Juliana Verni

Juliana Verni enters the investigation not as a known associate of the victims but as a name that appears to make an African journey possible—and then impossible. The discrepancy around her travel documents becomes an early clue that someone is using another woman’s identity to conceal a murder and redirect suspicion.

Identification and the Kigali trail

Katrine Bratt tells Harry Hole and Gunnar Hagen that immigration officials at Kigali airport found a card issued to Juliana Verni. Yet the name appeared neither on an airline passenger list travelling to Rwanda that day nor in the electronic records of the hotels checked by investigators. Three days later, however, Juliana Verni appeared on a Rwandair passenger list in Kigali. The records suggest a delayed or disguised arrival rather than a straightforward itinerary, making the card an investigative lead rather than proof of where she had been.

The search then reaches Leipzig. Kaja Solness says she has asked colleagues there to seize Juliana’s passport and check whether it carries a Kigali stamp matching the date under investigation. The passport is described as an older German document that records hair colour; its entry gives the shade as brick red. That distinctive detail provides a way to compare the identity on paper with the woman investigators are trying to locate, while the requested stamp check could test whether the travel trail was genuine.

The inquiry places Juliana’s name beside Adele Vetlesen’s in a larger pattern of travel and lodging evidence. Adele, missing after her partner reported her disappearance in November, had bought an online train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre had purchased a ticket to the same mountain region for that date, travelling from Kongsberg. Separately, a charge on Iska Peller’s account covered two beds in each of four mountain huts, spaced about a day’s walk apart; the final hut was Hävasshütte, half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. These records establish the route and the possibility of people travelling in pairs, but do not by themselves identify Juliana as one of the travellers.

A hired courier and a victim

The investigation’s first reconstruction treated Juliana as a link in a scheme devised by a man called Ole: she had travelled under Adele Vetlesen’s name, sent a postcard from Kigali, and obtained the Leopoldsapfel from van Boorst. Harry Hole reasoned that the false African journey would make Adele appear to have disappeared abroad, while the weapon’s connection to the Congo would direct suspicion toward Tony Leike. In this account, Juliana was killed after returning to Leipzig, and her body was discarded in the Elster. The explanation made her both a courier and a victim, but it was a provisional theory rather than the final account.

Juliana’s death was confirmed when her body was recovered from the Elster on December 2. The initial report listed drowning, but Harry rejected drowning in the ordinary sense; the distinctive pattern of injuries in her mouth connected her death to the killings under investigation. The discovery transformed the travel records from a puzzle about a missing woman into evidence of a fatal operation: the person sent to acquire the murder weapon had herself been killed with it.

Later, Tony’s account to Lene Galtung supplied a different and more direct explanation of Juliana’s role. He described her as a German woman from Leipzig whom he had regularly met and paid, and said that he had contacted her to travel to Görna in Adele’s name, send Adele’s postcard from Kigali, and collect the weapon from van Boorst. He then met Juliana in Leipzig after her return; his account makes clear that she was killed there with the weapon she had fetched. This disclosure shifts the agency attributed to Ole in Harry’s earlier reconstruction to Tony: Juliana was not simply caught in another man’s plan but was recruited by Tony into the deception that helped conceal his crimes, and then silenced as a witness to it.

The passport’s afterlife

Juliana’s passport becomes a clue that outlives her. The Leipzig police never recover the document that investigators had asked them to seize and examine for a Kigali stamp. Harry Hole later suspects that Tony Leike took it; a further discovery places it in Lene Galtung’s possession. The trail does not establish when or how it passed between them, but it shows that the identity recorded in the passport remains in circulation after Juliana’s death.

The passport’s brick-red hair description also returns as an investigative lead. Harry recalls the detail after reading that Lene Galtung had dyed her hair the same colour, then learns that a woman matching it booked a flight in Zürich to Görna for the following morning. Since Juliana is already known to be dead, the booking cannot straightforwardly establish that she travelled; instead, it raises the possibility that someone is using her identity or matching her description. The recurrence turns a bureaucratic detail into a warning that the apparent end of Juliana’s journey may conceal another person’s movement.

A life reconstructed from records

In the available account, Juliana Verni is known through documents, investigative deductions, and Tony Leike’s later explanation, not through her own testimony. Those sources establish the work she undertook and the danger it exposed her to, but leave her private understanding of the deception and her reasons for accepting it unresolved. The shift from Harry Hole’s provisional reconstruction to Tony’s account also makes her story a measure of how easily a victim can be obscured when investigators first see her chiefly as a link between other people and their crimes.