Today we’re exploring the term that has been circulating online for the last few months, Alpine Divorce, and two cases where these “divorces” of sorts were life-threatening. In 2012, Toni Henthorn fell from an off-trail ledge in Rocky Mountain National Park. Her husband Harold said she slipped, but a ranger found a map that indicated otherwise. Thirteen years later, Arielle Konig was attacked by her husband, Gerhardt, on a cliffside trail in Hawaii on her birthday, but against all odds, she made it out alive.
TW: Domestic abuse, mention of sexual assault on a minor, description of head injury
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.
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SOURCES
https://americanliterature.com/author/robert-barr/short-story/an-alpine-divorce
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/mar/17/alpine-divorce-abandoned-hiking-trail
https://www.alpineinstitute.com/the-dark-evolution-of-the-alpine-divorce-from-gothic-thrillers-to-trailhead-betrayals/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYz8LaMDhEI/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0k1xkllknmo
https://www.denverpost.com/obituaries/toni-bertolet-henthorn-co/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-investigates-the-deaths-of-harold-henthorns-wives/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/158650413/sandra_l-henthorn
https://www.reddit.com/r/lastimages/comments/phr0dk/last_photo_of_toni_henthorn_moments_before_her/
https://www.mycoloradoparks.com/national-parks/rmnp/rocky-mountain-wife-killer-harold-henthorn/
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/harold-henthorn-douglas-county-murder-investigation-stopped/
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/family-of-henthorns-first-wife-speaks/
https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/harold-henthorn-arrested-first-degree-murder-related-death-wife-rocky-mountain-national
https://www.denverpost.com/2015/09/22/woman-believes-she-was-number-three-on-harold-henthorns-murder-list/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/hawaii-husband-attempted-murder-trial
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/us/hawaii-doctor-wife-attack-arrest
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hawaii-doctor-rock-attack-rcna198593
https://abc7chicago.com/post/son-doctor-accused-hawaii-murder-plot-testifies-says-father-confessed/18821791/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTSdiBFaF8M
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-arielle-konig-heal-after-tragic-incident
TRANSCRIPT
Alpine divorce is a phrase I keep seeing everywhere. It’s when a couple goes on a hike and one of them abandons the other and leaves them for dead
There are way too many stories that fall into the alpine divorce category, but today, I want to tell you about two very twisty ones. This is Heart Starts Pounding.
Welcome to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding in our dark summer series! As always, I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
Last week, we covered a mysterious cruise disappearance, and I just wanted to thank everyone who listened and reached out. I put a little anonymous confessions box on our instagram @heart stars pounding to see what you all thought of cruises in general and your answers did not disappoint.
Someone wrote “there’s nothing scarier than looking out at the dark water at night, pure nightmare fuel”, another person wrote “after watching the poop cruise documentary, I don’t know if I could go on one” that’s referring to the netflix doc. And actually a lot of people said they thought they'd get too seasick to ever go on a cruise and they have a fear of throwing up. And fun fact, I also have the fear of throwing up. I didn’t know it was that common or WHY we all have it, but solidarity.
This week, we’re pivoting and talking about a phrase that I have seen all over social media this year. Alpine divorce. The idea that sometimes, your lover will take you on a hike and leave you on the mountain to die. I started researching stories that relate to this phrase and oh my god I could write a whole book about it! This happens way more than I would have ever thought.
But today, I want to tell you about two of those cases that I could not stop thinking about, and after listening, I don’t think you will either.
Alright, let’s get into this week's episode.
At 5:54pm on September 29th, 2012, a 911 dispatcher in Colorado got the following 911 call
(play audio from actual call) "My name is Harold Henthorn. I'm in Rocky Mountain National Park. I need an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately."
58 year old Harold Henthorn told the dispatcher his wife had fallen and needed to be rescued. They'd been hiking off-trail on Deer Mountain, taking photos from an overlook, and she'd stepped back and lost her footing. She was now at the bottom of a cliff. He needed help, and fast
The dispatcher starts asking questions. And for a man that just watched his wife fall off of a cliff he seems rather…measured…
Play :57- 1:17
He describes how far his wife fell like he’s telling her how far he can throw a football.
