Chapter 1: Who was the Isdal Woman and what is her story?
Hi, I'm Julia 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. To go with our theme of our Hisdale Woman.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What theories exist about the cause of her death?
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Okay, let's talk about one of the most interesting and confusing aspects in this case, her smell. So this is a striking thing. It's as striking as her use of language and her many different identities is the fact that she has been described as smelling like garlic. So what can we make of that?
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 so it could be something like that but let's assume for a second that 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 of garlic. So it's possible this could have been something she brought along with her, particularly if it's cured meat, which is something that she could take easily in her travels.
Now, we don't find any cured meat in her stuff, so she would have had to have eaten it all. And we know that she took her entire life with her in those two bags. The fact that we don't see it maybe puts a damper on that potential theory, but cured meat is a possibility.
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Chapter 3: How do listener insights contribute to understanding the case?
right and now it smells and you're using something like that and i think the fact that we know for a fact that whatever was going on with her skin was bad enough that while she's in norway doing whatever she's doing she's also stopping at a pharmacy to pick up something for eczema right so it's possible she ran out of whatever she had for instance so she certainly had some sort of skin condition and the fact that treatments for skin conditions particularly in german areas particularly the further east she went
created this garlic smell, I think this is the answer. I don't think it was that she just ate so much garlic it's pouring out of her pores. I think she was using some sort of skin cream.
And I'll take this one bit further. So up until there, I completely agree with you. I think the facts all point towards it. I'll go one step further that is more like conjecture. But I have a cousin who has really bad skin. Like the doctors can't really diagnose it exactly. It's like eczema. But basically, she's this beautiful young lady, very talented and everything.
But her skin just flakes off. Like it looks like snake scales all the time. And she's very, very self-conscious about it. I know because I kind of had that with my hands when I was younger. Like the doctors couldn't figure out what it was. It would just like crack and they would flake off. Not anymore, which is amazing.
But I remember when I was younger, I was so self-conscious about my hands because they looked really scary. They looked like... snake scales, I would never hold hands with anyone. Like at school, if you had to hold hands in line or something, I would never hold hands with anyone. I always pulled my sleeves over my hands, like I held my clothes like this. And my cousin is similar.
She's now an adult and she still has this skin condition, but hers is all over her body, her legs, her torso, her shoulders. And she is always, even in the hottest of weathers, wearing pants and long sleeve shirts because she feels so self-conscious. I note this because Remember her autopsy. So she's a 42-ish year old woman.
So she's past the age that many people in that generation would have gotten married. And we know that what the autopsy said is she was a woman who was of childbearing years who'd never born a child. Now that we know she's a little bit older based on her teeth, she's actually on her way to being outside of the realm of childbearing years. I think this is notable in that she has been described as
attractive or striking but she seems to be single everywhere she's going if she's talking to men it's platonic seemingly and it seems to be for some business purpose she's not traveling and checking in with a man she doesn't appear to be married or traveling with like a partner and she at least has never had children
Perhaps this skin condition has separated her from being in her mind, perhaps being able to have the normal life of having a husband and children. And so she's picked another life of maybe counterintelligence or something along those lines. But I do think it's notable that.
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Chapter 4: What evidence supports the suicide theory for the Isdal Woman?
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.
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Chapter 5: How do different identities play a role in her life?
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Chapter 6: What connections exist between her background and her behavior?
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, OK, 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. So it's possible she was a part of something like that. And that's why she has all these different identities.
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Chapter 7: How does the discussion reflect on the nature of intelligence work?
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 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 prosecutors pod, join the gallery. I've 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. 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of her story for understanding personal identity?
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 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.
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