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In November 1970, the badly burned body of a woman was discovered in an isolated, ice-filled valley in Norway. Despite numerous attempts, investigators have failed to crack the case, which was described by one investigator as “riddle upon riddle.”11 The mysterious death of the still-unidentified “Isdal Woman” has intrigued investigators for decades.
“This was during the Cold War,
and there were definitely a lot of spies
in Norway, including Russian spies.”
Gunnar Staalesen, crime writer
Isdalen (“ice valley” in Norwegian), is situated some 12 miles (19km) outside Bergen in Norway. While popular with local walkers, its inaccessibility attracts few tourists. Imposingly picturesque, this remote area is known locally as the Valley of Death. It earned this sinister nickname in medieval times because of its reputation as a notorious suicide spot. The valley has also been the scene of many accidental tragedies, when hikers, lost in fog, have fallen to their deaths.
On the afternoon of November 29, 1970, Professor Sund and his two daughters were hiking along Isdalen’s scree slopes. Low clouds were drifting over the valley and it was a brisk 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).22 Suddenly, the elder daughter spotted the body of a woman lying on her back between some boulders, a short distance from the path. Professor Sund told her to wait with her younger sister while he went to investigate. The woman’s body had been set on fire. Her arms were outstretched, in a distinctive, pugilistic attitude—a position typical of bodies that have been burned. There were extensive burn marks on her face and torso. The damage to her face was so severe that her features could not be discerned. Fearful that a killer could be lurking among the tall trees surrounding them, the family swiftly hiked back down the valley to report their horrific discovery to the police.
Bergen police soon arrived on the scene, armed with metal detectors and assisted by sniffer dogs. Carl Halvor, one of the first officers to arrive, recalled in 2016, “The first thing we notice is the stench . . . ,”33 implying that the body had been there some time. The police cordoned off the area, and by late afternoon the desolate valley was teeming with investigators trawling through rocks and vegetation, searching for clues. Several objects were found at the scene: jewelry; a woman’s watch; some Fenemal sleeping tablets; the remains of a pair of rubber-soled, lace-up boots of a type commonly worn by Norwegian women; two melted bottles that smelled like gasoline; a silver spoon; part of a half bottle of the State Liquor Store’s Kloster Liqueur; and a broken umbrella. The watch and jewelry were not on the woman’s person but appeared to have been arranged around her body. “It looked like there had been some kind of ceremony,” observed forensic investigator Tormod Bønes.
The deceased woman was 5ft 4½in (1.64m) tall, with long, brownish-black hair. She had a small, round face with brown eyes and small ears. Her age was estimated at between 25 and 40 years old. Her body was transported to the Gades Institute of Pathology at Haukeland University Hospital for a cause of death to be determined.
The autopsy and toxicology report concluded that the woman had died from a combination of the barbiturate Fenemal, a prescription drug, and carbon-monoxide poisoning. She had ingested more than 50 tablets in several doses in the hours leading up to her death. Many of the pills had not yet dissolved into her bloodstream before she died. Smoke particles in her lungs indicated that she had still been alive when she was set on fire. According to the police report, the woman had “been stained by a brief but intense fire.” The pathologist’s report added that injuries inflicted by the fire were also a contributing cause of death. It also noted that there was bruising to the woman’s neck and face, which could have been caused by blow or a fall.
Adding to the mystery, a portion of the woman’s fingerprints had been sanded away and all labels had been cut from her clothes and scraped off the bottles found at the scene.
It quickly dawned on the local police force that this wasn’t going to be an easy case, and the following day they asked for assistance from the National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos) in Oslo. When they were unable to identify her, the woman became known as number “134/70” at the Gades Institute. To the public, however, she soon became “the Isdal Woman.”
The first lead in the case came three days later, when investigators discovered two large unclaimed suitcases at the left-luggage office at Bergen train station. They had been checked in on November 23. Inside police discovered a notepad with a single handwritten entry that appeared to be in some kind of code; German and Norwegian money in the form of bills; and Belgian, Swiss, and British money in the form of coins. They also found some expensive-looking clothing, several wigs, a comb, a hairbrush, some teaspoons, glasses with no corrective lenses, and a tube of eczema cream. On one lens of the glasses was a partial fingerprint that matched the Isdal Woman, so at least it was clear that the suitcases had belonged to her.
Instead of helping to provide some answers, however, the contents of the suitcases only raised more questions about the woman’s identity. Once again, identifying labels had been removed, including the patient and doctor details from the tube of eczema cream. Whoever had done this had been so meticulous that the labels had even been rubbed off the comb and hairbrush. The fingerprint found on the glasses was sent to the Criminal Police Center in Oslo and run through their fingerprint register. However, this yielded no results.
