interesting thing, that the police actually in her one suitcase found the plastic bag from this store.

(13:51) — I think it was the only, what do you call it, the connection to the other, the rest of the world you know? Because you know, she had put and cut away all the labels on everything so that was strange. — And what do you remember about her? — Well, she was a very, what do you say, well dressed, good looking, you know, just behaving very normal.

(14:12) But she used a lot of time buying boots. But I thought, oh yeah she’s a stranger, they’re different abroad in her country. And she spoke with an accent, she was talking with an accent. — She spoke English? — English, with an accent, yes. — So you could tell she wasn’t English? — Yes, yes, absolutely.

(14:31) — And Rolf’s clear about a few things: One, that she was very indecisive when she was buying these boots, and the other thing is that his observation was that she wasn’t Norwegian, he calls her a stranger. And Stavangar is a very cosmopolitan city today with lots of foreign visitors, but I wonder about back in 1970? — Oh, I think it was rare with foreigners in Stavanger in 1970.

(14:54) And I guess it must have been especially rare if she was a woman travelling alone. I mean, which we don’t know, but that must have been very seldom. Were there other things that strike you? — There was only one thing. She was a nice looking woman, but she didn’t have a good smell. We don’t want to talk negative about our customers, you know, but the police were asking, and s

(15:31) he smelled… garlic wasn’t that common at the time, so I think, I thought about it later, you know, maybe it was garlic that smelled? But she didn’t smell good. That was really the only negative thing I could say. So, is this a police report, Marit? — Yes, it’s a description here from when she came to your shoe store. — Is that me or my colleague? — It’s your colleague. Saying this woman was around 1 metre 70, dark hair down to the shoulders, and she had a b

(16:17) lue hairband, brown eyes… the lady was dressed in a dress and had a jacket of artificial fur, it was short, and she asked for rubber boots size 37. They were too small and it says that that you then went to the basement to find number 38. On the way to the basement the lady was shouting something after you, but then in a different language than English. It says and you presumed it was German but it could have been French, and that the lady looked like a French type of person, because she had a golden skin and a typical south European look.

(16:59) Your colleague here in the shoe store, she also told the police about a bad smell, a bad perfume smell. — Yeah. — That this woman, she definitely smelled something strange. — This is a strange smell, absolutely. So when the police started the investigation here in Stavanger, after finding this plastic bag with the name of the shoe shop, they obviously at first had to contact with the shoe shop, and then finding out that, hmm, this must be the same woman buying her rubber boots in this shoe shop.

(17:50) They started the investigation around the shoe shops, at the hotels nearby, and they quickly landed here at this nearest hotel, finding out that they had a woman as a guest for some days with a foreign look and… — Matching the description? — Matching the descriptions, under the name of Finella Lorck. — Aha, Finella Lorck, that’s an unusual name.

(18:17) It sounds… I don’t know, where… did she put a nationality down in her registration card? — Yes, she wrote on the hotel card that she was Belgian. But it’s quite surprising that she stayed here for nine days from the 9th of November till the 18th of November, so she actually left the hotel and left Stavanger on the same day as she bought the rubber boots, and we’re then just some days before she disappears for the last time.

(18:50) The Comfort Hotel, as it’s called now, has a retro feel. It is, and was, a simple mid-range hotel in Stavanger, just a few minutes walk away from the shoe store and the port. The curved reception desk is in a slightly different place when we met Tone Svanes, an elegant lady in her 60s with straight blonde hair, who used to serve at the desk.

(19:13) She’s also wearing rubber boots. — This is the exact spot that Finella Lorck stood on when I talked to her. — Really? — Yes. She was coming in and asking for the key, and she was staying in room 615, a very small single room without a bathroom and without toilets, so, and went straight into the elevator.

(19:37) — Working alongside her in the hotel St Svithun, as it was called then, was Ove Bernt Ramstrøm, the bell boy. This lady, she had a suitcase and a bag, so I offered her help. In a strange way, I remembered this lift. And we went up to the sixth floor. Do you remember, now we’re going with a lift upstairs, did you speak with her in the lift? — Yeah.

(20:17) I don’t know how the conversation started, but I remember I asked her where she came from, because she had an excellent special English accent when she spoke, and she said she came from Belgium. — Belgium. — Belgium, yeah. And I don’t think I’d met a Belgian before. I think it, first and foremost, it was the look of lady that paid my attention.

(20:49) — Yeah. — Yeah. — What about her look? — She wasn’t one of the crowd. A lot of make-up, red lips, and and very dark eyes and dark hair. And she was quite… serious? There was no smile. That’s what I can say about it. What do you remember of her face, or her look? She had very dark hair, in a way, also the way she… behaved, the person she was actually.

(21:35) She was not talking very loud, she had a silent voice, but I didn’t feel she was shy, I just felt she has an agenda, and she doesn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I can remember very well it was her sort of hat gear and I hadn’t seen anything like it before. But I have now. — Really? — Yes, some sort of fur hat, but it was a bit worn out.

(22:14) I’ve seen those hats in, for example, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and those were actually Soviet states in 1970. And also of course the teeth were the gold and everything, I’ve seen them with teeth all golden or silver, they added all their values in their teeth during the Soviet period so the values shouldn’t be confiscated.

(22:42) I would have thought of that today but I didn’t when I was 19. — Kazakh hat, gold teeth: the Isdal Woman would even stand out now in Stavanger with all its tourists, never mind in 1970. — That hat reminds me of a detail from the police report from the crime scene. There was a fur hat actually found beneath the body.

(23:05) And it’s a special thing about this hat, and I imagine it must be the same hat from the descriptions, in that fur hat the police or the forensics they managed to locate some small amount of petrol or fuel, just just a drop. — That’s significant, because we’ve been wondering how the fire got started, there was no obvious fuel left behind or any containers to hold fuel, no wood that burned which would have lit the fire.

(23:31) — They found some remains of burnt plastic in this boulder, but in my mind I think, well, if she or somebody carried fuel to lit the fire up there in a can or some cans, isn’t it strange that they didn’t find more remains of this fuel can, or cans? — It’s very strange. Either the cans completely combusted and there was nothing left of them in the fire, or…

(23:58) — Or somebody carried them away again. And that somebody could have been the murderer. If it was a murder. And also I can remember very well where I was presented the ugly photograph, photo from her being burnt in Isdal. And I felt where am I gonna go, take the elevator, take the stairs, run away? Because it was, I think it was so scary.

(24:25) It was so spooky. It was so awful just to, to see the remains of her body. Every time when I now hear of fires, where people getting burned, I can see that photo from my inner eyes. It comes to me, after 47 years. So I think it will never leave me. And I felt so sorry for her, in a way. Tone is talking about the police photos from the crime scene showing the Isdal Woman’s badly burned body in Ice Valley.

(25:11) — We’ve seen the pictures, and they’re shocking now, but they must have been even more so then. Norway also had a really low crime rate, it’s still pretty low, but scenes like these were pretty rare. — And in terms of the police, who was dealing with it at this early stage of the investigation, was it just the Bergen police? — Quite soon they realised that they needed help, so they called for the murder squads in Oslo and they came over to Bergen to help out.

(25:39) It was being treated as murder from the beginning. — They showed me the photograph because I told them that she couldn’t pronounce the esses in a proper way, in Norwegian we call it “lespe”. — It’s the same in English, a lisp. And so they asked, can you describe her teeth? And I said it was a little bit of a gap between her front, upper front teeth, and um they wanted to show me the photo then.

(26:08) — And it was no doubt it was the same woman who was a guest at this hotel? — Yeah. Because I recognised her teeth. — Tone has very detailed recollections that the Isdal Woman had a gap between her teeth and a lisp. Quite recognisable features. And her name, Finella Lorck, has stuck in her memory. The police must have got quite excited to suddenly have a name to go on, a nationality and a description, physical description? — They were, we’ll come to that.

(26:39) But wait: Tone remembers a bit more: But again, I can remember her signature very clearly, because I saw it twice. And she had a very sort of big F with the upper line was rather long, and also the L from the Lorck was some sort of an underscore for the surname. — How come you noticed this woman so clearly during her stay here, before she got a big story in the newspaper? — She was the only woman at that time I had seen staying alone as a woman in the hotel.

(27:27) — Let’s have a look at what the police actually got from this hotel in 1970. The Isdal Woman checks in as Finella Lorck from Belgium, and is recognised by a witness. So we know Finella was here. What we don’t know is what she was doing here. — Yeah, that’s the big question and interesting is we know from the hotel registration that she spent nine days at that hotel.

(28:03) That’s quite a long time. I mean, even now if you go somewhere to spend nine days somewhere, then you are on holiday normally. But that’s also strange, because why should she go to Stavanger for holiday as a foreign tourist in November? — It’s cold. — Cold and dark. — But that brings me back to the hotel registration card, which had her name.

(28:27) Was she a tourist at all, it would have said on there? — Unfortunately, we cannot go back to that card and have a look because it’s missing. It went missing during the investigation of the police.Tone Svanes mentioned something about that. She got the feeling that this was a person on a special task.

(28:46) — Hmm, she had an agenda, she said. — Yes. — She even remembers Finella Lorck’s handwriting, and her signature. — Yes, that’s another curious detail that the police focused on. And it was her handwriting on other hotel cards that is about to give the police their second major breakthrough. Could there be more than one Isdal Woman? — Next time on Death in Ice Valley, the mystery is about to multiply.

Bergen’s remote archive, Death in Ice Valley, Episode 3 — BBC World Service

Youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp1z_McON5g

Glasp/ChatGPT Transcript:

(00:12) From the BBC World Service and NRK, this is Death in Ice Valley Maybe it’s easier to conceal your identity if only you know who you are. It’s hard to disappear these days. Footprints are left in the real and online world. There’s always an email address, a text message, CCTV. In 1970, it was easier to live a life unchronicled, especially if you were trying to disappear.

(00:46) I’m Marit Higraff from NRK — And I’m Neil McCarthy from the BBC, bringing you Episode 3: The Remote Archive Thanks to all of you who’ve been in touch with your comments and thoughts. As we’ve said, our investigation is ongoing, and we’re looking into some of the suggestions you’ve made.

(01:11) If you think you have a specific lead to share with us on this case, let us know. — OK Neil we have a few more facts at our fingertips now after our trip to Stavanger in the south of Norway on the trail of the Isdal Woman. — That’s right, we have a name, and a nationality from her hotel registration form which is quite exciting.

(01:31) She’s one Finella Lorck from Belgium. What struck me is how vivid our witnesses’ memories are of their very brief encounters with the Isdal Woman in hotels or shops. — Well, you have to remember, Norway was a very different country back then. Foreigners really stood out. Iver Neumann is the director of Norwegian Social Research, and he can tell us more about that.

(01:58) — In Norway, immigration only started in the very late 60s so you know, most people walking around in Norway would be lily-white, and in small places most people would know one another. It was a much more transparent world, as it were, so that meant that everything that happened out of the ordinary was easier to spot than today.

(02:20) So yes, diplomats stood out in Norwegian society. People simply knew that they were foreigners. That wouldn’t happen today, when 29% of Oslo’s population is either foreign-born, or born of two foreign-born parents, so there’s been a huge change here, and you shouldn’t forget that. And a lone woman traveling around like that must have had business, and the business must have been of a specific kind.

(02:46) I mean, you’re not a teacher if you travel like that. You may be a spy, you may be a prostitute, you may be a travelling saleswoman, but there aren’t that many other possibilities. This became a big criminal case in Norway very quickly. Police were analysing everything, trying to make sense of the odd clues; like the wig, and the code note they found in her suitcase.

(03:12) And of course, they were checking out the information on the hotel registration form. — And presumably they’d be cross-checking that info with the Belgian police? — Yes, but it takes a little time before they get answers. I think we should first go back to the city of Bergen and pick up the trail. We know that she spent time there.

(03:31) We know that she left for Bergen the day she bought the boots. The reason for us knowing that is from the documents of the police reports, you know? — You’ve got a photocopy of something typed out, pretty old, in front of you there? — Yes, this is a witness statement, a witness interview with a taxi driver from Stavanger.

(03:52) This is a copy from the police files. So, it says that this taxi driver, on the 18th of November 1970, and it’s the same date that she checked out from the hotel, he was called for a ride from this hotel and out came a lady. It says here he seemed that the lady had a very sexy body, literally stands here.

(04:18) She was good looking, broad hips, he says. And she spoke a very poor English, but it was difficult for him to understand where she wanted to go, but after a while he understood that she wanted to go to the hydrofoil boat. So he drove the lady down to this quay where the boat was. And he carried a suitcase for her on board the boat, Vingtor the boat is called, and the lady herself carried the bag.

(04:49) This taxi driver said that he noticed that this woman had a gap between her front teeth when she smiled. So obviously she smiled to him. So, it’s definitely our woman. — It’s good witness testimony that, isn’t it? So, the taxi driver left the Isdal Woman on the hydrofoil so she could she could travel to Bergen on the 18th of November, then the next thing we know is she checked in her luggage at the left luggage in Bergen railway station on the 23rd, and then her body is found outside the city in the valley on the 29th of November.

(05:28) That’s our timeline so far. I’d really quite like to know what kind of a city Bergen was back then? What sort of a city was she mingling in, moving around in? We still don’t know who she knew there, but it’d be good to get a sense of what it was like. — Gunnar Staalesen, Bergen’s famous crime writer, is waiting for us at the quayside.

(05:57) — When I was 14, I was living in this part of the harbour. I went to the school over there, so I took that ferry to school every day. — It’s very picturesque and atmospheric here, looking out across the flat grey waters of the harbour. On the other side of the bay is a row of traditional wooden buildings painted red and white and yellow; what are they? — It’s called Bryggen in Norwegian and it’s the old trading hub from the days of the Hanseatic league, when German traders dominated this region.

(06:28) It’s one of the most famous sites in Bergen. — And then there are more solid stone houses rising up into the hills behind the city, and then above them, trees. — The reason that Bergen was a city almost 1,000 years ago, is the harbour, and it was a very good harbour. It’s sheltered by the winds by the mountains around here, and the high waves by the islands which is outside, and it’s just in between the two longest fjords in Norway.

(06:55) There’s Sognefjord north of us and the Hardangerfjord south of us, so a lot of people from these fjords, they came to this good harbour to change things that they wanted to sell each other, or they had a meeting place where a boy could meet girl or whatever could happen. Tone Svanes, the receptionist in Stavanger, observed that the Isdal Woman was travelling alone, but I wonder if her story could also be one of boy meets girl, maybe here in Bergen? If she stayed for long periods, she must have had contact with someone?

(07:29) — Yes, I’ve also been wondering if the Isdal Woman had a love interest in Norway. In terms of her murder, if she was murdered, because we don’t know that yet, the UK crime statistics, at least, show that about 50% of women are murdered by their partners or ex-partners, so amongst many possibilities, hers could have been a love story gone wrong, some jealous lover or something? — Yes, whenever a woman is killed the police always first speak to their partner.

(07:56) Of course they couldn’t do that here, because they didn’t know who she was. Looking around Bergen harbour, you can see dramatic narrow inlets from the sea that were formed by glaciers. They’re found all along Norway’s coastline and are called fjords. It’s easy to see why Bergen is also known as Gateway to the Fjords.

(08:15) — This is the big city fjord Byfjorden, which leads into Bergen, and there are said to be seven mountains around Bergen. Where we stand now, we can see at least three of them. — And where is the Ice Valley from here? — The Ice Valley is just between Fløyen mountain and Ulriken, and you can see the contrast very well because it’s green, there’s a lot of buildings on the Fløyen mountain, but the mountain of Ulriken, the part that we can see from here, is a bare, more or less treeless, mountainside.

(08:46) And of course if you took the… Here we go again! — Here it comes! — Here it comes again, the Bergen rain! That’s the third characteristic of Bergen, you have the Bryggen, you have the mountains, and you have the rain. — It’s never gone for long, is it? — Ah well, it comes and goes, but I must say you have had quite a hard week here when you are visiting now, it it can be a little bit more comfortable this way.

(09:17) — And how long would it take to walk from the town centre here to where the body was found? — Oh, where the body was found, it would take at least one hour, perhaps one and a half. Isdalen, or the Ice Valley, does look very remote and forbidding from the city today, with low hanging dark clouds gathering inside it.

(09:41) Was this a lively part of Bergen in 1970? — This was very lively. It was, the reason was that the passengers coming and going from the boats here, and very soon we are coming to the fish market of Bergen. You could see cod weighing, live cod, and usually it was the mothers, the women who came here and they pointed, “I will have that”, and then the fisherman took it up, knocked it in its head, and you got a live fish that you could take home and, quite fresh, make the day’s dinner.

(10:15) — After the police found her name in Stavanger, they were searching hotel records here in Bergen, trying to see where else Finella Lorck had checked in. Remember, she travelled from Stavanger to Bergen by ferry, so she probably stayed here. — But this is part of the modern time coming to Bergen, because what is typical for Bergen around 1970 is that the baby-boomers, the children who were born just after the second world war, they were going into the universities, there was a big student revolution going on,

(10:50) a lot of people was able to go to the university. She would, most likely, could have seen a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, against atom bombs, and against the European Union, because there was a big discussion, should Norway be a member of the union or not, and we had a big vote about that in ‘72.

(11:14) And the discussion was going on in the years before that. — So it was a real time of change and tumult and generational tension? — Yeah, and the young people were started to grow long hair, the girls had shorter skirts, they had hot pants for a period and the music was part of this town’s culture, we had some very good rock groups, so it was for young people a very lively town.

(11:45) — So it’s potentially quite an interesting time to be in Bergen for Finella Lorck in the last days of her life. But let’s get back to the investigation, in those first days after the body was found. — Yes, the police were just about to make a breakthrough. They took her hotel card, studied the handwriting, and searched in all the hotels of Bergen and in other big cities in Norway to see where else did Finella Lorck stay.

(12:16) Do you remember what the receptionist said at the hotel in Stavanger? — I can remember her signature very clearly and she had a very sort of big F with the upper line was rather long, and also the L from the Lorck was some sort of an underscore for the surname. Very distinctive handwriting. And what were they able to find out, that she hadn’t stayed anywhere else.

(12:43) There were no records of a Finella Lorck in any other hotels in Norway. The Norwegian police also checked the information on the hotel card with the police in Belgium, and they couldn’t find any trace of Finella Lorck, and reported back that her passport number was false. — OK, well that’s more than a bit suspicious.

(13:07) — What they did find was her exact same handwriting on many other hotel registration cards up and down Norway, and especially in Bergen, but… hold on… with seven different names. She had been traveling under at least seven different identities. Seven different names? She has to be a spy, right? I mean, this is starting to sound like something from the movies.

(13:37) — Well, it looks that way, but we’re not in Moscow or Washington, why here in Norway? We’d better take a closer look at what could have attracted a spy to Norway in 1970. — Well the period is called the Cold War because it was an almost war between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the US on the other, and they both had their allies, and one of the US allies was of course Norway.

(14:04) It was a founder member of NATO. NATO was the security organisation that kept the US and Europe together. The whole thing was about the East and the West feeling one another out. In 1968, liberal communists in Czechoslovakia wanted to do something else, and the Soviet model, and the Soviet Union answered by going in and occupying the place, and that increased tensions.

(14:31) Ships were, Soviet ships, were sighted off the Norwegian coast, for example, so 1970 is only two years after that, so we’re in the depth of the Cold War, which means that people are feeling one another out, but it also means that there is no immediate threat of a hot engagement. All those happen by proxy in the rest of the world.

(14:54) Africa, for example. — So how did that affect a city like Bergen at the time? — The biggest naval base in Norway had moved to Bergen in the early 60s, so what we saw in the streets of Bergen too were a lot of marine soldiers going out on leave for evening, and in the sea outside the Bergen there was regularly big NATO exercises, when warships from USA, from Germany, from England, were in the harbour very often in the weekends, when they had a rest in rehearsals.

(15:30) And there were submarines coming here. And during all the 60s and 70s there were a lot of sightings of submarines in the fjords in the western part of Norway, which most likely were Russian submarines. So to see if there was some marine installation used, because of course in the 1960s and 70s, the Cold War was more or less on its strongest.

(15:57) It was quite a big fear of a war against the Soviet Union. — Soviet submarines snooping around the fjords, whilst NATO conducts military exercises? Sounds like Bergen would have been a magnet for spies, with so much secret military intelligence in the air at the time. Spies like Finella Lorck and her aliases? — Could be, but we don’t know that she was a spy, and if she was, then who was she spying for? What was she spying on? Where was she really from, and what real evidence is there? — Did Bergen have an international airport at the time?

(16:34) — Yes, Flesland airport was open in 1956, so she could have come here by airplane, but to go by airplane at that time was quite expensive. — But her lifestyle seems to have been quite expensive, she lived in hotels, she dressed well… — Either she must have had much money herself or somebody must have financed her travels, and that also points at her being part of a criminal organisation, or if she was an international agent.

(17:21) No matter which world she was moving in, the reality is she died on that bleak hillside in the most suspicious circumstances. Now, often in these cases, the body itself contains clues, and I’m just thinking back; you told me that the body of the Isdal Woman was taken to the Gades Institute at the university hospital in Bergen for the autopsy, what happened there? — We should go there and ask.

(17:59) Professor Inge Morild is the chief forensic pathologist at the hospital. I’ll introduce you to him. One of his predecessors did the original autopsy. So this is the forensic autopsy room. — So would it have been somewhere like here that the Isdal Woman was brought? — Yeah, something like this. — And could you just explain what a forensic pathologist does? — A forensic pathologist tries to discover the cause of death in police cases.

(18:28) And that is, in Norway, people who are murdered, they are victims of, from accidents, suicides, so that is the first part of our work. The second part is identification, that people have to be identified, and that’s what we do, both in single cases and in mass disasters or big accidents. That’s the main part of the job, to try to identify people, so that’s why I’m involved in this case.

(19:01) — So should we have a look at the autopsy report for the Isdal Woman? What do you read out of it? — The funny thing is that the autopsy report is very similar to the reports we make today. It’s describing how the body was found and who found it, and how she was lying. And then there is a description of how she looked like when she was brought in to this institute.

(19:33) — And tell us how did they conclude concerning death cause? — It was to conclude that the fire was very important obviously, because she had soot in her respiratory tract, yes? — Yes, soot from the fire. — When you breathe in, in a fire, you breathe smoke, then you get soot in your airways.

(20:01) So when they saw that… and you also get a slightly red colouration of your skin caused by the carbon monoxide, and that is a very good sign of carbon monoxide poisoning. So that they concluded that that was probably the reason, the cause of death. But then, they got the results from the toxicology which revealed that she had, in addition to carbon monoxide, a lot of drugs in her blood, which is a barbiturate.

(20:29) So both the concentration of carbon monoxide and the concentration of barbiturates could be the cause of death. It’s an open verdict. It is also said that the burn injuries could have been contributing factors. But it’s open. And it is not concluded whether it was a suicide, or an accident, or a homicide.

(21:04) — This is significant, because I’d assumed up until now that she died of burns or of smoke inhalation and that was it, but now these pills are detailed in the autopsy. — It was in fact also the most common type of pill used by women who took their lives with an overdose, at least at that time. — A common form of suicide and yet a very strange place to do it, a strange way to do it.

(21:29) — Why make all that effort, and go into that, all the way into that desolate valley, and put herself on fire, and all these arrangements with the things she brought in that valley? So it would have been easier to do that just lying in your hotel bed, taking the pills. — Anyone who’s ever watched a crime drama nowadays will know that many identification cases are solved using DNA evidence.

(22:00) But the body was buried here in Bergen, as we know, and the body holds the evidence inside that zinc coffin. — Yes, that’s right, her grave is here in a Bergen cemetery. But it’s very complicated for all kinds of ethical, legal and practical reasons to exhume the body to take samples like tissue and bone for analysis.

(22:22) Any tissue samples, hair or teeth, could give us excellent new possibilities with our unique genetic code, DNA, that didn’t exist in 1970. It would be a massive breakthrough in our attempt to identify her if we were able to find any of her remains, then extract DNA and match it, if we find a relative.

(22:45) — It sounds like, without that hard scientific evidence, it’s going to be very difficult to find out who she was. — Just find the right key, there’s a lot of things in here… — I contacted Inge Morild when I began this investigation, to see whether there was any physical trace of the Isdal Woman in the hospital archives.

(23:06) — As you can see, they are numbered into years… — Listen carefully now. This is a recording in Norwegian of our original search. — We have the tissue blocks in boxes marked numbers 133 to 145, and 134 will be from 1970. So, I’ll have to risk life and limb to get up on a chair to reach that shelf! Let’s see how it goes.

(23:47) So, er… here are the tissue blocks and if we take that block there and then we look here at the number on the report we’ll find the one that matches. It may be that’s the Isdal Woman. Yes! Inside these paraffin blocks is preserved tissue from the Isdal Woman, from her internal organs. And when there is tissue there are cells, and from there you can extract a DNA profile, which can lead to identification, or the possibility of identification.

(24:34) I think it would be very exciting if there were a DNA hit in Europe or the world and we find out her identity. It’d be amazing and worth writing about in international journals. And here are the fingerprints. And a police drawing. It’s not today’s CSI style, but uh here… uh here are photos of the teeth and some x-rays.

(24:58) Before the body was buried they actually took out the jaws and teeth and kept them, in case she could be identified at a later date. We’ve got a key here to the remote archive, where old things are stored that haven’t been thrown away. We could search for the teeth of the Isdal Woman. It’d take a while to get there, but uh well, you just have to follow this.

(25:30) I’m sceptical about us finding anything I must say, but we should try. What was it like to be there, Marit? — Oh, it was so exciting. I mean just to find, to see these tissue samples from this dead woman, almost 50 years old samples, it was so exciting, and then knowing we are going to search for the jaw, hoping to find it…

(26:11) We’re now far below the hospital itself, in what is called the pathologist’s remote archive, which has a collection of tissue samples of the same type we saw from the Isdal Woman. But there are also some other things. Human remains, saved by colleagues who retired. This actually, the uh… that’s the jaw from an unidentified person.

(26:42) It’s not what we’re looking for. Let’s see… there’s one more in there… ‘Do not throw away, medieval skull’, this one says. There are several jaws here, but um… They’re all remains from unidentified persons. That’s why they aren’t destroyed, just waiting for a time when they can offer new information.

(27:14) Here… I see something marked ‘1970’. I’ll risk my life a little bit more, see if I can reach it… Oh, I beg for forgiveness. I do not mean to be disrespectful. Here it says 134/70. That’s her number! Now this really is exciting. My hands are shaking as I open it. Incredible! This is the jaw of the Isdal Woman.

(28:17) It is completely unbelievable. There are even some good teeth in place. See the fillings in the lower jaw teeth? We also see the gold there. So there’s no doubt this is the same jaw as on the picture. The same teeth. And here is her number. We’ll take these with us. Dagens fangst! Catch of the day! That truly is a big catch.

(29:27) Tissue samples, and the jawbone full of gold teeth. — It was an incredible and unexpected find. It’s high value in terms of DNA. We need to take this new physical evidence to scientific specialists, and we’ll also need the cooperation of the police and their laboratories. Let’s see what it can tell us today about her identity that it couldn’t in 1970.

(29:52) — An identity she was very good at covering up, with her many different names. So perhaps the science could reveal who she really was? But it’s hard not to think that the Isdal Woman was on a secret mission when she was here in Norway. — Yes, I agree on that. But what kind of mission? — Next week, on Death in Ice Valley: Shady goings on.

(30:16) — I today believe that she was murdered because she had not swallowed all the pills. She had the pills in her mouth, and I think the pills were forced into her.