And then, less than four minutes into the call, he said his battery was running low—and he disconnected.
The nearest ranger station was miles away. The trail was off the marked path. The sun was going down over the Rockies, the temperature dropping fast, and somewhere at the bottom of a cliff in one of the most remote corners of Rocky Mountain National Park, a woman named Toni Henthorn lay injured—or worse.
Rescuers immediately were dispatched to try and save the woman, but it wasn’t going to be easy to get to where the couple was..
See, Deer Mountain sits in the southern reaches of Rocky Mountain National Park, just outside Estes Park, Colorado. The trail that bears its name winds upward through stands of lodgepole and limber pine. Past the treeline the terrain opens up into granite outcroppings, sky all around, the air thin and cold even on a warm September day. The summit tops out just over ten thousand feet. On a clear afternoon the views reach out across the Front Range in every direction—mountains stacked behind mountains all the way to the horizon.
But Harold and Toni Henthorn were not at the summit. They had left the marked trail behind and scrambled down to an off-trail ledge—a remote, rocky overlook roughly two and a half miles from the trailhead, in a section of the park most visitors never see.
And this stuck out to the rescuers as they made their way towards Toni. This was Not somewhere you'd find on the main trail map. Not even really somewhere you'd wander into by accident. It was…out of the way.
Rangers reached the scene just before eight o'clock that night—three hours after the fall. The drop from that ledge was steep, more than a hundred feet of exposed rock face, likely closer to a hundred and thirty. When they reached Toni at the base, it was already too late.
Toni was just fifty years old. A Mississippi girl, born and raised in Jackson. She had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Mississippi Medical School, built a career as an ophthalmologist—a nationally recognized one—and had served as the team ophthalmologist for the Colorado Avalanche. She came from a close-knit family with roots in Mississippi's petroleum industry. She had a seven-year-old daughter at home.
Toni was an amazing and accomplished woman, But one thing that I think is important to bring up about her here is…She had also had three surgeries on her knee.
Toni Henthorn was not, by any measure, an avid hiker. So what was she doing at the bottom of such a rugged, out of the way area?
Harold Henthorn's account of what happened that day was consistent. He told it to the first rangers who reached him that evening. The couple had a beautiful hike. They'd found a lovely off-trail spot for a picnic lunch—a little scenic overlook with a view out over the park. After they ate, Toni had stood up to take a photograph. She stepped back. Lost her footing on the uneven rock. And before he could even register what was happening she had fallen off the side
He'd raced down to help her immediately, he said. He'd called 911 the moment he could, and He'd been performing CPR—doing everything he possibly could—right up until the call connected. Desperately pushing on his wife’s chest and doing mouth to mouth to keep her alive until help got there.
Investigators took his story down and then looked at the area where Toni had landed. And they noticed three weird things.
Toni's camera, the one she was using to take a photo when she fell, was lying close to her body. That didn’t look right. If she had fallen over 100 feet while holding it, the Ranger expected that it would have been flung out into the rockfield.
Her wedding ring was still on her finger. But The diamond was gone. It was never recovered.
And 3, Toni had been wearing lipstick when she fell
Now maybe that’s not strange, sure it was a hike but some people like to dress up no matter the occasion. The thing that was weird about the lipstick, was that it wasn’t smudged. Harold had told investigators that he was doing mouth to mouth, yet none of her lipstick was outside of her lip line or on his face….
Investigators asked Harold if they could take a look at the vehicle the couple arrived in that day, and he led them over to where he had parked. One of the park rangers popped open a door and started rummaging through what Harold had in the car, and something caught his eye.
There was a map of Rocky Mountain national park, with one marking on it that harold had made.
An X, right at the spot where Toni had fallen.
The ranger looked back at Harold. Something was deeply wrong with his story.
