“May I see him?” Lynda asked after she regained her composure.
“Of course,” Rabl said. “But I would like to prepare you by showing you some photographs.” On his desk he placed two small prints of Duncan lying on a gurney. Lynda and Bob instantly recognized his face, which they thought looked surprisingly well for having been in a glacier for fourteen years. His upper body—still clothed in the violet Capriccio sweatshirt that Walter Hinterhoelzl had remembered him buying after lunch—also looked good. Though his left leg appeared to have been damaged, they didn’t look at it closely or give it much thought, as they assumed it had occurred as a result of being in the ice for so long.
“Most of his body looks so well preserved,” Lynda said. “I figured he would be crushed by the ice.”
“After he died, the snow around him turned into ice and acted like a coffin, which protected him,” Rabl replied.
“Why is his skin so dark?” she asked, referring to his face.
“That is oxidation from contact with the air,” Rabl said.
“Okay,” she said. “I think I’m ready.”
Fourteen years had elapsed since she’d said goodbye to him on the morning of August 2, 1989. He’d had a nervous look on his face as he’d embraced her, afraid she’d start crying.
“I’ll call you when I get to George’s place,” he’d said. “And I’ll see you at Christmas.” Since then the world had changed. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, the ten-year term of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, the spread of cell phones and the internet, the September 11 terrorist attacks on America—all had taken place while Duncan was in the ice. His brother had married, fathered a child, and divorced. His mother had grown old beyond her years. Photographs of her in the nineties show a marked acceleration of aging.
Lynda and Bob waited in Rabl’s office while he prepared the body for viewing. He soon returned and led them to a space outside of the dissection room where a gurney stood next to a window. Lynda went first, slowly approaching until she saw Duncan’s head resting on a pillow. A sheet was drawn up to his upper chest, and she could see the contour of his body underneath it. To her, his face looked surprisingly good.
“After Lynda stood there for a minute, I knew it was my turn,” Bob recounted. “You know, years earlier I’d heard a story about some poor Austrian soldiers in the Alps during the First World War who’d taken shelter in a cave and then gotten trapped in it by an avalanche. When the snow melted in the spring, there they were, dozens of dead, their fingers worn down to the bone from trying to claw their way out of the hardened snow. I always told myself that if they ever found Duncan, I would look at his hands to see if he’d tried to dig his way out of a crevasse filled with snow. But when I approached the gurney and saw him, I—I couldn’t,” he said, his voice faltering. “I couldn’t believe how ruined and reduced he was, and the odor coming off of him was terrible. And I just felt so sorry for him.”
“We stood there for a while, holding hands, looking down at him,” Lynda said. “It was so strange to see him dead. At the same time, that horrible restless feeling I’d had for all those years seemed to sort of go away. His death was certain, and it was the first time in fourteen years I’d been certain about anything.”
Lynda said she wanted to spend a final moment alone with him, and as Bob turned to walk away, he saw Dr. Rabl standing behind them with tears in his eyes.
“You people are very brave,” he said.
Lynda stood next to Duncan and gathered her thoughts. As with most mothers and their kids, she cared more about him than anything, including herself. Death had taken him, but it still seemed like she was getting some sort of chance to say goodbye. She wanted to hold his hand, so she lifted the sheet at the spot where she estimated it to be on the gurney, but it wasn’t there. She started to lift the sheet further to look for it, but then got the feeling that she was disturbing her dead son’s peace and privacy, so she put it back down.
“I’m sorry you died so young,” she said to him, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “But I know you had a good life and that you died doing something you loved, and that gives me some peace. Goodbye, Duncan,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.
Chapter 16: An Alternative to Autopsy
The next day (Friday, July 25) they went to the prosecutor’s office and requested a meeting with Dr. Freyschlag, with whom they’d discussed Duncan’s case before. Freyschlag apparently wasn’t available, so they were directed to speak with Dr. Rudolf Koll. He was icy, offered no condolences, and didn’t even shake Bob’s proffered hand.
“The puffed up little troll sat perched on the edge of his desk, glaring down at us,” Lynda recounted. “For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why he was so furious. I told him we’d searched for our son for fourteen years and had struggled the entire time for information. Now his body had finally turned up, and we still knew almost nothing. ‘The case is time-barred and there will be no autopsy and no further investigation,’ he exclaimed. And you know, he said it in such an authoritative way, he gave us the impression that an autopsy was lawful in Austria only if a public prosecutor ordered it.”
Returning to Dr. Rabl’s office, they told him they’d had no luck with Koll.
“Again, I told Rabl I didn’t understand why the prosecutor wasn’t interested in discovering the cause of Duncan’s death,” Lynda said. “And again, Rabl said that an autopsy may not reveal the cause of death, given that the body had been in the ice for so long. We told him we wanted to think about flying it home to Canada for autopsy, and that we’d let him know the following Monday of our decision. My parents and Derrick wanted us to fly the body home, but I doubted it made sense. The transport cost was high, and I also kept thinking about what Dr. Rabl had said about how an autopsy may not reveal the cause of death anyway, so I didn’t think there was much sense in having him cut open. He’d already suffered so much indignity.”
On Monday, they again went to Rabl’s office and told him how they were leaning.
“But I still want to know how Duncan died,” Lynda said. “Is there any way we can find out?”
As an alternative to autopsy, Rabl offered to take a CT scan of the corpse. A CT scanner, he explained, could show all kinds of traumas. An amazing diagnostic machine, the same kind had been used to investigate Oetzi’s body.
“He said it might not tell us how Duncan had died, but it would certainly tell us how Duncan had not died,” Lynda recounted. Bob remembered reading about the CT scans of Oetzi’s body, which showed an arrow head lodged in his left shoulder. Someone had shot him in the back, causing a fatal wound that wasn’t noticed during the initial examination in Innsbruck. Not hypothermia, but a murderer had killed the Ice Man. However, as Bob recalled, it was researchers in Bolzano, and not in Innsbruck, who’d taken the scans and noticed the arrowhead.
To the MacPhersons, a CT scan sounded like a great alternative to autopsy, and Rabl concluded by saying he would schedule it as soon as possible. Towards the end of the meeting, Bob asked if he could have the snowboard found with Duncan’s body, and Rabl fetched it from a storage room.
“We tried very hard in 1989 to figure out if Duncan had returned the board to the rental shop,” Lynda explained. “But the manager never gave us a straight answer. First he said no board was missing, and then later he or someone else told the police that the board had been returned. Now we know that it wasn’t.”