Isdal Woman: A mystery death haunting Norway for 46 years
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong#Tour_de_France...
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.
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
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.
The fact that most convictions rely on witnesses doesn't make me any happier. Human memory is deeply flawed.
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.
It's even used to investigate Jack the Ripper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Kosminski#DNA_evidence
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.
Around twenty years ago I did have some friends where all kinds of unusual contraband items were exchanged, up to and including passports. I was not in the market for buying one myself, however, this just seemed to be standard capitalism as applied to the black market - you could get a good fake passport or pay more and get an even better fake passport, i.e. from a decent country. I doubt that the lady was an international cocaine dealer on the run and in need of lots of passports to get across Europe but stranger things have happened and you cannot just assume the lady was a spy.
I have not studied the story any more than the article, however, the travel pattern is that of someone on the run. If you are up against a police (or intel. service) that has proper resources to track you then you are obligated to move every day. This is the most expensive lifestyle to have, not a sustainable existence. In this existence you need to be totally unpredictable, so where you stay may not have much significance other than a need to hide. In this mode of existence you also run out of friends quite quickly so staying in hotels becomes how it is done until the money runs out or you get caught.
One of these countries is not like the others… Switzerland is not a "Nordic" country by any stretch of the imagination.
Not that it's likely that the Swiss secret service had any business in that region.
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.
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.
I was several times in the situation that I had to check into Hotels without a passport or with "modified" data (don't ask). It is nearly always possible. Even in CHINA I was able to stay into hotels without a ID/passport. Something that should not be possible by law.
"Still, if she had multiple fake passports" You phrase this like a fact. If you tackle such a problem the right thing would be "she might have had..". You can never take such information as "proven facts". If I would assign something then: a 50% chance that she had faked passports.
Also, spies normally don't use so many different passports in the same country. Looks odd to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Bureau_of_State_...
Pretty tenuous but I guess some support for Germany.
By finding the killers? I doubt that very much.
By identifying the corpse? This alone doesn't quite solve the murder, but only unravels the depth of the incident. Really, to do so, someone has to spill the beans, much less than help discover a thread that cracks the case.
Sounds like what you're really doing is inviting a leak. I don't see what else would work.
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) (warning: contains mortuary photograph).
There's also Peter Bergmann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bergmann_Case) (warning: contains mortuary photograph) and 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...) and David Lytton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lytton).
(I don't have any fake passports, though, and my medications do have their printed labels.)
[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/B443/production/...
(I've seen narrators of history programmes on TV do this sometimes. It's annoying then too.)
Example: https://www.ancestry.com/dna/
downvote?! wtf?!
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/index.html
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-w...
But by all means produce your better studies than a comprehensive one by the CDC.
The figures are accurate, but there's a lot of people with an emotional investment in not believing the numbers. This phenomenon is a symptom of patriarchy, btw. Ask your feminist friends about it, you'll be amazed.
It was a telephone survey dependent upon what the respondent regards as rape. Nearly half of what they counted as "rape" were categorized "drunk/drug facilitated penetration". So they count anytime a man drugs a woman and has sex with her against her consent (which is clearly rape), as well as if a woman drinks too much, has sex, regrets it and later answers a survey that it was rape because that man should have known better.
Rape is a horrific crime. But trying to pump up the statistics by using vague and overly broad definitions isn't right either.
What would be the scientific measure of rape in this survey, 20 or 25? Do you let the victims decide what the definition of rape is, or does the scientist have a reasonable definition of rape that they apply to the victim's experience?
Now, if you're asking me how many women have been raped in a fashion that is likely to result in a conviction, I'll agree that the number is much smaller. But let's not confuse a failure in society with a society where this stuff doesn't happen.
You talk about a "scientist", only all these reports are stuck together by actual scientists, and all you've managed to produce is some flimsy MRA talking points.
TL;DR; Try believing women for once. It's surprisingly informative.
Rape is also defined (by the Rape Crisis Centre in New Zealand) as sex where one party has pressured the (unwilling) other into it, pressured the other into sexual acts, used alcohol or drugs to generate compliance, or even simply used force. Each and every one of those can be applied to a sexual encounter between a male and a female, with a non-consenting male. Would you just believe the women in those cases, too?
Something that's quite interesting to note, I've seen a citation of "The Gender of Sexuality" by Rutter and Schwartz for a claim that lesbian women reported rape by their partners in 1 out of 3 relationships, double the rate claimed for heterosexual relationships. (I haven't read the book, and the citation was quite some years ago.)
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
> 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?
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.
The victim knows that is doomed in some time, no mather what she does; and goes voluntarily to a far and solitary place to commit suicide and clean its remains for the investigators. She whore jewels and exclusive clothes and is probably worried by her aspect after the suicide. She takes painkillers to assure the death.
The case is associated probably with skin damage (eccema treatment) and maybe tooth decay, and the victim dines in public, and travel by several countries, so there is not a fear of contagious at least in this phase, this suggests that is not a biological live weapon (no waiters fell ill later)
Mushrom poisoning causes not eccema; therefore the killer agent would be probably of radioactive nature (Polonium?)
Should be relatively easy to check if the jawbone is radioactive and if gold and other metals in teeth are aplied in one or more than one time suggesting a beating or sudden tooth decay.
If tags are missing we could assume exclusive clothes. As we have a description of the colour and style of clothes exclusive could mean traceable materials, pigments and fabrics.
fingers and teeth all there; clearly not foul play; maybe accidental overdose during interrogation?
possible suicide, why not?
latent poison as murder weapon; she did it to hasten a very slow death; she had bad skin;
polonium, biological weapons, secret laboratories, tooth decay, dentistry, mushrooms...
unmarked clothes, no giveaway
> Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.
Or just unmanaged mental illness, leading to suicide. A lot of the reason things are unexplainable or confusing might be that there is no logical or coherent rationale for them - they are simply the paranoid responses to delusional fantasies.
Not. I was thinking in a post-mortem "cleaning" of the corpse. Why to remove the tags in clothes but forget to distroy the fingerprints if they where professionals? It seems that badly damaged but partial fingerprints where recovered.
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.
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.