Toni and Harold Henthorn. Photo / Supplied
The voice on the phone to the 911 operator sounds urgent, slightly breathless: "Hello, my name is Harold Henthorn, I'm in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and I need an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately." The operator transfers him to the National Park Service.
"My wife has fallen from a rock on the north summit of Deer Mountain," he says. "She's in a really critical condition. She's had a bad fall - about 30 to 40 feet." The second operator tells him to hold. For several seconds you can just hear the man on the end of the phone breathing.
Deer Mountain is one of the most popular outcrops for hikers in the Colorado park. The route begins at Deer Ridge Junction, about 9,000 feet up in a grove of ponderosa pine trees, before ascending, via various switchbacks, to the peak at 10,000 feet.
The round trip is a little over six miles, and from the top there is a 360-degree view of the Rockies and the Continental Divide. Harold Henthorn was in the mountains with his wife, Toni, to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary, while their daughter Haley, then seven, was at home with friends.
They were staying nearby at The Stanley Hotel - author Stephen King's inspiration for The Overlook, the fictional haunted hotel in The Shining. Photographs from that morning show Harold, 57, and Toni, 50, smiling for the camera at the summit.
There's also a picture of Harold, with his back to the camera, holding the branch of a tree on the cliff's edge. Minutes later, Toni plunged down the same cliff face to her death. Harold would later say she was taking a photo when she slipped and fell, but that he didn't see exactly what happened as he was looking at his phone.
But something didn't seem right. When rescuers arrived they found Harold on his mobile phone - not administering CPR. They discovered a map in his car, with an 'X' at the spot where the couple had lunch that day, despite Harold saying they had stumbled upon the place after spotting a sign indicating the trail they intended to take was closed. As he texted a friend to ask for a lift out of the park, leaving his wife's body there, he didn't seem like a man in the throes of grief.
It would be two years before Harold's arrest but investigators would, in that time, piece together circumstantial evidence proving he had pushed Toni from the clifftop, watching her tumble 130 feet - not 30 to 40, as he had first said - to the rocks below, in order to benefit from $4.5 million in life-insurance policies.
What they didn't know, then, was that Toni may not have been his first victim.
Yvonne and Bob Bertolet were at home in a suburb south of Jackson, Mississippi, on September 29 2012, when their younger son, Todd, a petroleum geologist, came to tell them his sister Toni had had a terrible accident.
When I visit them there, Bob remembers everything. 'Todd said, 'Daddy, why don't you come on into the kitchen, we gotta tell you something,'" he says. "Course, when somebody tells you something like that, your blood pressure drops.
When Todd said Toni fell from a cliff, the first words from my mouth were: "'He pushed her.' I knew it. His subconscious had been assembling the facts for years. It may've seemed like a lightbulb moment," he says, "but it wasn't. And we knew it."
The family tried to get on the next flight to Colorado to see their granddaughter Haley and Harold, but a forthcoming presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in Denver meant nothing was available until Monday - two days away.
When they arrived at the house, Yvonne asked Harold what Toni had been doing the last time he saw her. "He told me she was about 10 feet from the edge, supposedly taking a picture of him in the other direction - but I couldn't understand why she would be taking a picture away from the scenery behind her?"
Todd says they asked whether he had heard Toni scream. Harold hadn't. "Who is silent when they fall from a cliff?" Todd says. "He didn't seem upset. And he constantly changed his story." Harold then played them a video he had made for her funeral. He asked them to sit down and turned off the lights.
The video cycled through still photos of Toni, set to the song Held by Christian singer-songwriter Natalie Grant. There was a picture of the couple in hospital just after Haley was born; a photo of Toni and Haley in the snow; the Henthorns at a theme park. The family was incredulous.
"Toni's body was still on the mountain Sunday," says Todd. "And by Monday he's got the music picked out, the pictures chosen and put in order. You'd think he was showing us his holiday video - he was so proud of it."
That night, the family determined to see Harold convicted of their daughter's murder - but that meant pretending that they didn't suspect he had anything to do with it. "We knew it was in the best interests of justice," says Yvonne. "But we had to sit back and let things happen."
Toni was born in January 1962, a middle child and the only daughter of Bob, a geologist, and Yvonne, a nursing teacher (both now retired). She grew up with her brothers in Vidalia, Louisiana. Yvonne says Toni saw herself as the United Nations of the siblings, keeping the peace between her brothers, Barry and Todd.
She had a flair for science, played basketball, and was an accomplished pianist. At the University of Mississippi she studied zoology, sang in the choir, and went to medical school to become an ophthalmologist. She had practices in Jackson and Vicksburg - Bob and Yvonne say Toni lived for her work, and the church.
