THE UNKNOWN: The Isdal Woman

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Every mystery out there has an explanation.

It's just a matter of finding it, taking the time, putting the pieces together, not giving up.

But what if certain mysteries aren't meant to be solved?

In 1970, a woman was found mysteriously burned to death in the middle of a deserted valley in Norway.

There were no witnesses, no clues about her identity, and no conclusive evidence of murder or suicide.

Nothing seemed to add up.

But instead of doubling down, the cops gave up and the case was shuttered.

In 2016, a group of reporters reopened it, but there are still so many unanswered questions.

And it seems as if this isn't a coincidence.

Someone out there doesn't want this mystery to be solved.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week's episode is about the Isthal Woman.

This is the name given to an unidentified body found on a hillside in Norway in 1970.

50 years later, we still don't know who she is or who was responsible for her death.

But the answer could be even more complicated than anyone suspected.

We'll have more on the Eastall Woman coming up.

Stay with us.

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Today's story isn't supernatural in itself, but the mystery is so baffling it borders on otherworldly.

It takes place in Norway in the late fall of 1970.

It's Sunday morning on November 29th, and a professor and his two young daughters go for a hike.

They're headed for a forest outside of Bergen, which is a city on Norway's southwestern coast.

Eventually, they start climbing up a hillside above an area called Istalen, which is Norwegian for Ice Valley.

It's this gloomy, desolate place surrounded by steep, rocky hills, and it also has a strange history.

In the Middle Ages, people supposedly came to Ice Valley to take their own lives, and more recently, it's been the site of a lot of fatal hiking accidents.

But this morning, the family's just enjoying the fresh air when the oldest girl sees something.

something.

It appears to be a body laying in between some rocks on the hillside, and it's been burned.

From what they can tell, it belongs to a dark-haired woman between the ages of 25 and 40, but she's so badly mutilated that her facial features are impossible to recognize.

Her hands and arms are raised up near her chest in a pose that's often seen on burn victims, and she's wearing regular clothes, nothing appropriate for hiking.

It's so creepy and shocking that the family turns right around and leaves.

I mean, you got to remember, this is 1970, so there are no cell phones, which means that they have to walk all the way back through the woods to report the body, all while wondering if whoever killed this woman might be following them.

But they get back safely and soon a group of police is trekking up the hillside overlooking the valley.

As soon as they start examining the body, they notice something strange.

Only the front of the woman is burned.

The back of her body is completely fine.

There's a definite smell of burned flesh in the air.

So they know that this is the place where she caught fire.

She wasn't carried here after the fact.

And later, they find a drop of gasoline on a fur hat that's laying underneath her body.

But other than that, there's no evidence of an actual fire.

No charred logs or fuel containers.

It looks like she or someone brought a bunch of items along and set them on fire too.

There's a couple of shriveled plastic bottles that seem to have just contained water, a plastic cover for a passport, and a melted rubber boot.

The only things that haven't been burned are the woman's jewelry, a pair of earrings and a ring.

These have been carefully placed beside her in an almost ceremonial way.

And there are some pieces of clothing strewn around, but all the labels have been cut off.

Same thing with the clothes on the woman's body.

And when the police inspect the melted plastic bottles, they notice the names on the bottom have been rubbed out.

The police keep the body on the hill overnight until they've finished all their forensic investigations.

And the following day, November 30th, they bring her charred remains to a hospital in Bergen for an autopsy.

Then they go to the press.

They tell the papers that a body of a young woman with dark hair and medium build has been found, and they ask anyone who might have seen her to come forward.

Meanwhile, the Bergen police team up with the National Crime Investigation Service in Oslo.

called Kripos to begin a full inquiry into who this woman is.

They run her fingerprints through the National Police Register, but there aren't any matches.

So they turn their attention to any unclaimed luggage sitting at railway or bus stations.

And on December 2nd, they get lucky.

Two suitcases have been sitting in a luggage room at the Bergen train station for over a week.

They were checked in on November 23rd, so six days before the body was found.

And at first, the cops don't know if these are hers, but there's a fingerprint on a pair of sunglasses inside that matches exactly with the fingerprint from the woman.

Once again, nothing in her suitcase has a label.

There are a lot of sophisticated clothes without any tags, and the brand name of her makeup and hairbrush have been rubbed away.

