It was a ridiculous hypothesis, especially given that the district medical officer who’d attended the discovery scene considered it highly probable that Raven had not died at the site at which his body was found. Naturally his parents didn’t believe the police hypothesis, but in spite of their desperate plea for a proper investigation, the Innsbruck public prosecutor closed the case after the forensic doctor, Walter Rabl, found no clear sign of foul play on Raven’s decomposed body.
And so Mr. and Mrs. Vollrath persevered with their own investigation, seeking witnesses, and enlisting the help of an investigative journalist in Vienna named Zoran Dobric, who produced an award-winning documentary about their search. Watching it, I was amazed at how strongly they resembled Lynda and Bob—not in appearance, but in the story they told about their ongoing attempt to find out what had happened to their son. Much of what they said in the documentary was identical to what Lynda and Bob said on the fifth estate.
Particularly moving was the scene of Raven’s parents standing in the creek bed where his body had been found, his mother expressing incomprehension and rage at the Innsbruck authorities.
The police aren’t helping us anymore. The case is closed. I want the case reopened and further investigated. Every mother and every father wants to know how their child died. It is the worst thing that can happen in life—the greatest pain.
At least the Vollraths could speak German. For Lynda and Bob, the language barrier had made it impossible for them to understand what was going on around them. The locals could have openly discussed revealing information, even in the presence of the MacPhersons, without betraying anything.
The Canadian government could have helped Lynda and Bob, but in hindsight, it was clear that External Affairs dropped the ball in 1989. At first glance it may have appeared to be a case of an adventurous young guy who’d wandered off into the mountains, but on closer inspection, anyone could have seen that at least two circumstances of Duncan’s disappearance were undeniably suspicious. The first was the car that had sat in the same conspicuous spot for forty-two days without being reported; the second was the nebulous response to the question of whether Duncan had returned his snowboarding equipment.
Like all diplomats, Consul Thomson was trained to get along with the authorities in the country to which he was posted instead of confronting them, hence his chumminess with district gendarmerie Commander Franz Hofer, who doubtless showed him great deference. That Thomson was sent to the Stubai Glacier instead of an RCMP liaison officer indicates that External Affairs was too worried about ruffling the feathers of Austrian officials, and not concerned enough with discovering what had happened to Duncan.
“Post does not have resources to keep an eye on Mrs. MacPherson’s activities,” as Thomson wrote in a cable to Ottawa on October 2, 1989.
“I wonder why External Affairs felt they needed to keep an eye on me,” Lynda said. “All I was doing was looking for my child. What was so troubling about that?”
It was interesting to compare the MacPhersons to the Falcheros. A year after Duncan’s body was found, Fabrizio Falchero’s melted out of a glacier just to the west. His parents suspected he’d fallen into a crevasse while walking on a designated path, but because they weren’t given reliable information about where his body was found and the velocity of the glacier, they couldn’t prove it. To Lynda, it seemed the Falcheros had quickly accepted that the Stubai Glacier and the police would never tell the truth, so that fighting for it would be in vain.
“I respect that Gino and Anna have their own way of dealing with their loss,” Lynda said, “but I don’t think the ski operator should be allowed to get away with lax safety, because it’s likely to result in yet another death. If the Stubai Glacier had been confronted about Chiu’s fatal accident in 1988, Duncan and Fabrizio might still be alive.”
Lynda believed that every good citizen should fight injustice and corruption, but she had paid a heavy price for her convictions. As hard as she had worked to expose the malfeasance of Austrian authorities in their handling of Duncan’s case, it had so far gotten her nowhere. This reminded me of Machiavelli’s observation that “The way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.”
I asked Lynda what had sustained her for all those years of toil.
“My desire to know the truth,” she replied.
“Even though the truth can’t bring Duncan back.”
“I still wanted to know, especially after it became clear that people were lying to us. Once I realized that I was being deceived, it made me want to learn the truth all the more.”
Though I didn’t tell her, she reminded me a little of Captain Ahab, who believed that the “truth hath no confines,” and who chiefly hated “the inscrutable thing” he perceived to be behind Moby Dick.
“Another thing that kept me going was my belief that it was the right thing to do for Duncan. A lot of people probably think we wanted to discover the truth so that we could sue the ski resort. We did consider suing, but only because we’d spent so much money trying to find Duncan, and we’re not rich. Our desire to know what happened is motivated by something much deeper than money. Duncan lost his young life on that ski slope, and it’s not right for people to try to sweep the facts of it under the rug. To treat his death as an embarrassment is unfair and disrespectful to him.”
A large fig tree stood in the corner of the MacPhersons’ living room, out of proportion with everything else. I was struck by the oddness of a Mediterranean tree that appeared on the verge of taking over a living room in Canada.
“That’s a hell of a fig,” I said to Lynda one evening.
“Duncan gave it to us just before his departure,” she said. “He bought it as a wedding present for his friend Randy Smith, but then he figured it was too nice for Randy, who was always moving around and would probably kill it, so he gave it to us. We’ve since told Randy that if his marriage lasts twenty-five years, he can have it then.”
How ironic that Duncan had given his parents a fig tree—an ancient symbol of fertility—just before he died. I asked if they had any other objects that were strongly connected with him at the time of his death, whereupon Bob showed me the sweater and leather belt he’d left hanging to dry in Walter Hinterhoelzl’s office.
“I made him pack the sweater,” Lynda said. “He said he wouldn’t need it before Christmas, but I insisted that he take it.” I held the sweater in my lap and imagined him wearing it during his snowboarding lesson. And then Lynda handed me a bronze urn.
“This is the man himself,” she said.
Every evening around midnight, Bob gave me a ride back to my hotel. I wondered, with just the two of us in the car, what he really thought of me—a strange American with a peculiar resume, showing up in Saskatoon and dredging up every painful detail of the disaster that had befallen him two decades earlier. While I am often overbearing and mercurial, he was always calm, steady, and patient. We’d disagreed, even hotly debated certain aspects of the case, and later I felt ashamed of my presumption. He’d been living with it for twenty years, after all, while I’d only studied it for a couple of months. Who was I to come into his home and start telling him what had really happened?