In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a body melting out of a glacier and called the police, assuming it was a lost mountaineer — it turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man with 61 tattoos, an unfinished bow, and an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, making his death the world's oldest open murder investigation

In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a body melting out of a glacier and called the police, assuming it was a lost mountaineer — it turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man with 61 tattoos, an unfinished bow, and an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, making his death the world's oldest open murder investigation

On 19 September 1991, a German couple hiking high in the Ötztal Alps, on the ridge between Austria and Italy, took a shortcut off the marked path and saw something brown sticking out of the melting ice. It was a human body, face down in glacial meltwater, leathery and half-buried. They reported it, and the authorities responded the way authorities do when a corpse turns up in the mountains: as a police matter. The assumption was a climber lost d…