One item, however, did have an identifying feature. It was a shopping bag with the name “Oscar Rørtvedt’s Footwear Store” inscribed on the front. Investigators located the store in Stavanger and spoke to the store owner’s 22-year-old son, Rolf Rørtvedt. He informed investigators that he remembered the unidentified woman, correctly describing her as being of medium height with long dark hair and dark eyes, and a roundish face. “She was a customer who took up space, asked a lot of questions, and spent a long time making up her mind,” he recalled. “Her English was poor, and I remember a certain peculiar smell.” She had come into the store several weeks before and purchased a pair of blue rubber boots. He showed investigators the brand of boots that the woman had purchased and they recognized them as similar to the boots found beside the Isdal Woman’s body. Years later, Rørtvedt commented that, when garlic became a common ingredient in European cookery, he recognized the smell immediately as the odor that had emanated from the woman in his father’s store. “In 1970, no one smelled like garlic—now, everybody does,” he stated.
Confident that the Isdal Woman had been in Stavanger in the weeks leading up to her death, the police went from hotel to hotel asking staff whether they could remember a guest matching her description. A receptionist at the Hotel St. Svithun was able to connect the Isdal Woman to a female guest who had recently stayed a night at the hotel. She described the woman as “dark-haired, golden skin, wide hips without being fat, speaks poor English.” Checking through the registration cards, the hotel receptionist finally put a name to the woman: Finella Lorch from Belgium. It seemed like a major break in the case. The following day, the headline in Stavanger’s VG newspaper read, “Sensational Solution Today?” However, that glimmer of hope soon enough faded when Bergen police checked the registrations of hotels in Bergen and could not find the name “Finella Lorch.”
Investigators analyzed the woman’s handwriting in the notepad found inside the suitcase and continued to inquire about her in hotels throughout Norway. They eventually discovered that the woman traveled from town to town in Norway, staying in numerous hotels in the six months leading up to her death. Each time, she used a new alias and investigators found at least seven of them: Claudia Tielt, Vera Jarle, Alexia Zarna-Merchez, Claudia Nielsen, Genevieve Lancier, Vera Schlosseneck, and Elisabeth Leenhouwfr.
In addition, most of these aliases were supported by fake passports and a distinctive signature. During each hotel check-in, the woman claimed to be from Belgium, but after checking with Belgian police, investigators found out that each identity—and passport—was false; they could trace no Belgian citizen with any of those names. Even more peculiar, if the woman stayed in a hotel more than one night, she would always request to change her room and would often rearrange the furniture. If she were booked into a room with a balcony, she always requested a move. Staff at these hotels recollected that she wore wigs and could speak a number of different languages, adding that she spoke broken English with an accent.
Memories of the woman were hazy, but most witnesses described her as “confident,” “quiet,” “sexy,” and as a woman “with an agenda.” Witnesses who met her in Bergen recalled that she looked smart and sophisticated. Alvhild Rangnes, a 21-year-old waitress who was working in the dining room at the Scandic Neptun hotel in Bergen, recalled that when the Isdal Woman strolled into the dining room on her own, she was impressed by her confidence and expensive-looking clothes. She looked comfortable and had a proud posture. A woman dining alone was a rare occurrence back then, and Rangnes remembered that the woman looked as though she was used to traveling alone. “I remember I whispered to my colleague that I hoped I could adopt this woman’s style as an adult,” she said. From the glamorous image the Isdal Woman presented in the dining room, Rangnes could not picture her hiking in the bleak Isdalen valley. According to Frank Ove Sivertsen, who was working as a hotel bellboy in 1970, she was “the kind of woman we hardly ever saw.”44
Investigators trawled through missing persons reports but were unable to find anyone matching the mysterious woman’s appearance. They eventually cracked the coded entry in her notepad and determined that it was a record of the woman’s many trips around Europe. She had recently visited Paris, Hamburg, and Basel. They also discovered that she had traveled from Paris to Stavanger and Trondheim, before returning to Stavanger and then finally heading to Bergen, fated to be her final destination. She had traveled from Trondheim on the Braathens SAFE Airline, and taken the hydrofoil between Stavanger and Bergen using the names E. Velding and L. Selling. Investigator Carl Halvor wondered, “What was she doing in those places? Why did she go there? And why did she want to conceal both her identity and traveling route by using these codes?”