(15) The Isdal Woman’s telltale tooth, Death in Ice Valley, Episode 4 — BBC World Service

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et_ForN1YhU

Glasp/ChatGPT Transcript:
(00:13) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. What if you’re not the only one who knows who you are? Names and identities are disguises you can slip into, and slip away. But what happens if those disguises start to slip, and cracks begin to appear? — I am Marit Higraff from NRK.
(00:40) — And I’m Neil McCarthy from the BBC, and this is episode four: Telltale Tooth. The Isdal Woman, whose burnt body was found on a mountainside near the Norwegian city of Bergen, was not just called Finella Lorck as we originally thought she was, but she had at least seven other identities.
(01:06) What were the names and the nationalities? You’ve got the hotel registration cards here Marit. — Yes. — What names did she go under? — She had quite sophisticated names actually, I would say so at least, uh like Alexia Zarna-Merchez, Genevieve Lancier, Elisabeth Leenhouwer… that’s sophisticated names, but also Claudia Tielt, Vera Jarle, Claudia Nielsen, and later in the investigation they find out that she also stayed at a hotel in Paris under the name of Vera Schlossneck, so just another identity.
(01:49) Finella Lorck was was a Belgian, made-up identity, what about these? — Well, she is saying that she is from Belgium on all of them actually. — You’ve got the copies of the original hotel registration forms here. — So here we have copies of different hotel registration forms found by the police to be written by the same woman in 1970, and they are from different hotels in Norway, different cities, with different identities.
(02:24) But again, handwriting experts concluded they are written by the same woman. We know that she visited Norway two times in 1970. She was there in March-April, and then she came back in the autumn. First thing, presumably, the Norwegian police consulted the Belgian police what did they find? -And the Belgian police reported back that none of these identities were real, and the passport numbers were all false.
(03:00) Here we have the first one, Alexia Zarna-Merchez. But this is written in German, so I don’t understand it. — Yes, that’s significant: She writes, on most of the hotel cards she is using German. — Even though she’s saying she’s Belgian? — Yes.
(03:19) We can see here she fills in the date of birth. Here she says she is born November 1943. It changes a little bit, somewhere she puts in 1945, somewhere she puts in 1942… — Which would make her between 25 and 30 in 1970, yeah. And what did she put for her purpose for visit? — Well, it’s also changing a little bit.
(03:52) Here she writes that she’s trading with goods “Handelsverkehr”, in German it means trading with goods. But here, the next one, with identity Claudia Nielsen, she writes that the purpose for staying in Norway is “Berufsverkehr”. First of all, she writes it wrong in German, I’m speaking German fluently, and she writes “Berufverkehr”, w
(04:14) ithout an s. That’s wrong. And the second interesting thing here, this… this is a word that doesn’t exist. It says she’s “trading with professions”, so it’s a non-existing profession. So these small language faults in German writing shows me, at least, that she wasn’t a native-speaking German, it must have been a second language.
(04:44) — Who else have we got here? We’ve got Claudia Nielsen, then we’ve got Claudia Tielt, place of birth Brussels… — She’s born in 1943, and she says her occupation is that she’s handling antiques. — An antiques dealer. So it points towards, yeah, trades or business, at least in what she writes. And purpose for visit here? — Tourism. — Tourism, aha. OK.
(05:11) — She also writes on the different cards, she has to fill in the question where was, where did you last time stay, and what’s your next stay. And here it says, for example, my last stay was in London. Interesting. My next stay is in Oslo. — Yeah, OK so she’s come from London? — This one, she says last day was Brussels and next stay is Trondheim, a city in Norway.
(05:37) — So these are her routes; it’s hard to know at this stage what’s true and what’s false in this information on the cards, but it certainly gives a sense that this was a woman who travelled around a lot, internationally not just within Norway. We’re putting all the names and the hotel registration forms for you on our Facebook group, and also on the website at bbcworldservice.com/deathinicevalley.
(06:05) Now here’s another one below… Elisabeth Leenhouwer. But the writing here is very different from all the others, the others are rather controlled and quite an elegant script, whereas this is rather large letters, and it’s not joined up and a bit sort of clunky, the writing. — A very interesting thing with this card is that the handwriting experts concluded in 1970 that it’s the same person writing this form but trying to mask out her real handwriting, so it’s…
(06:38) you can see if you really study it, you can see how she she’s fighting with each and every letter. Some letters are small, some are big, she’s really concentrating on writing, and it’s more… it’s n
(06:57) ot a fluid handwriting, it’s more… — Yeah, it’s almost like she’s trying to write not in her own hand. What my eye is picking up here at the bottom, which is the administrator’s written her date, basically her date of arrival in the hotel is the 19th of November 1970, and this hotel is called the Hotel Hordaheimen. So the 19th, and then she was last seen on the 23rd of November, when she checked in her luggage at the the railway station, and then her body’s found on the 29th…
(07:24) so could this be the last place she stayed? — This is for sure the last place she stayed. She stayed there from the 19th of November till the 23rd of November, so this is actually her last check-in, with the identity Elisabeth Leenhouwer, and writing a masked handwriting. Why? Why does a person do that? — Perhaps she’s being pursued at this point, perhaps she’s afraid? Here she is, disguising a disguise.
(07:59) — Well, that’s what I think too, that she must have been afraid of something on this last check-in, in hotel Hordaheimen, and just some few days before she disappears. — Maybe she knew time was of the essence. How does somebody get hold of so many passports if they aren’t a spy or a criminal? It’s really hard to get solid documents. — Yes.
(08:26) So suddenly the police were presented with not just a possible murder case but something much bigger possibly involving espionage, or organised crime. — So can we speak to any of the police officers who worked on the case? Carl Halvor Aas, who took us up to the crime scene at Ice Valley, didn’t remain on the case, and most of the other officers have died, unfortunately.
(08:47) There is somebody else, though, who was close to the police during this period, and is a very important witness to events. He’s not in Norway, though. He’s somewhere much warmer. — Oh yeah? — He’s in Spain. You’ll have to meet me there, if he’s willing to meet us. — I love Spain! Hello, welcome to sunny Spain! — Thank you! It was snowstorm in Norway and it was, it was a huge problem on the airport uh getting the planes off for de-ice, you know, there was queues and we were staying… I was sitting two hours in the plane just on the ground,
(09:33) and for a while there I thought, I’m never going to reach Spain today! I will not see Neil today! This is quite a contrast from the the bleak winter in Norway. We’re under the blue skies of the Costa del Sol in the south of Spain. We’ve got the mediterranean sea lapping at our feet, in the distance you can see Gibraltar, the mountains of Morocco, Marbella, a town here in the south, but we’ve come here for a particular reason.
(10:10) — Yes, strange but the Isdal Woman brought us here to a key witness, so to say, from Norway. Knut Haavik. How’s my pronunciation? — You’re almost there. Knut Haavik. He is a former crime reporter for Norway’s biggest newspaper, VG. He was, back then in 1970, working as a senior crime reporter and writing a lot about the case.
(10:40) — So he was right there, at the time, following events? — He was. He knows the case very well. — It’s funny isn’t it, because this place also has a certain notoriety, because it was known as the Costa del Crime, because many British criminals and gangsters came here to evade justice and have a a safe haven, a quiet life by the sea, the Costa del Crime, here in the Costa del Sol.
(11:05) And this is where Norway’s most famous crime reporter has come to settle in the winters, no? — Yeah, like many other Norwegians, they live down here during the winter time when it’s, the weather is bad and it’s cold back home, and they have their sort of winter residence here, and he’s one of them. I think he’s expecting us.
(11:30) “In 300 meters, at the roundabout take the second exit onto urbanization Calle Cuidad de los Periodistas…” — She sounds very excited! So, Calle Cuidad de los Periodistas means city of the journalists road, and it’s the one that we missed before, we went on a wild goose chase around the back of some neighbourhood here. Former crime correspondent Knut Haavik has the look of a man who’s lived a full life.
(12:07) He’s in his 70s, has short blonde hair, and wears tinted glasses, and he leads us to the veranda of his winter house for the interview. The sun glints off the turquoise waters of the swimming pool as we settle into comfortable lounge chairs.
(12:25) — You were a senior reporter in Norway’s biggest newspaper back then, and you had good sources. — Yes I was. I think I was the only journalist who had access to the police headquarters. And the secret police were in the top level of the building, so it was impossible to get into that area, but they were eating lunch in the same lunch room as the other, the rest of the crime police investigators.
(12:55) So I met them in the lunch room. so I got some good sources in the secret police as well. So I think it was just a couple of days after they found this lady in the campfire, and I knew that at least two of the members of the secret police went to Bergen, but the local police didn’t admit that. I think they were looked as rivals or something. — So you’d covered many criminal cases.
(13:31) So did this one really stand out? — Yes. I have thought about it since 1970. And I think this case has followed me all the time during my career. And when I wrote that she hasn’t swallowed all the sleeping pills and they had some in the mouth, I was more and more convinced that somebody had put the sleeping tablets in the mouth.
(14:08) And if you’re falling in a campfire, you will not be laying there, even if you’re half-conscious. So that’s my theory, that, OK, it could be suicide; she tried to get off the hook from the organisation she worked for, or she has been murdered. I today believe that she was murdered, because I think the pills were forced into her. What do you remember from the atmosphere, those days when these first rumours came, first stories about a woman found dead in a desolate valley outside of bergen, I mean it was kind of shocking details coming out, severely burned, the body,
(15:03) what do you remember about, I mean people must have been talking about this case, and police were talking about this case? — I and a lot of my colleagues thought it was a spy case. When they they found this notebook with a code, and she used eight or nine different passports, and she used e
(15:36) ight or nine different identities, and she wear wigs, and she did everything to cover her… and I wonder, and how did she gets so much money? Because fake passports are expensive on the black market. And travelling around, Norway, Paris, Norway again… it was an absolute mystery. And I can’t, even today, understand how she got so much money? From where? I think she was a spy.
(16:11) — If she was a spy, it seems a strange way to be killed, to be forced to take pills? — Unless it was made to look like a suicide? — Haarvik’s pretty convinced that the secret police had some involvement from the start on the case, but we don’t know in what capacity. I mean are there any secret police around from the time who we can talk to? — There is one legendary agent, very old now, but he rarely gives interviews.
(16:35) They are quite, well, secretive, as Knut suggests. — But if they were involved, then there must have been a reason. They must have known something. I’ve heard that when intelligence agents or spies are caught in the field, then it can be hushed up by both countries. What about secret police files? The Isdal Woman may have one, and it may have some answers, because all we have are questions about her.
(17:02) — Well, the secret police actually denied any involvement in the case for years, and just a couple of years ago, they admitted that there is actually a case file for the Isdal Woman in the archives. One of the things that got me most excited when the police opened the suitcases in Bergen railway station, amongst the wigs and the clothes without labels were these what they called code notes.
(17:31) And we’ve got a copy of the code note in front of us here, which is all handwritten. — Yes, this is a copy of the original note from the suitcase. — And it’s sequences of, as you’d expect in code, l
(17:50) etters and numbers, so you’ve got 10 M, then you’ve got 11 M, 16 M L… what did they do with this code note? — Actually, they needed help because they didn’t see any system here so they needed help from an expert, yes a codebreaker from the Norwegian military intelligence service. And he didn’t spend much time on it, he cracked them quite quickly. — What was he able to see here? What was going on in these codes? — He managed to see the pattern, and that
(18:24) these numbers… the first row means a date, for instance 11th of… then comes an M, M could be March, or it could be May, and interesting enough, March, May all months are the same first letters in German, English and also Norwegian. He managed to find this out, combined with the hotel registration forms in Norway, because they knew that she stayed, for instance, in Bergen between the 24th and the 31st of March.
(18:55) So then he managed to see, OK, 24 M 31 M B, meaning this is her stay in Bergen, B for Bergen. — And that matched the registration card. It’s written out, it looks to my untrained eye like a code, but it’s more, yes, it’s more a sort of personal shorthand note of where she’s been, a record. — And through this travel route, we can call it that I think, they were able to find that she was in Paris for instance, and they found another identity in a hotel in Paris with the same handwriting.
(19:29) There she called herself Vera Schlossneck. So it really brought them something, this. And did he find anything more difficult to crack? I mean, there is some strange configuration of numbers and letters here at the bottom. ML 23 N MM. — Well, he didn’t manage to crack that last one.
(19:58) So I’m not a code breaker, but for me this is an interesting one, because 23 is the last day she was seen alive. — 23 N would be 23rd of November. — So if this follows the same system, 23 N means the last day she’s seen alive, and the day that she leaves the hotel in Bergen.
(20:23) So what then does ML at the start mean, and MM at the end mean? You can see the codes in our Facebook group, and on the website. The place she spent most time began with the letter R, but we are not sure where that is. Who knows, maybe one of you will be able to work out the uncracked bits of codes for us? — And of course the code note was found inside the suitcases.
(21:12) We’ve mentioned a few of the items that were discovered inside them, but we thought this might be a good moment to go through some of the others that were listed in the police document. There was another shoe shop bag, from Rome this time, there was a Norwegian road map with the names of railway stations between Bergen and Oslo listed at the top in her handwriting, there was a compass. — And there was cash: 500 German Deutsche Marks, quite a lot of money in those days.
(21:40) There were slippers, pretty worn out, but the word Italy could be made out on the label, and there were steel spoon. — There was a sewing kit from a hotel in Geneva in Switzerland, and also some cream for eczema from a pharmacy in Bergen, but the names on the label had been erased. — None of these items gave the police any useful answers.
(22:06) They investigated all the foreign leads, but they had to do it from Norway and had to trust the answers they got from local police abroad. — Some of you have been asking where her belongings are, and if we’re going to look at them more closely.
(22:22) But everything has been lost over the years by the police. And the passports, they must have existed, but they were never found. Now, let’s get back to today, and our mission to identify the Isdal Woman. We have her jaw, and her teeth. We need to take them to some specialists. We want to find out if we can get a DNA profile.
(22:46) But first off, I’m thinking we should talk to somebody who studies odontology, and knows about the structure and diseases of teeth, to see what might be revealed. There was a lot of gold work in the teeth, remember, which might tell a story. — Yes, we should start with one of the experts in that field here in Oslo Professor Sigrid Kvaal works closely with the identification team of the Norwegian national police. — In this box, I’ve got the jaws from this woman, which has been preserved.
(23:19) I’ve got an upper and a lower jaw. What strikes me when I look at it, is that it has got a lot of gold work, and she has got extensive dental treatment, but that is what I would have expected in 1970.
(23:43) We’ve got teeth which has got ordinary amalgam fillings, and we’ve got teeth which has got gold crowns on them, and we got some front teeth which has got gold crowns and a white, what we call a facing, the side towards you which you look at when you’re smiling is white. — But the dental, the healthcare of the teeth? — There has been teeth extracted earlier in her life, but in the later years she has had extensive dental treatment, and expensive treatment.
(24:18) — And are you able to read into the work that’s been done on the teeth, whether it would be, I don’t know, European, south European, Middle Eastern, Asian…? — Um, no, not quite, but I can do some exclusions. It doesn’t look like Scandinavian material, and I qualified in London in 1978, and I’ve never seen work like this done in England, and I was there at about the same time as when she died, so I would have seen gold work like this.
(24:50) I know in Germany they do a lot of gold work on the teeth, because the German, as far as I have understood it, the german Krankenkassa, that’s the national health service or equivalent in UK, um they don’t give financial support to amalgam fillings, but they will give financial support to gold fillings. So my suspicion is that she is from Germany.
(25:22) I had contact with a German dentist, and he says that this work could have been done in Germany. It could also have been done further east in Poland, or maybe even down in Austria, or in the Middle East. — This is good. So the teeth may tell a tale after all. The teeth may well be the best evidence we have in finding out who the Isdal Woman really was.
(25:50) Let’s run that German gold theory past Iver Neumann, our intelligence historian. — Well, that’s a typically East European thing to have gold in your teeth, and it was not unheard of in Norway, you know my mother was a dentist, and sometimes she would make one of these fillings of gold, but amalgam was the thing, so you would have these black things that are now sort of out of fashion, you know, now we would have sort of white plastic instead, much nicer, but gold was a telltale that you came from from Eastern Europe, or maybe from some other part of the world.
(26:21) And that would also fit, you know, in this particular case, you know, if you have a female spy in Norway travelling around, I mean my money would be on her being East German or maybe Polish, because there was a division of labour between the different intelligence services between north and east and south in Europe, and it would be much easier for a Pole or an East German to fit in, in Scandinavia and northern Europe than it would for someone from, say, Bulgaria.
(26:52) In those days, that is. This was before people started migrating on a big scale in Europe. — Let’s return to the story in Bergen in 1970. We know from the registration cards that the Isdal Woman stayed at different hotels under her different false names. — I’m picturing a glamorous, olive-skinned woman with brown eyes, fine clothing, and a wig, and smelling of garlic, moving from hotel to hotel on some secret mission.
(27:22) — Yes, the police went into each hotel to talk to staff to try and find out what she was up to. We are now by the Hotel Hordaheimen, and we can see up there on the fourth floor in the corner, that’s the balcony of the last room where the Ice Valley woman actually stayed, because in this hotel she was, it’s the last place where she was seen alive.
(27:50) Six days after checking out from this hotel, she was found dead in Isdalen. The last reliable witness to see her alive was actually here at this hotel, that’s for sure, that’s what we know, 47 years later. — We are going to enter this room, and this is the one that she stayed in.
(28:14) And from 406 you can pretty much see the whole street. You can see the beginning of the street, and the end of the street. — Good vantage point. So a room in the corner of the hotel building for Elisabeth Leenhouwer, the Isdal Woman’s final identity before she died. Here she had a good view down both the adjacent streets outside.
(28:33) I wonder, was she being followed at this point? — Or maybe she had the feeling she was being followed? — My name is Ann Rita Hovden and I’m the hotel manager, and I’ve been working here since 1993. — My name is Olaug Sangolt and I’ve been working here since 1972 at the reception desk.
(28:56) — You started working here actually only two years after she was found dead. — I had one girl, she said that the breakfast was not included in the room rate at that time, but she did always go for breakfast and bought the breakfast, and she was very elegant, when she came down to the breakfast room, and she had a very special perfume. — Yeah, a very strong scent. — Yeah, very strong scent.
(29:27) — And in what way? — It’s… I’ve been told it’s, it was kind of spicy, like an oriental scent. That strong scent again, like in the shoe shop in Stavanger. No mention of garlic this time, but spices. — She was smoking. These long cigars, quite long cigarettes that the Norwegians were not used to at that time.
(29:58) — So also the housekeeper who cleaned the room, the few times she was allowed in, she could also smell the perfume quite heavily in the room. — But you say the times that she was allowed in to clean, was that not routine? — No, she had the sign on the door that she didn’t want to be disturbed. But the thing is that when she left the room, the chair was always inside the room.
(30:25) She moved the armchair in the room outside into the corridor when she was in the room, but when she was away the chair was in the room, so when the chair was in the room, the maids went in to give her new towels and so. They were probably not allowed to do it, but they did it anyway. Yeah. So it’s kind of interesting how she moved the chair around.
(30:52) — Just to be clear, so the chair was outside when she was in? — Yeah. — And inside when she was out. And just out in the corridor? — Yeah. — An armchair? — Yes. — This, this, I mean they’re quite big armchairs. — Yeah. — Like, like a signal of something? — Yeah, that’s what I thought as well, yeah, yeah. And nobody was bothered about that, that was just okay? — I don’t think so, no. They found it strange of course, but she was a bit strange, a bit different.
(31:26) And then she left this hotel and was never to be seen again before they found her dead. — The story tells that our receptionist called her a taxi and that the taxi came, turned, took a u-turn in the… around the corner from the hotel, and then stopped in front of the building and she went in.
(31:52) — So here was a woman who certainly behaved strangely in the Hotel Hordaheimen, moving the furniture outside the room, getting plenty of attention from the staff, and again I think back to her hotel registration card from this very hotel, where her handwriting went from the rather controlled, elegant handwriting, to a sort of very strange erratic scrawl, almost, like her disguise had slipped or something in this hotel.
(32:14) Feels like something wasn’t quite right for her. I still can’t help but think that’s unusual behaviour for a spy who’s supposed to blend in and be inconspicuous, she seems to be getting far too much attention.
(32:31) I mean, I know about this wig and the disguises and the many names, but the spy theory does also sound a bit speculative at the moment. Is there anything more concrete? — Well, after a lot of perseverance, we finally gained access to the secret police archive in Oslo, and we were the first journalists to see the file of the Isdal Woman. Crime reporter Knut Haavik certainly believed the secret police knew more about the life and death of the Isdal Woman and kept it quiet. Now it’s time to find out what they really knew.

Was the Isdal Woman a spy? Death in Ice Valley, Episode 5 — BBC World Service

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kkGalEdlgY

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:11) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. Although the much-loved seabird of the Antarctic lives in the southern hemisphere, in the 1960s and 70s its namesake was taking to the skies off the Norwegian coast, way up north. — “Three, two, one, ignition.
(00:37) “ — And the Russians were watching. Closely. Episode five: The Penguin. — I am Marit Higraff — And I’m Neil McCarthy. Now, Marit, you’ve been examining this case closely for a couple of years now, trawling through police files and talking to witnesses, but there’s one place that took a lot of perseverance to get into.
(01:00) The secret police archive. — Yes, that’s right. It guards its secrets well. But along with my colleague Ståle Hansen, who’s the documents expert on the case, we were granted permission to look at the secret file of the Isdal Woman. Well, we’re here at the secret police in Norway, holding the file, the secret file of the Isdal Woman.
(01:32) We see here they’re marked with ‘Secret’. — Yes, that’s the classification from 1970, and Secret in the Norwegian system, it’s the second highest classification. The first document here is marked the Bergen Politiet, the police in Bergen, so they are also documents that we have in the police investigation file.
(01:58) So there aren’t very many documents here that are actually produced by the counter-intelligence police. — How was it to be inside the secret police archive? — It was exciting to look inside the file, especially since journalists hadn’t been allowed to see it for so long. We had high expectations that we’d find some hidden secrets inside, but were surprised that it was a very thin file, which didn’t seem to offer us much.
(02:31) But there was one very interesting classified document. This is a document, it’s dated December 22nd 1970, and it tells about a fisherman, a local fisherman in Tananger who claims that he has seen the woman close to his home and at the same time as the Norwegian defence tested a new missile system, the so-called penguin missile system.
(03:03) She’s supposed to have been watching these missile tests at several different times, and she is supposed to have been in Bergen and Stavanger at the same time as the missile tests were conducted, and that is of course very suspicious. — And very interesting. — It’s very interesting, because it’s more than just speculation.
(03:28) You know, they have done some real investigation around this, and it would suit well the other items that the police discovered, you know, I mean the the fake passports, the wigs, the unprescripted glasses and so on. That points towards that she might have been some sort of intelligence agent. At the top it says unidentified body of a woman found in Isdalen.
(04:04) At the end of this document, it says that a certain police officer in Stavanger is supposed to make an interrogation with the fisherman Berthon Rott, today, 22nd of December 1970 it says. — Yeah. — It’s the same day as the document is dated. — Yes. And the problem is that the documents from that interrogation is missing.
(04:33) It’s not to be found in the police investigation files, it’s not to be found in the counter-intelligence police, so that document, which would be extremely interesting to hear what this fisherman Berthon Rott actually saw, is missing. That’s quite a coup, to find such specific intelligence. Maybe we could find the fisherman who reported the sighting of the Isdal Woman to the authorities, if he’s still alive, or his family.
(05:10) Where is Tananger? — It’s a small fishing port near Stavanger in the south of Norway, where we were earlier in the footsteps of the Isdal Woman. I’ve already started looking for Mr Rott, but first, let’s hear a bit more about the Penguin missile testing program mentioned in the secret service documents.
(05:29) — It’s a funny name for a presumably devastating missile. I’m assuming it didn’t waddle, but the point is it didn’t go in a straight line. — Well, I’m no weapons expert, but yes, it was a guided missile that could seek its target. It was cutting-edge weapons technology at the time, and Norway was a pioneer in this field.
(05:49) Remember, Norway was on the front line of the Cold War as a Nato member, and had a land border with the Soviet Union. Iver Neumann, director of Norwegian Social Research, is our expert on the period. — Norway is a small country, but it has a tradition of producing stuff that is militarily useful. So the Penguin came out of a small but fairly advanced weapons industry, and Norway is still doing this by the way.
(06:17) We still have cutting-edge weapon technology that is filling niches around around the world’s markets. So yes, Penguin was at the forefront of that. “The firing range is situated in the southern part of western Norway. The launcher building is about 50 metres above sea level. The missiles are fired from here.
(06:37) “ — What sort of a target would that have been for the Soviets to find out more? — Well, one doesn’t need to know anything about new weapons in order to understand that they’re targets because anything that can change the status quo would be of interest to an intelligence service, and what they would like to know would be, how advanced are our production timelines, what can the weapon do, you know, specifically, how far can it shoot and how quickly can you get this stuff deployed etc, so all this would be a
(07:10) top priority for any intelligence service. — “Countdown starts at x-minus two hours after the missile has been thoroughly checked.” — And do we know if the Penguin program was infiltrated by spies? — The intelligence service wouldn’t do its job if it didn’t spy on this kind of thing, that’s what they are paid to do.
(07:30) “During firing trials, it is necessary to clear the danger zone and guard the area according to usual practice. This is performed by gunboats from the Norwegian navy. Incidentally, these are of the type on which Penguin later is to be installed.” — We needed a better weapon. — Henry Kjell Johanssen led the development of the Penguin program, and observed the missiles being fired from the test site near Tananger.
(08:05) — But none of the of the western countries had an anti-ship missile developed. The Russians had done so, a very large, more than two tonnes missile, so in the early 60s we started developing a very light one because these boats we had was very small and we had to have many missiles, and they had to be light.
(08:30) — “During the last 10 minutes before firing, it is checked that no undesired ships are within the danger zone. At x-minus five minutes, the security officer makes sure that no ships will enter the danger zone before the firing operation has been completed, and then gives the all clear to the firing officer.
(08:49) “ — Almost every time a Russian fishing vessel or a small ship got in trouble with the engine and stopped in that area, very close to the firing range, so that they could pick up the signals from the telemetry and they could see the trajectory and get some information about the status of our development. So there was always somebody there.
(09:18) — “The firing officer informs all positions that it is now x-minus five minutes. In the telemetry room, the tape recorder is started.” — And I remember once, which was rather scary, because the big Sverdlov class cruiser, enormous Russian ship with lots of large guns… -
(09:49) “30, 29, 28, 27…” -…stopped right outside the firing range, and I was on board this small, fast patrol boat with a missile, and it was going to fire. And at that time we saved the missile, we had the parachutes and floating bags so at the end of the trajectory, we could save it. — “…three, two, one, ignition.” And he took up his mic, the captain, and said very clearly: ‘If you take the missile, I will shoot.
(10:23) “ And it’s a small ship, with this enormous Russian ship. Of course, they didn’t do anything. — “During this particular trial firing, the missile performed as planned the following manoeuvers…” — I think what they did was to monitor the trajectory of the missile, and range of missile, picked up all the telemetry data etc, and then they went off.
(10:44) — “Elevation on firing 15 degrees. After 200 metres, flattened out, then continued to climb slowly. At 4.2 kilometres, changed direction to the right…” — Of course, it was very important for them because if we were successful in developing the Penguin missile, we would have enormous power, more than 100 missiles against an invasion, oh, that is not a simple thing for the invader.
(11:15) It would be rather dangerous to attack Norway. — So the Penguin was Norway’s, and the West’s, prized light missile system. A prize for the Soviets too, if they could get their hands on it. Here’s Iver Neumann again. — I remember seminars, and when the Cold War ended and there was a thaw in East-West relations, and communism simply fell and was discredited, never to rise again in Europe, I would have supposed, and I remember seminars where elderly Russian officers were telling us about what
(11:50) they saw in the periscope when they were going into these, and these, and these fjords etc. And I remember one guy came and said, you know it’s so nice to be here because I’ve never set foot in Norway, but I must have watched the country 70 or 80 times. So this is just a routine thing, and it’s still going on, obviously.
(12:14) — When you were growing up in the 70s, did you see any periscopes of Russian submarines popping out of the fjords? — No, thanks God I didn’t, but I certainly grew up with these rumours about Soviet submarines sneaking around in our fjords, and especially up north in Norway where I come from, where I grew up.
(12:33) — And was lots of military up there as well, because you’re getting closer I suppose to the border with the Soviet Union? — Yes, I actually grew up in a military town where the Norwegian defence are having their soldiers posted, and where also Nato used this town; they come in there at least once a year to train in Arctic conditions, so yes, I was used to kind of, heavy military activity when I grew up.
(13:00) — And was there ever any tension, sort of Cold War tension, in the air that you remember back then? What I do remember, is that I got scared from news reports, about atomic bomb was a scary thing, because my hometown was obviously a target. — Yeah, because people have talked to us about an invasion coming from Russia, it would obviously move from the north of Norway and come down, so the Russians were all over that coastline with their surveillance, and we know they were definitely snooping around the missile
(13:28) tests. But was the Isdal Woman a Russian spy? That we don’t know yet. Her gold dental work certainly pointed us towards Germany or eastern Europe. We need to do some more tests of our own to find out more about her identity, and I’m thinking DNA: our unique genetic code. — Yes, so I took the tissue samples and the teeth we found at the Gades Institute in Bergen, to a laboratory in Oslo, for analysis.
(13:54) I wasn’t there with you for this, but what’s it like in a DNA lab? What are the conditions, what’s the setup? — It’s very sterile, and we weren’t allowed to go into the rooms actually, we had to watch them work through a glass window, you know. They don’t want these samples to be contaminated in any way, and we didn’t want that either, of course.
(14:24) — And you took the teeth and the tissue samples? — Yes. All experts say teeth give the best possibilities for DNA, but when they tested them, the results came back negative. It turned out that the teeth had been washed in some chemicals back in 1970. So our only hope was the tissue samples. Beate Schønenberger and Marguerethe Stenersen are both scientists at the Department of Genetic Kinship and Identity at Oslo University Hospital, and this is the moment when they analysed the results.
(15:03) Now I’ll push the buttons. This is the first tissue block. — The first sample. Which is it? — Let’s see… 97. That is the spleen. Wow, yes, here. There is something here. There is something here! Very good! It is a bit degraded in the heaviest fragments, but there are definitely results here. Good, you are clever! — Yes! So exciting, goodness gracious! Now we’ll have a look at the kidney.
(16:01) We can see exactly the same results on this one, and since we get the same results from both organs, it’s likely that the data is actually from the dead person, that we haven’t got contaminated samples. It only misses data in about two markers, so it’s practically a full DNA profile, so it is very good.
(16:29) — And we can see that it is a woman. — Yes, we can say that for certain. This doesn’t say much about who the woman is, for that we’d need a reference sample from a relative. But this is a good starting point, when we send it to the DNA registry. Yes. That’s quite an exciting moment. It’s like a missing piece of code, something unique to her, as if she’s telling us something.
(17:19) Were you surprised? — Yes, these samples were old, so clear results weren’t guaranteed in any way. This was a really significant moment, because a DNA profile can open many doors for us, and at the end, this is the key to her identity. Nils Jarle Gjervog from the Bergen police has been working on this case with us.
(17:42) He is the leader of the forensic department in Bergen and he is also a member of the identification unit at the National Criminal Investigation Service. So what can we do with the DNA? When we started, we think, OK, 50/50 if we get their profile or not, and we get a good profile, and then we can look into it and see some population, at least, where in the world can this woman come from.
(18:12) That’s the first. And if we are lucky we can compare with relatives, if somebody comes up and says, hey, this woman may be related to me, we can look into that. — And where are you searching for the matches, the DNA match? — The official way we go when when we get the new profile, we send out to Interpol a new what we call a black notice, that we have an unidentified body and that we have got a new DNA profile, so there are new information in the file, and we want them to look in their databases if there are matches there.
(18:58) So what we need is the DNA of a relative to make a match with the Isdal Women. So if anybody listening thinks they may recognise any aspect of her story, it’s worth getting in touch. In terms of the Interpol databases, I was looking into that. It’s quite interesting. Their database contains DNA submitted by police from offenders, crime scenes, missing persons and unidentified bodies.
(19:22) It’s been going for about 15 years, and has nearly 200,000 DNA profiles from more than 80 countries. But of course the Isdal Woman’s profile won’t be in that database, because she died in 1970. But if any of her relatives were for some reason entered into the Interpol database then we could get a hit.
(19:42) — Well, we might do. It’s a long shot, and the Interpol database is obviously not very big, but it will definitely be exciting to see what answers that we get. — I mean up till now we’ve had lots of witness testimonies, which are very valuable, we’ve had lots of speculation, and we’ve had some good strong documents from the police, but this is the first time we’ve got some real science, something sort of immutable, some scientific fact, her code which can’t really be challenged.
(20:13) So it feels like it’s, it is a great breakthrough and we are getting closer to whoever she is. — Yes it’s definitely very valuable for us. Anyway, at the end, if somebody out there comes along and telling, “I might be a relative of this woman,” this DNA profile is the key. — We can test them, we can match it with her profile, and then we’ll know for sure whether it is or it isn’t.
(20:42) I’ve also been thinking more about her age. She wrote down in her hotel registration cards that she was 25 to 30 years old, usually, on her date of birth. Now we know there was a lot of false information on those cards, there were false names, fake passport numbers, made-up professions and all the rest, but maybe her age is something she was less likely to lie about? I mean, it’s harder to fool people about how old you are.
(21:11) Can DNA help us pinpoint a person’s age? — No, DNA cannot, but that’s one thing the teeth can help us with. Here’s the odontologist Professor Sigrid Kvall in Oslo again. She’s got the original age assessment from the forensic pathologist who worked on the Isdal Woman case, Professor Bang, and she’s also conducted her own examinations on the teeth.
(21:35) — Professor Bang has written, both in English and in French, and I presume it was sent out to Interpol, and he did the initial examination in 1970. And he writes: “Between the central incisors in the upper jaw there is a distinct open space, the rather extensive restoration and distinct occlusal and incisal wear, also including the third molars, indicating that the person is likely to be older than 25 years of age.
(22:09) A special investigation of six teeth, based on the extension of the root transparency, indicates that the person most likely is in her thirties but it does not exclude the possibility that the person could be slightly below 30.” The examinations we have done afterwards is to do an age estimation based on the x-rays.
(22:36) The conclusion of that is the same as Professor Bang did, 47 years ago. — Professor Bang actually worked a lot on this case. It seems to me that he was quite a burning soul, it was a big case for him, he spent years trying to find some answers on the Isdal Woman case. — He’s got here, he talked to a dentist in India he talked to a dentist who’s practiced in Germany, he talked to a French colleague, so he’s really gone a long way to find out about this woman.
(23:15) But it still remains an open case. Still very much an open case. — It seems she was being truthful about her age. Teeth x-rays, then and now, show her age to be probably between 25 and early 30s. So she’d have been born between 1940 and ’45, as it says on her hotel registration cards. — Yes, born during the Second World War, and by the middle of the Cold War, Secret Police documents are saying she’s been spotted in Tananger, where the Penguin missile tests were taking place.
(24:03) We’ve arrived at the site where they tested the Penguin missiles in 1970. This would have been a secret place, where secret weapons were being tested. And just offshore, there were Russian vessels or Soviet submarines, up and down the coastline, trying to find out more about these missile tests, at the same time that the Isdal Woman was spotted also very nearby in Tananger.
(24:41) And Marit, is this the first time you’ve been up to this geographical spot in the story? — Yes, I’ve never been here before. — Yeah. — And I get, again, it’s kind of a creepy feeling of being back in the Cold War or something, seeing all these this ruins of military activity, thinking about the tests going on out here.
(25:05) — And the radar mast, you know, slowly rotating still, as if somebody’s listening, it’s still going on, but a very beautiful and dramatic spot as well isn’t it? The sea’s there, it’s catching the light, it’s silver and the waves are breaking on the shoreline, and here we are, looking out, as many people would have been back then on a Cold War world.
(25:29) How has the search for the fishermen been going? — Well, it turns out Berthon Rott died some years ago, but I’ve tracked down his son, and we have a meeting with him in Tananger. — Here, we could have up to like 40 trawlers for the shrimps, just here in the inner harbour, because they had a shrimp factory over there…
(26:03) — Sverre Rott, with straight fair hair and blue eyes, is in his 60s now. Clean shaven and wearing a well-ironed, white shirt he strolls along the boardwalk. Clapboard houses overlook the fishing boats bobbing about in the harbour, freshly caught crab and lobster roll around in large vats of boiling water on the quayside.
(26:22) His father used to fish out of this harbour. — Yeah, this was in 1970, and my father has just got his new trawler and he was working on his trawl to fix it, to repair it, and approaching him, when he was alone at the quayside, there walked a lady. Afterwards, he remembered about this lady, she looked Slavic, could be Russian, could be Romanian, but that was first he was thinking after he saw her speaking on the other quay with one of the officers at the MTB navy vessels, because at this time they were trying out
(27:06) the Penguin rockets for the Norwegian defence system. — So this woman, first she came down here where we are walking now? — Yes. She came and she looked around when she was out there, and he was repairing the trawls. She was nicely dressed, and nice hair, he said, and didn’t say a word, but he became suspicious when he observed her afterwards speaking with one of the officers, why she should, he always asked, because she was speaking some time with him, it wasn’t like two, one minute, it was longer time.
(27:42) And why she should speak with him so long time? It was suspicious. And he was 100% sure, I’m 99% sure, but he was sure that he discovered the Isdal Woman. — The police drawings and descriptions of the Isdal Woman published in the newspapers left Rott in no doubt it was the same woman he’d seen on the quayside a few weeks before, and that’s what made him call the police.
(28:14) — The Secret Police file didn’t mention that the Isdal Woman was talking to a naval officer, just that she was spotted in Tananger during the tests. Sounds more like a rendezvous, doesn’t it? — Yes, and Tananger is very remote. For a foreigner, a nicely dressed woman, to come out there alone and then stand talking to an officer for a long time, seems strange.
(28:38) — Could she have been having a relationship with an officer, or was she really getting secret intelligence in plain sight? — His theory was that she had, this man she was talking with, could be an accomplice. That was what he believed. — An accomplice in what way? — With her. — And he was a Norwegian? — Most likely, yes.
(29:04) He was an officer on one of the MTBs. Most of them of course were Norwegians, but in theory it could be one from the other navies also, the Nato navies, but he thought it was a Norwegian. So Berthon Rott reported his sighting of the Isdal Woman to the police. And what happened next? — A few days later, Berthon Rott was paid an unexpected and menacing visit, and given a chilling warning about his personal safety.
(29:35) Next time, on Death in Ice Valley: — It was like a cover-up. It was like a layer of protection around this whole question about this lady.

