Over the Edge

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I'm Andrea Canning, and this is a story that literally took me high up into the Rocky Mountains. I wanted to see for myself where this all happened,

so I was harnessed to a tree in the very same spot

where the mother and doctor fell to her death.

It was absolutely terrifying,

and I can only imagine the fear she felt in those final moments.

Her death opened up a lot of questions about her husband,

not just from their marriage, but his first one too.

I knew this would be a tough case to prove.

Here's Over the Edge. My name's Anna Kate, and I'm nine years old.
I'm in fourth grade. Anna Kate once had an aunt named Tony.
They lived a few states apart, but were never more than a phone call or a letter away. Dear Aunt Tony, how are you? I have no homework.
We finished Little Pear, eight days till Christmas. I'm so excited.
I love you, Anna Kate. She still writes her letters, even though Toni can no longer respond.
Dear Aunt Toni, are you enjoying it in heaven? I miss you very much. I read a book about heaven.
It must be great.

Love your niece, Anna Kate.

Anna Kate was seven when her aunt died.

It was sudden, scary, and heartbreaking.

So she took out an old shoebox, decorated it, and filled it with thoughts of Aunt Toni.

Now she's dead. Now we can't see her again, and our lives will never be the same again.
The ripple effect of Toni's death was huge. She was a respected doctor, an ophthalmologist, who had a thriving practice first in Jackson, Mississippi, and later in Denver, Colorado.
A devout Christian who sang in her church choir. A mother to a little girl named Haley.
A wife to a man named Harold. And the older sister to Anna Kate's dad, Todd Bertolet.
This story is about Tony and what happened to her one bright sunny day high up in the mountains. Hi, my mom.
What's your address in emergency? I need an outside mountain rescue team immediately. It's also about how secrets long buried sometimes don't stay that way.
Where did Toni fit into your family? She was the middle between two brothers. Sometimes she thought that was an advantage and sometimes she thought it was a disadvantage.
Being the only girl with two brothers, obviously we're not going to sit down and play Barbies with her. You know, we needed the extra wide receiver during the backyard football game and she had to oblige us.
Did it turn her into a little bit of a tomboy? I wouldn't say she was a tomboy, but she was a great athlete. Of course, she could do anything she put her mind to.
Tony Bertolet grew up with her two brothers around Natchez, Mississippi, the epitome of the Old South. She was ambitious academically and athletically, and yet...
Did Tony embrace the hair and the makeup and sort of the things that you would think of a Southern Belle? We went to Ole Miss. I mean, it's coat and dye and Sunday dresses for football games.
No sweatpants? No. No, no.
Not to go out. She would never go out in public and sweatpants.
Never. Toni did have one flaw when it came to being a Belle.
When I first got to college, she felt like, you know, I was a little bit too skinny and needed to bulk up a little bit. And so she decided she was going to come over and cook some fried chicken.
Well, Mississippi is the place to be for that. Mississippi and every, you know, southern lady ought to be able to cook some fried chicken.
And little did she know that, you know, when you took it out of the freezer, you'd have to let it thaw. Frozen fried chicken aside, Toni was someone who set goals and made them happen.
After college, she went to medical school and in 1988 graduated in the top 10% of her class. Then she settled into a new practice and a new marriage with a young dentist.
But the woman who could do it all couldn't save a relationship that wasn't working. She tried, but after seven years, the marriage ended.
I don't think my sister took failure well, and so I think that was a disappointing time in her life. Todd's wife Rhonda remembers how Toni continued to thrive at work, but her love life stalled.
Her career was extremely important, and so there was a time issue there. She didn't have a lot of time to probably go places to meet guys.
She went to church, and she went to her job. And to be honest, I really don't think that there was very good pickings possibly.
And the clock was ticking when it came to starting a family. So in her late 30s, Toni turned to a place many do to find a mate, the internet.
She chose a Christian dating site. Finding a man who shared her faith was very important to her.
She didn't tell her little brother or his wife Rhonda right away about her online adventure, but she did share her secret with her good friend, Allison Talley. Did she give you updates on how it was going and if she was meeting anybody? I didn't really ask, but I did know that she had met a couple of guys.
Then, Toni met the one. A handsome guy, a little bit older than her.
Charming, incredibly charming. Just extended a hand immediately and well-dressed and very polished and well-spoken.
Very professional looking. His name was Harold Henthorne.
According to his dating profile, he lived in Colorado and worked as a consultant to

non-profits. He didn't smoke, rarely drank, and he said he was a planner.
Eventually, Harold flew out to Jackson to meet Tony in person, and with them both being methodical types, they devised a formula for lasting love. They had come up with a system for compatibility, and it was five C's, and I don't remember what they all stood for.

Compatibility was one of them.

Christianity was one of them. Chemistry, maybe? Chemistry was one of them.
When they met for the first time, they would know if the chemistry was there. They confirmed four out of the five before their first meeting.
So when they met, it was combustion. Maybe that was one of them.
Tony ticked off her C's. Then she introduced Harold to everyone.
First impression? Way more outgoing, way more vocal than she. She was quiet.
I thought this is great for her. This gets her out of her shell and it gives her somebody to do some really fun things with.
Harold was a widower and told the Bertolais he had waited a long time for another chance at love. His first wife died in a car accident.
My heart went out to him. I was like, wow, you know, he deserves his happiness, you know, and if it's with Tony, then that's awesome.
You know, he said that he had been lonely. Harold's friend, Kim LaFerrier, had been best friends with Harold's first wife, Lynn.
What did Harold tell you about this new woman in his life, Tony? He didn't tell me a lot, but he did tell me that he really liked her. After Lynn died, Kim and Harold remained close.
Now he wanted Kim to meet the new woman in his life. I felt like I couldn't talk about Lynn anymore, which I understood that.

But I was happy that he had moved on,

and I felt like it was time,

and that he was starting a new life.

So now, Harold, the planner,

as he'd said in his dating profile, was ready.

On Valentine's Day, 2000,

he set out to orchestrate the perfect proposal.

Harold really studied the Jackson area to find out the perfect place to propose. And he found this beautiful place in Jackson that we all love.
And how excited was she to tell you her news? Very. She was excited.
And she had a beautiful ring. It was a nice ring.
And she was very happy. Very happy that it seemed like it was all coming together and she was going to be very happy.

On September 30, 2000, less than a year after they had met in person,

Toni Bertolet married Harold Henthorne in a big church wedding in Jackson.

She looked fantastic, happy, glowing.

It was a lovely day. It was beautiful.

It looked like the first day of the rest of her life. It really did.
The future was bright. Tony's career had been her focus for so long, Harold promised something different.
Marry me. I'm wealthy.
I can take you away from, you know, your career and, you know, working all the time and allow you to be the mother, which is the main thing she wanted to be. Her knight in shining armor.
That's it. But it's amazing how life has a way of intruding on our fairy tales.
Coming up, a romantic surprise. She's like, what's going on? And he says, you know, we're going away for the weekend.

A whirlwind escape to the mountains.

She couldn't say no. He had it all worked out.

It seemed Tony's thoughtful husband had planned everything.

Almost.

I did an outpouring mountain rescue team immediately. After Tony and Harold got married, friends and loved ones knew the couple wanted to start a family, but it turned out to be difficult.
For the first two years of their marriage, their careers kept them apart. Tony in Mississippi, Harold in Colorado.
And when Tony was finally able to move west to be with Harold... They suffered a lot of fertility issues and had, you know, had miscarriages.
It was a sadness to her. Back in Mississippi, Tony's brother Todd and sister-in-law Rhonda were also struggling to have a baby.
But then, after years of disappointment for both couples,

all their prayers were answered.

