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FILE 089 · VOL XVI · They Were Never Caught

She Had Eight Fake Names. The Ninth Is Yours.

The best way to disappear is to become everyone.

Based on: The Isdal Woman

Intake record

Recovered file

On November 29, 1970, a man and his two daughters were hiking in the Isdalen valley outside Bergen, Norway, a rocky, lonely place locals sometimes called Death Valley. [1] Among the rocks, they found a woman's body.

She had been badly burned. Around her lay strange objects: a melted plastic bottle, a broken wristwatch, a few pieces of jewelry, a burned passport case with nothing inside it, and the remains of a fur hat. [2] Every label had been cut out of her clothes. The makers' marks had been removed from everything she owned. [3]

At the Bergen railway station, police found two suitcases that belonged to her. Inside were wigs, clothing, cosmetics, sunglasses, and money from several countries. There was also a notebook with a list of letters and numbers written in a code. [4]

As detectives investigated, they discovered that the woman had traveled around Norway and Europe using at least eight different false identities, with different names and passports. [5] She changed hotels often. She changed rooms. She told hotel staff she was a traveling saleswoman or an antiques dealer. She spoke several languages. [6]

Police eventually decoded the notebook. It was a list of dates and places, a record of where she had been. [7] It did not tell them who she was.

The official ruling was suicide. Many people, including some who worked on the case, have never believed it.

In 2017, the Norwegian broadcaster NRK reopened the investigation with new forensic tests on her teeth. The results suggested she was born around 1930 and grew up in or near Nuremberg, Germany. [8]

Her name has never been found. She is buried in an unmarked grave in Bergen, in a coffin made of zinc, in case anyone ever comes to claim her. [9]

Signe Haugland bought the guidebook in a box of old books from an estate sale. It was a 1969 English-language guide to Norway, cheap and common. She would have priced it at twenty kroner and forgotten it.

But someone had written in the margins.

Pencil. A neat, small hand. Every page had marks. A circle around a hotel in Trondheim. An arrow beside a ferry schedule in Stavanger. Lists of numbers and letters beside the photographs, in a pattern that looked almost like the notebook police had found.

Inside the back cover was a receipt from a Bergen hotel for a room in November 1970. The name on the receipt was Elisabeth Leenhouwer.

Signe looked it up that night. Elisabeth Leenhouwer was one of the eight false names the Isdal Woman had used. [10]

She took the book to a friend who worked in cryptography at the university. He spent three weeks on it. When he came back, he looked older.

"It isn't a code like the one in the suitcase," he said. "That one was a travel diary. This is different. It's a set of instructions."

He had decoded the first page. It was written in German.

To become another person, you must give away a piece of yourself each time. A name. A face. A home. A language. Every identity costs one piece. Eight pieces is the limit. Take a ninth, and there is nothing left of you to come back to.

Never take a ninth name.

On the last page, she had written something else. Not in code. In plain German, pressed so hard the pencil had gone through the paper.

They know the eight names. They are coming for the woman under all of them. Tonight I take the ninth. Let them find no one.

Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.