Next I contacted Andy Tyson, co-author of Glacier Mountaineering, and asked him to analyze aerial photos of the glacier taken on the day Duncan’s body was found.
“You can see a lot of crevasses on this glacier,” he explained. “But none of them are very big. I think you’d have to be unlucky to fall deep into one of them, but you could have a bad crash if you interacted with one while snowboarding.” I asked him to elaborate.
“A small crevasse is kind of like an inverted speed bump,” he explained. “Your whole body is not likely to go into it, especially if you are moving fast, but your snowboard might dip into it and catch the downhill wall, with very ugly results.”
Next, I wanted to get an additional opinion about the snowboarding equipment, so I asked the MacPhersons to send it to Dennis Nazari, owner of the Salty Peaks snowboard shop and curator of the Utah Snowboard Museum in Salt Lake City. Dennis was dumbfounded by the equipment combination.
The snowboard was a so-called “alpine” board—a stiff board designed for high-speed carving. Given that Duncan was a beginner, he would have had more control over a softer “all mountain” board. Then there were the mismatched boots and bindings that I had already noticed. As Dennis pointed out, the bindings were also mounted much too close together for a rider of Duncan’s tall stature, which greatly reduced his turning leverage. Last but not least, the plastic lips on the front of the hard ski boots projected over two inches beyond the board’s right edge, and would have dug into the slope every time he tried to make a right turn.
Turning and stopping on such a set-up would be difficult for an experienced rider, and Duncan was a beginner. Altogether it significantly increased the risk of a violent crash or hurtling out of bounds on a slope surrounded by lethal crevasses. Given that Walter Hinterhoezl had, by his own admission, helped Duncan to select this appalling equipment combination, I found it ironic that he had later become head trainer of the Austrian national women’s snowboarding team and is currently head of the Austrian Federation of Snowboarding Schools and Instructors.
I called a plaintiff’s attorney in Denver, Colorado and asked him if he knew any experts on skiing and snowboarding accidents.
“There’s a guy named Dick Penniman in Truckee, California who’s really good at reconstructing accidents,” the lawyer said. “I’d give him a call.”
I called Penniman and within minutes, I knew I’d found the right guy. He’d spent most of his sixty years around ski slopes, either skiing or working as a patrol director for various mountain resorts, and his resume, which he sent me after our initial conversation, listed dozens of certifications in skiing safety, hazard control, emergency medical care, slope design and maintenance. He’d also held several college teaching posts in mountain resort operations and safety. As a professional accident investigator, he had studied hundreds of skiing and snowboarding accidents, and depending on his findings, often testified as an expert witness in complaints of ski resort negligence, usually for the plaintiffs. In my research about grooming machine accidents, I’d just come across a report about an incident at a Michigan resort in which a boy skied into the side of a grooming machine and got his left leg (wearing a ski boot) caught in its grooming tiller. I wanted to learn more about the accident, and as luck would have it, Penniman was an expert witness in the case.
Seeking his unbiased opinion of the damage to the snowboard and to Duncan’s limbs, the only thing I initially told him was that a young man had disappeared at a glacier ski resort, and that his body and equipment had melted out many years later. I didn’t even mention Duncan’s name.
Penniman agreed to start by analyzing the snowboard and boots without any preconceived notions, and he called me a few days later.
“The board went through a grooming tiller,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Positive. I’ll show you in person all the indications, but for now, I can tell you I have no doubt whatsoever.”
“What about the ski boots?”
“They didn’t go through the tiller, but the left boot liner did.”
“How do you explain that?”
“I can’t just yet,” he said, chuckling. “I need more information.” At that point I sent him the photos of Duncan’s corpse.
“Take a close look at his left leg, and tell me what you think,” I said.
The “tiller” Penniman referred to resembles a garden rototiller for breaking up compacted soil. It consists of a rotating shaft (called a cutter bar) equipped with rows of three inch steel tines, spaced three inches apart. The shaft, mounted in a steel casing and driven by a hydrostatic pump, turns up to 1800 rpm as it tills the bumps and grooves that form on the slope from the action of skis. Running over the hard-packed snow, the tiller breaks it up and drives the chunks into a chamber at the top of the casing, where it pulverizes them into a smooth-grained material.
Dick called me back a couple of hours later.
“His left leg also went into the tiller,” he said. “Not only are the bones broken in pieces, but the flesh around the bones has also been chopped up. A crevasse fall could break bones, but it couldn’t grind meat. Also, the mass of broken bones and ground flesh are still together, indicating that the leg wasn’t pulled apart by ice flow. To me there’s no doubt about it.”
“But the tiller trails behind the tracked vehicle,” I said. “How could his leg go into the tiller without the tractor first crushing his body?”
“Well, first of all, the tiller is wider than the tractor, which means that the tractor could have driven past him without touching his torso, but still clipped his leg with the tiller and pulled it in. Also, the tractor could have been turning, which causes the tiller to swing out and away from the tractor.”
“Okay, but why in hell did his board and his left leg go into the tiller, but not his left ski boot? And why did his board, boot, and body all end up together in a crevasse, given that the tiller disaster must have happened on the surface?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I think we’re dealing with something dark.”
After we hung up, he went outside to work in his garden, but found himself unable to concentrate on anything but the riddle of what had happened to Duncan. He’d seen and heard of many bizarre incidents in the mountains, but this was definitely the most perplexing.
Duncan’s body was untouched by the tractor, but his leg got pulled into the tiller, not wearing the ski boot, only the liner, he thought as he paced back and forth in his backyard. Why wasn’t he wearing his ski boot, and why didn’t he—a professional hockey player—dodge a slow-moving groomer? Had he, for some reason, been unable to move? The epiphany hit him like a bolt.
Not one, but two separate events had resulted in Duncan’s violent death.
On September 20, 2010, I rendezvoused with Lynda and Bob in the little town of Incline Village on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, not far from Dick Penniman’s house. The date was the 21st anniversary of Duncan’s car being found. During their initial search, they’d figured that if they could just find his car, they would quickly learn what had happened to him. Twenty-one years later, they still weren’t sure and still wanted to know as badly as ever.