We both ended up pregnant at the same time.

That must have been a really happy time,

given what you went through to get there.

Absolutely.

And all of a sudden, you know, good news here, good news here, and, you know, get ready,

because, you know, you're going to have a house full.

In June of 2005, Tony and Harold welcomed their baby girl, Haley. By then, Todd and Rhonda already had Anna Kate.
When the girls were a little over a year old, the Henthorns came to Mississippi and the new cousins got to meet. It was a very happy occasion, and I do remember Tony just being so happy to have Haley.

And so was Harold.

And although Tony had always wanted to be a mom, it was pretty clear Harold was Mr. Mom.

He was the one in charge.

The diaper change.

Most women have to beg their husbands to do that kind of stuff.

He was the one. He was like a nanny.
Hands- on dad? Yeah. He was in charge of everything about that child.
Just have a good little day here. With Harold such a doting father, Toni was able to go back to work.
She soon built a thriving practice in Colorado. She was a beloved doctor.
She had a really great bedside manner. Tammy Abruscato managed the practice.
She took time. She treated her patients as a whole body, not just their eyes, but she was interested in their family life.
She just had the good old-fashioned, you know, southern hospitality. Tammy saw how committed Toni was to her patients.
Sometimes it was hard to get her to leave the office. So Tammy was charmed when one day in September, Harold asked for her help.
You get a phone call out of the blue from Harold. Yes, about two weeks before their anniversary, he phoned and said, Hey, Tammy, I want to surprise Tony for our anniversary.
Can you help me out? It was their 12th wedding anniversary. Harold wanted to celebrate with a surprise trip to one of Colorado's wonders, Rocky Mountain National Park.
So you're being really sneaky in all of this. I am.
I mean, we'd all love for our husbands to call and do something fun like that. So I made her schedule so that she could be done and out of the office by 3 o'clock,

but it looked like she would be there till 5.

The big day was September 28, 2012.

He came into the office, and the other girls thought it would be fun to really surprise her,

so they put him in an exam room.

A colleague shot this cell phone video.

So she picks up a chart, walks into the room like she normally would, and then there's her husband. And she's like, what's going on? And he says, you know, we're going away for the weekend.
Happy anniversary. And she's like, no, no, no, no.
I can't do that. And he says, you can.
Tammy fixed the set schedule so you're ready to leave. This was well orchestrated, this anniversary plan.
Harold thought of everything. He hired babysitters for Haley.
He'd even packed Tony's clothes. She couldn't say no.
I mean, she just, you know, he had it all worked out. So off they went.
Harold Henthorne, the consummate planner, had pulled it off. Now the perfect anniversary weekend could begin.
The couple left Denver on a Friday afternoon and headed north. Harold booked a room at the Stanley, a historic, beautiful hotel in Estes Park, famous for inspiring Stephen King's The Shining.
He scheduled an early dinner so they could turn in early. It was a romantic weekend, after all.
Then, Saturday afternoon, they set out for Rocky Mountain National Park to go on a hiking trail Harold had scouted out a few months earlier. But just about 24 hours in, the perfect weekend turned tragic.
Hi, Mama. What's your address, emergency? Hello.
My name name is Harold Hidworth. I'm in the Rocky Mountain National Park.
Okay. I need an Alpine mountain rescue team immediately.
It was just before 6, and Harold needed help urgently. My wife had fallen from a rock on the north of the summit of Deer Mountain on the Deer Mountain Trail,

when she's in really critical condition.

Harold told the 911 operator that Tony had fallen from the edge of a cliff.

Let me be sure that you know my location first.

I have really bad cell coverage.

Okay.

Okay, I'm on Deer Mountain.

Immediately, the park launched a ranger who was also a trained EMT, but the only way to get there from the trailhead was on foot, and that would take hours.

Harold, desperate, pleaded for a rescue helicopter. The operator tried to explain that no aircraft could do what Harold was asking, not at that altitude, over that terrain.
Harold knew Tony's situation was grave. She needed to get out of here.
She needed to get to the hospital. Harold didn't stay on with the 911 operator.
He hung up because he was worried his cell phone battery might die. Then, at 6.16, he texted Tony's older brother Barry, a cardiologist back in Mississippi.
Barry, urgent. Tony is injured in Est accident and that he was being texted the vital signs and it didn't look good.
You know, he said, I don't think she's going to make it.

Back on the mountain, the rescuers were having trouble finding the henthorne.

They're asking you to put as many bright items out as possible to see if they can't see you.

Okay.

Anybody near you, sir?

No.

The henthorne were all alone and time was running out.

The sun was setting, so Harold lit a fire.

Now in the dark, the henthorns were off the grid and still waiting.

Just before 7, an hour after Harold's first call to 911,

an operator called back to nothing, to zero. Okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to count for you as you go through the breath.
I got my computer on and I can count so we can make sure we're getting that blood flow. But Harold said he wanted to keep the line free.
I've got to turn off because you have to find me. Okay, I will let you go.
Call 911 anytime and you get me, okay? Harold continued to text Tony's brother with details. None were good.
Can't find Pulse. He texted a friend asking if he could drive up to Rocky Mountain National Park to pick him up.
He called back dispatch. You guys have any data on the Rangers? National Ranger in the area.
If it's not using your whistle, CPR, help 10 minutes out. Finally, 8.09 p.m., more than two hours after Harold called 911, the ranger arrived, prepared for a rescue.
But there was no rescue to be made.

Coming up...

I just said, is she okay?

And I fell to my knees.

Exactly what had happened up there on the mountain.

This is a spot that most people would be too nervous to approach.

The investigation begins. It was supposed to be the perfect weekend in the Rockies, but the tragedy struck during a hike.
Toni Henthorne tumbled off the edge of a steep cliff.

8.41 mountain time, her husband Harold texted her family two horrible words.

She's gone.

I'd never seen my dad cry. Never.

And I'd say for the next two weeks.

All the time.

She was his little girl.

