The Hanging Bride (UPDATED 5/18)

[Vedderman]

Site member makaluzo recently contributed some photos to the Hanging thread, but because a lot of users don't check there regularly and because this is sort of a fascinating case, I am taking the liberty of posting the pics in their own thread, along with some data about this event.

Several of these photos have been floating around gore sites for over a decade now, but makaluzo recently found a few that were only released to the public last month. One of the articles I researched said that there were additional photos that were not published due to being too graphic. I'm working on getting them from the original photographer, but it is something of a difficult process.

Anyway...the story:

On September 4th 1990, a body was reported to be hanging from a tree near the cemetery in Portbau, Spain. Portbau had been a very hot tourist city during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but by the early 90s had begun to decline and slow down dramatically. So what may well have been third page news in 1980 was a local sensation 10 years later.

The initial news story both locally and further abroad was that a young bride had hanged herself in her wedding dress. The death was somewhat sensationalized/romanticized due to this and an abundance of rumors circulated both in the public and in the press about who she was, where the groom could be, and why she had killed herself so publicly in her wedding dress. Over the years, books have been written about 'The Hanging Bride of Portbau' and local stories about her continued for over a decade. Most of this seemed to stem from exaggerated police statements, rank gossip, and the fact that the only publicly released image from the case was a very grainy b/w photo in the newspaper.

Eventually photographs were leaked to demonstrate that what was originally mistaken by the public for a bridal gown was actually a sheet that one of the passersby had draped over the girl's body. The clearer images showed that she was actually wearing denim overalls and a tshirt.

The 'legend' of the hanging bride has actually done some part in keeping the story alive for thirty years, as has the fact that the case was never 'solved.'

In recent times (as recently as last month, in fact), additional formal reports have been published to shed some light (and some fog in a few instances) on the circumstances surrounding the death of this girl, but her identity remains a mystery three decades later.

The actual data as reported by witnesses and police is still a bit tricky as some accounts conflict.

What is definitive on the police record is as follows:
1. A municipal garbage truck drove past the cemetery on its route just after 7am and there was no body on the tree.

2. The body was reported by a local who walked past the tree on their way to fish just under an hour after the garbage truck started its route.

3. The girl was a Caucasian female presumed to be around 20 years of age. She had no identification on her person and no identifying tattoos or scars.

4. She had ash-blonde hair and her body hair was unshaven and unwaxed. The investigator opined that her complexion, hair color, and depilatory habits made it likely that she was a tourist from Germany or Scandinavia, as they were the only two regions in Europe at the time where it was still a normal trend for young women to have unshaven body hair.

5. She was barefoot, but her sandals were lying at the base of the tree. They were not stacked uniformly together, so it is probably that she kicked them off while asphyxiating, but that isn't possible to prove.

6. Her fingers had unique calluses on them. The investigation concluded that the nature of the calluses was very likely to have been equestrian work or nautical work. They surmised that she was more likely than not to be somewhat wealthy because extensive work with boat ropes and horse reins was considered a purview of the affluent and she was quite obviously not a professional fisherman. They also posited the idea (later bourn out as truth) that the calluses were from extensive writing due to her academic background.

Photos of her face were distributed fairly widely among law enforcement and newspapers at the time, but her body lay unclaimed in the morgue for months before the city finally put her in a public grave. In the decades since, her fingerprints have been run against hundreds of girls reported missing in the area over the last 30 years, but none have ever yielded a hit.

The bar owner across the road from where she was hanging mentioned in an interview that it took them over 4 hours to get the body removed and he was forced to see it out his window all day.

The local constable at the time of the hanging made a brief and sparsely detailed report about seeing a young man in a parked foreign car, weeping and staring towards the cemetery when he walked by, but when he returned to question him, the boy was gone. This report was never substantiated in any way and the constable was elderly even in 1990 and died shortly after, so no further light was ever shed on this unidentified 'young man' if he actually existed.

The identity of the Hanging Bride should be more easy to locate now in the age of DNA, but it was recently reported that her body was somehow 'lost' in the public grave area of the cemetery and could no longer be conclusively proven to be hers. Basically, she's jumbled in with a bunch of other corpses and they aren't sure which body is hers so they can't obtain reliable DNA samples.

