Death on Aconcagua
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Due to the nature of today's episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of graphic body horror and death. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. It's 1973, a hotel in Mendoza, Argentina. Energy is high. Eight Americans are staying there, but just for the night. In the morning, they'll start a trek all the way to the summit of Aconcagua,

the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. That's the plan, anyway. A local reporter, Rafael Moran, is there documenting the group alongside a photographer. When the New York Times interviewed Moran 50 years later, he told them he didn't cover every bunch of foreigners that showed up to conquer the mountain. But at the time, this one feels special. There's a NASA engineer, a police officer, a doctor, a lawyer,

and even a woman, which is remarkable for the time period. Plus the party's attempting the difficult Polish route, which requires them to scale 2,000 nearly vertical feet up a massive glacier to reach the summit. Only four other groups have managed it since 1934. As Moran interviews everyone, something feels off. These people should feel like a team.

They're about to embark on a difficult, dangerous journey, but there's no sense of solidarity. In fact, many of them hardly know each other. They're from different cities and some are just meeting for the first time. Moran pulls the photographer aside and instructs him to get individual shots of everyone. It'll be convenient to have current photos on file if anyone doesn't make it off the mountain.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Today we're covering two mysterious deaths near the summit of Aconcagua. Officially, they were accidents. But ever since the bodies were recovered, theories have flown about murder on the mountaintop.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.

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Aconcagua has a reputation as an easy mountain, because compared to some other mountains that reach record-breaking heights, the trek doesn't require a lot of technical expertise. But that's not to say that climbing Aconcagua is actually easy. The landscape might be stunning, but it's also brutal. Windswept, blinding, and dotted with penitentes. They're like stalagmites rising from the floor of a cave, but made out of ice.

Climbers have to navigate through fields of these otherworldly formations, some as tall as six feet. And getting up the mountain is not always a linear trip. In 1973, the American climbers needed more supplies than they could carry at once. So their ascent was actually a maddening logistical nightmare of shuttling equipment up the mountain, then turning around to go down for the next load for days on end.

And then there's the elevation. Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia. Base camp is at roughly 13,500 feet. That's just a thousand feet shy of the highest point in the continental United States. And this is the starting point for the Polish route. From there, it's another 8,000 feet up to the summit at around 22,800 feet, over four miles above sea level.

The physical effort of getting to that elevation is no joke, but that's not why it's hard. Add to this the fact that the human body doesn't function well at high altitudes because the air doesn't have as much oxygen. And the higher you go, the less oxygen there is. Take it from me, I went to Everest Base Camp, climbed Kalapatar. At 16,000 feet, every breath feels like a hammer in your head. It is hard.

Low oxygen forces climbers to breathe deeper and faster. The body wants to protect the brain so blood vessels in the head dilate. That keeps everything firing up there, but the expanded vessels increase pressure. That means headaches. Severe ones, as I said. And those are just the basic symptoms of high altitude, called altitude sickness, that pretty much everyone experiences.

it can get a lot worse. Fatigue, dizziness, sleep issues, vomiting, loss of coordination, mental fog, heart palpitations, and all that is considered mild. When altitude sickness is severe, fluid can accumulate around the lungs or lead to swelling of the brain. At that point, you better get to a lower altitude fast or you're dead.

So, climbing Aconcagua is not a walk in the park. Today, climbers mitigate the risks by ascending with GPS trackers and radios. Some bring supplemental oxygen or take altitude sickness medication. And there are helicopter evacuations and rangers on standby for rescue efforts. But in 1973, Mountaineers had none of those safety nets.

If you needed help, it had to come from the people climbing beside you. By the time the group reaches their highest and final camp at 19,400 feet, they're well acquainted with the risks of their climb. Altitude sickness has already forced three of the eight American climbers back down to lower elevations. The remaining climbers are John Cooper, the NASA engineer, Janet Johnson, a teacher and the only woman in the group,

Bill Zeller, a police officer, Arnold McMillan, a farmer, and Jim Petroski, a psychiatrist. They're accompanied by Miguel Alfonso, their guide. It's been a hard journey to get this far, and it does not seem like the hardship fostered any team spirit. Alfonso is highly experienced. He's summited via this difficult Polish route before, but the group doesn't defer to him as the leader.