The Isdal Woman’s DNA clues, Death in Ice Valley, Episode 6 — BBC World Service

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylz_yc8BEuE

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:12) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. I am Marit Higraff from NRK and along with my BBC colleague Neil McCarthy, we’re trying to get to the bottom of the case of the Isdal Woman. Episode 5: Spycatcher Our last stop was in Tananger, a small fishing village in the south of Norway.
(00:51) This was the place where a fisherman called Berthon Rott saw the Isdal Woman talking to a naval officer, whilst the Penguin missile tests were taking place. — That’s right. He recognised it from the police drawings in the newspaper, and then he responded to the request to the public to pass on any relevant information to the police.
(01:14) — He did that, but he wasn’t prepared for what came after he informed the police. His son Sverre Rott was with him as the family were boarding a train at Stavanger railway station. They were on their way to London for their Christmas holidays in 1970. Whilst waiting for the train, his father was approached by two policemen. Sverre has never gone on the record with this story before.
(01:42) We were all four, the family was gathered there and should go on the train, and he left our group and went with these policemen for about 15–20 minutes, obviously talking with them, and he didn’t say much to us he said it was some policeman and then we were wondering about this the whole trip we were in London.
(02:10) — Did he say why they came to the train station? What did they want to speak with him about? — My father was a man of few words, when things should be kept secret, you know. When we came back, I was informed that he had had this knife and this handgun that he received from them, that they gave him that in the railway station and he had that all the time we were in London.
(02:35) For protection, yes. — Yeah, did he say something, why? Why did they give him this? — Obviously he was told by some people to keep his mouth shut. Obviously. Because he normally didn’t like to speak so much about it. But on the other hand, he was angry sometime, he was rather upset about that, why he was not properly informed. So himself he lacked knowledge about the whole situation.
(03:10) — So you can imagine, there you are about to get on a train, you’re with your family, the police take you away, give you a gun and a knife, and tell you to protect yourself. And just as you’re about to go on holiday. Not that they’re going to look out for you, and protect you, but you have to look after yourself.
(03:31) — And he had no idea who he was supposed to protect himself from. Quite a scary prospect. — But whatever he had reported, had put him in danger, that’s clear. What a different time they lived in as well. The fact the police just give him a gun and a knife, send him on a family holiday, tell him to protect himself, and nobody even checked, at customs or on the border, whether he had a gun, he got as far as London and brought it back.
(03:58) — Well that’s hard to imagine, but obviously it was not those strict security rules by travelling in those times. Maybe that’s also the reason why the Isdal Woman could move across borders with different passports and so. — The checks weren’t so strictly enforced back then, at least in western Europe. I’m sure maybe in eastern Europe it was a different matter. — Maybe.
(04:20) And how long was your father told he would need this gun and this knife? Did he keep it permanently? — He had it for many years. But in many ways, it was a story we didn’t speak so much about, so it’s impossible for me to say how many years he kept it. But many, many years he kept it. Sometimes I feel he looked behind his shoulder, sometimes.
(04:43) That was just a feeling, you know? — How did this whole thing affect your father do you think? You said he looked over his shoulder; was he anxious about something? — Yes he was. He was very much stressed about this case. All the years, he would have wanted that the truth came forward, you know? He would have wanted that.
(05:09) It was like a cover-up. It was like a layer of protection around this whole question about this lady. — The family Rott is still in the dark about who was behind any cover-up of the Isdal Woman’s movements in Tananger.
(05:40) They were never even told who the police were, who took his father away and gave him the weapons. — The Secret Police archives connected his father with the Isdal Woman in some way, but were you surprised by this story? — Oh yes, definitely. Leaving Tananger that day when we were there, during two years of work on this case, I was for the first time quite convinced I have to admit that wow this is the hard proof that she had something to do with espionage.
(06:17) I think we should take Rott’s story to Knut Haavik, the veteran crime reporter who covered the story at the time, and see what he has to say about it. — It must has been the Secret Police. They had their own rules you know about the weapon, because the uniforms were unarmed at that time, but the Secret Police had their gun.
(06:46) — But they must have felt he was in danger in some way, but from whom? — If the Isdal Woman wasn’t alone, the other person could have seen this fisherman and understood that he would go to the police and report. So maybe this number two is the man who killed her, later on, because she maybe tried to get off the hook. — And here he introduces another idea to the story. That the Isdal Woman was not operating alone.
(07:24) She was part of something bigger. We know she was talking to a naval officer, but did she have other accomplices? Iver Neumann, director of Norwegian Social Research, knows more about how spy networks were operating in Norway at the time. — Well the basic thing is, you always have an officer to which you report.
(07:48) In the Soviet days, and for that matter for Russia today, you would always have one person working in the embassy who is known as the resident, which means that he or she would be the ranking intelligence officer. And these people will of course have as their key job to maintain relations between themselves, and to recruit. And then you would have relations between intelligence services, so that for example the Soviet intelligence service the KGB would be tightly in kahoots with intelligence services in East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria etc. One person who can test to that would for example
(08:30) be Vladimir Putin, the present leader of Russia, who was stationed in East Germany for years. — And would you get other agents, who were just lone agents? — That would be the professional spies, those who actually earn their keep, that is their work, you know they are sort of, should we say, career spies, right? Then you would have people who would be working for these spies, they would have their networks.
(09:00) Some of those you might have for ideological reasons, and some of them would have been paid. In this country, Arne Treholt and Gunvor Galtung Haavik would be two examples of that, the two most famous spy cases in Norwegian Cold War history. So if she was a spy for Russia or an eastern European intelligence agency, it sounds like there would always have been a number two.
(09:26) Note, Neumann mentions a spy called Gunvor Galtung Haavik: that’s a surname which sounds familiar? — Yes, she was actually the cousin of Knut Haavik’s father. — That was a big scandal, because she had been working in the Norwegian embassy in Moscow, and let the KGB inside, because she was more or less in a honey trap before. — He’s not just a well-informed crime reporter, but somebody who actually had a spy in the family, working for the KGB, the Soviet secret services, in Norway for nearly 30 years. He knows his stuff.
(10:07) I’m totally convinced, absolutely 100% sure, these people are not lying, this story is true. But some say, no it cannot be, amongst our journalists in NRK who are discussing this case. — It’s more or less like a novel! — Because some say, hmm, the Secret Police, or any police, didn’t give him weapons, it doesn’t function that way. What do you think? — They have their own rules.
(10:33) They could lie to the press. They can lie to everybody. Because of the national security they were allowed to lie. And they were allowed to pass the border over what’s wrong and right. They didn’t share any facts with their colleagues, because they were lonely wolves, all of them, all the time.
(11:06) So Rott’s story sounds entirely plausible to Haavik, and remember, he had better police contacts than any other journalist at the time. — That’s right. Now, let’s get back on the road. There’s a key interviewee coming up: The man who caught the spy in Haavik’s family. Get ready to hear from a real spycatcher.
(11:28) Yeah but this is unlike a lot of the other interviews we’ve been doing, you’ve been trying a long time to get this interview. — I’ve been trying for two years to interview this person, this man, and it is not easy because he doesn’t give interviews any more. But we are now on our way. We got permission to come to his home.
(11:52) — So from what you’ve told me, he’s something of a living legend from the cold war period. Who is he? — His name is Ørnulf Tofte, he’s the most famous Norwegian spy hunter, and he’s the man behind chasing down the most famous spies in Norway. — And was he in Bergen in 1970 on this case, on the case of the Isdal Woman? — Oh yes, we know he was.
(12:23) When we read the files and the documents at the Secret Police about the case, we found documents with his name on, so it was no doubt he was there. We’re in a little community of bungalows. It’s a pensioners’ residence. As the front door to the bungalow opens, a very tall man in his 90s stoops down holding his cane. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has piercing blue eyes. — “It’s a nice area.
(13:02) “ — “It’s very nice, I’m very pleased to be here, it’s very fine.” — As Norway’s top spy catcher, I can only imagine what it would have been like to have those eyes boring into you during a long interrogation in a small room, especially once he knew he had something on you. Ørnulf Tofte had been called to Ice Valley in 1970 to the scene of death, along with the head of the murder squad Rolf Harry Jahrmann, to give their opinions on whether she was a spy, and whether she had been murdered. You’ll have to listen closely to this spy catcher’s
(13:33) theory. — All the people who have been connected with the woman in Bergen all told us about that she had in her possession a can of hairspray that was very big. Whatever this event, and whatever she was in hotel room and she was on the street, always a can of hairspray in her hand. And that can of hairspray was never found.
(14:07) The woman was found about 150–200 metres from the little lake, close to the track, close to the fire. And then Jahrmann and I had some talks, and our idea was that it wasn’t a murder, it was a pure accident. An accident could easily happen in that way, that she had sitting near the fire, had her hair spray beside her, and that hairspray was falling down in the fire, and she tried to pick it up, and then it blowed in her face. That was our opinion.
(14:55) — It’s strange because there are nothing about the hairspray in the police documents, in the witness interrogations. — I don’t know if then a criminal technician told that to the prosecutors, police people, I don’t know. — We’ve always been at a loss to find out what the fuel was that started this fire, and hairspray is incredibly flammable, and if her hair caught fire, if she did have a can of hairspray, it would make sense, and if that can exploded… it’s a possibility, isn’t it? — Yes,
(15:30) but I assume there should be some remnants of this bottle of hairspray then, and there were actually no remnants of a bottle like this, you know, if it was a big can of hairspray, could it vanish totally? — I looked at the thoughts about espionage activities; I couldn’t find anything. She hadn’t any good maps, she had no notes comparing to kind of espionage, and we thought the scene could have been that she lost her hairspray down in the fire and then it blew up in her face, and in that way she was killed. I had heard of many cases, intelligence forces
(16:19) killing people. They were using knives, they were using guns, they were using explosive, they were using poison, but I have never heard that any of the services are using burning as a way of taking life from people. — So your assessment at the scene of death is that she hadn’t been murdered? — Yes, and we told that to the chief of police in Bergen.
(16:54) We didn’t write the report, we told him our opinion, it was no case of murder, it was no connection with espionage as far as I could see. — So Tofte is pretty convinced that this scene where the Isdal Woman was found didn’t bear any of the hallmarks of a spy murder. — Yes, and he’s pretty convinced about his theory with the hairspray and his thoughts about this woman not being important for the police, because she obviously wasn’t the case for the police.
(17:20) It’s something about the whole thing that makes me think that he knows more than he says. — So the death may not have been connected with espionage, but could she have been a spy? Witnesses say that she checked in and hotel registration cards show that she had multiple i
(17:50) dentities and different passports which she checked in at different hotels… — I heard that later on. I heard that, but I should very much like to have seen this passport, some illegals she was sending out, and that has always has second identity, and that was a passport, but I hadn’t heard about several identities.
(18:16) I have seen it on spy cases on television are operating in several kind of passport but I think that if she has used another identity it should be only one I guess. — Here’s somebody who knows about chasing spies, catching spies, how spies operate, and if he says well spies would have one or two identities, rather than eight identities that she had, I tend to believe him on that. — Yeah, maybe he’s right.
(18:46) But then I get curious on who, then, needs eight identities? — Yeah, we’ve got to look into that further. I just wanted to ask you, the suitcases, the suitcases they were actually found just a couple of days after the body was found, so they must have found the suitcases while you were in Bergen, b
(19:14) ut they didn’t want to show..? — Of course, I was in Bergen about 14 days after, but they never showed it they never told about it. — They didn’t tell about that they found the suitcases? — No. It was their case. They grabbed it I guess. — So it was a… — A spittle of competition between police forces in Bergen and from Bergen also I guess. I already, I didn’t think about it.
(19:45) I mean he’s obviously a master spycatcher, and all his instincts told him well, one, this wasn’t a murder, and two, this wasn’t a spy. — I get the impression that they made this decision quite quickly after they came to Bergen. It seemed that they they didn’t do too much investigation in Bergen or in her belongings, as we say, they didn’t look into the suitcases, they didn’t even know, he says, about suitcases, and that’s pretty strange that they can that easy and quick decide that this is not a spy? — Yeah, it seems to be ruling it
(20:25) out before he’s looked at all the evidence. — For example, the code note with her travelling route. He says he didn’t know about that before later, it was in the suitcases, of course, but I mean it would normally be quite interesting for the Secret Police to know about such a coded route, don’t you think? — Hmm, yeah.
(20:53) But then the other point he raised is, there were no images, no drawings, no notes and that every spy has those. — That’s right. — You would think, that but a good spy will also memorise all these things. The classic is, you get a piece of paper you memorise it, and you eat it. That’s just the way spies operate. There are so many strange aspects to this case.
(21:48) — One of our great discoveries is the DNA profile that we got from the tissue samples. It was a very good profile, but now what to do with it? The police have checked it with the Interpol databases, criminal databases, and they didn’t find anything. — So, many of our listeners on the Facebook group have been suggesting, well, why not run it through the commercial databases? These much bigger databases which contain people looking for distant relations or ancestors, or building up their family tree using DNA and they have their dna profile stored there. That might be a much better place to get a match.
(22:21) So why don’t we do this? — We’d really like to do this, I mean of course it will give us possibilities if we could do that, but it isn’t easy for more reasons. It’s not like I can take this DNA profile or the tissue samples or the jaw in a suitcase and just walk away and do whatever I want to, as a journalist.
(22:44) The material belongs to the Norwegian police and they are in charge, and they are deciding what we do with this material, and so far they are not willing to do that, because it is a difficult situation both juridically and ethically to take this DNA profile and compare it in commercial databases, and also because of the resource situation in the police. They don’t want to put too much resources into this.
(23:10) — I suppose it sets a precedent on one side and then, through all sorts of confidentiality issues, for the database as well, that people don’t necessarily want to have their profiles matched in this kind of a case. — It goes both ways actually, I mean the police don’t want to put the profile into the commercial bases but the commercial bases often also not want that the police go into their databases and compare things.
(23:32) I mean, these databases, as you say, they’re containing a lot of profiles from people looking for their relatives, or whatever reason, so these people putting their profile into these bases does not necessarily want to be found by the police for something they had done, you know? — Yeah, or something their relative has done, or their unknown relative.
(23:55) Another thing hotly debated by people who have taken an interest in the story over the years is where the Isdal Woman actually came from. — Be good to really find out where she came from. Obviously, it’s really important for our investigation to try and work that out. We’ve got her DNA profile, could that help us determine where she came from? — Well, it can’t tell us exactly where she’s from, but there is something else you can do with an extended DNA analysis, which narrows down the broad geographical area she came from. It’s called mitochondrial DNA, and it
(24:32) connects us with all the ancestors on our mother’s side. The Norwegian police sent the Isdal Woman’s tissue samples to the University Institute of Innsbruck in Austria. Professor Walther Parson is a world expert on forensic DNA, and now we have him on video link to hear the results of their analysis, It took them weeks.
(24:59) — For the Isdalen case, it was difficult to analyse but it gave a successful result, and the result that we obtained with mitochondrial DNA analysis describes a signal that comes from Europe. It has a name, it’s termed H24 which is a combination of letters and numbers in order to differentiate between those different lineages that we find, and using a global database we can identify those regions where we are finding this lineage H24 that we find in the remains of the Isdalen Woman.
(25:41) And this is why we can assume that the mother of this individual, the mother of the Isdalen Woman, and their fore-mothers, are of European descent. — So she’s of European descent for sure. — There is one more test which can be more specific about geographical origins. But it’s rarely used in police forensics, and never before used in Norway.
(26:09) Let’s go back to the National Criminal Investigation Service, Kripos in Oslo. And here in the basement we find Knut, chemical expert. You decided to try isotope analysis in the Isdal Woman case. Why, and what exactly is isotope analysis, can you tell us that? — This is a very old case, the Isdal Woman, we don’t have any clue from which geographical origin she comes from, and one way to try to figure that out is to go into the body, to put it that way, into different types of ear tissue.
(26:54) You can go to hair, and then you can go to teeth analysis. And the remains of the Isdal Woman was, as we know, her jaw and then at the enamel on the teeth you have something called different elements. Elements are things like sulphur, carbon, iron, and we also find oxygen and strontium in the teeth. We know that what you eat is what you are.
(27:22) When you eat something, crops from the ground, there is an accumulation of different elements in the grains, or from the milk that you drink, or from the water you drink, it’s different elements, and those different elements have something that we call isotopes.
(27:40) That means actually that one element have different mass so different places in Europe have different abundance of different types of elements and their isotopes. — It’s really amazing actually, because the things we eat and things we drink, it’s being stored as isotopes in the teeth while the teeth are underneath the surface, while the teeth are being made, and it’s still there and can be analysed almost 50 years after your death.
(28:18) — And were you excited by the findings of the isotope analysis with the Isdal Woman? -For us, it was the first time we had done something like this, and secondly we did not have too high expectations when we started with this work, and we were extremely surprised about how accurate it seems to be, and how well we could actually pinpoint some places that she may originate from. So for us it was really exciting results.
(28:47) — So Knut-Endre Sjåstad, the chemistry expert at Kripos, is excited by the findings, and so are we. Isotope results from the teeth had to be sent to an expert in Australia, who interpreted them on a map. Listen next time to find out where in Europe the Isdal Woman most probably came from. We are getting closer.

The Isdal Woman’s mystery men, Death in Ice Valley, Episode 7 — BBC World Service — YouTube

Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knlitxVR3OI

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:

(00:12) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. She appears to have been everywhere a stranger, and yet she wasn’t alone after all. — It’s not like they were very friendly to each other. Didn’t sound like it was friendly. They was arguing. They weren’t smiling or anything like that.
(00:40) — I am Marit Higraff. — And I’m Neil McCarthy. And this is episode 7: Mystery men So last thing we knew, the isotope results of the teeth were being sent to the other side of the world for analysis by somebody very well qualified. — I have to be basically an astrophysicist, a chemist, a physicist, I have to understand the universe and all these things around us, just to solve a simple case.
(01:10) Jurian Hoogewerff is a Dutch isotopes expert at the University of Canberra in Australia. He understands what we’re made from, down to stardust, and he applies his knowledge to forensic science, helping the police to crack identification cases. And he studied the isotope results of the Isdal Woman. — Remember, these are traces of elements in the teeth which can indicate where a person grew up, based on the food and water they consumed as a child.
(01:38) — I’d like to have a very professional approach as a forensic scientist, do my case work. So when our colleagues contacted me, I said well just give me the the results of the teeth and don’t tell me anything about the case, because I don’t want to be biased about where the police might think the person might come from.
(01:56) So when our colleagues sent the data, I compared it with the databases that we have, I do a statistical analysis of it, and I come up with the most likely areas where a person might have come from. — Good, this is a completely unprejudiced analysis. So what did he find? — For early childhood, I was quite intrigued by it myself: We see only a few areas that have a higher likelihood in Europe, and we see that in the eastern part, middle Germany, there’s some areas maybe in eastern Europe, the balkan area, there’s a spot in Spain. — Looking at the isotope map he gave us,
(02:31) there are a few spots highlighted as he says. But the real hot spot is in the south-eastern part of Germany, and it’s centred on the Nuremburg area. — That’s incredible to think her teeth can give us a vital clue like this.
(02:49) So that’s her early childhood but different teeth form at different times. What about when she’s a bit older? — There’s evidence of movement of the person, from the teeth that we analysed, between early childhood and the teenage years. We see some changes. Looking at the time frame, that’s around the Second World War. There was a lot of movement going on in those years.
(03:10) Why did she move? We cannot tell, but there was a lot of movement. So we see areas, parts you can see in the UK, we see areas more western Germany, Belgium, that area, parts of France, part of Spain, Italy, there’s different areas. So she’s moved away from the Nuremberg area by her teenage years. But there are a few options as to where she went next.
(03:36) Looking at this second isotope map, the biggest hot spots are the French-German border area, and also the sort of Luxembourg-Belgium area, and there’s another good hot spot over North Wales, and there are some other spots scattered about in Europe, as he says. So there are a few places for us to look into then, Marit.
(03:54) — We can combine these results with the other information we have so far. We know that the dental work wasn’t from the UK, but probably from Germany or eastern Europe, and combined with all the witness testimony, that she spoke poor English, it doesn’t make Wales very likely. — But these are results from her childhood, and remember there was World War Two, and people were displaced, so a lot may have happened to her afterwards. Now, this isn’t a fail-safe method, but it’s the closest we’ve got to narrowing down
(04:23) the places she lived in. — The hot spots cover relatively large areas though, so we’ll have to think about how to use this information. But it’s exciting, it’s somewhere to look. The police in Bergen are also following these developments, which are using the latest forensic technologies. Nils Jarle Gjøvåg is the head of the forensic department there.
(04:57) — With the nutrient technology, we have found out that she can come from Germany, France… and what we know we’re looking into is to do a c-14, carbon-14 — Carbon analysis? — Yeah, off of the teeth, to find out maybe what year she was born. Then we will be a little bit closer. The carbon-14 method that he’s talking about is an exciting, cutting-edge experiment to date the teeth more accurately, and it uses a special ingredient from the Cold War. We’re just waiting for the Norwegian police to take the teeth
(05:38) to an institute in Sweden that specialises in this analysis, because we’re going there with them. Back to 1970. We’ve been discussing the Soviets and their interest in the Penguin missile tests. Well, I thought I’d contact somebody with very good espionage credentials, to give his assessment about whether the Isdal Woman was spying for the former Soviet secret services, the KGB.
(06:13) He’s now a writer and historian living in London, but he has insider knowledge. — I was trained for two years as a spy in the spy school that was called the Andropov Red Banner Institute of the KGB. — This is Alexander Vassiliev. We’ve shown him the relevant documents. So what does he think? — I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t think she was a Soviet spy.
(06:40) She had all the labels on her clothes cut off, and some people believe that it proves she was a spy because she was trying to hide her real identity. But let me tell you this: If she was a Soviet spy, she would be wearing clothes bought in Norway, or clothes bought in another country according to her legend, let’s say she presented herself as a woman from Belgium, she would be wearing clothes bought in Belgium. — To blend in? — Yes, to blend in.
(07:18) — To blend into her story? — Absolutely, absolutely, to support her legend, right? Legend, it means or the backstory, the invented story of spy. This is one thing. Another thing is that she had too many fake names. If she was a Soviet spy, she would have had solid documentation, and I mean passports, birth certificates, and so on.
(07:51) And that’s a very difficult thing to do, right? So she would have had one, maximum two, fake identities, because all this should have been organised. You know, it takes time. You have to find the people, dead people for instance, whose names this particular spy could adopt, and on whose names the fake documentation would have been prepared for her.
(08:27) People are saying that she had about a dozen identities. I can’t believe it, it’s impossible. The third thing which drew my attention is that people who met her are saying that she smelled of garlic, and told them that she was a foreigner. Well let me tell you that a Soviet spy operating in the field wouldn’t be smelling of garlic, she would be smelling of Chanel №5.
(08:54) And another thing, there were not many female spies in the KGB. — What do you believe then, why does a person in 1970, a woman, travel around on her own, with eight different identities? Who’d do a like that, if you’re not a spy? — And have the funds to do so? The money? — Yeah, it’s, uh-huh…
(09:21) No, I think she was a spy, but the question is, for whom she was spying? I don’t know. It’s very intriguing. Well that rules out the Russian angle. — How interesting that Chanel №5 would be a giveaway clue for a female Soviet spy.
(10:15) — Have you got any of that in your collection? — I couldn’t possibly say, you know, secrets are secrets. — But the question still remains, if she was a spy, who was she spying for? — Apart from the story about the Isdal Woman being seen with a naval officer, most people we’ve spoken to so far said she was always alone. But we’ve tracked down some other witnesses who saw her in company.
(10:36) Let’s get back on the hotel trail in Bergen, starting with the Neptune Hotel. — We’re up in a room which used to be the restaurant, I believe, and it seems to be a little bit frozen in time. It seems to have the light fittings from the 70s, with that smoked glass, and a mirror on the ceiling, and a sort of fading chandelier, and we’re looking out onto the main road.
(11:06) — We are here because we know that the woman stayed in this hotel for several nights and she was having her breakfast in exact this room back then, and also she had dinner here at least one time, because you remember that, Lillian Menas Køhne, you were serving her? — To dinner, and to breakfast, yes. — Can you picture her here, now? Has much changed in this room? — No, just the same.
(11:33) Sitting here at the table, and she has a black roses and a white top and and yeah she had sad eyes. Very sad. Not smiling, very serious. And the next day I served her dinner. She was with a man. — She had a serious face? — Yes, and don’t say much. And if they speak, they speak Deutsch. — She was speaking German? — Yes. Yes. — To the staff? — Yes.
(12:08) — Was it a different language with the man? Did you hear anything from the conversation? — No, they don’t conversation, they only eat and he sit with one paper, and she don’t say anything. — They were silent? — Yes. — A sheet of paper? — Yes, not newspaper. — Was he writing, or reading? No, he is reading the paper.
(12:28) — But they were sitting together because they knew each other? — Yes. — But that you didn’t see them talk to each other? — No. — Was that strange? — Yes, he looked at the paper, and she is sitting looking at him. — So it wasn’t a romantic dinner or something? — No, not romantic. — Was it more like a meeting between the two of them? — Yes, it looked like.
(12:55) The paper, all the paper on the table, and… yes. So they didn’t speak with each other and it looked like a meeting. I wonder what kind of meeting? — I can only imagine there was information being passed from her to him, or him to her, and who knows what was on that piece of paper.
(13:29) It’s not a very discreet place to have a meeting, if it was a sort of a secret meeting. — But not one that they were particularly enjoying. Again and again with the witnesses we’ve spoken to, we’ve always taken them back to the place where they saw the Isdal Woman, and they have such vivid recollections of her, whatever she was doing, how she interacted with people, 47 years on. It really is striking how much of an impression she made on people.
(13:58) — For Lillian it was so spooky, the whole scene, being back there again. She didn’t even want to sit on the same chair where the Isdal Woman was sitting back then. — Do you remember the man, anything about the man? — Yes, he had grey hair… — Did he look Norwegian? — Yes, he could be.
(14:20) — What is in the police statements? — Should Lillian read it? — Yeah. [Lillian reads her statement in Norwegian]. — Yes. — So, but then there is nothing about the man in this police report? — No. I told, that they had dinner. I don’t know why, uh, why it’s not… — In the police report? — Yes, yes I don’t know.
(14:53) — Not a word about that, this dinner this meeting with the man, what you told the police about. — Yes. — Strange! — Yes. — It’s really weird. The only evidence the police have been given to lead them to another individual, and they ignore it. Could they have been given orders not to pursue that lead? — Maybe, but why? The amount of police documents show that they did a thorough investigation.
(15:16) It’s odd that they didn’t pursue a crucial lead like this, and that they didn’t even write down her full witness testimony. — It is indeed. And there’s one more place you wanted to show me before we leave the Hotel Neptune. We’re in her room, the hotel where she stayed several nights. We know now it was known as a fine hotel, and I have some descriptions here from the police, witness descriptions.
(15:44) This witness is actually dead, but she gives some very good descriptions of this woman. She says… — Is this another worker in the hotel? — This is a worker in the hotel, she was a… how do you say? Room-maid? — Yeah, chambermaid, room-maid… — And she saw this woman several times, and she says, when she was in the hotel and went to and from the toilet, which was obviously in the corridor, not in the room, she was dressed in a turquoise-coloured, long bathrobe.
(16:16) But when she went out from the hotel, this witness describes that she was wearing a black leather hat, and she had a long scarf and she had a jacket… ah, here’s the descriptions from inside the room. It says she had two suitcases placed under the desk, the writing desk. — Which is still here.
(16:47) — Then she says this lady did something with a table, which normally was placed under the window, this table she had moved and turned upside down and put it out in the hallway, towards the door. Strange thing to do. Back then, it was a small entrance, like a hallway… — Inside the room? — Yeah, inside the room. — Would that be kind of blocking the door? — Maybe she used it for that. And when the maid saw it, it was taken to the side.
(17:18) So here she is, moving the furniture around again. Let’s continue. There are more mystery men. Siri Reikvam was a young worker in a home-furnishing shop in Bergen in 1970, when in walked the Isdal Woman. She was coming together with this man into the shop where I worked and going to buy a mirror.
(17:50) So they were discussing quite a lot before they finally found a mirror that was not too small and not expensive, just one of the cheapest that we had, yes. — A mirror? — A mirror, yes. — Was it kind of a mirror which you were holding in the hands? — No, no, it was a mirror to hang on the wall. It was about this size, a metre, metre and a half, yeah. At that time I didn’t think about it, but um they were both foreigners, and I couldn’t really…
(18:16) they didn’t speak English, they didn’t speak uh… it wasn’t German, so we were discussing afterwards where did they come from? Even if I don’t speak it, I could feel it wasn’t Italian, it wasn’t English, it wasn’t… — German? — Yeah, no. She had dark hair, brown eyes, and they looked eastern Europe? Something like that? — Do you remember, how was she? — Her hair was in sort of untidy curls, yes, and he was dark.
(18:52) They were both dark, yes. It was not like they were very friendly to each other. It didn’t sound like it was friendly. I did talk to the police at that time. Does it say anything in the records about that? Did they ask about that? — No. — No, it’s… several witnesses actually told about a man, that she was together with a man, or met with a man, or had dinner with a man, but the police didn’t seem to be too much interested in that, and that’s kind of strange, I think, because when you’re trying to find out who the person was you actually have
(19:39) to try to find the persons knowing this person. — Yes. — I think. — Yeah, that’s strange, yes. Like I said, they were sort of arguing when they were buying this. They weren’t smiling or anything like that, they were sort of… oh… yeah. Together with a man, arguing in an eastern European language, buying a large mirror.
(20:11) Why would you buy a mirror from a shop when you’re staying at a hotel? Evidently she paid a lot of attention to the way she looked, she had make-up, she had wigs, she had face creams, but this is a mirror that you would hang on the wall, not something you’d have in your handbag. — And what she says about untidy curls, that brings me to think she must have been wearing the wig that day, because what we know about the Isdal Woman’s hair was that it was straight, and… she was dark-haired and it was straight, but we also know about the wig,
(20:44) that the wig was a short hair wig and with a lot of curls. — And she’s attracting attention, which to my mind doesn’t feel very much like spy behaviour, where you’d want to keep a low profile. — There’s another key hotel in Bergen, the Rosenkrantz Hotel, where she stayed for just one night on the 18th of November 1970, as Elisabeth Leenhouwer.
(21:14) We’ll join the crime writer Gunnar Staalesen again, and Tufin Sande who has been caretaker of the hotel for decades. Here she stayed from the 18th til the 19th of November 1970, so one night she stayed, as Elisabeth Leenhouwer, the same name she used at Hotel Hordaheimen. So this was the hotel before Hordaheimen, so this was definitely the last period where she was alive, and she had room number 426 and we are supposed to see that room now. — OK.
(21:59) When did you start working here, before 1970? — No, I started working here at 23, in ’72. -’72. — Ah. — Do you remember the day? — Yes, yes. — That’s interesting! 426 was her room. How would the room have been then? — The room has been the same. — What I have here is quite an interesting witness description given to the police back then.
(22:43) She was a room-maid here in Hotel Rosenkrantz, and she’s telling the police about one evening, the room-maid locked herself into this room to make the bed for the evening, because that was usual at that time, the room-maids made the bed for the evening.
(23:04) And when she got inside she got a shock because on the bed, there was this lady sitting, and in a small couch beside the bed there was a man sitting. And the witness, the room-maid, she was apologising, sorry, sorry, and wanted to go out again, and she was sorry that she didn’t knock the door, at the same time, she asked if she could please do the bed and the blanket, and here comes the strangest part, the woman got up from the bed without saying a word, she let the room-maid do the work, and the room-maid was in hurry and left again, and when she left, neither the man or the woman
(23:45) in the room said one word to this maid, during this, I don’t know, minutes. But this is another witness telling about seeing a man together with the Ice Valley Woman. — Gunnar, what does your crime-writing mind make of that? — Mysterious. Is it the same man as another witness saw with her at the restaurant? We don’t know.
(24:11) Because we haven’t the precise description of this man. The other man was… he had white hair, didn’t he? That she met at the restaurant? There was an older man. — In the Neptune. — At the Neptune, yes. — Here we have a description of both of them actually, but you’re right the different witnesses describe the man, or the men, differently. — Yes.
(24:34) — So it’s here, this room-maid, here in Rosenkrantz, she describes the woman, with dark hair, beautiful face, dark eyes, pretty skin in the face, black dress and seemed like she was in sorrow in some way. She was thinking she must have grief, because she looked so sad. And this room-maid, she just describes the man as around 25 to 30 years old, tall, well built, yes, broad shoulders, blonde hair, nice face, and he was dressed in a grey-coloured suit. — Yeah.
(25:17) — And then we’re back to this strange thing about the police work. It seems like they didn’t actually do too much to find this man, or men. Strange. — Yeah. — It’s a special feeling to be in her room. — Every hotel room has a story, doesn’t it? You just wonder, what was it that made her move across town after one night? Yeah, why didn’t she just stay here, why did she move on the other side of the harbour to Hotel Hordaheimen, after one night here, I don’t know. — But she was looking, it seems like she was
(25:48) looking for a room where she could watch the street. The same, more or less, here. For sure, she had contacts in Bergen, and various rendezvous with men, and the police apparently weren’t interested. So who was the man, or men? In the Hotel Neptune restaurant, the witness thought he may have been Norwegian.
(26:15) — But in the shop buying the mirror, the witness thinks eastern European. In the Rosenkrantz hotel room, they didn’t speak at all when the maid came in. But she was connected somehow to people here, and none of those men came forward when the police called for witnesses after her death. They must have been keeping a secret. There’s been speculation in our Facebook group that she may have been a prostitute.
(26:39) Remember the matchbox found inside the suitcases, which had the label of an erotic underwear mail order service in Germany? Now it’s a chain of famous sex shops. Was that side of the story ever looked into? — Yes. The matchbox found in her suitcase is actually one of more things that have made prostitution theory to one of the main theories during almost 50 years, because it pointed to a postal order shop in Germany selling erotic underwear at that time.
(27:14) The other thing found in the suitcases that points towards maybe some sort of prostitution could be that it was a lot of underwear there, and sophisticated underwear. But to bring the link to prostitution, for me it doesn’t make sense, because I read about all the contents in the suitcases and this didn’t seem to be erotic underwear, more normal underwear. Beautiful, but not erotic underwear.
(27:42) And to make a woman to prostitute because of the content in the suitcases containing underwear, that’s for me a shortcut. — Yeah, or a bit of a leap. — Yes, and also this matchbox is, it isn’t a strong proof for anything actually because she could have picked up this matchbox in any lobby or bar left there by some German soldiers, which we know were in Bergen at that time. And there’s another thing concerning me about the prostitution theory.
(28:14) If we think that this woman was a prostitute, why did she then check into Christian hotels, where it was not allowed to drink alcohol, and it was quite strict rules for guests? We know she did that amongst other in Hordaheimen was this kind of hotel, in Bergen, where she spent her last days, and also St Svithun in Stavanger was a Christian hotel, and we know that she spent nine days there.
(28:44) If she was a prostitute, it would be a strange place to stay if she wanted to do her job, so to say. — It’d be very noticeable, yeah, she couldn’t ply her trade and not be seen or spotted. Whatever she was doing, she was on the move a lot, from city to city, hotel to hotel, sometimes even room to room.
(29:17) Our former KGB spy Alexander Vassiliev has a theory connected with her movements. We took him through her coded route. — So that’s the system. We don’t have all the codes, we have some of them, cities that she visited. So she was in Norwegian cities, four different cities, we know she was in Hamburg in Germany, in Basel in Switzerland, we know she was in Paris in France, we know she was in Rome in Italy. — She could be a courier. I mean a messenger.
(29:49) Because she travelled so much. A courier for someone else. Because let’s say you have a spy interested in the testing field for those Penguin missiles. The spy would be living in that area, staying in that area, trying to gather as much information as possible, establishing contacts with local people, with farmers or fishermen, something like that.
(30:30) So he wouldn’t be travelling so often around Europe, because that wasn’t his task. His task was to, you know, to get information about their missile. Now, if she was somehow involved in espionage activities, she looks like she was a courier passing information, let’s say, from a person who lived in that area to the headquarters of that espionage organisation, to the handler.
(30:59) I would say that if a spy was given such a serious task, he would be sitting in in that area. — Staying there. — Yeah she, he, didn’t have to travel, there was no need for it. He would be blending, trying to blend in, or to make some friends, I mean it would, it would take a lot of time. — It could fit this, with courier, uh when we think about that, in this missile test area she wasn’t actually seen trying to enter a boat or something like that, she was seen talking to an officer on the quay, so maybe she was there to pick up information? — Or to pass information. I mean
(31:48) it works both ways. I think we’ll break this case right now. Well it looks to me like there was an espionage ring operating in that area, possibly involving some Norwegian officials, and she was a courier for that espionage ring, and she did some mistake. They killed her, they put her body on fire, and then they try to cover up the whole story because some top-ranking Norwegian officials were involved. That’s it. — It’s a theory.
(32:31) Next time in Death in Ice Valley, the police investigation is suddenly shut down.

