184. Alpine Divorce Horror: Husbands Who Leave Their Wives To Die On Hikes

Dark Summer Merch Is Here! Get your Tour Tee, Scrapbook Tee or Bandana at ⁠https://shop.heartstartspounding.com/ Today we’re exploring the term that has been circulating online for the last few months, Alpine Divorce, and two cases where these “divorces” of sorts were life-threatening. In 2012, Toni Henthorn fell from an off-trail ledge in Rocky Mountain National Park. Her husband Harold said she slipped, but a ranger found a map that indicated otherwise. Thirteen years later, Arielle Konig was attacked by her husband, Gerhardt, on a cliffside trail in Hawaii on her birthday, but against all odds, she made it out alive. TW: Domestic abuse, mention of sexual assault on a minor, description of head injury The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or get a Corolla sedan packed with the latest features, advanced tech and head-turning style. Take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs, the spacious, family-friendly Grand Highlander and adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid and plug-in hybrid models available across the lineup, plus efficient all-electrics like the BZ, BZ Woodland and all-wheel-drive CHR, you can drive your way and skip the pump. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with legendary resale value,

• 0:44Kaelyn Moore?

  built on a reputation for quality and reliability. So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding in our Dark Summer Series. As always, I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. Last week, we covered a mysterious cruise disappearance and I wanted to thank everyone who listened and reached out. I put a little anonymous confessions box on our Instagram, @heartsstarts pounding, to see what all of you thought of cruises in general. And your answers did not disappoint. Someone wrote, "There's nothing scarier than looking out at the dark water at night. Pure nightmare fuel." And another person wrote,

• 1:29Kaelyn Moore?

  "After watching the poop cruise documentary, I don't know if I could ever go on one." And that's, of course, referring to the Netflix documentary that came out. And actually, a lot of people said that they thought they'd get too seasick to ever go on a cruise and that they actually have a fear of throwing up. And fun fact, I too have that fear of throwing up. I didn't know it was that common and I don't know why we all have it, but solidarity at least. This week, we are pivoting and we're talking about a phrase that I have seen all over social media. Alpine divorce. The idea that sometimes your lover will take you on a hike and leave you on the mountain to die. I started researching stories that relate to this phrase, and oh my God, I could write an entire book about this. This happens way more than I would have ever thought.

• 2:12Kaelyn Moore?

  But today I want to tell you about two of those cases that I could not stop thinking about. And after listening, I don't think you will either. As always, if you have case requests or scary stories that you want to send in, I love reading them. We have a form at heartsidespounding.com. And you can now sign up for our free newsletter on patreon.com on our free tier where I give Heart Serves Pounding updates and include some recommendations on what to watch. This week, I'm including a cruise documentary that I do think you'll want to check out. All right, let's get into the episode. At 5:54 PM on September 29th, 2012, a 911 dispatcher in Colorado got the following call.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency? Hello, my name is Harold Henthorne. I'm in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Okay. I'm in an Alpine mountain rescue team immediately.

• 3:01Kaelyn Moore?

  58-year-old Harold Henthorne told the dispatcher that his wife had fallen and needed to be rescued. He said that they had been hiking off trail on Deer Mountain, taking photos from an overlook, and she had stepped back and lost her footing. She was now at the bottom of a cliff and he needed help fast. The dispatcher starts asking him a couple of questions, just trying to get a better understanding of the situation. And for a man that just watched his wife fall off of a cliff, he seems rather measured.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  My wife had fallen from a rock on the north summit of Deer Mountain on the Deer Mountain Trail when she's in really critical condition. She's got a bad fall. How far did you fall, sir? 30, 40, 30 feet.

• 3:50Kaelyn Moore?

  He describes how far his wife fell like he's telling the dispatcher how far he can throw a football. And then, less than four minutes into the call, while the dispatcher is still asking questions, he tells them that the battery on his phone is running low, and he just disconnects the call. Now, the nearest ranger station was miles away from where the couple was. The trail that they were on was off the marked path. The sun was now going down over the Rockies. The temperature was dropping fast. And somewhere at the bottom of a cliff in one of the most remote corners of Rocky Mountain National Park, a woman named Toni Hen Thorne lay injured. Or worse. Rescuers were immediately dispatched and tried to save the woman, but it was not going to be easy to get to where she was.

• 4:33Kaelyn Moore?