It seems like they treat him more like the hired help, there to give advice or keep his mouth shut when needed. There's grumbling among the ranks too. Hooper complains in his journal that Johnson isn't pulling her weight. To him, it seems like she's there just to get to the summit and she's happy to let everyone else do the work. But he also copes to carrying less weight than Zeller. The altitude makes everything more difficult.

That reporter back in Mendoza wasn't the only one who thought these climbers were only looking out for themselves. Despite the dysfunction, the remaining group is now just a one-day climb from the summit. Conditions look perfect. Everyone is ready to make a final push up the steep glacier to the top. But as everyone gets suited up, Petroski suddenly can't figure out his crampons, his specialized ice shoes. He's disoriented.

They all agree that he's showing symptoms of altitude sickness, perhaps even that deadly version that causes the brain to swell. He needs to get to a lower elevation pronto, and he can't do it alone. Alfonso, the guide, accompanies him down the mountain. The remaining four climbers have a decision to make. Are they going to continue climbing without a guide? Cooper, McMillan, Zeller, and Johnson don't know each other well,

and none of them has ever been at this elevation before. The smart choice is probably to descend. That's certainly safer. But they've come all the way around the world and toughed it out on an unforgiving mountain for eight days. Now the sun is shining. They are so close. They all agree, there's no turning back now. It's important to note that from here on out, our story comes entirely from the memories of the survivors.

Their version of the story is the only one we have. The group decides to lighten their loads to hopefully accelerate their progress. They leave their packs behind, carrying just their ice axes and a few essentials. For Johnson, that includes her camera. She takes photos as they climb. But a few hours later, it's starting to get dark. They'd hoped to scale the glacier in one day,

But they have roughly another thousand feet to climb with none of their gear. They're forced to dig an ice cave to sleep in. It's claustrophobic. After a few hours, Johnson and Zeller can't stand it. They give up on sleep and wait out the night at the mouth of the ice cave.

Powder blowing down from overhead almost seals the cave's entrance. Johnson digs Cooper and McMillan out at first light. Cooper has spent most of the night with his legs buried in the snow. He's had it. He tells the group he's returning to camp. As best anyone can tell, Cooper is of sound mind and capable of getting down on his own. It's about a 1,000-foot descent, which is significant.

But to the climbers who had been going up and down that distance every day, it didn't seem far at all. With Cooper gone, only Zeller, McMillan, and Johnson remain. And they all agree, get to the top. So they continue, without gear and at this point, without any food. They start off optimistic. The weather is clear, but they begin to sink into the fine powder on the glacier.

Soon, they're waist deep in the snow. Zeller and McMillan take turns plowing the trail, 25 steps at a time. Johnson trails behind them. They're on a ridge, and it looks like the top is in sight. Although the climb is grueling, it seems straightforward. But nothing is straightforward at 20,000 feet.

The summit becomes a cruel mirage. Multiple times they're sure it's just a few steps away, only for them to see another ridge above them. Their bodies are working at the absolute limit. This time when the sun goes down, they just keep climbing. They're all exhausted by the time the true summit finally comes into view. They're having to rest after each step.

Just another 200 feet now and they'll reach the top. But at the rate they're going, that distance will take hours. During this process, everyone starts seeing strange things. Zeller notices a construction truck parked on the mountain. Must be here to do some work, he thinks, before realizing that is positively ludicrous. There is no construction truck. He's hallucinating.

That realization brings Zeller back to Earth, and just about the only thing he knows is real, his companions. Macmillan is right beside him, but it's just the two of them. Johnson is gone. This episode is brought to you by AMC and AMC+. Embrace the darkness in the new season of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches.

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Argentina, 1973. Three mountain climbers are near the top of the tallest peak in the western and southern hemispheres in the middle of the night. One of them is missing. The two men, Zeller and McMillan, turn on a flashlight. It's almost out of battery. They call out for Johnson, but their voices probably don't reach any farther than the flashlight's weak beam. They're surrounded by vast, dark wilderness.

