78: The Isdal Woman Mystery: Norway's Most Puzzling Cold Case
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On November 29th, 1970, a man and his two daughters climbed a muddy path up a hill near a small stream in the Isdalen Valley in Norway. The trio had trekked there from Bergen, a city along the southwest coast of the country. Just a two-hour walk from the city would land you in Isdalen Valley, which translates to Ice Valley, though this time of year it was mostly a wet valley.

From up where they had climbed, they could see the hiking trails below circle a lake where pine trees covered hills that rolled right up to the shore. Rocky streams carried clear water from the snow-capped mountains to replenish the lake's water supply. They kept climbing, telling stories and laughing with each other in the crisp late autumn air, when all of a sudden, up ahead, they could see something just off the trail, almost hidden from view by rocks.

A strange figure, human in shape, almost like a mannequin, was frozen in a strange position. As the trio got closer, the horror of the scene was exposed. Tufts of long brown hair showed that the figure was a woman who was laying on her back and had been badly burned all over her front.

They were unable to tell what she looked like by looking at her face. The fire had damaged it too badly. Though looking around, they couldn't find any evidence of a campfire taking place near her body. Scattered around her were only a few strange items, including water bottles full of clear liquid, a broken umbrella, a ring, and some rubber boots. They were arranged in an almost methodical way. Some would even later describe it as ritualistic.

It was unclear exactly what had happened, other than a fire occurred and the woman must have died. But the family wasn't going to stick around to try and solve this mystery. Once the initial shock of the moment wore off, they shielded their eyes from the terrible sight and ran as fast as they could two hours back to Bergen, where they phoned the local police.

What this family wasn't aware of was they were about to start one of the strangest investigations to ever happen in Norway. One that still plagues its people and police today. An investigation into the woman who would become synonymous with the valley. The mystery of the Isdal Woman.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host on this macabre journey, Kaylin Moore. We gather here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters for a new episode every Wednesday around 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. That's 4 a.m. Central European Summer Time for those listening in Bergen, Norway.

But no matter where or when you listen in the car, at the gym, in the cab of a long haul truck like new listener Tay Sky, who says they've been binging almost 11 hours a day for two straight weeks. I like to imagine that we're all together inside our creaking Victorian home, hanging out in the drawing room after dinner, telling stories.

And this week, I want to tell you the story of one of Norway's most intriguing unsolved mysteries. It's the story of a woman who was found, just as I told you, burned in a remote valley near a hiking trail in Bergen. But who she was and how she got there is one of the greatest mysteries I've ever heard. When I read about cases like this, I try to put myself in people's shoes and get inside their minds. And for this one, I want you to do the same.

try to understand the woman at the center of it. Because for the last 50 years, no one has been able to. So make yourself comfortable because we're going to dive in right after a break. And for this one, I'm using pronunciations based on reporting by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And as always, listener discretion is advised. This episode is brought to you by Quince.

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I don't know exactly what police were expecting when they hurried up the trail near the stream into the remote valley of Isdalyn. Bergen was safe. It was a relaxed seaside city. It was rare for them to get a call about a strange death. But as they climbed the muddy trails and arrived at the scene, officers realized this was nothing like what they had seen before.

The woman lay on the ground in the supine position. Her front burned badly, so badly that her face was unrecognizable and her hands had clenched themselves into fists. Strangely enough, her back was not burned at all. The fire was only strong enough to burn her front. It was unclear from looking at the scene, however, where the fire had even come from.

There was nothing at the scene suggesting she had lit one. No wood, no accelerant can, no char on the ground. Next to her, beside the bottles full of clear liquid that one good whiff proved to be water, not gasoline, a broken umbrella, a ring, and some rubber boots that the family had seen, was an empty ring used to hold passports and some burned paper beside it.

which the police deduced had been a passport. The other objects had survived the fire, but her passport had not. One of the officers got a chill. What was the intention of this fire?

