Isdal Woman: The most mysterious true crime case in Norweigian history
Putting all the true crime nonsense aside for a moment, on a human level, I hope that the two young girls who discovered the body of the Isdal Woman, along with their father, managed to find peace afterwards.
On November 29th, 1970, she was found lying face up in the foothills of Ulriken, a mountain in Vestland County, Norway. The discovery would be traumatising to an impossible extent to imagine, and a memory that nobody could shake off.
They nearly missed her, as she had sunk almost completely into the broken rock fragments at the base of the mountain. Perhaps, they wish they had done. Stumbling on a dead person would be bad enough, but the Isdal Woman had most of her body burnt away, which is the kind of thing that keeps therapists in business for life.
The body was taken in for testing just as this became the biggest news story in Norway, with theories abounding of what actually happened to the Isdal Woman. Especially when two incredible details were unearthed about the woman.
The first was the cause of her death. The obvious cause would be the burning, but the Isdal Woman was ruled to have died from a drug overdose. Analysis of her blood and stomach contents revealed she’d taken over 70 sleeping pills before dying, and, terrifyingly enough, there was soot in her lungs, suggesting she’d been alive as she burned.
The next part of the story came from the discover of two suitcases abandoned at Bergen railway station. Fingerprints found in the luggage partially matched those belonging to the body, causing the baggage to be ruled as her property. This was major because it raised the question of a possible suicide. However, the biggest finding to come from this discovery was a notepad in her luggage, one that showed her checking into eight previous hotels around Europe.
Nevertheless, her identity remained a mystery. It was found that the Isdal Woman had checked into each of these eight previous hotels under eight different aliases, with eight different fake passports to show for it.
Suddenly, this goes from a grimy true crime story to something that more closely resembles a spy story. Many hare-brained theories about her identity had focused on Norway’s presence in the Cold War; one can only imagine how vindicated they must have felt years after she was buried. Declassified Norwegian military files showed the test sites of Norway’s Penguin missile, and many places the Isdal Woman visited corroborated with those sites.
The more information that came in about her, the more it seemed like she was a suspicious character. Something that had been hinted at from the very beginning. The only identifying features on the luggage that had been found at Bergen station had come from a few fingerprints on a pair of sunglasses. Every other distinguishing feature had been removed. Something that only seems suspicious when you take into account everything discovered since.
Then you get the personal testimony from people who claim to have seen her. The hotels that hosted her reported a guest who was secretive to the point of paranoia. According to reports, she rarely left her room and when she did, rarely looked the same, to the point that a few people reported seeing her in multiple wigs.
However, this information also isn’t reliable. These people probably want to have seen a daring spy at work when, in reality, they probably just saw a few different women who looked alike.
Yet, nothing in the years of research and investigation has turned up any reliable details of her identity or even the circumstances surrounding her death. Two things that will forever make the Isdal Woman a mystery.