They descend, retracing the trail they plowed through the snow. Finally, they hear a soft voice responding to their calls. They find Johnson lying on the snow about 100 feet off the trail. She's not in her right mind. She begs the men, quote, "Just let me lay here and die." But they pull her to her feet instead. The trio trudges down the mountain. Despite all their efforts, none of them make it all the way to the top.

There are different versions of what happened next. According to one survivor, they all sleep exposed on the glacier, too exhausted to dig an ice cave. The other says he leaves the other two and sleeps alone. As he drifts off to sleep, Zeller hears voices. Perhaps he assumes their rescuers can't be too far away. It wasn't until Zeller got off the mountain that he learned help was never coming.

These voices were more hallucinations. Regardless of what really happened overnight, everyone reconvenes the next morning. Johnson is in bad shape. Her hands are swollen and discolored. She refuses to stand. But again, the men rouse her and tie her between them so they can help her stay upright. Eventually, they get down to the ice cave where they separated from Cooper.

Some of their abandoned equipment is still there, including a flare gun. McMillan fires it. No one below sees it or hears it. For lack of a better alternative, the group decides that McMillan should go down to get help. They're about 2,000 feet above camp, which means food, tents, and sleeping bags, and hopefully someone else who can help them get off this mountain. McMillan departs alone.

Johnson and Zeller continue on behind him, roped together and moving at a slower pace. It's a terrible trip for all of them. At one point, McMillan falls. He sees dead pack mules and what he thinks is a dead soldier lying in the snow. He watches as the Argentine military comes to his rescue, but they're just more hallucinations. Most of them, anyway.

Johnson and Zeller suffer a fall too. The rope between them snaps. They drop for what feels like a long time. When Zeller gets his bearings, he can hardly believe that nothing is broken, except his sunglasses. He can see camp about a quarter mile below. He looks around for Johnson, but first he sees someone else, Cooper. He's crouched on his haunches in the snow, head in his hands.

Zeller checks for a pulse. Cooper's ice cold. The soldier McMillan thought he saw in the snow earlier. It was actually his companion, John Cooper. He's dead. To Zeller, it looks like Cooper paused to rest and fell asleep. There aren't any cuts on his body or tears on his clothes. It doesn't look like he fell. Maybe he froze to death.

Zeller turns away from his fallen companion. He has to find Janet Johnson. She's not far. Like Zeller, the fall left her surprisingly unscathed. No broken bones, and she's able to speak coherently. The two sit and talk for a while, regaining their bearings. They can see camp below, the equivalent of a few blocks away, but it looks deserted. All the tents are blown over.

Zeller offers to head down and set up a tent. Johnson agrees. She'll follow him down as soon as she catches her breath. Zeller makes it down to camp and finds McMillan already asleep in one of the collapsed tents. He climbs into a sleeping bag beside him and passes out. It's their first proper rest in three days. Zeller and McMillan sleep until the next morning. They emerge from the tent.

but can't find any sign of Johnson. Zeller and McMillan check the landscape outside, but it's hard to see. The sun glares off the ice, and Zeller doesn't have his sunglasses, having broken them in the fall. Everything is blurry and too bright. Zeller's worried. He doesn't think Johnson could have survived another night out in the elements.

The men decide the best thing to do is to descend farther and see if they can find others to help search for Johnson. Down at base camp, the other members of the party have been watching the climbers through binoculars. Worry spread through camp when they could only spot three of the four hikers and then only two.

When it was clear the climbers were descending from high camp, Alfonso, the guide, and the youngest member of the group, John Shelton, hurry up the mountain to meet Zeller and McMillan. Shelton feels grim as he confirms it with his own eyes. Only two of his four companions are here. Zeller and McMillan spend two days recovering in sleeping bags at base camp,

In addition to exhaustion and altitude-related symptoms, McMillan has a black eye from his fall. Zeller looks grotesque. His forehead is black from exposure and blood vessels are ruptured in his eyes. Alfonso heads all the way down the mountain for more help. Word of Cooper's death and Johnson's disappearance spreads quickly.

It's a sensational story and the media jumps on it before an investigation can get underway. So initial news coverage is heavy on speculation. A paper in Cooper's hometown publishes that he's presumably dead after falling off the top of the mountain during a snowstorm and landing in a crevasse. As soon as the seven survivors reach the foot of the mountain, Argentine investigators intercept them for questioning.

