BUT, INCREDIBLY, THE STORY IS NOT FINISHED, and it probably never will be, since its mysteries seem to defy resolution by any single piece of evidence. Though Messner's proclamations of victory were reported all over the world—CLIMBER IS CLEARED OF ABANDONING HIS BROTHER, read the August 19 headline in The Times of London—his detractors still have plenty of questions.

"Finding Günther's body proves nothing except that he died somewhere on the Diamir Face," Saler said when I phoned him in Chile. "We still know nothing of how Günther died."

Critics were outraged that Messner had assumed the right to burn an unidentified body before conducting conclusive DNA tests. The bones, they argued, could have belonged to any one of the 12 or more climbers lost on Nanga Parbat's western face.

The DNA test results, it turned out, went Messner's way. On October 21, Messner held a press conference at the Institute of

There were no witnesses to Günther's death, and the last person in his company—an exhausted, oxygen-deprived man without food, water, or shelter on a 26,660-foot Himalayan mountain—was Reinhold Messner himself.

Legal Medicine, in Innsbruck, Austria. There, molecular biologist Walther Parson and other lab officials told journalists that they'd compared DNA in a recovered toe bone with DNA from Messner and his younger brother Hubert. The bone was "beyond a reasonable doubt" from a Messner brother, he announced. The lab concluded that the bone was 17.8 million times more likely to be from Günther than not.

Still, that didn't put an end to the wrangling. The teammates did not question the genetic tests—a wing of Innsbruck Medical University, the Innsbruck lab performs DNA analyses in civil and criminal cases, and is seemingly beyond reproach. But finding Günther's body, they reiterated, did not by itself solve anything. Günther might have perished in a fall near the summit, or in the upper or middle part of the Diamir Face, not toward the bottom, where Messner said he'd last seen his brother. In fact, Saler asserted, if Günther had died in the lower third of the face, roughly between 14,765 feet and 16,400 feet—as Messner has described the location—Saler believes the remains would have been found much lower than 14,110 feet (where they were reportedly recovered), since glacial movement typically carries bodies a mile or more down a mountain over a period of 35 years.

On one thing, Saler and von Kienlin had to concede defeat: Their theories about Günther's death on the Rupal Face hadn't proved true. But their Rupal conjecture, they maintained, was only one of several possibilities they'd offered, and, in their view, Messner had seized on it in a vast oversimplification that suited his needs.

In a statement last summer, von Kienlin wrote that Messner has "unjustly declared again and again" that "the discovery of the body on the Diamir side is proof that he is right" and that his critics "lied." "This is an untruth intended to cause confusion and to trick the public." Or, as he told me by phone: "Reinhold won't give journalists straight answers."

In crime novels, straight answers usually surface when someone is confronted with a "gotcha" piece of evidence. But no amount of sleuthing was or is likely to secure proof in this case. There were no witnesses to Günther's death, and the last person to see him alive—an exhausted, oxygen-deprived man without food, water, sleeping bag, or shelter on a 26,660-foot Himalayan mountain—was Reinhold Messner himself.

Until the 2005 discovery of Günther's body, the only evidence that seemed as if it might be a smoking gun was an alleged—and very controversial—handwritten note described in the 2003 book by von Kienlin, The Traverse. The one-page, penciled "confession," recorded by von Kienlin and dated July 4, 1970, purports to document a conversation between Messner and von Kienlin in a dusty motel room in Gilgit, Pakistan, just before the anguished Messner returned home. During their talk, Messner supposedly says he was not with Günther at all after summiting.

"I lost Günther," the note allegedly says. "For hours I was up there yelling for him. I don't know why, but he couldn't hear me. He was doing very badly. He didn't make it. Maybe he fell."

In his book, von Kienlin says he warned Messner that Herrligkoffer, the expedition leader, "won't take very kindly to [your] decision to go down the other side. Von Kienlin tells Messner that he'll need a "clear account" about the traverse to protect his parents and his reputation.

Immediately after the May 2003 release of von Kienlin's and Saler's books, Messner's Hamburg-based law firm marched into court. Von Kienlin's note, Messner claimed, was a fake that was created after the expedition, while Saler's book was a "fairy story." By July 2003, Messner won a temporary injunction against Saler's and von Kienlin's publishers. The two companies were ordered to make some minor revisions to the tomes: For example, reprints of von Kienlin's book could not include a reproduction of the disputed note on its back cover. As part of the dispute, von Kienlin was also ordered to hire an independent handwriting expert to assess the note's legitimacy and age. One expert hired by von Kienlin had concluded in 2004 that there was a 75 percent probability that the document was legitimate, but the court last summer ordered a second analysis. Those results have not yet been announced.

Meanwhile, muddying the waters even more, Messner offered this motive for von Kienlin's attack: "He lost his wife to me."

This last part is definitely true. Ursula Demeter and Messner had become enamored in the early seventies, when Messner, on the mend from his toe amputations, was a guest at Schloss Erolzheim, von Kienlin's castle in southern Germany. After Demeter and von Kienlin divorced, she and Messner were married from 1972 until 1977.

But did von Kienlin still harbor a grudge? In 2004, when I asked him this question at his suburban Munich home, the baron—wearing a hand-painted silk tie and puffing a cigarillo—casually waved off Messner's jealousy theories. "If I wanted revenge," he said, "I would have acted on it long ago."

When I called von Kienlin in September 2005 to ask about the recovery of Günther's remains, he had new theories of his own, a clear indication that this battle will not end soon.

"Messner has friends in Pakistan; he's invested in a school there; they may have helped transport the body," von Kienlin said, rattling off a laundry list of gripes that became more arcane as he continued. "Why was only one boot recovered in Pakistan?" he asked. "Where is the other boot? Could the recovered boot actually have been Reinhold's?

"Reinhold says that it's a dangerous place, where he left his brother—so then why did he leave Günther there alone?" von Kienlin went on. I could almost see him shaking his head in wonderment. "Reinhold says he's got his honor back," he said. "But why, if he left Günther?"