Anyway, here is a series of photos of her body after it was cut down and taken to the morgue, as well as some of her hanging. Like I said, some are older and have been here a while but several are thanks to poster makaluzo.

The very clear, high-res b/w photo of her still hanging was taken by a young reporter right after the body was reported. The timeline with <an hour since death is not possible to verify from the photo in terms of livor/rigor due to not being able to see her skin tone closely, but the urine soaking her overalls is obviously very fresh, so ~60 minutes since time of death seems reasonable.

That particular photo was only released recently, for the first time in 30 years btw. If you compare it to the scan from the 1990 local paper, you can clearly see how readers at the time might have confused the sheet for a bridal veil.

The clothing shots included at the end are photos of the labels of her overalls, including the pockets, and her sports bra (I think). It's a little tough to tell what each specific piece is, since when a body is brought into the morgue for autopsy, they typically cut the clothing off rather than remove it intact. Evidence is less likely to be disrupted that way. Several articles of her clothing were made in Greece, but that lent no clue to her identity.

UPDATE She has been identified after 32 years. Details and many more photos on pages 2/3 in the thread. Will add them all here shortly.

[SimoneFlen']

A slightly wider shot:



Where she's buried:

[Vedderman]

Originally Posted by Simone

Where she's buried:

Except she's not actually in there anymore. That's where she's SUPPOSED to be buried. They were unable to get DNA samples to match to databases because when they popped her can open, the body of an 80 year old man was rotting inside.

According to the local administrators, some big kurfuffle happened in the last few decades and a bunch of bodies in the 'public charity' portion of the cemetery got all mixed up. They have no idea which 'niche' she's in now.

[SimoneFlen']

According to this article, she was still in there in 2016:

https://www.elpuntavui.cat/punt-dive...ambe-mata.html

The people who die in solitude are mostly elderly people, but Bardalet does not get out of his head the case that breaks the statistics for the youth of the victim, a young girl who does not even have a name and no one has ever claimed. This is the girl, who looked like a bride, who was found hanging from a pine tree on September 4, 1990, 26 years ago, in Portbou. The tomb of this No Name, was precisely the first stop that the coroner made in the guided night visit to the cemetery of Figueres, which gathered hundreds of attendees on All Saints' Day. Niche number 134, on the fifth floor, was the only one lit by candles in the first department of the cemetery so that everyone could see where, embalmed by Bardalet, the girl the coroner has not yet lost hope of identifying is. Bardalet explained to his dedicated audience that he is working with the Civil Guard for the court to authorize the exhumation in order to extract DNA from it and include it in the databases on international missing persons. "I trust that through DNA banks, we will be able to know who he is. And in the event that no relatives appear, we will have to start thinking that the people around us do not want to know who they are and want to hide what happened ", says the researcher who finds the case very mysterious. "When the garbage truck passed by, the girl was not there and a quarter of an hour later, a neighbor found her hanging." She wore nothing to identify her. Now, DNA, a technique that didn’t exist 26 years ago, may be the key to naming it.

But, this article (same website but from 2020) states that she was moved to a mass grave in 2001:

https://www.elpuntavui.cat/punt-dive...l#&gid=1&pid=1

Thirty years after a mysterious hanging girl was found in Portbou that no one has ever claimed, attempts are still being made to name her. The Girona Civil Guard has asked the German police to send him the fingerprints of Christina Hermert, a 22-year-old girl who disappeared in Halle (Germany) on January 20, 1990, eight months before the girl appeared hanging in Portbou. It has been the Doe Network association, which helps in the search for missing people in Germany that, through the efforts of journalist Oriol Querol, compared Hermert's photographs with those of the girl from Portbou and discovered similarities. of facial physiognomy. Doe Network first contacted the forensic Narcís Bardalet, who embalmed the body of the girl from Portbou, and later with the judicial police unit of the Civil Guard, the body responsible for the investigation, to provide data on the missing person. in Germany. According to the Interpol archives, Christina Hermert was 1.65 m tall, thin and had wavy brown hair. Hermert was 22 years old when she disappeared and was the mother of two children. This a priori circumstance does not agree with the girl from Portbou, as the forensic scientist Rogelio Lacaci, who performed the autopsy, did not find any signs that he had children. However, the Civil Guard has considered requesting Hermert's fingerprints in Germany to be able to compare them with those of the Portbou girl, who took the corpse in 1990. Investigators have to work with the fingerprints as they do not have of the DNA of the girl from Portbou because at the time it appeared, in 1990, this genetic identification technique did not yet exist and due to an unforeseen and illogical misfortune that they encountered in 2001 when they wanted to take samples of DNA from the body to enter them in the database of the Fènix program: the employees of the cemetery of Figueres had thrown the body in the mass grave

