The Mountain

On January 18, 2025, Thomas Plamberger and his girlfriend Kerstin Gurtner began climbing the tallest mountain in Austria. But when they were almost to the top, they got stuck. One year later, prosecutors filed charges against Thomas for Kerstin’s death. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:29Speaker 00

  Tell me about the decision to go mountain climbing on January 18th, 2025. Who's idea was that?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  That depends on who you ask.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  How experienced were they at mountaineering and climbing?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  That also depends on who you ask.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  In late 2024, Thomas Plamberger and Kirsten Gertner had been dating for almost a year. Thomas was 36 years old and a professional chef in Salzburg, Austria. Kirsten Gertner was 33 and worked at an office in the same city. They'd met on Tinder and had started to talk about moving in. In January, they were going to go on a trip together.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Thomas and Kirsten were planning on summiting Grosse Glockner, which is the largest mountain in the Austrian Alps.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  New York Times reporter Jonathan Wolf.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  And they decided to take the most dangerous route, which includes sort of like this really sort of rocky, arched climb to the summit.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  A climbing tour company warns people that to take this route, you need to be in very good physical shape and have some rock climbing experience. An experienced mountaineer told a BBC reporter that in bad conditions, trying to summit Grosse Glockner can feel like fighting to survive.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Grosse Glockner's peak is over 12,000 feet above sea level. More than 7,000 people climb it every year.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  On January 18, 2025, Kirsten and Thomas began their climb of Grosse Glockner at 6:45 a.m. They had backpacks with ropes, emergency blankets, a tent, and headlamps. Kirsten had brought a split snowboard. She planned to use it to descend the mountain after they reached the summit.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  They were planning on it being an overnight hike. So it was, you know, going to be a very long day.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Some mountain guides break the trip up into two days, a day to reach the beginning of the ridge and then a second day to get to the peak.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Around 1:30 p.m., Thomas and Kirsten arrived at a resting point known as the breakfast spot, about 11,600 feet above sea level.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  And this was kind of like a point of no return before the summit. Like, a lot of times, people, if they don't get there at a certain time, they might end up turning back. But it's definitely a moment where you sort of rest for a moment and check in and see if you're going to continue. And mountaineers I spoke to said, you know, that's definitely a point where a lot of times they make their clients rest, whether or not they want to.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Thomas Plamberger said at this point, he and Kirsten didn't feel tired, so they kept going.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  It seems like there were some hikers who saw them on the mountain, including one hiker who said that he hiked with them for a little while, a little stretch, and he said that Thomas was, you know, sort of looking after Kirsten, checking in on her.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  How did people say that Kirsten was doing at that point?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  They said that she looked like she was doing fine. She wasn't struggling and seemed like a pretty normal hike to them.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  At nightfall, at around 5:00 PM in winter, Thomas and Kirsten were still climbing. About an hour and a half later, their headlamps were visible on a webcam that livestreams a view of the top of the mountain.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  We can see their light sort of slowly making its way up the mountain, and it's the only light that's on the mountain. So, you know, it's possible there's other people not using lights, but it seems like they were the only two people on the mountain.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Their plan was to climb to the summit in the dark.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Mountaineers that I've spoken to said that that's actually not out of the ordinary. Like, it's definitely riskier. You'd need to be of a certain level. But people do climb this mountain at night. And it seems like they were just a little bit more slow going, and they were sort of stuck on the mountain, and the weather turned quite bad. There was a weather pattern that the locals called the phone winds, which can really bring like really intense, cold, blustery winds to the peaks of the Alps. And from mountaineers that I spoke to, they were actually aware that this was happening on this day. So they said that they basically chose not to summit the mountain.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  At around 8:00 PM, they stopped for an hour and a half. Their climbing rope had gotten stuck, and then Kirsten hurt her hand.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  At 10:30 PM, an Alpine police helicopter went to check on Thomas and Kirsten. The helicopter passed them about six times. When they did not signal for help, the helicopter left.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Around this time, Alpine Police also tried to call Thomas. His phone number was listed on his climbing permit, but he never answered the phone. Later, Thomas Plamberger said he had not realized his phone was ringing because it had been set to vibrate. But Thomas says that soon after the helicopter left, Kirsten suddenly showed increasing signs of exhaustion. About a half hour past midnight, Thomas called the police.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  And there's real debate about what happened during this phone call. Thomas says that he was convinced that police were aware that a rescue was needed and that he wanted them to send a helicopter. The police, on the other hand, said that Thomas in this moment told them that everything was fine, and so they did not start a rescue procedure.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And then, for three hours, no one heard from him. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Alpine Police attempted to get back in touch with Thomas Plamberger by phone and then by texting him on WhatsApp. One officer wrote, "Do you need help now or not?" But they didn't get a response.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  In his WhatsApp, it appears it has the two checkmarks or whatever. It was delivered. We don't know if it was read, but it was delivered.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  When he had spoken to the police earlier, Thomas says they told him the best thing was for them to keep moving.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Because if you stop in a very cold environment, there's a chance that it'll be worse for you. Basically, you'll start to lose energy. You'll start to lose warmth in your body. So he was in the impression that he needed to keep moving. And so that's what he told Kirsten after that phone call, that they needed to keep moving.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  That night, the temperature dropped to 17 degrees Fahrenheit, but felt even colder with the wind chill.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  The wind would have been very strong at this point because when you get towards the peak of Grossglockner, it's really exposed. So a lot of the winds that might have been blocked off in other areas as you're climbing the mountain, that's no longer the case. You're just completely exposed, and it would have been very cold at that moment.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  They made it to just below the summit, where they stopped for about an hour and a half. Thomas says that at that point, Kirsten was too exhausted to move anymore. He said at around 2:00 a.m., he and Kirsten agreed that he should try to get down the mountain by himself, to try and get help at one of the refuge huts.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  At around 3:30 a.m., Thomas Plamberger called the police again and told them that he was on his way down and that he had left Kirsten behind. He asked if they could send a helicopter for her. But the wind had been picking up speed all night. By then, it was blowing up to 45 miles per hour, and they told him it was too dangerous for a helicopter to fly. Thomas told police where he had left Kirsten.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  The next day, a rescue crew headed up the mountain. Around 10:00 a.m., they found Kirsten. She was dead from hypothermia.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Kirsten's family held her funeral nine days later. The notice read, "Our lives are in God's hands. If it is His will, then do not grieve for me, but remember me with love." Kirsten's mother later said that she had to lose her life precisely where she felt so alive is almost incomprehensible to me.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Thomas wrote on Instagram, "It hurts so incredibly much."