They're all essential witnesses in a potential manslaughter case. Some journalists find the climbers accounts hazy and inconsistent. The US State Department has a similar experience. In the New York Times extensive reporting on the 50th anniversary of the climb, they noted plenty of inconsistencies in public interviews and coverage at the time. Some are small.

For example, when Zeller and McMillan found Johnson lying off trail near the summit, Zeller says that he used rope to help her off the ground, and McMillan says that Zeller grabbed her arm. But some discrepancies seem more significant. Zeller thinks they all camped together after the failed summit attempt, but McMillan says he spent the night alone.

This inconsistency on a really basic fact exposes just how muddled Zeller and McMillan's memories are. That kind of detail might seem hard to misremember, but then again, Zeller was hearing the voices of rescuers who weren't there, and McMillan saw a whole phantom army. Things get really sticky when their conflicting stories confuse the circumstances around Johnson's disappearance.

Some reports say that Johnson asked the men to leave her behind at the summit. Others say that Johnson said this just to Zeller during their descent, before they fell. Then there's the order of events after the fall. Some reports say Zeller found Cooper and then Johnson. But another says it happened the other way around. Zeller also seems a little unsure about his last interaction with Johnson.

Initially, Zeller said they both decided he should go first and get a tent ready. Later, it's reported that it was Johnson's idea for Zeller to head down without her. All these details are crucial to understanding how Johnson could have ended up dead when Zeller left her only about 10 minutes away from camp and safety. But considering the circumstances, poor recall should be expected.

Carmi Defoe, the climber who organized the expedition and a lawyer, tells the State Department that they shouldn't put much stock in any of the survivors' statements. The altitude made them all hallucinate. It gave the whole expedition a dreamlike quality. The Argentine police officer running the investigation comes to a similar conclusion. So in his mind, the answer to this case can't come from witness statements.

It has to come from hard evidence: the victims' bodies. At this point, it seems most everyone assumes Johnson died somewhere on the mountain too. The medical examiners aren't exactly prepared to summit Aconcagua, and retrieving the remains of John Cooper and Janet Johnson is not a straightforward task. Authorities have no idea where Johnson's body might be, and only a vague sense of Cooper's location.

Even once they are located, it will be another big feat to bring the remains down the mountain. Remember, experienced hikers fell climbing down and they weren't hauling extra weight. On top of all that, conditions are not favorable for a retrieval mission right now. Aconcagua is in Argentina, so December to February is the warm season. They'll have to wait until the end of the year to make another attempt.

Back in the States, Janet Johnson and John Cooper's families process their loss. Cooper's family holds a memorial and anxiously awaits his remains, and his father learns Spanish so that he can better follow updates from Argentina. Johnson's family relays her wish to Argentine authorities that she be buried near the mountain.

Her mother reads every news report she can and carefully fixes each misspelling of her daughter's name by hand. When she comes across a quote from her daughter asking to die, she crosses it out. Before 1973 comes to an end, a team heads up Aconcagua with the equipment they'll need to bring down a human body. Miguel Alfonso, the guide on the ill-fated expedition, goes along.

They find Cooper on a flat surface, legs straight. His hands are bare, laid on his belly. He's missing a crampon and his ice axe. Alfonso was surprised to find Cooper stretched out. He remembered that Zeller said Cooper was frozen into a crouched position. The team carefully photographs everything before excavating the body onto a sled. They also search for Johnson, but they can't find her.

A medical examiner performs Cooper's autopsy down in Mendoza. His face is beat up and frozen in an expression of terror. Once his arms thaw out, the medical examiner moves them and finds another wound in Cooper's abdomen, under where his hands had been. It's a deep, round hole that penetrates all the way to Cooper's spine. It was actively bleeding when he died.

When the autopsy is complete, the judge opts to keep its contents under wraps. He only releases two things: the cause of death and a short statement. Cooper's official cause of death? Cranial contusions. Cooper did not freeze to death. He didn't bleed to death. Something hit him on the head hard enough to kill him. As for what? Well, the judge makes a statement.