Another seeming break in the case came shortly afterward when the autopsy report noted that ten of the Isdal Woman’s teeth had gold crowns, and the majority of these crowns were preformed, which meant that they were premade. The investigation called in Professor Gisle Bang, who determined that the type of crowns on the Isdal Woman’s teeth were not used in Scandinavia. He said they would be more common in “the Orient and in some parts of southern and central Europe.” This information, combined with the fact that she had traveled from Paris to Stavanger, led investigators to speculate that the woman might have been French. Over the next few years, Professor Bang sent photographs of the woman’s dental work to dental journals in various countries, hoping that somebody somewhere could identify where it might have been done. Unfortunately, the journals’ experts were unable to pinpoint a precise location where the woman had undergone these dental procedures.
The bizarre case garnered extensive media coverage. Many early reports speculated that the Isdal Woman was a foreign spy who had almost certainly been murdered. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was ongoing and Norway was a NATO country with a 122-mile (196km) border with Russia. Bergen was a strategic naval port, and there was a collective fear that Soviet forces could potentially launch an attack from the sea.55 It was common knowledge that spies were operating in the country. “This was during the Cold War, and there were definitely a lot of spies in Norway, including Russian spies,” observed Gunnar Staalesen, a Bergen-based crime author.
The rumor that the Isdal Woman was some kind of foreign agent circulated widely and, in a bid to calm public fears, the police held a press conference. “No, I think I can safely say that there are no grounds for espionage. I count it as completely out of the ordinary,” declared Criminal Commissioner Oskar Hordnes. Skeptics questioned why a field agent would agree to meet somebody in such a remote location.
However, it later transpired that, around the same time as Commissioner Hordnes was speaking to the press, a telegram from the Norwegian Defense Security Department (NORDSD) suggested that the Isdal Woman was associated in some way with the Penguin missile program, a top-secret collaboration between the Norwegian armed forces and the country’s weapons industry. The telegram was labeled “Secret” and read: “Woman found dead in Isdalen probably observed Tananger in November while tests with Penguin were conducted.”
Fisherman Berthon Rott, from the town of Tananger, just 6 miles (10km) south of Stavanger, had informed the military that he had noticed a woman who could have been the Isdal Woman on the quays, where naval vessels were regularly moored. This woman had stood out from the crowd. “She was nicely dressed. You don’t usually go that way on a fishing pier,” he said. Rott claimed he saw the woman talking to “an officer”—presumably a naval officer—near motor torpedo boats that were playing an important role in the Penguin weapons program. Each boat carried a Penguin missile, which employed state-of-the-art infrared technology to target enemy warships. These boats, and in particular their Penguin missiles, were thus of great interest to the secret services of unfriendly countries. “They wanted to know how the missile worked, and how to deceive it,” said Henry Kjell Johansen, one of the leaders of the Penguin program.66
Ørnulf Tofte, Assistant Chief of Police and head of counterintelligence in the Police Surveillance Agency, had been sent from Oslo to Bergen to assist in the Isdal Woman case. During his investigation, he was never made aware of her possible connection with the Penguin missile program. He also said that he considered this claim very unlikely, believing that Soviet agents would employ more subtle and sophisticated methods to monitor the testing of new NATO weapons. “If they sent someone, they would probably have done so from the Soviet embassy in Oslo. Or sent some Russian fishing boats to the area. I don’t think they would use a woman like her,” he said.
When the “Iron Curtain” finally fell in 1991, none of the pseudonyms the Isdal Woman had used were found in the archives of the former spy services of Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, or East Germany. However, it is unknown whether any details of her identity reside in the files of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which succeeded the Soviet Union’s KGB.
In his book The Woman in the Isdalen, author Dennis Aske considers a theory that the Isdal Woman was a high-class sex worker. He suggests that this could be the reason she traveled so extensively and checked in to so many hotels.77 Aske also mentions the police’s description of underwear found in her suitcase, with its emphasis on the “brassiere’s bowls, lace, cassettes, and a small bow.” He suggested that the underwear had come from Beate Uhse, a shop in Germany that sold “sex products.”88 However, unbeknownst to Aske, this theory was considered by police back in 1970 and was quickly ruled out. The majority of the hotels she had stayed in forbade prostitution and all of the witnesses who came into contact with the Isdal Woman saw her on her own; she did not bring anybody up to her room and she dined and shopped alone.99 Moreover, why would a client lure the Isdal Woman to the isolated area where she died and go to such extreme lengths to conceal her identity? When a sex worker is murdered, it is typically during a sudden fit of rage and the crime scene did not fit this scenario.
Perhaps for lack of any other obvious solution, or to calm public fears, several investigators eventually concluded that the Isdal Woman had committed suicide. They noted how difficult it would have been for someone to force another person to swallow such a large amount of Fenemal tablets. Bergen Chief of Police Asbjørn Bryhn said he believed that, in the grip of some form of mania, she had opted to end her life. One possible suicide scenario is that she hiked up to the remote location, drank the bottle of liquor found with her body, started the fire to burn her belongings and then took the final dose of Fenemal. As the drugs and alcohol took effect and before she lost consciousness, she may have thrown herself, or fallen, into the fire in a final bid to protect her identity.
