“I regret to tell you gentlemen that we are now completely out of beer,” announced the stewardess on the plane’s intercom.
“What! No way! Aviation disaster!” a cacophony of thick Canadian accents erupted from the seats behind me. An hour north of Denver on a flight to Saskatoon, they had already drained the ship’s store. The scene reminded me of my earliest image of the Canadians, formed by the McKenzie Brothers. Looking out the window on the approach to Saskatoon, I saw a seemingly endless prairie in every direction, and wondered why people had settled in such an isolated place, so far north, with such a cold climate.
“How cold does it get here in the winter?” I asked Lynda and Bob as we walked to their car in the airport parking lot.
“Usually around twenty below,” Lynda replied. “The record’s fifty below.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No. Why? You think that’s cold?”
“Ah, yeah.”
For seven days, from 7:00 A.M. until late at night, breaking only for meals and brief strolls along the Saskatchewan River, we sat at the kitchen table and went over every aspect of the story, with Duncan gazing at us from a large, framed copy of his International Driving Permit photo, propped on a nearby cupboard. The image had been taken just before his departure to Germany in August of 1989, so it was a snapshot of the way he looked the last time his parents saw him.
Quickly I sensed he’d gotten his fighting spirit from his mother and his gentle nature outside of the rink from his father. Though Lynda was always polite and had a good sense of humor, she was by far the toughest woman I had ever met. In her mid-sixties, she was very fit and had an austere, almost Spartan style. She ate little and slept only a few hours per night, but her capacity for concentration and work was boundless. Though hers was the kind of toughness we often associate with women in competitive jobs or politics, Lynda thought of herself primarily as a devoted mother and wife.
“My friends sometimes tell me that I think like a man,” she said one day, “but to me, it’s just a matter of effort. I try to understand things instead of leaving them to men to figure out, though I do often rely on Bob to explain the technical stuff.”
Lynda was, as I learned during my visit, a thoroughgoing rationalist.
“I was often amazed at how many psychics were drawn to Duncan’s story,” she said. “Every year it seemed like we were contacted by someone who’d had a vision of him, but I never paid much attention to them. I wanted the facts.”
Though she believed that most of the psychics she’d encountered had been frauds, she conceded that Carole Wilson had been right about the blow to the left side of Duncan’s head and the conspicuous trauma to his left leg.
“What do you think? Lynda asked. “Did she really have a vision of his death?”
I figured that Wilson’s extrasensory perception was a form of intuition based on what she’d heard about Duncan’s case. Canadian press reports had mentioned the possibility of foul play, and as the majority of assailants are right-handed, a blow with a weapon or blunt instrument would have landed on the left side of Duncan’s head. Far more remarkable was Wilson’s advice in 2003 to look at his left leg, for as I would eventually learn, his left leg was the key to unlocking the mystery of what had happened to him.
The mystery of Duncan’s death still dominated the lives of his parents. Only by learning the truth would they be able to cast off its burden. Their story reminded me of a 1988 Dutch film titled Spoorlos (Traceless) about a young man willing to do anything to discover what happened to his girlfriend, who vanished while driving through France. He does not hate the man who abducted her, nor is he particularly interested in seeing him brought to justice. What motivates the bereaved boyfriend through years of searching is his burning need to know.
The MacPhersons are scrupulously honest, which has made it all the harder for them to comprehend their disaster. While discussing the array of malfeasance in Duncan’s case, Lynda asked questions such as, “How can you explain why a police officer would lie?” or “How could a government official falsify a legal document?”
“Because they’re corrupt,” I replied, which in her mind explained nothing. She wanted to know how people could be dishonest about something that so strongly affected the lives of others. This led to many late-night, Moosehead beer-fueled debates about one of the most puzzling aspects of human nature: While everyone feels anger and disgust upon discovering they have been lied to about something important, many seem to feel little or no compunction about lying themselves, even though the injustice is identical (only viewed from a different perspective).
“But not all lies are motivated by greed, ambition, and lust,” I pointed out to Lynda. “Sometimes a man lies, or plays along with a lie, because he feels he has no choice. He will receive no reward for telling the truth, but instead be punished and lose everything. Should we really expect him to do so?”
Lynda believed we should, but it seemed to me that she expected too much of ordinary humanity. Though history contains many philosophers and saints who told the truth knowing that it would result in their destruction, the majority of people would go along with a lie in order to save their own skins.
Lynda disagreed with me about this—the only occasion, it seemed to me, when her power to view things objectively deserted her. It was clear that she suppressed her feelings for her dead son in order to maintain a clear, unbiased mind. She didn’t like to talk about him as he’d been in life, and on numerous occasions I was amazed at her ability to look at photos of his mangled corpse without betraying the slightest emotion.
“I’ve been looking at them for seven years, so I’m pretty used to them,” she explained. Most of the time she maintained her sang-froid, but whenever we got onto the subject of people remaining silent in order to avoid trouble, she became angry and seemed to take it personally.
Because the MacPhersons are Canadians, they were treated as second-class citizens in Tyrol—a clannish land with a strong regional identity. This was nothing against Canadians per se; what happened to the MacPhersons could have just as easily happened to an Italian, German, or even Austrian family from a different state. In fact, as I was to discover in the months ahead, the same thing did happen to a German family during the years 2005-2009.
In December 2005, a twenty-five-year-old German named Raven Vollrath drove to Tyrol to look for work over the holidays, and soon found a job at the Rohnenlifte ski area near the town of Zoeblen. On December 22, he called his parents to tell them about his fun day of snowboarding, and then never called again. They didn’t know where exactly he was staying, and they couldn’t reach him on his cell phone for several days. With no help from the German or Austrian police, they drove to the ski resort to look for him. In the parking lot of a chair-lift station, they found his Opel Corsa. At an apartment adjoining the lift station, they found his friend and traveling companion, who claimed he’d not seen Raven since the early morning of Christmas Eve, when he’d driven off with a girl named Helena. And yet, Raven’s unlocked car contained all of his IDs and ATM card, as well as all of his clothing. His parents knew there was no way he’d abandon everything, run off with a girl, and never check in. Something had happened to him.
To his parents’ dismay, the local police conducted no investigation. Six months later, Raven’s decomposed body, clothed only in underwear, a t-shirt, and socks, was found lying on a mattress in a dry creek bed, 2.5 kilometers from the chair-lift station. The police concluded that in the early morning of December 24, 2005, Raven left the warm apartment wearing only underwear, a t-shirt, and socks (even though it was minus 11 degrees Celsius that night) and carrying a mattress. He then dragged the mattress 2.5 kilometers down the street to a small bridge crossing the creek, clambered down a steep embankment to the frozen water’s edge, went to sleep, and froze to death.