Juliana Verni’s murder turned an apparent drowning into a crucial link in a wider investigation. Found in the Elster in Leipzig on December 2, three days after returning from Kigali, Verni had been killed in a way that echoed the earlier murder of Borgny Stem-Myhre and suggested that her African journey had been part of a plan whose other participants remained hidden.

Discovery and Initial Findings

When Harry Hole learned that Verni had been recovered from the Elster, the initial description of her death as drowning seemed to leave open the possibility of an accident. He rejected that explanation: she had not drowned in the river. Kaja Solness asked whether the case involved the same distinctive injuries found in another murder, and Harry confirmed that there were exactly twenty-four. The shared number transformed a report of a body found in water into evidence of a recurring method, connecting Verni’s death to the investigation’s existing pattern without yet identifying who was responsible.

The African Journey and Concealed Identity

The investigation placed Juliana Verni inside a chain of travel and impersonation rather than treating her death as an isolated killing. She had gone from Leipzig to Oslo and then flown to Kigali using Adele Vetlesen’s identity. In Kigali, she registered at the Gorilla Hotel under Adele’s name and sent a postcard that had apparently been written earlier by the real Adele, probably under coercion. Verni returned from Kigali and was found dead in Leipzig three days later. The false identity and reused postcard concealed the true traveler while tying Verni’s movements to Adele’s disappearance.

That route intersected with the earlier inquiry into Borgny Stem-Myhre. Adele, who had been reported missing by her partner in November, had bought a train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7; Borgny had bought a ticket to the same mountain region for that date. Investigators also found that Iska Peller’s account had been charged for two beds in each of four mountain huts, including Hävasshütte, where the group was recorded on November 7. These travel and lodging records made the mountain journey a point of connection among the cases, while Verni’s later trip under Adele’s name suggested that the concealed network extended beyond Norway.

Harry Hole and his colleagues concluded that Verni had probably worked with another person, who then killed her to erase evidence of their joint crime. Harry noted that her record included drugs, prostitution, and vagrancy, and judged that she could readily have been hired for a job if the payment was sufficient. Yet the suspected accomplice had left no detectable telephone calls between Verni’s mobile and Norway. Her murder therefore both echoed the earlier pattern and removed a potential witness: the evidence exposed Verni’s role in the false journey, but not the identity of the person who had arranged it or killed her.

The Hävasshütte Night Reconsidered

Elias Skog’s account of the night at Hävasshütte became crucial when investigators revisited what he had seen. Awakened by noises outside, he noticed a woman and a man beneath the outhouse roof. The woman faced him; the man stood behind her, obscuring his face, and covered her mouth as he pulled her inside. Elias initially mistook the scene for a sexual encounter. Only after learning of the murders did he consider that the woman might have been trying to escape and that the man might have been silencing her. The episode therefore offered a belated, uncertain witness account of the violence surrounding the mountain-hut cases.

Tony Leike was later identified as the man involved, but Harry Hole’s sudden reassessment overturned the assumption that the episode had been a rape: it had not been, and that distinction supplied the motive. The revelation changed the meaning of Elias’s memory and sharpened the case’s central problem of interpretation: an apparently familiar explanation had obscured what had actually happened. Juliana Verni’s murder belonged to that larger pattern of concealed identities and misread events; the investigation could connect her death to the hidden operation without yet making its unseen organizer visible.

The Killer’s Perspective and the Limits of the Revelation

An early first-person interlude places the murders within an unidentified killer’s own explanation of violence. In a dark workroom, the speaker studies newspaper photographs of victims taken when their families still believed life lay open before them, while noting that the police have not yet recognized a connection between the killings. The contrast between those hopeful images and the speaker’s certainty gives the investigation an unsettling parallel: while detectives are still assembling a pattern, the killer already sees one.

The speaker treats the capacity to kill as present in every person and casts murder as an acceleration of an unavoidable death, even describing it as an act of mercy. This is a self-justifying philosophy, not an explanation that resolves the case. Set beside the later disclosures about Verni’s journey and the mountain-hut events, it invites the reader to reconsider how much the concealed operation depends on controlling what others believe they have seen. Yet it does not identify the person behind Verni’s murder or establish her exact role in the speaker’s account; the connection between the crimes becomes clearer while the organizer’s identity remains hidden.