Erstellt am: 23. 1. 2013 - 11:46 Uhr
Death on the Ice
In the summer of 1989 Duncan Macpherson, a 23-year old ice-hockey professional from Canada, disappeared in central Europe. Having failed to reach the Major League elite as a player, he had been planning to visit hockey friends in continental Europe before travelling to Scotland to take up a job as a coach in Scotland. In early August he left a friend’s house in Nuremburg and headed south. He wasn't seen again until, 14 years later, his corpse was dug out of the glacial ice in the middle of a Tyrolean ski run.
John Leake
Two decades after his initial disappearance, Duncan's parents asked author John Leake to write about their son's mysterious death and their attempts to unearth the truth. They chose Leake because he'd lived in Austria for a decade, spoke fluent German and, as the author of a best-selling reportage about Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger called Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer, they thought, as Leake puts it, that he might "understand the Austrian mentality".
“They had reasons to believe that their son's violent death had not been properly investigated,” Leake told me, “or possibly even intentionally concealed.”
Despite his initial scepticism, he agreed to take on the case after reviewing the initial contradictory documents: “I kind of got sucked into the mystery,” he told me.
In the resulting book, Cold A Long Time, which includes a 26-page appendix of evidence, he offers a shocking but convincing explanation of the death of Duncan that repudiates the original narrative: the young Canadian died in a tragic but common off-piste Alpine accident.
Instead, Leake suggests there might have been a complicated and cynical cover-up operation with the complicity of local businesses, the community of the Stubai valley and, most damningly of all, the Tyrolean officialdom that should have been investigating the case.
John Leake
These charges sound hard to believe, but Leake had at his disposal a massive dossier that the MacPhersons had gathered over two decades. This includes the official police reports and witness statements obtained through freedom of information laws, as well as a CT scan of the corpse which shows mysterious, regularly spaced fractures to his left leg. The dossier shows that the official investigation was full of mistakes and seemingly deliberate obfuscations. He supplements this with his own interviews with forensic experts, glacier experts and a ski safety expert, and builds on the work of Canadian television's investigative journalism programme the fifth estate.
Leake tells how Duncan's parents, Lynda and Bob, with little apparent help from the local authorities, established that Duncan had last been seen taking a snowboard lesson with rented equipment on Stubai Glacier. The parents spent weeks travelling around the entire Alps before someone finally reported his abandoned car in the lift station's car-park. His backpack was still inside, suggesting he hadn't planned to stray far. The car had been there for 42 days.
As Leake writes: “there was something profoundly macabre about Stubai Glacier personnel ignoring such a glaring signal that the car's driver was dead.” It should have been easy to establish whether Duncan had returned the rented snowbaord equipment, but the rental shop said it had lost the records. Witness statements appeared to contradict each other and the police seemed uninterested in the discrepancies. As Leake writes: “Inspector Franz Brecher did a remarkable job of not clarifying whether the gear was returned.”
John Leake
Was this all just incompetence? When, in 2003, Duncan's body emerged from the ice in the middle of the only ski run that had been open on the day of his disappearance, the web of contradictions and apparent deceit took on a more troubling aspect. According to Leake's narrative, nobody in charge seemed to want to get to the bottom of the case. The body was exhumed not by medical or police officers, but by lift-workers. The police appeared angry when Bob MacPherson took photos of the scene. The official press release claimed the body had been found off-piste. The family wondered why the authorities would lie about the position of the body. “What are we to make of the unprofessional and dishonest conduct of so many Innsbruck officials?” asks Leake in the book.
The MacPherson family petitioned for more official documents to be released and, when they finally received them, Lynda and Bob were shocked at the lack of procedure when it came to recovering their son's body: “As Lynda read the narrative, it struck her that the most corrupt banana republic would have treated the discovery of his corpse in a more lawful manner... What in hell is going on here? Lynda wondered.”
A conspiracy?
John Leake
Eventually she came to suspect that some of the ‘mistakes’ might have been deliberate and that impartial justice had perhaps fallen victim to the business interests of the ski industry which has provided jobs and riches to the local community. Had the circumstances of her son's death been swept under the carpet to avoid embarrassment and bad publicity for the entrepreneur, Heinrich Klier, who had created the resort on the glacier? That's what Lynda believed, referring to him as the ‘Godfather of the Stubai Glacier’.
