The next day, embassy officials travelled to Klagenfurt to visit Schoeffmann. After a long talk and a trip to the local ice rink to test his skating ability, they concluded that in spite of the differences, there were enough similarities to warrant further investigation. In their opinion, it was too close to call; the family needed to make its own determination. Coincidentally, one of Duncan’s old hockey pals, a guy named Emmanuel Viverios, played for the Villach hockey team, so Lynda asked him to visit Schoeffmann. A couple of days later he called and told her that the amnesiac bore no resemblance to Duncan.
She wondered about Schoeffmann’s dental work. Did he really have matching implants? It reminded her of the night Duncan’s teeth got knocked out by a checked opponent’s skate—the gruesome sight of so much blood on the ice, his teammates searching for the teeth, and his distress when he learned they couldn’t be replanted. She contacted Foreign Affairs and requested that his dental records be compared to Schoeffmann’s.
She’d already sent the records in 1989 to Interpol Vienna; however, what should have been a simple task ended up taking ten days because the Tyroleans didn’t have the records on file. Interpol Vienna had apparently never forwarded them to Innsbruck. Finally, on February 25, a consular officer called and told Lynda that, according to the Austrian police, Duncan’s teeth did not match Schoeffmann’s.
For two weeks she had sat by the phone and lain awake at night, waiting for news about the amnesiac—all for nothing. Or maybe not, she thought. Maybe she could help the young man to recover his past. She told the embassy she could use her North American media contacts to broadcast Schoeffmann’s story. If he had indeed lived in New York, maybe someone would recognize him in the newspapers or on television. Schoeffmann declined, saying he just wanted to be left alone.
Chapter 14: The Psychic
A few months after the Schoeffmann incident, Lynda received a proposal from an independent television producer named Christiane Schull, who’d already produced a documentary about Duncan for a show called Missing Treasures. Schull explained that a program about paranormal phenomena called Mysterious Forces from Beyond wanted to film an episode in which a Toronto-based psychic named Carole Wilson would attempt to locate Duncan with her extrasensory perception. Although Lynda was very weary of psychics, she had great respect and affection for Christiane, so she agreed to the proposal.
As Christiane explained, Carole Wilson had a reputation for giving the police decisive leads with her visions. In at least two cases, she had apparently led investigators to the perpetrators of abduction and murder. In one case of a murdered child in Toronto, the victim’s family had recommended her to the lead investigator—a seasoned homicide detective named Gord Wilson. Initially skeptical, he’d become a believer in her psychic ability when she helped him to solve the case. Indeed, he must have been impressed by her, as he’d later asked her to marry him.
In July, Carole and Gord Wilson arrived at the MacPhersons’ home, along with the Mysterious Forces from Beyond camera crew. Once the lights, camera, and microphone were ready, she sat down on the couch, put on a blindfold, and took Duncan’s Movado watch in her hands.
“Now, I have to assure you that I know nothing about this case,” she began. Lynda was sorry to hear this assurance, which sounded melodramatic and disingenuous. It seemed painfully obvious that Wilson was thinking too much about her television audience to have a genuine vision of Duncan. Soon enough, however, she went into what appeared to be a genuine trance, and started speaking in an unusual, disjointed way. She seemed to be free associating, talking about images and scenes that floated into her consciousness out of nowhere. On and on she went, and Lynda’s attention began to flag. She perked up, though, when the psychic started talking about being in the mountains.
“I’m breathless,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been cycling, or climbing—climbing mountains. I’m very cold; it’s very dark…. There’s a blow to the left side of my head; I see stars. It’s a heavy hammer or a pistol shot.”
Lynda was, of course, disturbed by this, in spite of her skepticism. Had Carole Wilson somehow just experienced Duncan being murdered with a blow to the left side of his head?
A few days later, Lynda and Bob listened to a recording of the séance, as they figured there was a chance they would notice something they hadn’t caught when they’d heard it live. Among other things, Wilson spoke about her visions of three men who were possibly responsible for Duncan’s disappearance. Her descriptions of these suspects clearly matched Walter Hinterhoelzl, Ron Dixon, and Mark Schoeffmann.
“I suppose that if one of them turns out to be responsible for whatever happened to Duncan, we’ll be impressed that Wilson got it right,” Lynda remarked sardonically, still doubting the psychic’s claim that she’d had no prior knowledge of the case, even though it had received extensive media coverage in Canada.
Bob agreed that Wilson appeared to be covering multiple bases. And though her vision of Duncan suffering a blow to the left side of his head was highly disturbing, it didn’t provide a useful lead. What were they supposed to do with this information?
In spite of her skepticism, Lynda was reminded of her nightmare on August 11, 1989, which, as it turned out, coincided with the approximate time Duncan had vanished. Since then she’d often tried in vain to remember what, in her dream, she’d seen. She’d even sought the help of a psychologist, but to no avail. Had it been a vision of what had really happened to him—an apparition that Carole Wilson had also seen? No, Lynda thought. Surely I was just having a bad dream, and surely this psychic is no more believable than all the others we’ve encountered.
Three years later, in the summer of 1997, Duncan’s brother Derrick married an Irish girl in the town of Newry, Northern Ireland. In the run-up to the wedding, Lynda and Bob made a trip to Innsbruck to see Martin Baer and some other friends. During their visit they drove to Klagenfurt to talk with the police about the strange case of Mark Schoeffmann. There they met a helpful officer named Franz Janscha who had the file.
“I don’t understand your embassy,” Janscha said. “We knew about your son in 1989, so when Schoeffmann appeared that September, we investigated the possibility that he was Duncan, and we ruled it out with certainty.” As for Schoeffmann’s true identity, Janscha confessed he had no idea.
In other words, the amnesiac had been a wild goose chase. Lynda wondered if the embassy had made such a production out of his story in order to appear helpful. On the other hand, she could sympathize with the notion that every lead, no matter how implausible-sounding, had to be investigated.
She wanted to believe that Duncan was still alive, and she would have gladly pursued any lead, but in her heart she knew that he was entombed in the ice of the Schaufelferner. Decades would pass, she feared, before he finally emerged at the bottom, and no one who’d known him would still be alive to commemorate his life and to give him a proper funeral. He would be just another “glacier corpse.”
Before returning to Saskatoon in September of 1997, they went up to the Schaufelferner for a final look.