A former Las Vegas youth pastor has been charged with murder and insurance fraud nearly 20 years after his wife fell 1,200 feet to her death in Zion National Park, court records show.
U.S. marshals arrested David Vander Meer on Monday in connection with the Aug. 22, 2006, death of Bernadette Vander Meer at the park in Utah.
“At the time, due to a lack of evidence, and limited investigation, Bernadette Vander Meer’s fall was ruled an accident and the case was closed — although investigators felt the circumstances were suspicious,” a probable cause affidavit filed in Fifth District Court in Washington County says.
The investigation was relaunched last year, according to the affidavit, after the senior pastor, Barry Diamond, of a church where Vander Meer had worked, told Washington County Attorney’s Office investigators that “he believed the death was not an accident and that David pushed Bernadette.”
The affidavit says Vander Meer previously said he increased his and his wife’s life insurance policies from $150,000 to $600,000 shortly before Bernadette Vander Meer died.
The available court papers do not explain why that did not spark a more serious investigation into whether Vander Meer killed his wife.
According to the affidavit, Vander Meer received a life insurance payout of more than $567,000 in 2007.
As of Wednesday, Vander Meer was still listed as an inmate at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, and the available court records did not detail whether he had a lawyer.
NBC News has reached out to the Washington County Attorney’s Office for more details about when it plans to extradite Vander Meer to Utah.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Bernadette Vander Meer’s father said he long suspected her death was no accident.
“I did a lot of hiking with her,” Richard Gudenkauf told the newspaper. “She was a mountain goat. For her to fall off a cliff? No.”
Vander Meer and his wife were both 29 and celebrating a wedding anniversary when they set off before dawn to hike Angel’s Landing, a towering 1,488-foot sandstone rock formation at the park, the affidavit says. Vander Meer told investigators they were wearing headlamps.
When they reached the summit, Vander Meer said, he went to set up the camera to take a photo of the sunrise while his wife was standing near the edge, according to the affidavit.
Vander Meer told investigators that he went to move their backpacks out of the shot and that when he turned around, his wife was gone, the document says.
“David heard her scream as she fell,” it says.
On April 6, 2022, investigators “received a tip” from a person identified in the affidavit as a “previous youth group member,” who accused Vander Meer of “using his position of special trust to groom kids,” the document says.
A person identified as SH, who had been a member of the youth group Vander Meer led, told a Washington County sheriff’s detective that she had been in an ongoing sexual relationship with Vander Meer that started when she was 16, according to the affidavit.
In an interview with the detective, SH said she broke off the relationship the night before Vander Meer left for Zion National Park in 2006 with his wife because SH “felt it was wrong,” the document says.
The detective indicated “further follow-up and investigation was needed,” according to the affidavit. Last year, Vander Meer’s former boss called the Washington County Attorney’s Office and told authorities he didn’t believe Bernadette Vander Meer’s death was an accident, the affidavit says.
Jessica Bate, a lieutenant investigator with the Washington County Attorney’s Office, re-interviewed SH, according to the affidavit.
During the interview, SH said that she recalled Vander Meer’s telling her that “the only way they could be together is if Bernadette was not alive” and that his wife suspected he was cheating on her, the document says.
SH told the investigator that she and Vander Meer resumed their sexual relationship and eventually got married in 2008, “so David could be on SH’s health insurance,” according to the affidavit.
Vander Meer had been fired for “throwing parties for the underage members of his church” at his house, where there were liquor and gambling, by the pastor who called authorities last year and said Bernadette Vander Meer’s death was no accident, the affidavit says.
Vander Meer and SH divorced in 2014, and Vander Meer married two other times, it says.
