I doubted that anyone really understood the Austrian mentality, including the Austrians themselves. Much ink has been spilled about the impenetrability of the Austrian soul, and I agreed with the cliché that it was no coincidence that psychoanalysis had been founded by an Austrian. That said, one thing seemed fairly clear to me: Expertly documenting suspicious circumstances wasn’t enough to shake things up in the land of Unterdrückungskünstler (“repression artists”) as a Viennese friend liked to call his countrymen. If Duncan had in fact been the victim of a crime, we would have to figure out precisely what crime had been committed, and to assemble enough evidence to prove it. Given that he had died twenty years earlier, this struck me as a very tall order.
Still, I was drawn to the mystery. How strange that in our age of advanced forensic science, a young man’s mysterious and unnatural death at a popular ski resort had not been investigated. I was also inspired by Lynda’s persistence. She’d been working on the case for two decades and showed no inclination of giving up. I’d never heard of anyone with so much stamina, and I was flattered that such a strong person would ask me for help.
I wanted to learn more about the story before I committed to writing it, and began by watching a recording of a television interview that Duncan had given just before his departure to Germany. It was strange to watch and listen to this big, strong, handsome boy of twenty-three, talking about wanting “to go somewhere else” and do something different with his life. He had a gentle way of speaking, without a hint of bitterness that the Islanders hadn’t renewed his contract. How eerie to think that he would be dead in a month.
What happened to you? I found myself asking.
I studied discovery scene photos that Lynda sent me, and again the experience was inexpressibly strange. Just moments before I had seen Duncan as a healthy young man, talking to a reporter in 1989, and now, here before me, were images of his corpse melting out of the ice in 2003. Seeing them must have been unfathomably distressing for his parents.
As the horror receded a little, I began to notice things. Though I didn’t, at the time, know much about glaciers, I’d heard of guys falling into crevasses and emerging decades later at the bottom. It struck me as odd that Duncan had melted out so high on the glacier, only halfway to the bottom. Also strange was the way he was lying horizontally in the remnant of a narrow crevasse, as though in a grave, his left ski boot standing upright, next to his waist. Didn’t most victims of crevasse falls end up wedged vertically in the ice?
Lynda then sent me photos of his snowboarding gear. I’d already seen the hard ski boot next to his body, so I was greatly surprised to see that the board was equipped with strap bindings (designed to be cinched onto soft boots) instead of plate bindings (wire bails designed to lock hard boots onto the board). With such mismatched gear, Duncan had no doubt struggled to set the board’s edges. What kind of rental shop would outfit a customer with such dysfunctional equipment?
I watched the fifth estate documentary, and found the snowboarding instructor, Walter Hinterhoelzl, and the forensic doctor, Walter Rabl, especially interesting. Among the Austrians interviewed for the show, they were by far the most attractive and articulate, and as I learned from Google searches, both had risen to the top in their professions. Hinterhoelzl ultimately became head trainer of the Austrian women’s national snowboarding team, coaching at the Winter Olympics in 2002 and in 2006. In 2004, Dr. Rabl was elected President of the Austrian Association of Forensic Doctors, a position he still holds and in which he has performed a number of high profile examinations.
In watching Hinterhoelzl’s interview, I got the impression he was trying to distract the interviewer, perhaps to deflect her from a certain line of questioning. His description of Duncan as “a Canadian hotdog” seemed calculated.
“Seeing him working on the snow—he was not scared of falling; he had no fear of the speed,” Hinterhoelzl said. Was he just being flattering, or did he have some other motive for saying that Duncan had been fast on fearless on the slope? It was hard for me to imagine how anyone could have “worked on the snow” very well using the equipment found with his body.
And then Hinterhoelzl said something even odder. As the interviewer unpacked the snowboard found with Duncan’s body, she asked him: “So this is the snowboard that you helped him to pick out?”
“Yes, this is a Duret board,” he replied. So, Walter had, in fact, helped Duncan to pick out the board. And the guys at the rental shop never asked him why his pupil hadn’t returned it, along with the boots and gaiters? This did not add up.
Then there was the jarring contrast between Dr. Rabl and the forensic anthropologist, Myriam Nafte. While Nafte vehemently expressed her opinion that Duncan’s injuries were caused by machinery, Rabl said he hadn’t examined the body because the public prosecutor hadn’t ordered it, though he did mention that the glacier “breaks up the body.” This was a very peculiar situation, because Nafte had formed her opinion largely from photographs of Duncan’s corpse that Rabl had taken.
What sucked me into the mystery for good was a photograph of Duncan’s Opel Corsa, parked all by itself near the gondola station on September 22, 1989, having sat in the same conspicuous place for forty-two days. There was something profoundly macabre about Stubai Glacier personnel ignoring such a glaring signal that the car’s driver was dead.
Everything about Duncan’s story was perplexing in the extreme. It was as if, the moment he parked his car at the gondola station and purchased a ticket, he entered a twilight zone in which nothing followed normal patterns and procedures.
I called Lynda and told her I wanted to write the story.
“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way and think I’m weird,” she said, “because I don’t really think that the dead speak to us. But I believe you decided to do this because you sense that Duncan wants you to. He wants you to speak for him.”
I didn’t think Lynda was weird. Though ghosts only exist in our minds, they do haunt us. Duncan’s haunted his mother day and night, and he was starting to haunt me.
Chapter 25: So Strange and Dark
Florian Skrabal, the journalist who’d written about the story for Datum magazine, had much of Lynda’s documentation. I met him at a café in Vienna for the hand off, and was alarmed by the volume of binders stacked on the chairs around him.
“Lynda has been researching it for twenty years,” he said. “I get the impression she’s done little else.” It was one of the most intriguing stories he’d ever heard of, he told me, but in spite of his best efforts, he hadn’t managed to penetrate the secrecy of it.
“The Stubai Valley is a weird place,” he explained. “At first the people are much friendlier than the Viennese. Tourism is everything for them, so I suppose that being hospitable is their second nature. But ask them about Duncan MacPherson and they’ll instantly become cold. It should have been easy to figure out what happened to him, but it’s like no one other than his parents wanted to know.”