ROCKY MOUNTAIN MURDER MYSTERY

THE voice on the phone to the 911 emergency call operator sounds urgent, slightly breathless: “Hello, my name is Harold Henthorn. I’m in the Rocky Mountain National Park and I need an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately.” The operator transfers him to the National Park Service.

“My wife has fallen from a rock on the north summit of Deer Mountain,” he says. “She’s in a really critical condition. She’s had a bad fall – about 30 to 40 feet (nine to 12 metres).”

The second operator tells him to hold. For several seconds all you can hear is LEFT: In Facebook pictures Harold and Toni Henthorn looked blissfully happy. ABOVE: The summit of Deer Mountain in Colorado in the US from which Toni Henthorn plunged to her death – it later emerged Harold had pushed her. the man on the other end of the phone breathing.

Deer Mountain is one of the most popular outcrops for hikers in the Colorado park in the US. The route begins at Deer Ridge Junction, about 2 700 m up in a grove of ponderosa pine trees, before ascending via various switchbacks to the peak at 3 000 m. The round trip is a little more than 9,6 km and from the top there’s a 360-degree view of the Rockies and the Continental Divide.

Harold was in the mountains with his wife, Toni, to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. Their daughter, Haley (then 7), was at home with friends. They were staying nearby at The Stanley Hotel – author Stephen King’s inspiration for The Overlook, the fictional haunted hotel in The Shining.

Photos from that morning show Harold (57) and Toni (50) smiling for the camera at the summit. There’s also a picture of him with his back to the camera and holding the branch of a tree on the cliff’s edge. Minutes later, Toni plunged down the same cliff face to her death.

Harold would later say she was taking a photo when she slipped and fell but that he didn’t see exactly what happened as he was looking at his phone. Yet something didn’t seem right. When rescuers arrived they found Harold on his cellphone – not administering CPR.

They discovered a map in his car with an X at the spot where the couple had