The Isdal Woman

The woman lay on her back in a remote part of Isdalen, the valley locals had long called Death Valley. The front of her body and clothing were badly burned and her face was unrecognisable. Nearby were the remains of a fire.

Around her investigators found an empty bottle of St. Hallvard liqueur, two plastic water bottles, a passport holder with no passport, rubber boots, a woollen jumper, a scarf, nylon stockings, an umbrella, a purse, a matchbox, a watch, two earrings and a ring. A fur hat beneath her smelled of petrol. Every label and maker's mark had been cut or rubbed away.

Three days later police traced two suitcases she had left at the left-luggage office of Bergen railway station. Inside were clothes, shoes, wigs, make-up, eczema cream with its label removed, coins from several countries, maps and timetables, a pair of glasses with plain lenses, sunglasses bearing her partial fingerprints, and a notepad. Five 100 Deutsche Mark notes were hidden in the lining of one case.

The notepad was filled with short entries of letters and numbers. To the detectives it looked like a code.

Detectives checked hotel registers across Norway and found the same woman again and again. She had stayed in Oslo, Trondheim, Stavanger and Bergen, and had also travelled to Paris. She always gave Belgian nationality, filled in forms in German or French, and used a different name almost every time: Geneviève Lancier, Claudia Tielt, Claudia Nielsen, Alexia Zarne-Merchez, Vera Jarle, Fenella Lorck and Elisabeth Leenhouwer. Almost all the addresses she gave were false.

Staff remembered a good-looking woman of about 1.63 metres with dark brown hair, who kept to her room, sometimes asked to change rooms, and said she was a travelling saleswoman or antiques dealer. She was last seen on 23 November 1970, checking out of room 407 at the Hotel Hordaheimen in Bergen, paying cash and asking for a taxi.

The autopsy found that she had taken between 50 and 70 Fenemal sleeping tablets, and soot in her lungs showed she was still alive while she burned. The cause of death was given as phenobarbital poisoning combined with carbon monoxide. There was a bruise on her neck that could have come from a fall or a blow.

Police concluded she had most likely taken her own life. The case was closed without a name. On 5 February 1971 she was buried in an unmarked grave at Møllendal cemetery under Catholic rites, attended by police officers who photographed the service in case relatives ever came forward.

In 2016 the case was reopened. NRK and the BBC World Service investigated it together for the podcast Death in Ice Valley. In 2017, isotope analysis of her teeth suggested she was born around 1930 near Nuremberg in Germany and moved toward France or the French–German border as a child. Her handwriting also pointed to a French-style education. Everything she had told hotels about herself, it seemed, was cover.