While Toni’s body was sent off to be examined, Harold was released and returned home.
He had to tell his seven year old daughter about the death of her mother, but he phrased it strangely. He told the girl that “mommy had lost consciousness forever”, and that she shouldn’t cry because people were going to be watching the family. He also started controlling her behavior in concerning ways, making her ask permission to even leave her room and keeping a baby monitor in there at all times.
And then there was Toni’s family. They reached out to Harold for more information on what had happened that day. her brother, Barry, was a cardiologist. It makes sense he wanted to know more, because what if Toni had suffered some sort of heart attack while she was on the mountain.
But every time Harold told her family what happened. Details would change. They felt like they were getting four or five different versions of the story, and they were having trouble keeping track of the details.
And they became even more suspicious when Harold not only filed a claim for Toni’s 4.5 million dollar life insurance policy, but he sent half a million dollars to his brother.
With each passing day, Toni’s family was growing more and more suspicious that Harold was hiding something. And they weren’t the only ones. Investigators were silently looking into Toni’s death more. And what they found was shocking.
What followed next was a deeper investigation, and where Toni died was about to play a huge role in how the investigation would go. Because Toni Henthorn didn't just die in a national park. She died in a federal jurisdiction—and that mattered enormously.
The National Park Service has its own investigative branch, a small corps of federal special agents responsible for crimes across the entire national park system—roughly thirty-three agents nationwide at the time. When a death in Rocky Mountain National Park looked like it might be something other than an accident, those agents got involved.
So NPS Special Agent Beth Shott started working on the case. And Beth was an incredible, detail oriented investigator. She hiked Deer Mountain more than fifteen times during the investigation. She walked the trail at every hour, in every weather, mapping every angle. FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing worked the case alongside her.
Beth was not going to leave any stone unturned, literally or figuratively.
And the first thing she wanted to look at was Harold’s phone records.
It turns out, During the window Harold said he was down at the base of that cliff performing CPR, that’s when his phone lit up with activity. Somehow, while he was doing chest compressions, at least according to him, he had also made twenty-two phone calls and exchanged ninety-eight text messages. Ninety-eight. including at least sixteen messages to a friend asking if he could drive to pick Henthorn up from Estes Park, and recommending that the friend take a particular route
He also sent a text to Toni's brother Barry, the cardiologist, at 6:16, twenty minutes after the first 911 call It just said “she’s gone”
But by the time he called Barry, he had already been on the phone with at least a dozen other people.
But the timing of those calls is even more damning. The Larimer County Coroner would later testify that based on Toni's injuries and the evidence at the scene, she had almost certainly died within twenty to sixty minutes of the fall. Almost certainly before the first 911 call went out at 5:54.
Special Agent Shott knew that Harold’s phone held more information than just phone calls and texts. It also had his location. And if you thought things already looked bad for him, they’re about to look a lot worse.
Harold's GPS data placed him inside Rocky Mountain National Park at least eight or nine times in the six weeks before Toni's death. Every single time, he'd gone alone.
When investigators confronted him, he said he'd only been there once.
Then there was a photograph recovered from Harold's phone. Taken that afternoon, at the cliff. It showed Harold standing at the very edge—toes at the lip, the drop behind him—holding a pine branch, angled back toward the spot where Toni was standing.
Special Agent Shott saw that photo and immediately knew what it was. It was probably Harold trying to lure Toni towards him, to stand where he was.
And then, she got a call from the coroner. It was confirmed. There was no physical evidence that any CPR was done on Toni. They would have expected to see cracked ribs or bruises. But no. There was nothing.
For as damning as all of this information was, though. The most startling evidence hadn’t even been discovered yet.
See, after Toni’s death had been reported on and picked up by news publications, investigators started receiving letters.
Seventeen of them, actually. all Anonymous. And they weren’t just sent to investigators, they were sent to Toni’s family, and to Brian Maass—an investigative reporter at KCNC, the CBS Denver affiliate. All of them carried the same message.
This isn’t the first one of Harold’s wives to die under strange circumstances.
