DiscoverScroll article

1930–1945 – November 1970) is a placeholder name given to an unidentified woman who was found dead at Isdalen ("The Ice Valley") in Bergen, Norway, on 29 November 1970.

Although police at the time ruled a verdict of likely suicide, the nature of the case encouraged speculation and ongoing investigation in the years since. Half a century later, it remains one of the most profound cold case mysteries in Norwegian history.

On the morning of 29 November 1970, a man and his two young daughters were hiking in the foothills of the north face of Ulriken, in an area known as Isdalen ("Ice Valley"); it was also nicknamed "Dødsdalen" ("Death Valley") due to the area's history of suicides in the Middle Ages and more recent hiking accidents. They came across the charred body of a woman located among some scree.

Three days later, investigators found two suitcases belonging to the woman which had been abandoned at Bergen railway station. As a result, based on handwritten check-in forms, police determined that the woman had travelled around Norway (i.e.

Claudia Tielt, place of birth Brussels, living at Rue de la Madeleine 3, Brussels One witness said that she overheard the woman talking to a man in German in a Bergen hotel.

A fisherman is also reported to have seen the woman in the area of Penguin missile testing in Stavanger; her presence in Stavanger is corroborated by a shoe salesman who sold her a pair of rubber boots.

The taxi driver who took the woman from the hotel to Bergen railway station was never found. In 1991, however, a taxi driver wishing to remain anonymous said that after picking up the unknown woman at the hotel, they were joined by another man for the ride to the railway station. In 2005, a Bergen resident, who was aged 26 in 1970, told a local newspaper that after seeing the sketch circulated, he had suspected that the Isdal Woman was a woman he had seen five days before the body was discovered, when he was hiking on the hillside at Fløyen. After the case was reopened in 2016, Norwegian broadcaster NRK commissioned the American artist Stephen Missal to create six alternative sketches of the Isdal Woman, which were shown to people who had seen her. In 2017, stable isotope analysis of the woman's teeth (taken from her unburied jawbone) indicated that the woman had been born in about 1930, plus or minus four years, in or near Nuremberg, Germany, but had moved to France or the France–Germany border as a child. In 2018, NRK and the BBC World Service published a podcast series titled Death in Ice Valley, which included interviews with eyewitnesses and forensic scientists, also suggesting that the Isdal Woman's birthplace may have been southern Germany or the French-German border region, and that she was probably born in or around 1930. Author Dennis Zacher Aske proposed that the Isdal Woman was a sex worker, based on the way that her route was planned (goal-oriented and always returning to the same point, probably her home), her wish to remain anonymous, her behaviour at hotels (including marking the doors in different ways) and the fact that the different men she was witnessed meeting never came forward. In 2019, after a publication of an article in the French newspaper Le Républicain Lorrain, a resident of Forbach claimed to have had a relationship with the Isdal Woman in the summer of 1970. On June 12, 2023, an article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung suggested that the Isdal Woman may have had connections with the Swiss banker François Genoud, and that Norwegian Intelligence Service (E-tjenesten) interfered with local police investigations.

Morgan, David, Isdal Woman – A New Perspective, Northampton 2021 ASIN B08XZQCT1G

Quick Facts

• They came across the charred body of a woman located among some scree.
• Although police at the time ruled a verdict of likely suicide, the nature of the case encouraged speculation and ongoing investigation in the years since.
• On June 12, 2023, an article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung suggested that the Isdal Woman may have had connections with the Swiss banker François Genoud, and that Norwegian Intelligence Service (E-tjenesten) interfered with local police investigations.
• In 2019, after a publication of an article in the French newspaper Le Républicain Lorrain, a resident of Forbach claimed to have had a relationship with the Isdal Woman in the summer of 1970.
• After the case was reopened in 2016, Norwegian broadcaster NRK commissioned the American artist Stephen Missal to create six alternative sketches of the Isdal Woman, which were shown to people who had seen her.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Isdal Woman". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.