20 years after his wife fell to her death in Utah, a youth pastor’s story unravels

An American flag flies outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, March 22, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

(CNN) — Richard Gudenkauf walked his daughter down the aisle in September 1996 with a frown on his face.

The bride, Bernadette, was a vision in her white dress and matching pearls, big doe eyes peering out from behind her veil. Her mother, Laura Gudenkauf, watched her daughter glowing, happy to finally be marrying the man she had met years earlier during a theater production at church.

From the start, Richard had a bad feeling about the groom, David Vander Meer. He wasn’t happy about David marrying his daughter, a vibrant young performer, rooted in her faith, engaged in her community.

Bernadette had always been a star in Richard’s eyes. But it was at a crowded nightclub one night that he realized just how bright her light could shine. There was a karaoke stage in the corner, where a small audience listened to amateur singers crooning above the din of the larger crowd.

Bernadette got up to perform, and she was only four or five notes in when a hush fell over the entire club. They were captivated.

That’s when Richard knew, she’s really good.

Bernadette did what she could to get her voice out there, performing in character as Betty Boop and recording demo CDs with covers from the likes of Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera and Patti LaBelle. She had the pipes to keep up.

Now, Bernadette was excited to continue pursuing her dreams alongside David in the Las Vegas area.

Despite Richard’s reservations, the wedding was beautiful.

A crowded home

About 10 years later, Laura Gudenkauf was separated from Richard and living with Bernadette and David, along with Bernadette’s sister, Vanessa, who had special needs.

There were always teenagers hanging out at the house, members of the youth group David led, Laura noticed. Bernadette noticed it, too. And there was one girl – her initials were SH – who seemed to be growing particularly close to David. She would often call the house.

The dazzling smile Laura had seen on her daughter’s wedding day had turned. Bernadette was feeling lonely and dissatisfied, married to a man who wouldn’t publicly express his love to her, who treated her like nothing special, she wrote in letters investigators would find years later. He paid more attention to the teenagers in his youth group, she told Laura.

Once, Laura saw Bernadette come home from a night shift waitressing at a casino, where she played the piano and sang for guests on her breaks, and her tips went straight to David. Bernadette was angry with her husband, her mom saw, and slammed the bedroom door behind her.

When Bernadette told David she wanted a divorce, the youth pastor told her to consider the optics.

“What would people think?” he asked his wife, Laura would tell investigators.

The couple stayed together. As their 10th anniversary approached, they planned a trip to Zion National Park in Washington County, Utah. Bernadette, an experienced hiker with a taste for adventure, was glad to finally get some time alone, in nature, with her husband, her mother knew.

Before the trip, Bernadette discussed her and David’s life insurance plans with Laura. They had recently raised their policies’ death benefits from about $150,000 to $600,000 each – money David ensured Bernadette would help support Laura and Vanessa if anything ever happened to the couple.

Explaining their decision, Bernadette sat down at a computer to pull up a document for her mother. She typed in a password. It didn’t work, so she tried again. It didn’t work.

She turned and looked at Laura: “David changed the password.”

The hike to Angel’s Landing

With headlamps lighting their way through the predawn darkness, David and Bernadette set out around 4:20 a.m. on August 22, 2006, to hike in Zion National Park, David would soon explain.

Set in southwestern Utah, the park is known for its awe-inspiring landscapes: the famed Virgin River running between towering gorge walls, steep cliffs giving way to vast sandstone canyons and challenging hiking trails beckoning adventurers into an unforgiving desert.

David and Bernadette approached the top of Angel’s Landing, long one of the park’s most popular and strenuous hiking destinations. Sunlight began streaming in and the couple removed their headlamps, David would tell detectives.

He set up his camera, planning to capture Bernadette’s silhouette against the sunrise as she stood close to the edge of the sheer cliff. David snapped a few photos of the scenery and waited a few seconds for each to expose. Spotting their backpacks in the frame, he picked them up and walked about 5 or 10 feet away, he would recall to investigators.