He can't make any determination in the case until he has Janet Johnson's body. For the next three climbing seasons, everyone who scales Aconcagua is on the lookout for Johnson's remains. But no one sees them. That is until February 1975, two years after her disappearance. A father, his 17-year-old son, and another climber are on their way to the summit.

While they're waiting out a storm, the 17-year-old spots something red within a patch of penitentes, those tall, striking ice formations that plagued the 1973 climbing team. When the trio dig out the red object, they expect to find a discarded backpack or tent. Climbers are always leaving behind things they don't need, but then they see a face, horribly blackened by exposure.

one of the climbers recognizes her. He met Janet Johnson in Mendoza before she ascended in 1973. I want to pause here and warn you that what you're about to hear might be upsetting. If you'd rather not hear details about the state of Janet Johnson's body, now is the time to skip ahead about 40 seconds. Despite the time that has passed, the climbers can see three places where Janet's face sustained some kind of heavy blows.

Bone sticks out of her nose, forehead, and chin. Her nose was clearly broken and a flap of skin was ripped off below her mouth. There's blood all over her face and jacket. Like Cooper, one of her crampons and her ice axe are missing. Her hands are bare. She's also tangled in a mess of ropes. And strangely,

There's a rock sitting on top of Johnson's face. There are no other rocks in sight. The climbers all find the scene disturbing. The two older men can't see how these injuries possibly could have been the result of a fall on the glacier. They're positive Johnson was killed. They don't have the equipment they need to get Johnson's remains off the mountain,

It's another year before a team of police officers can make it all the way up to the foot of the Polish glacier to retrieve her. She's so melded into the ice, one of the officers compares freeing her body to removing part of the glacier. Johnson's autopsy confirms the major head trauma the climbers noticed when they found her. The team also notes that her boot was sliced open in a few places.

Like someone went after it with an axe. Ultimately, the medical examiner issues Johnson the same cause of death as Cooper: head trauma. Now it's up to the judge to issue a final ruling. But for the medical examination team, it seems obvious. Because this looks intentional. It looks like murder.

In early 1976, three years after John Cooper and Janet Johnson died under mysterious circumstances, autopsies are finally complete. Their families, the media, and the public are anxious to hear the judge's final ruling on what happened on Aconcagua. But in March, about a month after Johnson's body was recovered, the Argentine military seizes control of the government in a coup.

Needless to say, bureaucratic priorities shift. The judge never gets to issue an official determination. All that leaves us with are theories. Journalist John Branch and his team from the New York Times covered the case extensively in 2023. They conducted interviews and research and presented essentially two ways John Cooper and Janet Johnson could have died, either because of an accident

or because of foul play. First, let's look at the most probable option, an accident. Everyone on the expedition who has offered a theory thinks both deaths were some kind of accident. One caused by a combination of altitude-induced confusion and dangerous conditions. John Shelton, one of the first to see Zeller and McMillan after they descended alone, says foul play never crossed his mind.

Shelton also said something about Johnson that may offer a clue. Apparently, he got the impression that Johnson was totally devastated when she realized she wouldn't make it to the summit. Johnson was an accomplished mountaineer, arguably the most experienced in the group.

She was the 82nd person and one of the first 20 women to become a Colorado 14er, a climbing title for someone who has summited all 50 peaks higher than 14,000 feet in Colorado. She had made it to the top of Kilimanjaro. Maybe she wasn't ready to give up on Aconcagua and tried to ascend again after Zeller left her. If so, she could have suffered another fall.

There's a fall theory for Cooper, too. Alfonso the Guide and another member of the team who retrieved Cooper's remains, Lauren McIntyre, both think that Cooper's injuries can be easily explained. Cooper could have fallen onto the handle of his ice axe, which caused the deep wound in his abdomen. Then he could have fallen again and hit his head.

Zeller told reporters that maybe Johnson and Cooper were experiencing the same kind of hallucinations he was that could have made them do something irrational, like wander off the trail or descend at a dangerous pace. But there have been years of speculation about foul play for a reason. Lots of details just don't line up with falling accidents. We're going to focus on mountain conditions and the state of the bodies.