The police looked for other clues that would give hints to her identity and found that it only got more confusing from there. All of the tags on her clothing had been cut off and all labels on everything around her had been removed. There was nothing at the scene that even hinted at where she had been,

Underneath her was a fur hat, which was not in style in Norway. It was most commonly seen in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which in 1970 were part of the USSR. But again, the hat had no label. One of the officers crouched by the scene and looked at the body. He wouldn't be able to identify her even by a photo. Her face was too destroyed.

"Who are you?" he asked himself as he scanned up and down the Isdal Woman for clues. And that's when he saw something that gave him a little bit of hope. Her right arm lay across her chest and her left arm reached out in front of her, bent at the elbow and outstretched, almost like a warning to not come any closer.

But there, at the end of the burned arm, he could see that her fingerprints had not been destroyed by the fire. It wasn't much, but it was the only thing at the scene that could lead to another clue. Officers worked quickly to get the unknown woman transported to a lab for testing, and a toxicology report and fingerprinting were going to need to be done, as well as any other tests that would help them understand what occurred.

They didn't even know if this was self-inflicted or if it was a murder. They wanted to get this sorted quickly so that they wouldn't scare the locals. But unfortunately for them, the press caught wind of what was happening. Someone in the police force must have tipped them off. Soon, everyone in Norway was glued to their mailboxes, waiting for the next paper that may answer the question on everyone's mind. Who was this woman?

And what happened to her? Remember, the 1970s lacked a lot of the tools we have today. DNA sequencing wasn't yet available, so the first place the police had to look was records of missing women that matched her description. Adult female with brown hair, and that was really all they had to go on. Nothing turned up in their search though. But then, officers get a surprising clue.

At the local train station, there were two pieces of luggage left unattended for over a week. A station attendant called the police when he heard about the investigation. And there, deep within the luggage, was a pair of sunglasses. An officer going through the bag held them up to the light and saw the one thing he was hoping to find. In the corner of the lens was part of a fingerprint.

one that would quickly be confirmed to match the Eastall woman. Think about your luggage. If someone were to open your travel bag, how quickly could they figure out who you are?

Think of the IDs you carry, the tags on the bag that say your name and where you're going, even the stickers you decorate your luggage with, or the clothes, books, and receipts you may have on you. Though it may seem to be an unremarkable bag of stuff, your luggage paints a picture of who you are, which is why it was so shocking to police that the bags that appeared to be the Isdal Woman's only added to the mystery.

Upon opening the bags, they ran into the same issue they had with her body. All of the labels of the clothes and objects had been removed. And even though the clothes were without labels, officers could tell that they were nice, high-end clothes. She must have had some money. The bags also contained wigs and glasses that had lenses without prescriptions, as if they were just used to conceal her identity.

There was also makeup that had the labels rubbed off. One of the only objects in the suitcases that had any label on it was a matchbox that had clearly come from a lingerie store in Germany.

A strange thing to have not taken the label off of, but important to note. There were also different currencies. She seemed like a woman who traveled around a lot and would change her appearance. But also, inside the bags was something that completely confused the officers. There was a notebook, full of what was only described as code.

I'll include pictures of this on Instagram, but on one page, she had written out a section that starts 10M and below it, it reads 11M, 16ML, and then below that is 17M, 19MG.

While the officers on the scene couldn't make sense of it right away, they knew at least they had her handwriting and that would be useful to them. They sent off the notebook to a code specialist in the military to see if he could make anything of it. In the meantime though, the cops poured through more of the contents of the bags to see if there was anything that could help them in this moment.

The bags had been checked in at the train station on November 23rd, and the woman was found on November 29th. What happened in those six days? Was there anything that could show them where to look next? And that's when one of the officers pulls out a shoe bag that still had a label on it. It read the name of a shoe store in Stavanger, four hours away from Bergen. Maybe the shopkeeper remembered seeing the woman.

The police quickly ventured down to the store and upon entering it, they noticed that the same rubber boots that were seen at the site where the Isdal woman was found were on a shelf.

The shopkeeper was a little caught off guard by the sight of the officers. It wasn't every day that police arrived at his store. But when they told him they were looking for information on a woman with brown hair who bought rubber boots at this store, he immediately remembered her.

