It appears that everyone could have gone on pretending not to notice Duncan’s abandoned car indefinitely. Even after the Tyrol Today notice was broadcast, no employee of the Stubai Glacier reported it. Georg Hofer, the man who finally called in, was a contract worker who’d noticed the car while repairing the parking lot.
It’s ironic that the MacPhersons chose a photograph of Duncan in his New York Islanders uniform for the missing person poster. They thought that Duncan’s prominence as a professional athlete would pique people’s interest in finding him, but it probably compounded the motivation for keeping him concealed. The prospect of sports reporters from New York camped out at the Mutterbergalm, telling the world about the ghastly death of a pro hockey player, was a PR nightmare.
For the purpose of concealing Duncan’s death, the more time that passed the better. Memories could fade, records could be thrown out, crevasses could close as they moved down the hill, and the autumn snow could cover everything up. And so long as the Innsbruck authorities avoided investigating Duncan’s disappearance, the statute of limitations period on negligent homicide could run out.
By the time Lynda and Bob went through most of their retirement savings and were worn down from the obfuscation they’d encountered at every turn, it probably seemed to the man (or men) who’d buried Duncan that they were in the clear. They and perhaps even their kids would be long gone by the time his body appeared at the Schaufelferner’s snout. However, with the big melt of 2003, the body, buried just deep enough to evade detection for fourteen years, emerged in the middle of the slope.
The Stubai Glacier told the police and press that an employee named Peter Birsak had stumbled across the body while picking up litter on the glacier, and then accidentally dropped one of his work gloves at the discovery site. But was the work glove found with Duncan’s body really lost at the discovery site on July 18, 2003, or had it been intentionally concealed in the crevasse on August 9, 1989 because it had blood on it? Blood is soluble in cold water, so fourteen years of summer snowmelt running through the crevasse would have washed much of it away. Still, the glove should have been analyzed for blood traces. The same is true of “the blue cross country ski gloves” that were found with Duncan’s body (in addition to a single red glove).
Duncan’s case illustrates how a crime may go undetected for years, even though a surprising number of persons are, to some degree, aware of it. Not everyone knows the particulars of the crime, but they are cognizant of suspicious circumstances, and simply choose not to look into it. Out of self-interest, they calculate that it is better not to know what is actually going on.
As I was about halfway into writing this book, a financial fraud investigator named Harry Markopolos published the book No One Would Listen about his efforts to warn regulators about Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme years before it was finally exposed. As Markopolos saw it, SEC investigators could have easily discovered Madoff’s fraud. Only “willful blindness” to the powerful man’s crimes could account for their failure. Madoff agreed: In an interview with the New York Times, he also spoke about the “willful blindness” of bank and hedge fund managers to his scheme.
“They had to know,” he said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’”
In Duncan’s case, it’s likely that only a few Innsbruck officials knew exactly what was going on. Others knew enough to recognize that someone with influence wanted the problem to go away, which meant that there was no sense in diligently investigating it. All were complicit in perpetrating a massive fraud against the MacPhersons.
The prosecutor’s decision to invoke the statute of limitations was the rankest kind of expediency, but even if criminal prosecution of Stubai Glacier personnel for negligent homicide was legitimately time-barred, it didn’t justify concealing the cause and manner of Duncan’s death from his parents and from the Canadian Embassy.
Lynda’s greatest wish now is that her son’s death be recognized by Austrian authorities as a matter of solemnity, not as a nuisance to be swept under the rug. At the very least, he should be issued a proper death certificate noting the correct date of death (not the date his corpse was found). His life ended on August 9, 1989, and he deserves the dignity of having this officially recorded. Lynda would also like for the official report of his death to be corrected to show that no autopsy was performed, and that the truth of this be conveyed by official correspondence to Canadian Foreign Affairs.
To me, it’s a plain matter of fact that the MacPhersons have been treated abominably by Innsbruck officials who were more interested in protecting local interests than enforcing the law. Because the cause and manner of their son’s death was concealed from them, they have been obliged to spend vast amounts of time and money to discover the truth. They have been systematically defrauded, and they deserve to be financially compensated for the terrible damage they have suffered.
Chapter 41: A Bigger Problem
If anyone could have shed light on the case after Duncan’s body was found, it was Dr. Rabl. He had the corpse in his dissection room for a week, and had he simply provided the MacPhersons with an honest forensic medical report, the entire complexion of their lives since 2003 would have been different. Had he given them clarity, they would have found the peace of mind that comes with understanding. Instead they have suffered yet another eight years of confusion and frustration.
On November 8, 2010, Lynda sent Rabl an email in which she asked him if he could identify the cable visible in the photo he’d taken of Duncan’s body. She attached a copy of the image with red arrows indicating the object, and she pointed out that it was not visible in his subsequent photo, taken from the same angle five minutes later.
Rabl did not respond to her email, so three weeks later, she sent her query to him again. He then replied with the following emaiclass="underline"
Hello Lynda,
I’m sorry that I did not get your email earlier—in the last few weeks we had some problems with the email-accounts of our institute. I hope that you are well. Concerning the picture I am not able to identify the object which you mentioned. I only could make a guess. Maybe it is a part of Duncan’s clothing (rest of an elastic tie) or a cord that belongs to the binding of the snowboard?? I couldn’t find it on any other picture too. I’m sorry that I can (sic) help you!
Rabl couldn’t find it in any other picture because he or someone assisting him had removed it. The cable is not part of Duncan’s clothing or equipment, and it is tensioned onto his bare skin and fractured bone, which indicates that it was brought into contact with his leg after his leg was destroyed. Why? A likely explanation is that someone tried to use the cable as an instrument for freeing the limb from the grooming tiller (see Appendix 1 for a full presentation of this hypothesis).
I would like to emphasize that theorizing about the cable would be completely unnecessary if Dr. Rabl had properly identified it. It is not enough for him to imply that he simply hadn’t noticed the cable wrapped around Duncan’s destroyed leg. The first task of the forensic doctor is to examine a body for the presence of foreign objects or marks left by foreign objects. It is Dr. Rabl’s job to notice such things.
In recent years, Rabl has served as the forensic doctor in three cases of foreign citizens who suffered unnatural deaths in Austria, none of which were officially solved in Austria. The first was the German boy Raven Vollrath, whose decomposed body was found in a stream bed near the Tyrolean ski resort of Zoeblen in June of 2006. Because Dr. Rabl found no clear signs of foul play on the boy’s body, the Innsbruck public prosecutor Rudolf Koll closed the case. However, after Raven’s parents discovered that their son had, in fact, been murdered, his body was exhumed in Germany, where a forensic doctor found marks on his ribs and sternum that were consistent with knife stabs.