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Chapter 1: What is the Aconcagua mystery about?
And we are the prosecutors. today on The Prosecutors. We finish our look at the Aconcagua mystery. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett, and I'm joined, as always, by my sumac sipas co-host, Alice.
Ten-ten.
Yes.
That was excellent. I have no idea what language or what that means, but I'm going to take it as fantastic. Fantastic.
Well, it's Quechua, which is the Peruvian dialect. It's actually the Inca, ancient Inca dialect. So I went with that instead of Spanish. Even though we're in Argentina, I wanted to change it up a little bit because I do have a Machu Picchu story I'm going to tell later on. So I felt like it was appropriate. And it means beautiful lady.
Well, thank you. Thank you very much. And good job. That was like, you guys haven't seen this because you have the glories of editing. That only took Brett about 10 minutes to practice his pronunciation. It was great.
I'm saying practice makes perfect. I'm like an ancient Incan. Just rolls off the tongue. OK, it does.
It does not roll off the tongue on this one. Aconcagua. It's still hurting me. But since we last recorded the first episode, it has been haunting me. I think I've had no fewer than three nightmares about this case because it's haunting. It truly is. And I don't think I will ever hike again in my life.
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Chapter 2: How did the climbers' expedition lead to tragedy?
You know, I don't know what it is about these mountain mysteries, but they really get to me. I really like them. You know, Dial-Up Pass is one of my favorite stories of all time. Always liked doing these. And this one's pretty intense. And if you guys listened to the last episode, just to give you a quick reminder, we're back in 1973. We're in Argentina. We're climbing Aconcagua.
And we're going up the Polish route, which has only been done four times before. And we've already had this tragedy that has befallen this group of hikers. You may remember the group started out kind of, you know, kind of large with a lot of different people with a lot of skills and abilities, the kind of group maybe you think will have no trouble climbing this mountain.
But one by one, they fell away until there were only four left.
those four went up the mountain and only two came down which is not a great percentage for your survival rate but at this point we have two people who are dead on the mountain the rest of the group has returned and has actually left the country and the expectation is this is the kind of thing that happens on mountains we talked about this climbing a mountain is a very dangerous thing i'll go ahead and tell my story my peruvian story so i'm not much of a mountain climber i'm sure this is shocking
to everyone but i did go to peru it was the first time i'd ever really been at altitude so it was an interesting experience but we went to machu picchu which is one of the things you have to do and it's amazing it's beautiful it's glorious highly recommend it in just stunning place you can't there's so many things about the ancient world that you see them and you just think it must have been aliens because how in the world they were able to do this i don't know up on this mountain but if you've ever seen sort of the traditional picture of
machu picchu looking down over the abandoned city there is this mountain behind it and you can climb that mountain and it gives you a very different view and so my friend and i being young and stupid decided we were going to climb the mountain it was a beautiful day it was a cool day we'd gotten there early seemed like a great thing to do we climbed the mountain all the way to the top absolutely exhausted just dead by the time we get to the top but it's amazing well worth it right
Well, as we're up there, you know, this is a beautiful day. All of a sudden, this storm starts to roll in while we're on top of this mountain. But because we're so high up, the storm doesn't come over us. It's like down over Machu Picchu. So we're standing there looking down at this storm and thinking, well, we'll just wait it out.
But then as we're watching it, the storm starts to slowly rise up the mountain. And this is like a thunderstorm, right? So we realize if we stay on the mountain, the storm is going to rise up and be above us. So we make the decision to go down the mountain, to climb down the mountain into the storm so that at least for the first half or so, we avoid the storm. Then we're in the storm.
Then we'll get out of the storm. And when we got to where the storm was, it was one of the craziest experiences I've ever had. I'm kind of surprised we're not dead because like I said, it was a thunderstorm. So like lightning is striking below us. Right. And then we go into the clouds and it's like lightning is just constantly striking all over this place. I mean, it was terrifying.
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Chapter 3: What suspicious events occurred post-expedition?
And so there was an attempt in the United States to prosecute him, and that was eventually dismissed because of this lack of any proof that anything happened in the United States as part of planning this crime. So I think they're in sort of an interesting place. And you would think Defoe, who is the lawyer, would know this. And so you wonder if part of this meeting...
It's him explaining to them, hey, as long as we keep our stories together, there's really nothing that can happen to us here. Unless we go back to Argentina, there's really nothing that can happen. So let's get our story straight. And it seems like that's exactly what they did. On February 15th, which is two days after the meeting, Defoe's secretary, types up a three-page summary.
And that would become the official story of the surviving climbers. Not only do they get together and get their story straight, they actually type it out. So they have a story that is their story. It's their timeline. It lays out exactly what happens. And it speculates that Johnson and Cooper probably died of pulmonary edema because that is typically what kills you on the mountain.
combination of the lack of oxygen the cold eventually your body gives out and you die but it would turn out this speculation would not be true but where it's going to be a while before you find that out march of 1973 john cooper remember he was the one who was found dead from hypothermia near the third camp His family held a memorial service in Kansas.
But at that point, his body still had not been recovered.
And a month later, in April 1973, Janet Johnson's family held a funeral service at a Minneapolis church, although Johnson's body also hadn't been recovered and her mother was not expecting it back.
