Inge Dalby and Frank's Relationship

Inge Dalby and Frank Brennan’s affair was a concealed relationship conducted alongside Inge’s involvement with Kristoffer Dalby. It began on Bornholm, flourished through private meetings and intense intimacy, and ended when Frank turned his attention to Alberte Goldschmid. Inge’s recollections later gave investigators a detailed portrait of Frank and his VW Kombi Van, but her resentment and jealousy also made the affair part of the suspicion surrounding Alberte’s death—not proof of who killed her.

Meeting on Bornholm

Inge met Frank in Rønne at the beginning of July, the day before a classic-car event. She already recognized him: she had visited Ølene with a friend to see the hippie house and had seen him there, walking shirtless. Their relationship began while Inge was still seeing Kristoffer Dalby, an island connection she regarded as someone to fall back on. She described Frank as offering an intensity that Kristoffer could not match, and admitted that she and Frank had sex in his vehicle.

Their encounter around the classic-car event became a vivid early detail in her account. Inge and Frank had parked behind a grass area because it was secluded, but the classic cars arrived earlier than she expected. She did not want her uncle to catch her with Frank, whom she thought of as a hippie, so she made her escape and left him to deal with the problem of being parked where he was not allowed. The episode captures the secrecy of their affair: Inge wanted the intimacy, but also needed to keep it hidden from her family and from Kristoffer.

A relationship lived in secret

Inge and Frank continued meeting while she also maintained her connection with Kristoffer. She and Kristoffer did not know the same things about one another: Inge kept her encounters with Frank from him, while Frank’s own later involvement with Alberte would give the private arrangement a second, more painful parallel. Inge said she had understood that her relationship with Frank might end abruptly, which helps explain why she kept Kristoffer as a familiar attachment on the island even as she wanted to be with Frank.

The affair depended on agreed meeting places. Before the folk school, Inge and Frank met in the square in Rønne. Later, they met at Ekkodalen, which could be reached by going down behind the school; the walk took about five minutes. Inge did not describe a direct conversation in which Frank ended things. Instead, he failed to appear at an agreed meeting, and when she returned to Ekkodalen on later occasions, he did not come. The silence and repeated absence became the practical ending of the relationship.

Inge recalled Frank as six feet one and six or seven years older than she was, with a husky but warm voice. He was tanned, though light-skinned beneath his clothes, and wore long, almost ash-blond hair down to his collar. She remembered a small dimple in his chin, blue eyes, very dark eyebrows, broad front teeth, and a small white mark on one tooth that he called a sunburn. He had talked about getting tattoos but had not chosen any. Inge also remembered his strong preoccupation with the sun: he said that it was why he had come to the island, and that he had found two different sunstones within a week—one like the stones Vikings used for navigation and another like those found at the sun-cult area at Rispebjerg. Her account joined intimate physical memory to the unusual interests that shaped his self-presentation.

The break and its aftermath

Inge’s account places the end of her affair within a wider romantic upheaval. She said that her relationship with Frank continued until the events involving Kristoffer and Alberte, and that she had at first thought the arrangement might be enough. Frank then began seeing Alberte. Inge described herself and Kristoffer as being discarded at the same time, each left despondent and unable to change what had happened. She did not want the relationship with Frank to end and said that, had she had the chance, she would have left the island with him.

The emotional aftermath persisted beyond the affair itself. Kristoffer felt guilty, and Inge believed she could use that guilt to her advantage for years. She later acknowledged that he did not know the full extent of her own conduct, even while she held him responsible for his part in the situation. Her recollections therefore present the triangle not as a simple choice between two men, but as a concealed, uneven arrangement in which desire, fallback, hurt, and leverage overlapped.

Inge also said she did not know how much Frank and Alberte saw of one another. Their meetings with her had taken place at selected locations, and Frank’s disappearance from those appointments did not tell her what he was doing elsewhere. That limit matters: her account establishes the affair and its ending, but does not establish the extent or timing of Frank’s relationship with Alberte.

Testimony and the Alberte investigation

Years later, Inge’s memories became useful to the investigation into Alberte’s death. She recognized the man in a photograph with a VW Kombi Van as Frank and confirmed that her earlier description of the vehicle came from personal experience, not guesswork. She recalled a black arched line rising from the roof and also described stripes on the side. Because she had been challenged over whether those stripes could be seen from the distance she claimed, she regretted mentioning them; Kristoffer had pressed her on the inconsistency until she became angry. Her testimony thus supplied identifying detail while also exposing a point investigators needed to assess critically.

When Carl Mørck and Rose questioned her, Inge disclosed the sexual relationship and the overlap with Kristoffer. Assad then accused her of killing Alberte out of jealousy and proposed that she had fashioned a board from material in her father’s workshop and attached it to the front of the vehicle. That was an accusation made during the investigation, not a fact established by Inge’s account. The eventual revelations further complicated any attempt to treat the affair as a sufficient explanation: June Habersaat later claimed that she had killed Alberte, while Christian Habersaat’s written account attributed the killing to Bjarke Habersaat after he discovered Bjarke’s poem about Frank. Against those competing claims, Inge’s testimony remains important chiefly for what it can establish directly: her affair with Frank, the way it ended, and the specific memories that helped investigators pursue his identity.