Harold had been married once before. To Sandra Lynn Henthorn—everyone called her Lynn. She had died on May 6, 1995 at just thirty-seven years old.
The official story, the one that Harold had told authorities when they arrived on the scene, was that She and Harold had been out on a rural stretch of Highway 67 west of Sedalia, Colorado, when their car allegedly slipped off a jack while they were changing a tire by the side of the road. Lynn was pinned beneath the vehicle. The cause of death: mechanical asphyxiation.
The only witness was Harold.
And even still, Douglas County authorities had closed the case as an accident in less than a week.
When Toni’s family learned about Lynn’s death, they were shocked and devastated. But it made them think back to something that had happened to Toni the previous year
In late August of 2011—fourteen months before Toni would die on Deer Mountain—Harold and Toni were at their vacation cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado. Harold was working on the deck one night, at 10pm no less, when he called out Toni to come help him with something. The exact details of what happened are a little murky, but we know that Toni walked outside and A heavy structural beam came down.
Now, the reason that details are a little murky is because Harold had at least three different versions of what happened. He told the ER doctor that the beam had fallen off of the deck. But he told a friend that it had slipped from his hands while he was on a ladder.
Regardless, It struck her and fractured vertebrae in her neck. But She survived. Later, she told her mother, Yvonne Bertolet: "If I hadn't bent down after I walked outside, the beam would have killed me."
And just like in Lynn’s case. The beam incident had been ruled an accident. No charges were ever filed.
But Toni’s family always thought that incident was strange, it just didn’t add up
And it didn’t add up to investigators either, who were still compiling evidence against Harold. Starting with the life insurance policies….
Harold Henthorn had taken out three life insurance policies on his wife Toni. All of them stacked. All managed by him. She didn't know about any of them. Maybe I’m naive but I didn’t even realize you could do that! Take out life insurance on a spouse without their knowledge.. The total came to roughly four and a half million dollars. When investigators first asked Harold how much life insurance he carried on Toni, he mentioned one policy.. Worth a million and a half.
There was also the educational annuity. Toni's parents had set up $205,000 specifically to fund their granddaughter's education. Harold had quietly redirected it—changing the beneficiary to himself.
And then there was the question of Harold Henthorn's career.
He called himself a Certified Fundraiser. A consultant to major churches and nonprofit organizations across the country. He had the business cards, the professional title, the social credibility that came from moving through Christian philanthropic circles. Toni had believed him. Her family had believed him.
Beth Shott pulled Harold's tax returns.
Zero reported income from work for the years 2005 through 2011. Zero. The organization whose certification appeared on his business cards had no record of him as a member. Harold Henthorn hadn't held a verifiable job since 1992.
He had been living off his wives.
Everything I learn about this man is infuriating. But this is spiking my cortisol in a way I didn't know was possible.
So let me tell you about Grace Rishell—the sister of Harold’s first wife–the one who died under the car. Sometime in 2009 or 2010, Harold had taken out a $400,000 life insurance policy on Grace and named himself the sole beneficiary. Rishell had believed the policy was for her daughters. She found out the truth after Harold was arrested. She would later tell ABC 20/20 that she believes she was meant to be victim number three.
Harold had found both of his wives through Christian dating networks—spaces where a man presenting himself as devout and professionally accomplished might not be asked to provide documentation. Where a question like "can I see your tax returns?" would never come up.
Harold Henthorn was arrested in November 2014, at fifty-eight years old. A federal grand jury had indicted him for first-degree murder.
The trial opened September 8, 2015, in U.S. District Court in Denver, before Judge R. Brooke Jackson. Assistant U.S. Attorney Suneeta Hazra led the prosecution. She knew exactly what the choice of location meant.
That remote off-trail ledge, she told the jury, was "the perfect place to murder someone."
The defense called no witnesses. Harold did not testify.
The jury deliberated for roughly ten hours. On September 21, 2015, they returned a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder.
