Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (29 page)

On May 8, four days after their discovery, the hikers’ bodies were taken to the mortuary at Ivdel’s central hospital for forensic examination.

WITH IVANOV PRESENT IN THE EXAMINATION ROOM, A
Sverdlovsk forensic expert named B. A. Vozrozhdyonny set to work on finding out how the last four Dyatlov hikers had died. He had been present during the first five autopsies, though his colleague Ivan Laptev had actually performed them. Vozrozhdyonny had been anticipating—and no doubt dreading—this very summons all spring.

First on the examining table was twenty-four-year-old Alexander Kolevatov. Vozrozhdyonny began by cataloguing Kolevatov’s abundant pieces of clothing, noting the conspicuous—though by now expected—lack of footwear. Though Kolevatov had gone out into the snow without his boots, no responsible outdoorsman is ever caught without matches—and he had a matchbox in one of his pockets, along with a packet of (now empty) painkillers. Kolevatov’s ankle had also been bandaged, which indicated a previous hiking injury, though one apparently not serious enough to prevent his participation on the hike. The rest of the examination found nothing unusual about the body other than rigor mortis, livor mortis and the accompanying discoloration of the skin and organs, and Vozrozhdyonny concluded that Kolevatov had died of hypothermia, as had the first five hikers found. No surprise there.

With the first examination out of the way, Vozrozhdyonny and Ivanov might have expected that the three others had met the same fates. And, indeed, upon initial examination of
thirty-seven-year-old Sasha Zolotaryov, things seemed to be progressing as the previous examination had. Zolotaryov was wearing generous layers of clothing, no shoes, and his skin and organs showed the same discoloration. One superficial difference was Zolotaryov’s multiple tattoos. In addition to a tattoo of beets and the name Gena on his right arm and hand, his left arm revealed a five-pointed star and the number (or year) 1921. It was Zolotaryov’s midsection that struck the forensic analyst as unusual: The right side of his chest had sustained serious injury, with five fractured ribs resulting in severe hemorrhaging. Vozrozhdyonny concluded that the fractures had been inflicted by a “large force” while the victim had been alive.

For twenty-three-year-old Kolya Thibault-Brignoles, Vozrozhdyonny found similar violent injuries, though this time the fractures were to the head. He concluded that Kolya had died of “impressed fracture of skull dome and base with abundant hemorrhage.” He added that the injury had been sustained while the hiker had been alive by “effect of a large force.”

The forensic expert’s examination of Lyudmila Dubinina was the most alarming. The twenty-year-old’s body had sustained massive thoracic damage, with internal hemorrhaging, including that of her right heart ventricle, plus fractures to nine of her ribs. Most disturbing, however, was that when Vozrozhdyonny examined the young woman’s mouth, he saw that her tongue was missing. He offered no explanation in his report for this last detail, concluding only that, along with two of her companions, Lyuda’s death could be classified as “violent.”

But what exactly did “violent” suggest in this case? Had the violence been inflicted by a natural force or a human one? The May 9 autopsies failed to provide satisfactory answers to these questions, but Ivanov was determined to learn all he could about the hikers’ final hours, ideally before their bodies were put in the ground.

The four funerals were scheduled for May 22, to be held at the military hospital in Sverdlovsk. Unlike the first five funerals, which had been conspicuously public, now only the families of the victims were permitted to attend.

In the meantime, speculation about the hikers’ fates continued to circulate. On May 15, Ivanov brought in for questioning Vadim Brusnitsyn, a search volunteer, third-year UPI student and friend of the hikers. Why Ivanov was still bringing in witnesses at this late date is unclear, though he may well have been casting about for something that could make sense of the recent autopsies. Brusnitsyn told Ivanov that he didn’t think there was anyone among the Dyatlov group who would have infected the others with unnecessary panic, and that something “unusual, unprecedented” must have compelled his friends to escape the tent. “Only a threat of death can make people run barefoot at night from the only warm shelter,” he said. He went on to suggest that a strange phenomenon such as “light penetrating the tent walls,” “a sound” or “gases” might have driven the hikers far from their tent.

All this speculation about extraordinary phenomena meant little, of course, without solid evidence. Ivanov knew that he needed more information to properly interpret the “violent” classification of the forensic expert. So four days before the funerals, Ivanov ordered radiological tests performed on the hikers’ organ samples and clothing. The results of the tests, however, would not be available for another eleven days, after the hikers were buried.

On May 22, the Dubinin, Zolotaryov, Kolevatov and Thibault-Brignoles families gathered at the Sverdlovsk military hospital for a closed casket funeral. The families had requested open caskets, but Ivanov denied this request due to the advanced decomposition of the bodies. He later regretted this decision, as revealed only decades later in a 1990 interview with a Sverdlovsk journalist, S. Bogomolov. “I should be blamed a lot by their relatives. I didn’t
let them see the bodies of their children,” Ivanov said. “I made the only exception for the father of Dubinina. I opened the coffin cover a bit to show that his daughter was dressed properly.” The reaction of Alexander Dubinin might have vindicated the investigator’s decision to keep the caskets closed. Dubinin was so horrified by the condition of his daughter’s body that he fainted on the spot.

A week later, the radiation tests came back from the city’s chief municipal radiologist, a man named Levashov. According to Levashov’s report, the hikers’ organs revealed the presence of the radioactive substance potassium-40. Though this might have seemed cause for alarm, Levashov quickly pointed out that separate samples taken from the victim of a fatal Sverdlovsk car crash revealed the same levels of potassium-40, suggesting that this was a naturally occurring isotope.

