Man guilty of pushing wife off Colorado cliff to her death

Barry Bertolet, right, the brother of Toni Henthorn, walks with his wife Paula from a federal courthouse following closing arguments in the murder trial of Harold Henthorn, charged with killing his second wife, Toni Henthorn, on a hike they took to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary in 2012, in Denver, Friday, Sept. 18, 2015. AP Photo

DENVER, United States—A federal jury on Monday found a man guilty of murder for pushing his wife to her death off a cliff as they hiked in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park to celebrate their wedding anniversary, rejecting his claim that her fall was a tragic accident.

It took the jury about 10 hours to find Harold Henthorn, 59, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of his second wife, a wealthy Mississippi native. She died after plummeting about 130 feet off a cliff in a remote, rocky area where the couple had been hiking on Sept. 29, 2012, their 12th wedding anniversary.

Henthorn told investigators that his wife paused to take photo of the view and fell face-first over the ledge. His attorney, Craig Truman, said prosecutors failed to prove he killed her.

But prosecutors argued during a two-week trial that Henthorn carefully staged Toni Henthorn’s death to look like an accident because he stood to benefit from her $4.7 million in life insurance policies, which she didn’t know existed. They seized on Harold Henthorn’s inconsistent accounts of the fatal fall and said the evidence did not match his shifting stories.

Harold Henthorn scouted the remote area of the popular park 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Denver nine times before bringing his wife with him. He was searching for the “perfect place to murder someone,” where there would be no witnesses and no chance of her surviving, prosecutor Suneeta Hazra said.

Toni Henthorn, 50, wasn’t an avid hiker, so it didn’t make sense that she would have gone willingly into such dangerous terrain, investigators testified. A coroner said he could not determine whether she fell or was pushed, but he said he found no evidence that Harold Henthorn actually performed CPR on his wife, despite what he told dispatchers.

And park rangers said Henthorn could not explain why he had a park map with an “X” drawn at the spot where his wife fell.

Prosecutors argued the fatal fall was reminiscent of the death of Henthorn’s first wife, Sandra Lynn Henthorn, who was crushed when a car slipped off a jack while they were changing a flat tire in 1995— several months after their 12th wedding anniversary. Henthorn has not been charged in that case, but police reopened the investigation after Toni Henthorn’s death.

Details of the earlier case dominated the trial. A paramedic who responded to the 1995 accident testified that Henthorn didn’t seem upset by what had happened, and an investigator said a shoe print found on the vehicle suggested it might have been pushed.

Though the investigation into Sandra Lynn Henthorn’s death was initially closed after a week, Truman argued that the probe had been thorough and the case only received new scrutiny after Henthorn was charged with murder. The first wife’s death was an accident, he said, as was a 2011 incident in which a 20-foot (6 meter) beam fell on Toni Henthorn while the couple was working at their mountain cabin. It hit her in the head and fractured her vertebra.

Toni Henthorn was a successful ophthalmologist from Mississippi who also earned money from her family’s thriving oil business.

Harold Henthorn told her he was an entrepreneur and persuaded her to move with him to the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch. They had a daughter, now 9.

Prosecutors said Harold Henthorn made phony business cards to make it seem like he was a hard-working fundraiser for churches and nonprofits, but investigators found no evidence that he had any income from regular employment.