The Isdal Woman: Europe's Most Famous Unidentified Person | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant earlier this year i did a video on the peter bergman case the unidentified man who washed up on the shore of county sligo in ireland who nobody can seem to figure out who he was it's a tragic story but apparently it's very intriguing because holy crap that video has taken off and at the end of that video i made reference to a few different cases including one that only goes by the name of the isdahl woman and i got a lot of requests for that one much like the peter bergman case the isdahl woman case is a story of somebody who died mysteriously under unexplained circumstances with multiple conflicting pieces of evidence and it's all shaped by the time and place and context that it happened in and in the case of the isdahl woman the time was 1970 the place was the icy mountains of norway and the context was the cold war let's jump into it [Music] bergen norway is surrounded by mountains how many mountains depends on who you ask but the number seven is the one that's usually used probably because there were seven hills of rome though there seems to be disagreement on which mountains make up the seven all the lists are different but everyone seems to include ulriken its snow-capped peak tops out at 643 meters above sea level and it's visited by thousands of hikers every year some take a long way around the mountain others ride the cable car to the top where waiting for them is one of the most amazing views in all of norway but those who really want to rough it head to the north face of oregon the face away from the city it's a rugged and picturesque landscape that's not for the casual hiker though it's relatively safe in the summers in the winters things get a bit more dangerous after all this valley is named is ludden which means ice valley many hikers have died on this side of the mountain and there's one particular segment of it that seems to be a particularly popular spot for suicides and this has led locals to call this particular part of the valley by a different name deds dullen the valley of death and it's in this valley where on november 29 1970 a middle-aged professor and his two daughters were taking a hike it was cold and wet that morning and as they entered a dense forested area of black spruce trees one of the girls saw something that made her stop in her tracks it was the badly charred body of a woman sprawled across the rocks by the way if you think that's the kind of thing that would maybe you know scar a little girl for life you would not be wrong even today as adults those two girls refused to talk about it according to police reports the woman's right arm was folded across her chest and her left arm was extended out in what they call a boxer pose or a pugilistic pose this is actually common with burn victims because as the muscle tissue burns it dehydrates and contracts in i suppose i should probably do a content warning here i don't do those very often but uh yeah there's uh it's gonna be some graphic stuff in this video her body was naked although the police think she was clothed before their clothes caught fire her body was charred her face was burnt and unrecognizable so the police turned to her belongings to try to figure out who she was and what happened and this was not helpful the complete list of items that they found at the scene include i'm just going to read these real quick cuffs on the arms of synthetic material the blackened remains of textiles and stomach crotch hips and left knee the remains of dark blue stretched trousers and a stocking on the right foot matching left stocking nearby one rubber boot of the type known as sailor boots outline of a rubber sole on the right knee plastic remains of a bag or purse wool from a sweater skeleton of a blue nylon ladies umbrella mostly empty bottle of cluster liquor liquor two bottles of carabiner hooks one partially melted found to contain water one partially melted plastic white cup shapeless remains of a plastic spoon one partially burnt round plastic lid one green checked woolen scarf with burnt end a wristwatch found under her knee whose plastic cover had melted freezing the hands at 12 32 and the remains of a match box burnt bread or crackers and a fur hat a hat that smelled of petroleum but that was the only trace of any fuel for the fire there was no wood no charcoal no container full of flammable liquid or anything like that but there was a container missing the partially melted white plastic cut that i talked about earlier was the kind that goes on top of the thermos and the thermos was not found a 1970 thermos would have been made of plastic or metal with a glass inside lining and that could have melted away completely if it was filled with gasoline or her killer took it away so the police set out to try to figure out who this person was and whether or not her death was an accident or a suicide or some kind of murder the forensic examiner concluded that the body had been dead for about six days when it was found which did coincide with some eyewitness reports on the 23rd that there was smoke in the air around 1205 pm but the rest of the report from the forensic examiner's office was not helpful because the cause of death was ruled as a combination between carbon monoxide poisoning which one would expect from a fire and um 50 to 70 sleeping pills it was a drug called phenomol which was often prescribed for people with anxiety or insomnia and it was also unfortunately at the time a pretty popular drug for suicide its recommended dose is around 30 to 320 milligrams a day and the pills that she was taking were 60 milligrams and she took 50 to 70 of them meaning she took 3 000 to 4 200 milligrams of this