This is Death in Ice Valley, an original podcast
series from the BBC World Service and NRK. Even 47 years on, many witnesses have a vivid
recollection of the Isdal Woman and how old she looked. But looks can be deceiving.
- Your age is written in your teeth. - I'm Neil McCarthy. - And I'm Marit
Higraff. This is episode 8: Case Closed. Last time, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev
gave us his courier theory, which sounds like it could fit. The Isdal Women didn't hang around in
one place for long or try to blend in, like a spy. She came and went, between European cities,
and she had meetings with different men, including a naval officer. She could have
been a messenger for a spy organisation, it's plausible. There is no evidence for her
being part of a Norwegian espionage ring, but it's an interesting speculation from somebody with
first-hand knowledge of the secret world of spies. Let's return to the science for a
while, to help us with this case. We'll keep things in Scandinavia.
- It's a cold night in Stockholm, we're in the Swedish capital, and
we're in the company of Harald, who's joined us from Norway. Could you introduce
him properly? - Yes. Harald Skjonsfell from Kripos is with us. He is now the leader of the
identity unit at Kripos, and he is here bringing through three teeth of the Isdal Woman, Harald?
- Yes, that's correct. I have three teeth with me to give to the scientists here in Karolinska
Institute to try to find out how old was the Isdal Women when she died in Norway in 1970. -
The very, very exciting thing, and the reason for us to be here, is that these scientists
here in Karolinska, they said hello themselves, and said, we have a method, we believe
we can define the age of the woman exact, by looking at her teeth with the carbon-14
method, where they look at the level of carbon-14 in her teeth, and then they can say
something about her age or exact birth year. - And have you used carbon analysis effectively
in any other missing persons cases? - No, we haven't done that before, so this is new for us.
- And Harald, you deal with missing persons cases all the time, what do you make of
the Isdal Woman's case? - Well, I am a police officer so I have to stick to the
objective facts. So it's a very interesting case, it's very special, because there's not many
people who are found in the forest burned in Norway. And if it's a suicide, it's a very
special way to do it. I don't think we have any similar case. So it's for sure, this is a very
special case. - Let's take a night's sleep, and let's see tomorrow what the scientists
can do. - Got the teeth in a very safe place? - Yes. I will not tell you! - Not under
your pillow I hope! - We're not very far from it. Harald Skjonsfell has brought the Isdal Woman's
teeth to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where professors Kanar Alkass and Henrik Druid
toil away in a lab full of scientific cutting instruments. The walls are covered in marble; it
used to be the hospital mortuary. - Hi Harald, welcome to the forensic. Here, I will show you
the lab. I hope you have the teeth with you? - I have the teeth with me. - So we have the lab
here to the left side, and I will show you how we're going to prepare the teeth and
hopefully we can help you with this case. And here I have my colleague Henrik Druid, professor
at Karolinska. - Hello Harald. - Hello, nice to meet you! - Nice to meet you, and thank you for
taking this case for us, it's very important. I have the teeth in my bag, it's packed in
an envelope, so here it is. - Thank you, and you have those three teeth
we asked for? - Yes. And we check this, ah, this is the wisdom tooth which is
very important. - We have three teeth. - Yes, and we have even here another tooth and here is
three teeth. Thank you very much. - I hope this will help you. So what are you exactly going to
do now? - We can say, your age is written on your tooth. So by analysing these teeth we hope we can
help the police in Norway by telling the age of the woman, the age at death. - One of the methods
that is so powerful is analysing carbon-14, which is an isotope of carbon. Carbon-14 is known to be
radioactive, and has been used in archaeological studies all over the world. And we are doing
the same kind of analysis but we are taking advantage of the increased levels of carbon-14
that started to occur 1955, due to extensive test bomb detonations of nuclear weapons from 1955
through 1963. And that was just a side effect. All that increased carbon-14 has been incorporated
in our bodies ever since, and the teeth, they are formed at a certain time after the person is
born, and then by looking at the carbon-14 levels in a particular tooth, we can match that with the
particular levels in the atmosphere at that time. I'm not scientific at all, but I think I get this.
The carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere went up during the period of the open-air nuclear tests,
so if a tooth was formed after the testing had started, it will contain varying levels of c-14.
