25 Years Ago, An Unidentified Woman Was Found Dead In Oslo. Experts Think She Was a Spy.
On June 3, 1995, a young woman was found with a bullet hole in her head in a hotel room at the Plaza Hotel in Oslo, Norway. At first it looked like a suicide—she had the gun in her hand, and there was no evidence of a struggle. But when the authorities went to identify the woman, the situation quickly turned bizarre.
The second episode of Unsolved Mysteries Volume 2, “Death in Oslo,” examines the eerie case of this hotel room death. When hotel security knocked on the hotel room door on June 3 to collect a credit card from the woman, who had checked in three days prior under the name Jennifer Fairgate and not yet paid, a gunshot went off. The startled employee ran to get assistance, and left the door of the room unattended for fifteen minutes. When police entered the room, which was double-locked from the inside, shortly thereafter, the woman’s body was found lying on the bed with the fatal gunshot wound in her skull.
It became apparent quickly that the mysterious guest had somehow been allowed to check-in without providing a passport, credit card, or any form of ID to the hotel. The name 'Jennifer Fairgate' proved to be false. All the tags were removed from her clothing, there was no hairbrush, toothbrush, or any toiletries that would provide any DNA evidence to police, and the registration number was removed professionally from the gun at the scene with acid. The woman was completely unidentifiable. Although a hotel employee was informed upon her check-in that a man would be staying in the room with her, there was no evidence of him in the room. And upon further examination of the odd way she was holding the 9 mm Browning pistol, as well as the fact that there was no blood spattered onto it, her death looked like a murder instead of a suicide. But after police spent a year attempting to identify her and solve the case to no avail, she was ultimately buried on June 26, 1996. All evidence was destroyed after the case was closed.
The Netflix reboot of the classic series shows journalist Lars Christian Wegner as he follows every possible lead in the case—from the fake home address in a small Belgian village that the woman provided on her hotel check-in form to the 2016 exhumation of her body to take new DNA samples from her. Still, there have been no leads or family members who’ve come forward to identify the woman—who was uncovered through DNA to be of European, likely East German, descent and 24 years old at the time of her death—in the decades since, leading experts to believe she was likely some sort of spy or secret agent. To this day, no one has ever reported her missing, and her business in Oslo remains unknown.
A visual simulation of the scene and investigation is available from VG, a Norweigan newspaper. It allows you to explore the Oslo hotel room and explains all the strange aspects of the case at length. It also provides details that the Netflix documentary excluded, such as the identities of the neighboring hotel guests at the time of “Jennifer Fairgate”’s death. One such neighbor proves particularly interesting: a Mr. F from Belgium, who checked out the morning before the woman was found dead, told VG that he was informed during his check-out about the incident. When he was questioned how the desk staff could have asked him about the death before it even occurred, he allegedly said: “I don’t know anything about that. I just remember they asked me. That’s all I know.” The sleuths of the internet have theorized that Mr. F could be a suspect, although Unsolved Mysteries does not raise him as one.
It’s undoubted that the mysterious woman in Oslo went to great lengths to avoid identification. Now, with the new season of Unsolved Mysteries out in the world, the team behind the episode is hoping for just the opposite.
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