Then, a scream.

By the time David turned around, he would recount, Bernadette was gone.

The 911 call came in around 6:20 a.m. David told responders his wife had fallen while hiking.

Bernadette, just 29 years old, was pronounced dead.

Detectives soon asked David if he’d ever been unfaithful to his wife. He had not, he told them.

Hikers had fallen at Zion before. But accidents in that portion of Angel’s Landing were rare, with just a few over the years deemed suspicious or suicides.

There were no other witnesses to interview.

Investigators ruled Bernadette’s death an accident.

A hefty insurance payout

So many people wanted to attend Bernadette’s memorial service, a special overflow room had to be arranged. At the funeral, David sat on the other side of the church from Bernadette’s parents with members of his youth group.

Richard and Laura had their suspicions about their daughter’s death. She was too experienced a hiker to have just fallen, they believed, especially with the rising sun lighting her path.

Then, there were the slamming doors, the calls from the teen girl in David’s youth group, the changed password on the computer. But Laura was beside herself with grief, and she was still living in David’s home, locked in a state of depression and fear.

Over time, Richard’s shock and sadness turned to a sense of vengeance he could feel in his core. He had many friends, but as the months passed, his anger turned him into something ugly. The friends stopped calling.

Realizing they couldn’t go on like that, Bernadette’s parents decided to give it to God – and did their best to move forward with their lives. Laura didn’t see David around the house very much anymore. Eventually, he moved out and his late wife’s family lost touch with him.

In 2007, David received a life insurance payout of about US$567,439 and began to live lavishly, buying cars and paying for trips for members of his youth group, investigators later would say.

Laura, by her own account, would never see a dime.

By the next year, David was leading a youth group at another church, under Pastor Barry Diamond. Barry fired David after reports that the youth leader had been throwing parties for teenage members, offering them alcohol and letting them gamble in his home, he would tell authorities.

But years would pass before it became clear that the unsanctioned parties barely scratched the surface of the grave allegations David would face.

A pastor offers a bombshell

In 2022, a former member of a youth group David led tipped off law enforcement that David had been using his position to “groom” underage members, including a girl with whom he had been sexually involved at the time of Bernadette’s death, investigators would later state.

Investigators with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Utah called the girl SH and interviewed her over the phone, indicating in a report that further follow up was needed. But no one followed up. The case went cold again.

Then, last October, more than 19 years after Bernadette’s fall, Barry Diamond, David’s old boss, reached out to the Washington County Attorney’s Office with a staggering accusation, investigators later described.

Bernadette’s death wasn’t an accident, the pastor said. He believed David pushed her.

Lieutenant Investigator Jessica Bate with the county attorney’s office got to work. She spoke with Diamond, who had tried unsuccessfully for years to get authorities to look into David, Barry would later tell the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Barry told the investigator about the former youth group members, all adults by then, who had come to him over the years with stories about David’s inappropriate behavior. Some felt traumatized, he said.

“The kids,” as Diamond still referred to them, were scared of David then, and they were scared of him now.

Jessica set out to interview them.

Again and again, SH’s name came up.

In December, Bate met with SH for an interview. And the story David had told detectives years earlier began to unravel.

A phone, an apartment and an omen

SH had met David when she was 14, she told Bate. SH explained how over time the youth group pastor, who was about nine years her senior, had begun paying her more attention – a gift, a hug, a touch on the knee.

When SH was 16, David took her to a cabin in Brian Head, where she said they had sex for the first time, SH told the investigator. It continued for years – at pay-by-the-hour motels, even at the church where David worked, she said.

The teen noticed Bernadette’s suspicion. Once, SH recalled Bernadette pounding on the door to the church, looking for David. He instructed SH to tell Bernadette he wasn’t there, she said.