Other investigators strongly disagree with the suicide theory, Carl Halvor among them. “If someone wanted to take their life out of the fact that they were sick, had problems, other reasons or whatever it might be, it is so unnatural to do it that way.”1010 Knut Haavik, a crime reporter who investigated the case, also refuted the suicide hypothesis. “Personally, I’m totally convinced that this was a murder. She had various identities, she operated with codes, she wore wigs, she traveled from town to town, and switched hotels after a few days. This is what police call conspiratory behavior.” Those who believe she was murdered also say that the remote location where she was found, combined with the brutal method of her death, make it seem extremely unlikely that she ended her own life.
Three years after the death of the Isdal Woman, on July 21, 1973, Israeli Mossad agents assassinated Achmed Bochiki in Lillehammer, Norway. They mistook the harmless waiter for Ali Hassan Salameh, leader of the Black September Palestinian militant group. The Isdal Woman investigation team questioned the four agents responsible while they were behind bars, but none of them recognized her or any of the aliases she had used.1111
In May 2017, a DNA profile of the unidentified woman was compiled in a bid to finally crack the case. At the time of her death, DNA technology had not yet been developed. However, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo was now able to isolate the Isdal Woman’s DNA from tissue samples. “What is new is that we have finally been able to create a DNA profile. The aim of sending it out now is that if she is reported missing and there is DNA from relatives in the database then we will get a match,” said Maj Nordskaug of Kripos. The sample was sent to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Innsbruck. Analysis revealed that the Isdal Woman was of European, but not Scandinavian, origin. Scientists were able to narrow her birthplace down even further with isotope analysis, which looked at the chemical composition of strontium and oxygen absorbed in her teeth enamel as her teeth were forming. These substances settle in the enamel when drinking and eating, and the level of them can indicate where a person may have grown up. The results indicated that, during her formative years, the Isdal Woman had possibly moved from Southern Germany to France during World War II.1212 This analysis meant that future investigation into her identity could focus on these, admittedly large, areas.
The following year, another break in the case came when experts at the Forensic Medicine Agency at the Karolinski Institute in Stockholm examined the Isdal Woman’s teeth and concluded that she was closer to 40 years old. Scientists had used a more modern method of analysis, known as carbon-14 analysis. This was linked to atomic bomb blasts. Between 1955 and 1963, thousands of nuclear bombs had been tested in the open air, causing a spike in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In 1963, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty made this illegal. In future, nuclear weapons could only be exploded underground. When carbon is in the air, it settles in the enamel of a child’s teeth as they are forming; once formed, the teeth do not absorb any more carbon. Because of this, people whose teeth formed after 1955 typically carry an extra “annual signature” in their tooth enamel. When the Isdal Woman’s teeth were examined using carbon-14 analysis, it was determined that she had no increased carbon, meaning that her teeth must have been fully formed by 1955, making her approximately 10 or 12 years old by then. “There were no traces of the test blasts. So I can say with 100 percent certainty that she was born before 1944,” said Kanar Alkass, a researcher at the Forensic Medicine Agency. In addition to the carbon-14 analysis, scientists also analyzed the Isdal Woman’s teeth using the racemization method. This used chemical analysis of the dentin in her teeth to calculate her age. The results estimated that she was born in 1930 or possibly a few years later, confirming that she was around 36 to 40 years old when she died.
In June 2019, a BBC World Service report provided a new possible insight into the mystery: the testimony of a former local man, Ketil Kversoy. He did not tell his story to police at the time for fear of ridicule. While walking on the slopes of the Isdal valley on a Sunday afternoon in November 1970, he recalled encountering a dark-haired woman. She was being followed by two men. “When she looked at me, I felt that she started to say something, but she didn’t, and then she looked behind her and saw these men. I’m sure she knew they were going after her.”
The Isdal Woman was given a Catholic funeral at Møllendal chapel in Bergen on February 5, 1971. Many of the officers who had tried so hard to identify her were in attendance. Her coffin—which was adorned with tulips and carnations—was lowered into the ground in the cemetery outside the chapel. There was no tombstone and there was no name. She was buried in a zinc coffin that will not decompose; therefore, if she is ever identified, her family can rebury her in her home country.
Photographs documenting the funeral remain stored at the Bergen police department in hopes that one day she will finally be identified and her family can be presented with them. To this day, the true identity of the Isdal Woman remains an enigma. The case is tinged with sadness, not only because of a life lost but also because her killer, or killers, may very well have evaded justice for decades.