This week we’ve got two cold cases from Norway which remain unsolved, the deaths of Jennifer Fairgate and The Isdal Woman. One of these cases has been back in the news lately due to its being featured on the new series of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix. Jennifer Fairgate, the pseudonym of the woman found dead at the Plaza Hotel in Oslo, and the Isdal Woman, were both found dead in Norway with no real identification, all attempts to identify them have so far been unsuccessful, and there’s more than air of mystery surrounding their deaths.
On May 31, 1995 a woman registered at the Oslo Plaza Hotel under the name of Jennifer Fairgate, accompanied by a man named Lois Fairgate. Three days into her stay one of the hotel staff members realised that she hadn’t put down a credit card.
Staff at the front desk sent security up to Jennifer’s room, room 2805, but when the security man knocked on the door, he heard a gunshot from inside the room. He returned to the ground floor and contacted the police. When the room was secured and officers were able to enter, Jennifer was found with a single gunshot wound to her forehead.
The police eventually ruled Jennifer’s death a suicide, but there were still so many questions about her death, and life.
Authorities ran into trouble contacting Jennifer’s next of kin. Jennifer had given her address as being in the small town of Verlaine in Belgium, but the street number she gave didn’t exist, she’d also given a phone number that didn’t exist, but the area code was consistent with that town. Usually the police would contact Interpol (today Europol would likely be the first contact before Interpol), and officers local to her home address would track down the family and inform them of the death and help them make arrangements to collect or repatriate the body.
But officers in Belgium were unable to find Jennifer’s family, or even any record of her living in the town, and nobody in the area recognised her. The task of locating Jennifer’s family was made much harder due to the fact that no passport or any other form of ID was found amongst her possessions in the hotel room.
There was also no trace of the man named Lois Fairgate, and nobody has ever been able to identify or find him.
Jennifer was not the first woman to be found in mysterious circumstances in Norway who authorities have not been able to identify. On November 29, 1970, the body of a woman was found in the Isdalen area, which translates as Ice Valley, and is just outside of Norway’s second city Bergen. The woman’s body was discovered off a hiking trail by a family who had noticed a strong smell of burning and decided to investigate. She was lying on her back with her fists up in a boxer-like pose, and her body was severely burned beyond recognition. The family quickly returned to the nearest town and contacted the police who began investigating. Near the body the police also found a liquor bottle, two water bottles, a plastic passport container, rubber boots, a jumper, a scarf, nylon stockings, an umbrella, a purse, a matchbox, a watch, two earrings, and a ring. A fur hat was also found nearby which had traces of petrol on it.
Three days after the woman’s body was found in the Isdalen area, police found two suitcases at a train station in Bergen which had belonged to the woman, who became known as the Isdal Woman. Inside the suitcases police found currency from Norway, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Belgium, along with wigs, non-prescription glasses, and a notebook which detailed her movements around Europe. A fingerprint on the glasses lens matched the fingerprint of the Isdal Woman. Police managed to identify hotels she stayed at while in Norway, all of which were filled out in either French or German, and although the woman used different names, addresses, and dates of birth, each time, she identified herself as Belgian.
Unlike Jennifer Fairgate, who had no form of identification in her possessions, the Isdal Woman had eight passports in her belongings, all of which were aliases.
Just like Jennifer Fairgate, the Isdal Woman’s death was eventually ruled a suicide, and in February 1971 the investigation into her death was closed and she was given a Catholic burial in Bergen. Investigators theorised that she was Catholic because she used Saint’s names for her aliases. She was buried in a Zinc coffin which is supposed to be one of the most hardwearing materials for a coffin, in the hopes that eventually she would be identified and her remains could be moved and reinterred close to her family and loved ones.
An autopsy revealed that she had ingested at least 50 sleeping pills before her death and there was smoke in her lungs, indicating that her body had been set on fire before she died. However, the sleeping pills hadn’t been digested by the time she died.
Even though both Jennifer Fairgate and the Isdal Woman’s deaths were recorded as suicides there are many questions and theories about foul play being involved in their deaths, and one of the most popular theories in both cases is espionage.
There are a number of similarities between the two women and the way they died.
When investigators examined clothing belonging to each of the women, they found that all of the labels had been removed from each item of clothing. According to Norwegian intelligence expert Ola Kaldager, who contributes to the Unsolved Mysteries episode on Jennifer, this is common practice within secret services because it makes it more difficult for authorities to narrow down the country the person comes from. The language used on the labels would usually narrow down the country, or group of countries where the person could have come from. It would also give investigators a better idea of what kind of person they were, what kind of income they had depending upon where they shopped, were the clothes from average high street stores or where they from more expensive, exclusive boutique shops which investigators could visit and ask staff if they recognised the woman.
In the Isdal Woman’s case, there were prescription medications found among her belongings and the label had been removed from the packaging along with the prescription stickers which made it impossible to find out which country the medicine came from, nevermind who prescribed it and who they prescribed it to.