  See, Deer Mountain sits in the southern reaches of Rocky Mountain National Park, just outside of Estes Park, Colorado. The Deer Mountain Trail winds upward through strands of lodgepole and limber pine. It's very beautiful. The summit tops out at just over 10,000 feet. On a clear afternoon, the views reach out across the Front Range in every direction, mountains stacked behind mountains all the way to the horizon. But Harold and Toni Hen Thorne were not at the summit. They had left the marked trail behind and scrambled down to an off-trail ledge, this remote rocky overlook roughly two and a half miles from the trailhead, in a section of the park that most visitors never see. And this detail

• 5:17Kaelyn Moore?

  stuck out to the rescuers as they made their way towards Toni. This was not a place you would find on the main trail map. It wasn't even really somewhere you would wander into by accident. It was out of the way, and that's putting it lightly. Rangers reached the scene just before eight o'clock that night, three hours after she had fallen. And the drop from that ledge was really steep. It was more than 100 feet of exposed rock face, likely closer to 130 feet. And when they reached Toni at the base, unfortunately, it was already too late. Toni was just 50 years old. A Mississippi girl born and raised in Jackson, she had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Mississippi's Medical School. She built a career as a nationally

• 5:59Kaelyn Moore?

  Ophthalmologist and had served as the team ophthalmologist for the Colorado Avalanche. She came from this really close knit family with roots in Mississippi's petroleum industry, and she had a seven year old daughter at home. Toni was this amazing and accomplished woman, but there was another thing about her that was going to stand out as being incredibly strange to the investigators. Toni had three surgeries on her knee. She was not by any measure an avid hiker, so what was she doing at the bottom of such a rugged, out of the way area? Now, her husband Harold's account of what happened that day was pretty consistent. He told it to the first ranger who reached him that evening.

• 6:42Kaelyn Moore?

  He said that the couple had this beautiful hike. They found a lovely off trail spot for a picnic lunch, this little scenic overlook with a view out over the park. After they had their meal, Toni stood up to take a photograph. She stepped back, she lost her footing on the uneven rock. Before he could even register what was happening, she had already fallen off the side. And he said that he was performing CPR on her the entire time, doing everything he could until the 911 call connected to the dispatcher. Now investigators took his story down and they looked at the area where Toni had landed, and they noticed three odd things about the area. The first was Toni's camera, the one that she was using to take a photo when she fell. It was lying really close to her body.

• 7:26Kaelyn Moore?

  And to the investigators, that just didn't look right. Now, if she had fallen over a hundred feet while she was holding this camera, the ranger expected that it would have been flung out into the rock field somewhere. So why was it so close to her as if it had been placed there? There was also the fact that her wedding ring was still on her finger, but the diamond was missing. It was never recovered from the crime scene. And the third thing was that Toni had been wearing lipstick when she fell. Now, maybe that's not strange. Sure, it's a hike, but some people like to dress up no matter the occasion. The thing that was weird about her lipstick, though. That it wasn't smudged. Harold had told the investigators that he was doing mouth to mouth on Tony.

• 8:09Kaelyn Moore?

  Yet, none of her lipstick was outside of her lip line or on his face. So, the next thing the investigators wanted to do was just take a look at the vehicle that Tony and Harold had arrived in that day. So Harold led him over to where he had parked. And one of the rangers popped open a door and started rummaging through the things that Harold had in this car. And there was something that caught his eye. There was this map that Harold had of Rocky Mountain National Park, and it only had one marking on the entire map. And it was an X, right at the spot where Tony had fallen. The ranger looked at Harold and then looked back at the map and knew in his gut that

• 8:51Kaelyn Moore?

  something was deeply wrong with Harold's story. While Tony's body was sent off to be examined by a coroner, Harold was released and returned home. He had to tell his seven-year-old daughter about the death of her mother, but he phrased it really strangely. He told the girl that, quote, "Mommy had lost consciousness forever," and that she shouldn't cry because people were going to be watching their family. He also started controlling her behavior in all these really concerning ways. He would make her ask permission to even leave her room for a moment, and he kept a baby monitor in there at all times. Like, he just really wanted to know where she was at any given moment. And then, there was also Tony's family. They reached out to Harold for more information on what happened that day.

• 9:34Kaelyn Moore?

