12. Anna and Angelina

June 6, 2021·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Anna Högerova's daughter Alejandra describes her mother as having 'more than one personality' — sentimental one minute, 'the biggest witch in the world' the next — and concludes 'even though my mother was a monster, she was a victim.'

1. Death in Ice Valley episode 12, 'Anna and Angelina,' is reported by hosts Marit Teegraaf of NRK and Neil McCarthy from the BBC, returning after a two-year podcast silence to present listener-sourced Isdal Woman candidates. 2. The primary voices are Emil, an American listener who passed information via encrypted messages; Alejandra, Anna Högerova's daughter reached on the Canary Islands; Italian journalist Francesca Marchesi; Italian history expert John Foote from Bristol University; Ukrainian academic Gelinada Grinchenko from Kharkiv University; and Australian listener Catherine Mitchell. 3. The episode's core premise is that thousands of listeners have become active researchers, and some have surfaced women whose lives intersect with the known profile of the Isdal Woman in ways that could be significant. 4. The Isdal Woman is an unidentified woman found dead in Isdalen valley near Bergen in November 1970; she had multiple passports, disguises, coded notes describing travel routes, and spoke multiple European languages — her identity has never been established. 5. Emil, the American listener, first sent an encrypted message to the podcast team containing a physical description, date of birth, and photographs of a woman who 'nearly made Marit's heart stop'; he and Marit later met by chance in the Bergen State Archive, where he handed her a slip of paper bearing only the name 'Högerova.' 6. Anna Högerova — also known as Jeanette Nemechek, Jeanette Polanski Caron, Francisca Alves Rodriguez, and the Black Tulip — was a Czech fraudster born in Prague in 1937 who operated in Brazil, Italy, Switzerland, and across Europe in the 1960s. 7. Her gang in Turin ran printing presses for counterfeit cheques overnight; a 100-member operation across multiple nationalities; Anna's role was to present herself at banks as a wealthy aristocrat and cash modified cheques. 8. Italian journalist Francesca Marchesi describes Anna from Italian press archives as wearing only Gucci, Prada, and Chanel, accompanied by three Siamese cats, owning all bottles of Chanel No. 5, and being referred to in Italian papers as 'La Bella Aventuriera' (the Beautiful Adventurer) and 'La Bella degli Assegni' (the Charming Woman of the Cheques). 9. The gang was caught in 1965 when they rented a Fiat 600 in Rome and left it parked on the street with five or six false passports visible on the back seat; Italian police traced them to a ninth-floor apartment containing two billion lire, 350 million lire in cheques, and five trolleys full of hundreds of foreign passports. 10. Anna was arrested in Piazza del Popolo when a police officer recognised her from a passport photo left in the abandoned car; her nine-year-old daughter Alejandra was taken to an orphanage run by nuns, which Alejandra describes as traumatic — underfed and isolated as a foreigner. 11. The team's growing belief that Anna could be the Isdal Woman intensified when they found a photograph showing a gap between her teeth — exactly matching what Isdal Woman witnesses had described — and both were dark-haired, tanned, South European-looking women who stood out in Norway rather than blending in. 12. Kripos, the Norwegian police forensics unit, performed a fingerprint comparison between Anna Högerova's arrest records and a high-quality fingerprint lifted from a pair of sunglasses found in the Isdal Woman's suitcase; the result was negative — not the same woman. 13. Anna Högerova died on the Canary Islands in 1996, confirmed by her daughter Alejandra, who also described her mother's family background: her grandmother Eva Maria Mariotti was herself a woman accused of murder who spent four years in prison before a 'sensational acquittal' in 1965, and Anna's mother suffered a dislocated leg in a Paris orphanage and was tied to a wooden plank for two years. 14. Alejandra explained that after the war, three generations of women — Anna, her mother, and grandmother — fled to South America, dealing in stolen art, and lost their middle-class Prague status permanently; she says her mother believed her crimes were justified by her wartime suffering. 15. Emil, on learning the Kripos result, said the finding gave him what he had wanted — a definitive ruling-out — though he admitted it was disappointing because 'it would have made a great story.' 16. Other listener-sourced leads mentioned in the episode include a French man who believed he was having an affair with the Isdal Woman in 1970; Giorgia Marchionne, a supposed Italian woman staying in a Swiss hotel in March 1970 who turned out to be a man, 'Giorgio,' due to a typewriting error; and an examination of the Isdal Woman's coded note by Kripos handwriting experts, which revealed only the number '22,8' impressed from another page. 17. The second candidate, Angelina Celeste, is introduced by Australian listener Catherine Mitchell, who connected the Isdal Woman's details — fur Cossack hat, gold teeth, Eastern European breakfast of porridge — with the Ukrainian diaspora in Belgium, specifically in Liege where a Ukrainian school and workers' organisation were based. 18. The episode blends field recordings, archival newspaper translations by Francesca Marchesi, and phone interviews across multiple continents into a texture that is partly investigative and partly a meditation on how unresolved mysteries draw people in. 19. Listeners interested in long-form cold-case investigation with active audience participation and a European spy-era backdrop will find this episode richly detailed. 20. Those who need linear narrative progress toward a definitive answer may find the episode frustrating; it explicitly opens with the disclaimer 'we're not about to reveal the identity of the Isdal woman in this episode.'

As heard by us

A measured return to the Isdal Woman case, with a family thread.

Death in Ice Valley returns to the Isdal Woman case with patience and a clear eye for the human damage around it. The path runs from Bergen's archive rooms to Anna Hogerova and then to her daughter Alejandra, where details like an elegant jacket, a cold grey building, and a…

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Stay with a cold case that widens into a daughter's memory.

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