As Florian explained, there were two contending hypotheses. The Stubai Glacier and the police claimed that Duncan had simply gone off-piste and fallen into a crevasse, just as an Asian tourist had the year before. Bob MacPherson and the forensic anthropologist Myriam Nafte believed he had been struck by a Snowcat.
“But if he was struck by a Snowcat, how did he end up in a crevasse?” Florian asked. “And why, when he was found, wasn’t he wearing his ski boots? To me, this suggests that he fell into a crevasse and took off his boots to try to climb out, but it’s just so tough to say. Everything about it is so strange—so dark.”
Back at my apartment I began to sift through the documents. Most of the Austrian files and all of the Foreign Affairs cables had been classified. Lynda had fought hard for them with a massive letter-writing campaign and by going through a tedious application process. Many of the documents would have remained inaccessible had she not had power of attorney for Duncan. That she’d had power of attorney had taken Canadian Foreign Affairs by surprise. At the time they wrote their cables, they apparently assumed the MacPhersons would never see them. Those written in 2003, following the emergence of Duncan’s body, were expressive of an agency that was genuinely trying to help the MacPhersons without being too confrontational with the Austrians. Consular officers at the Canadian Embassy in Vienna didn’t understand what they were dealing with, but in their defense, what they were dealing with was highly irregular.
More disturbing were the Canadian External Affairs cables from 1989, particularly those to and from Consul Ian Thomson. His relationship with the MacPhersons was obviously tense, and I got the impression that Lynda had rubbed him the wrong way. As a diplomat, he was probably unaccustomed to her direct, even blunt style of communicating. His situation reports to Ottawa expressed his concern that she was a loose cannon—demanding, lacking deference to local authorities, and capable of making trouble for Austro-Canadian diplomatic relations.
His point was more a matter of style than substance, and it disregarded fact that the MacPhersons had been obliged to conduct the entire investigation of their son’s disappearance on their own. Who could really blame Lynda for being distressed, tired, and frustrated with the lack of clear answers to her simple questions?
After Duncan’s body emerged in 2003, the Innsbruck authorities became aware of the non-existent communication between the MacPhersons and their Foreign Affairs. What Lynda and Bob were told in Innsbruck was often the opposite of what Canadian Embassy officials were told. Bernhard Knapp at the District Government Office apparently didn’t stop to think that Lynda might someday acquire embassy records through an Access to Information request. As I sorted through the cables, memos, and letters, I was reminded of Florian’s wry observation: “In Canada and in the States, you have your freedom of information. Here in Austria, we have our freedom of secrecy.”
Secrecy. I pondered it as I studied the Austrian police files and saw that Lynda was right: the Stubai Glacier did not want what happened to Duncan to be discovered, and the local police had made no effort to do so. Critical facts that would have taken an inspector just a few minutes to obtain and record were simply omitted. None of the witnesses had been examined with a probing interview. Whatever stories they told, no matter how unnatural-sounding and full of holes, were noted without question. I’d never seen such a systematic lack of curiosity.
But why had the police chosen not to investigate Duncan’s disappearance and death? It was, after all, a high profile case that had attracted a lot of attention from the media and Foreign Affairs. By the time Duncan’s body emerged in 2003, the Innsbruck prosecutor’s office had been dealing with the MacPhersons for years, and knew how badly they wanted clarification. A proper inspection of the discovery scene and corpse would have taken little time or expense, so why did the prosecutor immediately close the case? He appeared to have invoked the statute of limitations not only to bar prosecution, but also to prevent discovering what had happened.
The Austrian Justice Ministry also refused to acknowledge the suspicious circumstances of Duncan’s case. Astonishing was the assertion of Werner Pürstl, Justice Ministry Section Head for Penal Law, in his interview with the fifth estate:
The body was of course examined externally; there were no indications of a violent act against the deceased and there was a very obvious explanation for the events.
Who was Pürstl’s source of information? According to Dr. Rabl, the Justice Ministry never contacted him to discuss the case. Moreover, photographs of Duncan’s corpse, taken by Dr. Rabl, clearly show that his limbs had been subjected to a violent act. What exactly had produced it?
Addressing this in his fifth estate interview, Dr. Rabl said:
I saw such damages on glacier corpses. Yes. During the movement in the ice, the glacier breaks the body. But the injuries itself, I could not examine exactly. We saw the clothed body, but we did not unclothe it.
…We never, ever did an autopsy; we just had to do the identification.
In other words, Rabl assumed the injuries had been caused by ice movement, but he had not been able to examine them closely in order to confirm his assumption. Why not? What had hindered him from examining “exactly” the injuries?
Around the time I began researching the story, a leader of the Austrian Green Party named Peter Pilz submitted an inquiry before Parliament to the Justice Minister about Duncan’s case. A few months later, Justice Minister Claudia Bandion-Ortner replied with the same evasions the MacPhersons had been hearing since 2003. To Pilz’s question about Duncan’s fractured limbs, she replied:
At the time the public prosecutor had to decide whether to order an autopsy, he’d received no indications that the corpse or the equipment of Duncan MacPherson bore signs they had come into contact with heavy machinery. Multiple fractures are not unusual on corpses that have been extracted from glaciers, as they have been subjected to the forces of flowing ice.
This was another example of the infuriating circular reasoning of every Austrian authority the MacPhersons had encountered. The prosecutor had received no indications of contact with machinery because the police hadn’t told him about them. Either they hadn’t examined the corpse and snowboard, or they’d chosen not to report what they’d seen—precisely the malfeasance that had prompted Lynda and Bob to seek Pilz’s help.
Bandion-Ortner also didn’t take into account that Duncan’s body had sat in the Institute of Forensic Medicine for an entire week after it was recovered from the glacier. Even if the police assumed that Duncan’s injuries had been caused by ice movement, this didn’t prevent a forensic doctor from examining the injuries, which again raises the question: Why did Rabl say that he couldn’t?
Without a proper investigation, the job of discovering what had happened to Duncan was left entirely to his parents. Lynda hoped I would be able to help her make sense of it because I had lived in Austria, could speak German, and had already written a book about a complex true story. But as I would soon discover, my background had not really prepared me for the task ahead, for I had gained my experience studying a case that public officials had wanted to solve. In Duncan’s case, it was the exact opposite.
“So you’re taking on the Tyrolean ski mafia,” my girlfriend Johanna said after I’d told her a bit about the story.
“I guess so,” I said, not realizing that she wasn’t kidding or even exaggerating.
Chapter 26: The Need to Know