Chapter 1: Who was the Isdal Woman and why is her case significant?
Hi, I'm Juliet Cowley, a retired FBI profiler and host of the True Crime podcast, The Consult, Real FBI Profilers. If you're fascinated with true crime and criminal profiling, then join us as we discuss real cases and examine the behavior exhibited before, during, and after the commission of the crime. You can listen to The Consult wherever you get your podcasts.
It's as close as it gets to being in the room with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are The Prosecutors. Today on The Prosecutors, we conclude our look at the Isdale woman. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett, and I'm joined, as always, by my Ona Volgbar co-host, Alice.
I'm glad you came up with that because, you know, we promised people five episodes of Hisdale Woman, and here we are on six, so you had to come in strong with a descriptor. And I've got to think that you've been practicing that all week because I could never say that. So that means inimitable in Dutch, which they speak in Belgian. Belgium. Belgium. Belgish. In Belgish.
To go with our theme of our Isdale Woman. Thank you, Stephanie, for that and for all the help over the course of these.
episodes as we have looked at this great mystery alice i've really enjoyed this one if you enjoy this one i feel like we're finishing up today we are probably finishing up today as she said hopefully but i've loved this because i will say it started out as a complete mind boggler to me and i was afraid i wouldn't reach a conclusion because it is a very mind-boggling case and it is incredibly mysterious one of the most mysterious i think that we've ever covered
But I think I'm going to come up with a conclusion. You've got it. You got it solved. I don't know that it's solved, but I think I have centered on a conclusion because there are times when I haven't centered on a conclusion, you know. Yeah, and look, this one's been so much fun to me just because of all the listener interaction.
I mean, we've had so many great emails from people, people pointing out little things like, remember how we talked about it was weird that she had furs and skirts? Well, apparently that's what people wear, especially in Eastern Europe. They like to wear their furs and their skirts. Makes sense. If you're going to wear skirts, it's going to be cold. You've got to load up the furs. Hot up top.
Cause she can be cold down below. Right. So anyways, stuff like that. Great stuff. And we have some more listener comments we wanted to start off with as we embark on this finale. So this one, I'm not going to say the person's name because they get into some personal stuff. In this email, but I thought this one was worth reading. So this person says to me, this is a clear suicide.
I think she went to Norway is one additional way of ending your life after intentional overdose is to let hypothermia set in. Plus, it is beautiful. This is how I have tried to. This person has attempted to take their own life before. Take a lot of crushed pills mixed with juice and lie down in a cold place. a scenic place, and let nature do its thing.
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Chapter 2: What theories exist about the Isdal Woman's death?
So, remember, the store clerk at the boot shop, who still works there to this day, as we said, commented that she had an unusual smell. So, she's incredibly well put together. She's striking. She's polished. She looks like a lady of class. You know, she's attractive. This guy found her to be attractive. But the smell was off-putting. And later on... he would decide this was garlic.
At the time, garlic was not popular in Norway. It was not a smell he was familiar with. But when he later became familiar with garlic, it instantaneously reminded him of the Isdale woman. And the fact that she had this unusual smell was something that multiple people commented on. He was the one who really identified garlic.
Others would say it was sort of a spicy smell, a pungent aroma, like maybe she was wearing an exotic perfume. perfume. So it could be something like that. But let's assume for a second that it actually was a garlic smell that he smelled. What could account for that?
Garlic, yes, but also onions, certain Eastern European dishes, certain fish preparations, and perhaps most intriguingly, certain cured meats can all have a garlic smell and can all cause someone to smell garlic. So what else can smell like garlic? Arsenic poisoning, industrial compounds, organ failure, specifically the liver or kidneys.
But there's one thing in particular that could have caused the smell. Sulfur-based treatment for skin conditions. In fact, these treatments were the standard treatment in German-speaking countries, with German spa towns emphasizing these treatments. And the further east you went, the more popular these treatments were.
And wouldn't you know it, a cream for eczema was found in her belongings, though this was a cream prescribed in Norway that did not have a smell. Still, it shows she did have some sort of a skin problem that could have been treated with these kinds of creams.
So it's worth noting that Isdale was often described as wearing multiple layers, long sleeves, all of which could have been used to cover skin irritation. So I had been thinking about this a lot because the smell was so pungent or noticeable, despite her looking pretty put together. And we know that she had access, for example, to a shower because everywhere she went, she stayed somewhere.
So it's not like she was a vagrant living on the streets who may have had bodily odor because she didn't have access to a shower. I've thought a lot about the fact that people noticed it, not so much with what she ate, because you'd have to be continuously eating the garlic for so many people in different Times of the day and different days to notice the smell.
