Chapter 29: Withholding
Shortly after Duncan’s car was found near the Stubai Glacier gondola station, Inspector Brecher became aware that, in all likelihood, the missing Canadian was in a crevasse on or near the ski slope. Brecher was the original source of the September 27, 1989 Interpol cable stating that “MacPherson is believed to have had an accident while snowboarding on 9/8/89.”
The day after Interpol Vienna sent this cable, External Affairs Ottawa asked Consul Thomson to clarify whether Duncan had returned his snowboard, and it was then that Walter claimed he was certain the snowboard had been returned. Inspector Brecher knew that Walter’s claim was scarcely credible and intended for the consumption of Canadian External Affairs. A year later, when Walter gave a recorded statement to Brecher, he mentioned nothing about the board having been returned, and Brecher didn’t ask him about it.
For his part, Consul Thomson accepted Walter’s claim without asking him how (by what means) he was certain of the snowboard’s return. And to reiterate: While Thomson notified Ottawa of Walter’s newfound certainty, he didn’t tell the MacPhersons about it, even though he repeatedly spoke to them at their hotel after September 30.
When the MacPhersons were finally presented with the assertion that the snowboard and boots had been returned, it was in a report from the Tyrolean Security Directorate to the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, forwarded to them four months later. If they had known that Walter was the source of the assertion, they would have been in a position to question its veracity. As it was presented to them—in an official document with no reference to a source—they had no means of evaluating it.
In an effort to understand why Brecher and Thomson had left the MacPhersons in the dark, I sought and eventually found a man in the Stubai Valley who’d been in a position to know about the initial search in September 1989. However, he told me it was absolutely necessary that he remain anonymous. By his tone and facial expression, I could tell that he was very afraid of the consequences were I to mention his name or identifying characteristics. After I promised to protect his identity, he told me the following:
When the MacPhersons arrived in September 1989, I learned that the boy had last been seen on the ski slope, that he’d left his clothing in the ski school office, and that his car had sat in the gondola station parking lot for six weeks. At that point I knew he’d fallen into a crevasse while snowboarding. I knew it, the gendarmerie knew it, and everyone who worked on the glacier knew it. We knew it because there was nowhere else he could have gone. The problem was, his body wasn’t found, even though the searchers looked into the crevasses that were open in September.
“Why didn’t someone just tell the parents that their son had fallen into a crevasse while snowboarding, and that the crevasse had probably been filled in August?” I asked my anonymous source.
“One couldn’t tell them without proof,” he replied. “No one saw him fall into the crevasse, and his body wasn’t found.”
In other words, if someone had told Lynda that her son had gone into a crevasse while snowboarding, she would have demanded an explanation for why no one had saved him or at least found his body, and she might have also insisted on excavating the glacier’s crevasses to try to recover him. This would have required shutting down the slope in October, with ski season about to open, and generating a lot of bad publicity, with no guarantee he would be found. She would encounter resistance, but as Consul Thomson noted in a cable to Ottawa about her demanding ways, she had contacts in the press and in the House of Commons, and could muster support.
For the Stubai Glacier, it was far better if Lynda and Bob were led to believe that Duncan had returned his equipment and then gone for a hike. Surely, after successive searches failed to find him, they would give up and somehow come to terms with their uncertainty. At the same time, External Affairs officers could wrap up the troublesome business in Tyrol and return to their normal routine at the embassy in Vienna.
I wasn’t so surprised that the local police had withheld information from the MacPhersons. This was rural Tyrol, after all, where the village cop’s primary allegiance was often to the local great man. Much harder for me to understand was why Consul Thomson had withheld information from the Canadian citizens he was supposed to be representing. I made a considerable effort to find him and to obtain official permission from Foreign Affairs to ask him about his participation in the story, but he politely refused to speak with me.
I watched a video of the 1993 German television show (Bitte melde dich!) about Duncan. There before me was Walter Hinterhoelzl, standing on the glacier near where his pupil lay buried in the ice, saying that Duncan had been so “especially cautious” that whenever he’d come near slope boundaries, “he took off his board, walked back to the middle of the slope, and then started over.” The implication was clear: Nothing could have befallen him while snowboarding because he was far too careful (the opposite of a fearless “Canadian Hotdog,” as Walter would later describe him after his body emerged).
Inspector Brecher also implied that Duncan had made it off the slope and then later had an accident while hiking:
Sooner or later a hunter, an alpinist, a foreign visitor could go behind a boulder, and then he could be found somewhere. From our experience I believe that sooner or later he can be found.
Again the message was clear: Nothing happened to Duncan while snowboarding at the Stubai Glacier (a ski resort with a large German customer base and German investors).
Brecher didn’t mention the crevasse danger on the Schaufelferner, even though he was intimately familiar with it. On August 4, 1988, a student from Hong Kong named Chung Yin Chiu disappeared on the same glacier. Though the head of the rescue service, Helmut Tanzer, ultimately found Chiu in a deep crevasse, by the time the boy was extracted, his body temperature was perilously low, and he died in the Innsbruck Clinic on August 9, 1988. Exactly one year (almost to the hour) later, Duncan was last seen precisely where Chiu’s disaster had occurred.
Though no police officers were present during Chiu’s extraction, Inspector Brecher interviewed Helmut Tanzer and photographed the site the following day. Tanzer said that Chiu must have come off the tow-lift and skied through the crevassing zone, even though it was marked with warning signs and a cordon. Brecher’s photos reveal that, though one end of the crevasse was within two meters of the tow-lift path, it was not—as required by law—secured by a barrier. The cordon was entirely insufficient for stopping a skier from accidentally sliding off the path and into the sixty-foot plunge.
In August 1990, Brecher again interviewed Helmut Tanzer, this time about Duncan. Tanzer stuck to the script that nothing could have happened to him on the slope because it was so carefully controlled. He claimed his crew had marked the crevassing area on August 8, but he said nothing about the risk that Duncan had nevertheless gone into it, just as Chiu had, and Brecher didn’t ask him about this parallel.
After Duncan’s body was found, the silence about Chiu’s accident was broken. Michael Tanzer, head of operations in 2003, asserted that Duncan must have come off the tow-lift and gone through the danger area, just like the “Japanese” the year before. Given that no one in 1989 had spoken about the previous accident, when it could have guided the search for Duncan, it was remarkable that Tanzer chose to speak about it in 2003. I sensed that he’d drawn attention to Chiu’s disaster in order to make his proffered theory of Duncan’s crevasse fall more persuasive.