We think the Isdal Woman was born in the early 1940s, according to all her hotel registration
cards, which contained a lot of false information, we know, but we're assuming the year of birth
she wrote down was probably close to the truth. So most of her teeth would have been developed
by the time the nuclear tests started. - That's why they wanted to analyse the wisdom tooth. That
tooth is formed in late childhood, so if she was born in the early 40s, that tooth should contain
an amount of c-14 relating to a specific year. But they're going to do a separate analysis on
the teeth, something called racemization. - It's a chemical process. There is an amino acid who
with time convert to its mirror, like and then you count or calculate the quote of this amino
acid, and by these numbers you can hopefully get the age of death. - Hmm, I don't really follow
this one so well. You can date a tooth backwards, using amino acids? - Yes, my understanding is that
by chemical analysis of the dentin in the tooth, the scientists can calculate how
old a person was when she died, but this method is slightly less
accurate than the carbon-14 method. White lab coat on, Kanar Alkass gets to work
slicing one of the teeth in two. - You never know what she'll find. Perhaps there will
be some wisdom in this tooth after all. - Now I'm cutting the tooth, I do lingually
section through the whole tooth. - Is that like a cross section? - Exactly. - It's a
very slow saw, the rotating saw. - Yeah, yeah, in the beginning I do it very slow, so
until it comes through the tooth. Then I can increase the speed. - Everything will help us in
the search for our relatives. - It will help us to know when she was born, and it will decrease
the number of people we are looking for. So it, hopefully, it will help us to to get closer
to her relatives. - Back to a human level, not the scientific, but um and you might have a
view on this Harald, is that when you look at the registration cards that the Isdal Woman filled in,
under different names with different details and different information and identities, one thing
that seemed to be quite common was the date of birth, not the exact date of birth, but the year
of birth. It was often 1942, 1943... there wasn't too much variation there. You never know, maybe
that is just one thing that amongst all the other false information that was something that
was her own true year of birth. - Yeah, some say if you lie a lot or use a lot of false
information, you always have to stick to some truth so maybe she did, maybe she was actually
born 1942-43, around that. - If you are going to prepare as another ID, you have to look like
the same age, so it's natural that you use this, almost the same age that you are in real life, but
we will see, maybe we can get an, uh, more closely answer on that question after this. - If you
start lying once, it's easier to stick to that, also. - You have to remember all your lies.
- Yeah, exactly. This is the difficult part. OK, and how long will it take to get this result? - We, hopefully, the carbon dating take
maybe three weeks, and the racemization, the amino acid analysis, will be done by end of this month,
hopefully. - OK, thank you very much! - Thanks. We're at the airport now, and we're about to go
our separate ways, you to Oslo, me back to London, and obviously now they run our passports
through computers and all the details come up, but back in 1970 it would have been
very different then, in fact who knows, if she was traveling with different
passports, they would have just checked the photo I suppose against
her as she walked through, and I wonder how she she selected which identity she
was gonna come into the country with? What was her criteria, who did she want to be at different
times? - Yeah, that's the question, did she have a pattern, or was she sent by someone with special
identity for special tasks, we don't know. - So we wait. We wait for results. - We're waiting
for our plane back home, we're waiting for results... If they really succeed in finding
a more accurate age and birth-year, it will be very valuable for us when we want to research
more into where we think she most likely grew up. Let's head for the first time to our Isdal
headquarters at NRK in Oslo, with your colleagues Ståle Hansen and Øyvind Bye Skille, also
experts on the case, in front of a very orderly, very Scandinavian crime board, full of Post-Its,
and also an illustration of the Isdal Woman in the middle. - Well this is a timeline of the Isdal
case, which is based on the police investigation documents, where we have actually put up yellow
notes for each day, what happened each day, because it's an enormous amount of information,
and you need to get a system on it, to understand how the case moved, and then it's very useful
to use this chronological type of timeline, so if our heads are too full of information, we
can walk over here and try to get the system of it all. - So what have we got here? - Back at the
time, when police were looking into the case, they started it as like a big murder investigation and
they got together all their best investigators, the experienced ones. And they investigated for
some weeks, but just before Christmas in 1970, they somehow seem to have concluded it's a