The only things labeled are a matchbook from a mail-order erotic underwear company based in Germany, a metal spoon with an engraving that looks like a logo, and a couple of plastic shopping bags.

One from a shoe store in Rome and the other from a shoe store in Stevenger, which is about four hours south of Bergen.

There's also a compass, a railway map, and about 500 German marks, along with coins from Switzerland, Belgium, and England.

They also find several wigs and pairs of non-prescription eyeglasses.

Now, these are clearly items the woman's been using to change her appearance and coupled with all of the currencies and the labelless items, it's starting to look like she could have been some kind of spy.

There's even a notepad in one of the suitcases that's covered with rows of these handwritten letters and numbers that look like some kind of code.

But until it gets cracked, the police can't say for sure that espionage is on the table.

So they follow the only real lead they have, the bag from a shoe store in Stavanger.

Maybe she bought the melted boot there.

The Stavanger police speak to the son of the store owner, a man named Rolf Rortvet.

They tell him about their mystery woman and the rubber boot, and Rolf knows exactly who she is.

He remembers her very well for a few reasons.

One, she took a really long time to decide on the boots and actually came back the next day to buy them.

Second, she was a foreigner.

He knows this because she wasn't fair-skinned and blue-eyed like most people in Norway.

Her skin was golden and she spoke with a strange accent.

This would have stood out at the time because Stevenger didn't see a lot of tourists in 1970.

And there was one last thing.

She smelled bad.

Rolf can't quite describe the smell to police, but years later, he realizes it was garlic, which in 1970 wasn't a common ingredient in Norway.

He gives a pretty thorough description of her to police, even down to the color of the headband she had on and her shoe size.

He also tells police that at one point, the woman spoke in a language he didn't recognize.

It could have been French or possibly German.

So with all this in mind, the police start checking out the hotels in Stavanger.

They figure if the woman was from out of the country, she would have to be staying in a hotel.

And almost immediately, they find the right place.

The receptionist says a woman fitting their description checked in on November 9th and then left November 18th.

And according to the registration card that she filled out, her name was Finella Lorke and she was from Belgium.

So finally, the police have a name and a nationality.

The receptionist remembers a couple of other striking details about her.

She had a lot of gold teeth, which matches with the body they found.

And she wore a fur hat, which could have been the one found by the body.

Apparently, the woman left the hotel by taxi.

And when the cops track down the driver, he says he brought her to the harbor where she boarded a high-speed boat for Bergen.

So the police over in Bergen start checking hotels over there.

But none of the hotels in Bergen have a record of Finela Lork.

Meanwhile, experts are analyzing Finela's handwriting from the hotel in Stevenger and from the notepad in her suitcase.

They're going to match it against all registration cards filled out across Norway.

On December 9th, this is 10 days after the discovery of the body, they find their first match, and it proves that Finela Lork really is an alias.

This woman's handwriting is on at least six different registration cards at hotels all over the country.

In total, she lists about eight different names and passport numbers.

Piecing it all together, it seems she was in Norway for a number of weeks during 1970.

First, for a few weeks in March and April, and then again in October and November.

And she moved around a lot while she was in the country.

Between Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, and another city named Trondheim.

Sometimes she spent one night in a city, sometimes nine to 10 days.

And in almost every case, she lists Belgium as her home country.

But when the police hand these names and passport numbers to the Belgian police, none of them match a true Belgian citizen.

which means she had to have had a fake passport to match each identity.

And everyone knows a fake passport isn't cheap or easy to get.

So either this woman had a lot of money or she was a spy.

Whoever she was, things were only about to get a lot weirder.

Coming up, police learn more about the East Stall woman's mysterious behavior.

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Now back to the story.

When the Bergen police find out that the Isthl woman had eight different identities, they can only think of one thing, espionage.

In Norway in 1970, this isn't such a far-fetched idea.

For one, it's the peak of the Cold War, and Norway occupies a very tricky position on the world stage.

It's an ally of the U.S.

and Great Britain and a founding member of NATO.

But it also shares a 120-mile border with Russia, and just on the other side of that border is one of Russia's largest naval and military bases.

Because of this, Norway houses a lot of spies.

Soviet spies, Western spies, even Israeli spies are all known to have been present in the country during the 70s.

