The nearly 50-year-old unsolved mystery of who the woman found dead in Isdalen outside Bergen is has fascinated many people. The “Death in Ice Valley” podcast series, created by NRK in collaboration with the BBC, topped the download charts Wednesday night in the UK and Australia, second in the US, and third in Canada.
– This is really wild. We have put a lot of effort into making this happen, and hope it will go well, said Norwegian presenter, NRK journalist Marit Higraff.
Together with editors in Norway, he has been working on this case for almost two years. First in Norwegian, and then in English with BBC journalist Neil McCarthy.
In 1970, a woman was found dead and badly burned in Isdalen near Bergen. The police investigated the case, but never found out who the woman was. For years, tissue samples from the woman were stored at Haukeland Hospital. With this help, the editors, among other things, obtained a complete DNA profile of the woman, and new information from a chemical examination of her teeth indicating that she was likely of European origin.
BBC journalist Neil McCarthy and NRK journalist Marit Higraff went to Isdalen to make the podcast “Death in Ice Valley”
Photo: Eirik Gjesdal / NRK
Takes the listener out
The trend of podcasts investigating and trying to solve crimes is actually nothing new. What Higraff believes makes “Death in the Valley of Ice” so special is that listeners can go to the place where the events actually happened. While other podcasts are often recorded in a radio studio, the two presenters venture outside.
– We take listeners to the Norwegian countryside. This is what makes the experience of telling and listening different. The listener is sucked into the experience.
Higraff said he has received feedback from people who later looked for Isdalen’s photos to better visualize where they were taken.
The collaboration started with an online article
“Gåten i Isdalen” started as an NRK project in Norway, but eventually received backlash and questions from other countries regarding the issue.
One of the questions came from an online journalist from the BBC World Service. He was taken to Isdalen, and online articles he wrote got so much attention that the BBC’s podcast department contacted NRK about collaborating.
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