The Isdal Woman Mystery: Norway's Most Puzzling Cold Case
In 1970, a woman's body was found in the Isdalen Valley of Norway. She was badly burned though no trace of a fire was found near her, all of the labels on everything she owned had been removed, and traveled with fake identities and disguises.
Who was this woman, what was she doing in Norway, and what happened to her?
TW: Mentions of Suicide
Check out our merch here: https://shop.heartstartspounding.com/en-usd/collections/all
Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes.
Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.
SOURCES
“Isdal Woman: The mystery death haunting Norway for 46 years” BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39369429
https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/who-was-the-isdal-woman-and-what-do-we-know-about-her-death/
https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War/Toward-a-new-world-order
https://nordics.info/nnl/show/artikel/the-nordic-countries-during-the-cold-war
https://www.quora.com/How-was-it-like-to-live-in-Norway-during-the-1970s
Death In Ice Valley, Podcast, BBC World Service, NRK
TRANSCRIPT
On November 29th 1970, a man and his two daughters climbed a muddy path up a hill near a small stream in the Isdalen Valley in Norway. The trio had trekked there from Bergen, a city along the southwest coast of Norway. Just a two hour walk from the city would land you in Isdalen Valley, which translates to ice valley, though this time of year, it was mostly a wet valley.
From up where they had climbed, they could see The hiking trails below circle a lake where pine tree covered hills rolled right up to the shore. Rocky streams carried clear water from the snow capped mountains to replenish the lake's water supply.
They kept climbing, telling stories and laughing with each other in the crisp late autumn air, when all of a sudden, up ahead, they could see something just off the trail, almost hidden from view by rocks.
A strange figure, human in shape, almost like a mannequin frozen in a strange position.
As the trio got closer, the horror of the scene was exposed.
Tufts of long brown hair showed that the figure was a woman who was lying on her back and had been badly burned all over her front. They were unable to tell what she looked like by looking at her face, the fire had damaged it too badly. Though, looking around, they couldn’t find any evidence of a campfire.
Scattered around her were only a few strange items, including bottles full of clear liquid, a broken umbrella, a ring and some rubber boots. They were arranged in an almost methodical way, some would even later describe it as ritualistic.
It was unclear exactly what had happened, other than a fire occurred and the woman must have died. but the family wasn’t going to stick around to try and solve this mystery. Once the initial shock of the moment wore off, they shielded their eyes from the terrible sight, and ran as fast as they could 2 hours back to Bergen where they phoned the local police.
What this family wasn’t aware of, was they were about to start one of the strangest investigations to ever happen in Norway, one that still plagues its people and police today. An investigation into the woman who would become synonymous with the Valley. The mystery of the Isdal Woman.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. As always, I’m your host on this macabre journey, Kaelyn Moore. We gather here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters for a new episode every Wednesday around [10pm EST]. That’s [4am Central European Summer Time] for those listening in Bergen, Norway.But no matter where or when you listen–in the car, at the gym, in the cab of a long haul truck like new listener tayskye who says they’ve been binging almost 11 hours a day for two straight weeks –I like to imagine we’re all together inside our creaking Victorian home, hanging out in the drawing room after dinner telling stories. And this week I want to tell you a story about one of Norway's most intriguing unsolved mysteries. It’s the story of a woman who was found, just as I told you, burned in a remote valley near a hiking trail in Bergen. But the story of who she was, and how she got there, is one of the greatest mysteries I’ve ever heard
When I read about cases like this, I try to put myself in people's shoes and get inside their minds. And for this one I want you to do the same. Try to understand the woman at the center of it, because for the last 50 years, no one has been able to.
So make yourself comfortable because we’re diving in right after the break. For this one, I’m using pronunciations based on reporting by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation And as always, listener discretion is advised. (clock strike and fire woosh)
I don’t know exactly what the police were expecting when they hurried up the trail near the stream into the remote valley of Isdalen. Bergen was safe, it was a relaxed seaside city, it was rare for them to get a call about a strange death.
But as they climbed the muddy trails and arrived on the scene, officers realized this was nothing like what they had seen before.