I want you, my dear listener, to think about what you were doing seven days ago. Did you encounter any strangers for around 30 minutes? I want you to describe every detail you can about them. It's nearly an impossible task. Our brains are really good at throwing out information they feel like they don't need. And yet the shopkeeper was able to describe the Isdal Woman with shocking detail. How could that be?

Well, Norway is a Scandinavian country and immigration wasn't really a thing there before the 1960s. So that means that most people in Norway at the time of this investigation had similar characteristics. They were lean and tall with light brown to blonde hair, fair skin and lighter eyes.

Even when their appearances differed from what I just described, they mostly had the same accents. They ate similar things and they even smelled similar because they used the same soaps and perfumes that were available locally.

So immediately when the Isdal woman walked into the shoe shop weeks prior, the shopkeeper could tell that she wasn't from the area and he wasn't used to seeing anyone but locals. So he observed her as she walked around the store and took in everything about her he could. He described her as being on the shorter side, around one meter 70 or five five with dark brown hair and brown eyes.

Her skin was a more golden shade than the people in the area, and she spoke English with a strange accent he didn't recognize. He guessed maybe she was French, but he couldn't be sure. She had a gapped tooth and smelled of something unfamiliar but pungent. Maybe garlic? Though I will note here that Norwegians at the time hardly cooked with garlic at all, so maybe she smelled bad, but also maybe she smelled like what he thought garlic smelled like.

The shopkeeper also noticed a few important details about her behavior. She spent a lot of time in his shop thinking about if she wanted to buy the shoes or not. She didn't seem to be stressed or in any rush. He also noted that she left without the shoes, but came back the next day to buy them.

If the shopkeeper had seen the Isdal woman, then maybe other people in the area remembered seeing her as well. Police questioned local businesses and almost immediately got another clue. A local hotel confirmed that she had stayed with them for a few nights.

Similarly to the shopkeeper, the woman at the front desk of the hotel specifically remembered the woman coming in because of her distinct look. And she confirmed that the woman had a pungent smell, an accent she didn't recognize, and a gap tooth. The hotelier went over to the guest book sign-in and flipped a few pages back. She pointed to an entry in the log. "That's her," she said. Her finger stretched down to a flowery signature.

The officers could see a loopy F and L starting the first and last name, different from the writing in the book that looked like code. Are you sure this was her? They asked. But the woman at the front desk was adamant. I watched her write this name down. Fenella Lorke. Fenella Lorke.

When the officers looked down at the name and saw a passport number next to it, her home country listed as Belgium, maybe they felt a sense of relief. We got her. We have her name and identification. The hard part is over. I can't imagine they knew what was coming. The next step was to check her passport number and name, which immediately came back as fake.

A cursory search also showed that no trace of Fenella Lork could be found in Norway. Her name wasn't recorded in any other hotels. So the police went back and instead of using the name, they checked the handwriting and description of the woman in every hotel in Norway. And their search turned up seven different hits, all with different names and different passport numbers that were all confirmed to be fake.

Some of the names she used sounded French, others German, some were more native to Norway. She also had written down different years of her birth, making her anywhere from 25 to 30 years old. Typically, she said she was from Belgium, but when she filled out her forms in German, the language she claimed she spoke in Belgium, she misspelled words and often used incorrect ones, which made the police think she definitely did not speak fluent German.

This led them to a hotel that she stayed at while in Bergen, Hotel Hordaheimen. Their log said that she was there from the 19th to the 23rd, the date her luggage was checked in at the train station.

Aside from noticing her because of her appearance, there were other things about her that made her stand out. She was very serious and didn't speak much, but she had some strange quirks. Like whenever she would leave her room, she would take the chair inside out and put it in the hallway. And then when she returned, she would bring the chair back in with her.

At this point, the police were pretty stumped. So let's recap what we know about her movements so far. The woman bought rubber boots four hours away, made it to Bergen on the 19th, checked in with a fake name and passport like she had all six other hotels she had stayed in in Norway, and behaved a bit strangely. She checked out on the 23rd,

brought her luggage to the train station as if she was leaving, and then was found half-burned a two-hour walk away six days later.

Who was this woman? The fake identities, the code, the multiple disguises and currencies. This was not just a woman on vacation. This was something much, much different. Was she in Norway for some secret reason no one could know about? Spying? Maybe sex work?