I can tell you it doesn't matter you know what age they are you know a parent can't ever accept it. Tony's friends at work couldn't believe it either.
I got a call from Christy at our office and all she said is Tammy Tony fell. What did you think when she said she fell? I just said, is she okay? No, she died.
And I fell to my knees. And my husband said, oh my gosh, what's going on? And I said, Dr.
Henthorne fell off a cliff. Everyone was heartbroken for Tony, Harold, and most of all, the Henthorne's seven-year-old daughter, Haley.
I put myself on the mountain, and at the moment that she probably knew, well, this is it, you know, I know her thoughts were of Haley. About 150 people die in national parks each year.
In Rocky Mountain National Park, the leading cause of death is falling. Before I wrote this book, I didn't know that the national park had investigators.
Journalist Michael Fleeman covered the death of Tony Henthorne. I just thought the extent of their police work was to tell you to put out a rogue campfire or something or don't park here or don't feed the bears.
But there's more to it. Every death in our national parks is investigated.
And in Tony's case, the same EMT ranger who came to rescue her now switched roles from rescuer to cop. People wear different hats at the park service.
The guy who schlepped out there in the middle of the night and tried to both save Tony's life and get Harold off the mountain. The next day became an investigator.
The ranger set out to learn everything he could about Tony, Harold, and what happened on that quiet mountain. Harold told him the couple had set out around 145 on the Deer Mountain Trail as part of their romantic anniversary weekend.
You can see in this selfie Harold took that the henthornes seemed to be having fun on a trek that many would find challenging. Hikers call it a moderate hike, but these are hikers who are, you know, scaling the sides of mountains.
But Tony and Harold kept at it, following the trail as it snaked up and around the mountain to a point where it flattened out. It was a beautiful fall day here in the Rockies, much like this.
Harold said he and Tony wanted to be alone. It was their anniversary after all.
So right about here, they got off the trail and headed into the woods. Most people stay on the trails in national parks.
That's what the Park Service wants visitors to do. But Harold told the ranger the trail was so crowded that they left it to be alone.
Although Toni was a lifelong athlete, she had knee issues since her basketball playing days in high school. But if the hike was tough for her, it probably seemed worth it when the trees opened up to this.
Around 3.30, Toni and Harold ate lunch right here, with this amazing view as their backdrop. Once they finished eating lunch, they continued further into the backcountry.
Before they set out, Harold took this photo of Tony. She's smiling, relaxed.
Doesn't look like she had any inkling that anything bad was to come. Harold told the ranger the ridge where they had lunch wasn't private enough, so they climbed down these loose rocks looking for another spot.
At this point, they were several hours into their hike with not much daylight left and not much time to keep a 7 p.m. dinner reservation.
They ended up on a small, flat area with not a lot of wiggle room and steep drops all around. It's where this picture was taken at 5 p.m.
It's one of the last pictures on Tony's camera. Rangers believe Tony fell from right here, 128 feet down.
This is a spot that most people would be too nervous to approach without the proper safety gear. But Harold said Tony was trying to capture the perfect picture of some wild turkeys and apparently just got too close to the edge.
Harold said by the time he scrambled down the mountain and found his wife, Tony wasn't talking. She was barely breathing and she was lying in an awkward position.
So he told the ranger he pulled her to a flatter area. Then he made that first call to 911.
But there never was a rescue. Tony died too soon.
Her friend Allison Talley says in the days after Tony died, everyone's focus was dealing with their grief while trying to help Haley and Harold. He's the grieving widower with the young daughter.
Right. There was no shortage of people over there trying to help and be in the home.
We talked to him several times, and every conversation had that element in it of how wonderful all his friends and his church family were being to him. Within a day of Tony's death,

Harold reached out to someone who had always been there for him,

Kim LaFerrier.

I got a text at 10.30 on a Sunday night.

Tony fell. My bride is gone.

And I remember looking at this going, what?

And I ran upstairs. My husband was asleep.

And I said, Tony's gone. Kim found the tragedy almost unimaginable.
Remember, she'd known Harold for decades and had been best friends with his first wife, Lynn, who died 17 years earlier. I just felt so sad.
I felt like I could not believe that Tony was gone.

It just felt like I wished I could have changed it.

I wish I could have brought her back.

But soon, for some people, sorrow would be coupled with another feeling, suspicion.

Coming up.

My husband said, we can't let this go.

Please investigate this.

Turns out, this was not the first time Tony's life had been in danger.

He made a joke and laughed it off. Did you hear, almost kill Tony? Almost from the moment

Tony's friends and family heard that she had fallen off a cliff to her death, they all realized they shared the same uneasy feeling, and it centered on Tony's husband, Harold. Charming, outgoing, a hands-on dad, Harold was all of those things.
But now, Tony's friend Allison remembered what Tony had said years earlier when the couple was struggling with infertility. How was Harold through the bad times when she was losing the baby? Was he very supportive? I asked her how this was going, that this had to be incredibly stressful.
And she said her exact comments, I'll never forget these words.

Life with Harold is hard.

Brother Todd and sister-in-law Rhonda also looked back

and thought about how difficult it could be to get Tony on the phone

without Harold listening in.

You call her home number, you call her cell phone number,

you could call his cell phone number.

He would answer?

He would answer.

When we spoke to her, it was never just her. It was always him and her in the background.
Tammy recalled how Harold used to come into Tony's office as if he owned the place and how in his presence, Tony, the self-confident doctor, seemed to melt away somehow. She said, well, I've just learned long ago.
It's just

better to let Harold be right. Does that make you kind of sad? That made me very sad.
And that was

when I really thought things are not right. Tammy says that even though Tony seemed to

adore her daughter Haley, she often gave up mommy time, staying late at the office instead.

We would be done, patients gone, staff gone, and she would still be on her computer. But it wasn't work related.
It was playing games. And so we thought, that's so odd.
Why does she stick around the office? We started to think that maybe she just didn't want to go home, and maybe because of Harold. If there was trouble in the marriage, Tony never said so directly, not to friends, not even to family.
Todd and Rhonda worried maybe she was afraid to say too much. I think he had held control over Tony with Haley.
His parents heard conversation that they weren't meant to hear,

that he held, you know, divorce over her head.

I'll divorce you.

Yeah, and you won't see Haley and, you know, that kind of thing.

That's probably the one thing that would cut the deepest with hers.

Right.

Not being able to see her daughter.

Right.

And then there was a very strange episode that occurred a year before Tony's death at a mountain cabin she and Harold owned. Did she tell you at all about the accident with the beam at the cabin? No, but Harold did.
He made a joke that he almost killed Tony at the cabin. And he laughed it off that, did you hear almost kill Tony? It happened around 10 p.m.
Tony, despite the late hour, was under the deck. She said that she was cleaning underneath the deck and Harold was walking across.
And as he walked across, a beam came loose and fell directly on the back of her head. Toni had to be hospitalized.
She came back to work bandaged and bruised. Did she seem at all rattled by it?

Did it change her at all? She just seemed depressed, but, you know, people get depressed when they hurt. Tony's family looked back on that incident and wondered.
Are you starting to think that maybe the beam falling wasn't an accident? I think we were there at the time, maybe not admitting it, but enough to say there's something going on here. After the cabin incident, Tony's mother told her she didn't think Tony should be alone with Harold.
What's interesting about it is when my mother had that conversation with my sister, my sister didn't try to correct my mother. She just said, okay, which I think her silence probably spoke a little bit more.
Almost like she knew? I think she knew it probably wasn't an accident. And now Tony had accidentally fallen off a cliff.
It was as if the moment people within their circle heard about Tony's death, that they all instantly suspected something was wrong. My husband said, we can't let this go.
So he called the park rangers and basically just said, we're close with Tony. We have suspicions.
Please investigate this. Please.
He begged them. I felt immediately upon hearing the news that we had to find out exactly what happened and that we had to be her voice because the only story we were going to get was going to be his story.
But they all soon discovered even getting Harold's story wasn't easy. Did you ask Harold, tell me what happened? Several times.
I said, what happened, Harold? You know, and he blew me off. When Harold came to Mississippi for Tony's memorial service, her family thought he was more interested in watching a football game than talking about Tony's last day on earth.
He announced to us that day that he wanted to sit down with us and talk. And he said, I mean, he totally brushed it off.
It'll take about 10 minutes. You know, I want to watch the game at halftime.
We'll talk. Rhonda couldn't believe what she was hearing.
Nope, that's not going to happen. It's going to be a lot longer than that.
We weren't letting him off for 10 minutes. A lot longer.
They would all have to cross many miles and many years to get the whole truth. Coming up.
This is not an easy descent. A revealing trip to the scene, halting steps and haunting questions.
Would you recommend somebody who's not an expert come down here?

Definitely not.

What about a woman in her 50s with bad knees?

Absolutely not.

.

