She often had nightmares in which Duncan was trapped at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, wedged in the ice, terrified, crying for help. Along comes the Snowcat. Duncan hears the muffled throb of its diesel engine and thinks that someone is coming to rescue him, but the driver doesn’t get out of the machine to inspect the crevasse. Instead, he lowers the blade, scoops a pile of snow, and pushes it into the hole. Duncan looks up and sees the light above extinguished by a black mass falling towards him. Does the impact kill him instantly or does he suffocate?
Lynda hoped there was some other explanation for her son’s disappearance, but her intellect told her that a crevasse fall and burial was the most plausible. The trouble was the lack of proof. With no witnesses and no body, her mind couldn’t rest. Continually haunted, she figured she would never find peace until Duncan’s disappearance was properly investigated.
And so, in 1992 she and Bob went to Vienna to ask the Interior Ministry to reopen the investigation. Though unable to get an appointment with the minister, they were able to meet with the head of the federal gendarmerie. They told him they believed that the gendarmerie in Tyrol had not done a proper investigation, and they asked him to look into it. He said he would, and a year later they received the results of his inquiry: It was impossible for someone to fall into a crevasse on the Stubai Glacier’s ski slope, and equally impossible for someone to be buried in a crevasse by a grooming machine. So much for an independent investigation, Lynda thought.
Thinking that Canadian External Affairs might know something, she applied for a copy of their file on Duncan. External Affairs replied that the file was confidential because her son was an adult with the right to privacy. Lynda wrote back that she had power of attorney, and enclosed a copy of the document. She then received several memos and cables, but also a notice stating that External Affairs could not release the entire file because doing so could be “injurious to foreign relations.”
Lynda and Bob were intrigued. What about Duncan’s case could possibly injure Canadian relations with Austria? Once again they were reminded of the CIA business. Far from discouraging her, the access denial only inflamed her curiosity, so she sued External Affairs to release the documents.
Just before the hearing, she received a notice stating that External Affairs had decided, after all, to disclose the extra-sensitive documents. These consisted of correspondence between External Affairs and the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the question of whether Duncan had visited Czechoslovakia. The Czechs claimed they had no record of him ever traveling into their country.
Why on earth did External Affairs consider this simple query and reply so sensitive? Lynda wondered. One of her friends asked if she’d considered the possibility that the Czechs had in fact imprisoned Duncan for espionage, but Lynda was convinced that her son had told her the truth about turning down the CIA offer.
Chapter 12: The Ice Man
1991 was a year of glacier corpses. In March, a high level southerly air current carried dust from the Sahara desert up to the Tyrolean Alps and deposited it on the glaciers. With its brownish-yellow color, the dust absorbed sunlight instead of reflecting it, causing record snowmelt that summer. In August, the bodies emerged one after the other. On August 7, Odo Strolz and Otto Linher melted out of the Alpeinerferner. They’d met their deaths in a ten meter crevasse fall on May 2, 1953. On August 24, Dr. Kurt Jeschke emerged on the Bergglasferner. He’d plunged 30 meters on March 5, 1981. On August 29, Josef and Henna Schneider surfaced on the Sulztalferner. The Viennese husband and wife had been reported missing on August 8, 1934. That they’d died together in a crevasse was now confirmed fifty-seven years later.
All of the victims had died on glaciers that had not been developed into controlled ski slopes. Either they had underestimated the crevasse risk or their equipment had failed. Each body was examined by doctors at the Innsbruck Institute of Forensic Medicine, who later published a paper on the glaciological and forensic aspects of their deaths.
On Thursday, September 19, 1991, Erika and Helmut Simon, a couple from Nuremberg, climbed the Fineilspitze, a mountain lying thirty kilometers southwest of the Eisgrat as the crow flies. On their way down from the summit, they took a route just below a ridge called the Hauslabjoch, which had long been used as a pass over the main ridge of the Alps. Traversing a glacier called the Niederjochferner, they approached a narrow gully and saw a brown figure sticking out of the ice. Upon closer inspection they saw it was a human. Only his head, shoulders, and upper back were exposed; the rest of him was still encased in ice.
The Simons photographed the corpse with their last frame of film, and then descended to the Similaun Hut to report their discovery. The hut manager called the gendarmerie in the town of Soelden, whose inspector first thought the corpse to be a music professor from Verona named Carlo Capsoni who’d vanished in the area in 1941 (the inspector later learned that Capsoni’s body had been recovered in the fifties). Innsbruck prosecutor Robert Wallner was notified, and he opened an investigation into the possibility of foul play, offender unknown.
Because bad weather made landing a helicopter at the site unsafe, the air rescue service and Professor Rainer Henn from the Innsbruck Institute of Forensic Medicine were unable to recover the body for a few days. In the meantime, several hikers visited the site, and they noticed strange fragments of birch bark, wood, and fur that had apparently comprised the dead alpinist’s equipment. Most remarkable was a tool with a long wooden handle on which a metal blade was fixed with leather thongs. It appeared to be some kind of ice axe, but certainly not a modern one. Upon hearing a description of the tool, the famous climber Reinhold Messner, who later visited the site, said he reckoned it had to be at least five hundred years old. Shortly thereafter the local press printed rumors that the dead man had been a mercenary in the employ of Frederick Empty Purse, a fifteenth century Tyrolean count.
On Monday, September 23, the body was freed from the ice and flown to the Innsbruck Institute of Forensic Medicine. Several officials were present to witness the examination, including Inspector Konrad Klotz, prosecutor Robert Wallner, and examining magistrate Guenther Boehler. The forensic doctor Hans Unterdorfer began with an external inspection, from which he concluded that the body was at least several hundred years old and bore no signs of fatal or even severe injuries. Most of the damage was superficial, probably from scavenging animals. The left thigh and pelvic region were damaged, apparently from a dog-like scavenger (in fact from a pneumatic chisel during recovery, as was later determined). Dr. Unterdorfer found nothing suspicious about the condition of the body, so Magistrate Boehler did not order an autopsy.
The next day, a University of Innsbruck archeologist named Konrad Spindler examined the artifacts found with the body and concluded they were at least four thousand years old. Subsequent radiocarbon dating determined that the man had died around 3300 B.C. His pure copper axe dated him from the Copper Age—a transitional period between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.
Glaciologists in Innsbruck and all over the world were skeptical that the man was 5,300 years old because bodies buried in glaciers flow down the mountain in the ice and eventually get kicked out at the bottom. Even in the longest, most slow-moving glacier, the entire ride couldn’t take more than a thousand years. The oldest glacier corpse ever found in Europe was 400 years old.