If so, why did she die in the manner she did? It doesn't really add up. But I regret to tell you, this is Heart Starts Pounding and it's about to get even stranger. Because after this, the toxicology report comes back and more is revealed about the cause of her death after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Hero Bread.

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But a new question was starting to form in their mind. What was she doing in Norway to begin with? The passports, the different currencies and names, her label-less clothing and belongings. Was she undercover? Would that explain how a young single woman could afford a nice lifestyle of fancy clothes and constant hotel stays? And as they're pondering these questions, a call comes in from the coroner's office.

Their autopsy and toxicology reports had come in. It was revealed that when they opened the Isdal woman's mouth, they found little pink pills inside. They were identified as a popular sleeping pill in the area, except the ones sold in Norway were white. The pink brand found in her mouth was sold in England.

It appeared she had taken these pills in two or three batches because her stomach was filled with them. The coroner estimated that she had taken between 50 and 70 of these sleeping pills, starting a few hours before her death, which may have been when she started to climb into the Isdal Valley.

But what the coroner found peculiar was her blood only contained a small trace of the sleeping pills, just enough to make her drowsy, but not enough to cause her to lose consciousness and definitely not enough to kill her. On top of that, he found traces of soot in her lungs. She had been alive when the fire started, a truly sad and bizarre end to come to.

Surely the pills would have been enough, but why the fire as well? Her cause of death was ruled to be a mix of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fire and poisoning from the pills. A forensics report from the scene came in as well, and it didn't do much to make sense of her death. The report mentioned that two drops of petrol were found on the hat that was underneath the woman.

So to be clear, the only signs of fire were that her whole front was burned and two drops of petrol that were on her hat. I have some thoughts on this that I'll get into later because that is very, very menacing. This next part may frustrate you as it did me, but the suggestions the police came up with as to what happened were less than inspiring.

One cop suggested, and I'm not kidding, that she had probably used a can of hairspray to put out a campfire she built and torched herself accidentally. Sir, aside from that being a horrible knock against her intelligence, there was no sign of a can of hairspray or a campfire at the scene. So I can't even begin to unpack where he got that idea from. The cops mostly agreed on one thing though,

To them, the pills proved that this was self-inflicted. And on December 22nd, 1970, just three weeks after her body was discovered, her case was closed as suicide.

The public, understandably, had lots of questions. How did she set herself on fire when there was no trace of a fire? And wouldn't 70 sleeping pills have been enough? Why would she also have to set a fire? Why set her passport on fire? Why take her luggage to the train station like she was planning on leaving? Why not just die in a hotel bed? How did she make a two-hour walk with all of those pills in her system?

To them, it seemed physically impossible that she did all of those things. But this was the end of the line for police. They weren't going to be putting any more resources into this case. Rest easy, everyone. Nothing that happened here is a threat to you or your family. Nothing to see here. Or at least that's what they told the public. They assured the public that there was nothing strange happening with the woman.

She was not a spy, as some had suggested. She was just a mentally ill tourist. But that's just what they told everyone publicly. Secretly, they thought different. See, as they told everyone that the case was being closed, the Norwegian secret police were opening a case on her. They had discovered some information on the Isdal woman that was cause for concern.

Remember, it was 1970. The Cold War was this ever-looming threat in the background of everything. And while Norway might not be the first country you think of when you think of the Cold War, they were cooking something up.

The largest naval base in Norway was located in Tenanger, outside of Stavanger where she bought the boots. There, a missile system known as the Penguin Missile was being tested.

Secret police confirmed that spies would have been present in the area and were actively monitoring the missile tests. Okay, she was in an area near a naval base, so what? I'm sure some of you listening are also near or on a naval base, but it doesn't mean that you're an international spy. Or does it? If you guys are spies, you have to tell me.

But there was one sighting of the Isdal Woman, however, that makes this whole case even more bizarre. After her body was found, police sketches of the Isdal Woman were distributed throughout Norway. Anyone who had seen this woman was encouraged to come forward. When a fisherman named Berthin Raut saw the flyer, an alarm went off in his head. He had seen this woman in Tananger.