The woman lay on the ground in the supine position, her front burned badly, so badly that her face was unrecognizable and her hands had clenched themselves into fists. Strangely enough, her back was not burned at all. The fire was only strong enough to burn her front. It was unclear from looking at the scene, however, where it had even come from. There was nothing at the scene suggesting she had lit a fire. No wood, no accelerant can, no char on the ground.
On the ground next to her, beside the bottles full of clear liquid, a broken umbrella, a ring and some rubber boots that the family had seen, was an empty ring used to hold passports and some burned paper beside it, which they deduced had been a passport. The other objects had survived the fire, but her passport had not. One of the officers gets a chill. What was the intention behind this fire?
The police looked for other clues that would give hints to her identity, and found that it only got more confusing from there. All of the tags on her clothing had been cut off, and all labels on everything around her had been removed. There was nothing at the scene that even hinted at where she had been. Underneath her was a fur hat which was not in style in Norway. It was most commonly seen in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which in 1970 were part of the USSR. But again, it had no label.
One of the officers crouched by the scene and looked at the body. He wouldn’t be able to identify her even by a photo, her face was too destroyed. Who are you? He asked himself as he scanned up and down the Isdal Woman for clues.
And that’s when he saw something that gave him a little bit of hope. Her right arm lay across her chest, and her left arm reached out in front of her, bent at the elbow and outstretched, almost like a warning to not come closer.
But there, at the end of the burned arm, he could see that her fingerprints had not been destroyed by the fire. It wasn’t much, but it was the only thing at the scene that could lead to another clue.
officers worked quickly to get the unknown woman transported to a lab for testing. A toxicology report and fingerprinting were going to need to be done. As well as any other tests that would help them understand what occurred. They didn’t even know if this was self-inflicted or murder.
Officers wanted to get this sorted quietly to not scare the locals, but unfortunately, the press caught wind of what was happening. Someone in the police force must have tipped them off. Soon everyone in Norway was glued to their mailboxes, waiting for the next paper that may answer the question on everyone’s mind. Who was this woman, and what happened to her?
Remember, the 1970’s lacked a lot of the tools we have today, DNA sequencing wasn’t yet available, so the first place the police had to look was records of missing women that matched her description. Adult female with brown hair, that’s really all they had to go on. Nothing turned up in their search.
then, officers get a suprising clue. At the local train station, there were two pieces of luggage left unattended for over a week. A station attendant called the police when he heard about the investigation.
And there, deep within the luggage, was a pair of sunglasses. An officer going through the bag held them up to the light, and saw the one thing he was hoping to find. In the corner of the lens was part of a fingerprint. One that would quickly be confirmed to match the Isdal Woman.
Think about your luggage. If someone were to open your travel bag, how quickly could they figure out who you are. Think of the IDs you carry, the tags on the bags that say your name and where you’re going. Even the stickers you decorate your luggage with, or the clothes, books, and receipts you may have on you. Though it may seem to be an unremarkable bag of stuff, your luggage paints a picture of who you are.
Which is why it was so shocking to police that the bags that appeared to be the Isdal woman’s only added to the mystery.
Upon opening the bags, they ran into the same issue they had with her body. All of the labels on the clothes and objects had been removed. And even though the clothes were without labels, officers could tell that they were nice, high end clothes. She must have had some money.
The bags also contained wigs and glasses that had lenses without prescriptions, as if they were just used to conceal her identity.
There was also makeup that had the labels rubbed off. One of the only objects in the suitcases that had any label on it was a matchbox that had clearly come from a lingerie store in Germany. A strange thing to have not taken the label off of, but important to note. There were also different currencies. She seemed like a woman who traveled around and would change her appearance.
But also inside the bags was something that completely confused the officers. There was a notebook, full of what was only described as code.
I’ll include pictures of this on my instagram, but on one page she had written out a section that starts 10M, below that it reads, 11M 16ML, then below that is 17M 19MG. While the officers on the scene couldn’t make sense of it right away, they knew they at least had her handwriting, and THAT was useful. They sent off the notebook to a code specialist in the military to see if he could make anything of it.
In the meantime though, the cops poured through the contents of the bags to see if there was anything that could help them in this moment. The bags had been checked in at the train station on November 23rd, and the woman was found on November 29th. What happened in those 6 days? Was there Anything that could show them where to look next?