• 10:06Speaker 00

  And then, almost a year later, Austrian prosecutors filed charges against Thomas Plamberger for grossly negligent homicide. Prosecutors said that Thomas was the more experienced climber and should have been a guarantor of Kirsten's life.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Verena Morshetz is a professor of criminal law at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  A guarantor is somebody that is responsible for another person. And where you mostly need this term is when you have a crime committed by omission. Like, it's easy to say, if I commit a crime by action, like I do something, I hit somebody, then it's clear I am the one responsible for hitting somebody. But if a crime is an omission, it's failing to act with due diligence.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  In Austria, this charge is typically used in things like a car accident or, you know, maybe a parent who is not giving the correct care to their child. Or in the mountaineering context, it can be used in certain situations where you hire a person, like a guide, that is responsible for you, to take care of you and to look after you.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  But you can also be a guarantor as a leader out of courtesy. Where you don't have a contract, you don't get paid for it, it's non-commercial, but it's just out of courtesy. And as such, you're a guarantor and also responsible for outcomes or, let's say, negative things happening to the individual that you're responsible for.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  How big of a deal was it in Austria? Was everyone talking about it?

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yes, a lot of people were talking about it. I mean, where I am, we have all these mountains, where we have a lot of alpine tours. A lot of people come and pay guides to walk up the mountains, basically, with the skis. And there is a lot of people that do tours together, like, you know, friends that go up the mountains together. So I think for that reason, many people talked about the case and said, wow, look at this case, this is happening, what's going to come out? I think we actually haven't had a criminal case like this before.

• 12:27Speaker 00

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• 14:46Speaker 00

  Over the past two decades, 29 people have died on Grosse Glockner. But Thomas Plamberger's case was the first time the Austrian government had filed criminal charges for a death. Austrian prosecutors said that Thomas Plamberger had made nine mistakes that led to Kirsten Gertner's death.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  The first error they listed was that Kirsten had less experience than Thomas at mountain climbing at that high of an altitude in the winter.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  If I was in that position of taking a young woman up to do 12,500 foot, I would make sure that both of us were properly equipped, properly experienced.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  John Leach is a survival psychologist. He was a mountaineer, an emergency mountain rescuer, for years.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  She was going to a height level she'd never been to before, in winter, at night. Now, Thomas, he'd been up at that altitude before, only been on that sort of route before, so really, he should have stepped in right at the beginning and made sure that she was properly equipped, properly kitted out. And if they were going to go and do that at that altitude, in winter, at night, then I would have basically insisted that she does it in daytime beforehand, you know, quite some time beforehand, and build up experience for that on that terrain, in that area, under those conditions, and then build it up gradually. Once you know,