Harold was raised in Washington, DC, went to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and then the University of Kentucky, where he studied business and geology. While travelling, he fell in love with the Rocky Mountains and moved to Denver, Colorado.
The pair met in 1999 on a Christian dating website. Harold's profile said he was 44, widowed (he had been married before - to a woman named Lynn who, he said, died in a car accident), Presbyterian, "rather fashionable...very good looks... romantic and loving", and that he had spent a decade working as a development consultant for non-profit organisations.
The first time Toni's family met Harold, he said he wanted to marry her. It seemed fast, but Bob says he was impressed that he wanted to take care of Toni. Todd says Harold was offering his sister the chance to become a mother - something she dearly wanted.
"My sister did a terrible job of picking guys, but here was finally someone who was supposedly financially secure and successful." However their suspicions were raised almost immediately. In America, it's customary for the groom or his family to pay for the rehearsal dinner - a get-together that usually happens the night before the wedding.
Todd rented the clubhouse in his parents' gated community, asked his friend's band to play and arranged a caterer, but when the bill arrived, Harold said he'd forgotten his cheque book. The Bertolets paid. On family holidays to Colorado, Harold would book restaurants but expect Bob to foot the bill.
In 2005, Toni gave birth to their daughter. Meanwhile, the Bertolets became increasingly suspicious of Harold and claim they saw no evidence that he had an income. And Harold was becoming controlling. He'd phone his in-laws and put Toni on speakerphone so she could talk to them in his hearing.
On Bob's birthday, it was Harold who phoned him, not Toni. "He was isolating her from us," Bob says. What Harold Henthorn may not have known when he killed Toni was that the case would be investigated by the FBI because the Rocky Mountain National Park is on federal land.
Todd says the family became the bureau's eyes and ears - or "the fox in the henhouse". Detectives investigating serious crimes can subpoena mobile-phone records and trace the locations the owner has visited via triangulation (mapping the mobile towers the phone has interacted with).
By studying Harold's phone records, investigators discovered he had been to the spot where Toni died nine times in the months leading up to her death in September 2012. Yet, as Todd says, he told a ranger he'd only been to the general area once before, and never to that actual spot, because the trail the couple intended to go down had been closed off.
"These rangers aren't dummies," Todd says. "They don't just pour water on campfires. And as soon as Harold mentioned this sign [saying the trail was shut], the park ranger recalled they had removed it on the 21st - so they knew Harold must have scouted out the area that day, because by the 29th that sign had been gone a week."
So the trail was open on that fateful day. In addition, Bob says Harold told them he had moved Toni's body to an area where he said it was easier to perform CPR. "She had hit a tree and was lying below it, kind of in a rough area. And he said he had grabbed her by her legs and dragged her.
"Here she is with a serious head wound and he's dragging her by the feet." Todd says Toni must have been dead when Harold moved her body because there was no blood under her when she was found by rangers.
"She had no scalp, her skull was bared, and there was no blood, so all those vital signs he was giving everybody - including my brother Barry, who's a cardiologist - were a bunch of crap." In the days and weeks that followed Toni's death, people began asking about Harold's first wife's death in May 1995.
So Todd asked to see the original police report. It was a heart-stopping moment. Lynn Henthorn, it said, died from "traumatic asphyxiation". She had crawled under their car to change a tyre, the jack had given way and the vehicle had crushed her. The 37-year-old died later that night.
Six days later, police ruled it an accident. It was shortly after the couple's 12th wedding anniversary. "If I'd known how Lynn died, I'd never have let Toni marry the guy,' Bob says. 'And she'd be alive today.'"
The forensic pathologist who conducted the post mortem on Toni's body wrote that the manner of her death was 'undetermined' and that she "died as a result of multiple blunt force injuries when she fell or was pushed down a cliff while hiking... Homicide cannot be excluded."
According to Yvonne, in the two years following Toni's murder, Harold attempted to persuade everyone who would listen that the Bertolets supported him and thought him innocent. He'd invite them up to Colorado to see Haley play in football matches and take part in school singing groups.
"He was using us,'" Yvonne says. On November 21 2013, Todd told a local TV station in Denver: "The trophy of the family was tarnished by a loser who doesn't pull his weight, has no job, is not a good person and is a liar... I felt immediately he was responsible...
He had a hand in my sister's death, no doubt in my mind." Soon after, Harold was charged with murder. Jeff Dorschner, spokesperson for the US Department of Justice office in Denver, said it was a complex investigation that included subpoenaing financial records and life-insurance documents.