  Her brother, Barry, was actually a cardiologist. It made sense that he wanted to know more about the circumstances surrounding Tony's death, because what if Tony had suffered some sort of heart attack while she was on the mountain? But every time Harold would tell Tony's family about what happened, the details would change. And Tony's family felt like they were getting four or five different versions of the story, and now they were having trouble keeping track of what happened. And they became even more suspicious when Harold not only filed a claim for Tony's $4.5 million life insurance policy, but he immediately sent half a million dollars to his brother. Like, he was trying to move the money around really fast, maybe to hide some of it. With Each passing day, Tony's family was growing more and more suspicious that Harold was hiding

• 10:17Kaelyn Moore?

  something. And they weren't the only ones. Investigators were silently looking into Tony's death more because they agreed something was very weird about Harold and his story. And what they found, when they started digging around a little bit more, was pretty shocking. So what followed next was a deeper investigation, and where Tony died was about to play a huge role in how the investigation would go. Because Toni Henthorn didn't just die in a national park, she died in a federal jurisdiction, and that mattered a lot. So the National Park Service has its own investigative branch, a small core of federal agents responsible for crimes across the entire national park system. There were roughly 33 agents nationwide at the time.

• 11:00Kaelyn Moore?

  When a death in Rocky Mountain National Park looked like it might be something other than an accident, those were the agents that got involved. So NPS Special Agent Beth Schott started working on the case. And Beth was this incredible detail-oriented investigator. She hiked Deer Mountain more than 15 times during her investigation. She walked the trail at every hour, in every type of weather, mapping every angle just to see if she could find something that wasn't there before. FBI Special Agent Johnny Gruising also worked the case alongside her. Beth was definitely not the type to leave any stone unturned, literally or figuratively. And the first thing that she wanted to look at was Harold's

• 11:42Kaelyn Moore?

  phone records. And it turns out that during the window Harold said he was down at the base of that cliff performing CPR on his wife, that's when his phone was lighting up with activity. Somehow, during the time that he said he was doing chest compressions, he had also made 22 phone calls and exchanged 98 text messages. 98, including at least 16 messages to a friend asking if he could drive to pick Harold up from Estes Park, and recommending that the friend take this specific route. He also sent a text to Tony's brother Barry, the cardiologist, at 6:16 PM. That was 20 minutes after he made the 911 call. And the text just said, "She's gone."

• 12:24Kaelyn Moore?

  No context. But by the time he eventually called Barry, he had already been on the phone with at least a dozen other people. And most of those calls happened before he had even called 911. And the Laramie County coroner would later testify that based on Tony's injuries and the evidence that was found at the scene, she had almost certainly died within 20 to 60 minutes of the fall. And that certainly would have been before the first 911 call went out at 5:54 PM. Special Agent Schott knew that Harold's phone was going to hold more information than just these phone calls and texts. It also had his location. And if you thought things already looked bad for him, they're about to look a whole lot worse. Harold's GPS data placed him inside of Rocky Mountain National Park

• 13:06Kaelyn Moore?

  at least eight or nine times in the six weeks before Tony's death. Every single time, he had gone by himself. And when investigators confronted him about this, he said that he had only been there once, even though they were looking at the data and they knew that that was a lie. Then there was also a photograph recovered from Harold's phone. It was taken that afternoon at the cliff, and it showed Harold standing at the very edge of the cliff, holding a pine branch angled back towards the spot where Tony was standing. Special Agent Schott saw that photo and immediately could tell what it was. I mean, it looked like Harold was trying to lure Tony towards him to stand where he was standing, right at the cliff's edge. And then Agent Schott got a call from the coroner. It was confirmed.

• 13:50Kaelyn Moore?

  There was no physical evidence that any CPR was done on Tony. They would have expected to see cracked ribs or bruises, but no, there was nothing. For as damning as all of this information I just shared with you was, though, the most startling evidence hadn't even been discovered yet. See, after Tony's death had been reported on and picked up by news publications, investigators started receiving letters. 17 of them, actually. All of them were anonymous. And they weren't just sent to the investigators. They were also sent to Tony's family and to Brian Moss, who is an investigative reporter at KCNC, the CBS Denver affiliate. All of these letters had the same message.

• 14:34Kaelyn Moore?

  These letters said that this isn't the first one of Harold's wives to die under strange circumstances. Harold had been married once before to a woman named Sandra Lynn Henthorn. Everyone called her Lynn. She had died on May 6th, 1995, at just 37 years old. And the official story, the one that Harold had told authorities when they arrived on the scene, was that she and Harold had been out on a rural stretch of Highway 67 west of Sedalia, Colorado, when their car allegedly slipped off a jack while they were changing a tire by the side of the road. Lynn wound up pinned beneath the vehicle, and her official cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation.

• 15:14Kaelyn Moore?