Why was the Isdal Woman’s identity never solved? Death in Ice Valley, Episode 8 — BBC World Service

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggz-OJAUptQ

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:12) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. Even 47 years on, many witnesses have a vivid recollection of the Isdal Woman and how old she looked. But looks can be deceiving. — Your age is written in your teeth. — I’m Neil McCarthy. — And I’m Marit Higraff. This is episode 8: Case Closed.
(00:51) Last time, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev gave us his courier theory, which sounds like it could fit. The Isdal Women didn’t hang around in one place for long or try to blend in, like a spy. She came and went, between European cities, and she had meetings with different men, including a naval officer.
(01:13) She could have been a messenger for a spy organisation, it’s plausible. There is no evidence for her being part of a Norwegian espionage ring, but it’s an interesting speculation from somebody with first-hand knowledge of the secret world of spies. Let’s return to the science for a while, to help us with this case. We’ll keep things in Scandinavia.
(01:39) — It’s a cold night in Stockholm, we’re in the Swedish capital, and we’re in the company of Harald, who’s joined us from Norway. Could you introduce him properly? — Yes. Harald Skjonsfell from Kripos is with us. He is now the leader of the identity unit at Kripos, and he is here bringing through three teeth of the Isdal Woman, Harald? — Yes, that’s correct.
(02:09) I have three teeth with me to give to the scientists here in Karolinska Institute to try to find out how old was the Isdal Women when she died in Norway in 1970. — The very, very exciting thing, and the reason for us to be here, is that these scientists here in Karolinska, they said hello themselves, and said, we have a method, we believe we can define the age of the woman exact, by looking at her teeth with the carbon-14 method, where they look at the level of carbon-14 in her teeth, and then they can say something about her age or exact birth year. — And
(02:56) have you used carbon analysis effectively in any other missing persons cases? — No, we haven’t done that before, so this is new for us. — And Harald, you deal with missing persons cases all the time, what do you make of the Isdal Woman’s case? — Well, I am a police officer so I have to stick to the objective facts.
(03:24) So it’s a very interesting case, it’s very special, because there’s not many people who are found in the forest burned in Norway. And if it’s a suicide, it’s a very special way to do it. I don’t think we have any similar case. So it’s for sure, this is a very special case.
(03:45) — Let’s take a night’s sleep, and let’s see tomorrow what the scientists can do. — Got the teeth in a very safe place? — Yes. I will not tell you! — Not under your pillow I hope! — We’re not very far from it. Harald Skjonsfell has brought the Isdal Woman’s teeth to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where professors Kanar Alkass and Henrik Druid toil away in a lab full of scientific cutting instruments. The walls are covered in marble; it used to be the hospital mortuary.
(04:22) — Hi Harald, welcome to the forensic. Here, I will show you the lab. I hope you have the teeth with you? — I have the teeth with me. — So we have the lab here to the left side, and I will show you how we’re going to prepare the teeth and hopefully we can help you with this case. And here I have my colleague Henrik Druid, professor at Karolinska. — Hello Harald.
(04:52) — Hello, nice to meet you! — Nice to meet you, and thank you for taking this case for us, it’s very important. I have the teeth in my bag, it’s packed in an envelope, so here it is. — Thank you, and you have those three teeth we asked for? — Yes. And we check this, ah, this is the wisdom tooth which is very important. — We have three teeth.
(05:18) — Yes, and we have even here another tooth and here is three teeth. Thank you very much. — I hope this will help you. So what are you exactly going to do now? — We can say, your age is written on your tooth. So by analysing these teeth we hope we can help the police in Norway by telling the age of the woman, the age at death.
(05:52) — One of the methods that is so powerful is analysing carbon-14, which is an isotope of carbon. Carbon-14 is known to be radioactive, and has been used in archaeological studies all over the world. And we are doing the same kind of analysis but we are taking advantage of the increased levels of carbon-14 that started to occur 1955, due to extensive test bomb detonations of nuclear weapons from 1955 through 1963. And that was just a side effect.
(06:34) All that increased carbon-14 has been incorporated in our bodies ever since, and the teeth, they are formed at a certain time after the person is born, and then by looking at the carbon-14 levels in a particular tooth, we can match that with the particular levels in the atmosphere at that time. I’m not scientific at all, but I think I get this.
(07:12) The carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere went up during the period of the open-air nuclear tests, so if a tooth was formed after the testing had started, it will contain varying levels of c-14. We think the Isdal Woman was born in the early 1940s, according to all her hotel registration cards, which contained a lot of false information, we know, but we’re assuming the year of birth she wrote down was probably close to the truth.
(07:37) So most of her teeth would have been developed by the time the nuclear tests started. — That’s why they wanted to analyse the wisdom tooth. That tooth is formed in late childhood, so if she was born in the early 40s, that tooth should contain an amount of c-14 relating to a specific year. But they’re going to do a separate analysis on the teeth, something called racemization.
(08:01) — It’s a chemical process. There is an amino acid who with time convert to its mirror, like and then you count or calculate the quote of this amino acid, and by these numbers you can hopefully get the age of death. — Hmm, I don’t really follow this one so well. You can date a tooth backwards, using amino acids? — Yes, my understanding is that by chemical analysis of the dentin in the tooth, the scientists can calculate how old a person was when she died, but this method is slightly less accurate than the carbon-14 method.
(08:45) White lab coat on, Kanar Alkass gets to work slicing one of the teeth in two. — You never know what she’ll find. Perhaps there will be some wisdom in this tooth after all. — Now I’m cutting the tooth, I do lingually section through the whole tooth. — Is that like a cross section? — Exactly. — It’s a very slow saw, the rotating saw.
(09:08) — Yeah, yeah, in the beginning I do it very slow, so until it comes through the tooth. Then I can increase the speed. — Everything will help us in the search for our relatives. — It will help us to know when she was born, and it will decrease the number of people we are looking for. So it, hopefully, it will help us to to get closer to her relatives.
(09:33) — Back to a human level, not the scientific, but um and you might have a view on this Harald, is that when you look at the registration cards that the Isdal Woman filled in, under different names with different details and different information and identities, one thing that seemed to be quite common was the date of b
(09:58) irth, not the exact date of birth, but the year of birth. It was often 1942, 1943… there wasn’t too much variation there. You never know, maybe that is just one thing that amongst all the other false information that was something that was her own true year of birth. — Yeah, some say if you lie a lot or use a lot of false information, you always have to stick to some truth so maybe she did, maybe she was actually born 1942–43, around that.
(10:22) — If you are going to prepare as another ID, you have to look like the same age, so it’s natural that you use this, almost the same age that you are in real life, but we will see, maybe we can get an, uh, more closely answer on that question after this.
(10:45) — If you start lying once, it’s easier to stick to that, also. — You have to remember all your lies. — Yeah, exactly. This is the difficult part. OK, and how long will it take to get this result? — We, hopefully, the carbon dating take maybe three weeks, and the racemization, the amino acid analysis, will be done by end of this month, hopefully. — OK, thank you very much! — Thanks.
(11:30) We’re at the airport now, and we’re about to go our separate ways, you to Oslo, me back to London, and obviously now they run our passports through computers and all the details come up, but back in 1970 it would have been very different then, in fact who knows, if she was traveling with different passports, they would have just checked the photo I suppose against her as she walked through, and I wonder how she she selected which identity she was gonna come into the country with? What was
(11:59) her criteria, who did she want to be at different times? — Yeah, that’s the question, did she have a pattern, or was she sent by someone with special identity for special tasks, we don’t know. — So we wait. We wait for results.
(12:20) — We’re waiting for our plane back home, we’re waiting for results… If they really succeed in finding a more accurate age and birth-year, it will be very valuable for us when we want to research more into where we think she most likely grew up. Let’s head for the first time to our Isdal headquarters at NRK in Oslo, with your colleagues Ståle Hansen and Øyvind Bye Skille, also experts on the case, in front of a very orderly, very Scandinavian crime board, full of Post-Its, and also an illustration of the Isdal Woman in
(13:28) the middle. — Well this is a timeline of the Isdal case, which is based on the police investigation documents, where we have actually put up yellow notes for each day, what happened each day, because it’s an enormous amount of information, and you need to get a system on it, to understand how the case moved, and then it’s very useful to use this chronological type of timeline, so if our heads are too full of information, we can walk over here and try to get the system of it all. — So what have we got here? — Back at the time, when police were looking into the case, they
(14:14) started it as like a big murder investigation and they got together all their best investigators, the experienced ones. And they investigated for some weeks, but just before Christmas in 1970, they somehow seem to have concluded it’s a suicide. And there was a big press conference, and after the press conference the newspapers wrote that the police thought it was a suicide.
(14:48) And we have a small recording from from that press conference made by the NRK at the time, telling the story. And at the time there had been quite a bit of speculation in the media, so the press conference was sort of an answer to it. It’s black and white tv footage, showing a room full of men in suits, smoking cigarettes, some of them taking notes. Oskar Hordnes, one of Bergen’s police chiefs, is speaking.
(15:19) — And he tells about the investigation leads, so far in the investigation, the autopsy, saying about tablets being found in her stomach at the autopsy, and that they had different identities, not really identities, and that it’s clear she’s been in Norway for quite some time travelling around.
(15:47) But they don’t know why, why is she traveling around. — Someone’s asking a question. — He’s asking, was she a spy? And then the police boss says no, I’m, I think I can certainly say there’s no leads leading to her being a spy and that’s very strange for us today, because we know today the Secret Police was actually investigating that at the time.
(16:21) So this press conference closing down the investigation came just three weeks after the body was found, and it was a large-scale international affair, so why was it closed so abruptly, and how could they be so sure after such a short investigation that she wasn’t a spy, and that it wasn’t a murder? — I really don’t understand that, partly because they didn’t give out any information to back that up.
(16:46) It’s even harder to understand, when we know that on the same day that this press conference took place in Bergen with the local police, the Secret Police wrote a document about the woman being spotted near the Penguin missile tests by a fisherman. — And the day after that, the 23rd of December, according to his son, the police came to interrogate the fisherman at the train station in Stavanger and gave him weapons to protect himself.
(17:12) At that time, the newspaper journalist Knut Haavik was writing about the Isdal story from Oslo. He had excellent police contacts, but for some reason information wasn’t being passed on in the usual way. — So it seems like the investigation was shut down, more or less, before Christmas in 1970, already all the police officers, they went home celebrating Christmas in Oslo again, and they had this press conference denying… she wasn’t a spy and it wasn’t… it was suicide they said.
(17:44) — “I can ensure the press that this is not a spy case, and it’s not a murder case,” and yeah. — Do you remember your reaction then? — I think it was His Master’s Voice. — Do you think? — They had been ordered to say so, I believe, because it was so much international interest in this case, and it could be maybe a one of the Norwegian spies in Russia could be caught, and you know, it was spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
(18:22) — Ordered by who, do you think? — I think the Secret Police, or the Ministry of Justice. — So it was obvious for you… — Yeah, yeah. — …that this was something wrong here. — Why all this secrecy? Because in other similar cases, the police said that the press is the best detective of all. Why didn’t we get any more? This was a cover-up, I think. With this in mind, Vassiliev’s theory of the Isdal Woman being part of a Norwegian espionage network gone wrong isn’t perhaps so far-fetched. — Yes, and Haavik had his suspicions heightened when
(19:06) he looked into the police documents on the case. — Some documents has disappeared. And I got all the documents from the police, from the chief commissioner in Oslo, because I wrote stories for him in the Nordic police chronicle, which came out every year, and I got all the material from the investigation, and among the documents it was an envelope with, I could feel it was a tape in it. A recorded tape.
(19:43) And on the front of the envelope, it was written: This envelope can only be opened by permission of the chief of the Secret Police. And I understand that NRK, the Norwegian broadcasting, has got all the documents as well, but the tape wasn’t there? — That’s right, there was no tape.
(20:09) — Why has this tape disappeared? What did you do with the tape and the material? — I did nothing. I just felt on the envelope, because I couldn’t open it, the chief commissioner trusted me, I got all the documents, and I, of course I couldn’t open it. I regret it today because I could u
(20:36) se methods to open, unlocked… but I didn’t do that because the police trusted me, otherwise I would be kicked out of the police headquarters and lost all my sources. — What do you think it could have had on it? — I think it was a tape from a phone conversation, phone call. Back to the Isdal Woman herself. One of the most interesting clues she left behind was her handwriting.
(21:27) Remember, that was key evidence in 1970 for the police, in matching her different identities on the hotel registration cards. — Yes, but handwriting analysis has come on a long way since then. There is an expert at Kripos who has attempted to see whether the handwriting can reveal a new direction for us. Her name is Gunnel Isage. This does not look Norwegian to me.
(21:52) — So different countries do have recognisable handwriting? — Different copybook models, yes, in schools. — Copybook models? You mean when they’re teaching children how to write, they follow certain characteristics? — Yeah, that’s right. So we contacted Germany, we contacted Slovenia, we contacted Belgium, Switzerland, because it was suggested to us both from Switzerland and Germany that they suspected France, and a French way of writing.
(22:23) And we contacted two laboratories, and independent of each other, they said yes, we recognise these features, this is according to older French norm. — This is a sort of old-fashioned kind of French handwriting. — Yeah, and one of them… he sent us some old french letters. There isn’t a lot to go on here. So this is the ‘T’, do you see that they connect it, and then they write a bar across the stem of the T. — Yeah.
(22:56) — And he also mentioned the way of signing, you can see this is from the letter, they write diagonally and draw the line underneath. I wonder whether signatures are the biggest giveaways? — No, I would have said the T. I know it’s just one letter, but it’s not common, and uh, handwriting examiners around Europe, they’ve said no, this is not from our norm.
(23:24) — So the French laboratories, they confirmed, “we know this type of writing”. — Yes. I would say, it’s not conclusive in any way, but France is the nearest we’ve got, so far. — Belgium is half francophone, half Flemish, could it be that she was from the the French-influenced part of Belgium? — Of course.
(23:43) — Because she’s signed in as a Belgian more than any other nationality, isn’t she? — Yes, I quite agree. — This really is a significant development, because when we were looking at the hotel registration forms, you as a fluent German speaker could tell that she made mistakes in her written German, and now the handwriting experts are pretty sure that she learned to write in a French-speaking country when she was younger.
(24:11) — The isotope tests on her teeth told us two things: That she probably started her life in south-eastern Germany, Nuremberg area, but by her teenage years she had moved direction west, and there were a few possible places. — And this new information makes the hotspot on the German-French border particularly interesting for us. And by the way, all crucial documents, including the hotel registration cards, where you can look out for the giveaway letter T, are on the Death in Ice Valley website, and on Facebook.
(25:05) — Hello Neil! — Hi Marit, hi, hi, how are things? — Well things are are pretty OK, I’ve been to the exciting moment of truth by headquarters of Kripos this morning, to find out the results of the Karolinska examinations, to find out how old was our woman. — Yeah, and we’re hoping to get quite close to the truth with this one, quite specific, so I’m quite excited to know what kind of results you got back? — Well, there are some pretty interesting results.
(25:39) Well, let’s go through it. The carbon-14 method, which is the method where they had the greatest expectations. So the thing is, first result: She had, let’s call it a normal base level of carbon-14 in all the three examined teeth. So that’s the first result.
(26:03) So then came this other method in use, and they were quite satisfied with their examinations, it’s a quite technical method, difficult to understand, but this other method was successful. They also used three teeth, and two of the teeth made the exact same result. — Right. — Be prepared now! Saying: this woman was 45 years old when she died.
(26:35) — 45? — Yes! So this is a woman born around 1930, but most likely born in the 20s. — How interesting, she’s much older than we’d always imagined. — This changes the whole picture. She’s a lot older than we thought she was, as she’s a lot older than she said she was. So what was she doing pretending to be younger? It’s such a strange thing to be doing? — It’s so hard to understand this, I actually really got a shock when I got those results, because she’s kept on saying, or having identities showing, that she was born between ’42 and ’45, and why did she do that if she was actually born 1930,
(27:24) or even earlier? — I don’t know, have you got any theories? — Well I keep on thinking of it, and I think OK, we know from our interviewees like Iver Neumann saying, well there were only three possible tasks for this woman, either she was a prostitute, or she was some kind of agent, spy, or she was some kind of business woman.
(27:50) And I think if you’re a businesswoman travelling, why do you have to lie on your age, pretend that you are 15, maybe 20 years younger? As an agent does that make sense? Does it make sense to you that you have to pretend that you’re younger? — No, it doesn’t doesn’t make sense to me. — I’m sorry, I know I have said many times I
(28:16) don’t think she was a prostitute, but this… I keep thinking on this, and as a woman, I can find only one reason for making yourself younger than you are on the paper, and that is to make yourself more attractive. Isn’t it? Think of it. — Well, yeah, you would want to look younger, but you wouldn’t really need paperwork to prove that because prostitution was illegal and informal and you wouldn’t be presenting your passport I wouldn’t assume, and why would you have all these different passports, with different names, and all with a similar date of birth? — That’s so true.
(28:42) So it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense, because OK, you want to make yourself more attractive to pretend you’re younger than you are you need a paper on that, but then what with all those fake identities, why do you need them if you are some kind of sex worker or… I don’t get it.
(29:17) — Another possible answer could be that she she wanted to show that she was around the age of 30 because perhaps it raised less questions about a single woman travelling alone? If she was 45, perhaps there’d be an expectation that she’d be married, or she had to put those details down in hotel registration forms, or wherever she was being asked, whereas saying she was a 30-year-old travelling alone, it was gonna raise less questions.
(29:41) — The society was different back in 1970. Maybe it wasn’t that common that a mature woman, 45, was travelling alone. Yet again, the Isdal Woman surprises us, this time with her age. It’s again, there’s this riddle within a riddle. She was very good at covering her tracks. I mean it’s only now, after all these years, that her age, her true age, has finally come out.
(30:08) So rather than being born during the Second World War, she was probably born in the late 1920s, and if she was born in the Nuremberg area, as the isotope results suggest, then that points to a unique period in history. Join us next week, when we go from the end of her life, to search for her origins in the city chosen by Adolf Hitler as the cradle of his Nazi philosophy.

Where did the Isdal Woman grow up? Death in Ice Valley, Episode 9 — BBC World Service

