Who is Jennifer Fairgate? Woman who checked into hotel using fake name found dead 25 years ago still a mystery
In the early summer of 1995, a death happened in Oslo, Norway, that is still a mystery after 25 years. On May 31, 1995, a woman checked into the Oslo Plaza Hotel, which at the time was the top luxury hotel in the capital city. She was given room number 2805. Everything was fine till June 3, when the hotel manager noticed that the woman, who checked in as Jennifer Fairgate, did not give her credit card for her stay since it was an expensive hotel. It was then found that for two days the “do not disturb” sign had hung on the door of the room.
So, the manager asked one of the security guards to go and check. On the manager’s command, the guard took the elevator to the 28th floor and reached room 2805 at 7:50 p.m. and knocked on the door, but seconds later a gunshot was heard. The terrified guard waited a few minutes outside the room before going back downstairs to inform others about what he heard. “So, after the guard was gone, there was a gap of around 15 minutes when the room was not guarded, which means during that time no one knows if anyone left the room,” Lars Christian Wegner, Feature Journalist, VG Newspaper, said in the second episode of the second season of the Netflix series - ‘Unsolved Mysteries’.
Minutes later, the security chief came to check the room and found it double locked from inside, which led him to use the security key card to open the door. Once the door was opened, he found a woman on the bed. He also smelled a strange smell and immediately police were called. “We approached the room very carefully and found the woman dead on the bed. A gun was in her hand,” Audun Kristiansen, Prosecuting Authority Oslo Police Department, said in the episode, titled ‘A Death in Oslo’.
The Investigation
The scenario of the room was not exactly like a crime scene, meaning there were no traces of another person in the room. No evidence of struggle also. The woman had a wound in her head and the room was double-locked from inside. Also, there was no immediate entering around the time of her death. “Police believed she hit herself. During her stay, she prepared herself for what was coming, her death. In one of the documents, it says 99.9% sure it is a suicide,” Wegner stated.
The most strange part of the investigation came when the investigators went through the room and could not find any identity of the woman. No credit card, no driver’s license, no wallet, no car keys, and no home keys. Not just that, they did not even see any toothbrush, hairbrush, cosmetics, or anything. “Not even a passport and that’s very rare because mainly people have to have a passport to come to Norway. We looked at her clothes and found one odd thing that their labels were removed,” Kristiansen said in the Netflix show inspired by real-life crimes, where viewers are encouraged to provide information that might solve the mystery. Wegner added that one more thing was strange and it was “there was nothing to wear from the waist and down” in the woman’s luggage.
But what followed was the strangest of all since the woman got the room without providing any identification. She did not show her credit card, did not pay in advance. She also did not show her passport to get the room. Investigators only got the information about her through a registration card of the hotel where she provided her name as Jennifer Fairgate. “Date of birth was 28-08-1973. Telephone number: 35-68326548. The address she gave was of a Belgian street in a tiny village. Local police informed their Belgian counterparts as they wanted to inform her family. They suddenly realized there was no family to notify because that person did not exist. She checked-in under a false name,” Wegner said. To find out about the woman, investigators also ran her fingerprints through Interpol, but no one reacted to it.
Kristiansen said three or four days before her arrival, the woman called the hotel and said she was coming with Lois Fairgate. That person’s name was also written over the registration card. “One of the desk operators believed she observed a person standing beside her when she checked in, but after that he disappeared,” the journalist said, and continued that despite the tight security and cameras, unfortunately, there was no information in the police documents about the police searching those cameras. “So, to me, it did not look like they ever searched the cameras. The story was weird. So many questions and so few answers. But the real question was her identity,” Wegner added.
For a couple of weeks, the case was treated as a homicide, but since no concrete evidence came out of it, investigators returned to their original theory and dubbed it a suicide. They believed that the woman was depressed, or had some psychiatric issues and wanted to die alone. After keeping her body for a year, in 1996, the case was closed and she was buried.
For investigators, it was an end, but for Wegner, it was the start of a new investigation on a personal level. “I think she deserved a headstone, her family deserved to know what happened to her. So, I did a story in 1996 and for the next 20 years, time to time, I took the story out because I was sure this was an intriguing story,” he added.
The New Probe
Wegner said the mystery woman claimed to be from Verlaine in Belgium, a tiny village that actually exists. “Lars asked me if I could help him out, if we could do some research, talk with people here in Belgium,” Cedric Lagast, Journalist, Het Nieuwsblad, Belgium, said. The pair of journalists also talked to Hubert Jonet, Mayor of Verlaine, but failed to find anything about the woman. “Nobody had seen this woman, she was stranger to everyone,” Lagast mentioned, while Wegner said: “It was like following a ghost.”
The woman’s sketch and the story were widely published in different newspapers, but no lead. Geir Skauge, Crime Scene Investigator (Retired) said that the 9-mm gun that was found with the woman in the room “was a tough gun with a hard recoil. It was more of an assault weapon.” “When you fire, the recoil pushes the gun back. I think it’s very odd that the gun was not falling out of her hand. I think there must have been a second person,” Skauge added.
However, when no answer was found, Wegner took the help of Torleiv Ole Rognum, MD, Ph.D., Chief Pathologist at Oslo University Hospital, who said, “This could have been a suicide except for the fact that there were no blood spots on her hand. In most cases, when people perform suicide, they are shaky and they will also put the left hand around the barrel. I think I have never seen a case without any blood spots on the hand when they perform suicide.”
But Ola Kaldager, Group Leader, E14, Norwegian Intelligence Service, believed it was a well carried out intelligence operation. The basis of his theory was the Plaza Hotel was a place for several international top political meetings and one of the places for secret negotiations between Israel and Palestinian authorities. “I have a feeling she was executed. The registration number was removed from the weapon. Marks were taken away from clothing. That’s normal procedure in the intelligence service,” Kaldager said.
The mystery was still unsolved and Wegner then decided to open the grave of the woman to find the DNA of her to identify her. “In 1995, the use of DNA was not common within the Norwegian police. So, the only way to find the DNA was to open the grave,” he added. When the body was taken out, to everyone's surprise, it was in good condition. “We found everything we needed. It resulted in a full DNA profile,” Wegner stated. After the test, it was found that the woman was of European heritage, and according to the police reports, she spoke German with an eastern German accent, as per a desk operator at the hotel. “So, she might be either from the eastern part of Germany or at least she might have been living there for some part of her life,” the journalist noted.
But unfortunately, nothing concrete was found. Wegner then came in contact with Henrik Druid, Professor Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Druid suggested a way to confirm the age of the woman because her autopsy has given a different age than what she wrote while checking in the hotel. After examining the teeth of the woman, Druid found that the woman most likely was born in 1971, which made her a 24-year-old when she died.
“Probably born between 1970-72 and there is a reason to believe she had her childhood and youth in Germany. And that limits the range she might have been from there. Then I decided to work with Europe’s largest newspaper, The Bild-Zeitung in Berlin. They have a reach of ten million people daily. We were hoping that someone might recognize her. That was the best shot so far. We received many tips and information, but nothing that has helped us solve this story yet,” Wegner stated.
At the end of the episode, he asserted that it’s important for “society to try to solve cases like this and this woman deserves her name on a gravestone.” “I am sure there are people out there who know who Jennifer was. That is what we are hoping for. That’s the only thing that can solve this mystery,” Wegner added.
'Unsolved Mysteries - Volume 2' will release on October 19, 12:01 am PT. If anyone has any information about the woman’s identity, they are requested to contact the VG newspaper at Jennifer@vg.no or go to unsolved.com.