Apparently, because remember, Janet was a very seasoned climber, she had given explicit instructions that if anything were to happen to her on the climb, she wanted her body buried at the small cemetery by the Aconcagua Trailhead. So she had never anticipated that this would happen. But if it did, she didn't want her body shipped back.
So all along, the memorial service in the United States, at least, was going to be without a body. Now, nothing really happens for about half a year. Fast forward to November of 1973, a four person team led by Miguel Alfonso was assembled to recover the bodies. Remember, Alfonso was the guide who was going to take this American group up this particular path.
And he had been up this path successfully one time prior. A National Geographic reporter and photographer named Lauren McIntyre also joined the group to document this expedition. On November 20th, 1973, when they were on this expedition to look for Cooper and Johnson's bodies, Cooper's body was discovered about 150 yards uphill from camp.
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Chapter 4: What were the findings during the body recovery?
But when they went over to check out this red thing, Alberto realized that it was not abandoned gear left by a fellow mountain climber. It was the body of Janet Johnson. She was found face up and her face had blackened from two years of exposure and it was battered in three places. Now, this you may expect because she's been out in the open for a couple of years in the elements.
It's cold up there. So you can imagine the blackenedness might not be that surprising. But this next part is not necessarily what you would expect if you had found a climber who had just fallen asleep where they were and died of hypothermia.
you see what they saw on her face was that there was white bone sticking out of her nose and her forehead and her chin and even more gruesomely her skin hung down like a flap and there were blood stains on her face and jacket Certainly not what you would expect if she had fallen into the snow and fallen asleep.
Now, not unlike Cooper, she also had a crampon that was missing from one foot and ropes were tangled around her. Her hands were bare and her light jacket was unzipped. And also like Cooper, they could not find her ice axe. Now, the slope where she was found was shallow, which contradicted Zeller's story that they took a big fall together.
Remember, he had said that they were tied together and all of a sudden they fell and the force of the fall actually separated the two of them. But this isn't where she's found. Like Cooper, she's found in kind of a shallow slope. And there was also a rock sitting on top of Johnson's body. Now, the hikers who found her believed that someone had murdered Johnson and tried to make it look like
She fell. Now, these men who were just on their own hike, they weren't properly equipped to bring Janet's body down the mountain. So they dug it out to make it easier for a recovery team to properly remove it later. And when they did this, they noticed a ring on her finger, which they took and passed along to an American hiker they saw on the trail named Alan Steck.
Alan mailed this ring to Janet's sister a couple months later.
again kind of shows you that i mean this is incredible of them to even take the time to do this and i think kind of shows the climbing community typically what you have in a climbing community right these three men don't know janet johnson but when they see the ring they're not taking it off to pilfer it they're taking it off in hopes that it can be the one part of her body that can go back to her loved ones and so they pass it on to an american who does just that
mail it to someone that they don't know. That's the type of camaraderie I think you typically see among the climbing community, which is why if you rewind back to that journalist who interviewed the group at the hotel before they even set off, note at the very beginning, This dynamic for the group seems very off. They seem very segregated from each other.
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Chapter 5: What new evidence was discovered decades later?
I'll join your conspiracy theory with you. The only thing that points away from it is how did they get all their stories together? And Dafoe clearly knew something was up, even though there's only four of the whole group. Remember, much of the group, half of the group had already gone down for different reasons because they got ill, what have you. So only four were on top of that mountain.
But I think the fact that they called this meeting, even though half of the group was not even there to bear witness or to be implicated in whatever horrific event happened up on that mountain. It was so out of the ordinary. They were all climbers, right? Maybe none quite as experienced as Janet, but they were all climbers.
And even they knew something was up, even though half of the group was not up there. So much so that it was so horrific that if it ever came out, even though the other half of the group was not up on the mountain, they could be held somehow liable that Dafoe being the risk averse lawyer, legalist knew that they had to get their story together.
So the fact that they had that meeting, I think really points to they knew something even if nothing was said. And it may have been as simple as you guys shut your mouths. I don't want to hear what you have to say. So we're just going to plot out what happened. Because it's one of those like put your fingers in your ears, la, la, la, la, la.
I don't actually want to know what happened on that mountain because whatever it was, I know enough about the dynamics and what typically happens on an expedition that nothing good can happen if Zeller opens his mouth. So you're not going to. So the fact that Dafoe, who wasn't even up there, calls this meeting, I think points to the fact that the group knew something was up.
Well, before they even came down the mountain, I think there's a reason that the Argentinian police was already at base camp questioning people so soon when hundreds of people die on this mountain. This happens. People die on these treacherous conditions. And this was a treacherous condition that they were hiking in. And I do think I agree with you. I don't think it was a love triangle.
I don't think they liked each other. I think there maybe is something that we can draw from Janet Johnson's camera. We know that she was a bit of a loner. Others describe her, at least in diaries, it's described as at the expense of everyone else. She's only thinking about herself to get to the summit. And so already there's some discontent there. The fact that her pictures are also beautiful...
and capturing, you know, this is why she climbs, right? The world around her in the 70s, she had come out, she had a tough community. This is where she found beauty. And I think we're seeing a slice of why she loves climbing through her camera.
But we're also maybe seeing how things were very difficult up there, whether it be the hypoxia, whether it be having to be on the side of the mountain for multiple days in a row when they couldn't reach the summit. She's stopping and taking these photos. That is very... It's for herself, but it's also indicative of her personality.
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