According to a climber familiar with Aconcagua, photos of the expedition show that the snow was soft, not slippery. Plus, the area where Cooper and Johnson were found was relatively flat, not steep. He thinks a fall in that area, especially a fatal one, is unlikely, if not impossible.

Now, you could argue that conditions are irrelevant when we're talking about people who might be uncoordinated and dizzy from exhaustion and the altitude. But Cooper and Johnson's bodies don't look like they sustained falls. There's the state of their clothes. Cooper's in particular. Zeller remembered that nothing Cooper was wearing was roughed up. It didn't look like it had been dragged down a mountain. That's why he assumed Cooper froze to death.

The weathering on Johnson's clothes is less definitive, since those spent three years in the elements before investigators got a look at them. But remember, Johnson did have that rock on her face. It's hard to explain how it could have ended up there naturally when there are no other rocks in the area.

Plus one of her boots was sliced open. And as best we can tell, those cuts didn't seem like ragged rips from dragging over a sharp rock, but more like the clean cuts from an axe. There's also the specific trauma to Johnson and Cooper's faces and heads. Many experienced climbers familiar with the results of tumbling down a mountain just don't think that's what caused the injuries Cooper and Johnson suffered.

Typically, there are broken bones and scrapes, bumps and bruises all over the body. Cooper and Johnson just had head injuries, no other abrasions. Cooper also had that abdominal wound, a small hole reaching nearly to his spine. Not your standard fall injury. Daniel Araujo, who assisted in both Johnson and Cooper's autopsies,

doesn't think the wound in Cooper's abdomen could have been formed by an axe. He remembers that the hole was remarkably deep, round, and symmetrical. According to Araujo, an axe handle would leave a square mark. Araujo's theory is that Cooper had an ice screw driven into him. He thinks this long, sharp tool used to climb the ice more closely resembles the wound.

The medical examiner and their team, including Araujo, believe that Cooper and Johnson's head injuries were the result of blunt force trauma. They were killed. So let's take a closer look at that idea. Who could have done that to Cooper and Johnson, and why? There are some theories reported by the New York Times about an unknown outsider stalking and killing the two climbers.

Witnesses remember that Cooper was in charge of handling money for the whole group. Reportedly, he carried a backpack full of cash that has never been recovered. Maybe a greedy and very dedicated thief followed the party up the mountain to rob Cooper. Another rumor circulated that there was some kind of romance between Cooper and Johnson. Maybe they fought and killed each other. Or some jealous third party intervened.

But this theory doesn't square up with what we know about Johnson's sexual and romantic preferences or Cooper's opinion of Johnson. Shortly after meeting her, Cooper wrote in his journal, quote, "Janet sure is weird." It's impossible to completely dismiss the possibility of a third party, but it feels pretty far-fetched.

We know from the survivors' accounts and from plenty of other climbers that conditions on Aconcagua are treacherous. It's an incredible feat to climb the mountain. To do it stealthily and off the trail? It's hard to imagine anyone pulling that off. It would have been a lot easier for someone who was already with the group.

Zeller and McMillan aren't clear-cut suspects. There's really not a viable motive for them to kill Cooper or Johnson, but their explanation of what happened doesn't totally add up. There are many inconsistencies in their stories. When exactly did they separate and come back together? When did each of them come across Cooper's body and what state was it in? And how exactly did Zeller leave things with Johnson?

Like I said before, some of this can definitely be chalked up to the mind scrambling effects of high altitude. But there are a few hints that Zeller and McMillan might have known more than they shared publicly. You'll remember that Carmi Defoe, the man who organized the trip, downplayed the group's recollections to the US State Department.

But then, after Defoe returned to the States, he helped organize a secret meeting of his climbing club and summoned McMillan and Zeller to it. The goal of the gathering was to "learn the straight of things." The meeting resulted in a timeline that went into the climbing club records and seems to have informed Zeller and McMillan's later interviews.