Three months after Tony Henthorne fell to her death in Rocky Mountain National Park, her husband Harold sent out a Christmas card, a photo of him and daughter Haley hiking in the forest. The inscription, We appreciate your prayer for us as we walk through this difficult time.
Now, many people who had loved Tony saw these sentiments less as heartfelt and more as part of a cover-up. Did people see Harold as the husband in mourning who had just been through an absolutely horrible tragedy trying to save his wife? I mean, that was what was so odd.
We never saw any emotion out of him when we went to Denver. The only time he cried was when he got the phone call that my sister's death certificate was going to say pending.
And he was more angry than anything else. Friends and family were suspicious of Harold for many reasons, including that he couldn't seem to get his story straight about what happened to Tony.
The night she died, Harold told Tony's older brother Barry on the phone that Tony had lagged behind on the trail and he lost sight of her until he saw her at the bottom of the cliff where she fell. But later, when he spoke to Tony's younger brother Todd, Harold added several new details.
Tony was taking a picture,

and he had received a text. It says that Haley was playing in the soccer game, and it was a picture of Haley playing soccer.
And then when he looked up, my sister was gone. And she had fallen off the cliff.
Harold told many people Tony was taking pictures of wild turkeys, while the ranger recalled Harold saying Tony was trying to get a shot of him. Journalist Michael Fleeman.
Harold gave several versions of what happened, and where the stories begin to diverge is really what was exactly happening at the time that she went off the cliff. Was she taking a picture of him? Was he on his cell phone looking at text messages? Friends and family weren't the only ones comparing notes and clues.
Because Tony died in a national park, the FBI joined the investigation. And the more they looked at what happened, the more reasons they found for concern, starting with the trail itself.

This is not an easy descent, and people who knew Tony couldn't understand why a woman who had had

bad knees since high school would even risk it. Dateline retraced Harold and Tony's path with the

help of Joey Thompson, a climbing and hiking guide who often works in Rocky Mountain National Park. Is this path a path well-traveled? Do a lot of people come down here? It seems tricky.
No, this path is way out of the way for any recreational hiker to be, you know, scouting about and having fun in the mountains. Would you recommend somebody who's not an expert hiker or rock climber come down here? Definitely not.
This is a place that's very loose, high classification of how we rate the terrain. This takes a lot of technical ability and sure footing.
This is definitely out of the way. What about a woman in her 50s with bad knees? Absolutely not.
Investigators also look closely at Harold's story of what happened after Tony fell. Remember, he said it took a long time to pick his way down the mountain to his bleeding wife's side.
And sure enough, nearly an hour elapsed between the last photos on Tony's camera and Harold's call to 911. 911, what's your address, the emergency? I did an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately.
But here's the problem. When investigators retraced Harold's steps, it took just a few minutes to get from where she fell to where she landed.
Then there was Harold's statement that before calling for help, he had to move Tony to flatter ground so he could do CPR.

But the ground wasn't flat at all.

The first ranger on the scene wondered why Harold placed Tony's head below her body.

Harold had told friends he was trained in first aid.

Usually when there's a head injury, one elevates the head.

If everything else had been normal, you would just say this was a guy who freaked out and made some bad decisions after his wife fell off a cliff. I mean, you have to give people a certain amount of leeway.

But everything else was not normal. For example, Harold cut his call to 911 short because he said.
Okay, Harold. Yet, when the FBI examined his phone records, they found that over the six hours following his first call to 911, Harold made or received 22 calls and 98 text messages.
He's texting his brother-in-law. He's texting his friends about picking them up.
He's on the phone with different agencies. When was he actually performing CPR on her? The first ranger to arrive on the scene wondered the same thing.
Harold is sort of standing there not doing much of anything. I think he has a fire going.
And the ranger shows up and suddenly Harold zips over and starts performing CPR on his now dead wife. Remember, a 911 operator had coached Harold on CPR, but the ranger noticed Tony's lipstick wasn't smeared, no signs of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
We're not heroes all the time. We do the best we can with what we have, and it's a very traumatic situation.

But I think even factoring in all of that, Harold's behavior was extremely suspicious.

Perhaps most suspicious of all, a clue from Harold's cell phone records that he may have been on that mountain before.

In the weeks just prior to Tony's death, pings from Harold's phone show him traveling north toward Rocky Mountain National Park many times, something he never told investigators. Harold said that he and Tony came to this really hard to get to spot for the views, and they are remarkable.
But they're not that much better than the views where they ate lunch just up the hill from here. after the FBI found out that Harold Henthorne had come to Rocky Mountain National Park

at least nine times alone before that trip. They started to believe he was on a scouting mission for the perfect lonely location, lured Tony to this dangerous ledge, then a deadly push.
If that sounded chilling, there was something else to consider. After Tony died, within literally hours, law enforcement got tips saying, you have to look into the first wife.
Yes, the first wife. There was a whole other story to tell there.
Coming up. He was always with us.
He was always involved in every conversation, and we were never allowed to be alone.

What had happened to wife number one?

When she first heard that her old friend, Harold Henthorne, had lost his wife, Toni, in a fall from a cliff, Kim Laferriere was stunned that tragedy had visited this same man twice. It is possible that someone could be married to two women who both died from accidents.
Right. And at the time we thought, how sad.
A little less than five years before he met Tony, Harold had lost his first wife.

Her name was Lynn.

Kim was Lynn's best friend.

They met at a Christian youth camp.

When I first met her, she came flying into the room, bigger than life,

and she jumped up on one of the bunks and said, tell me who you like here.

Was she talking about boys then?

Yeah, she said, who do you like looking at her going, who is this wild woman? Lynn was funny and fiery and full of life. Kim knew she liked Lynn right away, but it was their shared spirituality that cemented their friendship.
We both were committed to serving God and she would just draw you in and she cared about, and she wanted to pray for you. She wanted to know what you needed.
Lynn was already out of college and working. Kim was still in school, but they shared prayers and secrets.
Lynn told Kim what she wanted in a man. A Christian husband, somebody who loved the Lord, was a leader and strong, but yet gentle.
And we talked about it. You know, if I started dating someone or if she did and we had a chick, and, you know, we talked about that.
I don't know if that's the best person for you. Did you have to approve? Yeah, I did.
After all that girl talk about boys, Lynn found a man Kim did approve of, an old friend she had first met in college. His name? Harold Henthorne.
She just said, there's this really neat guy, you know, we went to school together. It was in the years before email.
Lynn and Kim weren't living in the same town, so Kim would handwrite the latest about her new love. She would write me letters about him and how she felt about him and that she longed to be with him and wondered if he felt the same about her.
You must have been happy for her. I was.
I mean, I felt like it was a good thing. I felt like he would make a good husband for her.
Was Harold charming? Very charming. He was always bigger than life, always smiling, always laughing, always the center of attention.
Soon, Kim heard the big news from Lynn. Harold proposed.
I do remember that she was so excited, wanted, you know, couldn't wait for me to really be able to spend time and to help plan the wedding and to be part of all of that. And did you do all those fun things, wedding shower? We did.
Harold and Lynn married on September 11, 1982. Kim was happy for her friend, but she saw something in Harold on that day that gave her pause.
You're saying even on the wedding day he was being controlling? Well, he was just, everything is always planned with Harold. You move from one plan to another.
But Kim put her concerns aside and enjoyed the festivities. Lynn and Harold started their new life together in Colorado, where he had a job as a geologist.
Lynn got a job as a social worker. Kim was happy for Lynn, of course, but she also felt like her friend was slipping away.
Maybe it was the distance. Maybe it was her commitment to her marriage.
But just like it would be with Tony years later, Kim could never seem to get Lynn on the phone without Harold listening in. Many times I didn't know he was on the phone, but I would sense that he was on the phone, and I would say, before I said something personal, Lynn, is Harold on the phone? And he would always say, hey, Kimmy.
Kim couldn't even get alone time with Lynn when she went to visit her in Colorado. He was always with us, and he was always involved in every conversation, and we were never allowed to be alone, even if we were together.
And he would even make comments when we would go to the bathroom. You know, you girls, hurry up in there.
You know, he would always make those, you know, like joking comments.