I spoke to Heinrich Klier's son, Reinhard, who strongly rejected such allegations. He remains convinced by the original explanation of the death of Duncan MacPherson – that he fell into a crevasse somewhere beyond the bounds of the controlled ski area and that the fact that the body was recovered in the middle of a piste was due to natural movement within the ice. Reinhard Klier pointed to the official medical report that suggests the wounds on Duncan's body, including severed hands and fractured legs, could be explained by the movement of the glacier. Klier admitted that it is “unusual” that the empty car wasn't reported for 6 weeks, but said many people go on long hikes from hut to hut and empty cars are not uncommon at the glacier's carpark. Klier says he has not read “Cold A Long Time” which attempts to systematically discredit that official narrative. The businessman said he extends his sympathy to the loss suffered by the family. There is a plaque dedicated to the memory of Duncan on the glacier.
Criticism of The Forensic Team
What if this offical medical report, on which so much hinges, was flawed? That is the question that has obsessed the MacPhersons and John Leake. The author focusses on the words and actions of an initially friendly forensic expert called Professor Dr. Walter Rabl. In Leake's narrative Rabl seems keen to avoid an autopsy, although all other glacier corpses were given autopsies in his institute. Nor does he advise the clearly distressed family that they could order a private autopsy. The author is highly critical of Rabl, who is still a prominent forensic expert in Innsbruck. On the book's website Leake writes of the conversations between the scientist and the family:
“Dr. Rabl said nothing about the fact that three of Duncan's limbs had been amputated. This was a remarkable omission, as it is common knowledge that a man will bleed to death from three severed limbs unless he quickly receives emergency medical care.”
Residenz Verlag
John Leakes "Eiskalter Tod" ist vor Kurzem auch in einer Übersetzung aus dem Amerikanischen von Henning Dedekind im Residenz-Verlag erschienen.
John Leake will be taking his book on a reading tour with stops across Austria:
- 23. Jänner 2013, 19.00 Uhr: Wien, Buchhandlung Thalia
- 28. Jänner 2013, 19.00 Uhr: Innsbruck, Thalia Buchhandlung Wagnersche
- 29. Jänner 2013, 19.00 Uhr: Breitenwang, Veranstaltungszentrum
- 4. Februar 2013, 19.00 Uhr: Linz, Buchhandlung Thalia
There's more about the book in Wednesday`s Connected and you can hear an interview with Leake on Reality Check.
Furthermore, the records, at least as presented by Leake, suggest that Rabl failed to see suspicious circumstances in a series of cases of foreigners dying in Tyrol. Rabl found no evidence of foul play on the body of a young German man called Raven Vollrath who was found half-naked in a dry-river creek in Tyrol. Later a German exhumation determined that Vollrath had been stabbed.
I approached the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, where Professor Dr. Rabl is deputy director, to ask for a response to the criticism levelled against in John Leake's book. In a written response, the director Dr. Richard Scheithauer wrote:
"Aus grundlegender ethischer Überzeugung sowie in Wahrung der Persönlichkeitsrechte der Betroffenen und deren Angehörigen dürfen personen-und fallbezogene Angaben an die Öffentlichkeit zu konkreten Sachverhalten aus der Tätigkeiten unseres Instituts nicht erfolgen." He added that the institute was convinced that the publication of the book would not affect the reputation of Dr. Rabl.
A Fight For A Dead Man`s Dignity
This is a troubling book but it is in some ways a story of love. Where many would have given up, Lynda and Bob MacPherson tirelessly search for the truth behind the mystery of their son's disappearance. Canadian diplomats advise them "to get on with their lives" but for over 20 years, the MacPhersons have tenaciously continued to press officialdom on both sides of the Atlantic for answers. As Lynda sees it, the way Duncan's body and his case were treated robbed him of his dignity.
Leake and the family believe that Duncan MacPherson may have been the victim of negligent homicide. You'll have to read the book to find out exactly how. The statute of limitations means that no-one can be prosecuted for that crime more than 23 years after Duncan's death. So what impact does John Leake hope his book might have?
“I think what the parents would like to see some scrutiny of the authorities in Innsbruck and I don't think that is going to come from within Innsbruck." he told me. "If it is going to come from anywhere, it is going to come from the Justice Ministry in Vienna. Whether that happens, we'll see.”
(Pictures from the homepage of Cold A Long Time)