John Leake - Cold a Long Time

In my October 2009 meeting with Reinhard Klier—Heinrich Klier’s youngest son and successor as head of the Stubai Glacier—he suggested that Duncan’s body may have been struck by a grooming machine the year before it was discovered. He theorized that, at the height of the summer melt in 2002, the body may have come close enough to the surface to be struck by the vehicle, unbeknownst to the driver.

Several points argue against this, starting with the fact that, after going into a crevasse, Duncan’s body was never within the top, three-inch layer of snow, but always in the underlying ice. Every summer, this underlying ice did not start to melt until the covering layer of snow was gone, as which point there was no reason to groom. Moreover, Duncan’s undamaged torso, right leg and left ski boot were positioned closer to the surface than his amputated left arm and destroyed left leg.

It also important to understand that Duncan’s limbs, clothing, and snowboard were not grazed by the tiller passing over them; they went into the machine. If the three inch tiller tines passed over Duncan’s left leg as it lay underneath a layer of snow less than three inches thick, they might have gouged the limb, but they would not have chopped and ground it to pieces. The Snowcat driver could not have unwittingly damaged the limbs because pieces of clothing and limbs would have been ripped away from the body and either tangled in the machine or scattered on the slope.

Finally, Duncan’s left leg almost certainly became lodged in the machine. In the 2008 case of a boy whose left leg went into a tiller at a Michigan resort, his leg became so firmly lodged in the machine that the steel casing had to be cut away in order to free the terribly injured limb. This brings me to my hypothetical explanation for the cable that is wrapped around Duncan’s left leg in the photograph that Dr. Rabl took on July 23, 2003.

As the grooming tiller passed over Duncan’s left leg, the tines acted as hooks, grabbing his sweatpants and nylon gaiter, and pulling the limb into the machine. The back edge of the casing appears to have sliced all the way through his thigh, just above the knee, while the lower leg was segmentally fractured.

The clothing became tangled, while the limb jammed between the rotating shaft and casing. In this position, the leg would have been difficult to free. One strategy was to disengage the shaft’s hydrostatic drive and rotate it by hand in order to work the limb and clothing out of the machine. However, with the shaft stuck in place, a mechanical advantage was needed in order to turn it.

And so someone looped a piece of cable behind the tiller tines that were jamming the leg into the casing, and then pulled on the cable with a block (perhaps attached to an electric winch). As the cable tensioned onto one of the tiller tines, it was flattened out. As the shaft began to rotate, the cable slipped off the tine and drew into the fractured leg. Because the cable was covered with blood, it was simply buried in the crevasse with the leg.

In 1989, the key indicator that Duncan had died on the ski slope was the fact that he hadn’t returned his snowboarding equipment. Thus, concealing this fact from the MacPhersons was the key to covering up Duncan’s death at the Stubai Glacier. As was noted in the main text, Inspector Brecher did not clarify whether the equipment had been returned. He did take statements from Walter Hinterhoelzl and Seppi Repetschnig, but only a year later, after Lynda complained to Prosecutor Wallner about the lack of recorded testimony. In his report to the Innsbruck Court (“Zum Auftrag des Landesgericht Innsbruck 34 Vr 2434/89 vom 08.08.1990”) Brecher claimed that what Seppi and Walter said in their recorded statements of August 1990 was consistent with their unrecorded statements in September 1989, which he summarized as follows:

On August 9, 1989, Duncan MacPherson clearly rented a snowboard of the brand Duret 1700 for a day from the Sport Shop 3000. This was established by the statement of Walter Hinterhoelzl, snowboard teacher. A record of the rental does not exist at the Sport Shop 3000, manager Josef Repetschnig. Because the record of the rental of the snowboard Duret 1700 was no longer available—as was established at the beginning of the search on September 23, 1989—one could not discover any indication of the board being returned. According to Josef REPETSCHNIG on September 23, 1989, no snowboard of the brand Duret 1700 was missing. On the basis of his shop records, he established that no other board was missing as well.

In Seppi’s recorded statement, he again claimed to have no record of Duncan’s transaction, though he “could say with certainty that no snowboard is missing or has ever been missing.” With this careful wording, he neither denied nor confirmed Walter’s story. By sticking with his basic assertion that no board was missing, he implied that if Duncan had indeed rented a board, he must have returned it.

In Walter’s recorded statement, he reiterated that Duncan had rented a “Duret 1700” snowboard from the Sport Shop 3000. His account of going to the shop to renegotiate the price was strange.

Ich ging mit ihm dann noch zum Sport Shop zurueck und sprach dort wegen des Leihpreises vor…

I then went back with him to the sport shop and there I spoke forth about the rental price…

Walter’s choice of the German verb vorsprechen , which means “to speak before a person or an audience,” was very unusual and stilted, and it indicates he went out of his way to avoid naming the person with whom he’d spoken. Why? If he had named the shop employee, Brecher could have interviewed that person and probably clarified whether Duncan had returned the gear. Equally remarkable was that Brecher didn’t ask Walter to name the shop employee. The inspector merely went through the motions of taking statements. In no way did he examine the witnesses to discover whether Duncan had returned his equipment, which was the entire point of the investigation.

Then there was Walter’s false claim of certainty that Duncan’s board had been returned. As a result, External Affairs concluded that Duncan must have come off the slope, which meant there was no sense in pressing the Austrians to continue searching for him on the Stubai Glacier.

Almost a decade and a half later, when Duncan’s body emerged with a Duret snowboard, the MacPhersons received a letter dated October 14, 2003 from Seppi Repetschnig with the following:

For 14 years it could not be explained why no data of your son’s hire equipment could be found in our files, despite the claim of the snowboard instructor, that Duncan had hired the snowboard from us. Fully completed register files are only re-issued provided all rented equipment has been returned.

In the event that hire equipment is not returned in time, it is common procedure for us to inform the piste guards immediately. This system enabled us on several occasions to rescue skiers from calamitous situations.

Only now, 14 years after the tragic accident of your son, were we able to identify the snowboard found next to him. It transpires that the make “Duret” has never been sold or let in any of our hire outlets, thus explaining why we were unable to trace any data of your son’s hire equipment in our files.

If Seppi’s shop never carried the Duret brand, why hadn’t he said so to Inspector Brecher on September 23, 1989, when Brecher asked him about the “Duret 1700” board? Seppi’s phrase “despite the claim of the snowboard instructor” implied that Walter had lied about the origin of the snowboard, but this raises the question: Why did Seppi play along with Walter’s lie on September 23, 1989?