Newly Developed Photos Shed Light on 50-Year-Old Suspicious Deaths of Two Mountain Climbers
A newly discovered camera promises to shed light on the 50-year-old mystery surrounding the deaths of two climbers on Argentina’s Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Two porters discovered Janet Johnson’s Nikomat 35-millimeter camera in February of 2020, The New York Times reported in an extensive profile. The Nikomat was still situated in Johnson’s leather holding bag, embossed with her home address in Colorado.
Johnson’s camera is now at the center of the decades-old investigation into her death, and that of her comrade, NASA engineer John Cooper. Johnson and Cooper were found deceased on the mountain after a 1973 expedition went terribly wrong. Their deaths were ruled accidental, but questions have lingered considering the violent nature of the episode.
“There is sufficient mystery and enough unanswered questions surrounding the death of Janet Johnson and NASA engineer John Cooper on the same 1973 expedition to have raised the suspicion of foul play,” William Montalbano wrote in a 1976 article for the Miami Herald. He called upon investigators to “establish if Aconcagua killed Janet Johnson or if she was murdered.”
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Official records list Johnson’s cause of death as a brain injury, consistent with stories of a fall told by the two survivors. Those men, including Miguel Alfonso, the group’s guide, and Robert Bustos, the base camp manager, were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. But the man who performed her autopsy believes it was a homicide.
Daniel Araujo, who assisted the city’s chief medical examiner during the autopsies and is now a neurosurgeon in South America, told NYT that Johnson’s corpse bore signs of foul play. There was bone exposed in three separate areas on her face where the skin had been peeled back. Deep slices in her boots led Araujo to believe someone had struck her with a bladed object.
The full report of Cooper’s autopsy was never released, but a cause of death was: he died of cranial contusions, or injuries to the skull and brain.
“They were killed,” Araujo told the outlet. “Both of them. These kinds of injuries were not self-inflicted.” He confirmed that there was “no doubt” about this amongst the other experts in the room.
When Johnson was found, in 1974, her face was blackened from sun exposure and she was all but fused to the glacier. Blood stained her shirt and jacket, and torn patches of skin exposed bone on her nose, forehead, and chin. Her climbing ax was nowhere to be found, and on top of her was a large rock. It seemed somewhat unlikely to the recovery crew that the rock could have somehow fallen on top of Johnson after her death.
“They thought everything was planned,” Alberto Colombero, who was the first to spot Johnson’s body, said of his fellow, more experienced climbers’ conclusions. They felt “that it wasn’t an accident, that someone had hit her and tried to make it look like she rolled down the hill in exhaustion.”
For years, the story was twisted into legend. Stories that the murders resulted from a love triangle, or a search for lost treasure, proliferated. But few concrete answers have come to light.
When the film from Johnson’s camera was developed, the 24 shots divulged much of what the climber saw but little of what she was feeling or experiencing. Much of what occurred on Aconcagua remains a mystery, with the newly discovered photos opening up more questions than they resolve.
Ulises Corvalan, who was a part of the 2020 expedition which found Johnson’s camera, said that his experience previously told him what occurred was accidental. After reviewing the photos, though, he questions that conclusion. He noted to NYT that the shallow slope of Aconcagua, as well as the soft snow which falls there, would make a fatal fall like the one reported highly unlikely, potentially even impossible.
Robert Bustos is now 76. He tucked away the unpleasant memories of the 1973 expedition long ago, and contends that the entire ordeal was simply “a mountain accident.” However, he couldn’t rule out the possibility of foul play while speaking to The Times.
“It’s a different world at 6,000 meters, with different laws and rules,” Bustos admitted. “And the behavior—you would go down to 5,000 meters and think these people are crazy.”
