A quiet person, his character was difficult to fathom. While Lynda and I talked at the breakfast table, I occasionally glanced over to the kitchen and saw him making coffee and sandwiches for us, his tall frame bent over the counter—considerate and unassertive. I’d heard he was the favorite adult of kids in the neighborhood, and when we occasionally ran into some while out for walks, they were delighted to see him. It seemed especially cruel that a man so fond of children had lost two of his three. His first son, from a previous marriage to an Inuit woman (who’d died of a brain aneurism) committed suicide in 1993.
He was a very handsome man, though I was shocked by how much he’d aged since the fifth estate documentary had been filmed just three years earlier. One of nineteen children, all from the same mother, he’d grown up in the Scotch Catholic community of Cape Breton. One day he showed me a photograph of his mother, standing with Duncan, who towered above her with his arm around her shoulder. Both were grinning, as though someone had just said something funny.
“That was taken less than a year before mom died of cancer and Duncan disappeared,” Bob said. “Seems like they were both there one minute and gone the next.”
He didn’t share Lynda’s passion for examining every detail of the case, but he had grasped its key points before she had. While she often got lost in the minutiae, he had a knack for staying focused on the essential questions.
“I know that going over all of this again is reopening old wounds,” I said to him one night, just before getting out of the car. “I can only hope it’s for a good cause.”
“I think it’s a good thing that you’re writing a book about Duncan,” he replied.
“I wish I could be certain of finding a good publisher,” I said. “Unfortunately, publishing is a tough business, and I’m not a famous author, so I can’t promise anything.”
“We know that, John, and Lynda has great confidence in you, so don’t worry.”
They were kind words, but they had the opposite effect of what Bob intended. Riding up the elevator to my room, I felt acutely conscious of my limitations. Though I was determined to write a book about Duncan’s case, I knew that getting it published was another matter.
Should I really be here, giving these good and tormented people reason to hope that I can tell the world their story?
Chapter 27: A Maddening Puzzle
By the end of my visit to Saskatoon, Lynda and Bob had familiarized me with most of the facts they had discovered so far. They told me that Duncan’s injuries and the damage to his snowboard indicated he’d been struck by a Snowcat. Regarding his injuries, they referred me to the opinions of doctors Straathof and Nafte, who’d studied radiographs and photographs of his body. These scientists believed that a machine, and not glacier movement, had mangled his limbs.
But were they right? Or rather, would other scientists agree with their opinions or contest them if the matter were debated in court? For his part, Dr. Rabl told Lynda in an email that he was skeptical of the Snowcat hypothesis, and considered glacier movement the cause of Duncan’s destroyed limbs. Rabl had not only seen the body firsthand, his institute had much experience with glacier corpses, while Dr. Straathof had only seen one, and Dr. Nafte none.
As for the damage to the snowboard, the slope maintenance workers didn’t deny it had been caused by a Snowcat, but they claimed it had happened when they’d extracted the board from the ice. Bob fetched the snowboarding equipment from the basement, and to get a feeling for the setup, I put on the boots and placed them in the bindings. It was eerie to think that the last feet in them had been Duncan’s, just before he died.
“Look how deep the rust is at the places where the board’s metal edges were cut,” Bob said. “Those cuts happened many years before the board was recovered.”
The theory that Duncan had been struck by a Snowcat raised two questions: First, how could he have been run over by the huge tractor without sustaining injuries to his skull, ribcage and pelvis? Second, how had he and his board been run over on the slope and then ended up in a crevasse? As Dr. Rabl pointed out, if he had been run over, then a second action would have been required to push his body into the crevasse.
If we were going to make a persuasive case, we had to answer these two questions, otherwise the Snowcat hypothesis would never clearly vanquish the alternative hypothesis that Duncan’s limbs had been damaged by an off-piste crevasse fall and subsequent ice movement. The Stubai Glacier, the police, and the Austrian Justice Ministry could always stick with the idea that doctors Straathof and Nafte had simply misinterpreted the cause of the injuries. As the current director of the Stubai Glacier had written to Lynda about Myriam Nafte’s assertions in the fifth estate documentary: “Your forensic expert has no experience with glacier corpses.”
Bob hypothesized that the disaster had begun with a partial crevasse fall. First Duncan fell onto his back while snowboarding and partially broke through a snow bridge without going all the way into the crevasse. To stop himself from dropping all the way in, he kept his legs elevated and spread-eagled his arms, which exposed them to the vehicle on the surface. Then along came the machine, which, in a combined action, chopped up his limbs and snowboard and pushed him down into the hole. The operator may have been aware of the collision and panicked like a hit and run driver, or he may have deduced it later when he learned that someone was missing on the slope. Either way, he’d found it easier to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything and to fill the crevasse with snow as though it had been just like any other.
I had a hard time imagining how this could have happened. Duncan was broad-shouldered and weighed two hundred pounds. If he had fallen through a snow bridge and into a crevasse wider than his shoulders so that his entire torso went into it, he couldn’t have stopped a complete fall by spread-eagling his arms. With nothing to hold on either side of the crack, he would have been pulled into it by his own weight.
For her part, Dr. Nafte theorized that Duncan had initially fallen into a crevasse while snowboarding, taken off his board and boots, and then climbed out right as a Snowcat was approaching. At the moment he emerged on the surface, he was mowed down by the machine and pushed back into the hole. The trouble with this hypothesis, it seemed to me, was that it didn’t explain the damage to the snowboard, nor did it explain Duncan’s lack of cranial, rib, and pelvic fractures.
There was also the baffling position and condition of the snowboarding equipment. In the discovery scene photos, the left ski boot is visible next to Duncan’s body, filled with old snow, and its insulating liner is missing. This indicated that Duncan wasn’t wearing the boot at the time the crevasse was filled. Likewise, the liner must have come out of the boot before the boot was filled with snow, though the liner must have been deposited near the body, as it was among the items recovered. It is shredded and its upper part has identically-spaced cut marks.
Bob proposed that Duncan’s boots were ripped out of the bindings and off of his feet when his board and left leg were struck by the blade on the front of a Snowcat. However, given that both legs are bound to the board right next to each other, it was hard for me to imagine how only one of them could have been struck by the huge blade. Pulling him completely out of his boots would have required a complicated action of immobilizing his body while his board and boots were pulled away (or vice versa). Hard ski boots, which Bob had never worn, are designed to remain tightly clamped on to transfer great force from the legs to the skis. Unless their buckles are open, they won’t come off, but will pull their wearer with them. Also, in the discovery scene photos, Duncan is still wearing his right sock. If the ski boot had been ripped off, it would have likely pulled the sock off (or at least down) with it.