In July of 1990, Lynda and Bob visited the owner of the Bremer Hut, who reiterated the account he’d told Angelika the previous autumn. It was possible, he said, that the young foreigner had taken the smugglers’ trail into Italy. And so, with their friend Martin Baer, the MacPhersons went on a long hike south of Stubai, just across the Italian border. Martin was a bookish type who’d seldom left Innsbruck prior to meeting the MacPhersons. Bob thought he looked like a Talmudic scholar.
He said he’d been studying his trail guide and wouldn’t get lost. Four hours into their hike, Bob began to have doubts. At one point their path crossed a glacier.
“Martin, are you sure this is a secure path?” Bob asked.
“I think so, but just in case there are crevasses, I brought this,” he said, and produced a ball of twine from his backpack.
“What are we supposed to do with that?” Bob asked.
“Rope together,” he replied.
“I’m not kidding,” Lynda said, laughing hysterically. “He really handed me a piece of string and told me to tie it around my wrist.”
“Martin got real interested in the mountains after we started bringing him out to Stubai to translate for us. Over the years he sent me a bunch of interesting articles about mountain accidents, and once he had his own scare. He was up walking around on a glacier with a girl from Innsbruck when he broke through a snow bridge. Lucky for him it was a small crevasse and he was able to arrest his fall by throwing out his arms on either side of the crack, but it scared him so bad that he vomited.”
The MacPhersons had heard of crevasses before Duncan disappeared, but while searching for him in the Alps, they learned much more about them. Crevasses are cracks in glaciers that can be several meters wide and up to forty-five meters deep. For most of the year many are covered with a layer of snow that conceals them and prevents people from falling into them. However, during the summer, the warm temperature causes these snow bridges to melt down to a state at which they will no longer support a man’s weight, even though they may continue to conceal the crevasses. In an instant, a weakened snow bridge may give way, dropping the alpinist into a terrifying void.
The authorities in Innsbruck rarely spoke about crevasses, as they seemed to prefer the more general expression “alpine accident.” Lynda understood that if Duncan had snowboarded off-piste or hiked off the marked trails, he could have fallen into a crevasse, but she was confident he would not have taken such a risk.
“But in the summer of 1990,” Lynda recounted, “I began to sense that Duncan might have fallen into a crevasse on the ski slope. It was an intuition, I guess, sort of like my early intuition that something had happened to him around Innsbruck. The police insisted that the ski slope was safe, because the Stubai Glacier was required to keep its crevasses under control. But then again, the cops had also said that no car could sit in the mountains for more than a few days without being reported.”
One day, in late July, she felt an urge to take another look at the Schaufelferner. Bob’s brothers Jim and Truman were visiting, and she invited them to join her. They rode the gondola to the Eisgrat and then walked up the glacier on the designated path. A couple walked a few meters ahead of them, and about halfway to the top, the woman suddenly plunged into the snow as though she were being swallowed by the glacier. Luckily for her, her companion grabbed her wrist and stopped her from dropping all the way in.
To Lynda, the spectacle had a surreal quality, like a dream that gave visual expression to what she’d been thinking. She froze on the path, watching the man pull the woman to safety. She then approached the hole, peered down into it, and saw nothing but darkness. The thought of falling into the cold, black chasm made her shudder. Reflexively she pulled out her camera and photographed the crevasse.
A slope worker, who happened to be standing nearby on the path, saw the incident and spoke into a handheld radio. Minutes later a Snowcat drove up, scooped a pile of snow with its blade, and pushed it into the hole.
“Don’t you check to make sure no one is trapped in it before you fill it?” Lynda asked the worker standing on the path.
“Only if someone has been reported missing,” he replied. Again she snapped a few shots of the scene.
The next day Bob went to the gendarmerie post in Neustift, and as he entered, he saw three officers standing behind the counter.
“You shouldn’t have taken those photos on the glacier,” one of them said as he approached the counter.
“Excuse me?” Bob said, shocked.
“You had no right to take those photos,” the cop said, his voice raised in anger. Bob’s mind reeled trying to comprehend what he’d just heard. How did the officer even know that Lynda had taken the photos, and why on earth was he so angry about it?
“I don’t understand,” Bob said. “My wife saw a woman fall into a crevasse on the walking path, which is supposed to be secure. I came here to—.”
“You had no right to take the photos,” the policeman repeated. The other officers said nothing, just glared at him.
“I didn’t know what to say,” Bob recounted, “So I just turned and walked out. I guess one of the slope workers called to warn them that they might be hearing from us.”
A few days later they drove to Innsbruck to speak with Robert Wallner, a public prosecutor in charge of investigating mountain accidents in Tyrol. Lynda told him about the incident she’d witnessed on the glacier and asked him to reopen the investigation of Duncan’s disappearance, focusing on the ski slope and men who worked on it. She also told him she was concerned that the police hadn’t taken any witness statements. A year later, it seemed unlikely that anyone would have a clear memory of the conditions and events on the day Duncan was last seen.
Wallner agreed to order the police to follow up, but to Lynda’s dismay, he assigned Franz Brecher, the same inspector who’d done such a poor job to begin with. Among the statements that Brecher then took was one from Helmut Tanzer, head of slope maintenance, who asserted that his men kept a watchful eye on the crevasses and made sure to keep them safely filled with snow. Moreover, in the highly improbable event that a skier fell into one, he would certainly be found, because the slope workers inspected all depressions before filling them.
To the MacPhersons, Tanzer’s statement was merely a proclamation of official safety procedures—more of a PR announcement than a response to a police inquiry. For his part, Inspector Brecher didn’t ask Tanzer or his workers a single probing question about the conditions and events on August 9, 1989.
Not long after the MacPhersons went to Dr. Wallner’s office, they saw him at a supermarket in Neustift. Lynda greeted him and asked what had brought him to Stubai. He replied that he was visiting his family. Later Lynda learned that he had grown up in Neustift, and it made her wonder how energetically he would pursue an investigation that could adversely affect his home town’s biggest company. The more the MacPhersons learned about the valley, the more they realized that it lived from the Stubai Glacier. With the tremendous success of the ski resort, those who’d once been poor farmers became the owners of hotels, retail shops, restaurants, and gas stations. The Stubai Glacier was the goose that laid the golden egg, and no one would dare hurt it.
By the time the MacPhersons returned to Saskatoon in September of 1990, Lynda was fairly convinced that Duncan had indeed fallen into a crevasse on the ski slope and been buried—possibly alive—when a careless groomer filled it with snow. As for the statement in the Security Directorate report that his snowboard and boots had been returned, she figured it was probably a lie.