  The only witness to this entire horrible event was Harold. And even still, Douglas County authorities had closed the case as an accident in less than a week. And when these letters started being publicized, it really got Tony's family thinking because they knew about another event that had happened to Tony the previous year in late August of 2011. That was 14 months before Tony would die on Deer Mountain. And it made them rethink everything. So Harold and Tony were at their vacation cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado. Harold was working on the deck one night at 10:00 PM, for some reason, when he called out to Tony to come help him with something. The exact details of what happened are a little murky, but we know that Tony walked

• 15:59Kaelyn Moore?

  outside and a heavy structural beam came down onto her head. Now, the reason that details are murky is because Harold had at least three different versions of what happened. He told the ER doctor that the beam had fallen off the deck, but he told a friend that it had slipped from his hands while he was out on a ladder. Regardless, it had struck her and it fractured the vertebrae in her neck. But she survived. Later on, she would tell her mother, Yvonne, that "if I hadn't bent down after I walked outside, that beam would have killed me." And just like in Lynn's case, the Beam incident had been ruled an accident and no charges were ever filed. But Tony's family always thought that incident was so strange.

• 16:42Kaelyn Moore?

  It just didn't add up. And they didn't even know about the life insurance policies. Harold had taken out three life insurance policies on Tony. They were all stacked. They were all managed by him. And apparently, she didn't know about any of them. And maybe I'm naive, but I didn't know that you could do that. Take out life insurance policies on a spouse without their knowledge. That feels like a huge oversight. The total of all these life insurance policies came out to roughly $4.5 million, which is what Harold collected. And initially in the investigation, investigators had asked Harold how much life insurance he carried on Tony. He only said that there was one policy, and it was just worth a million and a half dollars.

• 17:22Kaelyn Moore?

  There was also the educational annuity. Tony's parents had set aside $205,000 specifically to fund their granddaughter's education. And Harold had quietly redirected it and changed the beneficiary to himself. And the whole time I'm reading about all of this, I kept asking myself, what did this guy do for a job? Because why is he stealing all of the money of everyone around him? Doesn't he have his own money that he can do whatever he wants with? Well, let me tell you what I found. Harold said that his profession was being a certified fundraiser. Basically, he said that he was a consultant to major churches and nonprofit organizations across the country. He had all of these business cards that he had made up. He had this professional

• 18:04Kaelyn Moore?

  title he used. He had a lot of goodwill from Christian philanthropic circles that he said that he worked with. And Tony believed him. I mean, she had no reason not to. Her family believed him. But Beth Schott didn't believe him. So she went and she pulled Harold's tax returns. And she saw that he had zero reported income from 2005 through 2011. Zero income. The organization whose certification appeared on his business cards had no record of him being a member. Harold hadn't had a verifiable job since 1992. He had been exclusively living off of his wives. Which is a fine thing to do, but when you're lying about it and you're stealing all of their money, that's where I draw the line.

• 18:47Kaelyn Moore?

  And the stealing from women extended far beyond his own circle. There was also Grace Reichel, who was the sister of Harold's first wife, the one who died under the car. Sometime in 2009 or 2010, Harold had taken out a $400,000 life insurance policy on Grace and named himself the sole beneficiary. Again, how is this a legal thing that people can do? Grace had believed that the policy was for her daughters. She found out the truth after Harold was arrested, though. She would later tell ABC 2020 that she believes she was meant to be one of Harold's victims. Harold had found both of his wives through Christian dating networks, spaces where he

• 19:27Kaelyn Moore?

  was presenting himself as being devout and professionally accomplished and was probably not being asked to provide any documentation to prove himself. These women were taking him at face value for the man he was presenting himself as, which is terrifying because I think that's something we all do. Harold was arrested in November 2014 at 58 years old. A federal grand jury had indicted him for first degree murder. The trial opened on September 8th, 2015, and the first thing to really come up in the trial was the location. It seems that this remote off-trail ledge was the perfect place to murder someone, as one of the prosecutors said. The defense called no witnesses during the trial. Harold did not testify.

• 20:11Kaelyn Moore?

  The jury deliberated for roughly 10 hours, and on September 21st, 2015, they returned a verdict: guilty of first degree murder. Harold was sentenced on December 8th, mandatory life without the possibility of parole. He did have something to say before the sentence was handed down, though. At the end of all of that, he said, quote, "Tony was a remarkable woman. I loved her with all my heart. I did not kill Tony or anyone else." And he spent a lot of time trying to get out of jail. He petitioned the Supreme Court, actually, in 2018, and they declined to see his case. He filed post-conviction motions alleging ineffective counsel. Those were rejected in 2022. By 2023, every avenue of appeal was closed for him, and now he is currently serving

• 20:55Kaelyn Moore?

  life without parole in a federal facility in Indiana.