The fishermen remembered seeing the woman down at the docks one day by where the missiles were being tested. She was talking to an officer briefly. The fishermen phoned the police and told them what he had seen. He didn't know if it would be of any importance, but he felt like it was right for them to know. Well, it seems like the police thought it was very important.

Because the next day, the fisherman was boarding a train to London with his family when he was approached by two police officers who handed him a handgun and a knife. They told him that he would need them for his own protection. From what exactly, we'll probably never know. If they mentioned that to him, it got lost over time.

The fisherman never spoke of his conversation with the police, and all we know of it was from what his son remembered as he watched his father be handed the weapons at the train station.

Okay, so that changes some things. Sure, she had disguises and different names like spies do in movies, but I wasn't convinced that was enough to accuse her of espionage. But now people were coming forward to say they saw her at a missile testing facility talking to an officer. It's no wonder the secret police were taking note of that. But what about the code she was found with? Maybe if it was cracked, they would know for sure if she was spying.

Well, it was cracked and it seemed to have less spy implications. The code was ruled to be shorthand for her travel schedule. The letters all correlated with months and cities and the numbers were dates she would be in each. It wasn't sensitive information per se.

And it's sad, but after this, there was not really any movement in her case. No one who knew who she was came forward. And over time, the evidence collected at the scene started to go missing. And eventually it was just assumed by many that there was no evidence left. Time marched on and the Isdal Woman started to become a myth, regional folklore, if you will. But as her case was sitting on a shelf,

technology started getting better. DNA testing became a reality, and what scientists could learn from a single bone fragment was almost a miracle. The Cold War also ends, and so people are less afraid to speak out about what was happening. The internet finally finds its way into everyone's homes, and the story of the Isdal Woman picks up again. And then, in 2017, someone decides to look back into her file.

There's not a whole lot there. Like I said, most of the evidence is gone at this point. But they find something important that officers previously thought was missing. A piece of her bone. And not just any piece, but her jaw. With teeth still in it.

The gold dental work is still visible on her teeth, popular in regions outside of Norway, like the UK and Russia. A lab is able to use the piece of bone to do some testing, and they learn some previously unknown things about the Isdal Woman.

First, she is most likely from Nuremberg, Germany, but had moved to France as a child. And also, she was likely between 10 and 20 years older than she claimed to be. Her age came back to be around 45 when she died, not 25 to 30 like she wrote on her hotel check-in forms.

But why lie about your age? Some have suggested that spies don't need to lie about their ages, but perhaps some catering to a male audience might. It's not the first time that the Isdal Woman has been thought to have been a sex worker, maybe a high-end escort. She wore nice clothes, stayed in nice hotels. She clearly had money.

And that theory seemed to only get stronger over the years, because since the case was closed in 1970, a few more people have come forward with Isdal Woman sightings. These are witnesses who never made it into the official police file, and some of them were interviewed by the police at the time. They just must have decided that the witness statements didn't matter enough to the investigation.

But you would think they were important though, because these sightings typically involved another man.

A woman working at the Neptune Hotel in Norway remembered seeing the Isdal woman there with an older gentleman with white hair. She said the two of them hardly spoke and didn't look very enthused. Another witness came forward and said she saw the Isdal woman in a store with a man arguing about a standing mirror that they wanted to buy. The person guessed that they were arguing in an Eastern European language but couldn't tell which one.

She described the woman as having curly dark hair, which lines up with one of the wigs that was found in the woman's suitcase. For a woman that only stayed in hotels, it was strange that she was looking at buying a standing mirror.

One hotel maid claimed that the night of November 18th, which would have been the night before she left for Bergen, she was in her room with another man. The two were sitting and talking in the room and allowed the maid to come in while they were there. It was never confirmed if she was seen with the same man each time or if it was three separate men. It was also never confirmed if this man was the officer she was seen with outside of Stavanger.

But the most damning sighting of all was one that was never brought to the police's attention. It wasn't brought to light until 2005, actually, when 35 years after her death, a man felt like he should come forward with what he saw.

