Some people will go to great lengths to win an insurance payday, with a recent Colorado case illustrating that tragic truth
By Sadie Gurman
A man accused of pushing his second wife to her death off a cliff during a scenic hike in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park might have killed his first wife in what also appeared to be a freak accident nearly 20 years earlier, prosecutors allege.
They will make that argument when a federal trial for Harold Henthorn, 58, opens Tuesday. Investigators say he carefully plotted and planned to shove his second wife, Toni Henthorn, 140 feet off a cliff in a remote area the couple had been hiking on Sept. 29, 2012. Henthorn had taken her to see the resplendent autumn colour and snowy peaks of the national park to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary.
As they wandered off the trail to capture the view, Toni Henthorn, 50, paused to take a photo. She tumbled face first over the ledge, according to autopsy reports that that did not draw conclusions about whether she fell or was pushed. Henthorn could not explain to investigators why he had a park map with an ``X'' drawn at the spot where Toni fell, prosecutors said.
Henthorn was the only witness to his wife's fall which prosecutors said was eerily reminiscent of the death of his first wife, Sandra Lynn Henthorn, who was crushed when a car slipped off a jack while they were changing a flat tire in 1995. Henthorn hasn't been charged in his first wife's death, but police reopened the investigation after a grand jury indicted him on a first-degree murder count in Toni Henthorn's fatal fall.
A judge ruled prosecutors can show evidence of the first wife's death during Henthorn's trial. They'll also be able to discuss an earlier incident in which a 20-foot beam fell on Toni Henthorn while the couple was working at their mountain cabin. She told her mother that if she had not bent over, the beam would have killed her.
Henthorn's defence attorney, Craig L. Truman, has argued that the two deaths were unfortunate accidents. Truman declined to comment Friday.
It was only after Toni Henthorn died that her relatives realized she had three life insurance policies totalling $4.5 million. At the time of his arrest, prosecutors said, Henthorn was living off $1.5 million in assets that were partly from his late wife.
Before Henthorn married Toni, 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 wealthy and convinced 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, and prosecutors said they found no evidence that he had any income from regular employment.
A hauntingly similar case was that of Jordan Linn Graham, who was convicted of killing her husband of eight days by pushing him off a cliff in Montana's Glacier National Park in July 2013. Graham was sentenced to 30 years and five months in prison but has appealed her conviction.
The Associated Press 2015
