[bear roars]
NARRATOR: Wild places.
Wilder crimes.
These are the stories of the elite team that solves them
in the most dangerous crime scenes in the world ‐‐
our national parks.
♪♪
DISPATCHER: Go ahead, sir.
‐ He was frantic, saying, you know,
"My wife just fell from a cliff.
She's unconscious. I need help."
[bird screeches]
Why were you there? Why is the "X" on this map?
♪♪
The only reason to be where you are is to commit murder.
♪♪
BURR: Oh, my gosh, you know, this is two wives for Harold
that have died now.
‐ There's no way that that was an accident.
♪♪
‐ That's it. That's it.
[animal howls]
♪♪
[wind rushing, birds chirping]
HETTICK: Every year on their anniversary,
Harold would plan a trip with Toni.
♪♪
Typically, the phone would ring, "Hey, Leigh, this is Harold.
Toni and I are going to go on this little honeymoon trip.
Could you take care of Haley for the weekend?"
"Sure."
‐ They were about to have their 12th anniversary,
and he was going to surprise her.
She was just going to be overwhelmed,
she was going to love it.
COBBLE: Harold projected a successful businessman
who was very well‐off
and had wooed this beautiful young lady from Mississippi.
WHITENER: Toni Bertolet from Mississippi.
She was an eye doctor ‐‐ ophthalmologist ‐‐
and very successful and a great mom.
♪♪
COBBLE: Harold called me and said,
"Hey, I'm taking my bride,
and we're going to Rocky Mountain National Park."
And I went, "Great. Have a great time."
‐ Harold had asked if I could clear Toni's schedule,
and he said, "I really want to surprise her with a trip."
And so I said, "Sure. I'll take care of that for you."
I ended up texting Dr. Henthorn just to say, "Congratulations.
Have a great weekend. Be safe. Have a great time.
See you Monday."
And I never heard back from her.
♪♪
FAHERTY: My name is Mark Faherty.
I was a Park Ranger
in Rocky Mountain National Park.
My job was to be the first to locate the patient.
I was told to go to Deer Ridge Trailhead.
PITA: My name is Mark Pita.
When that call came in,
I took the role of incident commander.
There's steep wooded terrain,
and there's no place in that immediate vicinity
to land a helicopter,
and it was already getting dark.
We were going to have to go in by ground
and make an assessment.
FAHERTY: I got to the trailhead about 6:15.
My primary concern was finding where the patient was quickly.
♪♪
‐ It wasn't an easy place to get to.
FAHERTY: I'd never been in that area.
I couldn't see because it was dark.
I'd only been hiking 30 minutes when I heard radio traffic.
Henthorn was performing CPR.
It made me realize that this was
probably not going to have a good ending.
I was very thankful when the moon came out,
silhouetted the ridge,
so I was able to vector in on their location.
[whistle blows]
As I got closer, I started blowing my whistle,
and Henthorn also had a whistle, and he responded.
[whistling continues]
As I approached him, Henthorn went over
and started performing CPR on Toni.
She was laying on her back, and her head was wrapped.
It was obvious she had a head wound.
Her eyes were partially open,
and I evaluated her for a pulse and respirations.
I told Harold, "I'm sorry, but she's gone."
And Harold said, "I think so, too."
And he seemed emotional to me.
I told him that he would hike down with me
and a couple people would spend the night with Toni's body,
and he agreed.
I thought at that time, it was just what 99% of them are,
is just a tragic accident.
‐ Park Rangers recovering the body
of a woman who fell to her death
while hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Authorities say the victim was from Littleton,
that she was in her 50s.
She'd been hiking in the area with a family member.
♪♪
‐ Now we have a fatality investigation
we have to conduct.
And the first thing I want to do is document the scene.
[birds chirping]
♪♪
LARSON: My name is Paul Larson.
I was the lead field investigator
for that Henthorn fatality,
which means I document the scene, you know,
take a lot of pictures, maybe take some measurements.
♪♪
There's a tree that, on one side,
the branches had been kind of knocked off or broken off.
