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Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 13, 2015 13:47:47 GMT -5
 Harold and Toni Henthorn
Henthorn is charged with first-degree murder in the death of his second wife, Toni Henthorn, 50, who plummeted about 130 feet off a cliff in a remote, rocky area where the couple had been hiking September 29, 2012, to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. Prosecutors say Henthorn carefully planned the killing, scouting the trail nine times before taking his wife with him. As they wandered off the trial to capture the view of autumn colors and snowy peaks, Toni Henthorn paused to take a photo. She tumbled face first over the ledge, according to autopsy reports.
The Colorado woman whose husband allegedly pushed her off a cliff in 2012 was wearing her wedding ring when she died – but its $30,000 diamond was missing, a park ranger said in court Wednesday.
Henthorn scrambled to climb down the steep terrain, defense attorney Craig Truman said. “As he tried to help her, he saw her life ebbing away,” Truman added. “He loved her very much.”
Prosecution witnesses, including a park ranger and dispatchers, focused Tuesday on Henthorn’s shifting stories about what led up to the fall and his response. CBS Denver reports that a 911 dispatcher testified that after Henthorn’s wife Toni fell nearly 140 feet, and as the dispatcher was walking him through doing CPR, she came to the conclusion he wasn’t actually trying to save his wife’s life at all. “I did not believe he was doing the CPR,” testified Julie Sullivan, who was a 911 dispatcher the night Toni Henthorn fell in Rocky Mountain National Park. The park ranger testified that a $30,000 diamond was missing from Mrs. Henthorn’s ring, but her hands were not badly injured. The coroner also testified there was no evidence Henthorn had performed CPR on his wife and that he also found it strange that Henthorn brought up his wife’s vanished diamond during an interview, noting its exact worth but saying “the missing stone did not matter at all at this point.”
Henthorn also could not explain why he had a park map with an “X” drawn at the spot where she fell, investigators said. And he did not mention that his wife was covered by life insurance policies totaling $4.7 million, with him listed as the sole beneficiary, prosecutors said. Neither Toni Henthorn nor her relatives knew about the policies.
Prosecutors said the death was reminiscent of that of Henthorn’s first wife, Sandra Lynn Henthorn (above), who was crushed when a car slipped off a jack while they changed a flat tire in 1995 – several months after their 12th wedding anniversary. Henthorn has not been charged in that case, but police reopened the investigation after Toni Henthorn’s fatal fall.
“These deaths were not accidents,” Hazra told jurors. And neither was an earlier incident in which a 20-foot beam fell on Toni Henthorn while the couple was working at their mountain cabin in 2011, the prosecutor said. It hit her in the head and fractured her vertebra. She later told her mother that if she had not bent over, the beam would have killed her. Henthorn’s attorney argued the deaths and the fallen beam were accidents. Truman said his client was hysterical after Toni Henthorn died and that grief was to blame for any inconsistencies in his accounts to investigators. Authorities closed their investigation into Sandra Lynn Henthorn’s death in about a week, but Truman said the inquiry was thorough. The case only got new scrutiny after the second woman died, the attorney said. “The government thinks lightning never strikes twice,” he told jurors. “Wait to see the evidence.”
Before Henthorn married his second wife, he studied the financial statuses of three women and asked his friends whom he should wed, friends told investigators. He settled on Toni, a successful ophthalmologist from Mississippi who also earned money from her family’s thriving oil business. He told her he was a wealthy entrepreneur and persuaded her to move with him to the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, her relatives have said. But once in Colorado, he seemed to be a controlling and obsessive husband, who monitored his wife’s phone calls and limited her contact with their daughter, now 9, her family said. Prosecutors said they found no evidence Henthorn had any income from regular employment.
Toni Henthorn’s brother, Barry Bertolet, testified Tuesday that Henthorn told shifting stories about why she went to the ledge. In one, he had been looking at his wife’s phone when he saw a blur and she fell, Bertolet said. But she had left the device at home, prosecutors said.
Testimony continues next week. If found guilty, Henthorn faces life without parole in a federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Sources: Associated Press, September 9, 2015, "Over the Edge," Dateline NBC; and Jason Silverstein, The New York Daily News. |
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Post by pat on Sept 13, 2015 14:40:25 GMT -5
This was on 48 Hours a few months ago. It will be interesting to see whether he's convicted or not. I think that he's guilty. He killed both of his wives close to their 12th anniversary.
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Post by natalie on Sept 14, 2015 11:34:17 GMT -5
I wonder if the second wife knew about the first wife's suspicious death. I would not want to marry a man whose wife died under suspicious circumstances. Maybe I think the worst of everyone, but better safe than sorry, I say and I would not want to be dead wife #2.
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Post by Graveyardbride on May 8, 2018 6:10:45 GMT -5
Harold Henthorn Loses Final Appeal
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Harold Henthorn, whom authorities say killed his second wife, Dr. Toni Henthorn, by pushing her off Deer Mountain in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park in September 2012. In so doing, the jurists let stand a July 2017 affirmation of previous rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which rejected Henthorn’s arguments regarding what his writ to the court calls “the doctrine of chances.” Specifically, the document maintains the original court biased the jury against him by allowing testimony concerning the suspicious death of Henthorn’s first wife, Sandra “Lynn” Henthorn, in May 1995, and a serious accident suffered by Toni the year prior to her death.