He claimed that he had been hiking in East Dillon Valley on a Sunday in November 1970 when he saw someone he believed to be the East Dillon woman walking up a trail, followed by two men. They were all wearing what he described as city clothes, definitely not hiking attire. He passed by the woman and thought she looked scared. After that, he didn't see what happened.

Now, it's most likely that he got the date he saw her incorrect. He probably didn't see her on the Sunday she was found by the man and his daughters, and she had checked her luggage on the previous Monday. Perhaps he saw her that Monday after she dropped off the bags or the following Saturday. Regardless though, it's a huge deal that he saw her being trailed by two men. It seemed that someone did want her dead. We just don't know why.

But that hasn't stopped people from theorizing over the years. Some of those theories after the break. This episode is brought to you by Liquid IV. Have you drank any water today? You, listening right now. Do you even have a water bottle within 100 feet of you? I swear, you guys.

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So the most prevalent theory of who the Eastdale woman was is that she was a spy. There's reasons to believe this, and then there's reasons why this theory doesn't work.

Okay, yes, she was hanging around a secret missile project. She had disguises that she wore, fake names and fake passport numbers. Some people have suggested that she couldn't have been a spy because she didn't have anything on her that proved she was a spy. No codes or secrets, no files on what she was doing, to which I would personally say, do you think good spies just carry around stuff that would reveal them? Maybe in movies, but in real life, they do not.

But also, spies tend to have one or two identities, not seven or eight. These identities will come with bulletproof lore that was specifically created for them. They'll also strategically be placed to not draw attention to themselves. The Isdal Woman used way too many identities and stuck out like a sore thumb. If she was a spy, she wasn't a very good one.

There is one person online who tracked the movements of Francois Ganoude, a Swiss banker who was funding terrorism in the Middle East. The travelogue found in the Isdal Woman's bag revealed that they were in Paris at the same time. Perhaps, they suggested, the two were meeting so the woman could get spy orders from him. The theory doesn't hold a ton of weight, but it's an interesting thought.

Of course, others believe she was a sex worker. She had money from some unknown source. She was exclusively seen with men. Perhaps she was a high-end escort who traveled and used fake names to not get caught. Maybe she was at the missile testing to meet an officer who wanted her services, and that was all. As for her tragic end, well, sex workers being killed by their clients is unfortunately a tale as old as time.

And the fact that none of the men who spoke to her came forward only fuels people's belief in this theory.

There are some people who believe her death was truly a suicide. There were so many pills in her system, it's hard to believe someone forced her to take them. Maybe she started a fire to stay warm while she was out in the wilderness on her last night, and it got out of hand, though evidence does suggest otherwise. Then there's her travelogue. The last entry was ML23MM.

No matter what you suggest, people get upset by the accusations. Some people think it's rude to her memory to accuse her of sex work. Well, they might get a little bit upset by what I'm going to say next.

But I don't think you have to decide she was either a spy or a sex worker. There's something in the middle of those two things that could be a possibility, sometimes referred to as a honeypot. Securities organizations may approach a known escort and ask them to use their services to get information from other nations.

They are sometimes viewed more as sex workers than as spies, at least by the people who hire them. So they aren't given the same training to be a spy and they're seen as more disposable. Perhaps she was using fake identities and disguises because she thought that's what would work. That also kind of answers who was funding her operation.

But I am just a girl sitting in front of my research trying to make sense of it all. What do you guys think happened? I'm going to get more into the theories and my speculation in our footnotes episode this week. I'll be joined by producer Matt, who has an ungodly amount of knowledge about spies and can help us fill in some of the blanks. And also we will be joined by Leo. In all of this, here's what I do know.

Everything I've read about this woman, every clip I've watched that digs into the mystery, is all asking the same question. Who was she? Not who killed her. Who was she?

And when we talk about true crime, that's hardly ever the question that gets asked. It tends to be the death that's the main subject, not the person whose life was lost. And yet, for over 50 years, we've been obsessed with finding out who this woman was. I mentioned that if she was a spy, she wasn't a very good one. Well, when she was alive, she didn't want anyone to know who she was.

And 54 years later, we still don't. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Junigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. Woo-hoo!

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