Moreover, although Raven’s undershirt was found with his body and is visible in police photos, it was subsequently burned by someone at the Innsbruck Institute of Forensic Medicine. Given that Raven was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, his undershirt may have been marked with blood stains and knife blade holes. Why was his shirt destroyed?
The second case was that of a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old German waitress named Susi Greiner, who disappeared in Tyrol in August of 2006. Two weeks later, her body was found on a mountainside (the Karwendel), completely naked and barefoot, 1,000 vertical meters above the lot where her car was parked. Her clothing, hiking boots, and backpack containing her laptop and cell phone were later found at different locations in the valley. All data—all records of communication before her death—had been deleted from her laptop and phone. Moreover, she was last seen alive with an unidentified man in the passenger seat of her car.
In spite of these suspicious circumstances, Dr. Rabl found no signs of foul play on her body and concluded that she had died of hypothermia. According to an ORF report, “the only injury on her body was a laceration on her head that may have resulted from falling and sliding several meters.” From Dr. Rabl’s findings, the police theorized that Susi must have hiked naked and barefoot (in an area popular with tourists) to the high elevation and died of exposure.
Susi’s mother asked Rabl about the condition of her daughter’s feet, and he replied that they bore no conspicuous marks, only a bit of grass between her toes. How, Susi’s mother wanted to know, had her daughter hiked barefoot for several hours over rocky terrain without cutting and abrading the soles of her feet? Mrs. Greiner might have also asked Rabl how he had determined that the laceration on Susi’s head was the result of an accidental fall, and not from an assailant’s blow with a blunt instrument.
The third case was that of a Slovakian caretaker named Denisa Soltisova, who died under mysterious circumstances in the Upper Austrian town of Voecklabruck in January of 2008. Ten days after she was last seen alive, her completely naked body was found in a nearby river. Five hours later, with no autopsy, the public prosecutor ruled her death a suicide, closed the case, and released her body for burial in Slovakia.
Unsatisfied with the Austrian investigation (or lack thereof) the Slovakian authorities commissioned the forensic doctors Josef Krajcovic and Lubomir Straka to examine Denisa’s body. They found bruises on her arms and inner thighs consistent with sexual assault. Her blood also contained significant amounts of medications used to treat diabetes and gout, even though she suffered from neither illness. At the time of her death, she was the caretaker of an elderly urologist, and it was a reasonable assumption that he kept stashes of these medications in his home office. Though the doctor’s old age and infirmity ruled him out as a suspect for sexual assault, it was not unreasonable to suspect that a regular visitor to his home had gained access to his medications and put them in Denisa’s drink without her knowledge.
After Austro-Slovakian author Martin Leidenfrost published a book about the case, it was reopened in Austria and the forensic doctor Johann Haberl was assigned to evaluate the findings of the Slovakian doctors. Presumably from his analysis of the autopsy photos, Haberl disagreed that the defects on Denisa’s arms and inner thighs were clearly injuries resulting from violence inflicted while she was still alive. Though Dr. Haberl conceded that this was a possibility, he argued that one could not be certain due to the body’s advanced state of decomposition.
On the other hand, the renowned Viennese pharmacologist Michael Freissmuth found it unlikely that Denisa had ingested the medications in order to commit suicide. More likely, he concluded, a culprit had dissolved the substances into her coffee or wine, causing a sharp reduction of her blood sugar that significantly impaired her awareness and motor skills, and thus her ability to resist.
At this point, three forensic scientists had found grounds for urgently suspecting murder, while a fourth had found that murder couldn’t be ruled out. Apparently unsatisfied with these opinions, the public prosecutor in the Upper Austrian city of Wels commissioned Dr. Rabl to serve as the final scientific arbiter. After Rabl concluded that “no signs of foul play could be established with the requisite degree of certainty,” the prosecutor closed the case.
All of the above cases were closed, in spite of suspicious circumstances, largely because Dr. Rabl found no signs of foul play on the victims’ bodies. This shows the tremendous weight that the Austrian criminal justice system assigns to forensic medical findings, as distinct from other investigative methods. To be sure, forensic medicine is an extremely advanced science that can reveal an astonishing amount of information about a corpse. The current (November 2011) issue of National Geographic features an article about a recent autopsy of Oetzi’s body. From this and earlier exams, we know that the man who died 5,300 years ago was about forty-five years old, had brown hair and brown eyes, and probably spent his childhood near the present village of Feldthurns, north of Bolzano. He was probably lactose intolerant, at high risk of hardening of the arteries, and like Duncan, had suffered from Lyme disease.
About two hours before he died he ate a meal of alpine ibex meat. His hands, wrists and chest had a number of cuts and bruises, indicating he got into a fight shortly before his death. He was shot in the back with an arrow, and it appears that he initially fell onto his back, but was then rolled over by an assailant attempting to retrieve the arrow. Cerebral trauma indicates he suffered a blow to his head, but it’s not clear if this was caused from falling or from being struck by an assailant.
We know so much about Oetzi because forensic scientists, with their array of analytic tools and methods, wanted to discover it. As National Geographic pointed out, “The Iceman might be the most exposed and invaded person who ever walked the planet.” When people are motivated to acquire knowledge of something, their ingenuity is boundless.
Given that Dr. Rabl was unable or unwilling to establish scientifically the cause of Duncan’s amputated limbs and shredded clothing, and also unable or unwilling to notice the knife marks on Raven Vollrath’s ribs, it seems to me that he should not be regarded as the ultimate forensic authority in Austria and given the last word in a controversial case such as Denisa Soltisova’s.
In 2007, Rabl gave an interview to the Viennese daily Die Presse in which he warned about the danger a society faces when not enough autopsies are performed—a growing problem in Vienna, due to a recent legal reform.
“It’s only a matter of time before unrecognized homicides happen,” he said. Rabl was right, though he might have also mentioned the equally grave danger a society faces when the competence of its forensic doctors cannot be trusted. When the controversial Governor of Carinthia, Joerg Haider, was killed in a car accident in 2008, the world was told that his ability to drive safely had been impaired by the large amount of alcohol (1.8 per mil) in his blood. How do we know that he was impaired as a result of drinking a large quantity of alcohol, and not as a result of some other mind-altering substance that someone put into his drink without his awareness? All we can do is trust that the forensic doctors who performed the toxicology exams were competent and impartial. The first exam was conducted by the Graz forensic doctors Kathrin Yen und Peter Grabuschnig. In order to confirm their findings, the Klagenfurt public prosecutor commissioned Dr. Rabl to perform a second examination. Can we trust that he did it competently and impartially?