John Leake - Cold a Long Time

After their visit to the rental shop, Felicity told Lynda what the manager had said. His claim that he’d thrown out his log from August seemed very strange, but why would he want to conceal his transaction with Duncan? Lynda marveled at how hard it was to get definite answers from everyone. The shop manager, like Ron Dixon and the parking lot attendant, offered a tantalizing clue, but established nothing as fact. That no equipment was missing suggested that Duncan had returned his, but didn’t prove it.

Duncan’s disappearance was widely reported in the Canadian and European media. The tabloid press exaggerated his celebrity as a professional hockey player, which attracted attention from dozens of people who claimed to have seen him, either in person or in “visions.” In the months ahead, many psychics would contact the MacPhersons. With the police unable or unwilling to provide concrete leads, the clairvoyants rushed in to fill the cognitive void with their extrasensory perceptions.

In a letter addressed to the MacPhersons at their hotel, one psychic said she was having telepathic conversations with Duncan. Because the letter was in German, Lynda asked the hotel manager, Angelika Ladner, to read it. The psychic explained that she was a “good witch” from Gmunden (a town east of Salzburg, far from the Stubai Valley). After reading about Duncan in a newspaper, she’d contacted him clairvoyantly. He spoke to her in English, and though she didn’t understand it very well, she had recorded his words and wanted to convey them to Lynda and Bob. If they wished to talk to her, they should put a notice in the Kronen Zeitung (Austria’s largest circulation tabloid) and she would call them.

The letter was peculiar enough in German, and it sounded even weirder when Angelika translated it into English, but the MacPhersons figured there was no harm in letting her talk to the “witch” on their behalf. Angelika put a notice in the paper, and soon the witch called and said that, according to Duncan, he had slipped and fallen into a cave in the side of a mountain. Though he was nourishing himself by sucking on tree roots, he was injured and couldn’t get out without help. The cave was located behind the waterfall between Neustift and the Mutterbergalm. As he put it in English, “Between kilometer markers twelve and fourteen I are.”

There was in fact a waterfall at the location “Duncan” had described to the witch, and so Angelika and Gabi drove to its viewing area to check it out. They knew there were no kilometer markers, but they were curious to see if there were any other objects inscribed with numbers. With heavy snowfall expected, a crew had delineated the sides of the road with wooden stakes, and the one standing in line with the waterfall was marked with the number thirteen. Angelika and Gabi turned to each other in astonished recognition. Maybe Duncan really was communicating with the witch!

Angelika raced home and called her father. He believed it was unlikely, but they still had to check it out, just in case, and so he assembled a group of climbers with repelling gear. That night they scaled the face next to the waterfall to look for the cave of the psychic’s vision. It was a dangerous operation because of the dim light and slippery ice on the rocks around the falls, and though the men searched for hours for a cavern containing Duncan, they found none.

That night the psychic called Angelika and said she’d just heard from Duncan. He was so glad that the men were looking for him behind the waterfall—they had come so close to saving him! A helicopter flew overhead as they had approached him. In fact a helicopter had flown over during the operation, but Angelika didn’t take the bait. The psychic was calling from someplace in the Stubai Valley and taking a malevolent pleasure in leading people around by their noses.

Bill Mitchell, a Saskatoon businessman, had also followed the story in the papers. When he read about the Austrians calling off the search, he contacted Lynda at the hotel and offered to help. She told him about her uncertainty and her growing sense that the local police weren’t conducting a thorough investigation. Mitchell offered an option: He would either pay a Canadian search team to continue looking in the mountains, or a private investigator to do what the police were supposed to be doing. With winter coming, Lynda and Bob wanted to make a final push to find Duncan before the first heavy snowfall. If his body was indeed somewhere on the mountain, they dreaded the thought of leaving it there for the winter. And so Mitchell covered the cost ($25,000) of sending a Canadian Search and Rescue team to Stubai.

The men arrived on October 8, and as they understood their mission, they were to pick up where the Tyrolean searchers had left off.

“Our External Affairs briefed them,” Lynda recounted, “and they went out of their way to avoid second-guessing the local police. They said they had some new computer program that somehow tells you the probable location of the missing person.”

“One of those fellows seemed more interested in looking at Gabi [the young hotel receptionist] than for Duncan,” Bob said with a wicked smile.

“I guess they did the best they could in an awkward situation,” Lynda added. “As a matter of policy, they had to rely on information provided by the police, and not by the family, because often it’s a family member who is responsible for a person’s disappearance. Years later we realized that Inspector Brecher misled them about Duncan’s last known location.”

“How did you learn that?” I asked.

“From an interview that one of the guys gave to the fifth estate [an investigative reporting show] in 2006,” Lynda said, and then found the transcript in a file.

As I read reporter Hana Gartner’s interview with Mike Doyle of the Search and Rescue Society of British Columbia, it occurred to me that the cleverest writer of black comedies couldn’t have come up with such ludicrous material.

Mike Doyle: In 1986 we had put together a program called SHIFTPOA, which did probability theory. We took a computer with us and…we crunched numbers. First of all, we had to figure out what had been done and then we segmented the areas and crunched some numbers. And came up with some areas that we thought could be looked at again. And initially that’s where the dogs and the handlers went.

Hana Gartner: AND WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU PUT INTO THIS PROGRAM? DID YOU HAVE TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE VICTIM?

Mike Doyle: Yes, specifically the point last seen. I mean where was he last seen? Well nobody knew where he was last seen. The car was found in the parking lot at the hotel so that was the last known position in LKP [Last Known Position].

Hana Gartner: BUT YOU ALSO SAID YOU FOUND OUT THAT A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE GO MISSING ON THAT GLACIER EVERY YEAR. DID YOU ALSO PUMP INTO YOUR COMPUTER THE LAST KNOWN SITES OF THOSE DISAPPEARANCES?

Mike Doyle: No we didn’t learn that until the last day.

Hana Gartner: WHAT?

Mike Doyle: We didn’t learn that until the last day.

Hana Gartner: HOW COME?

Mike Doyle: It was something that was just given to us as an aside. …I don’t know whether they thought it was important. They didn’t want it out as far as the tourists are concerned because it would look bad. And so we weren’t made aware of that at the time.

“So you see,” Lynda said after I’d finished reading the transcript, “Brecher told Doyle that Duncan’s last known location was the parking lot, so Doyle and his team set off with a wilderness dog named Daisy and sniffed around in areas far away from the glacier—a total waste of time and money.”