In a follow-up letter to Douglas dated March 26, 2004, Knapp assured him that “the exact cause of death was established by the Innsbruck Institute of Forensic Medicine.” This flew in the face of Dr. Rabl’s December 5, 2003 email in which he advised Lynda against filing a law suit because “the definite cause of death remains unclear.”
Another notable Canadian Embassy memo recorded a phone conversation between Knapp and Vice-consul Douglas on July 23, 2003.
They are handling this case on a special/priority basis. Indeed, because Mrs. MacPherson had expressed surprise at the funeral home costs, local authorities paid this cost out of local budget.
This was news to Lynda, as she had paid the undertaker’s bill of 1,742.90 Euros on August 4, 2003. She wrote Knapp to this effect. Had his office paid it a second time? On September 15, 2004, he wrote back that his office had indeed paid for transferring Duncan’s body from the funeral home to the Institute of Forensic Medicine for the identification procedure. “Besides,” he continued:
I want to mention that paying some costs out of our local budget was a voluntary service, our government is not obliged to pay these costs. Anyway we did never promise to pay the funeral home costs.
Enclosed with this letter were three additional pages from the “Report of Death.” Lynda had them translated and saw that the bottom of the final page pertained to the cause of death. To the question, “Was an autopsy performed?” Dr. Somavilla (or someone else) had checked the box for “yes,” and then checked the margin to confirm. Lynda was amazed that a public official would dare to lie about something so important on such a serious legal document.
Chapter 23: Stonewalling
On September 27, 2004, Dr. Knapp told the Canadian Embassy that he was no longer prepared to answer Lynda’s queries. Ten days later, the director of Consular Affairs, Dave Dyet, informed the MacPhersons that his officers would assist no further in communicating with the Austrians.
Lynda knew they wanted her to give up, but she’d be damned if she did. Her discovery that her son’s body bore marks of terrible violence added a new dimension to the mystery that had plagued her since 1989. She wanted to know—had to know—how he had died, and why no one had helped him or at least found his body. Duncan wouldn’t have given up, and nor would she. The duplicity of Innsbruck officials only spurred her on, for it confirmed what she’d long suspected: They were covering something up.
Her relentless effort took a toll on her and Bob. They were both tired and beginning to feel their age (Lynda turned 61 in 2004; Bob turned 66). Sometimes she feared that her husband couldn’t go on much longer pursuing the matter—that he longed simply to go up to his cabin on Lake Nemeiben and take consolation in his happy memories of watching moose and marten with Duncan. On their daily walks along the Saskatchewan River, he tried to take his mind off the subject, to talk about something else, but Lynda often couldn’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes she walked in silence, staring at the ground in front of her.
“Why don’t you look up and enjoy the things around us?” Bob said to her one day. His tone was uncharacteristically irritable and it troubled her. She knew that many marriages don’t survive the loss of a child because one or both partners cease being able to bear the other’s sullen, preoccupied manner. The fun and laughter go away, while the tension and irritability grow. I can’t let this consume our lives, she told herself. I must learn to work on it for only part of the time, and to be there for Bob and Derrick the rest, or else this is going to destroy us.
The MacPhersons again contemplated filing a law suit against the Stubai Glacier, but none of the lawyers with whom they spoke were encouraging. They said it would be tough to prove fourteen years later that Duncan hadn’t gone off-piste. Moreover, Tyrolean judges would be strongly inclined to rule in favor of the influential local defendant. Dr. Rabl also discouraged them from seeking a legal remedy. In an October 6, 2004 email, he wrote:
There is no doubt that some persons made severe mistakes in the context of the disappearance of Duncan, but it would be hardly possible for you to prove that these mistakes led to Duncan’s death—expressed in a different form: can anyone exclude the possibility of Duncan’s death if all the persons would have reacted in a correct way?? Asked as an official expert—I can’t.
And so, instead of filing a civil suit, Lynda and Bob wrote a letter to Heinrich Klier, requesting compensation for the costs (including thousands of dollars of gondola tickets) they had incurred in searching for their son while contending with misleading information from his employees and the local police. They told him they weren’t interested in a law suit to ascribe blame; they just wanted to get back their retirement savings, and they appealed to his sense of honor and fairness. A few months later they received a letter from UNIQA Insurance stating that “extensive investigations” had proven that their insured party, Wintersport Tyrol AG (Heinrich Klier’s company) was not at fault for the tragic death of their son.
The part about “extensive investigations” was infuriating. Blown off by Klier, Lynda decided to appeal to authorities in Vienna to reopen the investigation. She also set about trying to generate public awareness of Duncan’s story. She began by contacting Howard Goldenthal, producer of the fifth estate, an award-winning, investigative journalism program in Canada.
A couple of years earlier, Goldenthal had called to ask about her experiences with Ron Dixon, who died in a car crash in Mexico in 2000. The fifth estate wanted to do a documentary about the enigmatic real estate mogul and sports franchise owner. Lynda had never been able to learn much about him, though her son Derrick had made a discovery. By sheer coincidence at a hockey game in Vancouver in October 2000, he found himself sitting next to a man who knew about Duncan’s disappearance, and who also claimed to be Ron Dixon’s former parole officer.
“Dixon’s a really bad guy,” the man said. “If your brother had taken the job in Scotland, he definitely would have come to some kind of grief.”
The fifth estate never produced the Dixon story, but Goldenthal was highly sympathetic and curious to learn more about Duncan’s story. After his team did extensive research, he gave the green light to shoot the film in Saskatoon, Stubai, and Vienna. The result was a gripping documentary about the MacPhersons’ search for their son and their ongoing search for the truth.
To learn more about Duncan’s injuries as they were apparent in the radiographs and photographs of his body, the show consulted the renowned forensic anthropologist, Myriam Nafte. Like Dr. Straathof, she concluded that the fractures were caused by contact with heavy machinery, and not by a crevasse fall and ice movement.
For their participation in the documentary, Lynda and Bob returned to Stubai to give an interview at the glacier. Afterwards they visited several officials in the hope that at least one of them would be more frank and forthcoming. As it turned out, all were angry and defensive.
“What’s your problem?” Neustift police Chief Guenter Geir said angrily when he saw them walking into the station. Likewise, district medical officer Kurt Somavilla was furious when they showed up at his office.
“Your son was in the ice for fourteen years; he’s dead; what’s your problem?” he said.
“Why did you write on the death report that an autopsy was performed?” Lynda asked.