So things start to add up for the police.

If this woman was a spy, it would explain a lot.

The passports and the wigs and the eyeglasses, not to mention the cutout labels in her clothing and rubbed off names.

But if she was a spy, who was she spying for?

For answers, the Bergen police turn their attention to the people who saw her last.

People who worked at the hotels where she stayed, talking about housekeepers, servers, receptionists.

And what they learn confuses them even more.

The reporters from the NRK and BBC who began reinvestigating the case in 2016 tracked down a number of people who saw the Eastall woman in the days leading up to her death.

It turns out that her behavior wasn't very spy-ish.

Like when I think of a spy, I picture someone who's trying not to stand out.

But this woman was calling attention to herself in a bunch of different ways.

Like, for example, in at least two hotels in Bergen, she had this funny habit of moving furniture out of her room and into the hallway.

In one hotel, it was an armchair.

In another, it was a table.

And in the podcast, Death in Ice Valley, one employee told BBC producer Neil McCarthy she'd leave them out in the hallway while she was in her room and then put them back before she went out.

She also frequently requested a room change, sometimes more than once in the same hotel.

And there was the fact that she was traveling alone.

In 1970s Norway, women didn't do this.

But one waitress in Bergen noted how confident and self-possessed the woman seemed every time she came into the restaurant.

And then, of course, there were her identities.

Some of the names were so elegant and so memorable that they would have to attract some attention.

Alexia Zarne Merchet, Jean-Vieve Lancier,

and my personal favorite, Elisabeth Leinhoofer.

These aren't the names of someone who's trying to blend in, And neither is the way she dressed.

Like the shoe store employee had said, she looked like an elegant foreigner.

The clothes in her suitcase were fashionable and trendy.

And at the last hotel she stayed in in Bergen, a staff member told an NRK journalist that she wore spicy perfume and liked to smoke long, thin cigarettes.

To me, none of this sounds very spy-like.

It's more like she wanted to stand out, or at least she'd embraced this idea of a cosmopolitan gal about town.

But other details people give about this woman seem to support her being a spy.

Like the fact that she was sometimes seen with a man, but never the same man.

One waitress at a hotel in Bergen saw her having dinner one night with a gray-haired man who could have been Norwegian.

The two never spoke to each other.

They just sat in silence.

And eventually the woman passed a sheet of paper across the table.

The man read it, but he didn't comment.

At a different hotel in Bergen, a housekeeper opened the door to find the mysterious woman sitting on her bed in front of a blonde-haired man on the couch.

Neither of them spoke the entire time the housekeeper was in the room.

Another person who worked at a home furnishing shop in Bergen spotted the woman shopping for a wall mirror with a dark-haired man.

The shopkeeper knew just by looking at them that they were both foreigners and she could hear them speaking to each other in a language she didn't recognize.

She said the woman appeared to have curly hair, which may have meant she was wearing her wig.

It's unclear today how hard the police tried to track down these men because as far as we know, none of them were ever interviewed or came forward.

And years later, journalists would learn that some of these testimonies weren't even recorded in police reports.

The waitress's story about the East Hall woman having dinner with a man was completely left out, as was the shopkeeper's testimony, which to me just doesn't make sense.

How could they not keep track of that?

Like, why not follow up with who these men might have been?

Now, of course, none of these stories mean that she was a spy.

These men could have been lovers or maybe they were clients.

Some suggest that the woman could have been a sex worker.

It could explain why she stayed at so many hotels and dressed so noticeably and why she was always seen with different men.

And then there's the news about what's actually in the notepad.

It turns out it isn't a secret code at all.

It's her own version of shorthand.

She used it to mark down the cities she's been to in Norway and the dates she stayed there.

For example, O30BN5 means Bergen from October 30th to November 5th, and N9N18S means she stayed in Stevener from November 9th to the 18th.

It's all pretty simple, but there's one line at the bottom of the page that no one can figure out.

It says ML 23NMM.

Now, the 23N probably means November 23rd, the day she left her last Bergen hotel and checked her suitcases into the railway station.

It's the last day we know that she was alive.

But the other letters, that ML and the MM, they don't seem to add up.

Then the autopsy results come back and they throw a wrench into everything this case has been pointing towards so far.