I've always thought this must be something emanating from her. And the first thing that came to mind was liver disease. We know that that's a very common smell of death, right? Like this is why you can have dogs that are trained to be able to sense death.
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Chapter 3: How did listener insights contribute to the investigation?
Well, she disappeared six days before she was found. And remember, on November 23rd, there are multiple contemporaneous reports about smoke rising from the valley that day. And given the fire, it just really seems like she died on November 23rd. She's found on November 29th. So she would have already been dead most likely when this person saw this woman.
And once again, matching her description, what does that even mean? And recall, this is an area that people in the city, they would go to. They would walk this path. This was not unusual for people just like on a lunch break to head out, right, and take a little walk. So seeing someone in the city not dressed for the valley isn't necessarily unusual. So I think we can't discount that.
this sighting altogether, but I feel like I don't put a lot of stock in it and it does not move me much when I think about my theories of this case. I think it's fair to basically discount this sighting this many years later, not because this person has any like ill intent, but it's just 36 years later and it's very specific on the timing and it's just really hard to verify anything like that.
And if you just think about any case we've covered with lots of different sightings, there are always sightings that end up being wrong. So even if this was a legitimate sighting, it doesn't mean it's her. It just means it's a woman with two men out for a walk. Okay, so that concludes our sort of look at the evidence in this case. Let's talk about theories.
And we're just going to start with the answer because that's what we like to do. Well, we like to not hide the ball. Yeah, we don't hide the ball. So let's just go with it because it's already been 40 minutes, so we should just do it. Okay. The Isdale woman was a vampire hunter. And we have solid evidence for this. I mean, she has this transient lifestyle. She's moving around constantly.
She's hiding her identity. She doesn't want to be tracked. She is using garlic in excess to ward off any potential attacks by the vampires. I think it's even possible she was a vampire herself, but also a vampire hunter. So she's kind of like Blade. Like an early version of Blade. But literally, she had blades.
you know it was a little that's a good probably to sharpen all the twigs she was finding in the isdale valley so she couldn't walk around with stakes because that's weird you can't walk through like the you know train station with that It's also possible that the garlic was some sort of, you know, that we've gotten the lore wrong and that garlic actually protects vampires from sunlight.
And that what she did was she went out to the Isdale Valley. She just wanted to look upon the sun one time before she died. And then, of course, what happens when the sun hits a vampire? She wasn't burned by fire. She was burned by sun. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why the fire is very surface level. That's why it's connected to her death. And so and that's why her hands were up as well.
She was trying to reach for the sun in her last movements. Exactly. Exactly. So and can you dispute it? Can you deny it? Can you prove it's the wrong? I don't think you can. So vampire hunter, that is theory number one. And I challenge you guys out there to disprove that theory. Good luck.
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Chapter 4: What evidence suggests the Isdal Woman may have been a spy?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the Isdal Woman's multiple identities?
And that tells me that she planned her trips to Norway, not in Paris, not in Rome, but in this place where she bought those maps. And it looks like she bought those maps in England. So I think her base of operation, R, is Reading. I think it's the place that she ended up after the war.
So I think the reason she uses all the Belgian stuff is because she's not going to use England because that's where she's actually from. Right. That's where she actually lives. That's where actual base of operations is. But she has this deep connection to the place that she spent the formative years of her childhood, Belgium.
And so she's using these names that she remembers from that time for all these various identification things. documents. So that's where I think she was from. Now, what was she doing? I think there's two possibilities, two really strong possibilities. One is that she is in some sort of organized criminal gang.
So the Romani people, as most people know, have a stereotype and it's that they're involved in various frauds, right? And this is a stereotype they've been fighting for a very long time. But the stereotype, much like the whole Italian people are all in the mafia, is It does have some basis in truth. There have been organized Romani gangs for a very long time. How do I know this?
I've prosecuted one. When I was in the Eastern District of Virginia, we had one that was running this scam across the country. Very sophisticated scam, but not also where they would buy breast pumps. This is the way the scam worked. They'd go to Target as soon as Target opened.
They would buy the most expensive item in Target, which was this one breast pump that cost like an ungodly amount of money. It's like 800 bucks, right? They'd buy the breast pump. They would then immediately return it and get the money back. But Target had this policy of not marking your receipt because they didn't want people to feel like they didn't trust them. So there was their policy.
The second thing they had was their receipts did not, I don't know what the word is. Register? Yeah, I mean, basically, it wasn't until the next day that all of these receipts would be organized in the computer, whatever the word is I'm looking for.
