Isdal Woman
The investigation
Police launched large investigation hoping to learn identity of Isdal Woman and how she ended up on the Ice Valley. The sketch was prepared of what she might have looked like when she was alive and that picture was distributed in Norwegian media. Soon staff of Hotel Hordaheimen in Bergen recognized woman as one of their guests. New information provided police with the last date that Isdal Woman was last seen alive - it was on 23 November, when she checked out from Hordaheimen, which left police with 6-day gap between that fact and discovery of the body.
Staff of the hotel described woman as good looking, with dark hair and dark eyes. She checked in as Belgian from Ostend, and put name Elisabeth Leenhouwfr in the form. According to staff she was quiet, most of the time she spent in her room and she seemed to be cautious, although they did not think she seemed nervous or shown any signs of being in danger. So far police have found no clues where she was between 23 and 29 November.
On other front a cryptographer expert was given her notepad and had no problem with deciphering what was written inside - it seems that she put down dates and places where she was in recent months and names that she was using. Soon the check-in forms from different hotels around Norway proved that this theory was absolutely right, Isdal Woman used at least 9 different aliases while staying in hotels in Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim. Each time she put her data as Belgian citizen (once she put Ljubljana as her address), age between 25 and 30, different occupations, sometimes she filled the forms in French, sometimes in German.
The investigation shown that Isdal Woman was trying hard to disguise her identity, she often changed the hotels, often changed rooms after checking in, she was using different passports (although none were found she must have used them at least in some hotels during check-in), all of the names she used proved to be fake, she also used wigs to change her appearance. If that was not enough to create the mystery, she also was seen talking to different men in hotels, although it never seemed like it was a pleasant conversation, some of the hotel staff members remembered that she smelled of garlic and spoke better German than English.
All of those elements left police with very little to work on and the investigation was soon closed due to lack of new leads. The conclusion was that she most likely committed suicide, although murder was also taken under consideration. Isdal Woman was buried on 5 February 1971 in unmarked grave in Bergen. Only police officers were present at the ceremony.
The fingerprints taken from body were compared with Interpol database, but did not returned any matches. The DNA samples were compared with available official databases, but did not returned any matches. There were voices that DNA should be compared with commercial databases, but Norwegian police decided not to follow that path due to doubts of the ethical side of such move. The sketches of Isdal Woman were widely distributed in media, but so far no one came forward to identify her.
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