Harold Henthorn was sentenced on December 8, 2015—mandatory life without the possibility of parole. He had something to say before sentencing was handed down.
And at the end of all of that, he had this to say "Toni was a remarkable woman. I loved her with all my heart. I did not kill Toni or anyone else."
Harold appealed to the Tenth Circuit. They affirmed the conviction in 2017. He petitioned the Supreme Court. They declined the case in 2018. He filed post-conviction motions alleging ineffective counsel. Judge Jackson rejected those in 2022. By 2023, every avenue of appeal was closed.
He is currently serving life without parole at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Harold Henthorn is the worst of the worst, but I want to take a second to focus on the women in his life.
His daughter no longer speaks with him. In a February 2025 interview she referred to her father only as Mr. Henthor.
Yvonne Bertolet, Toni's mother, was in that Denver courtroom when the verdict came in. A juror hugged her afterward. She told the Associated Press: "Believe it or not I forgive him for doing it. I feel for him and his family."
And then there is Lynn.
Lynns death investigation was reopened in October 2012—seventeen years later, less than a month after Toni's death—and the details that had been filed away without a second look suddenly looked very different. A shoe print on the side of the vehicle suggesting it may have been kicked off the jack. Two jacks at the scene, one of them a boat jack propped on a cinder block—not a standard configuration for changing a tire on the side of a road. A passing motorist named Patricia Montoya who had stopped to help and later told investigators that Harold had not wanted to cover Lynn's body with his jacket while they waited.
Harold gave five different accounts of the timeline that evening. Five.
In December 2014, Douglas County Coroner Lora Thomas changed the manner of Lynn's death on her official certificate.
From "accident" to "undetermined."
The viral phrase that gets passed around when talking about these kinds of stories is “alpine divorce”
"Alpine divorce" is a term derived from an 1893 short story of the same name written by Robert Barr. The story revolves around a husband who plans to end his marriage by pushing his wife off a cliff while hiking in the Swiss Alps. The characters are John Bodman and his unnamed wife — a bitterly unhappy English couple whose mutual hatred has made their marriage unbearable. Unable to obtain a divorce under England's rigid laws, John devises a plan to murder his wife by pushing her off a precipice called the Hanging Outlook. However, when the couple reaches the cliff's edge, Mrs. Bodman reveals she has anticipated his plan all along. She has told friends, hotel staff, and arranged for witnesses to follow them — then throws herself over the wall, framing her husband for her own death. The story ends with John standing alone as two men arrive, realizing the truth will never be believed
It’s kind of ironic, that in the actual story that started the word, there’s a big question over who is actually guilty.
And that kind of brings me to my next story. A story about a couple that goes on a hike, but only one makes it down safely. And the questions that arise as to what REALLY happened up on that mountain….
Just like our last story, this tale begins on a mountain trail not on most maps. The Pali Puka Trail in Hawaii
Behind the bus parking area at the Nu'uanu Pali (noo-oo-AH-noo PAH-lee) Lookout on the windward side of Oahu—the spot on the Pali Highway where tourists stop to take photos of the Ko'olau (koh-oh-LAH-oo) mountains and feel the wind hit them like something physical. And it does hit you. The trade winds funnel through the saddle at the Pali with enough force that on bad days they can knock you sideways. There are signs warning you not to stand too close to the edge.
The trail itself is unmarked. The state's Department of Land and Natural Resources discourages people from hiking it. There are signs telling you not to go. People go anyway—because about a third of a mile up through the bamboo and the ohia trees, the forest breaks open onto a knife-edge ridge with the entire windward coast of Oahu laid out below you: Kaneohe (kah-nay-OH-heh) Bay, the green patchwork of the valley, the ocean flickering in the distance. And at the crest of that ridge, cut through the volcanic rock by wind and time, there is a hole—a puka, in Hawaiian. A window in the cliff face with a rectangle of sky framed inside it.
The drop on either side of that ridge is several hundred feet. In places, more. Hikers have died on this trail.