suicide. And there was a big press conference, and after the press conference the newspapers
wrote that the police thought it was a suicide. And we have a small recording from from that
press conference made by the NRK at the time, telling the story. And at the time there had
been quite a bit of speculation in the media, so the press conference was
sort of an answer to it. It's black and white tv footage, showing a
room full of men in suits, smoking cigarettes, some of them taking notes. Oskar Hordnes,
one of Bergen's police chiefs, is speaking. - And he tells about the investigation leads,
so far in the investigation, the autopsy, saying about tablets being found in her
stomach at the autopsy, and that they had different identities, not really identities, and that it's clear she's been in Norway
for quite some time travelling around. But they don't know why, why is she
traveling around. - Someone's asking a question. - He's asking, was she a spy? And
then the police boss says no, I'm, I think I can certainly say there's no leads leading to her
being a spy and that's very strange for us today, because we know today the Secret Police was
actually investigating that at the time. So this press conference closing down the
investigation came just three weeks after the body was found, and it was a large-scale international
affair, so why was it closed so abruptly, and how could they be so sure after such a
short investigation that she wasn't a spy, and that it wasn't a murder? - I really don't
understand that, partly because they didn't give out any information to back that up. It's
even harder to understand, when we know that on the same day that this press conference
took place in Bergen with the local police, the Secret Police wrote a document about the
woman being spotted near the Penguin missile tests by a fisherman. - And the day after that,
the 23rd of December, according to his son, the police came to interrogate the
fisherman at the train station in Stavanger and gave him weapons to protect himself. At that
time, the newspaper journalist Knut Haavik was writing about the Isdal story from Oslo. He had
excellent police contacts, but for some reason information wasn't being passed on in the
usual way. - So it seems like the investigation was shut down, more or less, before Christmas
in 1970, already all the police officers, they went home celebrating Christmas in Oslo
again, and they had this press conference denying... she wasn't a spy and it wasn't... it
was suicide they said. - "I can ensure the press that this is not a spy case, and it's not a murder
case," and yeah. - Do you remember your reaction then? - I think it was His Master's Voice. - Do
you think? - They had been ordered to say so, I believe, because it was so much international
interest in this case, and it could be maybe a one of the Norwegian spies in Russia could
be caught, and you know, it was spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. - Ordered by who,
do you think? - I think the Secret Police, or the Ministry of Justice. - So it was obvious for
you... - Yeah, yeah. - ...that this was something wrong here. - Why all this secrecy? Because
in other similar cases, the police said that the press is the best detective of all. Why didn't
we get any more? This was a cover-up, I think. With this in mind, Vassiliev's theory of the Isdal
Woman being part of a Norwegian espionage network gone wrong isn't perhaps so far-fetched. - Yes,
and Haavik had his suspicions heightened when he looked into the police documents on the
case. - Some documents has disappeared. And I got all the documents from the police,
from the chief commissioner in Oslo, because I wrote stories for him
in the Nordic police chronicle, which came out every year, and I got all
the material from the investigation, and among the documents it was an envelope with, I
could feel it was a tape in it. A recorded tape. And on the front of the envelope, it was written: This envelope can only be opened by
permission of the chief of the Secret Police. And I understand that NRK, the Norwegian
broadcasting, has got all the documents as well, but the tape wasn't there? - That's right, there
was no tape. - Why has this tape disappeared? What did you do with the tape and
the material? - I did nothing. I just felt on the envelope, because I couldn't open
it, the chief commissioner trusted me, I got all the documents, and I, of course I couldn't
open it. I regret it today because I could use methods to open, unlocked... but I didn't do
that because the police trusted me, otherwise I would be kicked out of the police headquarters
and lost all my sources. - What do you think it could have had on it? - I think it was a
tape from a phone conversation, phone call. Back to the Isdal Woman herself. One of the
most interesting clues she left behind was her handwriting. Remember, that was
key evidence in 1970 for the police, in matching her different identities on the
hotel registration cards. - Yes, but handwriting analysis has come on a long way since then. There
is an expert at Kripos who has attempted to see whether the handwriting can reveal a new
direction for us. Her name is Gunnel Isage. This does not look Norwegian to me.