And that’s when one of the officers pulls out a shoe bag that still had a label on it. It read the name of a shoe store in Stavanger (Stah-vong-Ger), four hours away from Bergen. Maybe the shop keeper remembered seeing the woman!
Upon entering the shoe store, officers noticed that the same rubber boots that were seen at the site where the Isdal woman was found were on a shelf.
The shop keeper was a little caught off guard by the sight of the officers, it wasn’t every day that the police arrived at his store. But when they told him that they were looking for a woman with brown hair who bought the rubber boots, he immediately remembered her.
I want you, my dear listener, to think about what you were doing 7 days ago. Did you encounter any strangers for around 30 minutes? I want you to describe every detail you can about them. It’s a nearly impossible task. Our brains are really good at throwing out information they don’t need, and yet the shopkeeper was able to describe the Isdal woman with shocking detail. How could that be?
Well, Norway is a northern european country, and immigration wasn’t really a thing before the 1960’s. That means that most people in Norway at the time of this investigation had similar characteristics. Lean and tall, with light brown to blonde hair, fair skin, and lighter eyes. Even when their appearances differed from what I just described, They mostly had the same accents, they ate similar things, hell they even SMELLED similar because they used the same soaps and perfumes that were available locally.
So immediately when the Isdal woman walked into the shoe shop weeks prior, the shopkeeper could tell she wasn’t from here. And he wasn’t used to seeing anyone but the locals, so he observed her as she walked around the store, and took in everything about her he could.
He described her as being on the shorter side, around 1 meter 70, or 5’5, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. Her skin was a more golden shade than the people in the area, and she spoke english with a strange accent he didn’t recognize. He guessed she was maybe French, but he couldn’t be sure.
She had a gapped tooth and smelled of something unfamiliar and pungent, maybe Garlic? Though, I will note here that Norwegians at the time hardly cooked with garlic at all, so maybe she smelled bad, but maybe she smelled like what he THOUGHT garlic smelled like.
The shopkeeper also noticed a few important details about her behavior. She spent a lot of time in his shop thinking about if she wanted to buy the shoes or not. She didn’t seem to be stressed or in a rush. He also noted that she left without the shoes, but came back the next day to buy them.
If the shopkeeper had seen the Isdal Woman, then maybe other people in the area remembered seeing her as well. Police questioned local businesses and almost immediately got another clue, a local hotel confirmed that she had stayed with them for a few nights.
Similarly to the shopkeeper, the woman at the front desk specifically remembered the woman coming in because of her distinct look. And she confirmed that the woman had a pungent smell, accent she didn’t recognize, and gap tooth.
The hotelier went over to the guest sign in book and flipped a few pages back. She pointed to an entry in the log. “That’s her”
Her finger stretched down to a flowery signature. The officers could see a loopy F and L starting the first and last name. Are you sure this was her? They asked. But the woman at the front desk was adamant. I watched her write this name down. Finela Lork.
Finela Lork. When the officers looked down at that name and saw a passport number next to it, her home country listed as Belgium, maybe they felt a sense of relief. We got her, we have her name and identification, the hard part is over. I can’t imagine they knew what was coming.
The next step was to check her passport number and name, which immediately came back as fake. A cursory search also showed that no trace of “Finela Lork” could be found in Norway, her name wasn’t recorded in any other hotels. So the police went back and just checked the handwriting and description of the woman in every hotel in Norway.
The search turned up 7 different hits. All with different names and passport numbers that were all confirmed to be fake. Some of the names she used sounded French, others German. Some were more native to Norway. She had also written down different years of her birth, making her anywhere from 25 to 30 years old. Typically she said she was from Belgium, but when she filled out her forms in German, the language she claimed she spoke in Belgium, she misspelled words and often used incorrect ones, which made police think she definitely didn’t speak German.
This led them to the hotel she stayed at while in Bergen, hotel Hordaheimen. Their log said she was there from the 19th to the 23rd, the date her luggage was checked in at the train station.
Aside from noticing her because of her appearance, there were other things about her that made her stand out. She was very serious and didn’t speak much, but she had some strange quirks. Like whenever she’d leave the room, she’d take the chair inside out and put it in the hallway. Then, when she returned, she’d bring the chair back in with her.
