Rachel Goldschmid

Rachel Goldschmid, Alberte Goldschmid’s mother, becomes the family’s principal voice when Carl Mørck and Assad visit to ask about Alberte. She defends her daughter against speculation about her sexual history, but does not claim certainty where she believes none is possible. Her account also gives the investigators postcards and drawings: modest objects that connect the disputed case to Alberte’s life beyond it.

Identity and family setting

Rachel receives the investigators at the family’s red-painted bungalow in Allerød. The house, with its wooden gate, birch tree, privet hedges and Danish flag, presents an orderly domestic setting; inside, however, the conversation turns on a loss the family has not resolved in the same way. Rachel’s husband, Eli Goldschmid, is reluctant to speak, and she tells the visitors that they will be talking with her. Her role in the interview is therefore not incidental: she takes responsibility for answering questions while navigating her husband’s distress and disagreement.

The couple’s Jewish faith is central to how Rachel describes Alberte. She calls the family normal and says that her daughter was a good daughter within their faith. Her insistence that they cannot think badly of Alberte is a statement of loyalty, but also a boundary around the terms of the investigation. Rachel does not deny that Alberte was beautiful or that she had suitors; she resists the leap from those facts to a judgment about her character.

Conflict over Habersaat’s investigation

Rachel recalls that the Bornholm criminal investigation team and then Christian Habersaat pursued information about Alberte. The inquiry became painful when Habersaat suggested that Alberte had been sexually experienced. Eli initially describes this as Habersaat calling their daughter a whore, but Rachel corrects him: Habersaat had not used that word. She also allows that he may have been driven by concern for Alberte, even suggesting that he might have taken his own life for the sake of the case. Her account thus differs from Eli’s anger without excusing the investigator’s conduct.

The dispute turns on what could be known about Alberte’s virginity. Rachel says Habersaat maintained that her daughter was not a virgin, while she argues that no one could establish this: Alberte had done a great deal of gymnastics, which made the physical assumption on which the claim rested unreliable. Rachel cannot bring herself to say the word hymen aloud. The hesitation makes the subject’s humiliation tangible, while also showing why she regards Habersaat’s questioning as invasive rather than simply procedural.

Rachel says the family stopped speaking with Habersaat because, in their view, he said horrible and vulgar things. She recognizes that examining such possibilities belonged to his police work, but objects to the way he pursued them. He also questioned Alberte’s friends and relatives behind the family’s backs, without making progress. In Rachel’s telling, the inquiry therefore had two separate failures: it did not produce useful information, and it damaged the family’s willingness to cooperate.

Postcards, drawings, and Alberte’s remembered life

When Carl asks whether Alberte wrote home during her absence of more than four weeks, Rachel recalls that the family received several postcards. They showed local attractions, and Alberte wrote briefly about school and what the students were doing. Rachel offers to show them, first looking to Eli for approval. His silence does not prevent her from sharing the material, but it preserves the tension between his guardedness and her readiness to remember their daughter through what she left behind.

Rachel also tells the investigators that Alberte was a good singer and could draw. She retrieves a box of drawings and postcards from a broom cupboard where cardboard boxes are stacked close to falling. Alberte’s room has been fitted out for visiting family, while her belongings remain stored there; the box on top contains the drawings and postcards. Rachel gets down on her knees to open it, and Carl and Assad kneel beside her. The physical arrangement turns the interview from argument into examination: investigators and mother attend together to things Alberte made and sent.

Rachel presents some of the work that had hung on Alberte’s wall, describing her daughter as unlike an average girl. This does not resolve the contested question about Alberte’s private life, and the objects are not offered as proof of it. Instead, they give the investigators a record of her interests and abilities that the sexual speculation had obscured.

Narrative role

Rachel’s testimony holds together two forms of knowledge that the investigation risks confusing: what can be established about Alberte and what her parents believe is consistent with the daughter they knew. She neither supplies a decisive new lead nor accepts Habersaat’s conclusions as fact. Her insistence on uncertainty is particularly important because the case’s questions about virginity cannot, in her view, be answered simply by inference from the body.

The scene also gives Rachel a distinct place within the family’s mourning. Eli’s hateful tone and reluctance to speak contrast with her effort to correct his account, qualify her judgment of Habersaat, and bring out Alberte’s keepsakes. Her hands become agitated as she speaks, and the scarf around her neck seems to choke her; the account registers the strain without turning her into a source of certainty she does not possess. By opening the box, Rachel shifts attention from an argument over sexual reputation to the postcards, drawings, singing and school life that make Alberte present as a person remembered by her family.