On the morning of March 24, 2025, Amanda Morris and Sarah Buchsbaum were making their way up it. Both were registered nurses there for the hike. The trade winds were blowing, the forest pressing in around the narrow path, and then—somewhere up ahead of them on the ridge—they heard a woman screaming. Soft at first, but then words started taking shape
"Please help. He's trying to kill me."
They rushed toward the sound.
And Sarah Buchsbaum pulled out her phone. And made the following 911 call:
"911? Hi. Someone's currently being attacked on the top of Pali Puka. There's a man trying to kill her. She has blood all over her face." (try to get audio)
The two nurses came around a bend in the trail and found a woman on the ground.
Her face and scalp were covered in blood, but she was conscious, and she was alone. Whoever she was screaming about was gone. Amanda Morris and Sarah Buchsbaum, sprung into action, using their expertise as nurses. They ran to her while still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher and helped her get upright. Then They held onto her and began the descent back down toward the lookout parking lot, supporting her on either side
Honolulu Police responded fast. Body camera footage captured the woman in the parking lot—conscious, standing, her face crusted with blood from the wounds on her scalp. They asked her her name and she responded: Arielle Konig. She had been hiking with her husband. Gerhardt.
What followed over the next six-plus hours was one of the larger manhunts in recent Honolulu history. HPD's CID Domestic Violence Detail, their Strategic Enforcement unit, Crime Reduction Units, the Special Services Division, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, and the Honolulu Fire Department all deployed into the Ko'olau ridgeline, searching the Pali Puka trail corridor and the surrounding forest.
Around six o'clock that evening, an off-duty HPD officer named Chauncey Nicola—spotted a man emerging from the brush onto Nuuanu Pali Drive, blood on his shirt. The man saw officer Nicola and ran back into the brush, but the officer was able to catch him.
Gerhardt Konig was forty-six years old at the time of his arrest. He'd been born in South Africa, raised in San Diego after his family immigrated when he was fourteen. He went on to medical school and an anesthesiology residency at the University of Pittsburgh—eventually becoming an assistant professor there in anesthesiology and bioengineering. He worked at UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, for years before the family relocated. In 2023, they moved to Maui, where Gerhardt was contracted to provide anesthesiology services at Maui Health, the hospital system that runs Maui Memorial Medical Center in Kahului. An anesthesiologist is someone you trust completely when you're at your most vulnerable—someone who controls the line between consciousness and unconsciousness, whose judgment you hand yourself over to entirely.
He had been married once before, to a woman named Jessica Patella. That marriage ended in 2014, when she filed for divorce. He had two children from that marriage, including an older son named Emile, who was nineteen at the time of this incident.
His current wife, Arielle Konig was thirty-six years old on March 24, 2025. Which also happened to be her birthday.
She was an incredibly accomplished woman. She had studied nuclear engineering at Penn State, then spent eleven years at Westinghouse Electric in fuel engineering. In September 2022 she joined TerraPower as a project manager, working on high-assay low-enriched uranium supply. Arielle was, by any measure, exceptional at what she did. She had built something real.
She and Gerhardt had met on eHarmony and married in September 2018. They had two young sons together, born in 2020 and 2023. In 2022, they'd relocated from Pittsburgh to Maui, purchasing a home in the foothills above Kahului (kah-hoo-LOO-ee)for a million and a half dollars. The accomplished doctor, the accomplished engineer, their two little boys, a house in paradise. From the outside, the picture was nearly impossible to argue with.
But, things were not all as they seemed. In December 2024, Gerhardt woke in the middle of the night and picked up Arielle's phone.
He opened her WhatsApp and found messages between her and a colleague at TerraPower; an exchange that Gerhardt believed constituted an emotional affair. He thought The messages were flirtatious. Ariel and her colleague had apparently developed a system: they used the code word "HALEU"—high-assay low-enriched uranium, a term from their actual professional work—as a discreet signal to each other about when Gerhardt was nearby.
