“I tried to contact my colleague at the department of radiology for the radiographs of Duncan, but I was not successful,” he wrote. “I’ll try it again the next days –I will not forget you!!”
Lynda feared he had encountered resistance to sending the images, so she emailed him that she hoped her request had not gotten him into trouble. A few days later, on November 21, he wrote that his radiologist colleague had finally brought him “the print-outs of the CT-scans,” and that he had “made photos [JPEGs] of them,” which he attached to the email.
“Even if I would get troubles,” he added, “I would stay in contact with you and help you as much as I can.”
She was confident he wanted to help. He’d always been such a warm and compassionate man, unlike the other Austrian officials they’d met. She would never forget his tears when they brought him the bones they’d found on the glacier, and she would be forever grateful to him for refusing to carry out Knapp’s order to mutilate Duncan’s face. And though she knew that her countless questions must have been a nuisance, he frequently assured her that she and Bob were never a bother because they were his “Canadian friends.”
Attached to the email were four radiographs of Duncan’s head, pelvis, and upper body. The images did not include Duncan’s legs, but one of them showed his arms, both of which were fractured below the elbows. Looking at the image of Duncan’s head and neck, Bob saw a large gap in the cervical spine, indicating a complete decapitation. Though Duncan’s head had apparently been attached to his body when they’d view it, in fact it had been merely aligned with it on the gurney.
That none of the radiographs showed Duncan’s legs seemed strange, given that his left leg appeared to be badly damaged in the photograph Rabl had taken. Also puzzling was the absence of a radiology report. Rabl had initially said he would send the images as soon as the radiologist found time to examine them and to render an opinion. Now it appeared that, after procrastinating for four months, the radiologist had then chosen not to write a report at all.
Two days later, Derrick MacPherson emailed Dr. Rabl, asking him to reiterate his opinion of the cause of Duncan’s death. He also wanted to know if Rabl had taken any photographs of the body.
“As I wrote to your parents,” Rabl replied:
I would estimate that Duncan died from non-asphyctic suffocation—that means that he had no fear of death but some kind of warm feelings, hallucinations and even some kind of happiness (such feelings are reported by persons who got hypoxia under avalanches and in crevasses and have been rescued!!).
Attached to the email were copies of the same two digital photos that Rabl had given to Lynda and Bob in Innsbruck.
On the same day Rabl replied to Derrick, he sent an email to Lynda, assuring her that the CT scans showed “no bony injuries on the skull, spine, thorax, and pelvis.” As for the “injuries” to the extremities, they “were caused by the moving glacier.”
From the proposition that Duncan had been buried alive in a crevasse, Lynda contemplated filing a lawsuit against the Stubai Glacier, and she asked Rabl if he would sue if the incident had happened to one of his children. By then she had come to think of him as the only man in Innsbruck who had the knowledge and the heart to help, so his advice, which he gave in an email on December 5, 2003, carried a lot of weight.
The case of Duncan theoretical might have been some sort of involuntary manslaughter, a crime that becomes time-barred after 3 years. That means that eventually guilty persons cannot be charged. In civil law some sort of (financial) damage has to be assessed. It is questionable which sort of damage can be determined. My friend [a lawyer] estimates that your chances of success in such a proceeding would be very small. The main reason for this is the fact, that the causal relationship between a possible misconduct of the glacier company and the death of Duncan cannot be determined with safety, because the definite cause of death remains unclear.
Lynda, you asked me what I would do if it was one of our children. As a person who has to deal with courts, lawyers and judges every day, I’m sorry to say, that I lost the illusion, that judicature is the same as justice. Therefore it is my honest opinion that on your place I would really do nothing to initiate legal action, because it would not change anything substantial, but cost a lot of money, time and energy that could be used much better for other things (e.g. the family).
After the holidays, the MacPhersons forwarded the radiographs to Dr. Brent Burbridge, head of radiology at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, and on January 8, 2004, he emailed Lynda:
The images are what we call digital radiographs. They actually look like standard x-rays but they are taken with a CT machine. They are very compressed and have a very low resolution. They are displayed as what are called screen capture images and I cannot modify the images to help me see a lot of detail….
I am sorry to ask this question, but is it possible Duncan was run over by the ski hill grooming machine?
Lynda replied that the circumstances indicated that Duncan had fallen into a crevasse, and that a forensic doctor in Austria believed the damage to Duncan’s arms had been caused by moving ice. Burbridge then wrote back:
I am not an expert about what happens to someone when they fall into a glacial crevice and are in this crevice for 14 years. Crevices open and close. Glaciers move and objects inside the glacier move. Presumably this movement and opening and closing of crevices creates very significant forces upon an object.
I see the following findings on the images:
1) Both forearms (radius and ulna) are broken (fractured). Presumably this is due to Duncan trying to break his fall when he fell into the crevice. I believe these fractures are most likely due to his original fall and not something that took place while he was in the crevice.
2) The right elbow is dislocated. This could be an injury at the time of the fall or may have occurred during his movement within the glacier. I do not know when this injury occurred.
After Lynda received Burbridge’s reply, she emailed Dr. Rabl, asking for hard copies of the images or digital copies in high resolution. She also requested a copy of a written report from his colleague in radiology. Rabl replied the same day:
I will send the original x-rays to you, so that you can provide it to your radiologist. I think you should discuss the x-rays with the specialist of your University, because I’m not an expert for x-rays. I didn’t work for the last two weeks, but I could not really relax during Christmas and New Year—it was another kind of stress.
Reading the last sentence, Lynda hoped he wasn’t having some kind of family or financial trouble.
A few weeks later, a stack of radiographs arrived in the mail. One of them—an overview of Duncan’s body from his head to his knees—showed a left femur fracture. Lying between his upper legs, just below his crotch, was what appeared to be his left knee, completely separated from the leg. It wasn’t possible to see the condition of his lower legs and feet because they weren’t included in the images.
Upon receiving the radiographs, Lynda emailed Rabl, asking him if, by any chance, he had taken additional photographs of Duncan’s body. On February 4, he emailed her several images he had taken “for [his] own use.”
The MacPhersons took all of the radiographs and photographs to Dr. Dan Straathof, a forensic pathologist in British Columbia. They chose him not only because of his outstanding reputation, but also because he had conducted a forensic examination of the “Canadian Ice Man”—a mummified corpse found melting out of the Grand Plateau glacier in northwest British Columbia in 1999. Radiocarbon dating indicated the mummy was somewhere between 300 to 550 years old. He’d died around the age of twenty, most likely after falling into a crevasse.