Lynda and Bob had begun their inquiry into the cause of Duncan’s limb fractures by forwarding the digital radiographs that Rabl sent on November 21, 2003 to Dr. Brent Burbridge, head of radiology at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. Duncan’s arms were visible in one of the images, but his legs were completely cropped out. Upon viewing the fractured forearms, Burbridge wondered if Duncan had been “run over by the ski hill grooming machine.” I followed up with Burbridge by sending him a less cropped copy of the same image, which Rabl had sent to Lynda in January of 2004. In this image, one can see Duncan’s left femur, detached left knee, and the top of his left tibia.
“From what I can see of his fractured tibia, it looks like his leg went into a blender,” Burbridge said.
Because the radiographs of Duncan’s body do not include his lower left leg, they may be misleading when viewed alone. An unsuspecting trauma surgeon who looks at only the low-resolution radiograph of the femur and knee may see what he interprets as a “floating knee” fracture pattern, often caused by a high energy car crash. To get a complete picture of the leg injuries, the viewer must also study the photographs.
In the summer of 2010, I visited a friend in Monterey, California who is a partner in an orthopedic surgery clinic. Having also practiced trauma surgery for many years, Dr. Sohrab Gollogly has seen injuries caused by everything from gunshots to wild animals to industrial machinery.
“The radiograph of his left femur and detached knee shows a supracondylar femur fracture and an oblique proximal tibia fracture,” he observed. “If I looked at only this image, I might think that Duncan took a bad fall. Likewise, if I only looked at the radiograph of his arms, at first glance I might think that the fractures were caused by falling from a great height onto outstretched arms. However, the whole picture changes when I look at the photographs.
The left hand looks like it was cut in half by a table saw. Blunt force trauma doesn’t cause that kind of separation. The left leg shows multiple segmental fractures and extensive de-gloving of muscle, skin, and tendon. You can really see it here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the tibia from which the flesh has been cleanly cut and pulled away from the bone.
“The right forearm has been amputated below the elbow, and the elbow joint has been dislocated and rotated 180 degrees. Now that I look closely at his right hand, I see that his fingers have been cut off. Neither a fall nor ice flow would do that. If you look here, just below the severed elbow, you see where the tendons have been pulled out. We call that avulsion of tendon strands, and it is a characteristic injury from something like an auger that has grabbed the limb and pulled on it as well as cutting it. I once saw the same avulsion on a boy whose arm got pulled into a meat grinder. You can also see it here, where Duncan’s left foot has separated. These white bands are tendon strands that were pulled out. Ice flow couldn’t do that, especially given that the tendons would have been frozen and therefore simply broken.
Finally, his clothing shows signs of being cut with a sharp instrument. You can see here on this nylon gaiter,” he said, pointing to a clean cut along the zipper, “that it hasn’t been pulled apart, but cut. Also, though his sweatshirt is largely intact on his torso, the sleeves have been ripped off. All of these are strong indications that he came into contact with machinery.”
“Do you think that a forensic doctor trained at a decent medical school could recognize these signs of contact with machinery?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s pretty basic stuff.”
“Is there any way, in your opinion, glacier ice could do this damage?”
“I suppose one could argue that the leg amputation above the knee began with a femur fracture from a hard fall, which ultimately resulted in amputation from the soft tissue decaying and the leg getting twisted in the ice, but that can’t explain the other segmental fractures and de-gloving. Also, if the left leg was destroyed by ice movement, then why are the right leg and the pelvis in almost perfect condition? It defies logic that the same small section of glacier ice chopped his left leg into pieces while leaving the right leg entirely unscathed. Finally, his ribcage and skull show no signs of crushing, which I would expect to see if his body had been subjected to high stresses by the glacier ice.”
Next I sent the photographs to Lynne Herold. She began her career at the L.A. County Coroner, and currently works in the physical evidence section of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Her decades of experience looking at every kind of trauma have given her an exceptional ability to determine what happened to the victim of a violent death or to his corpse after death. She is also a genius at analyzing trace evidence. I got to know her while researching the Jack Unterweger story, as she was an expert witness for the prosecution. We were on the phone together when she opened the overview photograph of Duncan’s body lying on the dissection table.
“His left hand was severed by a very heavy blade or machine,” she said without hesitation. “No kind of blunt force will cause such a linear cut.”
“What about the right arm and left leg?” I asked.
“Let me study the photos and get back to you.” Later that evening she called.
“Yeah, the right arm and left leg also went into the chipper,” she said.
“Glacier ice couldn’t have done it?”
“No. It was definitely a machine.”
“Is there any way the limbs were chopped up when the slope workers extracted him from the ice?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, because the fractures are the same color as the rest of the bones,” she said. “If the cuts had happened at the time of extraction, the fractures would be lighter and have no debris on them.”
“Do you think that any decent forensic doctor could see that they were caused by machinery?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
The first time Dr. Rabl met Lynda and Bob, he said nothing about the massive trauma to Duncan’s limbs, nor did he tell them about their right to order a private exam. He did, however, show them two small prints of Duncan’s body. As they looked at these images for the first time, they focused primarily on his face, and did not study his limbs. Thus they did not, at the time, ask Rabl about the limb injuries. Viewing their dead son a few minutes later, they again focused on his face, and it didn’t occur to them to remove the sheet covering his body.
Later Rabl claimed he had never examined the corpse, only identified it. And yet he unpacked the amputated limbs and loosely assembled them with the body on a dissection table. He then took samples from the right thigh muscle and left femur. The entire time he was doing this, the chopped-up left leg and amputated hands and forearms were sitting before him, in plain view, on the dissection table. He then photographed the body from different angles, and though he claimed on the fifth estate that he couldn’t examine the injuries, he had nevertheless noticed that the fractured surfaces were dark brown and grey, indicating that the breaks had occurred before the body was extracted from the ice.
In spite of the massive injuries to Duncan’s limbs, the only injury Rabl noted in his identification report was a cut on the left side of the head. Though he mentioned that the limbs and head were packed in different sacks, he didn’t write a single word about the characteristics and causes of these separations.