So these folks knew that for 24 hours, they could return that breast pump over and over and over again, get their money back, and the receipt wouldn't show as returned. So they would go from Target to Target doing this with basically fake boxes that they had bought that looked just like the breast pump box that had these like parts in it that looked like breast pump parts, but actually weren't.
So if anybody looked in there, they'd be like, okay, they're in there, right? And they would just return this over and over and over again, just driving from Target to Target doing this. And they would make thousands of dollars a day doing this. Returning these every single day. This is what they did. Anyways, so like this is a thing that happens.
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Chapter 6: How does the Isdal Woman's case connect to broader themes of identity and belonging?
I'm sorry, ma'am, your period is over. So they may not even know that her life was ended because they were never going to call her again. Spy agencies are just giant bureaucracies. I mean, there's some excitement there and, you know, things happen, but they're also just giant bureaucracies and giant bureaucracies don't care a lot for the people at the bottom.
But look, there are no wrong answers in this case. I mean, there might be. Vampire Hunter might be a wrong answer, but because we don't know. So we're interested in your thoughts, what you think happened here. Shoot us an email, prosecutorspot at gmail.com. Let us know. Give us some reasons for it. You know, back it up with some evidence, point to some things like we always do.
We're always happy to hear new theories. It's funny because think about this case. This is a case that's really hard to... To do sort of the Occam's razor thing with. Right. Because I don't actually know what the quote unquote simplest answer is. The simplest answer might be that she's a low level courier. You know, I don't know. It's usually pretty easy to find the simplest answer.
But in this one, it's kind of hard to me. Because you have to account, you have to explain a lot of the stuff she was doing. And it's possible she just was sort of a paranoid person. And so maybe she was a paranoid schizophrenic. She always thought people were following her. And so she changed her name. But nothing else about what she's doing fits with that.
She isn't showing any of the signs of schizophrenia that you often see with people that are in the throes of that. So it's hard for me to say that. But we want to hear your thoughts, as I said. If you want to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff, at ProsecutorsPod. Join the gallery.
There's been a lot of great discussion on the gallery, which is our fan-run group page on Facebook. Great place to be. A lot of discussion of this. You guys will... Enjoy it. But I think that's all we have on The Isdale Woman. This has been quite the journey, but can't wait to hear what you guys think about it. Alice, I know we've run a little long. Let's do a question.
We didn't do a question last time, and neither of us are physically dying right now. I know. It's such a rare thing. Okay. So this person wants to know, and by the way, if you leave a five-star review, you can ask any question you want. Okay. This person wants to know if you could have prosecuted any serial killers in the world, who would it be? What? If we could create any? Prosecute.
Oh, prosecute. I was like, I don't want to create any. Oh, really? Any of them? Okay, let's think. I don't know, because some of them are creepy. I don't want to learn more about John Wayne Gacy. I don't want to know more about, because those are some of the most disturbing murders I've ever heard in my life. I've been circling around buying a painting of his for a really long time.
I know you've told me this, and I don't know why you would do that. That is terrifying. So once... So I had a guy. I had a guy who did this. He was like a broker. He found John Wayne Gacy paintings and he would find one every now and then. And he'd email me like, hey, I got one. Do you want it? And just I was always like, is it still for sale? Do I really want a John Wayne Gacy painting or not?
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Chapter 7: What conclusions did the hosts reach about the Isdal Woman's fate?
So anyway. All right. Well, that's all we got. We'll be back with something next week. It'll have something to do with true crime or mysteries or something. Who knows? But until then, I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are The Prosecutors. They're like, thank goodness, because Alice is rambling. Can you tell us how you came to call your son Squanto?
Yes, this is a long-running descriptor of my son because I think it's been two or three years now. He has a true devotion, and I do not say this lightly, nor with any guile. He has a true devotion to Squanto the man. He owns approximately seven or eight homes. biographies of Squanto. He's six years old.
This started when he was about three, when he first learned about Squanto at his little Montessori school. And he dresses up like Squanto year-round all the time. He has a wooden spoon. He eats with a wooden spoon just like Squanto did. And he truly loves Squanto the man. He knows everything about Squanto.
And because he runs around shirtless with a wooden spoon and calls himself Squanto, we call him Squanto. Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows. You swear? If I'm lying, I'm dying. This is the mindset. Free. This is the mantra. Free. This is the mindset. Mindset, mindset. With movies like Interstellar, Dreamgirls, and Gladiator. Are you not entertained?
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Chapter 8: How can listeners engage further with the podcast's community?
Pay never.