“So you think that this body does not belong with this head and hands?” I asked. He flashed a winning smile that reminded me of his reputation as a charmer.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “I’m just saying that this looks very strange to me. What did the forensic doctor who took these photos say?”
Alone among Innsbruck officials, Dr. Rabl acted in a friendly and compassionate way with the MacPhersons instead of treating them like a nuisance. Because no official examination of Duncan’s body was performed, their burning desire to know the cause and manner of his death remained unfulfilled, and in their quest for answers, they most often turned to Rabl.
As a forensic doctor he found himself in the highly unusual position of ongoing consultant for the parents of a victim of unnatural death, corresponding with them for years, never missing an opportunity to assure them that they were his friends—that he often thought about them, admired their character, was proud of his association with them, and that they were always welcome to send him questions. Lynda was profoundly grateful to him. Indeed, in reading her correspondence, I noticed that she’d been more willing to share her personal feelings with him than she was now with me. Some of her emails were long and full of questions that weren’t easy for any doctor to answer for a layman, and writing her back was made even more time-consuming because he had to respond in English instead of in his native German.
One can hardly fault Rabl for being friendly and generous with his time, but he would have been far more helpful if he’d simply told the MacPhersons that they were free to order a private forensic exam of their son’s body before it was cremated, provided they were able and willing to pay for it.
When I visited him at his institute in the autumn of 2009, I was still sifting through the records, trying to make sense of it all. Like Lynda, I immediately liked him, with his big, open, preternaturally boyish face, warm smile, and fine sense of humor. I was impressed by his tall and athletic stature, which amplified his air of authority, though at the same time he was relaxed and casual, without a hint of arrogance or pedantry. He was one of those guys in whom you immediately feel confident without thinking about it, which I suppose is the meaning of charisma.
He invited me into his office, made me an excellent cappuccino from his little machine, and asked me how Lynda and Bob were doing.
“They’re okay, I guess, but Lynda is still preoccupied with figuring out what happened to Duncan. I have never seen anyone so devoted to anything.”
“Yes, I too have sensed that she can’t let it go,” he said.
“Well, what do you think happened to him?”
“Falling into a crevasse is not uncommon in the mountains,” he replied. “And when you fall into one, it is usually impossible to get out without help. I therefore don’t see how Duncan could have climbed out and been struck by a grooming machine.” Rabl was referring to Myriam Nafte’s hypothetical reconstruction of the accident, which she presented on the fifth estate documentary.
“There was another crevasse fall on the same glacier the year before Duncan’s accident,” he continued. “I have the police report, and I think you will find it interesting,” he said, and handed me the document. He then told me that his institute had recently received a skeleton that had melted out of a glacier, and he wanted to show it to me. We went down to the basement, where he hauled a box of bones out of storage and handed me a femur. I was surprised by its heft.
“We believe we know who this gentleman was, but his bones have created a paternity mystery,” he said with a grin. “His DNA matches that of one of his children, but not of the other.”
“A cuckolded alpinist,” I said.
“Exactly,” he replied, his eyes twinkling.
I thanked Rabl for his time and drove back to my hotel in the Stubai Valley. Only after I’d showered and dressed for dinner did I realize that he had managed to get through our entire meeting without addressing what had caused Duncan’s injuries. He had so thoroughly disarmed me, and so skillfully steered our conversation, that it hadn’t occurred to me to try to pin him down. Seeing the fascinating bones had then caused me to lose my train of thought.
Rabl didn’t actually say that Duncan’s accident was like Chiu’s, but by giving me Inspector Brecher’s report on Chiu’s accident, he implied it. Could a crevasse fall and ice movement really explain Duncan’s injuries? Dr. Straathof and Dr. Nafte didn’t think so. According to Dr. Nafte, his left leg resembled a leg she’d seen that had been struck by a large boat propeller. She felt that only heavy machinery, such as a snow grooming machine, could have inflicted Duncan’s traumas. Her opinion starkly contrasted with Rabl’s comments in his February 13, 2004 email to Lynda.
I saw persons who were injured by a run-over of such snow-grooming machines. None of them had an amputation of a limb or a decapitation. They all had severe and lethal injuries of inner organs and multiple bone fractures—especially ribs, pelvis, and limbs. If one supposes that Duncan was run over by such a machine in 1989 then someone would have had to drive the machine back and push the body into a crevasse in a second step. If he was just hit and pushed into a crevasse in a single-machine movement, then the machine normally could not run over him. The fact that there were no serial fractures of the ribs and no pelvic fractures argues against a run-over mechanism by a snow-grooming machine.
That Duncan’s body had emerged from the glacier with chopped up limbs but an unscathed torso was strange indeed, but did that necessarily mean that he hadn’t interacted with a grooming machine? What about Rabl’s suggestion that his limbs were sheared by flowing ice?
As some of Rabl’s colleagues in Innsbruck noted in a 1992 study of glacier corpses, when a body goes into a crevasse in the upper part of a glacier, where snow and ice accumulate, it will be transported down, into deeper layers of ice, where it will be subjected to tensile stresses that may dismember it. As with all dismemberment from natural forces, it tends to occur at the joints, which are held together by ligaments that weaken with decomposition. Duncan’s head, for example, separated from his body between two cervical vertebrae; a small amount of force could have broken the ligaments holding the bones together. His head was found with his body, indicating it may have come off as the slope workers moved his body without supporting his head. Likewise, his right foot detached at the ankle joint during the body’s recovery.
In a glacier’s lower region (the ablation zone), where its annual snow and ice melt exceeds accumulation, a body will be transported upwards and subjected to compressive stresses that will likely crush it. When a body is dismembered by a glacier, its pieces may ultimately emerge at different times and locations. Fabrizio Falchero’s upper body and lower body came apart between two vertebrae of the lumbar spine and were not found together. As Rabl mentioned in an email to Lynda, his bones “were separated but not fractured.”
Duncan’s corpse was found in the vestige of a transverse crevasse located precisely at the Schaufelferner’s equilibrium line (2,975 meters above sea level)—the level at which the glacier’s annual accumulation and melt were in a state of balance. His body was neither pulled apart nor crushed. His cranium, spine, ribcage, shoulders, pelvis, and hips were completely intact. And even though his left leg was amputated above the knee, his hip joint bore no signs of having been subjected to force. The injuries on his forearms, hands, and lower left leg consisted of sharp, linear fractures to the bone shafts, as Dr. Straathof observed. Moreover, the pieces of his severed limbs were all found together, in the same remnant of a small crevasse whose structure had not—as the discovery scene photos show—deformed as it moved down the hill.