That's got to start to get on your nerves.

At times it did, but he always dismissed it as,

I want to get to know you.

Lynn loves you.

I want to love you like Lynn does.

I want to know who this, you know, crazy woman is she loves.

But when Harold wouldn't let Lynn go to Kim's wedding,

even after Kim offered to help pay for the trip, Kim felt like she'd really lost her best friend. She called me and said, I can't come.
And I said, why? Can you tell me why? And she said, I need to honor my husband. And that's all she would say.
Kim thought Lynn was okay doing what Harold said, because she believed that was her role as the perfect Christian wife. There was some awe to the fact that she really did honor her husband.
She would never speak negative about him. So I always looked at her and thought, man, maybe she's the better woman.
As the years went on, Lynn and Kim spoke less and less frequently. But then in the fall of 1994, there was a reunion of sorts when the Henthorns went back to the East Coast for a visit.
Lynn and Harold got to meet Kim's children. And as true friends do, the two women picked up right where they left off.
We talked and we laughed, and it was a good time.

But we were always all together.

I mean, even when it was time to go to bed,

Harold didn't go to bed until Lynn was in bed.

In other words, Harold hadn't changed,

but Kim thought Lynn seemed happy.

Did you think Harold was good for her?

I did, yes.

What Kim didn't know? It was the last time she would ever see Lynn alive. Coming up...
I said I gotta get her some help. A husband in distress, a wife in danger.
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Since our Dateline story aired, Tracy has harnessed her outrage into a mission. I had no other option.
I had to do something. Catch up with families, friends, and investigators on our bonus series, After the Verdict.
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Cancel anytime through Apple under profile settings. It started as a romantic anniversary weekend, but that's not how it ended.

Tony Henthorne has died after a fall from a cliff in the Rocky Mountain National Park.

Her husband, Harold's first wife, also died in a terrible accident.

Such an awful coincidence.

Or was it?

We're about to hear exactly what happened to wife number one. Again, Andrea Canning.
May 6th, 1995. It was a cool spring evening in the Colorado countryside.
A little after 9 p.m., Patricia Montoya was with her family on Highway 67, about an hour and a half south of Denver, basically in the middle of nowhere. Came around a bin, and there was a flare in the street and a man trying to flag cars down.
The man was Harold Henthorne, and he was in a panic. Harold was at the driver window asking us for help because the car was here, and it had fallen on top of his wife.
And looking over to the area, you could see her legs coming from underneath. Lynn, his wife of 12 years, was under their Jeep.
It was a horrible scene. We asked him what happened and he said that they had stopped to fix a, and his wife somehow went under the car, possibly to get a lug nut,

and the jack fell from underneath the car, and she got pinned.

Lynn was face down with the brake rotor resting on her back.

The Montoyas carefully lifted the Jeep.

All four of us got her out, and we gently flipped her over And she was, her lips were already turning colors and she wasn't breathing. It was a cold night.
The Montoyas piled coats on Lynn. And so at that point, the two gentlemen that I was with, they started CPR.
And I said, I got to get her some help. Time was ticking down for Lynn Henthorne.
No one had cell phones. So Patricia raced toward the nearest town, nearly two miles away.
It was late. It was desolate.
She drove up to one of the few houses. I drove directly up to as far as I could get to the door and I flashed my lights and I honked the horn until the man came out, and I asked him if he could please call 911.
The man quickly went inside and made the call. Then...
He came back out. He said the help was on its way.
I asked him if he could bring a couple of blankets to cover her, and he grabbed some blankets, and he followed me back up the mountain. When the 911 call finally went out, accident on Route 67, Roxanne Burns was one of the EMTs sent out to help.
When we got on scene, there were two EMTs working Lynn. They were doing CPR on her.
I asked them what they wanted me to do, if there was anything I could help them with. They said, no, we want you to go talk to the husband.
She asked Harold how it happened. He said he wasn't entirely sure.
He did tell me that some lug nuts had fallen underneath the car, and she must have gone underneath the car to get those lug nuts and somehow jarred the car. Or, Harold thought, he might have jarred the car himself when he tossed the bad tire into the trunk.
Roxanne tried to reassure him that they could still save Lynn. Was she hanging by a thread? Do you think she had already died and they were trying to revive her? When you're doing CPR, they're actually dead at that point and, you know, so you're trying to pump their heart.
We had called for a helicopter because sometimes when you do CPR, you can actually revive somebody. And miraculously, it seemed, they did manage to revive Lynn.
We actually had a paramedic show up also on the scene, gave her a shot of epinephrine. Her heart started beating again.
So we were all real hopeful at that point that she was going to survive and got her on a helicopter and flew her. But Lynn didn't make it.
She died at the hospital. She was just 37 years old.
I remember the day as if it was yesterday. I received a call from a friend who said that,

I'm sorry to inform you, but there's been a bad accident, and Lynn died yesterday. It was heartbreaking for Kim that her friend was dead and that she died in a way that was not quick and certainly was painful.
The autopsy concluded after the 3,000-pound SUV fell on her,

Lynn hemorrhaged into her lungs and died from asphyxiation. The only marks on her body? Imprints from the brake rotor.
The local Douglas County Sheriff's Department opened an investigation, but a few days later, the coroner ruled Lynn's death an accident. The case was closed.
Did you have any reason to believe this wasn't an accident? No, we all believed him and took him at his word. Any thoughts that I might have had, I just dismissed.
Harold had his wife cremated, spread her ashes on a mountain he said she loved, and then went on with his life. He even kept driving the same Jeep for a while.
Eventually, he married Tony, and Lynn's death became a distant memory. For some people anyway, but not all.
Nearly 18 years later, after Tony fell off that cliff, the sheriff's office called Patricia Montoya. I don't understand why it took so long.
EMT Roxanne Burns got a similar call and had a similar reaction.

When you got the call, was it sort of like, I was expecting this call?

Yeah, I did say that to him.

I said, is this about the car accident up on 67?

And he said, yeah, it is.

And I go, is it about that woman that the car fell on her?

And he goes, yep.

I go, oh, thank God.

Coming up, was there reason to be suspicious of this accident too?

Made the hair on my neck stand up straight?

This guy was all over the map from the get-go. It was 2013, nearly 18 years since she'd arrived as an EMT at the scene of Lynn Henthorne's bizarre death, when the phone rang.
A sheriff's detective on the line.

Roxanne Burns felt a great sense of relief.

Finally sort of a chance to...

To make it right.

To make it right, yep.

She hadn't forgotten that night back in 1995.

It wasn't just the horrible way Lynn died,

her own Jeep crushing her.

It was the husband, Harold.

Roxanne remembered he just wasn't acting right. You've seen a lot of these.
Oh yeah, oh yeah. And he was just so calm about the whole thing and didn't ask any questions about how she was or anything like that.
He wasn't screaming at me, grabbing at me, saying you have to do something, you know. Desperate.

Desperate, yeah.

Instead, as Roxanne remembers it, Harold seemed to be avoiding her.

He kept walking around the car.

He kept, you know, making me follow him.

So I would ask him a question and he would walk away from me.

Patricia Montoya, the Good Samaritan,

also remembers thinking that Harold was acting strangely that night.

For one thing, even though Harold flagged down her family's car,

Patricia says he didn't seem to want their help. We started to get her out from underneath the car,

and that's when he started telling us, you know, get away from her, don't touch her.