The causes, or methods, of death have been questioned a lot in both cases. Self-immolation is a rare way to end your own life. In the case of Jennifer Fairgate, the single gunshot to the head was definitely the cause of death, but whether or not she pulled the trigger is the subject of much discussion. Although blood spatter pattern analysis is now generally considered a junk science, if a person shoots themself in the forehead, it is almost certain that they will have some form of blood splatter and gunshot residue on their hand. But Jennifer’s hands were clean, and the gun was found resting on her chest with her thumb on the trigger, not her finger. While it is possible that she could have shot herself and fallen backwards on the bed where she was found, and her hand had fallen neatly on her chest, according to contributors to the Unsolved Mysteries episode, it is unusual for her to have been able to fire the gun using her thumb. Gun experts claim that the powerful kickback from the gun, and the unusual grip would make it almost impossible for her to have kept a hold of the gun when she fell back on the bed.
To add even more suspicion, there were two shots fired in her hotel room, the fatal shot, and another shot into one of the pillows. The most popular theories posit that Jennifer had actually been dead for some time when the security guard knocked on the door and that the shot had been fired to warn off whoever was at the door and give the assassin in her room time to get away knowing that whoever was at the door would run and get help.
The security guard who heard the gunshot said that there was a period of about 15 minutes between him leaving the corridor following the gunshot and security returning to the room, which would have been ample time for a anyone inside to escape.
The Isdal Woman also was not without some strange goings on during her own hotel stays. As well as Bergen, the woman had stayed in Oslo, Trondheim, and Stavanger, each of them under a different alias, but she had requested to change rooms multiple times throughout her stay. Staff at the hotels remember her because of all this room switching, and all describe her as having been guarded and spending a lot of time in her room. While she may have been worried about being followed, and trying to hide by swapping rooms, she was making herself more identifiable to staff and potentially to other guests at the various hotels.
In 1970 and 1995 there were media campaigns to try and identify the Isdal Woman and Jennifer, both in Norway and in Belgium where it was thought that both of them were from, but these campaigns were unsuccessful, and nobody ever came forward to identify either woman. Most recent attempts used stable isotope analysis of Jennifer and the Isdal woman’s teeth.
The Isdal Woman’s jawbone was never buried and had been retained along with organ samples for future examination. The Isdal Woman had had some very interesting dental work done, she had a number of fillings and half-crowns which were identified as being of a style of dentistry typically found in Southern and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. During her stays at the various hotels the Isdal Woman was observed speaking in German, French, Flemish and English, this along with her check-in papers listing her nationality as Belgian led investigators to believe that she was from this area of Europe, somewhere in the region where the French, Belgian, Luxembourgish and German borders met. But the examination of her teeth massively increased the area where she might have been from. It went from a small border region to half of Europe, Russia and the whole of Central Asia. Which if you’ve been keeping track of our time frame, basically encompasses a big chunk of the Soviet Union. She died in 1970 which was pretty much smack bang in the middle of the Cold War, and just three years later many Soviet and Israeli spies were found to be living in Norway. She may not have been a Soviet citizen, but she may have spent a large amount of her adult life there. Her jawbone was used to carry out isotope analysis and Jennifer’s body was exhumed for samples to be taken.
Isotope analysis has many uses, it examines the isotope signature of a place and time, by measuring the levels of different types of radiation and certain elements in the atmosphere and in particular in the water supply. These isotope signatures become kind of embedded in our teeth where we are very small children. When it comes to trying to identify a Jane Doe, or John Doe, isotope analysis focuses on the carbon isotope found in the enamel of a person’s teeth, this carbon isotope will correspond to a time and place where the person was born.
In the case of the Isdal Woman, the isotope signature of her teeth matched that of an area in Germany near the French border in 1930, meaning she was either born in that region in 1930, or moved there as a very small child. So finally, investigators were able to give the Isdal Woman a fairly accurate age; she would have been around 40 years old when she died.
Isotopic analysis carried out on Jennifer, found that she was born in 1971 in Eastern Germany, which at the time would have been the country of East Germany. It also meant that she would have been about 24 years old when she died.
Now, you might be thinking that if scientists have been able to do isotopic analysis then why haven’t they also done full DNA profiling and begun searching for Jennifer and the Isdal Woman’s identities using forensic genealogy in the same process that ultimately caught the Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo?
Profiles have been developed for both of the women and they have been sent out with an Interpol Black Notice. A black notice means that authorities are searching for information regarding unidentified bodies. If we understand the process properly, this means that Interpol is requesting individual countries to check the profiles of the two women against their national DNA databases and report back if there is a match. As far as we can find out there have been no matches. So naturally the next step would be forensic genealogy. Although the DNA profiles have been distributed by Interpol, Norwegian law enforcement are not giving permission for them to be run through the main DNA sites such as Ancestry.com or GEDmatch.
Unless the Norwegian law enforcement and national security agencies decide to release both the Isdal Woman and Jennifer’s DNA for comparison on large international DNA sites such as Ancestry and GEDmatch, it seems quite unlikely that we will ever know their true identities. Although there is still a chance that someone will recognise Jennifer from the composite images and artist impressions that have been created over the years, the Isdal Woman would have turned 90 this year, and time is running out for someone to come forward and identify her.
FURTHER READING:
What Unsolved Mysteries Leaves Out
Unsolved Mysteries – Death In Oslo
Death In Ice Valley – The Isdal Woman
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