It turns out that this woman wasn't just a victim of a mysterious fire.

She'd taken at least 50 sleeping pills.

Not only that, they were phenomen pills, which contained phenobarbital, one of the most common types of drug women used to overdose with at this time.

But the pills themselves weren't the cause of death.

There were still some in her stomach at the time of death, and the concentration in her blood wasn't enough to kill her.

In which case, maybe she set herself on fire to eliminate her identity.

But then why take the pills to begin with?

And then there's the logistics of it.

How was she awake enough to set herself on fire after ingesting so many pills?

And who cleaned up all the evidence afterwards?

In the meantime, police have given her names and passport numbers to Interpol and police agencies all over the world, but nothing comes back.

Their last hope is the gold work in her teeth.

They take out her jaw and have some experts take a look, but all they can say is it looks like the kind of dental work done in Southern Europe or possibly Asia or South America, which really doesn't narrow it down.

At this point, it's late December, about three weeks since the body was found.

All over Europe, people are clamoring for an answer to this fascinating case.

So on December 22nd, the police hold a press conference and what they have to say is a total shock.

The criminal commissioner says they've completely ruled out that this woman was a spy.

But he doesn't explain how they know that.

And when the press asks about murder, he's much less definitive.

He doesn't say it's not murder, but he doesn't say that it is.

He just implies that it's something else.

Then, a couple days later, the Bergen police chief issues a statement definitively ruling her death a suicide.

And with that, the case is closed.

A few weeks later, on January 7th, 1971, the final autopsy report is made public.

It lists the cause of death as suicide through a combination of pills and carbon monoxide poisoning.

But there's just something really fishy about how quickly they reached this decision.

Even people at the time thought so because, again, she hadn't digested enough pills for them to actually kill her.

And regardless, who's to say it's a suicide?

It could just as easily have been murder or an attempted suicide that ended in murder.

It's as if the police are trying to shelve the case as quickly as possible, but no one can figure out why.

The woman is finally buried in early February of 1971, more than two months after she was found.

They bury her in a white, zinc-lined coffin so that her body will be preserved for as long as possible in case a family member ever tries to identify her.

They also save tissue samples from some of her organs and of course her jaw and teeth.

But no one comes forward.

No relative, no friend, no partner.

For years, it's assumed the case will never be solved, that it can't be solved.

But then, 45 years later, in 2016, investigative reporters in Norway decide to take another look.

And what they find only deepens the mystery.

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Now, back to the story.

In 2016, a group of reporters start start digging into the Eastall Woman case.

They're from the Norwegian public broadcasting company NRK, and their goal is to sift through all of the evidence for any unfollowed leads.

A journalist named Marit Hegroff spearheads the investigation.

Marit specifically wants to find the Eastallwoman's tissue samples and jaw, and eventually, she locates them deep in the basement of Hokelon Hospital in Bergen.

She arranges for them to undergo DNA and other types of testing.

A few months go by and in the spring of 2017, the BBC publishes an article about the Eastall Woman mystery and it sort of goes viral.

It's been so long that most people have never even heard of this case before and they agree there has to be a better answer.

Pretty soon, the NRK and the BBC World Service join forces to investigate the case.

They decide to capture all of it in their podcast, Death in Ice Valley, in the spring of 2018.

And thanks to their efforts, new information is uncovered, which casts the whole case in a really suspicious light.

It starts to look like there really was a cover-up.

The Norwegian secret police denied getting involved in the case for years, up until like 2002.

When they finally copped to having a file, nobody was that surprised.

But they don't allow anyone to see the file until 2016 when the cases reopened.

They hand it over to the NRK reporters and inside is a bombshell.

At the height of the investigation in December of 1970, a local fisherman named Bertan Rott came forward to say that he'd seen the Istahl woman.

He remembered her standing on a pier watching the Norwegian Navy perform a missile test.

Not just any missile, the Penguin, a guided anti-ship missile that had just been invented in Norway.

Roth brought this story to local authorities, and he was later accosted by the Norwegian secret police.

They took him in for questioning on the exact same day that the Bergen police issued their statement ruling out the whole spy theory.

Roth's son even says that the police gave his father a gun for protection.

Now, unfortunately, or conveniently, the transcript from the interrogation is missing.