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2gHzo9DlaM

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:12) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. We now know the Isdal Woman’s age has placed her in a different period than the one we first thought. — Her childhood belongs to the inter-war years, with the clouds of conflict gathering on the horizon. A place and time where people could be lost, found, or changed forever.
(00:59) I’m Marit Higroff and I’m Neil McCarthy, and this is episode nine: The Isdal Girl. So Marit, I’m hoping we’re taking a step forward here. We’re on a night flight from London to Nuremberg in the south-east corner of Germany. The reason we’re going to Nuremberg is because the isotope analysis of the teeth showed us a number of red spots, where we know the Isdal Woman was as a very young girl, and then later on as a teenager.
(01:42) And the first red spot is Nuremberg. — Nuremberg is really a red hot spot on the European map. She most certainly was born, and spent her first living years in Nuremberg. — There’s not much to see out of the window, it’s just black, black, black. — We just passed Belgium. — Yeah. — So we are over German area now.
(02:13) — This is quite a good time in our story, isn’t it? We’re moving to a different geographical space. We’re going into Europe, into deeper Europe, into the beginning of her story, of her life story. — Yeah. I think the exciting thing about this trip we’re doing now, I have a strong feeling we’re really going into the most interesting area for us now. Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg… that’s the area we assume are the most interesting countries for us.
(02:46) It’s a long shot in a way, this journey we’re making now, because we don’t have a name, we don’t know where to search exactly, so we’re doing what the isotope maps are telling us to, we’re going to those places where she most probably lived. If you were in Nuremberg in the late 1920s and 30s, and we assume that the Isdal Woman was as a child, you were in the spiritual heart of Nazi Germany, and you would have seen Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, close up.
(03:37) Propaganda rallies of hundreds of thousands of military and civilian Nazi party supporters filled the zeppelin fields during the famous Nuremberg rallies. A grandstand built in the image of a Roman temple looks out onto a giant stadium. — This is the place, you can see here a restroom where Hitler holds his speeches.
(04:15) Now it’s desolate and crumbling, with only passing tourists and weeds blowing across it, and this is where we meet historian from the documentation centre of the Nazi party rally grounds, Dr Alexander Schmidt. — Nuremberg was the city where the biggest celebrations from the Nazi movement took place.
(04:38) Every year, for one week, they come together and celebrated Hitler, celebrated Germany, and wanted to show the whole world how strong Germany now is. It was a propaganda show. And Nuremberg was the most important city for the Nazi movement. The medieval city, the old city, was a symbol for the typical Germany, and there was the celebration in uniform, that Hitler was the top and they will follow him.
(05:18) — And he talked a lot about one Germany and one people? — Yes, yes, he said we are one German community who goes in one direction, and I’m in front, and I will show you where to go. He means he knows that this would be a war, but he never said that. — Certain groups had no place in Hitler’s ideology of one German community, most notably the Jews, who were subjected first to harassment and attack, and were then victims of genocide as the Second World War unfolded, and approximately six million Jews were murdered.
(05:55) — Because of where she came from, but more importantly because she moved away from here in her youth, one theory we’ve considered is that the Isdal Woman could have been Jewish and fled Nuremberg in the 1930s. This has also been a topic of discussion in our Facebook group.
(06:13) We’re going to follow this line of inquiry for now, to see where it leads. — We were wondering with this rise of Nazism, how quickly the Jews would have been leaving Nuremberg? — It depends of their hopes and their thinking. Some of the Jewish people thought, we are Germans too, for example we have been in the First World War as a soldier.
(06:41) They didn’t leave, they are waiting, and this was their problem in the late 30s. Others who… I spoke to one Jewish man for years, and he said I’ve looked outside of my window and saw the big marches to the zeppelin field, and this was the moment I know I have to go. And you can feel it in Nuremberg, not so much other cities, that the Nazi movement will have a future, and the Jewish people in Germany will have not.
(07:13) So this is one connection. If she was in Nuremberg she has a chance to see how strong the Nazi movement is, and that a Jewish young girl will have not a good future in such a city. — So if she was Jewish, her parents would have been looking for an escape plan. Daniela Eisenstein is the director of the Jewish Museum in Nuremberg. — Jews had been in the city for centuries and were highly integrated.
(07:42) By the 1930s, anti-semitism was on the rise, encouraged by Nazi ideology. There were waves of attacks on Jews and their properties at the time the Isdal Woman would have been a young girl. So, many families decided to try and get their kids on a so-called Kindertransport in November, and they left from Prague, went over Nuremberg to Holland, and from Holland to England.
(08:16) Up to 10,000 children from Germany, from former Czechoslovakia, parts of Poland, and Holland were able to survive via the Kindertransport. And then of course there were these clandestine operations where Catholics all over Europe tried to hide children in monasteries, but it could have just been parents sending their children to relatives that lived westward. Those are the possibilities that may have an answer for you, who this person could have been.
(08:45) Now, non-jewish families sent their children away when the bombings began, after the outbreak of the Second World War, starting in 1940, but these children were sent to the countryside in Bavaria, to former Prussia, to Bohemia, Moravia, or Austria, but not really westward, exactly the other direction.
(09:15) — So whether or not she was Jewish, there were different reasons to be leaving Nuremberg at that time. The isotope science shows us quite a few areas where she might have gone next, and they are mostly in the western part of Europe. — And if the Isdal Woman was Jewish, and she was evacuated, she would have gone westward. Rudy Ceslanski, now in his 80s, was born around the same time as her, in Nuremberg. This is his story as a child.
(09:38) Could it have been similar to hers? — My earliest memories go back to when I was maybe between three and four years old, when there was a loud banging on our street door, and my father got up, went to the door, and suddenly there were five or six men standing in the room, wearing long black coats. They started opening all the drawers, they opened the cupboards.
(10:20) I was just wondering why they were doing that. Apparently they were looking for money or for jewellery. They didn’t find very much in our place. They came to our house because we were Jewish. After this event, I still remember hearing my parents talking about me, what they should do to save my life.
(10:51) — Like many Jewish children, Rudy was put on the Kindertransport out of Nazi Germany. It was an organised evacuation to a safer haven in Britain, between 1938 and 1940. — My parents took me to a railway station, and I remember my mother saying: “Rudy, you go ahead, we’ll be with you again in three weeks time.” In other words, my parents also wanted to leave the country.
(11:25) And then came the day when I had to leave my parents, and I remember being amongst very many other children. They took us by train to Holland and from Holland we went on a boat to Harwich, and from Harwich on a train to London. For me that was a terrible time because it was only a couple of days later that we were on the 1st of September 1939, when the war broke out.
(12:08) On that day I realised that my parents would be stopped from leaving Germany, and I was scared. And it was seven years I knew nothing about my parents. I didn’t know what was happening to them, and of course they didn’t know what was happening with me.
(12:42) — Rudy’s story is typical of a young child on the Kindertransport: quickly evacuated, not knowing what happened to their parents. Separated for the duration of the war, or permanently, as many Jewish adults were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Germany divided after the war into capitalist West and communist East.
(13:08) — If the Isdal Woman was reported missing in the East, which was under communist party rule, it’s unlikely that the Norwegian police or Interpol would ever have known about that. “So Andreas you film how they interact, how they discuss the next day, what are we gonna do…” — Now we’ve come to what we believe to be the part of the world she grew up in. We wanted to reach into people’s homes with her story.
(13:33) A German TV and radio crew has been following us around whilst we make our inquiries, filming and recording us, helping us get the word out to somebody who might remember her. — The story about that woman, nobody knows who she was and it’s very interesting for our viewers to hear that she was German, apparently, she had maybe German sisters or brothers, and parents, or a nephew who remembers her, or who remembers: “ah, back in the days there was this aunt of my father that never came back,” or something like that. I think
(14:04) people love these stories, and uh yeah, maybe someone remembers something. Claudia Kaffanke is a TV reporter from Südwestrundfunk SWR, one of Germany’s biggest broadcasters. I think for the people, it’s almost emotional a little. I mean if she was really German, if she was one of us, it’s really like yeah, you want to know who was she, and how did she end up there? — And from a very interesting time in German history, in the decades leading up to 1970, a divided country, people were lost on either side to each other’s families, and some were reunited, some weren’t…
(14:40) This is part of what I’ve been thinking is that did she, she sort of lost touch with her relatives or was caught on the wrong side of the border at one point? It’s all speculation, but in the course of history it’s quite possible.
(14:55) — Absolutely, yes, because there were so many people without roots and without families as you said, and maybe some difficulties in between political discussions in the families, you know, you have all these divided people back then, so you probably she said, “oh go to hell Dad, I leave you,” because we had the wrong political view or whatever, so everything could be possible, but yeah a lot of families has been divided back then.
(15:21) — And what’s good for us is that the cutting edge of science has brought us here, but now it’s over to human memory. It’s always going to be the two things that will help solve this mystery. We came on quite a long road trip from Nuremberg and we’re following the isotope map really. We’ve
(16:30) been through forests and hills and pine trees and silver birch and we’ve come quite high up into the Pfalz region. — Yeah it’s in the south-west of Germany and you’re right, the isotope map showed us the possibility that our woman, the Isdal Woman, actually moved here to this region. It could at least be one of some possibilities in this area.
(16:58) — And so where we are, we’re quite high up, surrounded by open farmland, we’ve been through vineyards, there’s a very old church to my right, an old sandstone church, and to tell us a little bit more about where we are is Mr Dully, a lay preacher here at Maria Rosenberg.
(17:16) — Maria Rosenberg is a pilgrim shrine of Our Holy Mother Maria. The first part of the chapel was built in 1150 and since this time people are coming here to pray, to enjoy the silence. — And as well as being a church, it’s also a place where children have lived, especially in the 20th century, haven’t they? — Yes. We were a home for children who don’t have parents. It was built in 1928.
(17:47) There lived in the former times only women, young women and girls, who don’t have parents, who came out from difficult families, yes. — So like a foster home for children. And so we’re interested because at the period we’re looking at, during the war, Second World War, it shows on the isotope map that the Isdal Woman as a teenager might have been in this area, perhaps she was in a foster home, perhaps she was somewhere like this. So I understand you have an archive? — Yes.
(18:21) — So we’d like to see it please. — I’ll show it to you. We’re going now in the Schifter House and this was the first home for the young girls because the other house was built in 1928 and it’s called the Schifter House. So the girls would have lived above us, right down in the basement? — Yes.
(18:40) So we go left, up the steps. And so we have our little archive, yes. — Yeah, here’s the archive. Filled with plenty of binders and files and handwritten documents. We have here documents from this home from when it was built, and some documents, some letters that we have contact to Nuremberg. — Oh you do? — It’s here. — Look at this.
(19:16) — This is the cardboard file, uh Hitlerseit 1933 to 1945. — It’s the time of Adolf Hitler and this is our director Muth, he’s called Johannes Muth, collected these documents in this map here. They have letters from 1935 here, and here it’s called [German title] from Nuremberg.
(19:43) — Oh! — It’s a letter from the from the Jugendamt, from the office for the young people from ’35, and it’s called [German title] — Children in the Nuremburg area that were being taken care of. — Yeah. It could be that that children from Nuremberg or from the area Bavaria were here in this time. — Could it be that there are name lists, that you have? — In some documents we find names, but the list of every year, we don’t, we have no. — Is it possible, could I have a look? — Yes, you can look. — Oh, thank you.
(20:21) — Right. — And there we could have some names. — Laub, Bösch… Steinbrecher, Wagner, Braun, Schendner… Oh here’s one very close, it’s one with the surname Thiel, T-h-i-e-l, it’s almost Tielt — Almost Claudia Tielt. — Yeah. We just need a name. A real name. — Claudia Tielt, you’ll remember, was one of the Isdal Woman’s identities.
(21:03) — It was very tantalising looking at the records and the photos, but there were no complete registers of girls sent from Nuremberg to the Maria Rosenberg school, so we couldn’t follow up any specific names and addresses. — Also joining us in the archive at Maria Rosenberg is Dr Richard Antoni, who has studied the history of the school in a bit more depth.
(21:29) He’s telling about what kind of children stayed here before and during the World War, and it was mostly of children with behavioural problems, they were sent here, the parents needed help and so on, they for instance came from the Nuremberg area. He’s not believing that there were Jewish children hidden here for the war, because there were too many people here.
(22:02) There were also soldiers here, so it was much too dangerous for the director to do a thing like that, because he would then probably be sent to a camp, and he had the responsibility for so many children here, so he wouldn’t have doing doing that, he says. — Not a likely place for her to have stayed if she was Jewish. But what about the surrounding area? — There’s one more person to see in this south-western corner of Germany before we leave. We’d heard rumours that the church hid Jewish children in this border region between
(22:36) Germany and France. Roland Paul is a historian of the Pfalz region. — Maybe the profession of the father, you know maybe he got a job here, then the family moved to here, this often happened, people came here and got a job. But in the 30s, if they were Jews they had a hard time, we know that and they often left then, you know.
(23:01) In Nuremberg, the persecution was very strong, so maybe this family had relatives here who invited them to come? That would be a possibility. I wouldn’t know if any monasteries would helped the Jews, there were a few ministers or a few families who helped Jewish people here, but this area was the centre of the Reformation already in the 16th century, so all the monasteries which once existed here, they disappeared very early in history already.
(23:34) — If she did come from a Jewish family and she moved to this area, up to what point would it have been safe to be in this region? — You could say it was really safe between ’33 and ’38. After ’38, it was very severe, the persecution, after the Kristallnacht in November 1938. Many people left in ’38 and ‘39.
(23:56) Many people, by the way, went to France because many hoped that the Nazi period would be over soon and then if they lived in this border area they could have, get home, come home early, you know, soon or fast also, instead of going in another country. — If she moved either forcibly or voluntarily she’ll be very hard to track down, especially without a name. But listen to Professor Stephen Dorrell.
(24:21) He’s an expert on intelligence services during the Cold War. He teaches at Huddersfield University in the UK, and he feels that a disrupted childhood like this one could have prepared the Isdal Girl for what was to come, later in life. — My thought when I was listening to this, and the fact that she came from where she came from, Germany etc, given her age, I did think maybe this is a refugee.
(24:43) Maybe she’s lost her family. Particularly if she was Jewish, she probably would have, and she would have been this single person, which is probably ideal for an intelligence agency to use. Little or no background. You can then develop these different identities. If we’re to believe the scientific evidence, it places the Isdal Woman in one of the hot spots of European history.
(25:14) — Yes, a child growing up around here at that time would have witnessed the rise of Hitler and anti-semitism, she would have felt the full force of war as the allies liberated Europe. — Yeah, and watched as the continent was divided by the West and the Soviet Union, and plunged into a Cold War. We’ve obviously spent a lot of time trying to piece together the last days, weeks, months of her life, and now to come back to what could have been the start of her life, in such a sort of fractured world of pre- and post-war Europe,
(25:49) there may be the seeds of these many identities that she ended up having. Because we just don’t know what happened to her life then, what sort of chaos she came out of. So Marit, we’ve done a big tour of the south of Germany. We’ve been to Nuremberg, we’ve been to the Pfalz area, following the isotopes, following the possible traces of the Isdal Woman, and now we’re at Frankfurt airport, about to depart our separate ways.
(26:28) But it’s been quite an interesting journey, hasn’t it? — It has been very interesting, although we didn’t get a real answer, and we didn’t expect to either, that we should get the final answer now, I mean this trip was to try to follow in her footsteps, where she has been when she was a small child, and we actually learned a lot.
(26:49) — Yeah, learned a lot about the sort of world she was living in the 1920s or the 1930s, the changes that were taking place, the movements people were forced to make, away from cities like Nuremberg, what life might have been like in the countryside. But we’re still not there yet, we’ve put the word out. It’s kind of strange to listen to German radio and suddenly, yeah, I hear myself and then talking about this case, and wow it was a big story! — I mean, I only speak about three words of German but you sounded great. — Yeah, it’s so strange to hear myself you know, yeah, thank you I think it was
(27:47) OK! — So they’ve spread the word, they want people to get in touch if they know anything. — Oh yes, it was really good for us this story, saying you should take contact if you know something about the case, you know, and pointing to the next programme that is going to tell more to the viewers and listeners, and also pointing out where they can send tips if they know something about our woman. — I believe there’s some news just in; another clue has turned up.
(28:17) — Yeah, it’s a coincidence actually that we had the same thought yesterday, me and colleague Ståle, who is at home at the office, both of us were coming on the same thought yesterday about a spoon in the suitcases, and the historian of the Jews we met in the Pfalz area, he got more enthusiastic after the interview, because then he could speak in his own language, German, and he was very fascinated by the story, and he started asking me questions about a spoon, but we didn’t pay it much
(28:51) attention, because it didn’t say much, this steel spoon, you know. But then again and again he asked me, but did you check that spoon, did you check if there was something on the back side, some initials or some engraving, you know? And I said I don’t think so, because we would have seen it.
(29:09) But then it shows out at the back side of this spoon, there is actually an engraving. Can you imagine?! — Yeah? — There is a clue on the back side of the spoon. — What is it, letters? Numbers? — It’s a heart, and inside the heart there are some letters: S C H, then a line, and then a P. — That has to stand for something. Could even be her own initials.
(29:37) — I got a bit confused yesterday when he started asking me about the spoon, but he was very very keen on knowing if if this spoon had some initials or something. Then he told me why, because he said some Jews sometimes bring a spoon with them, because it means something special for them. — What, like some sort of connection with a former home? — It could be that the spoon was given to them from a special person, the mother, or by some special occasion.
(30:08) Just think about that, think about if this spoon meant something really special for her and that was the reason she had it with her? — Yeah, and it’s the one thing that could have a personal connection with her life, whereas everything else seemed to be, you know, impersonal really, or just functional.
(30:25) -And think about that, if she really left us the one big clue and we haven’t seen it before. But we have the possibility now to find out what it means. I can’t wait to get home actually to see it myself.

What have we learned about the Isdal Woman? Death in Ice Valley, Episode 10 — BBC World Service

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO1XV03xTiw

Transcript Glasp/ChatGPT:

(00:11) This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. The Isdal Woman took her secrets to the grave after a life undercover came to a tragic end. Whether she ended up there by her own hand or through the actions of an organisation, a question mark hangs over that grave.
(00:40) — I’m Neil McCarthy. — And I’m Marit Higraff. — And this is episode 10: Underground. This is the last episode in the series. — We’ve still got some important leads to follow up in this podcast, but just thinking back to where we began, or where I began, on that bleak hillside outside Bergen, at the scene where the woman was found in 1970.
(01:12) So difficult to find, that spot, it’s etched on my memory. The rain falling and such a lonely, lonely place. — I’ve been there several times, and every time we had slight problems finding the exact spot where she was found. But I’ve heard that now there is a path leading to the place, a path made by people going there after we started this podcast series. — The word really has got out there.
(01:38) But also, you’ve been living with the Isdal Woman’s story longer than I have, I mean, how far she got under your skin? — Oh, this has been so intense, this work trying to get closer to the truth in this story. So of course it has done something to me.
(01:56) I find myself thinking about her, and asking myself questions all the time. It was the situation yesterday actually. I’m staying in hotel rooms all the time, every time I come here to London, and this time I stay in a rather old hotel in Soho, and the room is a very nice room, but with all handmade furniture and I have a big desk in there, and it just struck me yesterday that it might be like her hotel rooms, back then. — Yeah.
(02:26) It was one of those frozen-in-time rooms, so you could have been in the Neptune or the Hordaheimen. — Yeah. — And the desk, were you tempted to put the desk against the door for any reason? — No! No, I had no reason to do that, but my boss suggested me to sit down on the desk and write some poetry. — In code? [laughter]. So we’ve come a long way from that cold hillside, and those many hotel rooms, and we’re not finished yet.
(02:54) Last time, we got word about the spoon that was found in the Isdal Woman’s suitcase. On closer inspection of the police report listing all the items inside, we saw some detail about an inscription on the spoon that we’d missed. — We’ve done some research and had a few hits on the engraving, which was an ‘SCH’ underlined and a ‘P’ underneath.
(03:16) We found some references to a Norwegian shipping company which had those initials, but it was written differently. But remember, the letters on her spoon were inside a heart. — Another search gave us some more interesting hits. The letters SCH-P seemed to be a common abbreviation for a religious order called the Peerists, who are catholics, an order with an emphasis on education.
(03:40) Maybe they had a heart around the letters, as the heart is a common catholic symbol? — Well, we’ve been in touch with the order, both at their headquarters in Rome, and at other locations, but they knew nothing about any spoon or other cutlery with an inscription like the one described. — Strange to be carrying a spoon with a catholic symbol, if she was Jewish.
(04:00) There was also a picture of the Madonna with Child in her suitcase. Maybe it was all part of her disguise. Then, during another online search, we found something unexpected, a bit closer to home. We are now two hours’ drive north of Oslo outside a museum, and colleague Øyvind, tell, what brought us here? The hits brought us here to this museum.
(04:36) It’s actually Forest Museum within the forests in the inland of Norway, and they have something that might be similar. We are looking for a fork and a knife which is in our collection and it has belonged to an old couple in the railroad area look for the numbers this is museum curator Björn Bekuland. Should be this one. A bit rusty.
(05:12) Does it say something? — There should be a German manufacturer. — It says, made in Austria. — Austria! Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah. — This seems to be some kind of like butter knife, quite normal. — Quite normal. So I lived in 1970, and I think many people had such forks and knives in their kitchens at that time, yeah. — Do we see any inscription on this knife and fork? Can we turn them? — We can turn them.
(05:50) Yeah, on the fork there’s something. — Quite small. My old eyes can’t read it! — See now, it says Rostfreier Stahl, German for stainless steel. — In the middle, we have this inscription we are looking for. — Yes. — It’s a small heart with the s c h and the underscore, and a p. — Yeah that’s right.
(06:19) — But, and there is a but, there is no doubt that this inscription is not made afterwards. To me, it says that this is something made by the fabric. — Yes, factory. — Definitely. — And on the knife? — Yes, you’ve got the same heart and the same letters. — We have brought with us the documentation from the police about the contents in the suitcases of this woman. — It says suitcase number one and it’s object G.
(06:46) — Yeah? — In English it would it says it’s smooth… — Smooth, yeah. — Steel soup spoon, smooth, with an inscription: “Rostfreier Stahl” and SCH/P within a heart. — Yeah. It’s the same thing. — It definitely seems to be the same. — Yeah, the same manufacturer, I’d say. — Yeah.
(07:12) And so, we’re not getting any closer here now, but we know then for sure that this must have been made in Austria. — Yes. And must have been sold in Norway, I’d say. — Or brought here by somebody… — Yes. — …traveling in Austria, for instance.
(07:34) — OK Marit, now I know we got quite excited about the spoon, but I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be the case-cracking clue we were looking for after all. — Maybe not. But after we went to the museum and after episode 9, the Facebook group has done some amazing research, and that’s without even seeing the photos of the engraving we’ve just posted on the website.
(07:57) We must give special mention to Mike Alexander who found out that this symbol with the SCH/P within a heart, was the trademark of a steel company in Vienna, the capital of Austria. It was called Schutz & Patry, and they mass-produced cutlery. So it’s unlikely that this spoon had any special sentimental values after all. A bit like the matchbox in the earlier episode, it was an intriguing clue, but in the end it doesn’t tell us anything special about the Isdal Woman. It was worth a try though.
(08:50) So you found them? — Yes, they were in the safe. Number one and number two. The case number 4968–1970-A, means a criminal case. — This case has now gained a lot of international interest. One of the places that feels the effect of this is the State’s Archives in Bergen. — This says investigations.
(09:21) And if you open this one, we can see that this is the correspondence with the international police… — Its director is Ingver Nedrever, who was in the city in 1970. — Now the State’s Archive in Bergen has a pop star, a pop star case, and this is the Isdalen case? — Yes, of course when we have people coming from halfway around the world to see it, it means that the case has brought on an interest that not much of the things that we keep do have.
(09:51) The most fascinating thing is of course that no one has been able to find a solution, so that’s annoying. So where would they be able to find more information about her? Because obviously she stayed for quite some time, she had a lot of people probably that she met, someone is not telling everything, and so the feeling was that the police hadn’t done too good a job, and as I have been in the archive since the early 1970s there have been so many people coming here, and everyone was very optimistic
(10:28) and everyone said that I will find a solution. And no one, until you came. Well, we might have got closer, but we’re not there yet. — This feeling he talks about, that the police didn’t do their investigation well. It’s an interesting one.
(10:56) Do you think it’s fair? — Well there were teams of officers working on it, and they did a thorough investigation, we know because of all the documents they produced, and all the interviews they did. — You’ve been through everything. — Yes. And the national criminal intelligence police came quickly to Bergen from Oslo, as we know, and then the case was suddenly officially closed after only three intensive weeks, and that’s a bit confusing.
(11:19) There are no senior police officers still alive who worked on the case but here is Tore Osland. He’s the son of Harald Osland, who led the investigation on behalf of the Bergen police. My father was investigating murder and rape in western Norway, always when he was at the police in Bergen. When that case came, then day after day, there was new things that happened.
(11:47) I was much home at that time and he told me something about what happened. But later on, when I asked him what happened there, and what happened there, what was it like, why didn’t you go to Geneva, why didn’t you go to Paris, to follow up tracks after this woman? — Do you remember some of the things he told you? — Yes, I remember very well that he was surprised that the Kripos, the Norwegian Intelligence Service and Kripos, they came to Bergen the day after this happened, which was something that he almost couldn’t believe,
(12:25) because they never was that interested in what happened in the outskirts of Norway. So there was a feeling passed on to Tore Osland from his father that his father’s hands seemed to be tied in some way, he couldn’t carry out the investigation the way he wanted to. — No, obviously his father was quite frustrated about not being able to follow up leads that he wanted to follow up, I mean, going abroad to check up on things, and they were obviously stopped from doing that. — And then when the case is suddenly shut down, I can imagine it would leave a lot of
(13:05) local police officers scratching their heads? — Yeah, let’s hear what Tore Osland says about that. He hadn’t any good feeling about this case, and that is not alone, I’ve talked to many policemen afterwards, and they’re saying almost the same, “I have no good feeling about that case, I have no good feeling about that case.
(13:30) “ — What do they mean? — That means that they hadn’t solved the case. The case was stalled by the Kripos and the police chief in Bergen, saying that this was a suicide and it seemed like she had had an accident and got herself burned. The policemen working on the case accepted that it’s like that. Like policemen I suppose always do.
(13:51) But then what they said afterwards was that “I didn’t have a good feeling about that case,” which means that they they didn’t accept that it was a suicide. None of them. None of them I’ve spoken to. So local police officers didn’t have a good feeling about the case and the way it was closed but they obviously took the case very seriously and showed a lot of respect to the Isdal Woman.
(14:17) I mean they were the only people who attended her funeral in February 1971. — Yes, there’s a photograph of them at the graveside they really look like they care about the woman being buried. Gunnar Staalesen, Bergen’s most famous crime writer, took us to the spot where this photo was taken. — She’s lying here. As you know, it’s an unmarked grave.
(14:46) This you can see is the typical Bergen bush, it’s a rhododendron, and they grow very fast and very high. It’s an unmarked grave, I don’t think anybody really bothers about this place. And she was put down here because in 1971, when she was buried, they still had hope of finding her family in the near future so that she could eventually be brought home to her original country and buried again there.
(15:14) — And that was the reason for the zinc coffin? — Yeah so she is still preserved down there, I hope. A real mystery to the end. Even to her resting place. You can’t even see it! — Yeah, it’s only because of this old photo that we could identify it, and of course there are some people in Bergen who have known all the time that it was here.
(15:44) That is that is my father. — Tore Osland again. — When I saw policemen, standing at the coffin. — Yeah, this is the burial. — Yeah, very serious. It looks like they are a kind of sorrow there. — It’s a very sombre mood, yes. So we’re graveside, the coffin is being lowered into the grave.
(16:11) It’s a white, beautiful white ornate coffin with handles on the side and a sort of design around the edge and with flowers on top. You’ve got the priest on one end in a sort of frock and there are about, ooh about 15, mostly men, around the grave. — Yeah, the female detectives too. I remember them. This was the chief of police in Bergen. — What a unique funeral and burial. I can’t imagine there were many like that.
(16:39) — This is a very unusual picture, I never saw a picture like this. But the reason was that she had no relatives and the only relatives she had was the policemen that worked on the case. The evidence and witness testimony we’ve gathered suggests that she was involved with espionage, either as an agent, or as a courier taking information to or from an agent, but we still haven’t managed to pin down which organisation or intelligence service she worked for. Professor Stephen Dorrell of Huddersfield University is an expert in
(17:47) the field of western counter-intelligence. — You have been following our series. What’s your personal theory on the case? — Picking up all the bits and pieces of information, my first thought was that this was Mossad, which is the Israeli intelligence agency. They were operating in the late 60s and 70s, infiltrating far-right groups, infiltrating the PLO etc, and they used agents who did have different identities.
(18:21) This particular woman, I mean it’s pure speculation, but she came from Germany I believe, that she was maybe part of the post-war refugee problem, or could have been and maybe, I don’t know, maybe she was Jewish, that was my first thought, the one agency that is capable of doing this kind of operation, of running somebody with multiple identities, because they did it, was Mossad.
(18:46) It’s a shame we don’t know the passports, because Mossad did a great deal about passports, they stole passports, forged passports, used passports from different countries. And they used agents who did use different identities, and they did recruit more females than I think most intelligence agencies.
(19:08) — And can you speculate as to what a Mossad agent might have been doing in Norway at that time? — That’s the difficult part. Supporters of the Palestinians were across Europe, so that’s a possibility. They had agents in different places, they were tracking former Nazis, war criminals, they were still doing that, they were also out to get opponents of Israel and they engaged in assassinations of people from different organisations, so you know, there’s a number of possibilities. — So no one’s mentioned Mossad before. — Well actually,
(19:42) there was a big scandal involving Mossad in Norway in 1973. A year before, a Palestinian group called Black September took 11 members of the Israeli team hostage at the Munich Olympics in Germany and killed them.
(20:02) “It has been possible to hear what sounded like automatic gunfire and there’s been a great deal of police and military traffic in and out of the camp. Soon after the helicopters arrived from Munich a convoy of police cars drove into the airfield, and armed guards with alsatian dogs came out and started patrolling the barbed wire perimetre. Within minutes it had b
(20:26) een reported that one or more of the Arab gunmen had escaped…” — Mossad agents then came to the Norwegian town of Lillehammer and assassinated a man called Ahmed Bouchikhi, a moroccan waiter who they suspected of being involved in the massacre. He wasn’t, they killed the wrong person, and then they got caught before they managed to leave the country.
(20:44) So they were imprisoned in Lillehammer and it was a big, big story about that. So Mossad did have a history in Norway. Black September was one of a number of radical groups which emerged in the early 1970s and kicked off violent campaigns in Europe. Many of these groups were disillusioned with the response to student movement demands in 1968, and the often violent reactions of the state.
(21:15) So they moved from methods of direct action, to armed struggle, which included acts of terrorism. They saw their struggle as supporting similar groups which had developed in the post-colonial world as part of an eruption of nationalism and anti-imperialism, and many supported the Palestinians and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO.
(21:35) There was the Red Brigade in Italy, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, and the IRA in Ireland. Their aims and methods varied across Europe, but at their heart was a belief, rightly or wrongly, that democracy was something of a sham, and that states were perfectly willing to use violence to support it. Terrorism was seen as the means to expose this.
(22:02) This is something we haven’t considered either. We’ve been thinking about her working for a state intelligence agency in some way, but could the Isdal Woman have been mixed up with these groups, working as some kind of operative or courier? The Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof, started post-1968, and they were looking for weapons, they were looking for support.
(22:30) But they didn’t really get sophisticated, get organised again until the early 1970s, when they did have some contact with the Soviets, but more particularly with the East Germans. But the East German connection comes in a bit later. There were connections with the PLO and the Middle East, attempts to get arms through there, and they did require identities, they did require passports and all those kind of things, but again I think this particular incident is just too early for that.
(23:01) There were other terrorist groups throughout Europe, and the IRA, but I can’t think of an instance where they’ve done anything like this. And there were other groups in Europe, but again, I think this is 1970, it’s just a bit too early for speculation that these groups had some involvement with her, or she was part of that. Thousands of you have made comments on our Facebook group over the course of this series, offering theories and raising questions. — It’s been great to follow the conversations,
(24:08) and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response. And we wanted to try and answer a few of those questions, and share some of the theories. Quite a few of you were asking whether the Isdal Woman was pregnant, or whether she had ever had children, whether that was ever known.
(24:23) — We know from the autopsy report that this was a woman who had never given birth. — Yeah, and that also showed that she wasn’t pregnant at the time she died. — And then a lot of you have mentioned the story of the Somerton Man, the Somerton case. This is an unsolved case in Australia about an unidentified body found with the labels cut off its clothes.
(24:47) But from all we’ve seen, the two cases are not connected at all, but yeah, there are similarities. — People are asking whether we checked missing persons reports in Belgium and other European countries that she may have come from, and yes the police asked Interpol to check this with the member countries on their databases and didn’t get any positive results.
(25:02) — Many of you are suggesting that this could be a woman mentally ill in some way or another, that there are things by her behaviour that suggests that she was quite paranoid, fleeing from something, maybe she had some kind of mental illness. Yeah, I’m not a psychiatrist, but to me it’s too much with her behaviour showing that this was a person having control, she was pretty organised, I mean the way she traveled and so on.
(25:35) — She was highly organised, that’s true, but you just don’t know if she was being pursued at that point, whether it was fear, or stress, or depression, or loneliness… it’s hard to say. But Professor Stephen Dorrell has looked at mental health in connection with the lives of spies, and he has some thoughts on this. — It is entirely possible that somebody, maybe if it’s somebody’s been doing this for some time, just becomes totally depressed by what they’re doing.
(26:10) Where does it go? You know, is this the end of the road? I’m a Freudian, so I always think that these kind of things come out in the end in different forms, that you can’t keep this stuff secret. It will leak out. That might be internally, that you end up, because of the pressures of keeping up all these multiple identities, of the travel, of basically lying to people over a long time.
(26:44) And maybe you just can’t live with that and you end it. — Also because maybe you live a very lonely life? — That’s my feeling about this, that this maybe is a lonely person. It does seem quite a lonely life, keep travelling, going to different places, not being able to have any long-term relationships. I mean, one of the things with my work is, probably two or three times a year, somebody will contact me and say, could you tell me about my father? We think he worked in intelligence, but we don’t know.
(27:19) And it is the case that there are intelligence personnel who never tell their family what they actually do, it’s only when they die that they discovered in fact they worked in intelligence. They knew they went off on trips abroad, but they didn’t know it was intelligence work. Maybe they become suspicious, and it is a kind of, well obviously very secretive, lonely life.
(27:44) We had an interesting theory in from Will Selkeld. He says: I just noticed that each of the identities the Isdal Woman used, if written or typed in block capitals in a passport for example, could easily have been modified or altered into the next with minimal erasing and mostly by adding straight lines. Tielt becomes Nielsen, easily. Alexia becomes Vera, Zarna becomes Jarle.
(28:12) Also, Finella Lorck becomes Leenhouwer by simple, clumsy modification. Try it with pen and paper, and you will see. — Many of you have been asking if her DNA can prove whether the Isdal Woman was Jewish or not. I put this to our DNA expert Professor Walther Parson in Innsbruck. — First of all, we need to appreciate that we are using two different contexts here.
(28:39) The genetic context and then an ethnic or ethnological context. — The question is complicated, but essentially the answer is no. You can’t prove it with any reliability. — And this is why tests to predict the Jewish ancestry of individuals are subject to error, depending on the result that is retrieved with such a case.
(29:07) — Some of you are asking who else was staying at the same hotels as the Isdal Woman in Norway and whether they could throw light on her story. Maybe her contacts or accomplices stayed there too. — Well the police collected all hotel registration cards in 1970. There are nine boxes of them at the State’s Archive in Bergen. But again, it didn’t lead to anything.
(29:31) We had quite a few theories around whether the Isdal Woman was an art smuggler and was she dealing in stolen artwork. Here’s one: maybe she was buying the mirror for its frame or to smuggle a flat canvas behind the mirror? The scalpel in her bag may have been used to cut the canvas artwork out of frames to roll up in the metal canister. It seems she travelled to many cities that are connected to the art world.
(29:50) We know there was a lot of artwork stolen in World War One and World War Two; was she employed as a courier? — There’s been plenty of discussions about whether the sleeping pills were taken by the Isdal Woman voluntarily, or if she could have been forced to take them. We put this to our intelligence expert Stephen Dorrell again.
(30:15) — I’ve certainly heard of cases where barbiturates have been stuffed down the throat of a person to make it look as if they committed suicide, and I could think of one particular case where somebody told me that they did that, that it was made to look like a suicide, and that they actually injected this person but also stuffed barbiturates down his throat, so the sleeping pills could point us in different directions, suicide and murder.
(30:47) Back to Gunnar Staalesen, our companion in our search for the Isdal Woman’s shadow in Bergen. — I have followed this case from when the woman was found in Isdalen, Ice Valley, in 1970. From time to time, I have refreshed my opinions on it, but I must say that during the last years, when NRK started their series, and not at least in this period when there’s been an international podcast in cooperation with BBC, that has really made this case known all over the world. I am still
(31:21) travelling in some countries as a crime writer, and when I meet people this last year everybody is talking about this case so this is really a world mystery now, and it is a fascinating story. I think the big breakthrough was that one found her DNA and also the isotope researchers over teeth because what we have now is a possibility to identify her through some relatives if one would find them and i think too that what we have learned we are quite certain as I understand it that she was born somewhere in Germany, that she went to school in France and that she was a little
(32:09) bit older than one have thought earlier and for me as a writer used to use my imagination to solve mysteries that I have created myself but also that other people have written I can see a quite possible picture of who this woman was. If I should put it in some words, born in Germany around 1930, three years old or something like that when Hitler got into power in 1933, the family thought that they would leave the country because of that perhaps because they were jews and they went to the closest neighbour country, which is France, where she went to school
(32:57) and more than that I understand we cannot still find from what we have about her DNA and isotope researchers but after that we know that there is a woman who is found dead in Norway in 1970 and one of the theories that many of us have had is that she had had some connection with Israeli secret service.
(33:30) I myself have proposed once that perhaps she was searching for old Nazi people in Norway, or perhaps coming from Germany to Norway at the point. The other solution or other theory is that she was searching for Arab terrorists which the secret service of Israel did very clearly two years after in 1972 when there was a killing in Lillehammer and one could imagine that all her family was killed in a concentration camp during the war, she is the sole survivor, and would be very, if not easy, she would be possible to be a part of Israeli secret service after the war. This of course is just a crime writer’s imagination working on what we know, but
(34:14) I still think that this is not perhaps the real truth, but it might be part of the truth. — Well, we have come a long way. We haven’t found her yet, but she does feel nearer to us than when we started, doesn’t she? — Yes, and I will not give up now after two years of this project, so definitely we will continue to look into the leads we have.
(34:39) — Yeah, we’ve amassed so much evidence, so much testimony, we’ve talked to so many witnesses, we’ve built up this picture of her, the way she moved, her life, and yet despite all these clues and possibilities, her story does still feel like water, it just sort of slips through your fingers. I still don’t know who she really is.
(35:00) — Yes, and I still haven’t given up hope on bringing her back something that she has lost, and that is a name, and her dignity. It’s such a tragic tale and it’s somebody who despite our best efforts we haven’t found anyone who knows her now, and no one came forward who knew her then, you know.
(35:19) — Maybe this was a woman who just lived a life, a solitary existence, she had her contacts, she she met them, she passed information, but she was the lone wolf in her world. And who knows, when things seem to unravel at the end, and whether she was killed or she took her own life, it just felt like everything was just falling apart around her, her identity started to slip, or just everything she kept together managed to fall away, and her life went with it.
(35:49) But I think it’s a very sad story and I also would love to bring back her true identity and to memorialise it properly. — I think from the feedback we’ve been getting, more people care about her now than ever cared about her then, but I still stand by what we said at the very beginning. Someone out there still knows who she was, whether they were a family member or an associate, somebody has the answer for us. — I think so too.
(36:25) Somebody knows something about her and what happened to her, and I still hope that that person, or those persons, makes contact with us to help us solve this case.

