Alberte Goldschmid’s death is presented as a collision whose consequences unfolded over time, rather than as an instantly fatal impact. The autopsy and the investigators’ reconstruction establish that she survived the collision and died later from the combined effects of her injuries and the time she remained suspended in a tree. Yet the physical evidence does not settle every aspect of how the collision was carried out: Christian Habersaat’s theory gives the investigators a testable account, and subsequent analysis both supports parts of the reconstruction and rules out a crucial proposed object.

The disputed classification

The investigation begins by treating the description of Alberte’s death as traffic-related as a question, not an unquestionable conclusion. Carl Mørck asks whether the postmortem and the collision scene can establish that she died in a traffic incident, or whether another explanation remains possible. His attention to the lack of leads is practical: investigators might expect skid marks or at least tire marks, and he asks whether rain could have affected what was left behind. The questions keep the scene’s absences in view alongside its positive evidence.

That uncertainty shapes the case’s method. The investigators are not simply looking for an object that proves a theory; they are comparing the injuries, the position of the bicycle, Habersaat’s records, and material recovered from the area. A plausible account must explain how Alberte was moved, what happened to the bicycle, and why the expected vehicle traces did not produce straightforward leads. The scene remains open to scrutiny even after the cause of death is described as collision-related.

What the autopsy establishes

The postmortem, as reported to the investigators by John Birkedal, confirmed fractures and internal bleeding. The injuries were serious in combination, but the examination did not identify a single one as independently sufficient to cause death. That distinction changes the reconstruction: the fatal process cannot be reduced to one decisive injury at the instant of impact.

Carl’s account of the findings is that Alberte was still alive when the collision threw her into the tree and remained alive for a considerable period afterward. The injuries and her position there together form the explanation for her death. The report therefore supplies both a sequence and a limit: it establishes survival after the impact and a delayed death, but does not make any single injury the whole cause.

Carl summarizes the outcome as a collection of injuries, together with the time she remained in the tree. His response also marks the human consequence of the forensic detail: Alberte had been there for a long time before she died. The scene is not merely a diagram of impact and movement; the interval between collision and death is part of what the evidence makes visible.

Habersaat’s reconstruction and its traces

Christian Habersaat’s notes and drawings give the investigation a proposed spatial sequence. One notation places a splint in a straight line between the bicycle recovered in a thicket and the point where accounts said the collision occurred. The notation is in Habersaat’s handwriting. A separate plan depicts the tree, the road beside it, and the bicycle in the thicket; Carl remarks that its precision suggests that technicians, rather than Habersaat himself, may have made it.

The drawing matters because it connects separate locations into a reconstruction, not because it independently proves every part of that reconstruction. Habersaat’s account proposes that a board fitted with a shovel blade was involved in throwing Alberte into the tree. In response, Carl asks the technicians to revisit their archived analysis of the wooden material and assess whether a board of the required thickness could have survived the collision. He also asks whether such a board could have been secured to the hood of the pictured VW Kombi Van without leaving marks on the vehicle.

What the material tests leave unresolved

The splinter and the board found in the water initially invite comparison, but the evidence does not establish that they came from the same board. Although the material was identified as birch, the earlier analysis could not determine a common origin. Later, after the technicians retrieved the archived examinations, they identified the splinter as plywood and concluded that the board recovered from the water was not the one that had thrown Alberte into the tree.

The technical review also challenges the proposed attachment method. The boreholes Habersaat described could not, by themselves, have secured the board to a vehicle like the VW Kombi Van. Hooks through the holes might be imagined as an alternative, but that possibility creates another problem: if the hooks had been attached in the furrow beneath the windshield wipers, the impact should have thrown both the windshield and board away, and the technicians would have expected to find traces. The tests thus narrow the viable reconstruction without supplying a complete alternative.

The death is consequently more firmly explained than the apparatus behind it. The autopsy establishes that Alberte survived the impact and later died from combined injuries and elapsed time; Habersaat’s plan and notation preserve a proposed path between collision point and bicycle; and technical analysis rules out the board recovered from the water as the object involved. The remaining gap between a coherent reconstruction and demonstrable mechanism keeps the collision open as an investigative problem, even as the medical evidence clarifies how Alberte died.