• 21:01Kaelyn Moore?

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• 21:46Kaelyn Moore?

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• 22:05Kaelyn Moore?

  Harold was the worst of the worst. I think that's pretty obvious. But I do want to take a second to focus on the women in his life. His daughter no longer speaks to him. In a February 2025 interview, she referred to him only as Mr. Henthorn. Tony's mom was in the Denver courtroom when the verdict came in. A juror hugged her afterwards and she said to a reporter, quote, "Believe it or not, I forgive him for doing it. I feel for him and his family." And then there's his first wife Lynn. Lynn's death investigation was actually reopened in October of 2012, 17 years after the fact, but less than a month after Tony's death. The details had been filed away without a second look and suddenly everything looked pretty different.

• 22:47Kaelyn Moore?

  There was a shoe print on the side of the vehicle, like there had maybe been a struggle. There were two jacks at the scene. One of them was a boat jack propped on a cinder block, which is not a standard configuration for changing a tire on the side of the road. There was also a passing motorist named Patricia, who had stopped to help and later told investigators that Harold had not wanted to cover Lynn's body with his jacket while they waited. Harold gave five different accounts of the timeline that evening. In December of 2014, Lynn's death certificate was changed from accident to undetermined. And that might be the only justice that she ever gets to see in her case, but Harold will spend the rest of his life in jail. So maybe you've heard the viral phrase that gets passed around when talking about these

• 23:31Kaelyn Moore?

  kinds of stories, Alpine divorce. Alpine divorce is a term derived from an 1893 short story of the same name, written by Robert Barr. The story revolves around a husband who plans to end his marriage by pushing his wife off a cliff while hiking in the Swiss Alps. However, when the couple reaches the cliff's edge, Mrs. Bodman reveals that she's anticipated this plan all along, and she's told her friends to watch out for him, hotel staff, and she also arranged for witnesses to follow them. And then she throws herself over the wall, framing her husband for her own death. The story ends with John standing alone as two men arrive, realizing that the truth will never be believed. It's kind of ironic that in the actual story that started the phrase, there's a big question over who is

• 24:13Kaelyn Moore?

  actually guilty. And that kind of brings me to my next story. It's a story about a couple that goes on a hike, and only one of them makes it down safely. And it's also about the questions that arise as to what really happened up on that mountain. So just like in the last story, this one also begins on a mountain trail, not on most maps, the Poli Puka Trail in Hawaii, which is behind the bus parking area at the New Uwanu Poli lookout on the windward side of Oahu. It's a spot on the Poli Highway where tourists stop to take photos of the mountains. There are signs all over the place, warning you to not stand too close to the edge. The trail itself is unmarked. The state's Department of Land

• 24:55Kaelyn Moore?

  and Natural Resources discouraged people from hiking it. There's every reason not to go, but people go anyways. The views are very beautiful. You can see Oahu while you're up on the cliff's edge. However, the drop on either side of that ridge, as you're looking out at that beautiful view, is several hundred feet. And in some places, it's actually more. Hikers have died on this trail. On the morning of March 24, 2025, Amanda Morris and Sarah Bushbaum were making their way up that trail. Both were registered nurses there for a hike. The trade winds were blowing, the forest pressing around the narrow path, and then, somewhere up ahead of them on the ridge, they heard a woman screaming. It was really

• 25:36Kaelyn Moore?

  soft at first, but eventually they could start hearing words taking shape. Please help me. He's trying to kill me. They both rushed towards the screams, and Sarah Bushbaum pulled out her phone and made the following 911 call.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm... I'm currently being attacked on top of Polly Tuka. Where? Um, there's a man trying to kill her. She's blood all over her face.

• 26:01Kaelyn Moore?

  The two nurses came around to bend in the trail and found that there was a woman on the ground. Her face and her scalp were covered in blood. She was conscious, and she was also alone. Whoever she was screaming about was gone. Amanda and Sarah both sprung into action using their expertise as nurses. They ran to her while they were still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher and they helped her get upright. Then, they held on to her and began their descent back down towards the lookout parking lot. They were supporting her on either side. Honolulu police responded really fast to the call. Body camera footage captured the woman in the parking lot, conscious, standing with her face crusted in blood from the wounds that were on her scalp. And they asked her what her name was. And she responded, "I'm Ariel Koenig."

• 26:45Kaelyn Moore?