I call it the impact tree.
You can see that was in a place where I imagine
Toni probably impacted as she fell to the ground.
There were small things that didn't totally add up.
It was an obscure area ‐‐
it's not a place where I would expect your average hiker
to just happen across,
because it was just so steep.
I noticed there's a shoe that was there, an untied boot.
Usually, in the course of a fall,
shoes tend not to untie themselves.
Her backpack was very close to her body,
and also her camera.
I would think either it would be up at the impact area
or off somewhere else, you know, after falling down a cliff,
just not necessarily right where she was.
So I knew that the camera was important,
and it was something that I decided
to take to pass off to Ranger Faherty.
♪♪
[birds chirping]
♪♪
FAHERTY: That day, I tied in with a Ranger
who was inventorying Harold Henthorn's vehicle,
and she found a map in the vehicle,
thought the map was strange.
It was a park map, and it had curious drawings on it.
Deer Ridge Trail was highlighted.
Below Deer Ridge Trail was written the word "hike"
with an "X" circled,
and then above the Deer Ridge highlighted trail
was a highlighted "X."
And that was really curious
because it was right about the location
where Toni had died,
so I seized it as evidence.
It was pretty obvious
something that's going to require this much investigation
is probably going to go over to ISB.
♪♪
SMITH: The Investigative Services Branch, known as ISB,
investigates complicated felony crimes.
[siren wails]
If it happens in a national park,
we can investigate it.
The National Park Service
has over 400 units across the country,
and, by and large, they are incredibly safe places.
But when you have millions and millions of visitors
coming through every year,
crime will happen.
And in national parks, there are certain crimes
that, if they're committed,
become federal offenses no matter what.
And these agents need to be able to do it all.
MAYESKI: Wildlife crime, crimes against people ‐‐
just amazing where we can wind up
and what we can wind up doing.
So you truly never know.
McGEE: And a lot of times,
we are physically scrambling over rocks
and climbing to get to certain areas.
I don't think everybody else in the special agent world
is doing that.
SHOTT: We have huge areas to cover,
and there's only about 34 agents.
My name's Beth Shott.
I'm a special agent with the Investigative Services Branch.
We're the detectives of the National Park Service.
Because ISB agents are so far and few between,
I was an office of one agent.
So, Ranger Faherty called me
when he had some suspicion about Toni's death.
He presented his information that he had,
and I said, "I think we've got a case."
♪♪
Ranger Faherty had made arrangements
to go to Harold Henthorn's house and interview him,
'cause there's still a lot of questions we need to ask.
[wind rushing, birds chirping]
[doorbell rings] FAHERTY: When I got there,
he introduced me to his daughter, Haley,
and then he took me to the basement
and sat me down at what I guess was his office.
One of the things I had brought with me
was a memory card from Toni's camera,
and I showed him some of the pictures off the camera,
and he acted upset.
He said, "That's my wife, Mark. That's my wife,"
as he looked at pictures of Toni.
♪♪
Harold told me that when the fall happened,
she was walking rapidly toward the edge of the cliff.
He said he didn't witness it.
He was preoccupied with his phone and receiving a text
that said Haley had won a soccer game.
When I asked to see the text, he showed me,
and it said that the text had been received at 5:54.
SHOTT: He noted the time ‐‐ he said, "Oh, that's 5:54."
And we realized that the text message came in
at the same time that he called 911.
And he told Mark it took him about 45 minutes
to get down to the bottom of the cliff where Toni's body was,
and then he called 911.
We know that when he called 911
and when that text message came in,
and those don't match up to his story.
FAHERTY: And then I got the map
that a Ranger had found in his vehicle
and said, "Well, what about this?"
And that was like the first time in the interview
Henthorn didn't seem to have any words.
‐ This is a copy of the map found in the car.
That's the "X," and it's ‐‐ it's eerily near
where Toni's body was discovered.
"Why were you there? Why is the 'X' on this map?"
And he didn't have an answer for it. He seemed taken aback.
