In spite of Brecher’s awareness that Duncan had almost certainly gone into a crevasse while snowboarding, he chose not to pursue this obvious lead. Initially he withheld information from the MacPhersons and didn’t investigate the matter of the snowboarding equipment. When the Bitte melde dich! episode was filmed four years later, he made misleading statements about Duncan’s disappearance on German national television. When I called him in 2009 to discuss the case, he refused to talk to me.
Chapter 30: “Quaint at the bottom, savage at the top”
I timed my first visit to Stubai to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Duncan’s death. Entering the valley, I was stunned by the vista that spread out before me, which is nicely described in the book Stubai: Beautiful Valley, by Heinrich Klier, the founder of the Stubai Glacier:
Quaint at the bottom, savage at the top… the solitude of sheer ice and rock massifs in the backdrop, a narrow strip of lush green, cultivated and densely populated, in the middle: that is how the Stubai Valley presents itself to the beholder.
I arrived at the Mutterbergalm around 10:00 and parked where Duncan had parked exactly two decades earlier. Riding the gondola up to the Eisgrat, I looked out the window at the glacier-sculpted mountain below, and imagined him doing the same. What thoughts did he have, I wondered, as he’d approached the place where he would die a few hours later? I’d also toured Central Europe for the first time in the summer of 1989. A few weeks before Duncan visited Roger Kortko’s place in Fuessen, I visited the nearby Neuschwanstein castle, and then passed through Innsbruck. I could still vividly recall the excitement of being young in Europe. Death was the furthest thing from my mind.
Arriving at the Eisgrat Station, I walked out of the cable car terminal and took my first look at the glacier that had been Duncan’s grave for fourteen years. Though Lynda had prepared me, I was still surprised by how small it was. How bizarre that he’d vanished on a bunny hill! I had with me photographs taken by Judy Wigmore on August 9, 1989. They showed thick banks of fog rolling onto the slope. Riding up the tow-lift for his last run, Duncan must have vanished into the mist, out of sight from the base.
I walked up the secure path, which had been moved to the opposite side of the slope from its location in 1989. As I trudged along, the old, icy snow crunching under my feet, I thought about the woman who Lynda had seen falling into a crevasse on the path in the summer of 1990. Alone on the glacier, with no one to see me go in, I frequently glanced at its mottled grey and white surface, looking for spots that might give way.
About halfway to the top, I looked across the ice field to the area in which Duncan had died, and contemplated the same questions his mother had pondered for so long. How bad was your death? Were you afraid? Were you in pain? It was an overcast day, and the grey sky seemed to mimic the grey glacier. Beyond the ice was a craggy and barren rock formation. I understood then why Lynda had often called it a cold place. How ironic that it was an amusement area. How many carefree tourists had unwittingly skied over a dead man buried without a funeral?
Thoughts of death imbued all of my perceptions, and just like Lynda, I found myself wanting to get away from the place, but not without first thinking something solemn about the young man who’d come to occupy all of my waking hours and even my dreams. I conjured his face and voice from my memory of the television interview he’d given just before he died, and addressed my image of him. Your mother thinks you want me to speak for you. I’ll do my best.
Back at the Eisgrat I fell into a conversation with an affable guy who worked for the Stubai Glacier’s rescue service. Pretending to be an English teacher from Vienna, I asked him why the slope was no longer open for summer skiing.
“Because it’s too warm and there’s not enough snow,” he replied. “I guess it’s the global warming.” We rode the gondola down together at 4:15 P.M., and as we were traveling over the Schaufelferner’s former bed, he gave me a geologic history lesson.
“During the last ice age, these north facing glaciers used to go all the way to where Munich is now,” he explained. “You see how quickly they have receded in the last century. The Schaufelferner used to end at the Dresdner Hut down there,” he said, pointing at the building that appeared to be at least a mile downhill from the glacier’s present terminus.
“They used to have an icebox dug into the glacier just outside the kitchen door.”
“Who had the brilliant idea to build a ski resort here?” I asked.
“That was Herr Doktor Klier,” he said reverentially. And then, like a pious Catholic relating the life of a saint, he recounted Dr. Klier’s extraordinary deeds.
“The ski area was his vision, but because no one in the valley believed in it, he had to do it all on his own. He studied in Munich, where he met some rich Germans who he persuaded to invest in his idea. He built the gondolas and he extended the road up the valley. Now the Stubai Glacier is the most profitable ski area in Austria. Most of the others are in the red, but not us.”
“Sounds like an impressive guy. Have you ever met him?”
“Oh sure, he often visits the glacier and he takes an interest in all of his employees. Every year he sends our children Christmas presents. He grew up in the mountains and he was a great alpinist in his youth, so in a way, he’s just like us.”
Chapter 31: The Godfather of the Valley
Throughout the Stubai Valley, I encountered people who were quick to credit “Herr Doktor Klier” for their prosperity. It was common knowledge that he had single-handedly developed the local economy with his glacier ski resort. As is often noted in laudatory press reports about him, his achievements as a developer were the result of the same drive he’d earlier channeled into mountain climbing. In his younger days he summited 34 Viertausender (4,000 meter peaks) and had many close shaves with death, starting with a crevasse fall when he was fourteen on the Sulzenauferner—a glacier not far from the Schaufelferner. If a herdsman hadn’t seen him go in, he would have died.
A native of South Tyrol, which was ceded to Italy after the First World War, Klier was once a leading member of a militant group that protested Italy’s policy (initiated by Mussolini) of imposing Italian culture and language on its Austrian inhabitants. Affectionately known as the Bumser for their practice of blowing up (with a boom) South Tyrol’s infrastructure, some members fled to Austria to evade arrest in Italy. After Klier detonated a statue of Mussolini in the town of Waidbruck, he was tried in absentia by a Milan court in 1964 and sentenced to twenty-one years in prison. This kept him away from Italy until 1998, when he was pardoned by Italian President Scalfaro. For a while the Italians were determined to extradite him, so he lived in exile in Germany (which, unlike Austria, had no extradition treaty with Italy). As a former Bumser, he has special status among the older, patriotic inhabitants of Tyrol.
In the fifties and sixties Klier was a prolific author. His first novel, Feuer am Farran Firn (Fire on Farran Firn) won a literary prize in Vienna, and his second, Verlorener Sommer (Lost Summer) was translated into French and sold 100,000 copies. Bergwind und Träume (Mountain Wind and Dreams), published in 1955, tells the story of a Hollywood starlet’s adventures with a mountain climber (a relationship vaguely reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s with Andreas Heckmair). The novel’s setting is a Tyrolean village with the fictional name Ladaun that is transformed by winter tourism.