It ends with the conclusion that Cooper and Johnson probably died from complications from altitude sickness, which we now know they did not. There was also a curious letter from Lauren McIntyre, one of the people who recovered Cooper's remains to Cooper's widow. He encouraged her to get in touch with Zeller and McMillan.

because he suspected that the men may have adjusted the truth to make it easier for their consciences to deal with. Then there's the physical evidence on the two survivors. Both Zeller and McMillan reported falling during their descent, but neither man had the broken bones, scrapes, or bruises experts expect to see from a fall. McMillan only received a black eye.

and Zeller cut up his face and broke his sunglasses. Naturally, that's led to speculation about Zeller and McMillan's actions on the mountain. Why they survived and Cooper and Johnson did not. To be clear, they were never suspected killers. But let's talk about how whatever might have happened between the climbers could still fall under the umbrella of accidental deaths.

It's not clear if McMillan was feeling the physical effects of the altitude, but Zeller, Cooper, and Johnson all had bodily symptoms at some point during their summit attempt. In addition to all those symptoms, advanced altitude sickness can also cause unpredictable changes in mental status. We also know that Zeller and McMillan experienced psychological symptoms, visual and auditory hallucinations,

Back in the 70s, experts attributed these wild psychological experiences to altitude sickness. But in recent years, some scientists isolated them into a separate potential diagnosis: high altitude psychosis. Psychosis isn't just hallucinations. It's also delusions, believing something that isn't true.

The new diagnosis came about in part because a researcher experienced it himself while at roughly 26,000 feet. He was exhausted after a nighttime summit and desperate for a place to rest. A few guides he ran into on the mountain advised him to jump off a nearby cliff. He got close to the edge before realizing the strangers telling him to jump weren't real.

So, to recap: Cooper, Johnson, Zeller, and McMillan were working at their physical limits in a dangerous environment. They were practically strangers to each other, and they were all at risk of uncharacteristic mental shifts and disconnection from reality. Roberto Bustosi is a Mendoza local who was managing Aconcagua Base Camp during the ill-fated 1973 expedition.

Bustos says that high altitude creates a different world. People do things at 20,000 feet that would seem unthinkable to them at 5,000 feet, in his opinion. Even if Zeller and McMillan delivered the head trauma that killed Cooper and Johnson, the two survivors can't be held personally responsible. As he told the New York Times, what happened was an accident.

There will never be a formal trial on this case. McMillan and Zeller are deceased and so is everyone else who was on the expedition. But if there was a trial, the law might agree with Bustos. High altitude psychosis is a new diagnosis, but the phenomenon is well documented. As long as McMillan and Zeller could prove they suffered from it, and we know that they did,

they couldn't be held accountable for their actions. After the 1976 coup in Argentina shut down the investigation, it seemed like the case would be cold forever. But in 2020, the melting Polish glacier reveals a new lead: Janet Johnson's camera and her missing backpack, which contains a roll of film. Turns out a glacier isn't a bad place to store your film.

The developed images are surprisingly intact. The photos mostly show landscapes well composed, but there are plenty of images showing Johnson's fellow climbers too. Most of them are action shots. It doesn't seem like Johnson bothered to warn people she was taking their photographs. First, there are images of the four climbers who attempted the summit. The shadows confirm the timeline Zeller and McMillan described.

Then there are more photos of just Zeller and McMillan, presumably after Cooper departed to descend on his own. The last photo of a person is one of Johnson herself. She's headed up the summit ridge, less than a thousand feet from the top. She's tethered around the waist, the other end reaching out of frame, likely tying her to the photographer.

Despite the hopes of Johnson's family, journalists, and curious rubberneckers, the photos don't contain any revelations about Johnson or Cooper's deaths. They mostly confirm the story Zeller and McMillan and the other climbers told, except for one thing. Zeller and McMillan said Johnson lagged behind on the way to the summit. In that last photo, it looks like Johnson is in the lead. According to her sister, Johnson climbed mountains to prove that she could.

Perhaps that means Johnson captured the images most important to her. Not how she died, but proof that she did climb Aconcagua. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod.

If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Amongst the many sources we used, we found reporting by the New York Times extremely helpful to our research. They published a comprehensive report in 2023 led by John Branch with additional reporting by Pablo Betancourt and Nicolas Garcia. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.

And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Hannah McIntosh, edited by Mickey Taylor and Maggie Admire, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Kelly Geary. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.