“Could you find your old one?” Felicity asked.
“I will try,” he replied (indicating he had not already tried to find it for the police). He went into a back office, returned a few minutes later, and said, “I’m sorry, we have thrown away our log for August.” Not wishing to put him on the defensive, Felicity kept her surprise to herself.
“Is there any way to figure out if the equipment was returned?” she asked. The young man said he did not remember Duncan, but was certain that no snowboard was missing, which meant that if he had indeed rented his board from the shop, he must have returned it.
Unbeknownst to Lynda (again, she’d only learn about it twenty years later) External Affairs did make some effort to discover whether Duncan had returned his snowboard. On September 28, Ottawa sent a cable to Consul Thomson at the Vienna Embassy with four directives, including the following:
4. [First word redacted by censor] REPORTS INDICATE MACPHERSON WENT SNOWBOARDING ON STUBAI GLACIER AFTERNOON OF 09 AUG. WAS SNOWBOARD RECOVERED? IF NOT, THIS MIGHT PROVIDE ADDED PEG FOR RESUMPTION OF SEARCH.
On September 30 (the same day Lynda and Felicity visited the rental shop), Thomson replied:
RE PARA 4 REFTEL WALTER HINTERHOLZ SKIBOARD INSTRUCTOR IS 100/100 PERCENT CERTAIN THAT SKIBOARD WAS RETURNED. WOULD SUGGEST THAT RCMP/INTERPOL/AUSTRIAN POLICE AUTHORITIES IS BEST CHANNEL FOR SECOND GUESSING AUSTRIAN POLICE INVESTIGATION.
Again, Thomson did not disclose this vitally-important information to the MacPhersons, even though he repeatedly spoke to them on the phone after September 30. In Walter’s initial story to Lynda and Bob on September 22, he said nothing about Duncan having returned his snowboard, nor did he mention it again in his subsequent, recorded statements to Inspector Brecher and to the Innsbruck Court. Had Thomson told Lynda that Walter had become certain of the snowboard’s return, she would have confronted Walter before she left the Stubai Valley on October 14 and asked him what had prompted his revelation.
Though the MacPhersons continued to remain in the dark about the snowboard, External Affairs Ottawa concluded from Thomson’s cable that there was “no peg” on which to hang a request for the Austrian authorities to resume their search for Duncan. That his snowboard had been returned indicated that he had come off the glacier and gone somewhere else.
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.
Chapter 7: The Good Witch of Gmunden
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.”