A request for order filed by then-U.S. Attorney John Walsh, who prosecuted the case because Rocky Mountain National Park is federal land, stated: “On September 29, 2012, Harold Henthorn’s wife, Toni Henthorn, fell to her death with Harold Henthorn as the only witness, in a remote location in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.” Walsh added that “investigation has revealed there are three $1.5 million life insurance policies on Toni Henthorn, two of which are in trusts and one in which Harold Henthorn is the sole beneficiary.” This wasn’t the only circumstance Walsh saw as suspicious. In the report, he implied Henthorn was living off Toni Henthorn, a respected ophthalmologist, while conducting a mysterious double life, a key passage of which reads as follows:
“Harold Henthorn travels frequently, even weekly, allegedly for work. However, there is no indication that he has actual clients. He has no business in his name, no partners able to be located by law enforcement to date, and no one interviewed to date knows who his clients are or were, yet he told investigators he was financially secure, and he was a fundraiser for nonprofits like churches and hospitals. At his wife’s funeral witnesses told investigators there were no attendees from Harold Henthorn’s work and witnesses interviewed by investigators revealed no one actually knew what his business was called, or any of his projects or clients.”
Was Henthorn capable of murder? Walsh floated that possibility by noting that “in 1995, Harold Henthorn’s prior wife” – Lynn Henthorn – “died from injuries sustained from being crushed by a car while he was changing a tire in a remote location. The car allegedly came off the jack as he was throwing the tire in the trunk, crushing his wife, who was under the car for unknown reasons. There were no witnesses other than Harold Henthorn, and a life insurance policy on her had been taken out several months prior.” While the first Mrs. Henthorn’s death was initially deemed a tragic accident, Douglas County investigators reopened the case in the fall of 2014.
Meanwhile, Walsh cited what could have been another attempt by Harold to kill Toni Henthorn in a manner that would appeared accidental, writing:
“In early September or late August of 2011, a beam hit Toni Henthorn on her head while working on her cabin with Harold Henthorn, fracturing her vertebrae. The beam fell off the porch where Harold Henthorn was working, after he called her to come help him. Toni Henthorn told her mother, ‘If I hadn’t bent down after I walked outside, the beam would have killed me.’ This is another accident in which Harold Henthorn was the only other witness.”
At Henthorn’s 2015 trial, the prosecution was allowed to introduce information concerning both prior incidents, and after Henthorn was convicted and sentenced to life in prison during a hearing in which he stated, “I did not kill Toni,” he appealed for reasons alluded to in the introductory section of the 10th Circuit’s ruling.
“This case presents us with the difficult issue of whether a district court presiding over a murder trial abused its discretion in admitting evidence of prior, similar incidents, including whether the defendant killed his second wife in circumstances similar to those that led to the death of his first wife,” the document reads, adding, “We affirm. The district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting prior similar conduct. The court fully explained, and we agree, that the evidence was properly admitted under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), was relevant, and was not substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice.”
Henthorn’s aforementioned writ to the U.S. Supreme Court begs to differ. He requests the justices consider the following question: “Whether the doctrine of chances, which purportedly differs from character evidence because it is based on the objective improbability that similar incidents coincidentally repeat themselves, can logically support the inference that all of the incidents were the product of design.”
After synopsizing the case, the writ adds: “This Court should grant review in this case to provide guidance on how to apply the doctrine of chances, an issue that has confounded, and will continue to confound, the lower courts. Properly understood, the doctrine of chances allows only the limited inference that one or some, but not all, of the incidents – charged and uncharged – were intentional. And critically, the doctrine is incapable of discerning which of the incidents were intentional and which were not. Thus, the doctrine cannot single out the charged incident as non-accidental, which makes evidence admitted under the doctrine irrelevant to whether the charged incident was intentional and therefore a crime.”
Many assertions and statistics follow, but they weren’t enough to entice the U.S. Supreme Court and the January 8 rejection of the writ is brief and to the point: “Petition DENIED” it reads prior to noting that Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is from Colorado, “took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.”
Thus ends Henthorn’s bid for freedom, but his appearances in court could continue because he hasn’t been tried for the death of Lynn Henthorn, which many of her family members fervently believe he caused.
Source: Michael Roberts, Westword, January 10, 2018.
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Post by madeline on May 8, 2018 7:17:49 GMT -5
There was either a "48 Hours" or "Dateline" on this case. The reason his wife and others around him didn't see him for the fraud that he was is because they didn't want to see. At least he's where he belongs.
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Post by serena on Nov 19, 2023 16:11:28 GMT -5
Dateline has shown reruns of this case many times and every time I watch part of it, I wonder how can a woman live with a man whose trying to kill her and not realize there's something wrong.
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Post by jane on Nov 19, 2023 16:51:04 GMT -5
Dateline has shown reruns of this case many times and every time I watch part of it, I wonder how can a woman live with a man whose trying to kill her and not realize there's something wrong. |
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