Bornholm People's High School

Bornholm People's High School was a close-knit setting for about fifty students during the winter half-year of 1997, and the place where Alberte Goldschmid was known as gentle, pretty, and probably the most popular girl in the school. Its ordinary, cheerful rhythms stand in stark contrast to her death on November 20 and the long investigation that followed: the students had no sense of danger on the day she was killed, and did not yet know what had happened to her.

The School and Its Students

The school’s winter intake comprised approximately fifty students, all eighteen or older. They took courses in music, glasswork, painting, and pottery. John Birkedal described the group as mostly happy and on good terms with one another, recalling November 20 as an otherwise typical day. The account offers a small community rather than an institution defined by rules or hierarchy: its members shared courses and a generally convivial atmosphere, without knowing that one of their classmates had died that morning.

Alberte stood out within this group. Birkedal’s description of her as gentle and popular places her not at the edges of school life but among the people whose absence would be felt within it. Yet the students’ ordinary day and their lack of foreboding are important in their own right. At the moment when a fatal event had already occurred, the school remained unaware; the gap between what happened and what the community knew would last for more than a day.

Alberte’s Death and Its Discovery

Alberte was killed in a traffic accident on the morning of November 20, 1997. More than a day passed before anyone found her body. She had been thrown so high into a roadside tree that she was almost impossible to see. The first person to look up at precisely the right moment was Christian Habersaat, a uniformed police officer from Nexø. The sight of her limp body remained with him, as did the inscrutable expression on her face.

The investigation established that Alberte had been riding her bicycle. It was found some distance away in the thicket, mangled almost beyond recognition. At postmortem, the injuries indicated that she may have lived for a time after being thrown into the tree; she had suffered fractures and internal and external bleeding. The bicycle’s condition and its distance from the roadside gave the investigators tangible evidence of the violence of the collision, even as the school’s ordinary routine on that day showed how little its students knew of the danger around Alberte.

The School in the Unresolved Inquiry

Seventeen years later, the school’s connection to the case remained part of the questions Department Q pursued. Carl Mørck asked whether the death had certainly been traffic-related, what the postmortem had shown, and what had been found at the collision scene. The answers established both the injuries and the damaged bicycle, but did not settle the larger question of what had happened. When Rose asked whether the police still had the bicycle, Birkedal could not say: it was an old case, and he had not been in charge at the time.

The inquiry also returned to Alberte’s personal life during her time on Bornholm. Investigators knew from the earlier report that she had a boyfriend who was staying on the island, but did not know whether he had left before or after the accident. He may have been living in a temporary camp on a farm by Ølene. The farmer had rented out the land without a written contract, accepting five thousand kroner in cash for the rental period, although he declared the income to the tax authorities. The boyfriend’s unknown identity and uncertain movements left an important part of the case unresolved; the evidence does not establish that he was a student at the school.

A Community Preserved in the Case Files

The school later appeared in the extensive archive Christian Habersaat assembled around Alberte’s death. His house had become an organized repository for almost two decades of research: papers in the living room were arranged in chronological piles, while folders registered the material distributed among the other rooms. One room held interview transcripts from local residents questioned in the weeks after the collision. Upstairs, a bookcase labeled Alberte divided material into statements about her background, including files on friends from before her time at the school.

That archive preserves the distinction between Alberte’s life as a student and the case built around her death. At school she belonged to a group whose day had seemed entirely normal; in Habersaat’s files, the school years became one of several strands to investigate, alongside local testimony, earlier friendships, and the evidence from the roadside. Bornholm People's High School is therefore central as the social setting of Alberte’s last known period of ordinary life, but the available evidence does not assign the school or its students responsibility for the collision. Its strongest significance lies in the contrast between a cheerful community unaware of her fate and the painstaking effort, years later, to reconstruct it.