He was the Canadian ice hockey star who vanished off the map on his way to sign for Dundee Tigers in August 1989.
Duncan MacPherson’s body was eventually found encased in glacier ice with several broken bones and a crushed leg in the Austrian Alps 14 years later.
There were reports MacPherson was working as a spy for the CIA and the family accused the Austrian authorities of a cover-up and took the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Dundee hockey fan George Carr said: “It definitely is a strange scenario and leaves a question mark over his disappearance.
“MacPherson going missing must rank as one of the most unusual episodes in the history of ice hockey in Dundee.”
MacPherson was raised in the Canadian prairie town of Saskatoon.
He was drafted by the New York Islanders in 1984 but he was too slow for the NHL and never played a single game.
After his contract with the Islanders expired in 1989, the 23-year-old defenceman accepted an offer to become a player-coach for the Tayside Tigers.
Shortly before he disappeared, Duncan MacPherson made a call to Ron Dixon, the millionaire who was planning to take over the Tigers, saying he would arrive in Dundee two days later.
He stopped for a snowboarding holiday in Austria and was last seen on August 9 1989 on the Stubaier Glacier in the south Tyrol.
Initially, MacPherson’s friends and family had no idea where he was.
A car parked at the base area of the glacier was eventually traced to a friend who had loaned it to him in Nuremberg.
With no help from either the Austrian police or the Canadian consular service, Mr and Mrs MacPherson put up 2,500 missing persons posters in three different languages in four different countries.
Adding drama to the mystery was the fact MacPherson previously claimed he had been contacted by the CIA and they were interested in recruiting him as a spy.
In 1994 an amnesiac initially thought to be MacPherson surfaced in Austria although that lead also proved false.
Mr and Mrs MacPherson spent their life savings on 10 trips to Austria to try to find out what happened to their son.
In the summer of 2003, his body emerged from melting snow and ice in the middle of a popular ski run in Neustift, which is about 40 kilometres south-west of Innsbruck near the Italian border.
MacPherson’s body was discovered by an employee operating a snow-grooming machine.
Officials said he died after falling into a crevasse but a Canadian forensic anthropologist said that didn’t explain the way his bones were broken.
She suggested there was also an encounter with a large piece of machinery and the MacPhersons alleged the Austrian authorities took active measures to prevent the truth coming out.
The Austrian authorities maintained they did everything possible to discover what happened and to assist the parents in what was a very difficult investigation.
The couple applied to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg claiming violations of the right to life and the right to effective remedy.
The court found everything that could have been done by the authorities had been done.