The girl's body was embalmed and kept for three months in the tank in the hope that a family would arrive to claim and identify the body of a young, beautiful and polished girl, whom the civil guards called "the bride ”. No relatives appeared and finally the embalmed body was placed, on December 5, 1990, in niche number 134 on the fifth floor of the first department of the Figueres cemetery. It was a niche of charity for a body at the disposal of the court of instruction number 1 of Figueres, responsible for the investigation of the case of death. On February 22, 2001, he was transferred to the mass grave in accordance with municipal regulations, which guarantee that charity niches can be reused after ten years. The transfer to the grave was made leaving evidence that the body was available to the court number 1 of Figueres. He was recently removed when the Civil Guard obtained permission in 2001 to exhume the body and take DNA samples. The niche was not reoccupied until August 21, 2001, when a ninety-year-old deceased was buried in a charity. Although attempts have been made to recover the embalmed body from the grave, it has not been able to be located and with the inexplicable loss of the body the opportunity for its identification through DNA is also lost.

I don't think it's the same girl. There's a vague resemblance, but the tip of the nose gives it away.

[TxWader]

Wow! Someone somewhere is missing that attractive girl. In this day and age to not be able to ID a person is sort of screwed up.

Thanks for posting this.

[Vedderman]

And according to this source, written last month, she's been missing for far longer than that:

https://www.elespanol.com/reportajes...4200187_0.html

"In the early 90's there were no DNA records. The only thing that remains of that young woman are the fingerprints. Because the body remained buried in that niche for the next 10 years. And due to a question of space in the cemetery, the workers ended up throwing the remains into a common grave with other bodies, without taking into account that the case was still open and it was a body in judicial custody. This nonsensical mistake was perpetrated in 2000. Only a year later, the police put into effect the 'Phoenix Program' , which identifies people by DNA. Too late for the case of the Portbou Bride however: the remains of that young woman have disappeared forever."

[Vedderman]

Originally Posted by Simone

I don't think it's the same girl. There's a vague resemblance, but the tip of the nose gives it away.

Correct. The girl in the antemortem photo there is a missing German girl, Christine Hermert. The police were able to exclude her using the fingerprints on file from the dead girl's autopsy.

[SimoneFlen']

Originally Posted by Vedderman

Correct. The girl in the antemortem photo there is a missing German girl, Christine Hermert. The police were able to exclude her using the fingerprints on file from the dead girl's autopsy.

They could have saved their time by looking at her nose, haha!

[kellyhound]

There are also those who say that the girl was one of those victims of trafficking who ended up in any brothel in La Junquera, one of the municipalities with the most brothels per square meter in Europe, and that she did not kill herself: “The tree is the same as it does 30 years: the base is full of cacti. The girl was found hanging barefoot, with her shoes on well at a distance. But at her feet they didn't find a spike.

i luv a good mystery

[Pollucy]

The washing instructions on one of the clothing tags has instructions in swedish, english, french and german (in that order) so it's likely a correct guess that she would be scandinavian (swedish) or german. Swedish being the first language on the tag kinda makes me think it would have been sold in sweden, although the fact that the other languages don't include norwegian, danish or finnish makes me unsure. Usually all of these are included on items sold in Sweden, but of course I don't know if this was the case back then.

Another possible clue on the same tag is the brand name Impuls, which is a line of clothes started in the 70's by swedish clothing company H&M. Of course, this girl could still be from another country but swedish being the first language on the tag could imply that this is where it was sold.