  She had been hiking with her husband, Gerhardt Koenig. And what followed over the next six-plus hours was one of the largest man hunts in recent Honolulu history. The Police Department's Domestic Violence Detail, their Strategic Enforcement Unit, Crime Reduction Units, the Special Services Division, the Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources, and the Honolulu Fire Department, all deployed to look for Ariel's husband. Around 6 o'clock that evening, it was actually an off-duty police officer who had spotted a man emerging from the brush onto Polly Drive. There was blood all over his shirt. The man saw the officer and turned around and ran back into the brush, but the officer was able to catch up to him and detain him.

• 27:28Kaelyn Moore?

  Gerhart Koenig was 46 years old at the time of his arrest. He'd been born in South Africa, raised in San Diego after his family immigrated when he was 14. He went on to medical school and an anesthesiology residency at the University of Pittsburgh. He eventually became an assistant professor there in anesthesiology and bioengineering. He worked at UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, for years before his family relocated. In 2023, they moved to Maui where Gerhart was contracted to provide anesthesiology services at Maui Health. Now, an anesthesiologist- Is someone you have to be able to trust completely because you're at your most vulnerable when you're in the room with them. It's someone who controls the line between consciousness and unconsciousness,

• 28:11Kaelyn Moore?

  whose judgment you hand yourself over to completely. And I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want an anesthesiologist who had tried to kill someone before. Now, Gerhart had been married once before to a woman named Jessica Patella. That marriage ended in 2014 when she filed for divorce. He had two children from that marriage, including an older son named Emil, who was 19 at the time of this incident. His current wife, Ariel, was 36 years old on March 24th, 2025, which also happened to be her birthday. Now Ariel was also an incredibly accomplished woman. She had studied nuclear engineering at Penn State and then spent 11 years at Westinghouse Electric and Fuel Engineering. In September of 2022, she joined Terra Power as a project manager,

• 28:55Kaelyn Moore?

  working on high-say-low enriched uranium supply. Ariel, by any measure, was exceptional at what she did. And she and Gerhart had met on eHarmony and married in September of 2018. Together, they had two young sons, born in 2020 and in 2023, and they had relocated from Pittsburgh to Maui, purchasing a home in the foothills above Kahului for $1.5 million. An accomplished doctor, an accomplished engineer, their two little boys, a house in paradise. From the outside, they had a perfect life. But as happens in a lot of people's lives, things on the outside were not the same as how they were on the inside of that marriage. In December of 2024, Gerhart had woken up in the middle of the night and picked up Ariel's phone.

• 29:38Kaelyn Moore?

  He opened her WhatsApp and found that there were messages between her and a colleague at Terra Power. It was an exchange that Gerhart thought constituted as an emotional affair. He read these messages and thought they were really flirtatious. Ariel and this colleague had this system where they would say the word Haliu, which stood for high-say-low enriched uranium, as this discreet signal to each other whenever Gerhart was nearby. The confrontation that followed after Gerhart found these messages was really ugly. He demanded that Ariel quit her job entirely. He called her all These names, he bought a recording device to keep tabs on her. He even reached out to her affair partner's wife to tell her about the affair, kind of in an attempt to ruin Ariel's life.

• 30:21Kaelyn Moore?

  But Ariel said that despite all of this, despite how angry he was about the affair, she was willing to do whatever it took to fix their marriage. So they decided they would go into couples counseling. They listened to this audiobook together too, about healing after infidelity. And three months passed, they were on the mend. They were working together to repair their marriage. And that's when Gearhart booked their hike in Oahu. Ariel had mentioned three days before their departure that she had always wanted to visit Oahu. And Gearhart made all of the arrangements for this trip. He booked the hotel, he got them this really nice dinner reservation for that night. And that morning, before they left their hotel, Gearhart had given her a heart shaped card. And inside it said, "You are the heart of our family. The kids and I hid the jackpot with you. Love always, G."

• 31:06Kaelyn Moore?

  And then they drove out to the hike. Ariel had taken photos that day of the view on Snapchat. She sent those to her family. And then the couple began the Polypuka hike at around 10:00 in the morning. But the trail was not really what she was expecting for a fun birthday hike. It got really steep, really fast. About a quarter of a mile in, the cliff dropped away on one side, leaving the couple completely exposed to the fall below. And she started getting really uncomfortable. She was clinging to tree branches as they were taking selfies. You can actually see her grip in one of the photos and the drop is visible behind them. And in this photo, you can also see that Gearhart is wearing a small black backpack. And that's going to be really important. According to Ariel, shortly after they took their last selfie,

• 31:52Kaelyn Moore?