FAHERTY: I think, at that point,
he pretty much just wanted me gone.
He never returned any of my calls after that.
SHOTT: So all of those things, which we call the Spidey Sense
[laughs] so to speak,
all these red flags are what triggered Mark to ‐‐ to believe
that there was something more to this story.
We didn't really know what we had.
We just knew that everything didn't sound right.
And there was a really key piece of evidence.
Toni's camera was destroyed,
but the SD card was still intact.
We were able to look at the photos,
and these pictures are very important to us
'cause these are the last moments of Toni Henthorn's life.
♪♪
SHOTT: Within days of getting involved in this case,
I talked to Toni's family, the Bertolets,
and they gave me insight into Toni.
We discussed how they learned about Toni's death
and what they heard that night.
♪♪
TODD: I had just sat down, it was around 7:00,
and I look over,
the phone's ringing, and it's my brother.
And my brother said, you know, "Toni's been in an accident.
There's an ongoing rescue, but, you know,
from what I'm hearing," he said,
"I don't think she's going to make it."
My wife, Rhonda, heard me talking
and she knew it was serious.
"Oh, what's going on? What's going on?"
And I told her, I said, "Well, Barry wants us
to go down and prepare Mom and Daddy."
‐ The first call we got from Barry,
he said that Toni had an accident
and she was in serious condition and it didn't look good.
Of course, we prayed that God would intervene and save Toni.
And then he called back
and said that she ‐‐ she was gone.
Three horrible words.
♪♪
‐ We're on my childhood street in Vidalia, Louisiana.
This is the old homestead.
My mom and dad and Toni and my brother Barry,
we moved here in 1965.
My dad was a geologist in the oil business
and had several discoveries,
and we got to the point where we were a whole lot better off
towards the end than at the beginning.
♪♪
HANNAN: My name is Caleb Hannan.
I'm an investigative reporter in Denver, Colorado.
Toni Henthorn came from a lot of money.
Her family's done very well in the oil and gas business.
Her family wasn't old money,
but they very quickly became part of the money crowd,
but, to their credit, kind of never lost the work ethic
and the ability to see the other side.
♪♪
TODD: Toni could make the most of just about anything.
If she wanted to be a great musician,
she could be a great musician.
If she wanted to be a great student,
she could be a great student.
If she wanted to be a good athlete,
she could be a great athlete.
Toni always wanted to be a medical doctor.
She felt like ophthalmology would basically allow her
to do what she loved
and give her some downtime and some family time.
HANNAN: She was married pretty young ‐‐
someone she had met in medical school.
He was a dentist.
‐ But ultimately, it ended up in a divorce,
and to have a failed marriage and have that disappointment,
I don't think she ever really accepted that.
HANNAN: She clearly viewed giving up on the marriage
as something shameful.
MAN: Toni.
HANNAN: So I think after Toni's divorce,
she kept herself extremely busy.
She was always working.
TODD: She had a practice in Jackson
and one in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
She had built that practice up to a point
that it was ‐‐ finally had turned the corner
and it was profitable.
[organ music plays in church]
HANNAN: Toni was driven, smart, compassionate.
She threw herself into her church, First Baptist,
where she sang soprano in the choir,
but also where she counseled young professionals
in kind of a Sunday school for adults.
TALLEY: My name is Allison Talley,
and Toni Bertolet was one of my very closest friends.
Although Toni never outright told everybody,
"I want to get married, and I want to get married
as soon as possible," we all knew that she wanted to.
HANNAN: The clock, unfortunately,
was ticking for her.
The divorce had set her back,
and she wasn't meeting the kind of people
she apparently wanted to meet in Mississippi.
TALLEY: I was pretty shocked one day
when Toni and I were having a conversation
and she just outright said, "I met a guy online,
this guy named Harold."
SHOTT: When he was wooing her online,
some of the things that they talked about
was that they both wanted children.
It's a Christian dating site, so they were both Christian.
He said all the right things to her, I believe.
TALLEY: I think he knew he was in for an interview with us,
so he made the most of that.
