Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
The 911 call came in at 5:55 p.m. on September 29, 2012.
“My name is Harold Henthorn,” the caller said. “I’m in Rocky Mountain National Park. I need an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately.”
His wife had fallen from a ledge. She was alive but unconscious, he said. He was at the bottom of a cliff on Deer Mountain, more than two miles from the trailhead, and his phone battery was running down.
The dispatcher talked him through CPR. She would later tell a jury that she did not believe he was actually doing it. He did not sound out of breath.
While he waited for help, Harold built a small fire and started texting friends.
An anniversary at the Stanley Hotel
Dr. Toni Henthorn was 50. She was a respected ophthalmologist from Mississippi, from a family with oil money. Friends said she was deeply religious and always saw the best in people.
She had met Harold in 1999 on a Christian dating website. She was in her late thirties and wanted a child. He told her he was a successful entrepreneur who raised money for churches and charities. They married quickly, moved to Highlands Ranch outside Denver, and had a daughter in 2005.
That September, they drove to Estes Park for a weekend to celebrate 12 years of marriage. They stayed at the Stanley Hotel, the grand old place that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining.
Harold told the story of what happened next to rangers, to friends and to family. It was never told the same way twice, but the outline went like this.
They had planned on Bear Lake, a gentle half-mile loop. It was too crowded, so they made a last-minute decision to hike Deer Mountain instead. A mile and a half in, they left the trail to find some privacy. They ate lunch on a rocky shelf. Then they climbed down to a small stone outcrop to take pictures.
Toni was setting up a photo. A text from the babysitter came in on his phone, saying their daughter’s soccer team had won. He looked down. He saw a blur. She was gone.
She had dropped about 130 feet.
“Can’t find pulse”
It was close to 8 p.m. and already dark when park ranger and EMT Mark Faherty picked his way over boulders and fallen pines to reach them. He found Harold bent over his wife, weakly pressing on her chest.
Toni Henthorn had no pulse. A ranger reported her dead at 8:12 p.m.
Faherty talked Harold into hiking out with him. It took the two men a little over two hours to reach the trailhead in the dark. Then the small details started to bother him.
The timeline did not fit. Harold’s account of how long he had waited to call for help did not match his phone records.
He said he had given his wife mouth-to-mouth. Her lipstick was not smudged.
The fall had knocked off both of her boots, yet her camera was found just feet away, almost intact.
The diamond was gone from her wedding ring. Harold brought that up himself, telling a deputy coroner the stone was worth $30,000 and that it did not matter at all now.
And at 9:46 that night, more than an hour and a half after she was declared dead, a close friend got a text from him saying Toni was critical and to pray. Seventeen minutes later came another.
“My bride is gone.”
He had said it before
Faherty asked about Harold’s first marriage. His first wife had died in an accident too, Harold said. He did not want to talk about it.
Her name was Sandra Lynn Henthorn. She went by Lynn. She was 37.
Late on the night of May 6, 1995, Harold flagged down a passing car on a dark stretch of Highway 67 in Douglas County, Colorado. He said a Jeep had fallen on his wife.
His story was that a tire had gone soft, and that he had jacked up the Jeep to change it. When he tossed the wheel into the back, the jolt knocked the Jeep off the jack. Lynn, he said, had crawled underneath to find a lug nut.
A man who lived nearby had stopped earlier to offer help. Harold turned him away. A woman from the car he flagged down would never forget what came next. When her family tried to pull Lynn out, she testified, Harold got angry. “One of the creepiest things I’ve come across in my life,” she said.
Lynn died in surgery that night. A relative remembered the words Harold kept repeating: “My bride is gone.”
The case was closed as an accident in six days. Prosecutors later put his life insurance payout at more than $600,000. Some of that coverage had been taken out just months before she died.
He had Lynn cremated, against her family’s wishes. Seventeen years later, against the wishes of Toni’s family, he did the same thing again.
After Toni’s fall, letters started arriving at the park, at police agencies and at newsrooms. ABC News later counted 17 anonymous letters. “Sadly, there are many similarities to these two accidents,” one read.
Faherty and the other investigators turned to the Jeep Harold had driven to the park. It had been impounded right after the fall. Inside it they found a map of Rocky Mountain National Park.
Faherty put the question to Harold. Up to that moment he had described the whole day calmly. Now the ranger asked him to explain what was on the map.
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