She also noticed that although the night was chilly, Lynn was wearing just jeans and a t-shirt. Harold, on the other hand, had a nice warm coat.
He didn't even attempt to take his coat off and, you know, cover his wife with it. So we all covered her with our coats.
Then, when the EMTs got Lynn's heart started, Roxanne says Harold said something she never forgot. When we put her in the ambulance and she did have a heartbeat, he said, really, she has a heartbeat? He was more surprised than thankful.
Now that Harold had lost his second wife, Toni, in a second strange incident, the Douglas County Coroner's Office, which had originally ruled Lynn's death an accident, hired private investigator and former Denver homicide detective Charlie McCormick to review the case file. He noticed something about Harold right away.
On face value, he's inconsistent, and that's never a good sign. For starters, Harold told multiple stories about why he and Lynn were on that back road in the first place.
This guy was all over the map from the get go. We were going to dinner.
We had been at dinner and we left the house at three o'clock. We left the house at six o'clock.
In the police reports written in the hours and days after Lynn died, Harold is quoted giving different reasons as to why exactly they pulled over. He contradicted himself on what the tire problem was.
Was it a flat? Was it spongy? Was it soft? What caused this to happen? Whatever shape the tire was in, the Henthorns apparently tried to change it using jacks they normally used for a boat because Harold told the cops the jack that came with the jeep was broken. He couldn't get it to work and he even said that he sprayed some oil or solvent on it to try to get it to work and it didn't, wouldn't work.
But no oil or solvent was ever found to corroborate his story. Then there was the biggest question of all.
How do you get under a car and have a car fall on you? It just didn't make sense to me. It never has.
Once again, Harold seemed to tell multiple stories. Patricia Montoya remembers him saying Lynn went under the Jeep to retrieve a lug nut.
Lynn's old friend, Kim LaFerrier, says Harold told her Lynn was going after a flashlight, not a lug nut. And Roxanne Burns remembered Harold saying something else entirely.
He said she was changing the tire, which made the hair on my neck stand up straight because that, I was like, women don't usually change tires when a man is around. Investigator Charlie McCormick couldn't see any good reason for Lynn to get under a Jeep held up by makeshift jacks.
You'd have to be a fool under those circumstances. And from all the other interviews that were done, Lynn was no fool to crawl under a car that you already were insecure about.
McCormick believes the original investigation was incomplete. There's a lot of things that could have been looked at that would be easier to look at then than now.
For example, what caused the Jeep to fall? Harold said he thought it happened when he tossed the tire into the trunk. But this photograph shows a shoe print on the front right fender.
I would have jumped all over that footprint. That should have been analyzed compared to the shoes that everybody had on that was at the scene, whether it be Harold Henthorne or his wife or fire department or anybody.
But no one did. And no one ever checked the jack Harold said wasn't working to see if it was really broken.
No one ever checked with the restaurant that the Henthornes were either heading to or coming from, depending on which version of Harold's story, if any, was true. I interviewed the restaurant employees to see if they actually did have dinner there that night.
Did they have a fight? Were they getting along all right or were they not there at all?

Whatever happened that night, by the time he met Tony, Harold was telling stories about Lynn's death that were entirely different from the original. Once, while addressing a Sunday school class, he said his first wife had died of cancer.
And here's what Tony's friend Allison heard. It was one of those cars or trucks or vehicles where the back part opens up.
It hit her on the neck and broke her neck, and she died instantly. What Tony's family said Harold had told them was much more vague.
When they learned the truth, it was a complete shock. Your belief was that Harold's first wife died in a a car accident.
That's all you knew. Yeah.
And then you get this bombshell that she didn't die in a car accident. Correct.
It was a lie. And the first comment out of my mouth, and I'm talking to an investigator, I said, that sounds worse than my sister's case.
And especially in light of Tony's death, they wished Lynn's case had been investigated more thoroughly. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office declined to speak with us, but Michael Fleeman, who has written a book about the Henthorne cases, says sheriff's detectives did investigate, at least initially.
Everything was progressing as if this was suspicious, and then all of a sudden the brakes were put on the investigation, it was declared an accident, and forgotten for nearly 20 years. Detective Charlie McCormick thinks the reason for that was the coroner's quick ruling that Lynn's death was accidental.
If you're a policeman and you're trying to investigate a crime, and all a sudden the coroner who really has jurisdiction overall says it's an accident you're a little bit cut off at the pass two days after a death like this to call it an accident it's unfortunate all the facts would indicate that this was i think a rush to judgment the former coroner says there no rush to judgment. He didn't remember the case, but re-read the coroner's report at Dateline's request and says, quote, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at the time everything fit.
There were no suspicions raised and no reason to drag our feet. Nevertheless, after Tony's death and McCormick's review, the then-Douglas County coroner changed the manner of Lynn's death from accidental to undetermined.
Still, Harold Henthorne hadn't been charged with anything, not in Tony's death or his first wife, Lynn's. So sheriff's detectives called on Lynn's old friend, Kim.
What did they ask you to do? They asked if we were willing to be wired.

Best friend undercover.

What would she find out about Harold?

Coming up...

My husband and I were looking at each other going,

I can't believe this.

Were you a little scared?

I was very scared. Two dead wives.
Two lonely places. Lynn and Tony never knew each other, but they shared so much.
In life, they both married Harold Henthorne, and in death, Harold had them both cremated against the wishes of their families. We didn't find out my sister was being cremated until her memorial service.
We would like to be able to go to a grave somewhere and see her. I mean, first family said the same thing.
You know, devastated. Never heard that, you know, she wanted to be cremated.
I mean, as soon as he got that body released, boom, cremated. And the Bertolais added, if that wasn't enough, he then took those ashes and put them where he wanted them.
Tony's ashes are spread on the same mountain that he spread the first wife's ashes. Same spot, did the exact same thing.
And he always claims it's their favorite spot. I mean, we're talking, he did the exact same things from start to finish with both wives.
Crazy. I mean, even the same photo pose.
The families thought what Harold did with his wife's remains was insensitive, but the cops, federal and local, were looking for something else, evidence of murder. In Douglas County, the detectives went down the list of who might know anything about Lynn's case.
They talked to Patricia, they talked to Roxanne, and they wanted to talk to Harold. When he wouldn't agree, they turned to someone he would talk to, his old friend, Kim LaFerrier, and asked her and her husband to secretly record a conversation with him.
We said no at the time because we felt like he was innocent. After all, Kim and Harold had been close friends for years.
We prayed about it, and we asked our pastor, and he said, if he is innocent, then you will be able to reveal that. And so then we agreed to do it.
Now she and her husband were meeting Harold for a meal near her home in Virginia, but first getting wired up by police. The cops were hoping to use Harold's words against him, Kim still hoping to exonerate him.
Were you a little scared? I was very scared. I would be scared to do something like that.
I was scared. At first, she could only think of one thing.
We had a huge wire around my waist, and I kept saying, he's going to hug me. And they said, no, he can't.
And I said, he's going to hug me. He does that.
And they said, no, he can't. And I was trying to process, what am I going to do? So don't hug me.
That's kind of hard. Right.
That looks suspicious. When he hugged me, I put my hand in front of me to guard the wires.
Crisis averted. They sat down.
Do you think he could tell anything was up? We don't know. I mean, he said many times.
My attorney has told me that my friends will be wired. Did that send a chill? No, I said, golly, that's terrible.
Would they really do that? I could play the game. Kim and her husband were told to not mention Tony and to drill down on what really happened when Lynn died.
So this wasn't about you saying, did you do this? Did you cause her death? It was more about catching him in lies and inconsistencies. Then Harold said something which didn't make sense to Kim, that he'd put his career on hold when Haley was born, and he and Tony decided to keep that a secret.
He told us the reason he didn't work and didn't tell us is that Tony had asked him not to.