First impressions are his thing,
and he makes good first impressions.
HANNAN: Harold presents himself at this point in his life
as an independent fundraiser for nonprofits,
specifically churches and hospitals
which have a religious bearing.
And if you'd just met him, you already know
that he has made himself a fortune doing this.
♪♪
RHONDA: I'm Rhonda Bertolet,
and I'm married to Todd Bertolet,
and Toni is my sister‐in‐law.
My first impression of Harold was
he seemed very excited
and always very kind of exuberant in his mannerisms.
‐ Wow! Beautiful artwork.
RHONDA: Talked very loud, talked very fast.
Always felt like he was trying to impress me.
TODD: He's almost kind of like a used car salesman.
Harold is great
because Harold's told us how great he is.
But you go along with it
because you want something good to happen to your sister.
TALLEY: And shortly after that, they told us they were engaged,
and we couldn't have been happier for her
for finding someone,
even though it was Harold and he was different.
‐ What was concerning is how quickly
everything kind of progressed.
TALLEY: They got engaged in February,
they got married in September.
They didn't see each other but six or seven times
during that whole period.
‐ Merry Christmas, everybody.
♪♪
MAN: And there's the groom.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Here we go. One, two, right here.
[camera shutter clicks] Bingo. Alright.
‐ Alright.
[organ music plays]
‐ The wedding day for Toni and Harold was just beautiful.
♪♪
Toni was just stunning.
Yeah, it was a very happy event.
TALLEY: Huge church wedding, beautiful decor,
the flowers, the food, the dresses.
It was a class act.
MAN: Mr. and Mrs. Harold Henthorn.
[applause, organ music plays]
TODD: So, at that point, there's a little comfort
setting in with myself and Rhonda
that maybe this is the right thing to happen.
♪♪
‐ So, Harold and Toni, two years after they get married,
are leaving Mississippi.
TONI: It's so pretty, isn't it?
HANNAN: Apparently, he always wanted to go to Colorado.
He always wanted to bring Toni there
and away from her family and her friends
and her practice and her church.
So she sold her practice in Mississippi,
and they both relocate to Colorado
and an upscale neighborhood called Highlands Ranch.
TALLEY: They wanted children right away, both of them did.
She was in her mid‐40s when she got pregnant with Haley,
so she got her dream.
‐ That's right. We will. We promised.
HANNAN: From the outside looking in, Toni and Harold's marriage
looked ideal.
It certainly looks like the perfect life.
‐ We love you. ‐ We love you.
‐ [laughs] WOMAN: We love you.
♪♪
SHOTT: We're at where Toni worked.
She was a partner in this business.
Ranger Mark Faherty and I made an arrangement
to come down and interview the staff.
What Harold had told Mark Faherty
was that it was their 12th wedding anniversary
and he had planned the surprise trip for Toni
with her coworkers.
♪♪
DREWS: Then we made a dummy schedule for the afternoon.
We thought this was, "Oh, what a nice guy
to do this for her. She deserves it."
And so he showed up at the office,
and so then we made him look like a patient
and put him in one of the rooms.
And we took my phone to videotape it,
because we thought this was going to be a neat thing.
She went into the room and was shocked,
like, "What are you doing here?"
[laughter]
SHOTT: When I saw the video,
Toni just looked more bewildered
than, like, happy and ecstatic.
DREWS: I think she was probably like,
"I don't want that surprise."
When you see the video today,
you don't see that happy person that's, like, excited to go.
SHOTT: Toni, of course, was surprised.
She was taken aback,
and Harold had a little go bag for her,
and he said, "Come on."
He had a nanny come and take care of Haley,
and they left from here up to Estes Park.
We have some photos from his cellphone and her camera
that re‐creates their trip up there.
And photographs that we recovered
showed us exactly where they were.
And this photo is one of the last photos
that we have prior to Toni's death.
You can see that Harold's standing right on a ledge here,
and his hand is gripped tightly to this tree.
We have another photo from her camera about 15 minutes later.