• 16:20Speaker 04

  and you've got a feel for the route, you know where the top is, you can do all that, then you go for the big one, and do it in winter at night. So there's a number of failures here before she's even set off.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  A mountain guide on Grosse Glockner told reporter Jonathan Wolf that he's seen more clients than he used to, trying to summit challenging mountains, without getting used to the altitude, or continuing, even when the weather is bad.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  The prosecution also said that Thomas and Kirsten left two hours too late. Thomas had not considered how short the day would be in winter and how early night would come. Prosecutors said Thomas also should have noticed that Kirsten wasn't wearing hiking boots. Instead, she was wearing soft snowboarding boots. Other errors include Thomas not turning back when the weather got worse, Thomas not signaling for help before it got dark, and Thomas being unreachable after he had called police. Finally, they said that when Thomas left Kirsten at the summit, he had not moved Kirsten

• 17:30Speaker 00

  to an area protected from the wind, or used any of their emergency equipment to keep her warm.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  They had a small tent and emergency blankets that you can use if you get into trouble, and they said that, you know, she wasn't in the tent, the blankets weren't used.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  And there'd be more than one person I've been involved in with a mountain rescue, where we've recovered somebody who's got, you know, he's got a backpack full of survival kit, but he's not used any of it. And they say, well, it's a survival kit, I'll stick it in my bag, and they go off. But they've never used it, never even opened it at times.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  John Leach says he's never left someone behind to get help. He says it's part of an unspoken code. The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation says that climbers should be prepared to make compromises in order to balance the needs and abilities of all the group. Emergency dispatch operators often advise climbers to stay with their companions instead of leaving for help. But there aren't any official rules for mountaineers about what to do in emergencies.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, mountaineers that I spoke to said it's just never an option to leave someone by themselves on the mountain. And then at the same time, like, there's rescue workers that I've spoken to are also mountaineers, and they were saying it was hard to put yourself in the mindset of a person who's undergoing an emergency in cold weather, where you're under stress, and it's dark, and...

• 19:05Speaker 02

  They were just sort of unwilling to pass judgment on that, saying that, you know, we can look back at things and make judgments, but in that moment, it can be really difficult to understand what the best course of action is.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  John Leach says at high altitudes, people have a harder time making decisions.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  You can get cognitive impairment occurring around about nine, 10,000 feet, particularly in the skills of decision making and logical reasoning. If things are not going well, then your ability to focus gets diminished as well. So you find yourself being distracted and you're not concentrating. And that's when mistakes happen, when people start to get clumsy. And they're switching off from the major things, which afterwards, you know, if they're rescued successfully, they look back, and I've heard so many people say this, so many survivors, they say, you know, why did I do that? How far you can think ahead is severely diminished under pressure. And you get tied in more and more to the present moment.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Because if you can't see a future, then you're not going to respond to that future. But true panic is very, very rare. And usually if it does occur, it tends to occur in enclosed spaces. The most common trigger is if you're in a place, you know that your life is under threat. You know there's a chance of escape, but you also appreciate that that chance of escape is diminishing. So for example, if you're in an ocean liner that's sinking, you very rarely get panic outside, true panic. What you do get is confusion and bewilderment and people running around flapping, you know, like a bunch of penguins on steroids, all flap and no flying.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Thomas Plamberger's trial was scheduled for February 26th at a courthouse in Innsbruck. There would be no jury. The verdict would be decided by a judge named Norbert Hofer, who also worked part-time as an emergency mountain rescuer.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  He has a special competence. So all the mountain cases go to this judge.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Verena Morschatz.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Like we have judges that are assigned specific cases, like let's say corruption cases, whatnot. And he's assigned all these Alpine cases because of his knowledge, because of him understanding the difficulties that one faces.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Verena says that prosecutors would need to prove to the judge that Thomas was the more experienced climber and had been the one in charge.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  The judge tried to find out if the defendant was, in reality, more experienced. So he talked about what are the climbing techniques that she used? What are the climbing techniques that he uses? Like, he went into professional discussions with him to figure out, what did he know about alpine climbing techniques?

• 21:57Speaker 00

  But Thomas testified that he had no alpine training whatsoever. He said he wasn't a professional mountaineer. He had taught himself through trial and error and watching videos online. But he had climbed Grosse Glockner before. He testified that he and Kirsten had planned this trip together, that Kirsten loved mountain climbing and was physically very fit. They had climbed in other parts of the Alps together. But while they were planning their trip, Kirsten wrote in an email to Thomas, "I completely lack experience when it comes to winter tours."

• 22:39Speaker 00

  The prosecution called a police officer to testify. The officer said that Thomas had told him that he had been the main planner for this trip.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Another officer testified about taking Thomas's call just after midnight. He said that at that point, it wouldn't have been difficult to start a rescue operation, but it wasn't clear that they needed one. He said that, quote, "That was definitely not an emergency call."

