It starts with a hike.

Not the kind you prepare for, not where you pack carefully and check the weather.

This was the spur of the moment decision, the kind people make on a gray November morning in Norway, just to clear their heads.

A father and his two daughters set out near Bergen, heading out into the foothills of the mountains that cradle the city.

The path they took led them into Isdalen, a cold and quiet place known by a different name to the locals.

Valley of Death. Now, it's not a nickname. The valley has history. People have died there plenty of times. Climers who have slipped,

hikers who disappeared, even those deaths that were ruled suicides without much explanation.

There's always been a kind of silence hanging over it. Not just the trees or the stone,

but from the stories that people don't tell too loudly.

That morning, the trail was damp, and the air was thick with fog.

The forest around them seemed normal enough until the smell hit them.

Sharp, chemical, unmistakably wrong, like something had burned there recently.

And so they followed the scent a few steps off the path, and that's when they saw it.

Now, at first, it didn't even register as a body.

It looked like something had melted into the rocks.

It was dark and sunken, surrounded by burnt patches of earth.

But then the shape came into focus.

A torso, arms curled forward in a way that didn't look accidental, as if the woman had tried to protect herself, or maybe as if she had been placed there, arranged.

The man pulled his daughters away and contacted the police, and what followed was confusion,

and then silence, and then slowly, a case that never really went anywhere at all.

In this episode, we're going to be exploring one of the most mysterious cases in recent times.

Well, the times around the

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