It's the exact same photo, but he's wearing a blue denim shirt.
And then there were two deleted photos
that we were able to recover
that were pictures of him standing up there.
Why are there so many of them,
and why are they 15 minutes apart?
♪♪
‐ So, Harold's story to Mark was that they were coming up
on their 12th‐year anniversary,
and it was going to be a romantic weekend.
They went to Estes Park, stayed at the Stanley,
which is a beautiful old hotel.
So we had pictures from the night before,
and then the next day, they have breakfast,
they pick up a couple sandwiches,
and then they go on the hike.
♪♪
This is where Harold and Toni went on September 29th.
We're at Rocky Mountain National Park
in the hike called Deer Mountain.
Deer Mountain goes from about 8,700 feet
to up around 10,000 feet.
It's about three miles up to the peak.
Most of Rocky Mountain National Park is wilderness,
and so these remote locations
can be incredibly difficult to get to.
You have to have a certain level of fitness.
♪♪
My background is not in law enforcement.
I grew up on the East Coast wanting to be an artist.
My dad had taken us hiking and camping when we were younger.
I used to go rock climbing with my brother.
I remember distinctly having a conversation
with someone at one point ‐‐ "You know, I'd just love to
get a job where I work outside." [laughs]
So I started applying for jobs with the National Park Service,
and my first job was working on
the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
And 27 years later,
I'm still working for the National Park Service.
♪♪
When Mark Faherty interviewed Harold Henthorn,
Harold told him that they got a late start that day.
They probably started their hike sometime after 2:00.
It's not a super long hike,
but that's a little bit late to be starting a hike
when sun sets around 6:00.
♪♪
They took pictures,
and we were able to look at the photos
and re‐create from that photo exactly where they were.
This spot is where we actually have a photo of Toni.
She's standing in this aspen grove. She's very pretty.
She's wearing makeup and looking quite happy.
What Harold had told Mark
was they hiked up 'til the trail plateaued.
They wanted to get off the trail for some privacy,
and if you look around you,
you can walk 100 yards off the trail
and nobody would know you were there.
They wouldn't have had to have gone very far.
When we re‐created their steps,
there's no trail where Toni and Harold had lunch.
It's not cleared in any way,
and it's pretty difficult hiking.
There's absolutely no reason that you would think
there's a scenic view
just a quarter mile off the trail
unless you had scouted it before.
We were actually able to determine that this is indeed
where they did have lunch.
That was a very distinct rock feature
with a very distinct dead tree in the photos.
And there's a photo of Toni and Harold
sitting right where I'm standing.
So we were able to actually put them in this place exactly.
The lunch spot is a very beautiful spot,
and there's really no reason to go any further.
However, they go further.
What's incongruous to us
is why they ended up where Toni fell from.
♪♪
FAHERTY: I asked him, "Well, why did you down to that spot
where Toni fell?"
And he said, "Well, Toni had seen turkeys,"
gone down to investigate.
I was like, "Turkeys? Really?"
Wasn't even aware turkeys would be in that kind of environment.
When I questioned that, he said,
"Well, I don't know about turkeys, but definitely deer."
And then it was, "Well, we went down there for a romantic time."
SHOTT: In order to get down to that cliff,
you have to go down this 60‐degree boulder field.
It's an incredibly hard‐to‐get‐to spot.
You'd have to know this spot was here.
It's a dangerous place to be, especially for somebody
who is not a major hiker, who has knee issues.
She was going to have to hike back up.
TODD: Toni had played sports in high school.
She had two knee surgeries.
And so, it's not something
that you would want to do
on, supposedly, your anniversary ‐‐
go on this extreme hike to these very rocky, very steep areas.
That didn't make sense to us.
SHOTT: There's no reason for anybody to go down there
unless you want to push someone from a cliff.
We know that this is the spot that they stopped
because there are several photos of Harold Henthorn
standing right on that ledge
with this death grip on this tree,
because it's a sheer drop on the other side of him.