Death in Ice Valley Live, Episode 11 — BBC World Service

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yGIN-dlKio

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:21) From the BBC World Service and NRK, this is Death in Ice Valley. — With me, Neil McCarthy — And me, Marit Higraff. — Coming to you with a special edition, live from Bergen in Norway, where the story began. — And joining us performing live is the excellent composer of Death in Ice Valley, Phil Channel.
(01:16) Thank you. We’ve been away a while, but we’re back, and it’s great to be back, with episode 11. — This show isn’t so much about our investigation, but yours. — We said from the start that we wanted the listeners to help us crack this case. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s amazing how many of you have been inspired by the story to become detectives yourselves. — We’re about to hear what you’ve been up to over the past year.
(01:42) Thanks to all of you who have come to listen here at the student union of the university of Bergen. Thank you for coming, you’re all welcome. — Yeah you are. And we have a very special panel of guests here with us, all people you’ve got to know during the series so far.
(02:00) And they’ll be answering questions from our audience here, and questions that you’ve been sending from around the world. But first, we’re going to listen to what we’ve been recording with some of our Death in Ice Valley detectives. — Yes. Death in Ice Valley has come home to Bergen.
(02:25) — We’re up in the hills behind Bergen in western Norway, surrounded by mighty pine trees, the icicles hanging off the branches and off the rocks nearby, and the ground is covered in snow, and snow is starting to fall again, it’s late afternoon. Isdal valley is very near, but we’re back really where it all started. — You can see here it’s uh, I have a bag with me, and this is it’s equipment for digging, I have a bag with me, and you see here the metal detector is two pieces you have to take it together.
(02:54) — So you were back here Marit recently, with somebody who knows the area well and has special techniques to find and search for clues? — Yeah, this guy took contact with us, telling us that he has been searching in Isdalen with his metal detector for almost two years. I put it on like that, you get the peep, like that, and I found everything with this, and you can hear it, if it’s iron it’s like that…
(03:26) so it’s a good noise. This is Death in Ice Valley: Turning Detective So to remind ourselves, the Isdal Woman’s badly burned body was found on a mountainside outside Bergen in Norway on the 29th of November 1970. Laid around there were objects: Jewellery, a
(04:03) watch, a rubber boot, cake, liquor… but all traces of her identity and the labels on her clothes had been removed. — The police searched the surrounding area, but didn’t find anything else. But now, nearly half a century later, Arne Magnus Vabo has been searching the area, and he has found something potentially very interesting. — T
(04:36) he search, after some found… in this area around the spot where the woman was found, I have been searching for almost two years, but in 2016 I take an area from the road, where you can drive with a car, up to the point where this girl found the body. And it’s like if you say it’s around 200 metres in a square. But it was nothing to find.
(05:12) So in 2017, I begin in another area, and try the same method, and it was nothing, it was nothing to find. — You’ve been here many times. — Yes, I’ve been here very many, many times. It’s good exercise, and it’s exciting to use this detector in a search like this. And you know, this case is… everybody in Bergen or Norway knows about it.
(05:34) So I always think that it’s possible to find something in the area around where the victim was found. So, when you’re alone it’s a creepy, creepy thing to go here. You know that people have used this place to have rituals, and they have taken their lives, everything like that, so it’s not a nice place to be. This forest is not taken down, so this is exactly the same as it was 48 years ago.
(06:01) So I’d been searching in this area we’re in now in October for one hour and a half, and then it was something down in the ground. And exciting, you’re very excited when you go with the detector, it’s like gambling, you think you’re winning, all the time.
(06:23) — How was it like that day, when you came here to this spot? — Yeah, it was something like that, it was iron, and it was other metal, like copper, like bronze, or something like that, so it was a mixing noise. But really loud noise, and you know that it’s a big thing you have found. — And then? — And then I dug down 15 to 20 centimetres, take my finger under, I don’t know… if you dig up on the thing, you can damage it.
(06:50) So I go under this thing, and I felt it was something organic or something like that. It’s soft. And then I saw there was a belt on it, a black belt with some iron on on it, and and then I knew it was a bag. And then I take a handbag up. — Wow! — Yeah. — It must have been a great feeling for you, that day? — Yeah, of course, of course.
(07:19) — It definitely looked like the handbag was hidden, it wasn’t by accident, just lying on the ground? — No, no, no, this is not an accident or it just threw it away, this is just for hiding. Maybe a person has hidden it to come back. And it was something interesting in this thing? I don’t know. — You have secured the handbag? — Yes. I have not opened the handbag, I think this could be a very good evidence for the police, and I know that the people in NRK have used many, many hours to search on this case, so I think it’s a good thing for them to be with me when I deliver it to the police,
(07:55) and let’s see what’s happening after, maybe it’s shot in the air, but I don’t know. — So, the first find in 50 years. — Yeah, can you imagine? — It doesn’t surprise me in a way that, like, nothing has been found. That place, I have been there, and it’s a boulder-strewn, forested area, but the police investigation was pretty thorough, right? They were there, they were all over that place? — Yeah, they were. And the police were very thorough in their search.
(08:25) They also used metal detectors and search dogs. — And this is just, like, 40 metres away from where the body was buried. So he took this off the mountain, this bag, what did he do with it next? — He secured it at his home, in his garage, and waited there for the police, and us, to come and get it. We’ll come to that later.
(08:53) So Neil, as you know, a lot of people have been contacting us after the series, and one of them, I think we should speak with her. She lives in Denmark, her name is Cecilie Flo, and she has a special story to tell us. — Denmark, close to Norway, any connection with Norway? — Definitely.
(09:16) Cecilie was living in Bergen as a child with her family before they moved to Denmark and her grandfather, Rolf Flo, he was actually [employed] by the Bergen police. — And is he still alive? — No, he’s dead. But her father brought Cecilia a story that she wasn’t aware of. — And I asked my father if he knew anything about i
(09:42) f my grandfather had been working on the Isdal Woman case, and my father just… he had this reaction I had never seen before. He, um, he got very quiet and he… it’s kind of like I punched him in the gut. He just had to take some deep breaths, and he walked away. I even get a little bit emotional myself, because it was just such a strong reaction.
(10:04) And my father said that yes, my grandfather had worked this case, and he explained that this was a case that had, in a sense, broken my grandfather’s, I guess, trust in his work. And he… my father said that it was a case that had been very frustrating also, because the police had been, at least my grandfather had this feeling that they were being put barriers on their work, so they were being told to work the case, but then when they worked the case, they were being told, you know, don’t work it anymore, or don’t go into that, don’t go down this track,
(10:50) and that was very frustrating I think to my grandfather, who was a man who was very hard-working. And I guess my father, even though he was only 10 years old, he must have sensed this frustration from my grandfather, then possibly seen some notes or some crime scene photos. And it was, um, it was very strong for me to hear about this, because my mother was there as well, and she just, they’ve been married for like 35 years, my parents, and my mother knew nothing about this fact. And then we started listening a little bit later that evening to the podcast,
(11:38) and actually had to stop it because my father was so affected by it. He just… it… I was somehow, um, yeah opening an old wound that he had buried so deep in him. So it was very difficult for him to hear. And then, he’s been telling me a little bit, bits and pieces of the case, but it’s still too hard for him to talk about.
(12:02) And I know that he’s been talking to you Marit on the phone, but the reason I’m doing this, and not him, is because it’s too hard for him to talk about. So. Yeah. — This story makes you wonder again, what was of such importance 50 years ago… — Yeah. — That it was worth it? — And that’s, that’s the big mystery here.
(12:34) But I waited with writing to you until I had heard, I think maybe eight episodes or so, and then towards the last couple of episodes you start touching on the fact that there were possible links to some foreign intelligence and possibly Israel, and that was when I knew that I had to write to you, and sort of confirm it, because second after my father said yes, your grandfather has been working on this case, he said there was something about some links to Israel, and that was why the case was shut down.
(13:04) So that was my father’s understanding of it. So once the police in Bergen had been working the case, and were digging deeper and finding some possible connections to foreign intelligence, then it seemed like that was when the the local police, the Bergen police, were somehow being shut down. — Yes, the murder investigation was shut down, rather abruptly, just three weeks after it was launched.
(13:47) What you’re hearing is one of the bosses in the Bergen police giving a press conference to a smoke-filled room of journalists. — The police chief is saying they have no indications that she was a spy, but there were numerous theories going around about the Isdal Woman belonging to some foreign intelligence agency or other, including Mossad, the Israeli secret services.
(14:15) — Cecilie says her grandfather and the bergen police made a link between the case and Israel, and that’s why the case was shut down. But we have no solid evidence to back that up. — Yet. — It’s been really an eye-opener for me, I feel like I understand my father and my grandfather a little bit more after knowing about this.
(14:36) It’s a sad occasion, but it’s given me and my family a little bit more insight into my grandparents, and my father. But I will definitely be listening to it because we urge you, both my father and I, urge you to keep working this case. — That’s quite a revelation. I really wasn’t expecting that. — It’s a strong story, huh? — Yeah.
(15:04) So you talked to her father, about the grandfather, about how these traumas are passed down through the generations. — Well I think this makes it even more clear that what we’re working on here is not just a project about a woman’s identity, this is about more than that, this has influenced families, people’s lives, through 50 years, this case. And again, what could be of such importance, almost 50 years ago, that it was all worth it? When we left the email address at the end of the podcasts, we never knew what would come in.
(15:51) Just like Cecilie’s family story. — We’ve got lots of feedback, theories and possible new leads. — And many of you have turned detectives yourselves, working on the case. Marit, you went to visit one of them didn’t you? — Yes I did.
(16:08) Tøren Waal sent me a message saying, ‘we’ve found a box full of documents from the Isdal Woman case stored in the basement, are you interested in seeing them?’ Can you imagine? Yeah, I tell you I was interested! Of course, I was curious and I went to visit her, just outside Oslo. — Hello! — Yes, it’s me, thank you for inviting, and I’m very, very excited about what you told me on the phone! — I hope I can help you.
(16:36) — Let’s see what you have! — Shut the door first. — Yes. — You can come in, in the living room… and here’s the box with documents. — Wow. — It’s from the Isdal case. And there might be something in there for you. — We can see that there are some old newspapers in this box, and obviously this is a big folder with police reports. — Yeah, I think it’s five of them. Big documents.
(17:13) You might have seen it before, but I wanted you to see them, in case there is something in there. — How did this box show up? Where did you find it? How did it happen? — I’m very interested in the case, and I told the friends of my son to listen to the podcast, and they got very excited, and one day one of them showed up with this case.
(17:48) — How? How did he find it? — It was a relative that had this case at home. We’d like to help you to solve this mystery. — Wow, I look forward to come to the office and read everything. And we’ll meet again! — Yeah, looking forward to hearing if you found something new. — I will tell you, I will call. — Good luck! — Thank you! We’ll come back to her later in the podcast.
(18:27) You might remember Ann Rita Hovden, the manager of the hotel Hordaheimen, the last place the Isdal Woman stayed before she disappeared in November 1970. It appears we had some wrong information about the room she stayed in. We thought it was on the corner with a good view onto the streets below, but our listeners again have been helping us with our ongoing investigation.
(18:55) One of you has done some in-depth research, and found an old room planner for the hotel. The room that we thought the Isdal Woman was staying at was on the corner, that’s what we thought, but actually it’s a few doors down, it’s here, and that’s because there’s been sort of reorganisation of the rooms. — That’s correct, yes. Yeah.
(19:13) — So it has also been a myth amongst you here in the hotel that she actually stayed in that corner room we saw the last time? — Yeah, the story has always been that she stayed in the room with the balcony so she could see everywhere, but that might be a myth of course. — And this room also has a bay window now, a window that juts out onto the road a little bit more, it’s not flat and flush with the rest of the building.
(19:36) — It has more windows than most of the other double rooms have, yeah. — Anyway, what we can say is the view isn’t much different from this room. We seem to be going through the mountain! — Yeah. — We’re on a funicular, it’s like a railway going up the mountain. — It’s a 150-year-old railway and we will come up now to Bergen mountains. And it’s very popular with tourists and everybody.
(20:10) — So we’re climbing up, passing white, wooden houses and bridges and rock. — Be careful, don’t look down, maybe you get scared here. — So we’re in the snow a bit here now. — Yes, there is some snow and ice in this road up too. This is Ketil Kversoy, a sea captain who used to live in Bergen in 1970. He has a story he wants to share with us.
(20:36) — In our ‘Mystery Men’ episode, we reported on the various sightings of the Isdal Woman with men, in Bergen hotel rooms, or restaurants, or shops. But this is slightly different. — He wants to show us a place up in the mountains over Bergen where he’s convinced he saw the Isdal Woman in 1970.
(20:56) A friend of his heard the podcast and got in touch with him. — And I haven’t been speaking to her for about 25 years and one evening she says: ‘You must call them, and tell them your history. So you can be finished with that. They need your information.’ I had to tell somebody about it. Because this tragedy filled me up.
(21:26) I have remembered it good for 48 years. I have always had a need to tell it to somebody. I didn’t want to have it for myself. — And we have been walking now 20–25 minutes from that point, Fløyen mountain where you have the beautiful view over Bergen.
(21:52) We have Isdal Valley behind us, over there, just for you Neil to get an impression. — So Isdal Valley behind us, Bergen below us. And we’re in deep snow here, and it’s mid-winter, and beautiful hawthorne trees and conifer and spruce trees all around. It’s very picturesque.
(22:10) We’ve had skiers come past us, but there’s hardly anyone around is there? It’s very quiet, very solitary. And you haven’t been up here for many years? — I have not been here since I had this meeting, 48 years ago. And I was going here quite often, before. But after that, I couldn’t go here. — Right, after that you couldn’t come here again? — No. — What, you were walking right here where we are standing now? — I was coming down here, in a good mood, feeling good, and I was surprised. Some people were coming up to the mountain.
(22:48) And that was not normal. And I saw nobody else, and I had been walking for a couple of hours, and finally I saw somebody here. The lady first, and two men behind, and they were wearing clothes like they should go in the town.
(23:14) Next I saw her, I come closer to her, and I’m thinking, she had not enough clothes on, and when we meet, she was very close. Her face was looking at me. And the face… to me, it looks like she was scared and she were giving up. And for me, when I go to the mountains, I always say ‘hello!’. Here, I… everything stopped. And when the men behind, I met them a little bit further down.
(23:52) And they continue going to the mountain. The wrong way, not to the town. — And how far behind were they? — About 20 metres. And they have not communicated. But their faces was dead. It was wooden face, on all. It’s not normal. — Do you think they were following her, or were they with her? — No, they were following her. The lady knew that they were coming after her, but they didn’t communicate.
(24:16) That was my impression. — Did she look like she was being chased in some way? — No, she only looked scared. — Did she look you in the eyes? — Yes. And when she looked at me, I even feel that she started to say something, but she didn’t. And then she looked also behind her, and see these men, but I’m sure she knew they were going after her.
(24:47) I feel that. — What do you remember about their looks? What did she look like? — I remember the hair, dark hair, going down on the side not too long but something, and also the men coming behind had dark hair and were a little bit more brown in their skin than than we are here, but not too much. — So you thought they didn’t look Norwegian, no? — No, they didn’t.
(25:19) I was thinking south Europe. — After you had this experience, meeting these people here up in the mountains, some days after, you you could read in the news about a woman found dead in Isdalen, and you got more and more convinced that that was the same woman as you had met. — Yes. — But you waited some days, or some time, before you contacted the police officer. — Yes, I waited maybe too long.
(25:48) I didn’t go to the police station because I feel [like] a crazy man, coming and telling a crazy story. But I know a policeman, I didn’t know that he was working with the case, and and I tell this story. And he was very, very nice. He said, I’m sorry, Ketil… [speaks in Norwegian]. — What he is telling is that the Norwegian police officer, his friend, said that this case is way beyond our task, it’s an international case, and it’s never going to be solved. — Yeah. Exactly what you say. It was, you know, just a short time after that
(26:38) came information, more and more and more, and as I can understand now, it’s many moments fit together, yes? And still now, even if so many different theories I feel I met this lady. — What a story. It has echoes of what Cecilie just told us about her grandfather, being told to drop the case by his police superiors.
(27:15) — And it ties in with the mystery man she was spotted with in Bergen, although she was never seen with two men at a time. — The way Ketil tells that story, you can really imagine them following her into the mountains, well, following her or accompanying her. — Yeah, he was pretty sure that the group belonged together in some way, at least. They knew each other.
(27:40) Now, he thinks this happened on a Sunday, he’s pretty sure about that, and that is the awkward thing about Ketil’s story. Because we know that she was found on a Sunday morning, and we know that the last sighting of her is on a Monday, the Monday before the Sunday when she was found.
(27:59) And Ketil explains that this all happened on a Sunday, but a Sunday late afternoon. That means that it can’t be the day when she was found, it must have been the Sunday before, or another Sunday. But that doesn’t rule out the story anyway, does it? — No, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t her.
(28:17) I mean, she could have just returned from that trip and gone back up again. — Yeah, he also said that maybe the fact that this group, that they met him that Sunday, that that was a surprise to them, so for some reason or another, they returned. — But whilst we’re talking about the mysteries and secrets of the mountains in Bergen, what about the story we started with, the bag that was found by the metal detectorist? What happened next with that? — I was with him when he delivered it to the forensics team at the Bergen police. —
(28:52) I have a present for you, and I hope it will give some results. It’s from the Valley of Ice. So… — Thank you very much. Most exciting this, and let’s see what we can get out of it. — Yes. It’s not open, it’s like I found it.
(29:13) — We’ll take you to our lab and see what we can sort out, and try to open it as gently as possible. — Yes. It’s a heavy one. — Yeah. — A couple of kilos, so there’s maybe something in it, I don’t know. — Oh this is exciting, huh? — This is exciting, really exciting, certainly it’s been a long time underground.
(29:35) — Yeah and we hope it’s having some connection with the Isdal Woman. This is maybe the first lead of evidence we have in almost 48 years. — And it’s only 40 metres from where she was found, so how many purses are there in the area? — Well, we thank you for your cooperation and we will once we have processed it we will keep you in the loop to let you know what we have found.
(30:04) — Yeah, I’m grateful for that. — So thanks a lot. — Yeah thank you. — See you! — Yeah So we’re in a laboratory. What can you see from it so far? — There’s a lot of roots in it, and also a lot of dirt and soil. So what we’ll do is to try to clean it to find out which part is up and which part is down but you can tell in the colour that it has a bluish, gray-bluish cast with red stripes.
(30:48) Yes, it’s very exciting and I can’t wait to look inside actually, but we need to do this carefully so we don’t destroy more than we have to. So we’ll use a brush to brush off some of the dirt and soil. — I can tell that in this room, it’s so exciting to be here now. You should have been here Neil! This is… this is… whaaat! I can’t wait till they open it.
(31:15) — We see that we have some inhabitants in this bag, some worms between all the roots. We have here two straps, probably for carrying on shoulders. So could this be a backpack? But they’re quite small. And here you see in the upper part of inside there is some yellowish leather patches with buttons on it.
(31:46) What do you think this is? — You can see on school bags, to use to have a… — A ruler. — Ruler, yes. — Yeah I remember. — Does it belong to a child? — Well if you see the length of the straps they are not very long. It’s approximately 35 centimetres long, plus the bottom parts which can be adjusted. Straighten out the bottom of the backpack. — Actually, in the bottom of it is not so much soil as well.
(32:21) — But also in the bottom there, it’s nothing. It’s empty. — No, it’s very empty. Really. It’s nothing. We can’t say that the backpack has been empty and when it went there, but if it’s been like for example paper, or… that could have been totally broken down and gone to soil.
(32:45) — Because this has been there for a long time. But if there had been some metal items, for instance keys or something like that, you would expect them to have at least parts of it to have survived. — So the temperature was definitely high in this room, and the excitement, but now we can conclude there’s nothing to find in this backpack. — No. No, we are a little bit as empty as the backpack. — Yeah.
(33:16) It’s a bit disappointing, I must say. Of course we will want it to be something in here, that… I cannot say any different enough. — I was hoping so much for a passport, or some kind of identification. — Or anything! — At least anything that could tell us who’s this backpack was belonging to. I can hear all your disappointments and I really am too as well.
(33:48) I so much wanted to be something inside, and how frustrating: nothing. But like the policeman says, if there was something like paper ID documents, they probably would have rotted away anyway. Is there anything else that can be done with this bag, test it for the Isdal Woman’s DNA or something? — No, the experts on that said it’s no use after being so long in the ground it was a case of being so near, and yet so far.
(34:20) I still believe that this bag has some connection to the case, though. Found only 39 metres from the body, and in such a desolate area, huh? So we’re on the outskirts of Oslo. Everything is white. There’s a metre-high of snow on top of everything, the chairs, the benches, the rooftops. It’s a wondrous place.
(34:49) We’re in the midst of a snow drift, but there are houses, you can just about see them, some beautiful old ones with red wooden timber, typical here, and next to us, a more modern one. The lights are on, and it all looks very cosy. Now, this is the house you came to a few weeks ago, and where there was a surprise discovery of some documents. And now you’ve brought me back here.
(35:15) — Yes we are going here to meet Tøren, the lady who took contact with me, telling she had some documents, and possibly new documents for us on the Isdal Woman case. And she has now actually gathered the young guys in this Crime Club, and they’re excited to meet us. — So they meet occasionally to discuss the case and go through the documents, and that kind of thing? — Yeah, I’ve understood they are very excited about the case and are discussing, and trying to help us and to solve the case.
(35:49) — Good, well it’s going to be warmer in there than out here, so let’s go in! — OK. Sitting around Tøren Waal’s table, with documents and photographs laid out, are Sindre Bratli, Fredrik Knudsen and Thomas Hayes, all in their early twenties. — But Thomas is not just an amateur sleuth, is he? He’s quite a famous actor in Norway.
(36:16) — Yeah, he’s quite a hot shot actually, not only in Norway, but in Scandinavia and some other countries, because he plays a character called William in a tv series called Skam, or Shame in English. But first up, Sindre. — How did that happen that you came to this story? Tell us. — It started when I was celebrating my mum’s 50th birthday and I was in Voss in on the west coast of Norway, close to Bergen, where I met my uncle and I told him that I had listened to the podcast.
(36:51) And then he stood up and went around the table and to shake my hands, he said that he was touched by that I had, so many years after he had worked on the case, listened to the podcast and that the case was interesting to listen to. — Because who was… what was your uncle’s connection with the case? — He was working for Bergensavisen, a newspaper in Bergen, in the 90s, and 25 years after the case he made a big article about the case, and he also [borrowed] the documents from the police in Bergen, and never delivered them back. [Laughter] —
(37:40) Amazing that you got these documents from him, and we were given the possibility to go through them and I can tell you now that actually we have been going thoroughly through every single document in here and you actually managed to find some brand new documents, to us, that we didn’t know of before. Not many, but some few, and that’s great! — Yeah, that’s impressive.
(38:07) I thought my uncle always was clear about that, that everyone that has access to the state’s archive has access to those documents, but apparently there was some new documents. — That’s true. What we do know is that this case has had thousands and thousands of documents, but there are some documents lacking in the state’s archive, because they are in some basements around, s
(38:44) o… — What do you do when you come together and talk about the case? — We started listening to the podcast and we came up with different theories about what happened, or what was she actually doing in Bergen or Norway, and started talking about who this woman actually was. And later, then Sindre came across these documents and then we sat down and started going through all the papers and news articles and started discussing, you know, further on from that.
(39:13) — And I guess you wanted to solve the case? — Obviously, I think she’s a spy or something like that, because she was spotted by some military places in Bergen and uh… yeah, so I think she was just too tired about uh, doing her job, then she killed herself, I guess.
(39:34) — What is your theory? — My theory is she is a spy, or an agent, but how she died? I think it was another man who killed her or… but I don’t think she killed herself. — And there’s one thing here that we should explain to our international audience, that one of these guys, Thomas, is an actor in a web series called Skam.
(40:08) Skam started very slowly and then it increased and got into an enormous popularity, not only in Norway, in Scandinavian countries, and in other countries, it reached the US as well, and even China, so in a way, we are merging here the biggest international success stories from Norwegian broadcasting for the last years, because Skam did reach out, and Death in Ice Valley did reach out. So you… I guess you have a lot of followers, Thomas.
(40:40) Did you tell them about the Isdal Woman? — Er, no this has kind of remained between us four actually, a little crime gang, but it would definitely be interesting to tell people about it when this comes out. — Yeah. — Because I h
(41:00) ave a lot of followers from Russia, Ukraine… and maybe they probably have some relatives that have disappeared during the 70s, who knows? — You should definitely tell your followers to listen to Death in Ice Valley because, yeah, maybe you’re right, somebody out there knows something. — Yeah, certainly someone knows, but if it’s from Russia, Ukraine, England, Norway, S
(41:29) weden, Denmark… who knows, but maybe something will come come up? Maybe someone will have some great aunt or something who just disappeared in the 70s, who knows? Unfortunately the new documents the guys found didn’t reveal any significant new information which moves the case forward. — But all credit to them for finding them, looking into them, and thanks ever so much for bringing them to our attention.
(41:53) From the Facebook group, we can see there are online conversations going on between listeners from all over the world: Bangladesh, Australia, and even Antarctica! Lots of amateur detectives, working on the case. — It was great to actually meet a group that comes together to try and work on the case.
(42:15) The most frequently asked question from listeners has been why don’t we compare the DNA profile of the Isdal Woman with the biggest commercial databases, containing millions of DNA profiles. And as we’ve explained before, the DNA material in the case belongs to the police, and the Norwegian police has so far not allowed the material to be run through commercial databases that people use to find out about their ancestry. And that’s for legal and ethical reasons.
(42:38) But there might be hope for the future. Genetic genealogy is a field with an explosive growth when it comes to solving identity cases, especially in the USA. We’re talking about using unknown persons’ DNA to track down distant relatives, and combined with traditional genealogical methods, to build family trees to finally get to the answer and find the person’s identity.
(43:05) And one of the world’s leading experts within this area, who’s had great success with solving cases, has contacted us and wants to contribute in solving the identity of the Isdal Woman. And here she is: American scientist Colleen Fitzpatrick. — Well, I contacted you because I had read an article on how you guys had already done some isotope testing, which narrowed down her origins, so that piqued my interest.
(43:39) I’m part of the DNA Doe project, part of the new way of doing identification, and we handle many cases that have had the isotope testing done, and we’ve actually made the identification of those people. It’s a very well known case, and it’s very interesting. We’d love to work on it.
(43:59) — And as a matter of fact, the wheels are slowly in motion in Norway now. Since there has been a revolution in solving cases with methods like this, there’s now going to be a legal hearing to decide if the police can use this process to solve cases like the Isdal Woman. So for the time being, we have to wait and hope.
(44:28) Meanwhile, our own investigation goes on, and is taking us to some unexpected places. For now, thanks to all our listeners in this episode of Death in Ice Valley, who turned detective for us. Well, there you are there you have it: the signature sounds of Phil Channel and the beating,
(45:53) driving, freezing Bergen rain that’s become so synonymous with this podcast. My name is Philip Sellars, and I’m one of those people whose name is buried in the credits of Death in Ice Valley, so the credits are the bit you fast-forward through to get to the more interesting stuff, but I’m the series editor, and it’s been my privilege to work with Marit and Neil for the last two years on Death in Ice Valley, and I don’t know about you, but when when I’ve listened to an episode of Death
(46:19) in Ice Valley, what I really want to do is sit down with a cup of tea, being a British person, having a cup of tea evens out the emotional peaks and troughs of life, having a cup of tea, maybe a biscuit, and and thinking hard about it. Now, I can’t offer you that opportunity because we’re in the middle of a podcast! What I can say to you is, you’re now getting the opportunity to ask the questions that you’ve always wanted to ask of Marit, Neil, and some experts.
(46:45) You will be familiar with them from the series. We have Bergen crime writer Gunnar Staalesen We have forensic pathologist Inge Morild and superintendent from the Bergen police Nils Jarle Gjøvåg. So whilst you’re reflecting on your questions, I also have some questions from our Facebook group.
(47:26) We’ve been harvesting questions from the Facebook group as we go along, and they’ve responded in plenty. So have a think about your questions, I’m going to ask some questions from the Facebook group, if you want to be part of the Facebook group, it’s facebook.com/groups/deathinicevalley — you’re very welcome to join that community. I thought I’d start, Marit, with you: Podcasting is a very private affair, you have just listened to your work whilst staring out at an audience.
(47:57) How does it feel to have a podcast in this rather strange environment? — Oh, it feels great, I have to say, and I think I speak for the both of us, saying that it feels especially great to be here, in Bergen, where the story actually started. Nils, you work with Bergen police and the podcast genre is a very popular genre now, we think at Death in Ice Valley that we do it differently because we have interaction with the audience, what is it like having Marit, Neil, and 20,000 amateur detectives doing your job for you? — In many cases, especially like cases like this, we are depending on the people out there, and
(48:35) the people are the greatest detective. Especially in such as this case when we are trying to get identity from a woman we don’t know who [she] is, and certainly we don’t know where she comes from, and to get it out in the world like this, and perhaps somebody out there says, ‘hey, I had an aunt who went missing at that time, could that be her?’ So of course they’re very important to solve cases like this. — That’s good to know. And Gunnar Staalesen, as a crime writer
(49:13) obviously you make some crimes up, what is it about this true-life crime that you think has captured the imagination of literally millions of people around the world? — Well, it really is a big mystery because there is the question of her identity, that we don’t know, but I think the biggest question is, what what was she doing at this remote place in the mountain around Bergen, because if she wanted to do a suicide she could do that much easier in several places before going all this way into the Ice Valley. — And if somebody took her there, and killed her there,
(49:53) why didn’t they get rid of the body afterwards? Because it was almost a week since she was last seen and until she was found. And of course for a crime writer, this is the two biggest mysteries, I think. And of course her background, with I think in this episode, what was most interesting for me was the story of the woman who told about her grandfather the policeman who was refused to continue the investigation because that seems the same story as Tore Osland has told us his father,
(50:25) who was one of the main investigators, and one of my theories has always been that there is some connection to Israel in this case. — Ah, we may come back to that. Inge Morild, when we watch American crime dramas it’s always, you’re a forensic pathologist, it’s always the case when there’s DNA, this is half way to solving the case, but that’s more complicated in the Death in Ice Valley case, isn’t it? Why is that? — When in a forensic case or a criminal case you have, nearly always, somebody to compare your DNA findings with. But here there’s nothing.
(51:06) But I’m a little bit interested in those big databases that exist, in the USA for example, and I hope the police will decide this very soon. — Can you, Nils, shed any light on whether the the authorities here are likely to share this DNA and allow it to be shared with databases? — There is a collegial hearing if we as a police should be able to do that in the commercial bases, so I don’t know how long before it will come an answer, yes or no, but we are waiting.
(51:46) — Good, well I think Death in Ice Valley will be waiting with you as well. Are there any questions in the audience? — My name is Katrina and I’m from Bergen. My question to BBC and NRK is actually, what archives have you been searching and can you tell us about each and every one please? — Yeah, we’ll be here till tomorrow, I think! Marit, do you want to do that? — Yeah, I’ll stay here until tomorrow if we’re supposed to give all our sources, but our main source is of course the
(52:22) police documents from the state’s archive, that is the main and basic source for us, has been from the very beginning, but of course as you know, we have done a lot of things scientific experiments and we have been researching in different archives, from the archives at the Gades Institute in the basement there, to archives abroad, totally other types of archives.
(52:48) I’m Tore Osland. My father was the main investigator on the Isdal Woman case and there are so many things I can ask, but one thing is that why are there so [many] different ages? — Marit, do you want to address that one? — There have been different age estimates, we have the time witnesses who says she was around 30, somebody says older than 30, somebody says a bit younger than 30, and then you have the autopsy reporting and saying around 30-something, and then we have used scientific methods from Karolinska
(53:32) hospital experts in Sweden, analysing the teeth with two different methods, and they came to the quite shocking result for me actually that this was a more mature woman, maybe born around 1930 plus/minus four years, meaning this was a woman around 40, maybe even older than 40 at the time of her death.
(53:58) A shocking result because I guess most of us assume this was a younger woman. On the other hand, we have to trust science. Our project is very much based on science, that’s what we work with to try to find her identity, uh speculations, we can speculate for another 50 years and that will not give any solution. So our hope from NRK side and from NRK-BBC side has all the time been to use science and modern forensic methods, like DNA and so on, to try to come closer to the answers.
(54:34) — The science, and obviously we trust our witnesses, because what the witnesses see is the age they would give her, but if we also are open to the belief that she was in disguise, or wanting to look of a different age to the age she actually was, or wanted to look younger, then that’s all part of the story. — You said your father was involved in the case; it would be interesting to think about that suggestion we heard that there was some sort of cover-up in this.
(55:01) Did he describe that to you? — Yeah, and the case was closed against the will of most investigators, against the will of the policemen in other places in Norway, against the will of the investigator that was a technical investigator, he said that ‘I really have a bad feeling in this case for calling it a self murder’.
(55:23) — It might be worth just bringing in… not guilty of the sins of the fathers, but… Nils, you’re with Bergen police and West Norwegian police now. What do you think when you hear the suggestion this is a case that may have been closed prematurely, and may have had pressure on it to be closed? — Of course such a case with the details, they come up with all the identities, we don’t know who she was, we don’t know what she was doing here, to close such a case after three weeks, that wouldn’t happen now, that’s for sure. — Gunnar? — This was during the Cold War and
(56:02) the secret service was of course very… had a big influence on politicians in Norway and also on the police I guess, so there’s always been a suspicion that the secret service knew more about this case than they ever have told, and of course it’s the name, they have secrets, I still think they have some secrets in their archives that they don’t allow us to see.
(56:26) — Yes. And do you think… I mean, the series as a whole, Death in Ice Valley, edged towards the conclusion that she was involved in some kind of international espionage. Do you agree with that, or do you think that’s merely part of the story, or in fact t
(56:46) here could be other reasons? People on Facebook suggesting… or in fact Kev Peter suggesting that we’ve overlooked the fact that this could just be someone who had psychiatric problems, who was very low and depressed and fragile, and took their own life, and there’s a sense of debate there about whether we’re inventing a series of events, that we want the Cold War to have provided, or…
(57:02) or not. — No, my personal theory, which has no real depth, is that she was hunting for war criminals, old Nazi people, either in Norway, or coming from Germany and settling in Norway, because this is just the same period as Simon Wiesenthal and his group was hunting for old Nazis all over the world. So that would be my main theory.
(57:27) And Israel was a country that Norway had a very friendly connection to in that period, so if the secret service knew that this was what she was doing here, perhaps they would keep that a secret, but there are a lot of other questions that aren’t answered by that, so it’s only a slight theory.
(57:48) — And this leads to your Israeli idea? — Yeah, and it’s only three years after that they kill a man in Lillehammer, Mossad, so it might be some sort of connection there too. — Just talking about the death, again there’s been discussion on Facebook about the actual cause of death. Inge, maybe this is something you can help us with, she took sleeping tablets, and they were found in her system, but there’s discussion about whether all the tablets were digested, or whether that was the cause of death. Is there anything you
(58:18) can clear up on that? The concentration of the drug was measured in her blood, and that is what counts. What you have in your stomach is undissolved tablets. They don’t do anything, they just lie there. So it’s what you already have absorbed in your system that matters, and she had a concentration which is not lethal, but maybe… incapacitating.
(58:48) Is that the right word? So I think she was incapacitated by the drug, and then she was in some way lying close to a fire and has breathed in the smoke, and I think quite clearly that the cause of death is carbon monoxide poisoning. She has a concentration of 48%, what we call carboxyhemoglobin, which is a little concentration.
(59:24) So she was in some way drugged down, maybe from her free will or somebody else’s, and she was lying there close to a fire or maybe falling into a fire and then breathing in smoke until she died. That’s my opinion. But when you talk about murder or suicide, I’ve seen so many bizarre suicides and so many unbelievable ways of suicide that this is, in my opinion, not impossible.
(59:57) — I am Sebastian and I come from France, and I work at the university here in Bergen, and my question is, can you think that maybe the Isdal Woman has been killed in one of the many cabins that there is close to Vidden, and then she has been brought here to like, to merge the clues, and at that time do you think that the police investigated the cabins in Vidden, and close to Ulriken and Fløyen? — Shall we give that to Inge first, in terms of did she die where she was found, or killed somewhere else, and then perhaps Nils? — She was breathing in
(1:00:38) smoke and there was a fire, so she must have died on the spot where the fire was, or there has to have been a fire or smoke in some other places, which is not reported as to my knowledge, so I think she was breathing in smoke and died on the place where the fire was. — And Nils, how extensive was the police investigation at the time? Would they have looked into things like that? — What I see, and when I see the picture and the reports, and the area where she was found, if she had had something done to her before she was [taken to] where she was found, there was
(1:01:18) a big forest, very steep to get her up there, and um, as we say, nobody carries a body more than approximately 75 metres, we have done research around the world, if we found outside the road, and to carry around with a body who was already dead, there was nothing really that indicated that.
(1:01:53) And then they have also had to have light her up at the place, so she must have, as Inge said, had died in a fire before and then do you have brought her there and light her up again? — Marit, go on. — The police did investigate in the cabins in that mountain area, they did. They did search the whole mountain area. — Whilst we’re just on the the pathology of the death, Oscar Duggan asks on our Facebook group, what do you think is the best account of a bruise found on the back of the Isdal Woman’s head in the autopsy? What might have explained that? — I would very had wished there was a photo.
(1:02:36) This is described as a large hematoma or something in the muscle on the side of the neck, and it may come from a heavy blow with the side of the hand, that is possible, but it can also be the result of a fall against something hard like a wood or a stone or something, so it doesn’t say so much.
(1:03:04) I doubt that she has been severely injured by that thing. — She wouldn’t have been incapacitated? — No, I don’t think so. They’re telling me that if you blow to the side of the neck with a certain force you may lose your conscience for a while but you will very soon wake up I think. — My name is Tothen, I’m here from Bergen.
(1:03:24) If we think about the theory about her being a spy, do you think there in the future may be some documents unearthed, like from the secret intelligence service, or from secret police or anything, do you think that might resurface in the future like being released, like we see with for example the JFK case in the US? — I think it’s in the nature of secret police and secret i
(1:04:00) ntelligence services, it’s in their nature to be secret, so I don’t have much hope for.. or Gunnar, do you have hope for them to release something in the future? — Some of these archives are secret for 100 years, perhaps, so perhaps in the future one can get into them. — OK hi, my name is Tiriman and I come from Iceland, but I live here in Bergen, and I’ve been going on walks in Isdal Valley and listening to the podcast while, like, walking around the site, a
(1:04:33) nd I’m just wondering about the… because there are some indications about like a […] on behalf of the secret police or something, because now we all know the reputation of secret police and in different countries like the KGB or Mossad or something like that, is there any any incidence in the past surrounding the Norwegian secret police that indicate that they could themselves carry out like some sort of assassination, or like you know if there’s a threat, you know if there’s a like a threat from eastern parts, you know, watching the missile program being developed, you know, do you think the Norwegians
(1:05:12) themselves could actually carry out something like this? — Gunnar? — Well, I’m quite sure that they wouldn’t do that because if they had done it, they would have got rid of the body, nobody would have found the body if the secret police in Norway was behind it, so I’m quite sure that that’s not the answer to the mystery. — OK.
(1:05:34) And I was aware earlier on we had members of the Facebook group in the room. Have they… you’re normally ever vigilant on the Facebook group… any more questions? Ah yes. — Hi my name is Joachim Næss. Thanks for a great podcast. I was just wondering, first to the BBC, probably their most… most of the listeners to the podcast is from England, United States or English-speaking countries I guess, and do you think that’s a problem, that the areas where it’s most important that people know about the case, they don’t know it because
(1:06:08) they don’t speak or understand much English? — The World Service podcast is actually reaching out to a lot of countries and is actually also on the list on a lot of the middle-European countries. Additionally, we can say that I have been interviewed for journalists from so many countries for this last two years that I don’t even remember anymore, so I’ve done a lot of interviews f
(1:06:38) or that reason. As you say, it… to us it is important to reach out there to those countries, to a lot of countries in Europe, because we know that the answer is out there, is definitely not in Norway she wasn’t a Norwegian. So our hope is still to reach out to that somebody who knows something about a lost relative or something, so yeah, we are trying to spread the word, and actually today there is a German TV crew here, in here, to do an interview with me tomorrow, and they have been interviewing other people, so they will also like many other TV companies in Europe bring the story. I mean people have been coming forward after stories
(1:07:13) like this. We’ve been in contact with a lot of people from different European countries. Unfortunately, not the right one, till now. — My name is Maria and i’m a student in Bergen. I wonder how you decide on which tips you will research further, and do you research every tip that you get in? — Yeah, I mean, we’ve got a huge volume of tips coming in.
(1:07:38) Marit and the NRK team take most of them in, some of them they will have seen before, some of them are original, some of them, you know, we can’t resist but follow up, and some of them don’t lead to anything. We have got through the podcast, especially this last year, an enormous amount of tips, and we are not following all, no, because then we wouldn’t do anything else, a lot of us in NRK and BBC.
(1:08:07) Of course also because we are not that interested in all of them, that’s part of our job, is to to find those that can bring us further in our investigation and that’s the one we are following. — OK. One last question from the Facebook group, it’s not a planted question, it’s from Ian Briggs but it’s to Neil.
(1:08:26) Neil is this just a one-off, this episode 11, or is there a second series? Now I as the series editor couldn’t possibly comment, but Neil can. — Well, it’s a bit early to say, but back to the previous question as well, you know, these leads are coming in from all over the world and taking us to places we didn’t expect and, you know, quite exciting, but it’s just early days, so we have to keep some things under wraps, but hopefully they will… it will lead to something, yeah. — If you were sitting as close as
(1:08:50) I am to Neil, you’d see a twinkle in his eye when he said that! You can join the Facebook group, it’s facebook.com/groups/deathinicevalley — do join the growing throng of people on Facebook. We haven’t quite finished, but it might be worth just thanking our panel for making the effort to come here, and thank you for asking all your great questions.
(1:09:18) [Applause] Thanks Philip, and thanks to all of you, both here in Bergen, and our audience around the world who follow the story, and even help us shape it. Thanks also to our brilliant panel of experts for sharing their thoughts, to Nils to Gunnar and to Inge, and of course to Phil for performing the Death in Ice Valley soundtrack. But we should remember why we’re here in Bergen.
(1:09:38) Well, not to make a piece of entertainment. But because 50 years ago in the hills just above where we are all sitting now, a frightened, possibly fragile, possibly hunted woman lost her life in the most terrible way. — When we are talking about our theories and trying to solve the case, we must not forget that she was a real person. Someone’s daughter, someone’s friend.
(1:10:03) We are in Bergen to pay respect to the Isdal Woman and to bring our investigation home to her. And we promise to keep looking for clues and leads that might solve the case once and for all, and to allow her to rest in peace.