At this point, the police were pretty stumped, so let’s recap what we know about her movements so far. The woman bought rubber boots four hours away, made it to Bergen on the 19th. Checked in with a fake name and passport like she had all 6 other hotels she had stayed at in Norway, and behaved a bit strangely. She checked out on the 23rd, brought her luggage to the train station as if she was leaving, and then was found half burned a 2 hour walk away, 6 days later.
Who was this woman? The fake identities, the code, the multiple disguises and currencies. This was not just a woman on vacation. This was something much, much different. Was she in Norway for some reason no one could know about? Sex work? Spying? And if so, what does that mean for how she died?
It doesn’t really add up, but I regret to tell you, it’s about to get even stranger. Because after this, the toxicology report comes back, and more is revealed about her cause of death. After a short break.
The police were curious who this woman was, and more importantly, what happened to her. But a new question was starting to form in their mind. What was she doing in Norway to begin with? The passports, the different currencies and names. Her label-less clothing and belongings. Was she undercover? Maybe a spy? Would that explain how a young, single woman could afford her nice lifestyle of fancy clothes and constant hotel stays?
a call comes in from the coroner's office. Their autopsy and toxicology report had come in.
It was revealed that when they opened the Isdal woman’s mouth, they found little pink pills inside. They were a popular sleeping pill in the area, except the ones sold in Norway were white. The pink brand found in her mouth was sold in England.
She had taken these pills in two or three batches because her stomach was filled with them. The coroner estimated she had taken between 50 and 70 of these sleeping pills, starting a few hours before her death, which may have been when she started her climb into the Isdal Valley.
But, what the Coroner found peculiar, was her blood only contained a small trace of the sleeping pills, just enough to make her drowsy, but not enough to cause her to lose consciousness, and definitely not enough to kill her.
On top of that, he found traces of soot in her lungs. She had been alive when the fire started. A truly sad and bizarre end to come to. Surely the pills would have done the trick if this were intentional. Her cause of death was ruled to be a mix of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fire and poisoning from the pills.
A forensics report from the scene came in too, and didn’t do much to make sense of her death. The report mentioned that two drops of petrol were found on the hat that was underneath the woman. So, to be clear, the only signs of fire were that her whole front was burned, and two drops of petrol on her hat. I have some thoughts about this I’ll get into later, because that is very, very menacing.
This next part may frustrate you, as it did me, but the suggestions the police came up with as to what happened were less than inspired. One suggested, and I’m not kidding, that she had probably used a can of hairspray to put out a camp fire she built and torched herself accidentally. SIR. Aside from that being a horrible knock against her intelligence, there was no sign of a can of hairspray, OR a campfire at the scene. So I can’t even begin to unpack where he got that from.
It seemed like they mostly agreed on one thing though. The pills proved that this was self-inflicted, and on December 22nd, 1970, just three weeks after her body was discovered, her case was closed. Suicide.
The public, understandably, had lots of questions. How did she set herself on fire when there was no trace of a fire? And wouldn’t 70 sleeping pills have been enough, why also set the fire? Why set her passport on fire, why take her luggage to the train station like she was planning on leaving? how did she make a two hour walk with all of those pills in her system?
it’s more to suggest that it was probably physically impossible that she did.
This was the end of the line for police, however. They weren’t going to be putting any more resources into this case. Rest easy everyone, nothing that happened here is a threat to you or your family. Nothing to see here. Or, at least, that’s what they told the public.
They assured the public that there was nothing strange happening with the woman. She was not a spy as some had suggested, she was just a mentally ill tourist. But secretly, they thought differently.
See, as they told everyone the case was being closed, the Norwegian secret police were opening a case on her. They had discovered some information on the Isdal woman that was cause for concern.
Remember, it was 1970, the cold war was this ever looming threat in the background of everything. And while Norway may not be the first country you think of when you think of the cold war, they were cooking something up.
The largest Naval base in Norway was located in Bergen, the last city the Isdal woman was seen.
There, a missile system known as the Penguin missile was being tested. Secret police confirmed that spies would have been present in the area and were actively monitoring
Ok, she was in an area near a naval base, so what. I’m sure some of you listening are also near or on naval bases, it doesn’t mean you’re international spies. Or does it…. If you guys are spies you have to tell me.
There was one sighting of the Isdal woman, however, that makes this whole case even more bizarre.