The confrontation that followed was ugly. Gerhardt demanded that Arielle quit her job. He called her names and bought a recording device to keep tabs on her. He even reached out to her affair partner’s wife to tell her about the affair.
But Arielle said that she was willing to do whatever it took to fix their marriage. So They went into couples counseling. They listened together to an audiobook about healing after infidelity.
Three months passed. Then Gerhardt booked a trip to Oahu.
Arielle had mentioned, three days before their departure, that she had always wanted to visit Oahu. Gerhardt made all the arrangements. He booked the hotel. He also made a dinner reservation at a Honolulu restaurant for the evening of March 24—Arielle's birthday for the two of them.
That morning, before they left the hotel, Gerhardt gave her a heart shaped card. Inside, in his handwriting: "You're the heart of our family. The kids and I hit the jackpot with you. Love always, G."
Then They drove out to the Nu'uanu Pali Lookout. Arielle took photos of the view on Snapchat and sent them to family, and the couple began the Pali Puka hike around ten in the morning.
But the trail was not what Arielle was expecting for a fun birthday hike. It got really steep really fast. About a quarter mile in, the cliff dropped away on one side, leaving the couple completely exposed to the fall below. Arielle started getting uncomfortable. She clung to a tree branch as they took a selfie—you can see her grip in the photo, the drop visible behind them, the cliff less than ten feet away.
And in this photo you can see that Gerhardt was wearing a small black backpack.
Shortly after the photo was taken, Gerhardt grabbed her by the upper arms. He told her "I'm so f---ing sick of this s---, get back over there." He then started pushing her toward the edge of the cliff. Less than ten feet away.
In a panic, She threw herself to the ground. She grabbed at the roots and shrubs around her—anything rooted, anything that held.
But He straddled her. And then, He reached into the backpack and produced a syringe. "Hold still," he said.
She was able to knock it out of his hand, but the nightmare wasn’t over
Because He went back into the pack. He pulled out what looked like a vial. He was loading a second syringe. Whatever was about to happen, Gerhart had obviously planned for it.
He put his hand over her mouth and said something that sums up “alpine divorce” horror perfectly. He said "Nobody's going to hear you out here. Nobody's coming to save you."
Arielle was not going down without a fight though. She bit his forearm. She grabbed at him. She fought.
He reached down and picked up a rock from the trail. He struck her in the head with it. She estimated it happened as many as ten times.
And then, from down the ridge, the voices of two women echoed. It was Amanda Morris and Sarah Buchsbaum shouting that they were calling 911. Gerhardt froze. Arielle crawled on her hands toward the nurses' voices, and Gerhardt fled.
Sarah Buchsbaum's 911 call went out at approximately 10:38 that morning.
Authorities took Areille’s statement and then went to the trail to look for Gerhart and for evidence of what had happened. If she had knocked the syringe from his hand, it should be somewhere in the brush.
But when they searched the trail, they never found the syringe. And the nurses who found Arielle said they didn’t see a syringe either. Was it possible that Arielle was embellishing that part of the story?
Three days after the attack, Arielle returned to the family home in Kahului, without Gerhardt. She was looking through the house when she found a Nike fanny pack in a closet. Inside: Gerhardt's Kaiser Permanente employee ID. Multiple empty syringes and needles. And vials of propofol.
Propofol—brand name Diprivan—is a powerful intravenous anesthetic used in operating rooms. It induces unconsciousness quickly and completely. It is also, for most people, the drug associated in public memory with the 2009 death of Michael Jackson, whose personal physician administered it to him as a sleep aid.
Gerhardt Konig was an anesthesiologist. He had unrestricted access to propofol which he had been stealing from the hospital he worked at. He had brought it to Oahu in a fanny pack along with the syringes needed to administer it.
No syringe was ever recovered from the Pali Puka trail. The defense would make that point repeatedly at trial. But Arielle had testified she knocked the first syringe out of his hand on a mountain ridge in the wind. [
Honolulu police seized the fanny pack. It became central evidence at trial.