15 minutes later, there is another picture of him,
identical, but he's wearing a blue denim shirt.
Why did they take the same photo 15 minutes apart?
And why is he standing on this ledge
when the view is identical
if he wasn't standing on the ledge?
One of our working theories
was that he was trying to lure Toni up there.
"Look, it's safe. Come on, step up,
and I'll take a picture of you up here."
And right below this tree is where Toni's body was recovered.
This is 160 feet. This is where Toni fell.
♪♪
So, we're almost halfway down the cliff where Toni fell from,
and right behind me is sort of an outcrop on that cliff
where one of Toni's boots was recovered.
♪♪
And then over there is the tree
that she fell into.
And we know that she fell into that tree
because we were able to see a freshly broken branch,
but also some evidence, some hair and some blood.
As you look up, you can see the tree
that Harold was hanging onto in the photo.
Her body was recovered almost directly below that.
We know that Harold did drag her from this spot
because there was a pool of blood
about 8 feet away in the dirt over there,
and then over the rocks, there was a trail of blood
leading down to where Toni was located.
♪♪
I talked to the coroner as an investigator,
so he provided me with the photos
that he took from the scene, also from the autopsy.
WILKERSON: This is the case file on Toni.
It has the autopsy report in it.
It has my notes and drawings in it.
She had what we call multiple blunt‐force injuries.
She kind of tumbled down the rock face.
And you see injuries to the extremities
and to the head because it's tumbling.
She had abrasions of her forehead,
and she had a large laceration,
or tearing injury, to the top of her head,
to the scalp,
so it was almost a scalping‐type injury
on the top of her head.
‐ My initial reaction when I saw the autopsy photos
was how big her head wound was.
I was shocked.
She would have bled a lot,
and for Harold not to say "She's bleeding profusely,"
there's something wrong with that.
The other thing that struck me, though,
is one of her impacts was enough
that it actually crushed her ribs and crushed her lungs.
It's a hard way to think of a loved one dying.
My only hope was that she wasn't conscious very long.
♪♪
So, Toni's body is lying here ‐‐
her head's here, her feet are here.
♪♪
Over here, and you can almost see some remains of,
he built a fire.
He said it was a signal fire,
but that's not really going to signal to anybody.
There's a lot of things here that don't add up.
‐ He said he was doing CPR the whole time.
If he had been doing mouth to mouth,
that lipstick would have been smeared more around her face.
♪♪
‐ And that was very suspicious.
♪♪
SHOTT: Ranger Faherty came down and met with me at my office,
and our first step was to go over what he had
and then start making a plan of, what do we want?
We want his cellphone records.
One of the things that really triggered Mark
was Harold's story that they stopped at this cliff ledge
and that he received a text message from his nanny
saying that his daughter had just won a soccer game
and that, out of the corner of his eye,
he looked up, and Toni was gone.
Very specific moment in time.
And Mark said, "Can I see all of the text messages
that you received that day?"
And Harold's like, "No, I can't do that."
Mark and I recognize we need that information.
We need to know what was on his phone.
We need to see those text messages,
especially because he had gotten rid of that phone.
He knew he was under suspicion
and that there was an investigation against him.
So, around 5:55, Harold dials 911,
and the dispatchers start working with him
to try to get him help.
And he keeps hanging up on them.
He says, "My battery ‐‐ my cell battery is low.
I'm going to hang up on you."
[dialing, ringing]
He then subsequently starts making more phone calls.
He calls Barry Bertolet, Toni Henthorn's brother.
He is a surgeon, so he texts back and forth with Harold
during the whole incident.
And his text is that Toni has fallen from a cliff,
it's critical, Rangers are on their way.
Here's her respirations, and here's her pulse.
Harold never says she's got a massive head wound,
never says that she's bleeding out ‐‐ none of that ‐‐
just that she fell and is unconscious.
‐ Harold said he did CPR from the whole time
that the 911 call came in
to when the Park Service got there.
‐ I personally have done CPR,
and I know that it's a very messy process.
