The Hävasshütte Murders are a series of killings connected to a particular mountain-hut gathering, whose isolation left investigators with few witnesses and whose significance emerged only as separate victims and journeys were linked. The investigation initially entertained the pattern of a serial killer, but Harry Hole came to see that the victims’ connection to a specific place and time—and a crucially misread episode at the hut—offered a more focused explanation.

Scope and Setting

The cases reached the police as separate deaths and lines of inquiry. In the material presented to investigators, the murders involved at least four people, but the evidence did not establish that every killing took place at Hävasshütte. Borgny Stem-Myhre, for example, was found in a cellar after disappearing in Oslo. What drew such cases together was the emerging connection to the hut and to a particular period, rather than a simple pattern of victims chosen from one demographic group.

The hut stood in a remote mountain region, and reaching it meant travelling between lodgings on foot. During a later journey through the area, Kaja Solness crossed a broad, featureless snowfield beneath the mass of Hallingskarvet; the stopped snowmobile left her, in her own estimate, far from the nearest settled place. The landscape’s scale helps explain the practical difficulty of finding witnesses or assistance there. Isolation was not merely a backdrop to the case: it shaped what could be seen, reported, and checked.

Routes and Guests

A travel record supplied an early link between two women. Adele Vetlesen, a 28-year-old from Drammen, had been reported missing by her partner in November. On 7 November, she bought a train ticket online from Drammen to Ustaoset. For that same date, Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket from Kongsberg to Ustaoset. Ustaoset was a mountain region rather than a single town, and the shared destination made the journeys significant without, by itself, proving what happened to either woman there.

A second set of records connected the hut to a multi-day route. Iska Peller’s account had been charged for two beds at each of four huts belonging to the trekking association, with the huts roughly a day’s walk apart. Hävasshütte was the last on the route; investigators were told that the party had been there on 7 November, about half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. The dates and bookings gave the investigation a way to compare movements and lodging, but they did not yet identify the person responsible.

Borgny’s last known movements gave the route evidence a human context. She had attended an event at the Mono, where a new issue of the fashion magazine Sheness was launched, then told a friend and colleague that she was going home to prepare a photo shoot. She was thought to be heading for a taxi stand, but the taxi records and drivers checked by police did not place her in a cab to Sagene. No one was known to have seen her after she left the venue. Two Polish bricklayers later found her in a cellar after noticing that its iron-door padlock had been forced.

Reconstructing the Night

The medical examiner placed Borgny’s death between 10 and 11 p.m. and recorded traces of Ketanomin, a fast-acting sedative. The report also described a highly unusual pattern of injuries, but the investigators did not know what instrument had caused them. At that point, the case had neither a recognized weapon nor technical traces such as fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions. The cellar floor had been cleaned the previous day for heating cables and flooring, further limiting what investigators could recover. These findings made the crime distinctive while leaving its perpetrator difficult to identify.

The hut’s central witness question was unusually stark: Iska Peller was the only person known to be alive who had stayed there that night, yet investigators understood that she had spent the day and following night asleep, ill and alone in a sleeping room. Adele, by contrast, had been there with a man she had met only shortly beforehand. No one in her circle seemed to know him. Investigators also had records of men who had contacted her by telephone or online, but reaching them would take time. The gap between a crowded list of possible connections and the absence of usable eyewitness testimony became a central problem in reconstructing the gathering.

Elias Skog’s account offered a belated view of one episode outside the sleeping quarters. On the night in question, noises woke him; looking out in the moonlight, he saw a man and woman beneath the overhang of the outhouse. He could not see the man’s face. At the time, Elias interpreted the encounter as sexual and went back to sleep without understanding it as an emergency. After reading about the murders, he reconsidered what he had seen: the woman might have been struggling to get free, and the man’s hand over her mouth might have been intended to stop her calling for help. Elias later told a woman on a bus in Stavanger that he had witnessed what he now feared could have been an assault. His account thus reached the investigation only after his first interpretation had failed him.

From Hypothesis to Motive

When Mikael Bellman reviewed the known names, times, and likely routes with his team, he argued that the victims did not look like random selections from a demographic group. Their connection to a specific place and time suggested a concrete motive, potentially one that could be rationally explained. He asked the investigators to consider what could unite at least four murders. Jealousy and voices commanding a person to kill were offered as hypotheses, not established findings. The distinction mattered: the pattern at the hut could direct the investigation, but it did not yet explain why the killings had occurred.

Bellman also used the press conference as part of the investigation. He publicly recapped established developments: rope connected to the Mark Olsen murder had been traced to a rope factory on Lyseren, Adele Vetlesen had been found as another victim, and the weapon used in two of the murders had been identified as the so-called Leopoldsapfel. He then announced that Iska Peller would arrive in Oslo from Australia and return to Hävasshütte with an investigator to reconstruct the evening. Ordinarily, police would not have disclosed a witness’s name. Here, Bellman meant the announcement to reach the killer: it signalled that the police had located someone from the guest list and were sending two people, a witness and an investigator, back to the remote hut.

The interpretation of Elias’s sighting shifted again when Harry learned that Tony Leike had raped Adele Vetlesen at Hävasshütte. Harry could imagine Leike as violent, but the identification did not settle what Elias had witnessed. Harry then recognized that the apparent assault had not been a rape. That reversal supplied the motive: the decisive fact was not simply that an assault had taken place, but that the event was something else. The account leaves the precise alternative unstated at this point, while making clear that Harry’s realization abruptly brings the pattern into focus.

Narrative Significance

The novel first presents a killer’s private theory of murder: the speaker claims that the capacity to kill belongs to ordinary humanity and recasts murder as an act of mercy. At the same time, the police have not yet recognized the connection among the killings, though the speaker expects them to do so. This contrast sets the investigation against a self-justifying voice whose certainty does not amount to a reliable explanation of the crimes.

The case’s revelations arrive through a sequence of corrected readings. Ticket records establish a shared destination, bookings place guests on a route, and Elias’s memory changes meaning after he learns of the murders. Harry’s final recognition similarly reverses the assumption that the hut episode was a rape. The investigation therefore depends not only on discovering facts, but on understanding what earlier facts actually signify. The remote setting withholds witnesses; the delayed testimony withholds meaning. Together, those conditions make the Hävasshütte gathering the point at which apparently separate cases can be reconsidered as a connected pattern.