Have we identified the Isdal Woman? Death in Ice Valley, Episode 12 — BBC World Service

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPPIJpCJS9Q

Transcript by Glasp/ChatGPT:
(00:13) From the BBC World Service and NRK, this is Death in Ice Valley I’m Marit Higraff — And I’m Neil McCarthy, and it’s been two years since you last heard from us. And even though the podcast has gone silent we’ve not given up the hunt for the Isdal Woman. — This episode’s story starts with an American man on a holiday in Europe, which takes him to Norway. — So I added Bergen on as a last stop, just because I love Bergen.
(00:47) And I just spent a few days in Bergen, kind of hiking around and, you know, enjoying the town While I was there, I stopped in to the Norwegian State Archive in Bergen. It’s a beautiful building, that archive, there. Lots of light, and the tables are down below so you go in and get down the stairs I went in to ask them if I could take a closer look at some document or other You know, you put your stuff down in the little locker, you know, before you go down into the reading room, and I walked into the top and I looked down and I thought: ‘well, that woman at the table down there
(01:24) looks familiar’ — I was deeply into the work I was there for — You had a stack of documents that you were copying down — And I was very concentrated — I think that she was the only other person there. So after I got my document, I took a closer look and I noticed that it was you. And then I was getting up to leave, and I thought: ‘well, I should say something.
(01:50) ‘ You know, it’s a very unexpected occasion. — And then came this person and said something, and I was this concentrated so I didn’t pay too much attention… — So I leaned over and said something to you… — And then, you know, you said: ‘who are you?’ — ‘Who are you?’ Yeah, who is this t
(02:19) alking to me?! I didn’t understand what you said… — And so I briefly tried to explain He handed me a slip of paper, and on that slip of paper was simply a name: Högerova. — You know, I think I had to mention the name Högerova so that you would understand, because I’m not sure whether you knew my name at that point. — We had been sending encrypted messages to each other a lot discussing Högerova, but I didn’t know your real name.
(02:42) — I thought that was the quickest way to explain who I was, like how you would know me, you know? — It was amazing because suddenly this American source is standing in the state’s archive in Bergen. Let me start by telling you something straight away. We’re not about to reveal the identity of the Isdal Woman in this episode.
(03:12) But we do have something for you that might get us closer to the world she inhabited. — Who was this mystery man that I bumped into in the national archives in bergen? His name was Emil, and he was just like you right now: a listener. Over the past few years, you, the listeners, have been researching in archives, newspapers, and in family histories all over the world.
(03:40) And some of you have sent me details of women that have simply left me breathless. Some were easy to rule out, and some weren’t so easy. — So consider this episode not a final chapter, but a tribute to every one of you listener-detectives. — When we first made the podcast, we thought the Isdal Woman would stand out from the crowd, because she was so rare: a woman in 1970, travelling around Europe on her own, and with her own finances.
(04:07) But what you’re about to hear will test that theory. — Today we present the stories of two women. They may not be our woman, but what we’ll tell you about their lives might be just as fascinating. Episode 12: Anna and Angelina So let me tell you a bit more about who Emil is.
(04:33) A couple of years ago, in the spring, I had left the office for the day and was heading home, when I got a call. It was from my boss. We had been working together on the Isdal case. He said: ‘Marit, we’ve got a sensational message from a secretive source. I think you should turn around and come back to work.’ And when I got back to the office, he showed me an encrypted message that contained details of a woman: height, date of birth, physical description. And it nearly made my heart stop.
(05:06) Most excitingly, there were photos. I looked at the pictures and thought: ‘Well, this must be the Isdal Woman.’ But even after months of communication about this woman with my source, I still didn’t know where the information was coming from.
(05:27) — You know, the reason for the secrecy at the beginning is I didn’t much want to be involved in the telling of the story. I was enjoying getting to hear the story being told, and I wanted to hear more of the story told to me, I didn’t want to be doing the telling, so I sent you that very quietly, hoping that, OK, that they’ll take this and run with it.
(05:46) The mystery of the Isdal Woman had even inspired Emil to take time out from his European holiday to walk in her footsteps. That was the reason behind our chance meeting in the Bergen state archives. — He was there because he’d become interested in a fraudster. You may remember there was a theory put forward by the police in Norway that the Isdal Woman may have been part of a criminal gang, making counterfeit cheques.
(06:12) Emil was interested in a woman who, just like the Isdal Woman, went by many names in the 1960s. Sonnet Nemechek, Jeanette Polanski Caron, Francisca Alves Rodriguez, The Black Tulip… and also Anna Högerova. And that’s what we’ll be calling her. — I was really fascinated by the story, and then I was really disappointed when it sort of stopped.
(06:38) And I wanted to know, you know, what happened next. I wanted to know the rest of the story. So I went and started doing some reading that led back to some gangs that were similar in South America a few years before, actually in the early 60s. The cheque fraud gangs were very active there. — The cheque fraud gangs, just to explain a little bit about that. These are sort of traveller’s cheques.
(06:56) How were the gangs operating? — The bigger operations apparently ran printing presses. So if you follow these stories, you know, the police are always searching for where is the gang’s secret printing press now. — If you’ve never heard of them, traveller’s cheques are a way of spending money in another country, a bit like carrying around cash, and they were very common back then.
(07:19) But they required a signature, and this could be faked. So think of it as the credit card fraud of its day. — And in the case of this woman, her gang in Turin, in Italy, ran a large operation. My understanding is, the neighbours would complain about noises all night long, you know, of machinery and things, and then people being on the phone at all hours to other continents and things.
(07:44) Actually, one of the men who was arrested that time in Norway was in the same gang as this woman that we’re talking about now, so there’s there’s definitely a strong connection between this woman and the cheque fraud gangs that ended up actually operating in Norway around the time of the Isdal Woman.
(08:01) So, you know, the more I kept reading about this woman, the more interesting details there were, especially because I had already been thinking about your story. — Yeah, yeah, I mean when I read your summary, it really did give me goosebumps.
(08:21) Because so much seemed to sort of intersect with the life we imagined she’d had, all the… some of the things we’ve been able to prove. But it took also took us in a completely different direction. It made us look in an area we hadn’t really given much consideration to, the criminal side of things. That had been a sort of fleeting idea in the series, so this was… this was really, really intriguing.
(08:40) Where did her name first come up? — Yeah, I first saw her name appear in newspapers from Brazil She had lived in Brazil for a while in the 60s. And then there was one headline that jumped out, t
(09:01) hat I thought was really fascinating… “Interpol takes daughter from strangler” — …where Interpol was searching for a woman. “Jeanette Polanski Caron, better known in Brazil as Francisca Alves Rodriguez”. — She had been arrested in Italy in the mid 60s. “When the arrest took place, she was getting out of a luxury Jaguar car.” — The way the story was told was just fascinating.
(09:18) So I sort of set it aside and thought: ‘Well, I should come back and look at this, because it’s just a really fascinating story.’ “She presented a passport with the name Maria Lucia Suarez…” “The wife of a Brazilian millionaire…” Would you tell us a little bit about the facts that you found that cross the paths a bit with our woman? — Yeah, I think the thing that stood out the most was the way that she moved and operated… “Beautiful, enigmatic and sophisticated.” — …very flashy… “She’s right
(09:45) out of James Bond: a beautiful woman who heads the world’s deadliest counterfeit ring.” — And she would get into trouble with the police in different countries, but she moved around quite a bit. “At her home, more than 30 passports of different nationalities were found.
(09:58) “ — She spent a lot of time in Italy, and I remember that there was a mention of the Isdal Woman being possibly dressed in an Italian style. “Jeanette Nemechek arrived in Italy a few months ago and settled in Turin.” — She had a big fan club among the police who had arrested her, apparently.
(10:11) “A raven-haired beauty of Czechoslovak origin.” — And they all talked quite a bit about how physically beautiful she was, but they also talked about how extremely intelligent she was. There were many stories about how she would run circles around the police and interrogations and things like that. — Really, I… I’m… it’s just amazing. Yeah.
(10:29) Where did you see that, was that in the newspapers? — Yeah. It’s hard to know how much of that is true, and how much of it is embellished. They liked to tell a story; maybe they might have played a little bit fast and loose with the facts. But yeah, everyone seems to have been very impressed by her, and you know, when I think about the Isdal Woman, this is all very circumstantial, but I guess you could say she reminded me of how the Isdal Woman seemed to have acted, you know, very self-confident, clearly had something she was
(10:53) doing, it seemed. — There is another reason we became so fascinated with Anna Hörgerova’s story. From what we know about the Isdal Woman, it is highly likely that she spent time in Italy. A bag from a shoe shop in Rome was found in her belongings, and an expert told the police at the time that she appeared to be dressed in an Italian style.
(11:17) And the code note: she always seemed to return to a place with the letter ‘R’. It was the place she spent the most time. So could Rome have been her HQ? So to tell Anna’s story, and maybe the Isdal Woman’s too, we need to go back to 1960s Italy, and its capital, Rome.
(11:41) What kind of a place was it? This is John Foot, an expert in Italian history, from Bristol University in England. — You’ve got a booming country, and it’s a place that’s becoming very fashionable, and trendy, and exciting. You’ve got a great music scene, you’ve got all the newspapers and the magazines, you’ve got a massive film set, film stars, plus you’ve got gossip. And so it’s a very exciting place in that period.
(12:04) And in fact it’s where people go on holiday, right? The film Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn, you know, everyone wants to go on a scooter and go around Rome, and go to all those places. — Rome definitely seemed the place to be in the 50s and 60s! — Yeah, I would have loved to be in Rome in the 50s and 60s.
(12:23) — Anna Högerova was written about a lot at the time in Italy, so to really understand her, we needed the help of an Italian speaker: journalist Francesca Marchese. — Francesca, yeah thank you very much for joining us, from Sicily? — Yes, from Catania on the slopes of Mount Etna. — Newspaper articles paint a picture of an attractive woman, zooming around the streets in her car, a silver Jaguar.
(12:47) — We are in 1965, five years after La Dolce Vita by Fellini, and a lot of the reporting, as well, of that time had that sort of charming images of Rome and the Via Veneto, aperitivos full of foreigners with lots of money, and a lady in a silver Jaguar must have been an absolutely charming situation. — What’s your impression of Anna Högerova through the media of the day? — The picture that emerged from the article is of a lady of incredible charm and who has a self-control of her emotions as well, a person that wears only Gucci and Prada and Chanel, a person who describes
(13:24) all the bottles found in her bedroom as perfume Chanel No 5. It is mentioned that she was never apart of her three siamese cats. So it was a really enigmatic woman, both for journalists who reported about her story, but also for the police officers that had to deal with her. So you say you get the impression from these articles that this woman was very charming, and she was even charming the police officers that arrested her.
(14:05) How do you see that? — Well, in the articles by Il Tempo, written by a woman, the journalist writes about the reported beauty of her legs and in particular the entire body that was very elegant. The article says that when she was questioned, she was also able to hide her emotion, that she would be able to speak to ‘an army of Perry Masons’. — Perry Mason is a famous TV lawyer, in case you didn’t know.
(14:34) — We know that she used different names, fake identities. Which identities does these articles mention? — Eleven names. Anna is the main one, and then Jeanette, and then another name… one of the most hilarious parts in a way, one of her nicknames was Anita Garibaldi. That, for an Italian listener, is of course really, really famous.
(15:05) It sounds a little bit fake, but we know that in Italy sometimes there is somebody called the Giuseppe Garibaldi, anyway, so why not Anita Garibaldi? — Another of her nicknames that we came across is The Black Tulip! Was that ever referenced? — Yes, but in Italy she’s called ‘the beautiful adventuress with the 16 names’, ‘la bella venturiera’, ‘the beautiful adventurer’, and ‘the woman thief who was born 12 times’. And another one: ‘la bella degli assegni’, ‘the charming woman of the cheques’. —
(15:47) You know, I had kind of both of these stories in my head at the same time, and I thought, well, that’s interesting, you know, that she’s behaving in a really flashy way, and in many ways so did the Isdal Woman. You know, I think that’s one of the strange things about the case is that she didn’t blend in, you know, a lot of people noticed her.
(16:03) — At what stage did you actually start to believe this might be the Isdal Woman? — That’s a good question. You know, it’s a feeling that came very slowly, you know, the more I kept reading about this woman, the more interesting details there were. You know, her age would have put her around 30-something at the time of 1970.
(16:24) She was born in Prague, but moved westward toward the end of the war, through Germany, and there were just a lot of clues, where things about her life reminded me quite a bit of your story. — Yeah, Emil picked up lots of things in common there, didn’t he, with the Isdal Woman’s story, as far as we know.
(16:51) You know, here’s a woman who never stood still, always on the move, travelled a lot… They followed similar routes, perhaps even. We think we know the Isdal Woman had passed through Oslo, and Paris, and Rome. — She indeed travelled a lot in Europe, at least from what we know.
(17:08) — Yeah, it’s interesting Emil points out the fact that Anna made no attempts to blend in, you know, she carried on her activities in plain sight, even though they were criminal by the looks of things. Because with the Isdal Woman, she didn’t attempt to blend in too much either. — From her looks at least, we know that she did stand out in Norway.
(17:27) She was dark-haired, tanned, looked South European, but from her behaviour we know less, because of course the witnesses, they did remember her very clearly, but that’s maybe not so strange, because of course she was a woman found dead, and on the front of all newspapers in Norway, then you remember her better I guess.
(17:50) — And then the other thing perhaps in common, we hear Anna worked with a gang, and we sensed with the Isdal Woman, although many of the sightings of her she was by herself, she was also seen with these mystery men, in hotels or restaurants. — Yeah, we know that she was definitely observed in kind of meeting-like circumstances, with men. What’s strange about that was that, as we remember, the police didn’t seem too interested in that fact.
(18:16) — No mention so far of the smell of garlic, just Chanel No 5. — For Högerova, it seems to be Chanel No 5, yes. — There were, like, almost 100 members of the gang. Three Argentinian, two French, one Italian from Milan, one Peruvian, and one Belgian person. And each member had 10 different passports.
(18:48) — Oh really? And what was her role, specifically? — The role was to be the cashier, and exchange the cheques for money. — So did they steal the cheques? No, they modified them, changed the name. She went to banks, used her feminine charm to let them think that she was really a luxurious aristocrat. She carried with her lots of money as well. For example, when she was arrested in Milan, in her bag there was one million lira, that at the time was an enormous amount of money.
(19:26) — That’s at least over 10,000 US dollars in today’s money. But before we get caught up in the glamour of this exciting world, for every crime there is a victim. And for every fake cheque, there was someone losing a lot of money. — But as we’re about to hear, Anna didn’t get away with what she did. The year was 1965.
(19:51) — It is quite incredible how the Italian police was able to discover the gang. It looks like a crime story on a film. They rent a Fiat 600 in Rome, but they failed to return the car, and incredibly they left the car parked in the street, with five or six false passports visible on the seat. And of course Italian police was very curious to discover more.
(20:25) — That car led them to the gang’s HQ on the ninth floor of an apartment building on the same street, and to more evidence of the size of the gang’s operation. — Two billion of lira, 350 million of lira in cheques, and five trolleys full of hundreds of foreign passports, from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, France, and even United Kingdom.
(20:57) — There is also a daughter mentioned in the articles, as well as an older lady who looked after her. “Her daughter is a beautiful nine-year-old girl who does not even know who her father is. She is tossed from one continent to another, and is the real victim of the situation.
(21:15) “ — The daughter is mentioned in all the articles I’ve read. Always with her mother and the old lady. — And what does it say about the arrest of Anna? Because that involved her daughter as well, didn’t it? — Yes. Incredibly enough, in the same car there was one of the passports by Anna Högerova, with the photo of her face.
(21:44) One of the police officers remembered her face, and a couple of days afterwards, while he was in Piazza del Popolo, a very popular spot in Rome, he spotted the Jaguar with that lady driving. — And the flash car that had made her notorious to the police was to be her undoing. She was at the post office to pick up some documents for the vehicle when she was finally spotted, and arrested.
(22:16) — She didn’t scream, or she didn’t run away, and she started saying: ‘I have nothing to say to police’. And with her there was also the daughter, and the old lady. While the lady was talking with the police officer, the daughter, who was a nine-year-old at that time, started crying, because she was full of fear for what was happening. So police decided to send her to an institute led by nuns.
(23:06) The trail sort of disappeared around 1970, and there was a news article from a couple of years after that, where a close relative had described her as missing. “She’s worried about her daughter who has disappeared without a trace.
(23:25) “ — There were so many things that were so reminiscent of the Isdal Woman’s story. There are also similarities in the way that she was behaving, toward the point where you lose sight of her in the news, which is around 1969. She was arrested in Switzerland, and she was staying in different hotels, carrying around wigs and make-up which the police believed were meant to be disguises.
(23:49) With the Isdal Woman, she has distinctive teeth and so one of the things that you look for is pictures of someone’s teeth to know if they are a possible match. And we spent some time looking for those pictures, and you know, there’s not always great pictures in the newspaper that show people smiling with their teeth visible. — Yeah, so we have a number of photographs of Anna Högerova, taken from various sources in front of us now, and she looks every inch the film star in all of them, you know, very beautiful, very sort of statuesque, and Sophia Loren, the actress, comes to mind. The hair, the high cheekbones.
(24:27) But in reference to Emil’s point about the teeth: there is one with her lips parted, and you can see a gap between the teeth, and we always thought the Isdal Woman… witnesses often said that she had a gap between her teeth, didn’t they Marit? — Oh yes, she definitely had a gap between her teeth, and this photo, showing the mouth of Anna Högerova, was actually the first one I saw when I came back to work that day, you remember? And I saw this one, and I thought: ‘my God, this is… this is the sister
(24:56) of Sophia Loren, and it is definitely our woman, you know? You also, when you describe her, it’s worth mentioning, very dark, very beautiful, very sophisticated, and with this typical makeup for just end of the 60s, 1970s, the distinct line on the eyelid. — It’s great to see.
(25:20) But then, next to them, is another document which shows a quite different Anna Högerova, on the Interpol report, which we have in front of us. The photo taken at the police station, I guess, when she was arrested, of a very sombre-looking woman, none of the smiles or the glamour. Can you tell us a bit about that? — Yes, it’s obviously photos taken by an earlier arrest, because we know that this wasn’t the first time Anna Högerova was arrested.
(25:51) She was arrested several times in different countries. There are photos, and there are fingerprints. — So, fingerprints. That presumably was pretty useful for our friends in Kripos? — Yes, and on that stage, we were extremely excited because the police did take the fingerprints of the Isdal Woman back in 1970s, so we went to Kripos to ask, could you please do a comparison? Unfortunately, the quality of the fingerprint set of the Isdal Woman weren’t good enough, so they weren’t able to match those fingerprints with the ones from
(26:22) Anna Högerova, but then there were a fingerprint of the Isdal Woman on a pair of sunglasses found in her suitcases back then. And that fingerprint is very good, and they were able to compare it with Anna Högerova. — And what happened then, did they rule her out, or rule her in? — They came back with a negative answer. They said this is not the same woman.
(26:48) But we weren’t too sure about that. We felt the need to know more about Anna Högerova, and her life after 1970. Because remember, Emil lost track of her after 1969, so we wanted to research more, to be sure. — I was looking for things that might definitively rule her out from being connected with the Isdal Woman and my hope was to find some way that I could, you know, myself, say: ‘well, this is definitely no connection.’ There must be some sighting of her, you know, after that, she can’t be in the news
(27:21) constantly throughout the 60s, and then suddenly there’s just nothing after 1970. — One thing you’ve said which made me think, is that you, sort of, wanted to rule her out in the course of your research.
(27:36) Because along the way, you must have been thinking, this could be it, this could be her? Do you want to rule her out because this person that you were getting to know, you didn’t want her to have had the tragic end that the Isdal Woman had? — Yeah, well, there’s certainly plenty of tragedy in Anna Högerova’s story without being the Isdal Woman also.
(27:52) You know, yeah of course, if you’re reading about someone, you kind of learn their life story, and you do sort of feel like you’re understanding them in some way. That’s certainly not how you hope that the story ends. — So Emil, we had contact for quite a long time because it actually… it wasn’t easy to find traces of Anna Högerova after 1970.
(28:26) One of the things we discussed was that Anna Högerova had children, and that didn’t quite fit with our woman, because the autopsy said she didn’t give birth. Of course, you can never be sure about these things, an autopsy in 1970 could be wrong. We, or I, landed on taking contact with her daughter, who lives on the Canary Islands. I managed to reach out to her, and she was the one that could solve this for us.
(28:59) We left Anna’s story during her arrest in Rome. You’ll remember, her daughter was taken too. She’ll tell us what it’s like when your mother is an international fraudster. Anna Högerova, born in Prague in 1937, died on the Canary Islands in 1996. And that’s where she’s buried. Her daughter confirmed that for us.
(29:40) But we couldn’t follow Anna’s story this far and not find out more, and it turned out her daughter was just as interested as we were about her mother. You spoke to her, Neil. — I did, yeah, in Spanish. Alejandra. and she told us what happened to her after her mother was arrested, and she was taken away. She was a young child and she didn’t really know much about what her mother was getting up to, what her mother’s activities were, but she knew something was going on. She’d see her mother sort of getting all dressed up,
(30:19) she wore something similar to a suit, she described her jacket, she looked very elegant… …and she’d go out with her, but then this one day she went out to a place, to a building… — I remember it being cold and grey. Someone said something, I think it was a judge. Then all of a sudden, my mother fainted.
(30:42) She could be a bit dramatic. Suddenly, a man and a woman held my hand and took me off to the hospital. — And after that, you know, her mother was put into prison and Alejandra was taken off to an orphanage for a long time. — And how did she describe the time in the orphanage? — Well, she was just really astonished by how much misery she found there.
(31:07) You know, they fed her very poorly, she lost a lot of weight, and she hadn’t even been long in Italy before this all happened, so I guess quite a kind of traumatic time. — I was an outsider from another country. They weren’t nice to me. I couldn’t wrap my head around how poorly they fed us.
(31:30) I lost a lot of weight and when I got out of there, I was taller, but as thin as an asparagus. Her earliest memories of her mother went from when she was three years old and they were still living in Brazil. She was living with her great-grandmother at the time, and her mother would just come and go very occasionally.
(31:53) And when I asked her how she remembered her, she said, very distant, she was a very distant person. And it wasn’t until she came to Italy with her great-grandmother, they came by boat, that she started to spend more time with her mother. I mean she was a young child, she lived… it was all a bit of a Mary Poppins adventure for her.
(32:15) — Back then in Italy, you might think it’s daft, but what I remember most is going to the cinema to see Mary Poppins. It changed the way I viewed the world. It’s very impressive to go to the cinema. But my mother, I didn’t see her much. — From what you’re telling, what she remembers of her mother is that she was absent. — She was absent.
(32:46) And I think Alejandra was just picking up clues here and there, or piecing things together. For instance, I mean, she said, you know, when she was a young girl she wasn’t stupid, but it was later on she started to find out, find things out. For example, she saw a postcard, and it had been sent from a prison in Rome. But she still didn’t know much about why they had imprisoned her, and she didn’t find out that really until Emil got in touch.
(33:14) — I said to him, ‘I don’t understand much Italian could you sum up the whole story for me?’ And he did. But he said: ‘I’m sure it’s all lies.’ I’m guessing he said this just to protect my feelings. — And Neil, did you feel that she had an insight into her mother’s way of living? I mean, why did she commit these crimes? — She talked about how her mother and her grandmother lost everything during the war.
(33:54) They had a good lifestyle in Prague, they were middle class, they were well connected, and they lost everything when the Russians invaded. So she said, you know, three women. So it must have been the mother, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, three women, and she was saying, you know, many women, and men probably, went through similar situations. But women more than men.
(34:09) And that you’ve got to take into account that women had it more difficult. — It was harder for them to work than it was for men. They didn’t want to give up their social status. So she started to manipulate, you see. My mother thought that survival, the things she did were justified… …because of everything she went through in the Second World War, and all that she’d suffered.
(34:44) — I think her mother also had a hard time after the war. She was in an orphanage, as well, in France, and had a bad time. I think she was badly injured. She had problems with her legs. — In France, when it snows, they turn the parks into places where you can use your snow sleighs. She must have been nine or 10.
(35:12) She was riding her sleigh, and some kids came to make fun of her they crashed into her and they dislocated her legs. So my grandmother sent her to a school run by nuns. She stayed there for two years, tied to a plank, unable to even move. Even though my mother was a monster, she was a victim. My grandmother, her mum, didn’t visit her there once.
(35:46) But after all that, her limping wasn’t so noticeable. She still walked a bit funny. She could walk everywhere with an umbrella, you know, as a walking stick. Maybe that’s why I like Mary Poppins so much. The truth is, it doesn’t surprise me she became the person she did. — She talked about how they had to flee, basically, to South America and start from scratch.
(36:25) When they were in South America, I think they were dealing in stolen art. Alejandra also talks about her grandmother also being in prison. Did you find out more about that in your research? — We certainly did. She has a very famous grandmother. Her name was Eva Maria Mariotti, and she was also a woman known as beautiful, mysterious, and as an owner of several passports with sophisticated names, accused of murder, and going through three trials, spending four years in prison, before a sensational acquittal in 1965. — So that’s the grandmother. So it’s a very complicated family