But we know that the Eastall woman's movements matched the dates and places in Norway where the Penguin missile was being tested.

Another fact that the secret police had figured out by the day of the press conference.

To me, it's all the more evidence that the Eastall woman really could have been a spy.

At the very least, there was a deliberate effort to cover up Roth's testimony.

This tracks with how some police felt at the time.

There was a general feeling that the official verdict had been a hasty one at best.

According to the granddaughter of a cop who worked on this case, he never felt satisfied with the verdict.

It seemed as if they were being prevented from actually solving the case.

A few months go by after the discovery of the Roth testimony.

And finally, Marit Higroff gets the test results back from the E-Stall woman's tissue and teeth.

It seems the E-Stahl woman was, in fact, German.

From a combination of DNA, isotope analysis and carbon-14 dating, scientists can say that she was probably born in Nuremberg.

Then, when she was an older child, she moved somewhere closer to the French-German border.

This is supported by a new expert analysis of her handwriting.

She seems to have been taught how to write in a French school.

The last breakthrough is the woman's age.

Even though she put down her birth year on hotel cards as somewhere between 1942 and 1945, she was actually probably much older.

Scientific testing on her teeth puts her birth year at 1930, making her 40 years old at the time of her death.

This is interesting because this is around the time the Nazi movement swept into Nuremberg.

The city was the site of annual Nazi rallies from 1933 up until World War II.

So the fact that the Eastall woman moved closer to the French-German border could mean that she was Jewish.

It could also explain why she became a spy and who she may have been a spy for.

Gunnar Stolsson is a crime reporter in Norway and an expert on the Eastall woman.

He believes she worked for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mussad, and that she was in Norway tracking down former Nazis or Arab terrorists.

It's not a far-out theory.

Mossad recruited more female spies than other agencies, and they were known for falsifying passports.

Also, their agents were definitely operating in Norway during the early 70s.

But when you think about the missile tests, it's just as likely she worked for Russia's KGB or any other country for that matter.

There's one last discovery.

Apparently, a former sea captain says he spotted the Eastahl woman and two other men walking up into the hills outside Bergen in the early winter of 1970.

The captain was walking down the mountain and he spotted the woman heading up.

Behind her were two men who seemed to be following her.

He says that she looked scared and he got the impression that she wanted to stop and talk to him.

At least once, she looked nervously over her shoulder.

The captain reported this to a friend on the police force at the time, but he was told that the case was beyond the local police and that it would never be solved.

If the testimony is true, it's further evidence of a possible murder by the Eastall woman's spy cohorts.

There's just one problem.

The captain swears he saw her on a late Sunday afternoon, but the Eastall woman was found on a Sunday morning and she'd been seen alive the previous Monday, the 23rd of November.

So if this was her, the sighting had to have happened at least a week before she was killed.

And besides, the entire theory that she was a spy does really nothing to explain the sleeping pills.

It's possible someone forced them down her throat, but there's no evidence of that.

And even if there was a killer or two who could clean up the fire evidence, why why leave her body surrounded by so many personal items?

The only other option might be that the Eastall woman was a spy, but maybe she wanted out.

So she took some personal belongings to Ice Valley where she planned on taking her own life, but maybe someone followed her.

They waited out of sight as she swallowed a bottle of pills, and when she fell asleep, they sprinkled her with gasoline, lit a match, and waited until the flames went out to clean up the ground.

I mean, that's just a theory, and I'm not even saying it's a great one, because in the end, this story is just too weird and unnatural to explain with any kind of logic.

For all we know, the answer is completely paranormal.

My only hope is that there will someday be an answer, and we can finally refer to the E-Stall woman, whoever she is, by her real name.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck originals.

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Hey, so supernatural listeners.

If you enjoy the mysterious and eerie stories we discuss here, then we've got another show you need to check out, Park Predators.

Hosted by our friend Delia Diambra, Park Predators dives into the dark and twisted crimes that have taken place in some of the most beautiful places on Earth.

These haunting cases range from stories of disappearances and murders to unsolved mysteries.

Delia's storytelling will transport you right into the heart of these breathtaking landscapes.

And her dedication to finding the facts ensures that you get all the details of each case.

So if you're looking for some more chilling cases, Park Predators is for you.

Listen to Park Predators available wherever you listen to podcasts.