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Isdal Woman: A mystery death haunting Norway for 46 years
- INTPenis 9y agoDisappointing end of the article, real cliffhanger. I wonder if there will be a part 2.
- ggambetta 9y agoWearing my fiction writer hat - I found this fragment fascinating: DNA analysis is now one of the key tools police use in forensic analysis and identification cases. It didn't exist back in 1970. But it turns out several tissue samples from the woman's organs, including from her lungs, heart, adrenal gland and ovaries, have been stored at Haukeland University Hospital. Makes me wonder what kind of "perfect crime" may be committed today, where the criminal literally achieved technical perfection, only to be caught 40 years later by a forensic technique that doesn't even exist today.
- croisillon 9y agotime travel
- dogma1138 9y ago>Makes me wonder what kind of "perfect crime" may be committed today, where the criminal literally achieved technical perfection, only to be caught 40 years later by a forensic technique that doesn't even exist today. This happens all the time, when DNA became a core forensic tool a lot of cold cases were solved, and a lot of people were also acquitted. That said since no one knew about DNA samples were often not preserved also due to the cost of preservation in some cases evidence was destroyed that latter primarily affects acquittal efforts since after you've lost all your appeals the evidence can be destroyed legally to save costs. IIRC there was a proposal or even a change in law to mandate the preservation of evidence for all convictions on death row until they are executed but since in the US it's a state by state issue it's likely not to be uniform.
- lettergram 9y agoIt's actually interesting to note that over time I've become increasingly skeptical of ferensics. My wife works daily in a genetics and neuroscience lab. She said typically one out of three experiments they do, even under the best conditions don't turn out. Given how little forensic DNA is often collected, and how often DNA either becomes contaminated or the experiment/process fails, I often question the validity of tests. My wife doubts the validity even more than I do lol
- washadjeffmad 9y agoAnd you're right to. Without proof of blind sample testing and rigorous QA on the process, there's no reason to trust the results. And that type of evidence, if accepted, would only wisely be used for ruling out suspects. Even considering the defense as the null hypothesis, the US legal process is not as scientific in some very important ways as it could be.
- dogma1138 9y agoWell it's not necessarily applicable. DNA sequencing in forensics isn't a full sequencing it's just a profile with an 1 in n match usually in the low millions which outside of direct same sex familial match is going to be highly unlikely to be a false positive. Forensic evidence doesn't exists in a vacuum it's looked at in context. It's also worthy to note that most cases aren't an episode of CSI and most convictions still rely on witness testimony and or confessions. Thats not to say that there haven't been bad practices in he past ranging from bad science to individual malpractice and even malice. But it's still better than just having he said she said, as forensics allow you to verify testimonies and build a plausible depicture of events.
- mikeash 9y agoHas the false positive rate been empirically evaluated? The fact that most convictions rely on witnesses doesn't make me any happier. Human memory is deeply flawed.
- arjie 9y agoEncrypted records of the crime but which you refuse to decode. Your drive is imaged and stored and at some point in the future, the algorithm is revealed to have a flaw which leaks key information into some part of the cipher text.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoWasn't one of the things we learned from Snowden that the NSA archives huge amounts of encrypted data because they can't crack it right now, but might in the future, given enough technical advancements?
- jamesbowman 9y agoThis happened to Lance Armstrong. As one investigator put it, his 1999 urine was meant to pass the drugs tests available in 1999. But when subjected to tests developed 5 years later, it failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong#Tour_de_France_urine_tests:_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong#Tour_de_France...
- nawitus 9y agoThis is quite common these days, e.g. many atheletes lost their 2008 Olympic medals due to retesting in late 2016.
- nawitus 9y agoDNA analysis was used to reinvestigate the Lake Bodom muders (which happened in 1960): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bodom_murders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bodom_murders It's even used to investigate Jack the Ripper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Kosminski#DNA_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Kosminski#DNA_evidence
- Mtinie 9y agoHere's a related HN discussion from earlier this year about a story published on nrk.no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309624
- atomical 9y agohttps://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/gaten-i-isdalen-1.13182053 https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/gaten-i-isdalen-1.13182053
- louithethrid 9y agoI read recently that by some DNA Samples you can trace your origin back to certain local groups- shouldnt that be possible with the sample taken here. How accurate would this be? Example: https://www.ancestry.com/dna/ https://www.ancestry.com/dna/
- vocatus_gate 9y agoI remember reading about this a few years ago when I somehow ended up on the Wikipedia "List of famous unsolved murders" or something like that, and went down the rabbit hole. It's an eerie, creepy story, one of the few that left me feeling genuinely creeped out.