stuff that's more twelve pills were undigested in her stomach meaning she probably took those just before she died which also means that she probably took the rest of them about two hours before that so did she take all those pills at the hotel before she went out there chances are she would have had trouble walking around at that point especially in the rocky terrain unless someone was helping her there were no cable cars until later in the afternoon so she couldn't have taken one of those and there are roads on the mountain but even if she had gone down those roads there was still a long path downward that she would have needed to take from the road so it is kind of hard to imagine there's a big question of how she would have even been able to get to that spot after taking that many sleeping pills much less set herself on fire once she got there and why would somebody take that many sleeping pills easily enough to kill yourself and then set yourself on fire sounds like overkill to me [Music] what have i become the police struggled to find an answer but three days after they found the body they got a big break a coin operated storage locker at the bergen train station had expired and inside the attendants found two suitcases this got the police's attention because those bags had been put in there on the 23rd literally just a few hours before the woman died and in one of those suitcases were some sunglasses that had a very clear fingerprint they were able to match that fingerprint to the isdahl woman so it was definitely her stuff this was a huge clue and what they found inside was not helpful the listed items inside the suitcase include 500 german deutsche marks several pairs of shoes and boots two bags from different shoe stores a number of clothing items with labels cut out one steel soup spoon with engraving one bottle of perfume one package of a clay-like substance one scalpel-like knife one map of southern scandinavia three detail road maps of norway all marked 16 6 in pen one with the train stations and pencil multiple hats including a cossack hat of beige sheepskin a wig made in france described as mahogany brown prescription eczema cream with all the identifying information scratched away and two notebooks one blank but with some pictures stuffed inside including a picture of the madonna with child a postcard of religious scene and a postcard of her horse-drawn sleigh the second notebook though it was very much not blank on one page of the notebook were four tables of numbers in a sort of code nobody knew what this code meant it didn't seem to have any repeating patterns and didn't have a cipher in it of any kind so the police called in some experts a specialist in the norwegian military intelligence service took a look at it and he came out with an answer pretty quickly turns out it wasn't much of a code at all the code breaker said it was some sort of travel record the numbers are dates the first letter after each number a month and the letters at the end of a column stand for cities for example when you look at the first column second entry you see the code 11m16ml according to the code breaker that means from march 11th to 16th the writer stayed at a city whose name begins with l this combined with the items in the suitcase led the investigators to start piecing together her movements remember the shoe bags i mentioned earlier well one was from rome italy and the other one was from norway police interviewed employees and got a description of the woman who bought the sailor boots from the interviews the police figured out that she was a foreigner although people disagreed on where she was from one described her as a young american tourist one said that she was french one said jewish slavic asian so not too helpful at least two hairstyles were mentioned by witnesses one of which matched the wig in the suitcase so the other one might have been her natural hairstyle her teeth were distinctive with several gold crowns and a gap in the front and she was described as slim with white hips a taxi driver went so far as to call her sexy using these descriptions in the coded notebook the investigators were able to track her signature to five different hotels in norway and while the coded travel record matched her movements closely it wasn't perfect there are discrepancies between some of the entries in the code book and some of the known arrival and departure times in some of these cities but was it a diary written after the fact to record her journey or was it something like an itinerary that was written in advance we don't know yeah the code is mostly deciphered but there's still a few things that they haven't been able to figure out like rome was important she seemed to go back to rome pretty often but there were some cities that they still don't know what it is but all in all they found nine different hotel registries and four travel forms with 10 different names all using the same handwriting the names were checked by investigators as well as passport numbers and old addresses and it was all made up whoever this woman was between the codes and the disguises and the fake names she went to great lengths to hide her identity combine that with a mysterious and unexplained way that she died and that's fertile ground for a lot of different theories about what happened to this woman so let's get into those theory number one she was a spy you probably saw this one coming a mile away and it makes sense considering the codes and the disguises and everything and the fact that this was the cold war and norway was really close to soviet union well in the podcast death and ice valley which is a fantastic podcast by the way it's all about this story if you want to go deep on it i'll put a link down below but