My incredibly busy season is finally over so I can concentrate on being a proper morbid factster again! The reasons for my absence for much of the summer are mostly mundane – moving house, a hectic project at work, petsitting, and traveling. But now that I am back from my travels, I’m ready to get back to a routine again – and celebrate the 20th anniversary of this strange little hobby of mine!
Today’s Grotesque Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Bob Mitchell, now 73, was in charge of attempting to recover the bodies of 257 who died when they crashed into the side of Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, on November 28, 1979. It was a sightseeing flight that went terribly wrong and which still attracts conspiracy theories to this day. But the search and recovery of the bodies became the template for all subsequent air disaster recoveries.
In New Zealand, search, rescue and recovery of bodies is a police job. The fact that the plane had crashed 2,500 miles away in one of the most inhospitable areas on the planet was not relevant. The plane was an Air New Zealand DC10 and the great majority of the passengers were Kiwis. Mitchell had just a few hours to gather a small team of policeman together, collect some cold weather kits from a Polar expedition base, and fly to Antarctica on a Hercules.
His mission, and the tales of his team, is told in a documentary film ‘Erebus: Into the Unknown’, which splices their memories with dramatic recreations of the fortnight they spent on the glacier. While Mitchell comes across as very level headed, many of the team were overwhelmed by the scene of death and destruction they encountered, in particular, Stuart Leighton, who was just 22 at the time.
“We had no idea what Antarctica would throw at us. We just knew it would be dangerous,” Leighton says in the film. Even for the experienced policemen, the scale and the freezing temperatures were something they had never encountered. Leighton recalls: “There was a lot of mutilation with a lot of the bodies. It was grotesque. It was overwhelming. I personally felt a little bit out of my depth. I had the thought, ‘I don’t belong here. This is for the big boys’.”
Mitchell admits now that Leighton was probably too young to have been part of the mission. The team leader’s main concern was not the sight of corpses scattered across the glacier — “The 257 bodies didn’t bother me a great deal because it goes with the territory” — but the safety of his team. How they would cope with the sudden winds that would suddenly pick up bits metallic debris turning them into missiles that flew across the site, how they would avoid falling into the numerous fissures in the ice, how they would be able to recover 257 individual corpses, bag them up and return them to the New Zealand mortuary to be identified before the ice runway at the McMurdo station melted?
Mitchell instituted an efficient system, dividing the crash site into a grid. Each corpse, or part of a body, was numbered according to who found the victim and where they were found. “I am a chess player. So, I used the international correspondence chess method of numbering the grid of the crash site.” After setting up the operation, he spent most of the fortnight at the McMurdo base camp – 70 miles from Mr Erebus. Meanwhile his team slept in tents at the crash site itself. Every day they would laboriously pick through the wreckage, along with the help of a team of mountaineers and photographers.
Viewers of the documentary are left in little doubt it was a gruesome job. Mitchell says: “If anything the film understates it. There is no easy way to deal with a body. You have to pick it up, put a label on it, and you have to handle it. You can’t airbrush it. And some of those bodies were very difficult to get to.” Some had fallen down a ravine, caused by the burning engine melting the glacier. Many were difficult to put into a standard body bag. Leighton recalls: “These bodies were frozen solid. Whatever grotesque shape they landed in, that’s what they froze into.”
All of the team remember the stench of the disaster. Mitchell says: “The smell of kerosene, jet fuel, takes me straight back to Erebus. It’s not that I get flashbacks, but I immediately remember.” There were other challenging aspects of the mission, not least the endless presence of loud and aggressive skua gulls, carrion-eating birds of the Antarctica, who kept on pecking at the corpses. The team resorted to burying the bodies again under the snow, once they had been bagged up, to stop the birds getting to them.
They were there for just 14 days but they never stopped working. The perpetual daylight of the South Pole meant that they worked around the clock, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, but never properly resting nor escaping the tragedy, even when having a meal. Leighton says: “We had one set of gloves while we were there. They were baked with the fatty human remains, the soot, the whatever, and you ended up having to use the same set of gloves to put food in your mouth.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that the experience has severely affected the policeman, who then was just a young man. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I hope this is not going to traumatise me, I hope this isn’t going to completely screw me when I get back.’ Because I knew it had the potential to do so. And unfortunately it did.”
For all the scars some of the team were left with, it was a successful mission. Of the 257 victims, 213 were successfully identified. The Royal Commission into the causes of the crash ruled it was not pilot error but rather errors by Air New Zealand in allowing sightseeing flights to go too low and for changing the course of the flight, without telling the crew. It proved a controversial conclusion and was challenged. The police, however, were universally praised for their recovery mission.
The ghastly recovery scene.
Culled from: The Telegraph
There is a documentary about this recovery that is available for streaming on Amazon entitled Erebus: Operation Overdue. I’ll have to check it out this week!
It Was Twenty Years Ago… This Month!
Can you believe that I’ve been doing the Morbid Fact Du Jour for over 20 years now? Yes, as Aimee kindly reminded me when I was away, the first MFDJ was created on August 1, 1996. I thought it would be fun to revisit that first fact:
August 1, 1996
On March 21, 1947 police were called to the home of New York City’s most famous recluses, the Collyer brothers (Homer and Langley), to investigate a possible dead body. When there was no response they kicked open the front door to find an ocean of debris – old newspapers piled to the ceiling along with sundry other precious things – which made the downstairs impassable. They used a ladder to access the second floor and eventually came across the body of Homer Collyer, who was blind and paralysed and relied completely upon his brother Langley for support and subsistence. It turned out that the paranoid pack rat Langley had constructed many booby traps from his debris around the house and one day he had accidentally set one of them and buried himself under a huge pile of trash; Homer consequently starved to death. It took police three weeks to find his body – after removing 120 tons of trash from the house. (Another warning to pack rats!)
And here’s a look at one of the early designs of the Morbid Fact Du Jour website, courtesy of the Wayback Machine:
Morbid Fact Du Jour – June 5, 1997
I’ll try to dig up some more relics of the past in the next few weeks. And if you have a favorite MFDJ memory, please feel free to share it!