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Thomas had put his phone on silent after speaking with the police. When Thomas was asked why he had put his phone on silent, he said he was trying to save the battery because he hadn't brought a power bank.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Thomas said the change in the weather had taken them by surprise. He said that lower down on the mountain, the wind had been nonexistent, but had gotten stronger the higher they went.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Thomas also spoke about... About his last conversation with Kirsten.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  So he said that during their tour, because of the weather, it was sometimes hard to understand each other at certain moments. But he said that when he left her, that she was in relatively good condition. And she was clear, she was responsive. She was exhausted, but she was clear. And she told him to go and that it was a mutual decision.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Thomas said he tied Kirsten to a rock before he left. He said he didn't have an explanation for why he had not sheltered her more. He testified that the last thing she said to him was, "Go on your own and save your own life."

• 24:23Speaker 00

  We'll be right back.

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• 26:22Speaker 00

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. At Thomas Plamberger's trial, the prosecution presented photos of how Kirsten Gertner had been found by rescuers. Thomas had said he had left her near the summit, but it appeared that she had fallen. She was about 150 feet from the summit, and she was, quote, "hanging from a rock face, her feet dangling."

• 27:05Speaker 00

  A doctor testified that Kirsten had died from hypothermia. He had also found that she had pneumonia at the time of her death, but it was not clear if that had contributed to her exhaustion. The prosecution also presented data from Kirsten and Thomas's smartwatches that they'd been wearing on the mountain. They said it showed a clear decline before the police helicopter went to check on them.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Kirsten Gertner's mother, Gertrude, also spoke at the trial. She said she didn't blame Thomas for Kirsten's death. She told a German newspaper that she was angry that Kirsten is being portrayed as a stupid little thing. Her mother said that Kirsten loved the outdoors and that she had plenty of climbing experience on her own and with Thomas.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  And she was very intent on making sure that Kirsten wasn't seen as a weak individual who had no agency in this. And she really defended her daughter in terms of her strength and she seemed like she didn't want her to come off as a weak person.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Gertrude told a reporter, "Many people who blame Kirsten's boyfriend have never been in such a situation. I hope they never find themselves in such an exceptional situation, because nobody knows how they'll react then. It's easy to be a hero in the comfort of your own home." Near the end of the day, the prosecution called a woman named Andrea Bergener to the stand.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  An ex-girlfriend of Thomas's, and they had dated a few years prior.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Andrea Bergener told the judge that Thomas had also taken her on a trip to Grosse Glockner a few years earlier.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  You know, the way she described it, she said that they were descending the mountain at night. And then she said that, you know, during the climb, they had been arguing and that she wanted to take a shortcut down the mountain.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  She said that she was exhausted and her headlamp had just run out of battery. And then she lost sight of Thomas.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  And that's the moment that Thomas apparently left her. She screamed, she felt dizzy, and, you know, at that moment, she realized she was completely alone. Then she said from then on, they didn't go on any hikes together.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  The trial lasted 14 hours. At the end of the day, at around 11:00 PM, the judge issued his verdict. He said Thomas was guilty. He said that he had, quote, "galaxies more experience than Kirsten," but that he did not see Thomas as a murderer. The judge said, "You are an excellent alpinist, but someone who finds it very difficult to make the switch." Between your own limits and those of others.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  You know, he acknowledged that Thomas lost someone very close to him in his life. But then he also was pretty firm about condemning him for certain actions he took during the climb. He said that Kirsten really put herself in his care and really trusted him to bring her to the summit and back down safely. And in the end, he said, very bluntly, you know, if you would have acted differently, he strongly assumed that Kirsten would still be alive.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Do you think this verdict will have an effect on mountaineering regulations?

• 30:39Speaker 03

  I think in practice, it will have an effect insofar as I think people will be more conscious about if you go with another person or if you go into a group, if you go as a group and do these activities and one of you is better than the others. And one of you resumes the role of, yes, I'm planning the trip. I'm going to check out the route we're going. I'm going to decide when we're going to start. And I'm going to be the one that during the trip figures out how sensible is it to move on or how sensible is it to abort. Friends that do a tour, I think they haven't been aware of the fact that they could be responsible.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  And that I think will change now because people realize if I, as the expert on the mountain, take my friend that is no expert and ask him, let's go do this trip, that I can be criminally responsible.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Thomas Plamberger was sentenced to five months in prison and a fine of 9,600 euros, about $11,000.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  He told the judge, I am infinitely sorry for what happened.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  He's filed an appeal of the verdict.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  Here's this woman that I've been dating a brief time. I invite her on this trip. It's supposed to be luxurious and fun. And now we're in this situation, contemplating terrible things.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  On our other show, This is Love, another story of a couple on a mountain.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  It's just a wall. There's no ledges. You're trapped.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  So many things would have to go wrong for nobody to notice we're gone. So I just had confidence that there's no way this many things can go wrong in a row.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  You can listen to that story right now on This is Love.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silson. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter.

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• 34:15Speaker 00

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.

• 35:12Speaker 00

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