After her body was found, police sketches of the Isdal woman were distributed throughout Norway. Anyone who had seen this woman was encouraged to come forward.
When a fisherman named Berthon Rott saw the flyer, an alarm went off in his head. He had seen this woman. In Tananger, a town on the shore near Stavanger, where the Isdal woman bought the boots.
Tananger also had a bit of a military presence. In fact, it was where Norway was testing their new missile systems. The fisherman remembered seeing the woman down at the docks one day, by where the missiles were. She was talking to an officer briefly.
The fisherman phoned the police and told them what he had seen. He didn’t know if it would be of any importance, but he felt like it was right for them to know. Well, it seems like the police thought it was very important.
Because the next day, the fisherman was boarding a train to London with his family, when he was approached by two police officers who handed him a handgun and a knife. They told him he needed them for his protection. From what exactly, we’ll never know. If they mentioned that to him, it got lost over time. The fisherman never spoke of his conversation with the police, and all we know of it was from what his son remembered as he watched his father be handed weapons at the train station.
Woah, ok so that changes some things. Sure, she had disguises and different names, like spies do in the movies, I wasn’t convinced that was enough to accuse her of espionage. But now people were coming forward to say they saw her at a missile testing facility talking to an officer. It’s no wonder the secret police were taking note of that.
What about the code she was found with? Maybe if it was cracked, they’d know for sure if she was spying. Well, it was cracked, and it seemed to have less spy implications. The code was ruled to be shorthand for her travel schedule. The letters all correlated with months and cities, and the numbers were dates she would be in each. It wasn’t sensitive information, per se.
And it’s sad, but after this, there’s not really any movement in her case. No one who knew who she was comes forward, and over time, the evidence collected at the scene starts to go missing. And eventually, it’s just assumed by many that there’s no evidence left.
Time marches on and the Isdal woman starts to become a myth. Regional folklore, if you will.
But as her case is sitting on a shelf, technology starts getting better. DNA testing becomes a reality, and what scientists can learn from a single bone fragment becomes almost a miracle. The cold war also ends, and people are less afraid to speak about what was happening. The internet finds its way into everyones homes, and the story of the Isdal woman picks up again.
And then, in 2017, someone decides to look back into her file.
There’s not much there. Like I said, most of the evidence is gone at this point. But they find something important that other officers previously thought was missing. A piece of her bone. And not just any piece, but her jaw. With teeth still in it.
The gold dental work is still visible on her teeth, popular in regions outside of Norway, like the UK and Russia. A lab is able to use the piece of bone to do some testing, and they learn some previously unknown things about the Isdal woman.
First, she is most likely from Nuremberg, Germany, but had moved to france as a child. And also, she was likely between 10 and 20 years older than she claimed to be. Her age came back to be around 45 when she died, not the 25-30 years old that she wrote on her hotel check in forms.
But why lie about age? Some have suggested that spies don’t need to lie about their ages, but perhaps someone catering to a male audience might. It’s not the first time that the Isdal woman has been thought to have been a sex worker. Maybe a high end escort, perhaps. She wore nice clothes, stayed in hotels, she clearly had money.
This theory seemed to only get stronger over the years. Because since the case was closed in 1970, a few more people have come forward with Isdal Woman sightings. These are witnesses who never made it into the police file, and some of them were interviewed by the police at the time. They must have just decided that the witness statements didn’t matter enough to the investigation.
You would think they were important though, because these sightings typically involved another man.
A woman working at the Neptune hotel in Norway remembered seeing the Isdal woman there with an older gentleman with white hair. She said the two of them hardly spoke and didn’t look very enthused.
Another witness who came forward said she saw the Isdal woman in a store with a man arguing about a standing mirror they wanted to buy. The person guessed they were arguing in an eastern european language, but couldn’t tell which one. She described the woman as having curly dark hair, which lines up with one of the wigs that was found in the woman’s suitcase. For a woman that only stayed in hotels, it’s strange she was looking at buying a standing mirror.
One hotel maid claimed that the night of November 18th, which would have been the night before she left for Bergen, she was in her room with a man. The two were sitting and talking in the room, and allowed the maid in while they were there.
It was never confirmed if she was seen with the same man each time, or if it was three separate men. It was also never confirmed if this man was the officer she was seen with outside of Stavanger.