  Gearhart grabbed her by the upper arms and he told her, "I'm so sick of this. Get back over here." And then he started pushing her towards the edge of the cliff, which was less than 10 feet away at that point. In a panic, she threw herself on the ground and started grabbing at roots and shrubs around her, anything that was rooted into the earth that could hold on to her. But she said that Gearhart straddled her. And then he reached into that black backpack and pulled out a syringe. And he told her to hold still. Now she was able to knock that out of his hand. It went flying somewhere on the mountain. But the nightmare wasn't over because he went back in the backpack and pulled out another syringe. Whatever was about to happen, Ariel felt like Gerhardt had clearly planned for it.

• 32:35Kaelyn Moore?

  He put his hand over her mouth and he said something that really sums up the whole Alpine divorce horror perfectly. He said to her, "Nobody's going to hear you out here. Nobody's coming to save you." Ariel was not going down without a fight, though. She bit onto his forearm. She grabbed him. She fought as hard as she could. And at some point, Gerhardt reached down. He picked up a rock that was by them on the trail and he struck her in the head with it. She estimated that it happened somewhere around 10 times. But from somewhere down below, she could hear the two nurses screaming that they were calling 911. And Gerhardt heard this too, and he froze. Ariel was able to crawl on her hands and knees towards the nurses' voices as Gerhardt fled away.

• 33:19Kaelyn Moore?

  And that was the story that Ariel told investigators as they were wiping the blood from the event off of her face. And the first thing they wanted to go do was find that syringe because they wanted to know what was inside of it, but also they needed to know that it existed, that the version of the story Ariel was telling was actually what happened, you know, despite the fact that she suffered a head injury. So the investigators went back up. They searched the trail and they didn't find anything. And the nurses who found Ariel said that they didn't see a syringe either and, you know, they had worked with a lot of syringes inside of the hospital. They knew what they looked like. And yet, when they scanned the ground around her, they didn't see anything like that. And that made the investigators wonder if Ariel was potentially embellishing part of the story.

• 34:05Kaelyn Moore?

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• 34:48Kaelyn Moore?

  their Luxe weave French linen sheets are stone washed and get softer with every wash. Really beautiful for a bedroom refresh. Go to sijohome.com and use code HSP to get 20% off your first order. That's S I J O H O M E dot com and use code HSP for 20% off at checkout.

• 35:07Kaelyn Moore?

  But three days after the attack, Ariel returned to the family home without Gearhart. And she was looking through the house when she found a Nike fanny pack in a closet. And inside she saw Gearhart's Kaiser Permanente employee ID, multiple empty syringes and needles, and also vials of propofol. Now, propofol is a really powerful intravenous anesthetic that's used in operating rooms. It induces unconsciousness quickly and completely. It also is for most people, the drug that's associated with the 2009 death of Michael Jackson, whose personal physician administered it to him as a sleep aid. It is kind of notorious for giving you the best nap of your life. Gearhart was an anesthesiologist.

• 35:49Kaelyn Moore?

  He had unrestricted access to propofol, which he potentially had been stealing from the hospital that he worked at. It looked like he brought it to a Wahoo and a fanny pack along with the syringes that he would need to administer it. However, no syringes would ever be recovered from the Polypuka trail. The defense would make that point repeatedly at trial. But Ariel had testified that when she knocked the syringe out of his hand, they were on a cliff's edge. It could have gone anywhere. It was super windy that day. Honolulu Police did seize the fanny pack and that became central evidence at the trial. The trial ran for roughly three weeks in March of 2026 before Honolulu Circuit Court Judge Paul Wong. Now Gearhart's defense attorney presented this counter narrative to Ariel's story.

• 36:33Kaelyn Moore?

  They said that this had been an unplanned, unpremeditated scuffle that was precipitated by Ariel pushing Gearhart. The Rock, they argued, was this heat of the moment response to Ariel screaming at him and striking him, all in regards to this affair that had occurred. Gearhart also took the stand in his own defense, and he claimed that this was a self-defense thing that he did. He didn't deny that he hit Ariel over the head, but he did say that she was the one that started this. And they really tried to make a big deal about Ariel's credibility. They said that she was unreliable because she had been hiding an affair from Gearhart for who knows how long. She was clearly capable of lying, and the syringe was never found at the scene. Was she lying about that, too? Sure, there was medical gear

• 37:17Kaelyn Moore?

  in her home that was found, but that could have been from anything. Gearhart was a medical professional, for goodness sake. But the closing argument really cut through all of this. They said, quote, "The only thing that got Gearhart to stop was being caught red-handed", which, that was true. He heard those voices coming up the mountain, and that was when he fled. If he was trying to protect himself from Ariel, why did he continue to bash her over the head for so long? And, you know, there were also these calls that he had made to his son. So during the six-hour manhunt that followed, Gearhart placed two FaceTime calls to his son, Emil. The first was at 10:42 in the morning, four minutes after the 911 call was placed. He told Emil that he was not going to make it back to Maui.

