“I sent the body to Rabl in Innsbruck!” he yelled. “Everything was done in Innsbruck. I’m going to call Rabl!” he said, and stormed out of the room.
“You do that,” Lynda said, thinking he was just blustering.
By the time they visited Prosecutor Richard Freyschlag, Bob had had enough abuse and was ready to fire back if Freyschlag expressed impatience, which he did.
“Why is it so hard for you people to understand what we are going through?” Bob said. “Imagine if your child was last seen getting on a school bus, and fourteen years later his body turns up, mangled and covered with bus tire tracks. How would you feel if the police did nothing and the prosecutor closed the investigation?”
Dr. Freyschlag was unable to answer the question, but the rings of sweat radiating from his underarms down to his belt were telling of how it made him feel. He did, however, make one notable statement, though its full significance was not, at the time, apparent to Lynda and Bob.
“If Dr. Rabl had seen any cause for concern, he could have called us.”
From the prosecutor’s office, they went to the Stubai Glacier’s corporate office in Innsbruck and again snuck into the building. Dr. Klier told them he was on the way to an appointment and had little time to talk.
“I have made my peace with Duncan and with my God,” he said with perfect equanimity. Lynda said nothing, but simply turned her back on him and walked out, to his and Bob’s surprise.
The fifth estate documentary, titled The Iceman, was aired on November 8, 2006 to a million viewers. From all over Canada, hundreds sent emails to the show’s website, expressing dismay at how the Austrian authorities had handled Duncan’s case. One viewer, a woman in British Columbia named Judy Wigmore, remembered that she’d taken her kids skiing at the Stubai Glacier in the summer of 1989. She rushed to where she kept her travel journals and found the entry for the outing. The date was August 9.
One of her kids remembered speaking with “a young guy from Canada,” though he couldn’t remember his face well enough to be sure it matched Duncan’s in photos. The boy had been surprised to meet a fellow Canadian there.
The MacPhersons met Judy Wigmore in Vancouver to discuss her recollections of August 9, 1989. She told them that because the weather that day was “pretty awful,” with whiteout and slushy snow, they came off the slope around 1:00 P.M. She had no memory of a mesh fence or crevasse warning signs. Had she seen any, she would have pulled her kids off the slope.
She’d also taken photos of her kids on the glacier. Lynda and Bob studied them, hoping to see Duncan on the last day of his life. Some shots caught other skiers in the frame. A few were close enough to be discernible; others were mere silhouettes in the fog. None appeared to be a tall man wearing a yellow rain jacket.
The background of some pictures showed the area that had, according to maintenance workers, been fenced off on August 9. No fence was visible.
Around the time The Iceman was aired, Lynda submitted petitions to the Austrian ministries of Justice and the Interior in which she documented the extensive malfeasance of Innsbruck authorities. She concluded by asking the ministries to reopen the investigation. Both rejected her petition.
In October 2006 she visited the Austrian “People’s Attorney” in Vienna—a tribune for correcting cases of maladministration of justice. Upon seeing the photo of Duncan’s body on the ski slope, one of its lawyers gasped and said, “I’m going to set aside my other files for a week to look at this!” Lynda got her hopes up, only to be dashed again. The People’s Attorney saw no merit in her case.
On September 27, 2007 she filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights under Article 2 (Right to Life) of the European Convention of Human Rights, which states that all member nations of the Council of Europe have a “duty to investigate suspicious deaths.” A year and a half later, in April 2009, the court dismissed her complaint.
Chapter 24: “He wants you to speak for him.”
It is more tolerable to be refused than deceived.
Lynda contacted me in July of 2009 and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about the unsolved case of her son Duncan. I’d already heard a bit about it from a friend who happened to be a friend of Derrick MacPherson. Derrick told his mother about me, and emailed me a link to an article about the story that had appeared in Esquire.
At the time I received it, I was contemplating moving back to the United States. Almost two years had passed since I’d published my book about the Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger, and I was running out of reasons for staying in the country that had been my home for a decade but in which I didn’t want to stay for the rest of my life. I’d also sworn I would never write another twisted Austrian crime story that would require endless research.
Nevertheless, I was touched that Lynda considered me a worthy candidate for telling a story that meant everything to her, and I carefully read the Esquire article. Written by Chris Jones, it was a lyrical piece with undertones of Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” but it didn’t go into the suspicious circumstances of Duncan’s disappearance and death. Lynda called me shortly after I read it, and in my initial conversation with her, I didn’t know what to make of her conviction that Duncan’s death—however exactly it had come about—had been covered up by the Stubai Glacier with complicity from local law enforcement. For Lynda and Bob, all those years of not knowing what had happened to their child had created a special kind of hell.
I’d heard about this kind of anguish. My great grandmother suffered for years after her son (my granduncle) Bobby vanished without a trace in Italy during the Second World War. She knew he was dead—probably struck by a German tank shell—but not having any witness confirmation or even a shred of his body created a mysterious vacancy in her heart, a pain with no end. Her story made me wonder if we have a primordial need for certainty that our dead are in fact dead. We cannot consecrate a death, after all, unless we have a body to bury or burn, or at least a witness to attest to it. Funeral rites and monuments are a hallmark of every culture, a way of giving form and meaning to the end of a person’s life. As I would soon learn in reading the literature about glaciers, alpine folklore contains a few references to herdsmen and dairy maids who fell into crevasses. Their spirits were thought to be doomed to dwell in an icy purgatory until their bodies were finally released from the glacier and given a proper burial.
Ultimately the glacier had given up Duncan’s body, which made me wonder if Lynda and Bob simply couldn’t come to terms with their child dying young. One thing that gave me confidence in Lynda’s judgment was her obvious intelligence and her grasp of something I had learned while researching the Jack Unterweger story: A few suspicious-looking things may be a fluke, but a clear and consistent pattern of suspicious conduct and circumstances cannot arise from chance occurrence.
Lynda said she’d appealed to every institution to conduct a proper investigation of her son’s death, but hadn’t gotten anywhere, and the Austrian media had ignored the story. Only one reporter—a young and talented Viennese named Florian Skrabal—had written about it for Datum magazine, but its influence was limited by its small circulation.
The fifth estate documentary had created widespread public awareness of the MacPhersons’ plight, but it had not brought closure to the case, nor had it prompted a fresh investigation in Austria. Howard Goldenthal, the show’s producer, had encouraged Lynda to find an author to write a book about the story, as a book could cover more than a forty-five-minute documentary. However, as Lynda explained, she was having a hard time finding an English-language writer who could speak German and who understood the Austrian mentality.