In May 2000, 32-year-old Australian astrophysicist Rodney Marks died suddenly on an Antarctica base after falling ill just 36 hours earlier. The National Science Foundation (NSF) released a statement saying he most likely died of natural causes. But when the toxicology report came back, it revealed he had actually been poisoned by methanol. How did the methanol get in his system? And why did New Zealand authorities feel like the NSF wanted to stonewall their investigation? We spoke with reporter Stephen Davis, whose own investigation into the death of Rodney Marks first began more than two decades ago Stephen is also a professor and the host of the audio series The Secret History of Antarctica. It’s available on Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Antarctic Treaty and why is Antarctica unique?
This episode includes discussions of murder, substance abuse, suicide, and sexual assault. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. For mental health support, visit Spotify.com slash resources. Imagine a place without war, without mineral exploitation, where the environment is fully protected.
A place where peace and cooperation, science and the environment come before money and power. This sounds like an imaginary place, doesn't it? However, this is reality in Antarctica under the Antarctic Treaty System, which was put into place in 1959. The treaty is a very successful example of how governments have worked together to protect this unique continent.
Every word I've said so far has been a verbatim quote pulled from the UK-funded website Discovering Antarctica, which also highlights a line from the treaty itself that states, "...Antarctica shall continue to be used forever for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord."
With that said, this is New Zealand-based investigative reporter Stephen Davis talking about a story that came out of an Antarctic base back in 2000.
Chapter 2: Who is Stephen Davis and what is his connection to the Rodney Marks case?
We have a man dying suddenly, and we don't know why. The organization responsible for him just wants to wrap it under the carpet. And they have no grounds for complaining that there are lots of suspicions because they acted in an incredibly suspicious way right from the start. You know, it's appalling.
It's appalling that the National Science Foundation and the US government allowed this to happen.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Stephen Davis, an investigative reporter, professor, author, and the host of the podcast The Secret History of Antarctica. We're grateful for his time and insights. Stay with us.
Do you want to hear something spooky?
Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot.
Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal.
One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession.
Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves.
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Chapter 3: What makes Antarctica a dangerous yet awe-inspiring place to visit?
Stevens referring to his investigation into the death of Rodney Marks, an Australian astrophysicist and former employee of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The base is run by the United States and is still in operation today. Its location continues to attract leading scientists from all over the world, especially those who hope to study the sky.
When people think of the Antarctica and they think of ice and they probably think of snow and things that melt. It's not like that. It's solid ice rock and it's an incredibly dry climate. You can't just go and find water. You can't just chip into the ice. I am one of those people who thought of it that way.
And in addition to being the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica is also the driest. And its lack of moisture and lack of light pollution allows for a particularly uninterrupted view of the night sky.
Rodney Mark served as the sole operator of Amundsen-Scott's Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, work that took place in a separate building, a trek away from the residential facilities. Stephen says Rodney would spend hours there, often alone, conducting experiments and recording the movement of the planets.
His supervisor in Boston, the wonderfully named Tony Stark, who I interviewed, said Rodney was doing well. His science was doing well. He had all the sort of incarnations of a man who was having a successful career and doing what he loved.
Winter is a unique time for all the bases at the South Pole. Exact figures are hard to come by, but estimates suggest the continent's population drops from about 4,000 to 5,000 people in the summer to around 1,000 in the colder months. Stevens says back in 1999, Rodney was one of about 50 employees at the Amundsen-Scott base who would be, quote, wintering over.
Winter over at the South Pole is when all the summer people have gone and a small group stay behind. Rather than being light all the time, when I was down there it is dark 24-7. Exceptionally cold, very difficult to move around. You are effectively trapped.
Trapped or not, New Year's Eve 1999 was an especially exciting time to be at the South Pole. Because of its location, it exists in every time zone on Earth, which made for quite the celebration. Every hour on the hour, workers ushered in a brand new millennium with a different part of the world.
He was in a band down there with his then girlfriend. So they celebrated the millennium at the South Pole and his band played a concert. And, you know, they had, as it were, a few drinks and an amazing celebration.
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Chapter 4: Who was Rodney Marks and what led to his sudden death at the South Pole?
It happened while lying in his girlfriend's arms. He was 32 years old. The National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the United States federal government which operates the base, quickly released a statement saying Rodney's cause of death was unknown, but he had, quote, "...apparently died of natural causes." The news of his sudden passing came as a shock to everyone.
Despite the physical exams employees had to pass, some assumed Rodney's death must have been linked to underlying health conditions. How else had his health deteriorated so quickly?