He couldn't tell us because he was afraid

that if we ever met up with the Bertolais

that we would tell them that he was a stay-at-home dad.

I'm like, we would never see them.

And he goes, well, I couldn't take that chance.

Then there was a technical glitch.

At one point, my wire wasn't working. How did you know it wasn't working?

They called me on the phone. So you're taking a call in front of Harold from the police?

And they told me to get in the bathroom and they would fix it.

Wire fixed. Kim went back to the table.
Harold, who was never shy about anything,

launched into a sad story about life without Tony.

We didn't do much talking. He did.

I mean, he cried and said how hard it was

and how, you know, it was hard to be a mom and a dad.

But there was one thing Harold, who loved to talk, never said.

We never asked him, did you kill her?

But he never said, I didn't kill her. He would make statements like, why would I do that? They're accusing me of this, why would I do that? But he never said, I didn't kill either one of them.
Still, as a longtime friend, Kim couldn't bring herself to believe that Harold was capable of murder. Even after all of this, you still aren't convinced that he's a killer? Not 100 percent, no, but we have lots of questions.
Lots of unanswered questions, lots of concerns, lots of things that my husband and I were looking at each other going, I can't believe this. After that night, Kim and Harold continued to talk.
It took Kim some time to process what Harold had said. She considered his inconsistencies, the differing stories he told her and others.
In time, she grew to believe that neither of Harold's wives, her friends, had died accidentally. How did that sink in? How did that feel? Sad.
I felt like he was such a broken person, and I just felt sad that he wouldn't even come clean and tell the truth. Sad in part that a man she thought she knew seemed to be someone else entirely.
Do you think he is the master manipulator? Yes. I think he totally controls every situation and tries to control everyone.
And I think when he can't control you, he becomes angry. And I'd never experienced his anger until he was going on and on about, if the FBI contacted me or if anyone contacted me, they would tell me lies about him.
I said, no, they don't. And he goes, what are you talking about? And I said, they don't tell you lies.
They ask you questions. And he said, well,

how do you know this? And I said, because I've talked to them.

Did he freak out?

Oh, he freaked.

Harold must have wondered if Kim was talking to the FBI, who else was? And what were they

saying about him?

Coming up.

I work with nonprofits.

Harold told people he was a fundraiser for nonprofits. Fundraiser? That's about to raise some questions with the FBI.
And so is this. His wife's life was worth millions of dollars.
And if she died, he would get all of it. Every morning, we choose how to begin our day.
I think about the people at home. They tune in because they are curious.
They care about their world, and they care about each other. There's always something new to learn, whether a news event or a new recipe.
And when we step through the morning together, it makes the rest of the day better. We come here to make the most of today.
We are family. We are today.
Watch the Today Show with Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin weekdays at 7 a.m. on NBC.
Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with one of the hottest artists in

all of music right now, Grammy winner Lainey Wilson, to talk about her path from the tiny town of Baskin, Louisiana, to country music stardom. You can get our conversation now for free wherever you download your podcasts.
Now they had the final answer. Or did they? Nothing has more suspense than a Dateline mystery

And no one wants to wait to find out what happens next That's why everyone needs Dateline Premium Where listening is always ad-free You get the whole story and nothing but the story Or do you? Yes, actually, you do Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or DatelinePremium.com. On the Christian dating site where Harold and Tony met, there's a question for members.
What would you do if you inherited a fortune? Harold wrote he'd give a good chunk away and set up a foundation to fund various ministries. As it turned out, Harold had come into a small fortune, although there's no evidence he gave any of it away.
When his first wife, Lynn, died, Harold told police she had about $300,000 in life insurance. But when they re-examined the case, they found the amount was more than double that, over $600,000.
After Lynn's death, he collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in life insurance money. And as best anyone can tell, this is how he supported himself.
Harold wasn't living the high life on that money. He lived frugally in the years after Lynn's death.
But by 1999, when he met Tony, he may have been trying to upgrade his lifestyle. There was evidence that he was researching a number of women's financial situations, including Tony's.
It had been several years between wives. It was during those years he met Sanceret Lise Calvar.
When you're dating on the internet, a widower is actually, you know, could be a good find. Sanceret was on that same Christian dating site that Harold and Tony were using.
She found Harold's profile appealing and reassuring. Because a guy in his late 40s might have a lot of weird tics or haven't had any relationship experience, but a widower, oh, a widower, that's nice.
So you think that's safe. She agreed to meet Harold for coffee.
He knew how to carry himself. He dressed nice.
He was good looking. He had a tan and seemed to present himself physically.
She says Harold was very interested in her work in the film industry and how she was making a lot of money. And I went into detail about what I did, and I made a very good living and was living by myself in a three-bedroom house.
So he knew I was well-established. But Sansare remembers Harold had few details to share about his work in charities.
He just seemed like he was making more of his life than what was going on. He was pretty vague in his career.
Sauceray saw that as a huge red flag and decided Harold wasn't for her. She can't remember the exact date they met, but she thinks it was the spring of 2000.
If that's correct, Harold was already engaged to Tony, who thought he was a successful consultant to charities, able to support her if she decided to quit her medical practice and be a stay-at-home mom. It's what he told everyone, including a friend making a home video shortly after Haley's birth.
I work with nonprofits, whether it be churches, schools, or hospitals. Harold and Tony had even lived apart for two years after their wedding, supposedly due to the demands of their careers.
Harold told people he was a fundraiser for nonprofits. He had an address, a post office box.
He had a business card. And this was his story.
Remember, Harold had told Kim in that undercover restaurant meeting that when Haley was born, he decided to be a stay-at-home dad for a while. He just didn't want Tony's family to know.
It's an exciting year. We love you all.
And we want you to come out and visit us in Denver. But there was much more to it than that.
When FBI investigators dug deep into Harold's financial history, they found no tax returns, no pay stubs, no evidence Harold had held a job since Lynn died in 1995. When he was investigated after Tony's death, they could find no evidence at all that he ever made a dime.
Apparently, everything he ever said about his job was a lie, including nearly every Thursday when he said he went on business trips. Just as there was no business, there were no business trips.
The FBI looked at Harold's cell phone and credit card records and found out that he really spent Thursdays at this Panera bakery a few miles from his house, eating and surfing the web. So after the wedding, why did Harold say he needed to stay in Colorado for his work?

Why eventually did Tony have to leave Mississippi?

Tony's family wondered if Harold's real purpose was to separate her from them

so she'd be easier to control and maybe to kill.

Do you think that there's the chance that he knew his plan for Tony from the very beginning, from the time they said, I do? Well, they got a life insurance policy as soon as they got back from their honeymoon. And so I think he was probably going down that path.
The life insurance policy they bought after the honeymoon was just the first one. By the time Tony died, there were more.
A huge part of this investigation was just untangling the life insurance policies and what he took out and what Tony signed off on and what she may not have known about and where the documents went. At the end of the day, Harold arranged it

so that his wife's life was worth millions of dollars

and that if she died, he would get all of it.

Investigators discovered four policies totaling $4.7 million.

