Who was the dead woman in room 2805?

In a room at the luxury hotel Oslo Plaza lies a young woman, shot in the head and with a gun in her hand.

It is written off as suicide, but the woman is enigmatic. The way she holds the gun, the fake identity, the clothes with the patches cut off.

Who is she – and what brought her to room 2805 in June 1995?

The glass facade of Oslo’s tallest building reflects its surroundings. The luxury hotel has housed presidents, world stars and secret negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

But the tinted squares also hide a mystery.

On the evening of June 3, 1995, a shot goes off in a room on floor 28. The security guard who seconds earlier had knocked on the door is frightened and rushes for help.

A quarter of an hour passes before the hotel staff returns. When they open the door – locked from the inside – they are greeted by a pungent smell. The curtains flutter in the open window. On the bed lies a lifeless young woman.

She has a bullet hole in her forehead and is holding the gun herself. It looks like a suicide.

The Fergate couple

The woman, Jennifer Fergate from Belgium, checked into room 2805 three days earlier with her husband Lois. It is when you realize that the couple has not paid that the guard knocks on the door.

There are no ID documents, no wallet and no personal belongings in the room. Not even a toothbrush. Apart from a testimony from a receptionist, there is also no trace of any man.

However, there is an almost empty bottle of men’s perfume and an attache case filled with cartridges. All the patches on the woman’s clothes have been cut away.

Clothing for the lower body is completely missing, so is a bag that holds the clothes.

Staff who have been in the room for cleaning and room service tell in questioning about a rolling bag, a pair of elegant shoes and that the woman was wearing a long dark skirt – none of this is left in the room.

Belgian police announce that the couple Jennifer and Lois Fergate do not exist.

Eluding the police

The serial number on the gun, a nine millimeter Browning, has been burned away with acid. There are no fingerprints.

On the woman’s hand holding the weapon, there is neither blood spatter nor gunpowder residue, something forensic experts later react to. Others note that the finger remains on the trigger despite the recoil.

According to the staff, the woman spoke English and German. No one has reported her missing and her fingerprints are not in the Interpol database. She has provided a false address in a small Belgian town.

Before her death, she made two calls to almost identical Belgian telephone numbers. None of them have any subscribers.

The police have several hypotheses – luxury prostitute, involved in drug dealing, professional killer or intelligence agent – but find no support for any of them.

Was she simply depressed and wanted to die?

After just over a year, the investigation is put on hold. Jennifer Fergate is buried in an anonymous grave in Vestre Gravlund in Oslo.

Reporter dug further

Verdens Gang’s reporter Lars Christian Wegner writes a report from the funeral and then cannot let her go. Twenty years later, he begins a collaboration with the Oslo police to solve the case.

– There was a lot that went wrong in the investigation because they were initially sure that it was a suicide, he says.

The woman, he can now say, was away from her room for a whole day before her death. Wegner also seeks out a Belgian man who lived in the room opposite during her last night of life. Through a closed front door, the man claims he was asked about his observations in connection with checking out – even though she did not die until 12 hours later.

– It was a strange story, says Wegner.

In the fall of 2016, Jennifer Fergate’s remains are exhumed from the earth. Pieces of bone and teeth provide an almost complete DNA profile. She is estimated to have been 24 years old with roots in Germany.

50/50

– She was a young woman who must have gone to school, had friends and love partners. I think there are people who know who she is but for some reason don’t want her identified.

Do you think she killed herself?

– The experts we spoke to say that it is 50/50 between murder and suicide. Even if she did it herself, she may have been pressured or realized the alternative was worse. I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of criminal act behind it.

Despite intense scrutiny and thousands of tips, the woman in room 2805 remains a mystery. But Lars Christian Wegner believes in a solution. The hope is not least that in the future one will be able to search for dna matches in genealogy registers, which is currently prohibited.

– The key is to identify her. If we do, there is a greater chance of finding out what happened and why.