The Serial Murders of Borgny Stem-Myhre, Charlotte Lolles, and Marit Olsen form a case whose apparent pattern is clearer than its cause: the investigators come to suspect a common perpetrator or perpetrators, but cannot yet establish who was present at the crucial mountain hut or why the women were killed.

Pattern and Initial Evidence

In a first-person account, an unidentified speaker describes collecting newspaper photographs of people who had seemed happy and secure before their deaths. The speaker observes that the police have not yet connected the murders, but expects them to do so. This strand places the crimes inside a larger pattern before the investigation has recognized one, while withholding the speaker’s identity and the truth behind the killings.

The case file gives the investigators concrete grounds to look for a link. Borgny Stem-Myhre was last seen leaving the Mono after an evening event; she had told a friend and colleague she planned to go home and prepare for a photo shoot. No nearby taxi driver identified her or recalled taking her to Sagene. Two Polish construction workers later found her in a cellar after noticing that its iron-door padlock had been forced. The medical examination placed her death between 10 and 11 p.m. and found Ketanomin in her blood. Her death was attributed to drowning following injuries to her mouth; the unusual pattern of punctures left investigators unable to identify the instrument used. Investigators also lacked ordinary trace evidence, in part because the concrete floor had been cleaned the previous day for building work.

The inquiry’s geographical and chronological clues begin to draw the victims together. A search of missing-person records identifies Adele Vetlesen, who had been reported missing by her partner in November. Ticket records show that Adele bought a train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7; Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination on that date. A separate account search finds that Iska Peller paid for two beds in each of four mountain huts, with the huts roughly a day’s walk apart. The final hut, Hävasshütte, was near Ustaoset, and the records place the booking there on November 7. These records do not by themselves establish what happened, but they move the investigation from resemblance between deaths toward a shared location and possible company.

The Hut and the Reinterpreted Witness Account

Harry weighs the travel and booking records as evidence of proximity, not proof of a shared crime scene. His assessment is that Charlotte Lolles was very likely with Adele Vetlesen, while Borgny Stem-Myhre and Marit Olsen had both been near Ustaoset. The records therefore point toward overlapping company and place, but leave a crucial gap: the investigators still do not know who else was at Hävasshütte or what happened there.

Elias Skog’s account gives that gap a human witness, though not an immediate explanation. During the night at the hut, he was awakened by sounds outside his bedroom window and saw a man and a woman near the outhouse. He took their movements for a sexual encounter and returned to sleep before seeing what happened next. Only after reading about the murders did he reconsider what he had observed: the woman might have been trying to get free, and the man’s hand over her mouth might have been meant to stop her calling for help. The scene is thus introduced through a witness’s mistaken interpretation, and the murders retrospectively alter its meaning without making his observation conclusive.

Later, Harry’s working interpretation shifts again. He initially considers the possibility that Tony Leike assaulted Adele at the hut, but then recognizes that the encounter was not what he had assumed and that this reversal supplies the motive. The realization changes the meaning of the apparent pattern: the hut connects people and events, yet the connection is not explained by the straightforward violent crime Harry first imagined. The evidence available here stops at that turning point; it does not establish the full motive or identify all those present.

The Killer’s Theory of Mercy

The opening first-person voice offers a private theory of what makes a murderer. It rejects the idea that the capacity to kill belongs only to a distinct class of people, presenting it instead as part of ordinary human existence and, in extremity, a means of survival. From that premise, the speaker recasts murder as an acceleration of the death that awaits everyone and therefore as a possible act of mercy. This is not an explanation established by the investigation, but the speaker’s own moral framework for the crimes.

The passage also exposes a tension within that framework. The speaker argues that life consists of suffering, yet recognizes how readily warmth, water, and the desire to continue living can make a person surrender dignity, position, or principles. In that moment, the speaker’s supposed clarity depends on resisting the pull of life itself. The stark opposition between blinding light and clear-sighted darkness makes the doctrine sound less like a settled answer than a conviction the speaker must repeatedly enforce. Its claim to have found the truth behind murder thus stands apart from the investigators’ unresolved work: a self-justification is present, but the evidence does not yet establish how it accounts for each killing.

The Uneven Pattern of the Case

Harry’s later inventory makes clear that the suspected connection does not rest on a single repeated method: two women were killed in a similar manner and had Ketanomin in their blood, while another woman was found hanged from a diving tower with a rope from an old rope factory. The inventory also includes Elias Skog, who drowned in his own bathtub. Although the victims appeared to have been at Hävasshütte at the same time, the investigation had not established who else was there, what occurred at the hut, or what motive linked the deaths. The case therefore remains suspended between a compelling overlap and an unproved explanation: the evidence can bring people and places together without yet showing that every death belongs to one comprehensible design.