David even bought SH a phone she could use to call him, SH said in an account Bate later would confirm with phone records. When SH turned 18, David told her to move out of her mother’s house and into an apartment he rented so they’d have somewhere to have sex.

David never spoke of a future with SH – except once, when he told her, “The only way they could be together is if Bernadette was not alive,” SH told Bate.

It stuck with SH for years.

On August 20, 2006 – a Sunday – SH met David at church and told him she had met a boy her own age. Their relationship needed to end. The next day, David and Bernadette left for Zion.

After Bernadette’s fall, SH found herself in David’s living room with other youth group members, sitting “shiva” – a term usually associated with a Jewish mourning custom – as David had requested, she told Bate.

Then, two to three months after Bernadette’s death, SH and David “re-engaged in a sexual relationship,” she told the investigator. And after David was fired from his pastor job in 2008, David and SH married privately, so he could use her health insurance, she said.

Two years later, they married publicly.

The marriage dissolved, and by 2014, the pair had divorced. Around that time, David said “everything … afforded to them during the duration of their marriage came from Bernadette’s life insurance,” SH told Bate.

A suspicious sunrise

As the story David told investigators all those years earlier started cracking, Jessica Bate began collecting more evidence: phone records, electronic and physical notes Bernadette had written, and accounts from officers who were at Zion National Park the day she fell.

Another officer got to work collecting another kind of intel from August 22, 2006. Using data from NASA and other public databases, he determined the sun rose that day around 6:54 a.m., more than a half hour after David’s 911 call. Given the extreme terrain in the park, the sun would not have been visible on Angel’s Landing until even later, the officer said.

The picture David had painted for detectives after Bernadette’s fall – the sunlight streaming in as he and his wife reached the summit – began to darken.

Bate then met with the chief of Zion National Park to review fatalities from near Angel’s Landing dating to the 1980s and found that of 17 documented deaths, the only ones that occurred from around where Bernadette fell were deemed to be suspicious in nature or suicide.

Bate compiled her findings in an arrest affidavit, which she signed June 16, and the Washington County Attorney’s Office charged David with murder in connection with Bernadette’s death and insurance fraud. He was arrested June 22 and booked into the Clark County Detention Center.

But days later, as his extradition hearing was set to begin, a judge made yet another stunning revelation to the court in the case of the ex-youth pastor now facing a pair of grave allegations:

David, the judge announced, was dead.

A sense of closure

Hours before he was due in court, officers found David Vander Meer unresponsive in his cell – along with a suicide note and a handwritten will – Las Vegas Police reported without revealing what he wrote. David was taken for self-sustained injuries to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Jessica Bate said she could not comment on the case until it was officially closed. But the investigator called Laura Gudenkauf that day to share the news of David’s death. Laura at first felt sad, then relieved when she realized they would not have to face the ordeal of a long court case.

Richard Gudenkauf experienced a mix of emotions. He wasn’t expecting to feel sadness. David’s family didn’t deserve this, he explained, they’re good people. As for David, Richard had hoped due process would give him time to think about what happened to Bernadette, but there’s a satisfaction in knowing he’s gone.

Barry Diamond, the former pastor who helped relaunch the investigation, was speechless when he heard the news from Jessica. There are no winners in this story, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but he didn’t regret coming forward: Bernadette deserves justice.

Meanwhile, David’s official cause and manner of death were still pending two weeks later. His family couldn’t be reached for comment.

The case Bate presented against David won’t result in a conviction, but after a slow drip of concerning signs over the years – a bad feeling on a beautiful wedding day, a hand on the knee that lingered, parties with teenagers and calls from a schoolgirl – Bernadette’s parents feel they’ve finally found clarity.

They’re hopeful their late daughter’s story will bring awareness to the patterns that are so often missed when an adult working with minors takes advantage of their authority.

And in the whirlwind of news surrounding David’s death, they hope people will remember Bernadette – the light she exuded from the time she was small, her dedication to her faith and all the joy she spread with her beautiful voice.