Examining the site, police noted the woman's supine position, her clenched hands up by her torso and the evidence of a nearby campfire.

[7] Among other items, they also found clothing, shoes, wigs, makeup, eczema cream, 135 Norwegian kroner, Belgian, British and Swiss coins, maps, timetables, a pair of non-prescription glasses, sunglasses with partial fingerprints (which matched the woman),[6] cosmetics and a notepad.

[9] As a result, based on handwritten check-in forms, police determined that the woman had travelled around Norway (i.e. Oslo, Trondheim, Stavanger) and Europe (Paris) with at least eight fake passports and aliases.

[13] On 5 February 1971, the woman was given a Catholic burial (based on her use of saints' names on check-in forms) in an unmarked grave within the Møllendal graveyard located in Bergen.

Attended by sixteen members of the Bergen police force, she was buried in a zinc coffin to both preserve her remains and for ease of disinterment.

[3] Much remains unanswered about the case, especially the reasons for the woman's many identities and unexplained travel plans, which raise the question of espionage or criminal activity.

[14] The declassified records of the Norwegian Armed Forces also reveal that many of the woman's movements seem to correspond to top secret trials of the Penguin missile.

In 1991, however, a taxi driver wishing to remain anonymous said that after picking up the unknown woman at the hotel, they were joined by another man for the ride to the train station.

After the case was reopened in 2016,[6] Norwegian broadcaster NRK commissioned the American artist Stephen Missal to create six alternative sketches of the Isdal Woman, which were shown to people who had seen her.

[24][25] In 2018, NRK and the BBC World Service published a podcast series titled Death in Ice Valley, which included interviews with eyewitnesses and forensic scientists, also suggesting that the Isdal Woman's birthplace may have been southern Germany or the French-German border region, and that she was probably born in or around 1930.

[21] Further, Colleen Fitzpatrick, a geneticist with the DNA Doe Project, contacted the Death in Ice Valley team to offer her help in identifying the woman through genetic genealogical isotope testing of autopsied tissues.

[29] In 2019, after a publication of an article in the French newspaper Le Républicain Lorrain,[30] a resident of Forbach claimed to have had a relationship with the Isdal Woman in the summer of 1970.

According to this informant, the woman was a polyglot with a Balkan accent who often dressed herself up to look younger than her age (26), refused to share personal details and often received scheduled phone calls from abroad.

[31] On June 12, 2023, an article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung suggested that the Isdal Woman may have had connections with the Swiss banker François Genoud, and that Norwegian Intelligence Service interfered with local police investigations.