- Boothroid 9y agoThis is a weird one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Masks_Case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Masks_Case
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoThe explanation on that Wikipedia article sounds convincing for me. Brazil has a lot of spiritualism cults and movements that few foreigners hear about and which can seem pretty weird.
- smoyer 9y agoI followed a similar rabbit-hole ... I think mine started here on HN with a story about the Tamam Shud case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case).
- roman_savchuk 9y agoI thought gold teeth were so Soviet/Eastern European thing at the time, that it should be an immediate giveaway of woman's origin.
- ginko 9y agoFrom the image, these are gold crowns with porcelain fronts, safe for the ones in the back. In countries were gold teeth are/were a status symbol, these would be made to be blatantly visible, so no porcelain fronts.
- reducesuffering 9y agoBut if she was a spy, she would have a reason to not blatantly show the gold crowns.
- Boothroid 9y agoA question that occurred to me a few years ago: how many murderers get away with it, and are out there walking the streets like normal people? And bearing this in mind, how many murderers have I walked past on the street, blissfully unaware of their heinous crime(s)?! Creepy! downvote?! wtf?!
- moomin 9y agoNever mind murder. Murder's pretty uncommon. On the other hand, 1 in 5 American women report having been the victim of either rape or an attempted rape. Even more report some incident of domestic violence so I can assure you that you walk past some pretty awful people every day. You probably work with some of them too.
- valuearb 9y agoYea, that's not true. You are conflating a university study with all women. And the 1 in 5 number comes from a study with a strong self selection bias, and also conflates drunken sex and unwanted kissing with rape. Better studies produced a 1 in 40 estimate.
- 467568985476 9y agoWhich better studies in particular?
- valuearb 9y agohttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/21/how-misleading-is-the-new-one-in-four-campus-rape-statistic http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/21/how-mislead...
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> You are conflating a university study with all women Are they? Yes, that figure comes up in campus studies, but there's not-too-dissimilar numbers for the general population. For instance, RAINN cites a 1998 NIJ/CDC survey as saying that about 1 in 6 American women had “been the victim of an attempted or completed rape” in their lifetimes. https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence > the 1 in 5 number comes from a study There's more than one campus sexual assault study which gives a figure in that range. Which one are you referring to?
- jlg23 9y agoCan anyone tell me what "ACI"[1] stood for back then? I wonder why Lafayette had/has an "ACI Liaison Officer". [1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/B443/production/_95974164_dsc_0607-copy.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/B443/production/...
- qubex 9y agoAside: I find the pervasive use of the present tense throughout the article to be bewildering and quite inexplicably sinister.
- to3m 9y agoI don't know about sinister, but I'll go with bewildering. I also find it rather distracting. (I've seen narrators of history programmes on TV do this sometimes. It's annoying then too.)
- pleboidal 9y agoEverything about this says dead spy caught by other spies. The interesting part won't be her real identity, even though that would be a critical window into the things that are actually interesting. No theft, no sexual abuse, no emotional yarns, bloodless, no noise yelling or fighting, drugged and burned, and obscured identity, effective for decades. The murderers were professional state operators, so whoever did it, collects a paycheck for killing people like this woman, above all ordinary law and order. Some of the rival operators may have been women, staving off sexual transgression, since that doesn't always remain professional on its own. What was she trying to do? How did her cover blow? Whoever killed her, they had clear understanding that she wasn't who she claimed to be, and no one knew who she really was. Once they discovered mystery girl, if they weren't ordered to take her out, all they had to do was phone home and ask if they were supposed to have peers in the vicintity, if not, she's the enemy. Based on this, you can assume by geography that she was a cold war spy, attractive, with money heading into Eastern Europe, not westbound out of Europe. If she were sourced from Eastern Europe, she wouldn't have been caught and erased so quickly while still mainland. Closer into Eastern Europe, she'd have had more protection. Operating alone like this, she may have been a canary. Bait, doomed from the start, but unaware of her role in the operation she proved as hazardous.
- jamespo 9y agoWhy all the pills in the stomach AND set her on fire?
- wavefunction 9y agoPills to kill and fire to obscure? Fire means it will be some time before forensics could pin down the chemical situation of the victim and by that time the perpetrators would be out of the country.
- pleboidal 9y agoTakes her out of the game. The pills don't produce a conclusive casualty in under an hour. She might survive by incidentally vomiting, recover and fly home. There might be others, undercover, tailing the kidnapping, and waiting to rescue. Rescue might simply be incidental first responders. Since she wasn't rescued we might assess there were more layers of interference in the murder. Lookouts, participating as accomplices. The burning kills quickly (minutes or less of smoke inhalation), and even if ineffective in killing due to interruptions, certainly produces scars that won't be easily hidden in the future and puts someone on the sidelines. It also sends an unpleasant message to everyone who didn't bring her home, and we still don't know who that is. Given that she wasn't even recovered, one might presume her original identity was marked deceased in a contrived accident, conincidentally, thousands of miles away. Maybe her family already knows the real story, and remains quiet.