they interviewed norway's most famous spy catcher he goes by the name of ernest tufta and he doesn't think this is a spy situation he had actually investigated this story back in the 1970s and decided that it wasn't consistent with other spy murders that he was familiar with he actually concluded that it was a can of hairspray that exploded death knight's family also consulted former kgb officer and current british journalist alexander vasiyev and he also didn't think that the spy theory held a new water he said that a soviet spy would only have one or two fake personas that they would carry around and it would have like a wealth of documents to back it up and create a legend for that persona that wasn't the case for the isdahl woman she had 10 different names but didn't really have much to back it up and in fact only one hotel manager said that he saw her passport and even he may have only seen the front of it bessie have also made the point that a soviet spy would have gone out of their way to avoid drawing attention to themselves and the isdahl woman very much did not do that as the investigators tracked her movements across all these hotels they found out that she had a pattern of really strange behavior she had a habit of switching hotel rooms and moving all the furniture around sometimes just moving it out of the room entirely into the hallway in fairness if she was a spy maybe she was worried that it was bugged it just kind of seems like whatever hotel she was staying in she was that guest that you had to deal with so the hotel attendants had to pay particular attention to her and that made all the details about her kind of stand out a little bit more like the fact that she spoke little to no norwegian and usually spoken german french or english and then there was the smell witnesses at the shoe store and at the hotels claimed that there was something of a an odor around this woman something about garlic and bo mixed with cheap perfume some witnesses described it as nauseating the kgb expert said that if she was a female spy from russia she would have smelled like chanel number five and concluded that she wasn't from a major cold war country although she might have been from a smaller country with a less developed intelligence agency and by the way if you're hearing all this and thinking like why would a spy be hanging out in bergen norway like that seems like a random thing to assume um it's actually not bergen was actually kind of an espionage hotbed in the 1970s specifically because of missile testing that was going on nearby a guided missile known as penguin was developed in norway from the early 1960s in 1972. it's actually still in use by several countries including the united states but yeah the area where they were doing this testing in was near bergen so it actually wasn't that unusual for spies to be hanging around the area and there's one eyewitness account that may corroborate that she was there to get missile intelligence in december 1970 police heard a story of a fisherman who claimed that he saw the isdoll woman speaking to a military officer near where the penguin testing site was yeah he apparently saw her talking for some time with a naval officer now if that really was her that brings up a lot of questions could this officer have been an embedded agent or could she have been a actually a courier somebody who just transports messages from one spy to another there's a lot of twists and turns here but the question of whether or not she was a spy is still up for debate theory number two she was a sex worker there is the possibility that the isdahl woman was a high-end prostitute and the the coded travel itinerary was from her well employer are they still pimps at that point or a log sheet like that's how she reported back to her employer what she was doing was illegal it would make sense why she would want to use different identities to try to keep people from finding out who she was the wig may have been to hide her identity it may have been because a client wanted a brunette and there were some eyewitness reports of men going into her room or dining with her or going out shopping with her too now none of this of course tells us who killed her or why outside of the fact that sex workers are often the target for violence theory number three there were multiple women when you have so many disparate threads around one person you have to eventually consider the possibility that it's not just one person it's possible that some of the reports and eyewitness accounts that the investigators tracked down were actually describing different women now that's the theory of another author who looked into the case a criminologist named david morgan he wrote a book called is doll woman a new perspective i'll put the amazon link down in the description below and he was kind enough to respond to our emails and clarify some things for us so i wanted to thank him for that but in his investigation he focused on a young american woman that was sought by police early witness reports made her a good candidate for the isdahl woman but there were some issues with her being the the actual isdoll woman but like for the fact that uh some of the shoe and shop employees described her differently than other people one customer described her as a bit taller than usual then she didn't say anything about the gap in the teeth though she did carry a bag with her that say california in large letters which was corroborated by other eyewitness accounts and she did have the apparently noteworthy bo now police at the time ruled out the american woman because apparently some friends of the american woman had received some postcards that were postmarked three days after the isdahl woman died but somebody else could