• 37:59Kaelyn Moore?

  He said that he had just tried to kill Ariel because she had been cheating on him, said that outright, and that he also planned to jump off the cliff before the police could catch him. The second call was at 11:46 a.m., and Gearhart asked Emil if he had told anyone. And then he said, quote, "I'm going to go before the police catch me." But he wasn't able to before the police officer caught up with him and brought him into custody. On April 8, 2026, at 2:18 in the afternoon, the jury returned the verdict. They had deliberated for just eight hours. Gearhart was found guilty of attempted manslaughter based on extreme mental or emotional disturbance. He was not found guilty of attempted second-degree murder. And this distinction really matters. Attempted second-degree murder would have

• 38:44Kaelyn Moore?

  been life with the possibility of parole. Attempted manslaughter under Hawaii's extreme emotional disturbance Provision carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. And a juror spoke to reporters afterwards and said that the jury was not convinced that Gerhart had specifically intended to kill Ariel on that particular day. But this juror also noted that a head injury is a very deadly part of the body. Gerhart's sentencing is scheduled for August 13th of 2026. It's coming up as of the airing of this episode and prosecutors are going to seek that 20-year maximum. Ariel testified on the one-year anniversary of the day that Gerhart tried to kill her. She described the scar on her forehead, the patch of scalp where her hair no longer grows.

• 39:27Kaelyn Moore?

  Her two sons were three and six years old at the time of the verdict and they are now in her custody. She did file for divorce in May of 2025. And as of this recording, Gerhart is being held while he waits for sentencing. You know, I was trying to write an outro for this episode, but in classic Heart Starts Pounding fashion, there was a huge update on an Alpine divorce case that happened as I was writing the episode. A bunch of you messaged me about it on Instagram and so I wanted to take a second here and just explain what's happening. So on June 25th, 2026, a man named David Vandermeer died in police custody after appearing to take his own life. Vandermeer was waiting to go to trial for the 2006 death of his wife. So in 2006, David and his wife Bernadette were on an anniversary trip to Zion National Park

• 40:12Kaelyn Moore?

  when Bernadette fell roughly 1,200 feet to her death from Angels Landing, which is one of the most dangerous trails in America. And because it's such a dangerous trail, her death was initially ruled an accident. But basically, everyone thought that it was incredibly suspicious. Bernadette fell in a place where people don't usually fall. David's story kept changing as to what happened that day. And then it came out that he had raised her life insurance and collected over half a million dollars after she died. I mean, this is basically the playbook that we've already gone over in this episode. Years went by, no arrests were ever made. But then, a few years ago, a woman came forward and helped paint a bigger picture of what was happening in the couple's life at around the time of Bernadette's death.

• 40:54Kaelyn Moore?

  See, David was a youth pastor at the time and he had been grooming a 14-year-old girl. And he told her that they could be together if only his wife were dead. The teen girl was able to put an end to the abuse the night before Bernadette was killed. And now the multiple women he brutalized and their families will never see justice because he took his own life and he's never going to stand trial for what he allegedly did. And that is why it's so important to end this episode with this. If anything in this episode resonated with you, maybe a little bit too much. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or you can text START to 88788. That is all I have for you today.

• 41:38Kaelyn Moore?

  Now I turn it over to you wherever you listen. Feel free to leave comments, questions, theories, thoughts. I love hearing from you guys. I love hearing your stories, your updates, everything. If you've ever been on a hike with someone who just left you behind, because that's another thing that comes up with these Alpine divorces all the time. I was on a hike with my boyfriend and he just like took off without me and I was left on the mountain and I got lost. Let me know, you can comment wherever you listen. I will be back next week with another episode. I will see you all then. And if you want to hear more stories of Alpine divorces, I have the High Council tier on Patreon where every week I do a bonus extra show where I talk a bit more about the episode. I talk about stories that didn't make it in. I give a little bit more context to stories. That all happens with my sibling Leo. We just kind of chat through the research, talk about some stuff that's been on our minds,

• 42:22Kaelyn Moore?

  the true crime stories that we can't stop thinking about for the week. You can always join us there. And until next time, stay curious. Ooh.

• 42:35Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Red Rum Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out heartstarts pounding.com.

• 42:55Kaelyn Moore?

  Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.