- discardorama 9y agoSO many fake passports... I bet she was an East German spy. People in such a line of work usually don't have labels in clothes, because the labels might not match the rest of the story.
- dvtv75 9y agoTo be fair, I don't have labels in my clothes because they irritate me so much. Oddly, it never used to be a problem but it has become one in the last five or six years. (I don't have any fake passports, though, and my medications do have their printed labels.)
- owenversteeg 9y agoThe multiple passports are fascinating, and that's probably the best thing that limits the search space. The number of white, brown-eyed, 164cm tall women between 25 and 40 with many fake passports is very small: almost certainly with a state-sponsored intelligence service. Add in the gold crowns, and you've got a pretty good profile of this woman. You can rule out small countries and countries with bad intelligence services at the time. With her European ancestry you can probably rule out her working for African, South American, or Asian governments. That leaves European and North American governments. The list then is pretty narrow: America, Canada, USSR/East Germany, West Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain. Canada, Spain, Italy, and France almost certainly wouldn't be spying in Norway. Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Denmark are all unlikely, as she seemed "foreign" to the Nordic region. Belgium and the Netherlands don't have much of an intelligence service to speak of, especially during the time, and almost definitely wouldn't be spying in Norway. That gives the final list of America, USSR/East Germany, West Germany, and the UK. "English with an accent" (probably) rules out the UK and America. So that leaves us with the USSR/East Germany or West Germany. Anyone on HN want to solve a murder? My email's in my profile :) I feel like that'd be a really interesting group, even if none of us could put much time into it.
- tiatia 9y ago"The multiple passports are fascinating" 1. This is a broad assumption. "this means she would have had several fake passports." Make this a "should". I have checked so often into hotels that either did not check my passport or did not look at it. 2. 70ies passports were easy to fake. In fact, I knew somebody who "professionally" faked and manipulated passports to help people escape from the GDR (East Germany) when he was a student.
- owenversteeg 9y agoFWIW, I have also checked into hotels that don't check my passport (or look at it) but the vast majority of them do check and write down the info. Especially in Nordic countries I find people do check the insides of passports. Six days ago I checked into a hotel in a Nordic country and they checked both of my passports and looked carefully at the photos, in sharp contrast to the rest of the world. I think, especially for a foreign woman in small Norwegian places in the 70s, that people would check passports. And yes, 70s passports were easier to fake. Still, if she had multiple fake passports, as well as with the circumstances from the article, I have a feeling that this isn't just some independent person playing spy. Using a fake passport to escape the GDR makes sense: that's something a non-spy would do. Using multiple fake passports to check into hotels in a foreign country, meeting with Germans in Norway, evading detection, then getting killed by someone who knew what they were doing? That doesn't sound like a non-spy. But yes, the problem here is that if each of my assumptions has a 10% chance of being wrong, and I make 5 assumptions, my final categorization has about a 60% chance of being correct. Still, it can put the search on the right track: searching a small list of people (short female aged 25-40 that was a USSR, GDR or BRD spy in the year 1970 with gold teeth and brown eyes) makes the search a hell of a lot easier.
- arghimonmobile2 9y agoThe thing that strikes me is that she used American date notation on the "coded" note -- AFAIK no Europeans put the month first. Probably a red herring though ;)
- malydok 9y agoThat's not the case here. The only way America differs from Europe in writing the date is when you include the year. She didn't do that on the note, so whether it's "October 22" or "22nd of October" carries little meaning. I'd go for the shorter O22 myself as well.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoNRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) have a web site about this case: https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/gaten-i-isdalen-1.13182053 https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/gaten-i-isdalen-1.13182053 (English version: https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/the-isdalen-mystery-1.13249066 https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/the-isdalen-mystery-1.13249...). There are a few other mysterious cases of unidentified people, the most famous of which is the Somerton Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case) (warning: contains mortuary photograph). There's also Peter Bergmann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bergmann_Case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bergmann_Case) (warning: contains mortuary photograph) and Lyle Stevik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyle_Stevik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyle_Stevik). Two recent British cases have been solved, Emmanuel Caillet (https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/jan/05/weekend7.weekend1 https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/jan/05/weekend7...) and David Lytton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lytton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lytton).
- Cole_Jontrane 9y agoRemember when people thought this was a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion
- oliyoung 9y agoAdelaide, Australia has a similar story “Somerton Man” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case
- bingomad123 9y agoGood one but not as mysterious as Tamam Shud case.