Audrey ValezThe Woman with No Name
There's a valley outside Bergen that the locals used to avoid. Its old nickname translates as Ice Valley, and people had been dying in it, one way or another, for long enough that the name stuck. On the last Sunday of November in 1970, a man went hiking there with his two daughters, and among the rocks they found a woman's body. She had burned.
I've read a lot of files that start with a body. This is the only one I know where the body was the least strange thing the police found that day.
What was missing
Her face and the front of her body were burned past recognition. That alone would have made her hard to identify. What made her impossible was everything around her. The labels had been cut out of every piece of her clothing. The maker's marks had been scraped off her belongings. Nothing on her or near her carried a name, a brand, or a place of origin. Somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble so that nobody could ever say who she was, and it's worth sitting with the fact that the somebody may have been her.
The autopsy found phenobarbital in her system, and carbon monoxide. She was alive when the fire started. There was bruising on her neck.
Two suitcases
A few days later, police traced her to a pair of suitcases in the left-luggage office at the Bergen railway station. Inside were wigs, cash in several currencies, and cosmetics with the labels peeled away. And a notepad, filled with what looked like code.
The code turned out to be a travel log. Once it was cracked, it mapped her movements across Europe over the preceding months. She'd checked into hotels under at least eight different names, usually giving Belgian nationality, and she changed rooms often. Some of her stops were near military sites where weapons were being tested. Witnesses who'd met her along the way described a woman who spoke several languages, kept to herself, and seemed to be waiting for someone.
You can see why the spy theory took hold. It was 1970, it was Norway, and she was moving around the country like someone who'd been trained to. The Norwegian police looked at all of it and ruled her death a suicide, and closed the case.
The teeth
She was buried in Bergen in a zinc coffin, sealed, on the chance that someone would one day come for her. Decades went by. Then in 2017 a new analysis of her teeth, the isotopes laid down in them while they were forming, suggested she'd been born around 1930 near Nuremberg, in Germany, and had moved west as a child. Nobody has taken it further than that. No family has stepped forward. No missing-persons report from anywhere in Europe has ever been matched to her.
The part I keep going back to
The wigs and the code and the eight names are the spy story, and the spy story is the popular answer for a reason. What I keep going back to is the labels.
Cutting the tags out of your clothes is slow work. You do it sitting down, with scissors, one garment at a time. Whoever did it had time, and a very clear idea of what would happen next. If it was her, then a woman planned her own erasure and carried it out in a valley people were afraid of. If it wasn't her, then someone else did the planning, and the suicide ruling has been wrong for fifty years.
I can't tell you which. Nobody can. She's still in that coffin in Bergen, and the coffin is still sealed, and the reason it's sealed is that someone, once, thought there might be a name to put on it.
This case first appeared in my subscriber collection. My mailing list hears about new books before anyone else.