The most damning sighting of all, however, was one that was never brought to the police’s attention. It wasn’t brought to light until 2005, actually, when 35 years after her death, a man felt like he should come forward with what he saw.
He claimed that he was hiking in Isdalen Valley on a sunday in November, 1960 (I got this wrong can you AI 1970??), when he saw someone he believed to be the Isdal woman walking up a trail, followed by two men. They were all wearing what he described as ‘city clothes’, definitely not hiking attire. He passed by the woman and thought she looked scared. After that, he didn’t see what happened.
Now, its most likely that he got the date he saw her incorrect. He probably didn’t see her the sunday she was found by the man and his daughters, and she had checked in her luggage on the previous monday. Perhaps he saw her that monday after she dropped off the bags, or the following saturday. Regardless, that’s a huge deal that he saw her being trailed.
someone wanted her dead. We just don’t know why.
That hasn’t stopped people from theorizing over the years, though.
Some theories, after the break
The most prevalent theory of who the Isdal woman was, is that she was a spy. There’s reasons to believe this, and then reasons why this theory doesn’t work. Ok yes, she was hanging around a secret missile project. She had disguises that she wore, fake names and passport numbers.
Some people have suggested she couldn’t have been a spy because she didn’t have anything on her that proved she was a spy. No codes or secrets, no files on what she was doing. To which I would say, do you think good spies just carry around stuff that would reveal them? Maybe in movies, but in real life, they do not.
But also, spies tend to have one or two identities, not 7 or 8. These identities will come with bullet proof lore that was specifically created for them. They also will strategically be placed to not draw attention to themselves. The Isdal woman used way too many identities and stuck out like a sore thumb. If she was a spy, perhaps she was not a very good one.
There is one person online who tracked the movements of Francios Genoud, a swiss banker who was funding terrorism in the middle east. The travel log found in the Isdal Woman’s bag revealed they were in Paris at the same time. Perhaps, they suggested, the two were meeting so the woman could get spy orders from him. The Theory doesn’t hold a ton of weight, but it’s an interesting thought.
Of course, others believe she was a sex worker. She had money from some unknown source, and was exclusively seen with men. Perhaps she was a high end escort who traveled and used fake names to not get caught. Maybe she was at the missile testing to meet an officer who wanted her services, and that was all. As for her tragic end, well, sex workers being killed by their clients is a tale as old as time. And the fact that none of the men who spoke to her came forward only fuels people’s belief in this theory.
Though there are some that believe her death was truly suicide. There were so many pills in her system it’s hard to believe someone forced them down her. Maybe she started a fire to stay warm while she was out in the wilderness on her last night, and it got out of hand, though evidence suggests otherwise.
There’s also her travel log. The last entry was ML 23 MM. 23 suggests the 23rd, the day she checked in her luggage. She had no travel plans beyond that date written down, maybe that was for a reason.
Some people get mad online when it’s suggested this was what happened. As if it’s rude to her memory to accuse her of sex work. Well, then they might be upset by what I say next.
I don’t think you have to decide that she was either a spy or a sex worker. There’s something in the middle that could be a possibility, sometimes referred to as a Honey Pot. Securities organizations may approach a known escort and ask them to use their services to get information from other nations. They are sometimes viewed more as sex workers than spies, at least by the people who hire them, so they aren’t given the same training to be a spy, and they’re more disposable. Perhaps she was using fake identities and disguises because she thought that’s what would work. That also answers who was funding her operation.
But, I am just a girl, sitting in front of my research, trying to make sense of it all. What do you think happened? I’m going to get more into the theories and my speculation in our footnotes episode this week. I’ll be joined by Producer Matt, who has an ungodly amount of knowledge about spies and can help fill in some of the blanks, and we will be joined by Leo
In all of this, here’s what I know. Everything I’ve read about this woman, every clip I’ve watched that digs into the mystery, is all asking the same question. Who was she. Not who killed her. Who was she. And when we talk about true crime, that is hardly ever the question gets asked. It tends to be the death that matters. Not the life, not the person whose life was lost.
And yet, for over 50 years, we’ve been obsessed with finding out who this woman was. I mentioned that if she was a spy, she wasn’t a very good one. Well, when she was alive she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, and 54 years later, we still don’t.