What I think was equally or even more shocking is what happened immediately after that. So you can imagine in New York, somebody at a lab dies suddenly for no apparent reason and very quickly. What would happen then? The police would be involved. People would be interviewed. Tests would be done because you want to find out how he died.
According to Stephen, his investigation found the National Science Foundation did absolutely none of that. Investigative reporter Stephen Davis first heard the name Rodney Marks about a year after his passing. It happened while Stephen was investigating another Antarctic story altogether.
In 2001, almost exactly one year after Rodney's death, a physician named Jerry Nielsen Fitzgerald diagnosed herself with breast cancer while working on the Amundsen-Scott base. She then proceeded to treat her own cancer with the help of airdrop chemotherapy equipment and untrained colleagues until she could finally be evacuated months later.
It was a fascinating story. But in the course of investigating it, a source said to me, it's very easy to cover things up. in a place like this, because access is controlled by authorities and it's a long way away from anywhere. And you know what, Stephen, you should look at the death of this scientist last year.
And that was the start of my investigation, an investigation which has carried on now for 23 years.
Over the course of those 23 years, Stephen interviewed Antarctic historians and some of Rodney's colleagues who were working at the base that winter. The ones willing to talk, that is. He learned what happened after Rodney's sudden passing that May, and perhaps more surprisingly, what didn't.
They had a dead man and months to go before he could be taken anywhere. So his body was held effectively in a freezer and finally they decided to make a coffin for him and have a ceremony and bury him in the ice. and then at the end of the winter, dig them up again and ship them back to Christchurch.
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Chapter 5: How did the National Science Foundation respond to Rodney Marks' death?
After years of more attempts, the National Science Foundation eventually agreed to send out a questionnaire to Rodney's 49 colleagues, one that investigators created but the NSF approved all questions for.
Ultimately, only 13 people responded, and key witnesses were not among them, which proved challenging because by that point, the world had learned Rodney hadn't died of any disease, illness, or natural cause.
When the toxicology was done in Christchurch, shockingly, it was discovered he had died of methanol poisoning.
The question became, how did methanol enter Rodney's system? Because of their unique circumstances and environments, Antarctic bases often have cultures all their own. Some scientists travel to Antarctica to study space, but other organizations study Antarctica to better understand space travel.
NASA, when it wants to observe how people might react on a long mission to Mars, looks at what happens at the South Pole.
As with anywhere else in the world, cliques can form. Workers generally fall into two categories. The scientists, there to do research, and the staff, there for maintenance. Cooks, carpenters, electricians, the people who, quite literally, keep the lights on and heat running. Stevens says there's also typically a skewed ratio of men to women.
Back in 1999, Stephen estimates it was about 41 men and 8 women. All of them were stuck in close quarters, for the most part cut off from the rest of the world and never seeing the sunrise. Sure, they had work to do, but even if everyone worked more than their standard 40 hours a week, it still left them with a lot of time to kill.
It's well known that there was a psychological condition of winter over that people really suffer. It's that people have been in conflict, in battle, have a thousand yard steer, which means you're trying to engage with them and they're just looking off like this. And people get that into Antarctica or they become obsessed with things or they become morose or isolated. They also can drink heavily.
Workers apparently provided their alcohol preferences ahead of time and the base made sure to stock up. So much of social life in Antarctica, Stephen says, revolved around the mess hall and the bar. To supplement the already generous stores, base residents also made their own homemade brew. along the lines of a bathtub gin, which they referred to as toast juice.
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Chapter 6: Why did New Zealand authorities get involved in the investigation?
Infamously, in the late 50s, at one of the Russian bases, this was a story I thought was an Antarctic myth and apocryphal, but actually turned out to be true. Two Russians were playing chess and also drinking heavily. One left and came back and accused the other of moving something while he was gone, and so he killed him. It was a murder. Then covered up by the Russian authorities,
who then, for a long time, I don't know whether they still do, banned the playing of chess in Antarctica. In another infamous incident, again involving Russians and drinking, two Russians were at a two-person base in the middle of nowhere. One liked to read books, and they weren't getting on these two guys.
And the other man, as his compatriot was getting to the end of the book, would tell him how it ended, give the plot away, again and again. Anyway, the other guy had had enough, so he attacked the other man with an axe.
One year, a Chilean doctor at the South Pole burned down an entire base when told he had to stay for winter. Roommates have tried to kill each other with hammers over seemingly harmless drunken antics. Sexual assaults and rapes have historically been all too common and underreported. As for Rodney Marks...