have sent those postcards too bottom line is as if this case couldn't get more complicated it turns out there might be multiple isdahl women theory number four the serial killer theory two years after the isdahl woman was found in september of 1972 bergen was the site of another horrible tragedy another young woman similar in age and physical appearance was found murdered but in this case at least we know who she is her name was marianne tunisvet and her death was also unsolved her murder has never been found now some have suggested that this may have been the same person who killed the isdahl woman and there might be multiple women that this person is killed that we don't even know about yet now there is a tiny amount of connective tissue here it's not totally spurious marianne's mother edith was actually a maid at the last hotel that the israel woman stayed in and she gave a lot of very descriptive information to the police could it have been another guest who had stayed in that hotel at the same time as the isdahl woman and then he came back through later on or as edith wondered was it some kind of revenge against her for giving all that information to the police perhaps this guy killed multiple women but the isdahl woman was the only one weird enough and mysterious enough to attract the attention that it got this theory is very much up for debate now there is another theory that's worth at least mentioning you call it theory number five if you want but possibly she just had some mental illness you know she took 50 to 70 sleeping pills that seems like kind of a hard thing to make somebody do so assuming that she had some kind of mental illness that made her suicidal she also seemed very paranoid you know she she moved all her furniture around she's changed rooms if you know people say if she was a spy she might have done that or maybe she's just somebody who was paranoid and thought that there were people following her you know people with paranoid schizophrenia were not treated the same back then as they were today and it's and it's possible that she traveled all around thinking that somebody was following her with these paranoid delusions and eventually just offed herself the fact of the matter is the story that is all woman is so convoluted and weird and it's been around for so long that we'll likely never truly know the answer not that it stops us from trying because we all love a good mystery but it's important to remember that this was a person tourist spy prostitute whatever at the end of the day she was a human being and her death was tragic and horrific even though she had taken so many sleeping pills we do know that she was alive at the time that she caught fire because soot was found in her lungs meaning she was literally choking on the smoke of her own burning flesh plus as the coroner report said she had carbon monoxide poisoning so she had to have breathed in a lot of that this was somebody's daughter maybe somebody's sister somebody's friend somebody out there is still wanting closure for this and who knows maybe they'll actually get that closure podcasts like death and ice valley that i mentioned before are still researching this and now they're applying techniques to it that just weren't available back in the 1970s for instance tests on this doll woman's teeth showed a chemical residue that suggests that she might have been from nuremberg germany other tests show that she was probably older than she claimed on forms maybe 40 to 45 although that would also contradict eyewitness reports saying that she was more in her early 30s maybe she used a lot of moisturizer or maybe the tests were wrong some argue that the teeth have been washed with a substance that does degrade dna and that some of the chemicals they found you know traced it back to nuremberg are actually available in multiple places just like everything else in this story there are multiple explanations another group that's looking into this is the dna doe project dna doe has identified multiple john and jane doe since they were founded in 2017 including an unknown a previously unknown victim of john wayne gacy the clown killer as of june 2019 colleen fitzpatrick of the dna doe project has filed a motion to get access to the remains to do some more tests on it so hopefully this might be another one of their success stories on february 5th 1971 the isdahl woman was laid to rest at mullendall cemetery in bergen based on items found in the suitcases they chose to do the service with a catholic priest it was attended by a handful of police officers including the chief detective and she was laid to rest in a zinc coffin this is common for unidentified people because it can be hermetically sealed to be preserved for later the hope in 1971 was that some relatives would come and claim her body and take it back to their homeland so far this has not happened so she remains in bergen waiting for someone to come along and figure out exactly what happened that morning in ice valley so maybe somebody watching this will have the critical thinking and deduction skills to come to an answer here but if you don't think that your critical thinking and deduction skills are up to the task you might want to superpower it with brilliant specifically brilliance logic course where you can sharpen your analytical skills to understand the basics of logic and deduction including truth tables logic gates and even combinatorial game algorithms and what's great about brilliant is it's a different kind of learning platform brilliant uses visual and interactive lessons to 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 860,865

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: lA-5OJ8Yj7g

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021