The radiation measurements of the hikers’ clothing, however, was a different matter, and Levashov’s own interpretation of the data is one of the central reasons the Dyatlov case has continued to spawn conspiracy theories some five decades later. Levashov stated that the Soviet Union’s “sanitary standards” for beta-particle contamination were under 5,000 decays per minute per 23 square inches. If the hikers had been exposed to natural levels of radiation, why then was a brown sweater belonging to one of the hikers (probably Kolevatov or Lyuda) found to contain almost twice this number—9,900 decays per minute? According to Levashov, this level of contamination “exceeds standards for people working with radioactive substances.” It turned out that the other pieces of clothing found on the hikers also measured at levels above the normal 5,000 decays per minute. And because the clothing had been sitting for days in melting snow and water, Levashov suggested that “one can suppose that the initial contamination was much higher.” When the question was put to Levashov if the clothing could have become contaminated by radioactive substances under normal conditions,
he said that this was impossible. “The clothes are contaminated either with radioactive dust from the atmosphere or by contact with radioactive substances. As I’ve said, this contamination exceeds standards for people working with radioactive substances.”

But the radiation tests and their alarming implications would have no bearing on the active criminal case. Just one day before the radiation tests were to come back from the lab, Ivanov bowed to pressure from his regional superiors to terminate the criminal investigation, effective immediately. Though Ivanov did have the option to apply for a one-month extension, it would have been unusual to do so in a case in which the bodies had already been found. Additionally, applying for an extension would have put immense stress on Ivanov to produce conclusive new evidence within a month. And so on May 28, without being able to follow through on the tests that he himself had ordered, Ivanov closed the Dyatlov case, citing no particular cause for the hikers’ deaths.

In the coming days, the hikers’ families would become outraged by the lack of communication from the prosecutor’s office. The parents of the victims were shown and told nothing, and probably had no idea even that radiation tests had been performed. Yuri Yudin remembers that the only decisive action the authorities took was to close the northern Ural Mountains to hikers for three years. (Hiking permits were denied. But given the remote nature of the terrain, people could still venture there at their own risk.) There were also the expected punishments doled out to various organization heads for their failure to prevent such a tragedy. UPI, for its part, dismissed the sports club director, Lev Gordo, for giving students leave to explore avalanche-prone areas of the Urals. The director of the university, N. Siunov, was officially reprimanded for failing to adequately oversee the sports club, as were Valery Ufimtsev and V. Korochkin at the municipal level. And, finally, Party secretary O. Zaostrovsky was reprimanded for his part in failing to police all the sports clubs, both university and city.

The case files, however, came to no conclusions about the night of February 1, avalanche or otherwise. Before Ivanov shut the casebook forever, he cited the cause of the hikers’ deaths as “an unknown compelling force.” For the next forty-plus years, the families and friends of the hikers would have nothing more than this cryptic summation to explain the secretive behavior of their government and the harrowing deaths of the people they had loved.

26

2013

BACK IN LOS ANGELES, IN WHAT HAD ONCE BEEN THE
garage of my house, I built something of a command center. In the year since my return from Russia, I had struggled to make sense of the evidence and investigative materials surrounding the Dyatlov case. The focal point of the room was a wall of photographs I had mounted to illustrate the progression of the hikers’ journey and the timeline of the investigative case.

What I had learned on my second trip to Russia was of immeasurable value, but I had left the country without an answer—without
the
answer. But then, of all those who have trekked to Holatchahl mountain, why had I assumed I’d be the one to solve this puzzle? Was it because I had gone in the middle of winter and had trudged through knee-deep snow? Did I think that by retracing the hikers’ footsteps and standing on the slope where they had pitched their tent, the answer would be handed to me?

My entire strategy thus far had been process of elimination, not unlike the oft-quoted maxim of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In that spirit, I had been able to eliminate the following theories with a satisfying degree of certainty:

1. MANSI ATTACK. Though initially considered a viable angle in the 1959 investigation, it was quickly discarded. At the time
of the incident the nearest Mansi settlement was 60 miles away. Besides, the Mansi tended to stay away from Holatchahl mountain; there was no hunting to be had on its bare face, nor did it hold any religious or sacred value to the group. Aside from there being zero evidence—physical or otherwise—of a native attack, such behavior is not in the nature of the Mansi: They are a historically peaceful people, a fact evident in their generous assistance from the beginning in the search efforts.

2. AVALANCHE. I had been able to judge the steepness of the slope for myself firsthand. In addition, measurements of the incline pointed to an avalanche in the area being unlikely, if not impossible. There are no records of an avalanche occurring on Holatchahl mountain—certainly not in the fifty-four years since the tragedy. Furthermore, investigators who had visited the slope in 1959—including Ivanov and Maslennikov—had not entertained an avalanche as a possibility, nor had they found any indications of one. After all, the tent had been found largely intact and secured to the ground. During my own research on the subject, I contacted Bruce Tremper, one of the foremost experts on avalanches in the United States. He is director of the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center and author of
Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain
. After reviewing the data, he concluded: “It is highly unlikely that an avalanche hit the hikers’ tent or surrounding area.” Given all of the above, it is surprising that the theory continues to have such staying power among skeptics.