It was a bold deception, but it could have been revised or abandoned at any time, depending on how things unfolded. It’s strange to think that just one conversation between Lynda and Vice-consul Douglas would have exposed it. Someone in Foreign Affairs must have told Knapp that the MacPhersons had broken off contact with their Embassy, which made it all the more tempting to withhold information from them. If Lynda and Douglas had spoken with each other and realized that they weren’t being told the same story, Rabl could have said that he’d simply misunderstood his mandate.
To Douglas’s credit, he tried to get in touch with Lynda to discuss what was going on in Innsbruck, but her negative experience with Consul Thomson in 1989 had left her with the conviction that Foreign Affairs was only interested in pleasing the Austrians. Though perfectly understandable, her decision to avoid contact with Douglas was a tragic mistake, and it would cost her and Bob dearly.
Why is it so intolerable to be deceived? What exactly is so monstrous about someone pretending to be a friend in order to trick us? Victims of such deception experience a complex emotional reaction when they discover they have been manipulated. Often they report feeling foolish, humiliated, confounded, and deeply disturbed. It’s a notable fact that, while most of us are capable of forgiving even major transgressions, it is virtually impossible to forgive someone who has feigned friendship in order to deceive us. Once unmasked, the deceiver will always seem alien, no matter what he says.
At the same time, it’s hard to explain just why we regard the deceiver with such violent revulsion. In his defense, he may say he didn’t want to hurt his victim; he wanted to get something while leaving his victim in a state of ignorant comfort. He might also say that he didn’t want to feign friendship, but had to in order to inoculate his victim against suspicion. Our instinct to loath the deceiver is probably rooted in our essentially social nature, from which springs the distressing thought: If I can’t trust a “friend,” then I can’t trust anyone, which means that I am alone.
I suspect that Rabl rationalized deceiving Lynda with the thought that “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” and that it was better for her to believe that her son had died a relatively pleasant death from non-asphyctic suffocation. He didn’t understand that Lynda despises such comforting illusions.
After she concluded that Rabl had played a key role in covering up the cause and manner of her son’s death, she wondered why she’d been so taken in by him. The answer is simple: She trusted him. While the suspicious mind is hyperactive, the trusting mind sleeps. Rabl treated Lynda with warmth and kindness, and acted as the sole helping hand in a horrible situation in which everyone else was giving her the cold shoulder. His tears when Bob gave him the bone fragments left behind on the glacier had touched her, as did his refusal to carry out Knapp’s order to remove Duncan’s jaws. Altogether, he gave her the impression that he was caring and trustworthy, and it therefore didn’t occur to her to doubt and fact-check what he told her.
We perceive the world largely in accordance with our assumptions. Being a sincere person, Lynda assumed that Rabl was sincere when he acted friendly and helpful. On top of it all, he was a doctor, scientist, and expert witness for the court, whose most fundamental duty was to remain impartial. Because of his position, she assumed that he would simply tell her if there was something abnormal about Duncan’s body that had not been scientifically clarified. After all, wasn’t that his job?
Chapter 37: The Cable
With the benefit of hindsight, Lynda and Bob wondered why their suspicion about Duncan’s injuries wasn’t piqued the first time they saw the photos in Rabl’s office, just before viewing the body. The answer is that their minds weren’t primed to notice suspicious, mechanical injuries because they’d gone into the meeting with the assumption that Duncan had fallen into a crevasse on the slope and been buried alive.
Even at a purely empirical level, we often fail to see things unless we expect them to be there. In April 2001, Dr. Paul Gostner, head of radiology at the Bolzano General Hospital, studied CT scans of Oetzi and didn’t notice anything unusual. A few months later, he took a chest x-ray of the ancient mummy and noticed the outline of an arrowhead beneath his left shoulder. Gostner then went back to the CT image and there it was. He hadn’t seen it at first because he hadn’t expected it to be there.
One day in September 2010, I took yet another look at the photos of Duncan’s body. While studying a shot of his mangled left leg, I suddenly saw something for the first time, even though I’d already spent hours looking at the image. Zooming in on it, I saw that among the jumbled mass of bones, oxidized skin, and torn up clothing was what appeared to be a cable with a swaged end attached to a handle or bracket. What was it, and why hadn’t anyone noticed it before? It was a strange experience, because once I’d seen it, I couldn’t look at the photograph again without seeing it. What had long gone unnoticed became conspicuous.
Was it part of Duncan’s clothing or equipment? Through painstaking work, I established that the cord was not his sweatpants’ draw string, not his gaiter draw string, not a snowboard leash, and not part of the snowboard binding. Nor could it have been a bootlace, as his ski boots had buckles and not laces. The chord appeared to be tensioned. In one place it was drawn into the fractured bone, and then flattened out as it looped around the leg. That it was snug against the skin and bone indicated it had been applied after the leg was unclothed and injured. What was a piece of cable doing wrapped around Duncan’s wrecked leg?
The cable is visible only in a photo of the leg as it was lying on the dissection table. In the images of the leg after it had been transferred to the gurney five minutes later, the cable is missing, which means that it was removed by Dr. Rabl or his assistant. I also found it notable that he didn’t remove any other articles from Duncan’s body—only the cable.
“Rabl must have seen it and even held it,” I told Lynda. “Trouble is, if we ask him about it, he could easily play dumb.”
Chapter 38: Putting the Pieces Together
By September 2010, we had a growing body of facts, but we still didn’t have a coherent theory of what exactly had happened to Duncan. Bob and Dr. Nafte had formulated hypothetical reconstructions of his death, but neither of these seemed plausible to me. We needed help from people who had more experience with glaciers, snowboarding, and snowboarding accidents.
I contacted Professor David Evans, co-author of the authoritative Glaciers and Glaciation, and told him I was researching the case of a young man who had apparently fallen into a crevasse on a glacier ski slope and then emerged fourteen years later. Would Professor Evans examine photographs of the discovery scene, and tell me if he noticed anything remarkable? He agreed, and the next day he emailed me:
After looking at those photos, I would say that this is a very strange case indeed. He was found on the upper part of the glacier. I thought he had come out at the snout, which would make more sense if he’d been buried deep in a crevasse. He must have died near the surface but sufficiently deep to avoid being detected. Otherwise there is no way he would have melted out this far up the glacier. I also find it difficult to believe that on a glacier so small no one saw what happened or found him immediately after the alarm was raised.