On the surface, he would make it sound like this life insurance policy. Tony would benefit their daughter in some kind of a trust.
And one of the policies had named Haley as a beneficiary. But Harold hadn't bought it.
Tony's parents had. And Harold had his daughter's name removed.
His name put on instead. And he did it just weeks before that beam mysteriously fell on Tony at their mountain cabin.
Then, just days after Tony died, he alerted the insurance companies hoping to collect all those millions, but couldn't get the money because the case was being investigated. By late 2014, the FBI had found the insurance policies and the cell phone pings to the park.
They knew about the near miss at the cabin. They had dissected all the lies.
Finally, they decided it was enough. November 6, 2014, a little over two years after Tony Henthorne died, Harold dropped Haley off at school, then headed for home.
He never got there. Law enforcement stopped him near his house.
They arrested Harold and charged him with Tony's murder. A good day amongst all the bad.
This won't have a happy ending because we won't be able to bring my sister back. But from here on out, there will be good moments for us.
And that was a good moment. And it just so happened to be on my parents' 55th wedding anniversary.
But there was still a trial to come and another battle, with even more at stake. Coming up, Harold Henthorne heads to court.
I'm thinking, OK, well, this is going to be hard to prove. No witnesses, no evidence.
What do you have? Would a jury buy the case against him? Thank you. By 2015, the Bertolais had been waiting for justice for three years.
They missed Toni, but felt an incredible connection to her through Haley. Do you see your sister in Haley? Oh.
I mean, tremendously smart girl. I mean, they're just alike.
I think she'd grow up to be just like her mother. But when the Bertolais went to the media with their suspicions about Harold, soon after Tony's death, he cut off their contact with Haley completely.
It was agony for Tony's family. Then, immediately after his arrest, a lawyer assigned to represent Haley's interests in court made sure she got to see the Bertolais.
It had been a year since they had even been allowed to talk to her. She finally got to be a little nine-year-old girl, and she just needs to be able to grow up without a lot of adult issues around her.
The Bertolais also went to court to seek custody of Haley. But Harold was still her father, and even from jail made it clear he was not going to let his in-laws take his daughter.
He is a horrible person that I want to be put in prison for the rest of his life. He deserves to be there, and he does not deserve to be a parent to this beautiful child.
Haley stayed in Colorado and lived with her godparents. The Bertolais' only chance to gain custody of her would be if Harold was convicted of her mother's murder.
Harold pleaded not guilty, and that meant the stakes were doubly high when on September 8, 2015, 10 months after his arrest, Harold Henthorne went on trial. It would be a battle for both his freedom and his daughter.
The burden of proof is always on the prosecution, which in this case had no forensic evidence, no physical evidence, no fingerprints or DNA, and no witnesses who saw Harold push Tony off the cliff. Juror John Johnson was skeptical.
Right at the start, because I didn't know anything about it, I'm thinking, okay, well, this is going to be hard to prove. No witnesses, no evidence at that point.
So what do you have? But there was all that life insurance. There were the cell phone pings that seemed to show Harold scouting out Tony's last hike.
The prosecution even showed the jury a map found in Harold's car with an X marking the spot where Tony fell. And there were all those versions of what Harold said happened on that mountain.
And this was a case in which the evidence was not so much the physical evidence. The evidence were the lies.
And it was lie after lie after lie after lie. The defense said none of the so-called evidence added up to murder.
They said the pings on Harold's phone didn't show trips to the park, but rather him taking a back route to his weekend cabin. And as for the life insurance, Tony knew all about it.
Besides, they argued, Tony would still be alive if the park service had sent a helicopter to rescue her, as Harold begged them to do and even offered to pay for. The crux of the defense was Harold Henthorne is an odd duck.
He says more than he should. And that may make him a

blowhard and an annoying person to be around at a cocktail party, but doesn't make him a killer.

Look past his character and focus on the evidence. Nobody saw Harold Henthorne push Tony off that

clip. There is no video of it happening.
There's very little physical evidence to prove anything

Thank you. Nobody saw Harold Henthorne push Tony off that clip.
There is no video of it happening. There's very little physical evidence to prove anything other than it was just a fall.
But the prosecution had another powerful card to play. Although the defense objected, the judge allowed in testimony about Harold's first wife, Lynn, about her death, her life insurance, and about Harold's many versions of what happened.
And the question was, is this man just horribly unlucky, or is he a double murderer? After 10 days, the case went to the jury. John Johnson, along with fellow jurors Peter Cristofalo and Jerry Tabawada, told us that over the course of the trial, they came to believe that Toni was a victim from the time she first met Harold online.
Was Toni just really unlucky when she chose Harold Henthorne on that website, or he chose her? I think he chose her. I think she was a target.
Because of her age, for one thing, you know, and she wanted to have kids. She was vulnerable.
Yeah. The jurors thought that Harold had conned her when they met on the dating site,

controlled her while they were married.

And when they looked at this last photo Tony took before she died,

they thought they saw Harold duping Tony one last time.

In my mind, she was doing the same pose he did.

The last photo of him is he's on the edge of the cliff holding onto a tree, like looking over.

Well, if she gets there at the same time, it's like, oh, poof.

And while Harold was not on trial for killing Lynn,

they believed he was responsible for her death also.

Did everyone believe that they were somehow,

that there was a pattern there?

There was certainly a pattern, absolutely.

Yeah, the similarities were just too much to push aside.

The nighttime incidents, I mean, desolate areas.

I mean, it was just like, everything was just like

the domino effect that was falling into place.

In the end, they had no doubt. Guilty.
It was guilty., I don't know, everything was just like the domino effect. It was falling into place.
In the end, they had no doubt.

Guilty.

It was guilty.

Absolutely guilty.

Yes.

Kim cried when she heard the verdict.

Cried because she knew it was right.

And because she thought about her two friends and their last moments on Earth.

I feel sad because Lynn was afraid.

And I know Tony was afraid. And that saddens me.
But I have to believe in a God and met them right where they were. Held their hand.
Loved them. And told them it was going to be okay.
Harold has never been charged with killing his wife Lynn. Three months after the verdict in Tony's case, Harold was back in court for sentencing.
Tony's family asked that Harold be spared the death penalty so that Haley wouldn't lose both parents forever. Harold was sentenced to life in federal prison without the possibility of release.
Harold told the court that day that he never killed anyone. He also said he loved his daughter Haley.
Tony's family's focus then turned to the custody of Haley. Do you hope to resolve that custody issue that she can be with the Bertolais forever? I think that's exactly what we're hoping for.
And praying. You fought hard for her, for that little girl.
Oh yeah. Her mother went through life, was a great person, worked hard.
We're doing that because Haley needs to inherit all the good things that her mother did. And she needs a secured life going forward.
We're doing all that for Haley and no one else. December 23rd, 2015, a court in Colorado granted Tony's oldest brother and his wife guardianship of Haley.
We won't show her face as she looks now, but it was the best gift the Bertolais could have hoped for. Haley was with them in Mississippi in time for Christmas.
Now, this little girl who has gone through so much is starting to heal. She has her cousin Anna Kate to help.
People are saying I'm therapeutically helping her through this. I don't really understand, but I don't know how I'm doing this, but I guess I'm just keeping her entertained and happy.
Though all that money Harold was after is now in a trust for Haley, it won't bring her mom back. But everyone who knew Tony wants to make sure Haley never forgets her.
She came into the office, and her mom's lab coat was hanging behind the door. And I said, Haley, would you like your mama's work coat? She said, Miss Tammy, I would like that a lot.
So I put it on her. And she went, it smells like my mommy.
A true crime story never really ends. Even when a case is closed, the journey for those left behind is just beginning.

Since our Dateline story aired, Tracy has harnessed her outrage into a mission.

I had no other option. I had to do something.
Catch up with families, friends, and investigators on our bonus series, After the Verdict. Ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances

with strength and courage.

It does just change your life, but speaking up for these issues helps me keep going.

To listen to After the Verdict, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or at datelinepremium.com.