(37:03) and I think Alejandra was never even sure what the grandmother’s real name was, or even what her mother’s real name was, it was all… it’s all very, very confusing, but she even… she did talk about how she thought her mother, maybe, had a sort of personality disorder, not schizophrenia or anything like that, but a sort of multiple personalities that she could slip in and out of.
(37:25) I’ve been thinking maybe she had more than one personality. One minute, she seemed to be sentimental, good hearted. The next, she was the biggest witch in the world. So sweet in certain moments, then capable of doing terrible things. Maybe she was just a very good actress, that could be it too.
(37:56) — She told me that, you know, her mother wanted to go to the Canary Islands to disappear from the world. She said that numerous times. So I think, one by one, the granddaughter and the grandmother, they all moved to the Canary Islands, where indeed to all intents and purposes they did disappear.
(38:13) — It’s not that she actually disappeared. She disappeared for the rest of the world. — So Neil, what did Alejandra feel about our approach, asking if her mother could be the Isdal Woman? — Obviously, the first thing she she told us was that her mother died in 1996, so we know for sure that it couldn’t have been, but she did have the feeling that they could have been almost in the same room at times, there was a lot in common in their lives.
(38:46) — It’s possible my mother and that woman you’re investigating were connected. Are there similarities? Yes. But my mother, she was still alive in 1996. — When I contacted you and told you that, Emil, how did you feel about it, were you disappointed? About all your research and work? — You know, it’s interesting, it’s a mix of feelings really…
(39:28) My goal was to rule her out, so in a way, I got what I had been wanting. It just took a really long time. It is a bit disappointing because, you know, it would make a great story, you know, you would have an answer. But I don’t know if I’ll be more disappointed when the story is finally resolved because then there won’t be anything else to figure out.
(39:52) — Do you personally still research a little bit, to find her identity? — I definitely do still research a bit. You know, I’m extremely fascinated by the story still today. I’m always optimistic that someone out there is going to find something that sheds some new light on the story, on the case.
(40:12) You just need to find that next interesting story that, you know, might be connected. — Yeah, yeah I’ve always had that same belief that no one can sort of leave without any trace at all, you know, without… everybody knows somebody, would have had a family member or a work colleague, a lover or something, and it’s not so far in the distant past that those people wouldn’t still be around to make that link. — You still optimistic Emil? — I am, yeah. I’m optimistic still, for sure.
(40:41) — I’m confident that you will dig up a new name, and I hope we’ll speak again! — Yeah. — I’d love to. — So, Emil helping us on our way there. And he’s not alone, is he Marit? There are many other listeners who have been getting in touch with the podcast, suggesting other women who could have been the Isdal Woman.
(41:18) — Yeah, I could mention a couple of examples of very interesting women where I, for a shorter period of time, thought we could be onto something here, one of them was a French man who who was convinced he was having a fling with the Isdal Woman back in 1970. He read about our project in a local original French newspaper. The woman he was seeing in 1970 was very secretive, she travelled a lot, and he was already then convinced that she was into some kind of intelligence work.
(41:55) He had a photo of her and so I was able to show it to the witnesses, and unfortunately it was not his former girlfriend that was the Isdal Woman. — And anyone else stand out? — Yeah, I can mention another very interesting example, also with the help of listeners. We’ve been searching for an Italian woman named Giorgia Marchioni.
(42:17) She was staying in a Swiss hotel in March 1970, at the same time as the police assumed the Isdal Woman could have been there. And Swiss police then reported back on three foreign women staying there, those actual dates. Marchioni was the one not possible for us to trace after 1970, and we tried for quite a time with all those three names.
(42:47) And she had also had a birth-date that made her very interesting to us, and she was located in Milan. So we got help in Italy, and it turned out that Giorgia actually was Giorgio: a man! Giorgia Marchioni never existed. It was a typewriting mistake from either the hotel or Swiss police in 1970. Anyway, good to sort out Giorgia, after 50 years as a person of interest. — Another one of those registration form conundrums, where things aren’t quite what they seem eh? Yeah.
(43:18) And in terms of new research that the listeners wouldn’t know about, what’s come to light? — Well, what we have been doing is we have made an examination, together with all the Kripos handwriting experts have have been doing an examination, on the coded note. You know, the travel route of the Isdal Woman.
(43:36) There have been discussions going on, if it’s possible to examine this coded note for breakthroughs, you know, if you write something on the page, and could there be something written, you know, hidden on this coded note? — You mean, the imprint of other writing from another page that has been left on the code note itself? — Exactly. That’s what I mean.
(43:59) And they found something, but it isn’t much of use to us I’m afraid. There wasn’t any name written or anything, the only thing they could find was written on the top page was the number 22 comma eight. Doesn’t tell much. — Well, whatever she wrote in that code note it wasn’t to be easily cracked! — Definitely wasn’t.
(44:25) — But let’s now turn to the second woman of our story, also brought to us by a listener. — Yes, this one came from Cathryn Mitchell who lives in Canberra, Australia. — I can go through stages where I’m doing lots of research online, and then other times it’s waiting on documents and then once those documents come through, they’re quite often in foreign languages and I translate all of them.
(44:48) And that included the Ukrainian secret service, and they come back as scans, so you can’t even just do a copy and paste and put it in Google Translate, you have to sit there with letters that don’t look like our ABC, pick one letter out at a time, and recreate the letter and then stick it in Google Translate… so yeah, quite time consuming.
(45:07) — Cathryn was a member of the Death in Ice Valley Facebook group, and she was following a theory that maybe the Isdal Woman came from Ukraine. — I was just following the Facebook group and watching comments coming up, and I started looking at some of the the facts that were available, and some of the things were quite interesting.
(45:27) You know, her fur hat, for instance, the Cossack-style Russian hat, which is very popular with Russians and Ukrainians. Her gold teeth, which are also very popular in Russian culture. Her breakfast that she liked to have was an Eastern European-style breakfast of porridge and coffee. So all these little facts were interesting to me.
(45:54) And you start to wonder, what type of person would that be? I was very interested in the Ukrainian community and two of the locations that were very prominent in the Isdal Woman’s registration hotel cards were in Belgium, and they are locations where Ukrainian communities settled. So in Liège, there’s a Ukrainian school and it was also the location in Belgium for a Ukrainian workers organisation.
(46:23) — That’s really interesting to sort of hone in on a community. And when did an individual start to suggest herself? — There were a number of women that went across to Belgium after World War Two, and one lady was quite interesting to me, by the name of Angelina Szelest. She’d come across to Germany as an Ostarbeiter.
(46:48) A lot of women were moved across from the Ukraine across to Germany during World War Two. — Cathryn mentioned a word there. She said this woman, Angelina, was one of the Ostarbeiter. To find out more, we spoke to Gelinada Grinchenko from Kharkiv University in Ukraine. — So they were called Ostarbeiter because in translation that means that they were workers from the east.
(47:22) And among all this group of so-called Soviet Ostarbeiter, the Ukrainians formed the biggest part. More than two million and a half persons were deported from Ukraine to the forced labour in Germany. — Yes, so in World War Two, millions of people who had found themselves under Nazi occupation were forcibly moved to work for Germany. Many children as young as 12.
(47:52) They were taken against their will, and Angelina, around 18 years old at the time in 1943, would have travelled from her home in Poltava in Ukraine in terrible conditions. — It was mostly trains without anything inside, so only walls and only floor, so-called cattle wagons.
(48:13) They were living in this wagon several weeks without food, mostly standing during all these weeks, that was a very, very terrible experience. — And what we know about Angelina, was she a typical Osterbeiter? — She’s absolutely typical. The average Ostarbeiter came from Ukraine, she was a woman, and 18 years old. So absolutely typical. — In 1945 at the end of the war, millions of the so-called Osterbeiter were returned back to what was then the USSR, the Soviet Union.
(48:55) But what Cathryn found out about Angelina is that after the war she didn’t return home to Ukraine. — And what about after the war, was there a reluctance to return to Ukraine? She didn’t return; was she unusual not to return? — Usually, Ostarbeiter returned back, usually. So the most part of Ostarbeiters returned. Some of them returned forcibly, because due to the Soviet regulations, they should be taken from Germany by force, and returned to the Soviet Union, as the point was in the using of their labour too.
(49:29) — Yes, that is strange isn’t it? Could it be that the chances of a better life were bigger in Europe, do you think? — Those who decided not to come back, their decision could be the result of propaganda. According to this propaganda, they will be settled in Siberia and live in a concentration camp.
(49:56) Mostly they decided to come back. Imagine yourself at the age of 18. What would you prefer? To come back to your mother and father, or to find I don’t know what in the foreign lands? — So Angelina didn’t decide to go back to Ukraine. At the end of the war, she made it out of Germany under a false name. She ended up getting arrested, and went through the courts in Belgium.
(50:29) So we have here a court statement from Belgium Neil. — It’s a testimony, sort of her declaration. ‘I was forced to leave my country in 1942 to go to Germany… I worked first in east P
(50:46) russia and then in Pomerania until 1945 when the Russian troops arrived…’ — She also says that she was raped by a Russian officer, that she had to to flee to the American zone. — But she talks about herself and other Latvian girls, and she talks about herself as a Latvian. Now, we know she wasn’t a Latvian, so already we sort of question the integrity of this document, or of this testimony.
(51:06) Seems like she’s lying in it. — Yeah, it seems that she maybe had to lie to get herself out of the situation. — Yeah because even in her declaration she says: ‘I expressly assure you that if I made a false declaration about my nationality…’ which she still is, within this d
(51:27) eclaration, ‘…it was only because I was afraid of being returned to Latvia,’ where she wasn’t from, ‘…which I do not want, because I had been told that all persons of Russian and Latvian nationality would be sent back to their country of origin.’ And she didn’t want that at all. So she’s also sort of s
(51:43) hape-shifting, creating new identities… there’s an air of mystery about her story as well. So it very much aligns with what we know about the Isdal Woman. — Yeah, and when we look at these papers from Angelina, it seems she was surrounded in a way by enemies everywhere. Nowhere to feel safe, in a way. Nowhere to belong. — Yeah, it would make sense if she had to lie her way, you know, across different territories, different occupied territories, trying to get to where it was that she wanted to go. But she ends up in Belgium.
(52:10) She was desperate to stay in Belgium. She worked as a servant, you know, she was learning French, she said she wanted to be allowed to stay in Belgium, she no longer has parents in her country of origin. — So this woman was interesting to me because she was someone already sort of lying about who she was and what she was doing.
(52:37) Probably to protect herself. She didn’t want to, obviously, go back to Ukraine. She then continued to live in Belgium for a few years and she went on to work for the Canadian consulate in Brussels, where she was caught going through records in the consulate and she came to the attention of authorities again.
(52:59) And she was a member of a communist party. And so the authorities searched her room looking for evidence that she was transferring information back to Russians. They didn’t find anything in her room, but they did find some money stashed, which… similar to the Isdal Woman having money stashed in her bag as well.
(53:22) — And where did you find the record? I mean, the records during wartime are notoriously difficult to put together, if they exist at all, so where were you finding this detail of this woman, who she was, and her movements? — Yeah. Some of this detail came from CIA records. She came to the attention of authorities later on in her life.
(53:45) She applied to work with the CIA, so from there I became quite interested in the CIA programmes at the time, and one of those was the CIA’s longest-running and most successful programme, which was the aerodynamic programme, where they tried to very softly reach out to the Ukrainian community through literature and pamphlets to attack communism softly, that way.
(54:13) When I started going through the CIA programme, I started looking for people that might have been of interest, and that’s when Angelina Szelest’s name popped up. — Then you tracked this woman, Angelina Szelest, you tracked her to Rome. She had a life in Rome, right? — That’s correct. From there, she moved to Rome. So lots of these little facts were sort of coming together and seeming really interesting.
(54:40) — So these CIA documents, Marit, Cathryn shared them with you didn’t she? So what do they tell us? — Well, they tell us that it seemed that Angelina Szelest did study in Rome, and she obviously worked for something called Ukrainian radio in Rome, and amazingly enough she was a stewardess for an Italian airline.
(55:10) And, listen to this, she knew five languages Neil! We know about the Isdal Woman that she was at least capable of using English, German and French. — No, it’s really interesting. Yes, she’s very diverse isn’t she in what she does and her abilities, you know, but can we say she’s a spy? — Well, according to the documents that Cathryn found, she definitely did work for the CIA in Rome, at least until 1960, but not in the field.
(55:38) The CIA wanted her to work in the field at the Rome Olympics. They then did her POA, that is, Provisional Operational Approval. They then discovered her trail of lies, you know, back to Belgium and so on, and they suspected a connection with the Russians.
(55:59) — Yeah, so proper Cold War intrigue, so they thought she might have been a double agent? You must have been getting pretty excited at this point! A woman, possibly involved in espionage, travelled a lot around Europe, perhaps to the city named ‘R’ that we see in the code note… and also involving a shoe store, I understand? — Yeah, it turned out that Angelina Szelest did live quite close to the shoe shop in Rome where the plastic bag in the Isdal Woman’s suitcase came from, so you can sure think I was excited about this candidate. In fact, a lot of
(56:32) candidates in the search for the Isdal Women, and I have looked at many, often passed through Rome in Italy. It seems it was the centre of something after the war, and on through the Cold War. Here’s more from our voice we heard earlier, John Foot from Bristol University in England. All roads lead to Rome, it seems.
(56:56) — Rome is where power is in Italy. It’s the politics, and all the press. Rome has more diplomats than anyone else because it’s got a Vatican embassy and a foreign embassy, so it’s full of diplomats, and discussion, and foreign press, and all this kind of intrigue. So it’s a place where many people would pass through.
(57:16) And yeah, it’s a recruiting ground. It’s a place where intelligence is very interested in. It’s a place where all kinds of people are moving around and going through and I think that makes it a place where there are many more spies than in most cities. There were lots of places to hide in Rome.
(57:34) There’s all the convents, there was lots of smuggling of people, and movement, and ways of getting people out that were illegal, all the rat-lines. After the Second World War, lots of Nazis escaped through Rome, but these kind of rat-lines in and out, not necessarily for Nazis, but also for communists, continued after the war. And she might well have been involved.
(57:54) — What about in the sort of Cold War context? Is it a frontier in that sense as well? — Rome is very much a frontier in the Cold War. Italy had an enormous Communist party, the biggest Communist party in the West, at one point with over two million members in Italy, so one in 25 people was a card-carrying communist. So this is a place that the West was very worried about.
(58:18) — So it was sort of a meeting between West and East? — Yes. Italy had a border with the East, had a border with Yugoslavia. So the Cold War in Italy was fought very bitterly, it was fought in elections, it was fought on the streets, it was fought in parliament, it was fought in everyday life.
(58:36) And it patterned everything that people did. And of course, the Vatican was a very important fighter in that Cold War. Vatican has its own spies, has its own intelligence, and the Pope, you know, gets up on his balcony and says anyone who votes communist is excommunicated, is going to Hell, basically. You know, it’s quite a big thing for two million Italians, but anybody across the world as well, so they’re also in the game. It’s also a place where you can move more freely in and out.
(59:08) It’s an international city, it’s a global city, it’s a place where you can easily have a cover story for being there, and so you know, this… your person’s cover story was Alitalia stewardess, right? Which is a very glamorous job to have at that time, but it’s also a great cover story, right? Presumably she spoke very good Italian to have that job.
(59:26) You wouldn’t have been able to get it. But it also conjured up an image of a certain kind of person. — She also worked as a journalist, for a period of time at least, in the so-called Ukrainian Radio in Rome.
(59:43) Would you tell us about that? — I mean, the idea that there was a Ukrainian Radio in Rome is quite weird anyway, isn’t it? I mean, why would you have that? The Ukrainian community in Rome at that time was very small. Now it’s a quite a big community, but then it wasn’t, so why would you have a Ukrainian Radio? It sounds to me like a front for something else. — And if we go back to sort of 1960, there were the Olympics.
(1:00:08) Were Cold War tensions heightened even further at that point, because they were hugely politicised anyway, the Olympics, during the Cold War weren’t they? — Clearly, you know, the Olympics is a crucial moment, right at the height of the Cold War. It’s in Italy, which is the frontline state in the Cold War.
(1:00:22) Italy also is very interested in presenting itself as a modern, democratic, efficient country. It doesn’t always work, though, because it rebounds on you. One of the most amazing things in the Olympics was an Ethiopian runner called Abebe Bikila who won the marathon, who had fought against Italy when Italy colonised Ethiopia, and then won the Olympics, running without shoes. So that wasn’t part of the plan.
(1:00:45) — And I guess, interestingly for our story, Angelina Szelest, the woman we’re trying to follow here, there would have been a recruitment drive at that point perhaps for the CIA, and she tried, she attempted to join it, and was denied because they suspected, given her past, she may have been a double agent.
(1:01:06) — Yeah, that’s a fascinating moment, and it seems that, you know, this was also, from the evidence that you’ve given me about her, connected to espionage in some way. Or, you know, how can we tell exactly what. She seems so ambiguous, it’s very difficult to tell what exactly she is and what she’s doing. The more documents that Cathryn uncovered, the more questions we needed answered.
(1:01:32) Luckily, we were working with the right person. Cathryn already had a background in doing this kind of thing. She had successfully tracked down her husband’s family that he never knew, and since then, it had become a kind of hobby for her, to search for people’s ancestors and relatives.
(1:01:50) — Oh I was excited, I was, yeah, very excited that potentially it could be her. But also you always bear in mind that it can always change. You never know until you know. I learned, I guess, with DNA and with biological families, is that sometimes I would get over excited very early on.
(1:02:11) And you get very excited, and you could blurt it out to someone that you thought it was, you know, your biological family might be xyz, and then you’d realise that, you know, what you’re saying is quite damaging, potentially, to someone. Until you have that final word, that final confirmation, you’re never 100% certain.
(1:02:29) — Yeah, but it must have it must have been quite exciting at moments, especially when her story intersects with what we already knew, especially things like the shoe store, I mean that’s quite a coincidence.
(1:02:45) What other things did you uncover that match the Isdal Woman’s story? — One of the really good clues too was that in the CIA papers they listed a range of aliases and false names that Angelina Szelest had used, and one of them was Elizabeth, which was the last name used by the Isdal Woman. The other thing was that in the letters that she had written, she was literate in French and German. More fluent in French, but did speak German.
(1:03:10) And you know, it backed up the Isdal Woman as well, that her German was a little bit clunky and she was much more fluent in French. — And at a certain point, you start thinking, hmm, could this be the Isdal Woman or…? When was that? — I think when I received the records from the Belgium archives, I was really interested then.
(1:03:32) Especially when I saw her handwriting. Her handwriting was interesting. When I could see side by side and see similarities between her handwriting and the Isdal Woman’s handwriting, then I started to think maybe, you know, maybe she could be the one. And then I handed it over to you so that you could pass it on for people to assess.
(1:03:56) — So Marit, the handwriting’s been very useful to us in the past, when we looked at the Isdal Woman’s handwriting and her script, and a specialist in Kripos was able to tell us that it came from a certain kind of copybook writing in Europe, French probably.
(1:04:17) How useful was the handwriting this time, in Angelina’s case? — Well, I took the letters that Angelina wrote to a handwriting expert at Kripos to have a look, and in a preliminary examination of the existing material, the answer back was positive. They have a scale from plus three to minus three, where plus one means it might be the same person’s handwriting. Plus one, they said.
(1:04:44) A weakness was that Angelina’s letters were written as a young woman, and 20 years before the Isdal Woman wrote on the hotel cards. We do develop our handwriting quite a lot during life, so we had to continue looking for other leads that Angelina left. — From the documents Cathryn had uncovered, we didn’t have any sign of Angelina beyond the 1960s. And just like Anna Högerova, there was no trace of her after 1970, the year the Isdal Woman went missing. Of course, this made it very interesting for us.
(1:05:16) We needed help on the ground in Italy, so we turned to Italian journalist Claudia Marchionni. Could she find traces of Angelina after 1970? — I went everywhere I could. The problem: Covid. I have a journey by telephone, of course. I called to Alitalia, I called to secret services, to the police, I called the taxes office. I asked Ukrainian churches in Rome. Everybody I suppose who can give me any information.
(1:05:57) The traces I found about Angelina are very strange because she lives in the documents. But it’s very strange that in Rome, she’s a ghost. — But then you, after a long time of research, you ended up finding that Angelina Szelest actually left Italy and went to Germany. — Yes. I called a lot of people, and then arrived in Italy the news that…
(1:06:31) she isn’t our woman. She went to Germany in 1990. She lived in some little village in the mountains of Germany. About five years ago, in October in a hospice, in [a town] near Frankfurt, she died. — Claudia, in all your investigations were you able to find any family members at all or any trace of them? — No there aren’t. There aren’t. No married, no children, alone.
(1:07:27) — And all the time, Claudia the more you investigated, the more you tried to fill in the gaps of her life, were you building up a picture of this person, of Angelina? Did you feel you were getting to know her? What kind of a woman was she, do you think? — I imagine her like a lonely woman.
(1:07:55) I think, of course I am a journalist, so I believe only in what I can verify, but alone, and I suppose that she had no choice. She did what in those years an Ukrainian woman had to do in Rome. I imagine her, a young woman arrives from Nazi force camps in Germany, with no friends. I suppose that she was an instrument. There was somebody who ordered her what to do.
(1:08:46) In those years, you had two choices: the East or the West. She lived non-her life. — She didn’t live her own life. — I think so. A hard life. — It’s so interesting isn’t it, because when you think about the Isdal Woman and we imagine ourselves in her mind, and you know, the decisions she would have been making, it could so easily have been her.
(1:09:25) You know, a woman alone travelling around these countries, pulled by different forces, you know, East or West, and we still… we’re still determining, and it almost feels like Angelina… it could so easily have been her. — She isn’t our woman. It’s sure now.
(1:09:50) But really I think that we can try to find the name of the Isdal Woman in this large group of survivors from Nazi forced labour. — So what do you reckon, Marit? I mean, does the Ostarbeiter theory hold up for the Isdal Woman as well do you think? — Definitely. It could be a Ukrainian girl or woman that didn’t return home after the w
(1:10:21) ar. It’s possible. — And what did… what was Claudia able to find out about what happened to Angelina towards the end of her life? — Claudia’s research into different archives, she has been putting that much questions to different archives that she’s still getting answers back, and strange enough, the other day she got an answer back from Germany that Angelina Szelest is buried in an unmarked grave. Anonymous, like the Isdal Woman.
(1:10:51) — The strangest of coincidences, isn’t it? You know, both of them in unmarked graves. Talk about the things they have in common in life, and in death. — For a very long time, we did believe that Angelina Szelest could be the right person. — I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry that I gave you this solution, I’m sorry.
(1:11:20) — No, you found brilliant information because you could actually exclude Angelina Szelest as a candidate for us in finding the real identity of the Isdal Woman. But how was it for you, after that long time? After three months of research, Angelina now is a friend of mine. I would like to see her grave. I imagine her the day in which she died in a hospice in Germany. A sad sensation remains in me.
(1:12:03) — She was a very private woman, and that came to be proven with the journalist’s research in Italy, where she could barely find a trace of Angelina in the Italian records. But a private person but also very strong, I think. As a young woman, to travel across Germany under a false name, to start a new life, you have to be a certain calibre of person to be able to do that.
(1:12:55) — So one woman leads to another, and another. They each could have been the Isdal Woman, up to a point. We’ve got to hand it to Emil and Cathryn, our two listener sleuths who brilliantly pieced together their complicated lives. I come away with a richer understanding of the kind of world the Isdal Woman was passing through. These women were survivors in a tough, post-war Europe.
(1:13:17) Whatever their strengths and weaknesses, their crimes or heroics, they carved their own paths in defiance of the greater forces of their time. And that’s how we’ve often imagined the Isdal Woman: as a loner, but under the influence of other forces, maybe secret services, maybe criminal, who knows? And so the search continues.
(1:13:39) We always hoped the listeners would take this and run with it, and maybe even crack it. So keep on looking, because as we’ve said all along, somebody must know something. Death in Ice Valley is an original podcast series from the BBC World Service and NRK. It’s presented by me, Neil McCarthy, and Marit Higraff, whose research was integral to this episode.
(1:14:46) Of course, if it wasn’t for you, our listeners, and the work you are doing, this particular episode wouldn’t have happened. In fact, this whole podcast is driven by you. For us, that’s what makes Death in Ice Valley so special: we know we aren’t investigating the story alone.
(1:15:02) We have the help of thousands of you around the world. If you haven’t yet joined our Death in Ice Valley Facebook group, you still can. We have around 34,000 members. If you want to be part of that community discussing the case, go to Facebook.com/groups/deathinicevalley You can now watch all our previous episodes, all 11 of them, with photos and documents, and you can opt for subtitles in various languages. Just go to the BBC World Service YouTube channel.
(1:15:34) Thanks to the two listeners we featured in this episode, Cathryn Mitchell and Emil, and special thanks to Claudia Marchionni. You heard the voices of Jane Slavin, Marilyn Nnadebe, and Joshua Riley. Sound design and original music is by Phil Channel. The series editor is Philip Sellars. The BBC World service podcast editor is Jon Manel. This episode was produced and mixed by Joel Cox.

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The Isdal Woman — A New Perspective

Bonus video link:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFmv8ny2Fc/T5WuOw_wdnMvyqZ2RKHV7A/view?utm_content=DAFmv8ny2Fc&utm_campaign=share_your_design&utm_medium=link&utm_source=shareyourdesignpanel