The trial ran for roughly three weeks in March 2026, before Honolulu Circuit Court Judge Paul Wong. Deputy Prosecutor Joel Garner led the state's case. Defense attorney Thomas Otake presented a counter-narrative: this had been an unplanned, unpremeditated scuffle precipitated by Arielle pushing Gerhardt first. The rock, Otake argued, was a heat-of-the-moment response. The affair had caused real, genuine emotional disturbance.
Gerhardt took the stand in his own defense and claimed that this was self-defense.
They really hammered Areille’s credibility. That she was unreliable. She had been hiding an affair from Gerhardt for who knows how long, clearly she was used to lying. And the syringe was not found at the scene. Sure, there was medical gear in her home but that could have been from anything. Gerhardt was a medical professional for goodness sake.
But Joel Garner's closing argument cut through all of it. "The only thing that got Gerhardt to stop," he told the jury, "was being caught red-handed." If he was trying to protect himself from Arielle, why did he continue to bash her over the head?
Then, they brought up the calls that he had made to his son
During the six-hour manhunt that followed, Gerhardt placed two FaceTime calls to his son Emile. The first, at 10:42 in the morning—four minutes after the 911 call was placed—told Emile he would not be making it back to Maui. He said on this call That he had tried to kill Arielle because she had been cheating on him. That he planned to jump off the cliff before police could reach him.
The second call came at 11:46. Gerhardt asked if Emile had told anyone. And then: "I'm going to go before the police catch me." But he wasn’t able to before an officer caught up with him and brought him into custody.
On April 8, 2026, at 2:18 in the afternoon, the jury returned its verdict. They had deliberated for eight hours.
Gerhart was found Guilty of attempted manslaughter based upon extreme mental or emotional disturbance. Not guilty of attempted second-degree murder.
And this distinction matters. Attempted second-degree murder would have been life with the possibility of parole. Attempted manslaughter under Hawaii's "extreme emotional disturbance" provision carries a maximum sentence of twenty years.
Jury foreperson Makalapua Atkins spoke to reporters afterward. The jury had not been convinced, she said, that Gerhardt had specifically intended to kill Arielle on that particular day. But she noted: "A head injury is a very deadly part of the body."
Defense attorney Thomas Otake's statement after the verdict: "We are thankful that they did not convict him of attempted murder, which would have been life in prison."
Gerhardt Konig's sentencing is scheduled for August 13, 2026. Prosecutors will seek the twenty-year maximum.
Arielle Konig testified on the one-year anniversary of the day her husband tried to kill her. She described the scar on her forehead. The patch of scalp where hair no longer grows.
Her two sons were three and six years old at the time of the verdict. They are in her custody. She filed for divorce in May 2025.
As of this recording, Gerhardt Konig is being held at the Oahu Community Correctional Center, awaiting sentencing.
I was trying to write an outro to this episode, when I checked instagram and a bunch of you guys had sent me messages about a huge update in another alpine divorce case, so before we end I want to tell you more about what you guys were looking into.
On June 25th, 2026, a man named David Vander Meer died in police custody after appearing to take his own life. Vander Meer was waiting to go to trial for the 2006 death of his wife
In 2006, David and his wife Bernadette. While on an anniversary trip to Zion National Park, Bernadette fell roughly 1,200 feet to her death from Angels Landing, one of America's most dangerous trails.
The accident was initially ruled an accident, but basically everyone thought it was suspicious. Bernadette fell in a place where people don't usually fall, David’s story kept changing as to what happened, and then, it came out that he had raised her life insurance and collected over half a million dollars after she died
Years went by, no arrests were made, but then, a few years ago, a woman came forward and helped paint a bigger picture of what was happening. See, David was a youth pastor at the time of his wife’s death, and he had been grooming a 14 year old girl and told her that they could be together if his wife was dead. The teen girl was able to put an end to the abuse the night before Bernadette was killed. And now, the multiple women he brutalized and their families will never see justice
And that’s why it’s so important to end this episode with this. If anything in this episode resonated with you maybe too much, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.
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