The Curious Case of the Isdal Woman

Author: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader / Source: Today I Found Out

Sometimes the most intriguing whodunits aren’t found in mystery novels, they’re found in real life. Take this curious case, which has puzzled investigators for more than 40 years.

COLD CASE

One chilly afternoon in November 1970, a father and his two daughters were hiking up a remote, rocky hillside overlooking the Isdalen valley near Bergen, a port city on the southwest coast of Norway.

The man’s 12-year-old daughter came upon it first: the badly burned body of a woman lying between two large rocks. As soon as the father realized what they were looking at, he turned his daughters around and they headed back down the hill to report their grisly discovery to the police.

When the police arrived, they discovered that many of the woman’s possessions had been burned as well: an umbrella, some plastic bottles, what appeared to be the plastic cover for a passport (though it was too badly damaged to know for sure), and other items. Also found on the scene was an empty liquor bottle. That caused police to wonder if alcohol had played a role in the woman’s death. Had she gotten drunk, perhaps tripped on some rocks, and fallen into the fire by accident?

THE PLOT THICKENS

After the police removed the body and the other evidence from the scene and examined it more thoroughly in the crime lab, the mystery of who the “Isdal woman” was and how she’d died deepened. Not only did the woman have no identification on her, but the labels on the articles of clothing not destroyed in the fire were all cut out. The same was true of the other articles recovered from the scene: any identifying marks that might have shed light on who the woman was or where she was from—even the labels on the bottoms of the plastic bottles—had been removed.

Three days later, another major clue surfaced when two large suitcases in the “left luggage” office of the Bergen railway station were traced back to the woman. Police established the link when a fingerprint lifted from a pair of sunglasses in one of the suitcases matched a fingerprint taken from the body. But if the investigators hoped that the contents of the suitcase would solve the mystery of who the woman was, they were soon disappointed. There were passports in eight different names in one of the suitcases, and just as with the articles recovered from the crime scene, all labels had been removed from the clothing. Even the brand names and other identifying marks on the woman’s comb and hairbrush had been rubbed away.

There were several wigs in the suitcases—not that unusual for a woman in the early 1970s—but along with the wigs, investigators found several pairs of eyeglasses with ordinary, nonprescription lenses. That led police to suspect that the woman was using the wigs and glasses to disguise her appearance.

Another mysterious item found in the suitcase: a writing pad with three columns of what appeared to be an alphanumeric code on the top sheet of paper. Nothing else was written on the pad.

BAG LADY

The best clue—and a peculiar one, considering how much effort the woman put into removing identifying marks from all of her possessions—was a shopping bag with the name “Oscar Rørtvedt’s Footwear Store” printed on the outside. That was a store in the city of Stavanger, about 100 miles to the south.

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An investigator was dispatched to the shop and there a clerk remembered selling a pair of blue rubber boots to a woman three weeks earlier. The woman was between the ages of 30 and 40, with long dark hair, brown eyes, a round face, and “slightly plump, almost chubby curves, with pretty legs.” She spoke poor English and smelled of garlic, which was unusual in Norway at the time.

A pair of the same brand of blue rubber boots had been found next to the dead woman, so the investigators were satisfied that this was the same woman they were looking for. Next, the investigators began visiting hotels in the area to see if anyone matching the description had stayed there around the time the woman bought her boots. At the Hotel St. Svithun, within walking distance from the shoe store, a clerk remembered a woman who registered under the name Finella Lorck, from Belgium, and had stayed in the hotel for several days. One of the hotel maids remembered seeing her wearing the blue rubber boots.

CHARACTER STUDY

A search of hotel registers in Bergen for a Finella Lorck found no one by that name staying in any of the city’s hotels in the days leading up to the discovery of the woman’s body. So investigators turned to the “Alien Registration Form” that all foreign visitors had to fill out when checking in. Hotels all across the country were asked to scour their records for all Alien Registration Forms filled out by women in their 30s or 40s over the previous 12 months and send them in to the police.

As the forms began arriving in the mail, the investigators compared the handwriting with samples collected from the coded notes on the pad found in the suitcase, and from the Alien Registration Form that “Finella Lorck” had…

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