Cold a Long Time: An Alpine Mystery

Not even after Duncan’s body was found fourteen years later were they given an honest account of how he had died. No authority supervised the recovery of his corpse, and even though it lay for an entire week in one of the world’s most advanced institutes of forensic medicine, his parents weren’t told the cause of his death.

Against all of this obfuscation, we have fought back. After our meeting at Dick Penniman’s house in September 2010, I continued researching the story for another year. Much of what I found confirmed what Lynda and Bob had long suspected but couldn’t be sure about. Working together with them, comparing their thoughts and notes with mine, we assembled an ever clearer picture. Questions that had long plagued them were answered, at least with a high degree of probability. The closer we got to a comprehensive understanding of their ordeal, the less burdened they felt by it.

Lynda became more lighthearted and quicker to laugh at the ludicrous parts of the story. One day she told me she’d been going through Duncan’s old photos and letters, and was finding it interesting instead of painful. She also found herself dwelling less on the lousy public officials she’d encountered, and giving more thought to the good people who’d done their best to help. Even the disappointing characters seemed more comprehensible to her.

At a two-year reunion dinner in Saskatoon, we again fell into a conversation about why, in certain situations, people find it so hard to tell the truth. Lynda had become, it seemed to me, far less dogmatic than she’d been at our first meeting.

“I guess there are a lot of people out there whose lives are dominated by fear on the one hand and craving for something better on the other,” she said. “And when they find themselves in a story like this, they don’t know how to do the right thing.”

It was a profound statement, and it went to the heart of human affairs. Most of us go through life trying to avoid conflict, even if it requires tolerating bad behavior. We don’t want any trouble, and we don’t want to rock the boat. If we hear about an injustice happening to others, we often fear the potentially negative consequences if we get involved, and we therefore choose to stay out of it.

“You may think I’m boasting, John,” Lynda continued. “But I’m not afraid of anyone.”

“It’s true,” Bob said. “Once Duncan warned her about being too confrontational with people. ‘Don’t forget that you are a tiny woman,’ he told her.”

“And I told him that size doesn’t make the man,” Lynda said.

The conversation reminded me of a thought I’d been turning over in my mind for a few years—namely, that courage is the chief virtue from which all others spring. Doing the right thing often starts with having the guts to do the right thing.

If there is redemption in the MacPhersons’ story, it is from their own fortitude. They did everything possible to find their child, and through terrible frustration they stuck together and refused to let their marriage become an additional casualty. In the face of endless deception, they persevered in their quest for the truth, and ultimately exposed public officials for accommodating powerful interests instead of enforcing the law. Treated with a long train of shabby behavior, they never yielded to the temptation of hate or cynicism. Tricked and manipulated, they remained honest. Encountering all that is lamentable about human nature, they responded with all that is best about it.

Appendices and Illustrations

Appendix 1: Physical Evidence

General

Duncan’s wallet, two of the cards inside his wallet, the left side of his left heel, his snowboard bindings, his left boot liner, and his snowboard all display marks made by a cutting instrument of approximately the same size and shape as grooming tiller tines.

^{Amputated left foot: Note the deep gouge on the left side of the heel. Also note the white tendon strands that have been pulled out.}

^{Duncan’s long distance calling card: Note how the punch mark is the same size and shape as a grooming tiller tine.}

^{Overview of snowboard.}

^{Three strikes, identically spaced, identical cutting angles.}

^{Crescent-shaped cuts on the snowboard, decreasing in depth from left to right.}

^{Crescent-shaped cuts on Duncan’s detached knee and top of tibia.}

^{Destroyed left leg. Top arrow: De-gloving of tibia. Right arrow: Flesh stripped from bones, but not removed (missing) as a result of ice movement. Note also the undamaged condition of the right leg (clothed in blue sweatpants).}

^{Close-up of the only radiograph submitted to the MacPhersons that shows any (a small section) of the left leg. The top horizontal arrow indicates the top of the knee. The bottom horizontal arrow indicates the bottom of the femur where it fractured. The top, vertical arrows indicate where Dr. Rabl removed a section of the femur for a DNA sample. The bottom, vertical arrows indicate the multiple fractures of the tibia and fibula—“like his leg went into a blender,” as Dr. Burbridge put it.}

^{Detached left knee: Arrows indicate de-gloving of flesh around top of the knee, possibly from where it caught on the edge of the tiller casing.}

^{Side view of left leg: Arrows indicate points where leg was cut all the way through.}

^{Right arm: Bottom arrow indicates where the forearm was severed a few inches above the wrist. The severed lower limb is lying upside down on the gurney. Second from bottom arrow indicates tendons that were pulled out. Third from bottom arrow indicates where fingers were cut off. Top arrow indicates completely undamaged upper arm. The relatively weak shoulder joint is also intact, indicating that little or no force was applied to it in the ice. The tear pattern on the shirt sleeve is consistent with the lower sleeve getting caught in machinery and violently pulled.}

^{Severed left hand. Note the sharp, linear nature of the cut. The arrow indicates where the forearm was also cleanly severed a few centimeters above the wrist}.

^{Side view of the left hand and forearm: Arrow indicates fracture of the radius and ulna. The fractured surface is the same color as the bone shaft.}

^{The undamaged binding buckle on the left has no rust, while the damaged buckle on the right has deep, pocked rust at the points where the paint was knocked away, indicating that the metal and paint were struck a long time before the board was extracted.}

^{Section of the snowboard near the point at which it was broken in half and where its bottom, plastic laminate was ripped away: The coat of paint, which was sealed underneath the plastic sheet prior to the board’s destruction, is severely weathered, indicating that it was exposed to the ice long before the board was extracted.}

^{Arrow indicates Duncan’s body. The small crevasse in which he was buried is estimated to have moved 20 to 60 meters down the hill during the 14-year period he was in the ice. It is one in a row of transverse crevasses that are moving uniformly down the hill near the glacier’s equilibrium line, where its flow is chiefly horizontal.}