Borgny Stem-Myhre

Borgny Stem-Myhre is a 33-year-old stylist whose murder becomes an early, difficult-to-interpret part of a wider sequence of killings. Her disappearance follows an ordinary professional evening in Oslo, but the circumstances of her death leave investigators with an unusually precise pattern and few conventional traces. Later, her case is connected to Charlotte Lolles’s through evidence suggesting that both women were killed with the same device, even as the larger investigation struggles to identify a coherent pattern or its intended target.

Identity and background

Originally from Levanger, Borgny is single, has no children, and lives in Oslo’s Sagene district. Her work as a stylist places her among a broad professional and social network of hairdressers, photographers, and people in the fashion media. The account presents her as socially active rather than confined to a single fashionable circle: she frequents pubs and restaurants of different kinds.

Her interests also extend beyond city life. She enjoys nature, hiking, and ski tours that take her from one mountain cabin to another. That detail gives her a life that moves between the capital’s social venues and Norway’s outdoors, although the evidence does not establish that these interests caused her to meet her killer or explain the circumstances of her death. She remains, in the investigation’s records, a person with a discernible professional and social life, not merely an unidentified victim.

The evening she disappeared

On the evening in question, Borgny attends an event at Mono, a fashionable bar where the new issue of the fashion magazine Sheness is launched each month, with advance samples also available. The event lasts from seven to eight. Afterwards, she tells a friend and colleague that she intends to go home to prepare a photo shoot. The photographer has requested a theme combining jungle and punk with an eighties reference, placing Borgny’s last known plans firmly within her working life.

Investigators assume she means to walk to the nearest taxi stand. Yet the taxi records provide no confirmation of a ride home: none of the drivers working nearby at the relevant time recognizes her in photographs, and none has a recorded journey to Sagene that fits. In practical terms, the trail ends after she leaves Mono. The gap between a known departure and an unverified journey becomes the first uncertainty in the case; the assumption that she was heading home does not establish what happened next.

Two Polish bricklayers discover her the following morning when they arrive for work. They notice that the padlock on an iron cellar door has been forced and go inside, where they find Borgny fully clothed. The location is a building site in the middle of the city, a setting later contrasted with the woodland location where Charlotte Lolles is found. The contrast in places does not initially offer investigators an obvious shared explanation.

Death and forensic evidence

The forensic estimate places Borgny’s death between ten and eleven that night. Ketanomin, a fast-acting sedative, is detected in her blood. The medical examiner determines that the cause of death was drowning as blood from wounds in her mouth obstructed her breathing. The finding establishes the fatal mechanism while leaving the method used to inflict the wounds unexplained.

The mouth injuries form an exact pattern: 24 punctures, arranged symmetrically and each seven centimetres deep, except where they pass through the face. Investigators cannot identify the instrument, and the arrangement has no familiar precedent for them. The case therefore combines highly specific physical evidence with uncertainty about what produced it. This is not a pattern that immediately supplies its own interpretation; it becomes a question the investigation repeatedly revisits.

The scene yields no fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions on the concrete floor. The absence of those traces sharply limits the ordinary routes by which investigators might identify a visitor or reconstruct movement through the cellar. Other findings offer clues but not a complete answer: iron and coltan are identified in connection with the case, and investigators later note that both Borgny and Charlotte had these substances on the inside of their teeth.

Links to other cases

For two months, the investigators analyze blood samples, hair, and nails and examine images without finding a solution to the distinctive pattern. They develop 24 theories about why the first victims have 24 mouth punctures, apparently originating from a central point inside the mouth, but none resolves the question. Marit Olsen also has a mouth wound, yet the investigators distinguish it from Borgny’s: Marit’s was made with a knife and is described as rough and violent, not as part of the same precise method. The difference matters because a shared general location of injury does not, by itself, establish a shared instrument or killer.

The comparison with Charlotte becomes more consequential. Investigators consider it highly likely that Borgny and Charlotte were both killed with the Leopoldsapfel, a device that gives the two cases a possible method in common. Their locations remain sharply different: Charlotte is found behind a wrecked car in the woods, while Borgny is found in a cellar at a city construction site. The killer’s later willingness to leave bodies less concealed marks a change in how the crimes are presented, but does not make the crime scenes alike in every respect.

Borgny’s name also enters an inquiry into missing women and mountain-hut bookings. A search for Borgny, Charlotte, and Marit initially produces no useful result; expanding it to missing people in Norway yields a possible lead involving Adele Vetlesen. Adele bought a train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7, and Borgny bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination on that date. Separately, a payment made from Iska Peller’s account covers two beds in each of four association cabins, about a day’s walk apart. Investigators reason that the bookings are unlikely to belong to both Marit and Borgny, since the Kriminalamt would probably have found evidence if two recent victims had stayed in the same places. They therefore consider whether one of the occupants was a missing woman. These are investigative inferences, not a confirmed account of Borgny’s movements or companions.

Role in the investigation

Borgny’s case resists the usual expectation that a series of murders will reveal itself through a stable victim profile or a consistent method. Investigators observe that the victims differ in age, background, appearance, and sex, and that the crime scenes also vary. They find no indication that sexual activity links the crimes. The likely shared use of the Leopoldsapfel in Borgny’s and Charlotte’s murders is one limited point of continuity inside a broader pattern that remains difficult to read.

Later reconstruction places Borgny and Charlotte among the victims killed as the murderer tries to make the police connect the cases and pursue Tony Leike. Their bodies are no longer being hidden in the same way as those of Adele Vetlesen and Juliana Verni. The intended effect is not achieved as planned: the investigation does not lead directly to Tony, and further killings and planted clues follow. Borgny’s murder is thus both a death investigated on its own terms and part of a constructed trail whose purpose is to influence police judgment.

The novel’s treatment of her case preserves the difference between evidence and conclusion. Her last known plans, the missing taxi record, the cellar discovery, and the distinctive forensic pattern are concrete; the proposed connection to a mountain-hut journey and the meaning of the shared clues remain matters investigators must test. That tension gives Borgny’s story its significance in the larger investigation: the evidence is exact, but exactness does not immediately make it intelligible.