Håvass Cabin is a mountain refuge near Ustaoset whose importance in the murder investigation grows from a simple geographic connection into a question of what happened there, who witnessed it, and whether the place can draw the killer back. The cabin links travel records, an incomplete witness account, and a high-risk police operation; its remote setting makes it both a repository of clues and a dangerous place to investigate.

Setting and access

Håvass Cabin lies in the mountain region of Ustaoset, about half a day’s walk from the settlement. The surrounding area is marked by long distances between refuges: the records later examined by the investigators show bookings for two beds in each of four Norwegian Trekking Association cabins, roughly a day’s walk apart. Håvass Cabin was the final stop in that sequence. The route gives the place a practical context: it was part of a multi-day mountain journey, not an isolated destination readily explained by ordinary local travel.

The terrain also matters to the cabin’s later role in the investigation. The refuge stands in a hollow approachable from the northeast or south. Steep rock walls obstruct the eastern side, while fissures to the west make that approach difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the ground. These constraints shape the landscape as more than a backdrop: access is limited, movement can be anticipated, and knowledge of the terrain offers a substantial advantage.

The journey that connected the cases

Travel evidence placed Adele Vetlesen and Borgny Stem-Myhre on the route to Ustaoset on November 7. Adele had bought a Norwegian State Railways ticket from Drammen; Borgny had purchased one from Kongsberg for the same date and destination. Investigators also found that Håvass Cabin was only about half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. The separate journeys therefore converged on a small mountain region at a consequential time, even though the records alone could not establish what happened after the women arrived.

A further line of inquiry came from Iska Peller’s account. A search of her bank transactions showed that her account had been charged on November 20 for two beds at each of four mountain huts. The bookings placed her itinerary along the same chain of refuges, with Håvass Cabin as its last stop on November 7. The date and route gave investigators grounds to place her in the relevant area, but a booking record was not itself an account of the night’s events.

By comparing the travel and accommodation information, Harry Hole concluded that Charlotte Lolles had very probably been in Iska Peller’s company, while Borgny Stem-Myhre and Marit Olsen had been in the immediate vicinity of Ustaoset. The cabin thus helped shift the case away from treating the victims as unrelated people selected at random. It offered a shared place and time against which the investigators could test possible connections, without initially providing a complete explanation for them.

What went unseen

The cabin’s importance rests partly on the gap between an event and its later interpretation. Elias Skog told a woman in Stavanger that, during the night at Håvass Cabin, he had heard something outside and looked toward the area by the lavatory. In the moment, he understood what he saw as a private encounter and returned to bed. After learning of the murders, he reconsidered the memory as a possible assault. His delayed reinterpretation made him a witness to a scene whose meaning he had not recognized at the time.

That testimony did not immediately resolve what had happened. Harry Hole and Kaja Solness reasoned that the apparent familiarity between the two people could suggest they had met before, rather than having encountered one another for the first time at the refuge. The scene therefore became a clue about prior connection, but not a self-sufficient identification of the people involved. In the wider investigation, the cabin had produced neither a clear eyewitness account nor an uncomplicated route from observation to conclusion.

Håvass Cabin was also linked to the victims through physical evidence and the investigators’ reconstruction of their movements. The examination of Borgny Stem-Myhre’s death yielded unusual findings, including two small stones that did not match the gravel at the scene; the report suggested that similar stones found elsewhere could become useful comparison evidence. Those details did not, by themselves, establish the cabin as the source of the stones. Their relevance lay in the broader effort to connect places and movements through evidence that could be checked rather than assumed.

From crime-scene lead to police trap

As the investigation advanced, Harry Hole presented Håvass Cabin as the point from which the new leads ran. With no dependable witness able to describe the whole night, he urged the team to develop hypotheses about the motive and relationships behind the deaths. Iska Peller was believed to be the only person in the group still alive, but she had been ill and asleep through the day and following night. Others were dead or had not come forward. The remote refuge therefore stood at the center of the inquiry partly because it concentrated the investigators’ leads, and partly because so much of what mattered there had remained unwitnessed.

The police eventually returned to the cabin to use its geography as part of a sting. Harry Hole, Kaja Solness, and Jussi Kolkka took positions inside, while other officers concealed themselves in groups around the valley, about three kilometres apart. The team had three reasons for choosing the place: their presence there could appear credible, they hoped the perpetrator might feel secure in familiar terrain, and the confined approaches made the hollow suitable for a trap. Because only the Telenor network worked in the uninhabited mountains, officers whose phones used other providers relied on walkie-talkies to communicate.

The operation turned the refuge from a location investigators needed to understand into one they deliberately used to draw a suspect out. But the terrain’s dangers were not merely tactical. A vast avalanche struck while the officers were inside; Harry warned the others and reached out to Kaja and Kolkka as the cabin was hit. The mountain refuge that had organized the case’s clues and the police plan thus became the scene of an immediate survival crisis. Håvass Cabin’s narrative significance lies in that reversal: a seemingly remote stop on a walking route gathers the victims’ movements, a belated witness memory, and the investigators’ attempt to make hidden danger visible, only to confront the danger of the place itself.