There are only three potential ways that Marx died. At his own hand, accidental poisoning or deliberate poisoning. Now, having spent a long time and many interviews and many years thinking about it, I think he was deliberately poisoned.
Stephen Davis says in the days after Rodney Mark's death, rumors immediately began to circulate around the Amundsen-Scott base.
I know for a fact that there was a conversation in the canteen about a day after it happened where people who knew Rodney were speculating that something quite untoward had happened. Because generally speaking, healthy people in their 30s don't suddenly die.
Some rumors were fueled by an observation made by the base's doctor. He found needle marks on Rodney's arm. Whether it was intentional or not, the needle marks became a red herring in the case. Suspicion grew around whether they were somehow connected to Rodney's sudden death. But Stephen doesn't believe they were.
Though Rodney had used intravenous drugs in the past, no illegal drugs were found in his system.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did the investigation into Rodney Marks' death face?
As for what evidence may have been lost, some attention has been drawn to a strange-looking bottle Rodney kept at his station. Stephen says he was given it as a gift, and it apparently had a memorable label.
He had been sent a bottle on his shelf with a strange prawn motif. Nobody really knew what was in it, some kind of spirit or liqueur, but this other man threw it away.
By the way, since the podcast came out, I've had people from all over the world contact me to say, we think this is the bottle, including some people from South America who said this is a liqueur we have in Peru and it has a prawn motif on the side. But the point is that the area was sanitized.
As you might imagine, the lack of information in this case has given rise to multiple theories. All related to how Rodney ingested the methanol that killed him. One of the earliest suggested that he drank the methanol himself on purpose and died by suicide. Something Stephen disagrees with.
He didn't know what was wrong with him. He kept saying to the doctor, I feel terribly ill, find out what's wrong with me. Methanol, by the way... would be the last thing you would swallow if you wanted to kill yourself because it would be a horrendous way to die. It burns you inside, makes you blind. I found the fact that somebody quickly floated a suicide rumor very suspicious.
Often the first version of the story is the one that's believed.
New Zealand officials drew a similar conclusion. More than six years after Rodney's death, the chief investigator working the case held an inquest. They announced that their investigation concluded it was highly unlikely Rodney knowingly ingested the methanol, which left open the possibility that he drank some by mistake. Toast juice has played a role in this theory.
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Chapter 8: What did the toxicology report reveal about Rodney Marks' cause of death?
Some have wondered whether one of the batches of homemade liquor accidentally had traces of methanol. Maybe Rodney, in a state of insobriety, used the wrong bottle to make himself a drink. Stephen doesn't give this theory much weight either. Of note, it wasn't a small amount of methanol that killed Rodney. It was more than half a cup.
Stephen also spoke with Rodney's supervisor, who said that all of the scientists on the base were incredibly safety conscious. They knew the risks of methanol because they worked with it all the time, and everything was labeled. Not to mention, methanol and alcohol interact with one another in a unique and relevant way.
Ironically enough, your listeners might not understand that if you poison yourself with methanol and you find out, ethanol is the solution.
As in, regular old alcohol can counteract methanol's poisonous effects. If the basis doctor had made a proper diagnosis, Rodney presumably could have been saved by a product that, by all accounts, was readily available. But Rodney never received a proper diagnosis. And there's one major reason for that.
One of the things that you absolutely ought to do in making this diagnosis is run a blood test. That's, you know, Medical 101. There was a machine there called the ECTCHEM machine for blood testing, but it wasn't working. It needed batteries and maintenance and had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Because it wasn't working, the blood test was never done and a proper diagnosis was never made.
And I've been informed by other experts who I've subsequently talked to that a blood test would clearly have shown what was wrong with him. Interestingly enough, I have spent years trying to find the doctor who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. And there were several things about his treatment which you might have questioned.
If anybody out there knows where Dr. Robert Thompson, formerly of the South Pole, is, please contact me and let me know.
A doctor isn't the only missing link Stephen's been trying to track down all these years. He says he's still fighting to get those memos that the United States sent New Zealand authorities unredacted. He wants to learn more about why, in his view, the U.S. and the National Science Foundation seemingly wanted to stonewall an investigation.
Now, in 2009, a spokesperson for the National Science Foundation stated that they had cooperated fully with New Zealand authorities. They also mentioned that their bases have a zero-tolerance policy for drug use and that alcohol consumption is regulated. Both statements that seem to contradict other reporting and accounts from both workers and Antarctica experts Stephen interviewed.
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