An investigation into Harold's income showed that, despite telling friends and family that he was a charity fundraiser, he did not appear to be employed at all - he'd been living off Toni's income as a doctor for years. Harold's trial began in September 2015 and lasted two and a half weeks.
The court was told about an incident, just over a year before Toni's death, when the couple were at a holiday cabin in Granby, Colorado. One night Harold dialled 911 after Toni had apparently been struck on the back of her neck by a wooden board.
Harold told paramedics that a light had blown outside and that Toni had been picking up shards of glass. Harold, meanwhile, had been chucking boards off the deck and one had struck Toni on the head. She was diagnosed with a neck fracture.
But Harold allegedly told inconsistent stories about what happened, and at that time he had four life insurance policies on her, totalling $6 million. Prosecutors contended the 'deck incident' was evidence of Harold's premeditated intent to kill Toni.
Then the jury heard about the death of Lynn, including discrepancies in Harold's accounts of what happened: which of the couple was actually changing the tyre; whether one or two jacks were used to prop up the car; whether they were returning from, or going to, dinner.
The government presented evidence that the tyre being replaced was not flat but had low pressure; and that the spare also had low pressure. Harold declined an offer of help that night from a passerby.
According to federal prosecutors, Harold also tried to prevent a second group of passersby from performing CPR on Lynn; and he apparently refused to warm her with his coat, despite near-freezing temperatures.
Prosecutors asked whether it was possible that any man would lose both his wives in such rare accidents, by chance. Harold was the lone witness and beneficiary of both, they said, carrying out a plan to kill them in situations made to look like accidents.
Yvonne was holding her eldest son Barry's hand when the verdicts came in. She looked at Harold but he didn't look back. "I was thinking to myself, he's lost everything. He's lost his daughter's respect: Haley now calls him Mr Henthorn and no longer refers to him as her daddy.
She's changed her name by herself to Bertolet. And she's doing fine." [Barry and his wife were granted custody and Haley now lives with them.] Harold was sentenced to life without parole, and is currently in a maximum security federal prison in Indiana.
One woman who attended every day of the trial was Harold's former sister-in-law Grace Rishell, who was married to Lynn's brother Kevin. She had known both Lynn and Toni well, and once called Harold a good friend. She felt especially betrayed.
The night Toni died, Harold texted Grace saying, "My bride is gone, my bride is gone." Speaking at a cafe near her home in Austin, Texas, Grace admits her initial response was - did he kill Lynn? "It was like déjà vu," she says. He had said those exact words when Lynn had died.
"The same events were being replayed. It was a Saturday night when Lynn died, too. And I was thinking, wow, he's out in the middle of nowhere. It's remote. He's away from emergency crews. There are no witnesses." Grace met Harold at James Madison University - around the time she began dating Kevin.
The two couples - Harold and Lynn, Grace and Kevin - went on trips together, and became close. "Harold was an amazing conversationalist," she says. After her divorce from Kevin, Grace says Harold became even closer to her and her daughters.
"He'd write them letters about how to find the right man, how to avoid troubles in life. I looked at him as a father figure to my girls," she admits. But on 24 April 2013, seven months after Toni was killed and two years before Harold faced trial for her murder, the FBI knocked on Grace's door to tell her that he had taken out a life insurance policy in her name too, listing himself as the primary beneficiary.
She told the agents that Harold had suggested she take a life insurance policy out on herself, with her daughters as beneficiaries, in case anything ever happened to her. She thought it was a good idea and began filling in the paperwork to put in place a policy for $250,000, but for medical reasons she never completed it.
The FBI agents told her that the policy was, in fact, processed - but for $400,000, and with Harold as beneficiary. "The insurance company should have called me and said this is odd, but they didn't," she says. It was very overwhelming." Had Harold set his sights on Grace as his next victim?
"When I look back, there were a couple of things that he said that were probably not OK from a married man," she says. Six weeks before Toni died, Harold visited Grace and her daughters in Austin with Haley, rented a boat and took them out on the lake.
"I was getting out of the boat and changing into some shorts, pulling a sundress over my top, and he said something like, 'All I can say is Kevin was a fool.'" She adds, "He used Lynn's money - blood money - to act like he was this amazing, fun uncle. He's lied to me for all these years - for decades - and he's killed our precious Lynn and he's killed Toni and he's a dangerous man."
Harold Henthorn's attorney has lodged an appeal against his conviction in Colorado. It could take several years to come to court. Henthorn did not respond to an attempt to contact him in prison.
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