Telling Lynda that an autopsy may not reveal the cause of Duncan’s death was highly misleading, and it planted in her mind the notion that it was probably senseless to fly the body to Canada for autopsy. As Rabl certainly understood, what the case called for was not an autopsy—i.e., opening Duncan’s cranium and thorax to view his mummified organs—but examining the limb injuries, shredded clothing, and any foreign objects found with the body. If the shredding of limbs and clothing had been caused by ice movement, he could have determined and documented this, thereby giving the MacPhersons peace of mind and forever clearing the Stubai Glacier of suspicion. Instead, through all the talk of autopsy, Rabl never mentioned that Duncan’s limbs bore obvious, external marks of violence.
The idea that he “couldn’t examine the injuries exactly,” which he presented in his interview on the fifth estate, was nonsense. Who hindered him from looking closely at the injuries? Did the Innsbruck public prosecutor forbid him from looking at the chopped up limbs on his dissection table?
Without precisely examining the injuries, Rabl had no scientific grounds for concluding that they’d been caused by glacier flow. He claimed he’d seen such damage before on glacier corpses, but I doubt he could produce documentation of a single other glacier corpse that was found completely undamaged except for sharp, closely-spaced segmental fractures on both hands and forearms and on one leg, the pieces of the amputated limbs found together with the torso and intact leg. To reiterate: Natural dismemberment from flowing ice tends to occur at the joints, which come apart as their connecting ligaments decompose. Conversely, amputations of the hands and forearms are very common in accidents with industrial and agricultural machinery, and as Rabl knew, Duncan’s corpse was not found on a glacier in the wilderness, but in the middle of a ski slope on which heavy machinery was regularly used.
Rabl told the fifth estate and the reporter Florian Skrabal that he hadn’t performed an autopsy because the public prosecutor hadn’t ordered it, but this was putting the cart before the horse. Given that Duncan’s injuries resembled well-documented injuries inflicted by machinery, it was Rabl’s job to tell the prosecutor that they needed to be examined. According to Innsbruck prosecutor Richard Freyschlag, Rabl never called to express concern.
When Lynda insisted she wanted to know how Duncan had died, he offered to take a CT scan, which, in his words, would at least show “how Duncan didn’t die.” But if Rabl wasn’t authorized to examine the body, why was he authorized to requisition an expensive CT scan of it? The scan required transporting the decomposing corpse from the Institute of Forensic Medicine to the University Clinic’s department of radiology—a facility for performing diagnostic studies on living patients. Rabl did not tell the MacPhersons that regardless of what the CT scan revealed it would have no bearing on Duncan’s (irrevocably closed) case. As they understood his offer, the scan was a genuine attempt to shed light on the cause and manner of their son’s death.
Because Lynda trusted Rabl, she assumed he would tell her before Duncan’s body was cremated if the scan revealed any abnormalities. He assured her that it showed “no severe injury to Duncan’s head, spine, or thorax.” Again he said nothing about the amputated limbs, even though, as every doctor knows, bleeding from three severed limbs will cause a man to die unless he receives emergency medical care.
After the CT exam (and the body’s cremation the following day) Rabl delayed sending the MacPhersons any images for four months, and he only did so after Lynda repeatedly asked for them. Those that he finally sent on November 21, 2003 were low resolution digital radiographs that did not include Duncan’s legs. One has been cropped to leave out the legs entirely. The original, hard copy of this image—which Rabl sent two months later in response to Lynda’s requests—shows the upper legs and knees.
In a striking departure from customary medical practice, Rabl did not enclose a radiology report with the images. What was the point of requisitioning radiographs without asking the radiologist to examine them and to write a report? Nor did he send the CT (three-dimensional) images that he’d initially offered to make. Three years elapsed before he finally sent Lynda CDs containing a few CT studies. Rabl’s staggered method of sending images to Lynda created a huge amount of confusion that I was able to dispel only after constructing a precise chronology of which images he’d sent at which times. In the final analysis: Because Rabl had initially said he would order a CT, Lynda assumed that the digital radiographs that he sent on November 21, 2003 were CT scans. Though he did indeed order a CT exam on July 31, 2003, he did not send her copies of the resulting high resolution, three-dimensional imagery until the autumn of 2006. Even then, it was apparently because, in August of 2006, a fifth estate producer inquired about the “CT scan” that Lynda often spoke about.
The scan was performed by the radiologist Peter Waldenberger, but he either didn’t write a report (highly irregular) or his report was not exported from the database and burned onto the CDs. Waldenberger told me he didn’t remember if he’d written a report, but didn’t think that he had.
Two of the CT studies are of Duncan’s cranium; a third is of his thorax and pelvis. Digital radiographs were also taken with the machine; some shots of the thorax and pelvis were saved as screen capture images on August 8, 2003. Why did Waldenberger or Rabl save some of the images in a different format (in which they could have been altered) nine days after they were taken instead of promptly sending all of the imagery to the MacPhersons?
Conspicuously absent from the CT studies are any images of Duncan’s left leg and forearms—the parts of his body that had sustained the trauma. Why were the fractured forearms, hands, and left leg excluded from the field of view? The images on the CDs were exported from a patient database on August 27, 2006. Because Lynda and Bob were unfamiliar with the imaging software, they didn’t know how to access the file information. When I did so, I discovered something strange: The exam was filed under the alias “Wissenschaft Waldi” and the false date of birth June 13, 2000. Only someone who knew the patient number, false name, or false birthdate would be able to find Duncan’s file on the database.
Wissenschaft is the German word for science, which indicates that Rabl told Dr. Waldenberger that the exam was for scientific inquiry, and not for a forensic medical case. Waldenberger, who is now head of radiology at a large hospital in Linz, told me that Rabl “wanted to make the images solely for the parents,” as the condition of the body was “no longer relevant,” given that the case had been closed. This is not what the Canadian Embassy was told. On July 31, 2003, Bernhard Knapp at the District Government office informed Vice-consul Douglas that the CT scan was performed “to determine the presence of any fractures.”
Regardless of what Rabl told Waldenberger, the MacPhersons and the Canadian Embassy were told that a CT exam was conducted to discover what, if any, injuries Duncan had sustained, which could shed light on the cause and manner of his death. They did not understand that the exam was performed solely to make images of the uninjured parts of Duncan’s body, and that it would be filed as a science project (an insult to the MacPhersons and to science).