Isdal Woman: Connecting the Scattered Dots
The body of a woman was found on a hillside in Bergen, Norway in 1970. She carried no identification on her or in her luggage that was recovered from a locker at a nearby train station.
However, an item — a notebook tucked away in one of the suitcases — turned out to be particularly interesting to the investigators. A security officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces deciphered the meaning of the seemingly random sequences of letters and numbers jotted down on the first page of the — otherwise empty — notepad.
It was a journal: the author abbreviated the months and place-names with their initial letters to meticulously record the location and length of the stops of a half-year journey — the last part of it ending in Bergen on the day when the woman arrived in the town before ultimately disappearing.
A few stops in the first-, and all stops of the last part of the log were verified by the Norwegian police — for instance by tracing them to the hotel registration forms she had filled out.
The rest of the documented movements are still unknown — the identity of the woman remains unidentified, as of 2020.
On various online discussion-boards, the question often arises: why isn’t the original log re-analysed — leveraging “big data analysis methods” in order to infer those stops…