When I saw the photos of Toni,
her lipstick was very much intact
and not smudged, and that was very suspicious.
‐ In addition, while he was doing the CPR,
he started a fire ‐‐
not a big, significant fire,
but to start a fire, it takes a little bit of time.
You got to gather a little bit firewood.
You're not doing CPR while that's happening.
‐ So, Harold's texting with Barry
while he's allegedly helping his wife,
while he's building a fire,
and telling people that Toni has fallen from a cliff.
Harold told a lot of different stories,
and it appeared that he lied a lot.
♪♪
HETTICK: I guess it was about 10:00 at night.
We got a text from Harold ‐‐
"Toni's been hurt. She's critical." Uh...
♪♪
"Please pray."
There was one more text that followed, and it said,
"My bride is gone."
Just was inconceivable.
We just couldn't ‐‐ We just couldn't believe it.
RANKIN: And Harold took us
down the long stairs to the basement
and shut the door,
so we were down in the basement,
just the three of us, alone.
And I thought, "Wow."
He just seemed kind of together
for having gone through what he went through.
‐ No tears, no sign that he had been crying.
No, you know, struggling with his voice to get the words out.
This is not a normal grieving husband.
That's when I felt like something's not right here.
‐ Harold called me and asked me to officiate
the memorial service for Toni,
and I agreed to do that.
He had this service entirely planned.
He'd already put together a video montage of Toni.
‐ Somehow, in the 36 hours
since he was in this cold, dark place
next to his dead wife,
he's put this together.
COBBLE: It felt like, to me,
that he had been planning this for a while.
♪♪
HANNAN: In the hours and days after Toni's death,
everyone's watching Harold.
Everyone trying to figure out how he's behaving,
and he is, for the most part,
showing no signs of what you would expect.
How can it not put your antenna up?
TODD: We arrive in Denver,
and the whole time, you never saw him cry.
He never said, you know, "I loved your sister," you know,
that ‐‐ never heard any of that kind of thing
out of him the entire time that we were there.
♪♪
HANNAN: I think of all the things that the Bertolets
were sort of shocked by
when they came out to Colorado
on a moment's notice,
the first was that Harold was adamant
that Toni wanted to be cremated.
TODD: That was the first time we had heard anything like that.
He goes, "Well, you know Toni wanted to be cremated."
No, we didn't know that.
This is the first time I've ever heard it.
♪♪
HANNAN: Toni's funeral is the ultimate chance
for Harold to kind of control the narrative.
♪♪
And what Harold chooses to do that moment is pretty telling.
Everybody notices, the Bertolets especially,
where everyone's sitting at the funeral.
They're brought in, they're seated
away from the rest of the family.
Harold is one of the last people escorted in.
TODD: You know, I'm all the way positioned at the back,
because everything was planned out,
just like Harold always does.
HANNAN: Everyone experiences some feeling of deep discomfort,
that this isn't right.
And that extends to the slide show, too,
because one of the first people Harold contacted
the day after Toni died
was the photographer
to create the slide show for her funeral.
And she's expecting some loose collection
of photos over the years.
And that's not what she gets.
What she gets are 70 carefully selected photos.
Somehow, in the 36 hours
since he was in this cold, dark place
next to his dead wife,
he's put this together.
♪♪
‐ Harold had created a video story of her life in pictures,
and he was in all of them.
♪♪
BURR: It was like Toni's life started
when she got married to Harold,
and I thought, "How insulting and hurtful to Toni's family."
♪♪
SHOTT: We talked to other people who were at the service,
and other people remarked on sort of how bizarre it was,
and Harold didn't appear really to cry or to be mourning
and he didn't say any nice things about Toni,
that he was more angry that there was an investigation.
And, in fact, at one point, he said to somebody,
"Toni had to go and get herself killed on federal lands."
♪♪
And then the park received a letter about his first wife.
Harold's first wife tragically died in an accident ‐‐
deemed an accident at that time ‐‐ in 1995.
There were so many similarities
between the death of these two women.
The similarities are too eerie to ignore.
♪♪