- So different countries do have recognisable handwriting? - Different copybook
models, yes, in schools. - Copybook models? You mean when they're teaching children how to write,
they follow certain characteristics? - Yeah, that's right. So we contacted Germany, we
contacted Slovenia, we contacted Belgium, Switzerland, because it was suggested to us
both from Switzerland and Germany that they suspected France, and a French way of writing. And
we contacted two laboratories, and independent of each other, they said yes, we recognise these
features, this is according to older French norm. - This is a sort of old-fashioned kind of
French handwriting. - Yeah, and one of them... he sent us some old french letters. There isn't
a lot to go on here. So this is the 'T', do you see that they connect it, and then they write
a bar across the stem of the T. - Yeah. - And he also mentioned the way of signing, you can see
this is from the letter, they write diagonally and draw the line underneath. I wonder whether
signatures are the biggest giveaways? - No, I would have said the T. I know it's just one
letter, but it's not common, and uh, handwriting examiners around Europe, they've said no, this is
not from our norm. - So the French laboratories, they confirmed, "we know this type of writing". -
Yes. I would say, it's not conclusive in any way, but France is the nearest we've got, so far. -
Belgium is half francophone, half Flemish, could it be that she was from the the French-influenced
part of Belgium? - Of course. - Because she's signed in as a Belgian more than any other
nationality, isn't she? - Yes, I quite agree. - This really is a significant development, because
when we were looking at the hotel registration forms, you as a fluent German speaker could tell
that she made mistakes in her written German, and now the handwriting experts are pretty sure
that she learned to write in a French-speaking country when she was younger. - The isotope
tests on her teeth told us two things: That she probably started her life in south-eastern
Germany, Nuremberg area, but by her teenage years she had moved direction west, and there were a
few possible places. - And this new information makes the hotspot on the German-French
border particularly interesting for us. And by the way, all crucial documents, including
the hotel registration cards, where you can look out for the giveaway letter T, are on the
Death in Ice Valley website, and on Facebook. - Hello Neil! - Hi Marit, hi, hi, how are things?
- Well things are are pretty OK, I've been to the exciting moment of truth by headquarters of
Kripos this morning, to find out the results of the Karolinska examinations, to find out how
old was our woman. - Yeah, and we're hoping to get quite close to the truth with this one,
quite specific, so I'm quite excited to know what kind of results you got back? - Well,
there are some pretty interesting results. Well, let's go through it. The carbon-14
method, which is the method where they had the greatest expectations. So the thing is, first
result: She had, let's call it a normal base level of carbon-14 in all the three examined teeth. So
that's the first result. So then came this other method in use, and they were quite satisfied with
their examinations, it's a quite technical method, difficult to understand, but this other method
was successful. They also used three teeth, and two of the teeth made the exact same result.
- Right. - Be prepared now! Saying: this woman was 45 years old when she died. - 45? - Yes!
So this is a woman born around 1930, but most likely born in the 20s. - How interesting,
she's much older than we'd always imagined. - This changes the whole picture. She's
a lot older than we thought she was, as she's a lot older than she said she was. So
what was she doing pretending to be younger? It's such a strange thing to be doing? - It's so
hard to understand this, I actually really got a shock when I got those results, because she's
kept on saying, or having identities showing, that she was born between '42 and '45, and why
did she do that if she was actually born 1930, or even earlier? - I don't know, have you got
any theories? - Well I keep on thinking of it, and I think OK, we know from our interviewees
like Iver Neumann saying, well there were only three possible tasks for this woman, either she
was a prostitute, or she was some kind of agent, spy, or she was some kind of business woman. And
I think if you're a businesswoman travelling, why do you have to lie on your age, pretend
that you are 15, maybe 20 years younger? As an agent does that make sense? Does it make
sense to you that you have to pretend that you're younger? - No, it doesn't doesn't make sense to
me. - I'm sorry, I know I have said many times I don't think she was a prostitute, but this... I
keep thinking on this, and as a woman, I can find only one reason for making yourself younger than
you are on the paper, and that is to make yourself more attractive. Isn't it? Think of it. -
Well, yeah, you would want to look younger, but you wouldn't really need paperwork to prove
that because prostitution was illegal and informal and you wouldn't be presenting your passport I
wouldn't assume, and why would you have all these different passports, with different names, and all
with a similar date of birth? - That's so true. So it doesn't, it doesn't make sense, because
OK, you want to make yourself more attractive to pretend you're younger than you are
you need a paper on that, but then what with all those fake identities, why do you need
them if you are some kind of sex worker or... I don't get it. - Another possible answer could
be that she she wanted to show that she was around the age of 30 because perhaps it raised less
questions about a single woman travelling alone? If she was 45, perhaps there'd be an expectation
that she'd be married, or she had to put those details down in hotel registration forms, or
wherever she was being asked, whereas saying she was a 30-year-old travelling alone, it was gonna
raise less questions. - The society was different back in 1970. Maybe it wasn't that common
that a mature woman, 45, was travelling alone. Yet again, the Isdal Woman surprises
us, this time with her age. It's again, there's this riddle within a riddle. She was very
good at covering her tracks. I mean it's only now, after all these years, that her age, her true
age, has finally come out. So rather than being born during the Second World War, she was probably
born in the late 1920s, and if she was born in the Nuremberg area, as the isotope results suggest,
then that points to a unique period in history. Join us next week, when we
go from the end of her life, to search for her origins in the city chosen by
Adolf Hitler as the cradle of his Nazi philosophy.
