Early in the morning on Aug. 22, 2006, a Las Vegas couple, David and Bernadette Vander Meer, went hiking in Zion National Park in southern Utah. They chose the Angels Landing Trail, one of the park’s most popular — and most dangerous — hikes.

Sometime before 6:30 a.m., Bernadette Vander Meer, 29, fell 1,200 feet to her death, according to news reports at the time. Her husband, a 29-year-old youth pastor, said she had fallen while he was trying to take a picture of her near the trail’s edge, according to later court documents.

Her death was ruled an accident, owing to a lack of evidence, and the case was closed, according to the documents.

On Tuesday, the Washington County attorney’s office in Utah announced that it had charged David Vander Meer with first-degree murder in the death of his wife, saying he had pushed her off the trail.

The pastor had been engaged for years in what an investigator for the attorney’s office described in an affidavit as an “inappropriate sexual relationship” with a member of his youth ministry that began when she was underage. David Vander Meer had told her that they could be together only if his wife were “not alive,” according to the affidavit, which identified the girl only as “SH.”

Prosecutors also charged Vander Meer with insurance fraud, alleging that he had taken out life insurance policies in 2005 for himself and his wife that eventually totaled $550,000 each.

Vander Meer, 49, was arrested Monday in Las Vegas by a task force led by the U.S. Marshals Service and was awaiting extradition to Utah, said Philip Soelberg, a spokesperson for the Washington County attorney’s office.

The Marshals Service did not respond to a request for comment. It was not clear if Vander Meer had a lawyer.

Investigators reopened the case in 2022 after receiving a tip from a former youth group member who said Vander Meer had been using his position at his church, New Song, to “groom kids,” according to court documents.

One of those children was “SH,” who prosecutors said was a teenager when she met Vander Meer in roughly 2002, according to prosecutors. The relationship became intimate over time — the couple had sex at the church after hours and at pay-by-the-hour hotels — and continued for years, ending only two days before Bernadette Vander Meer’s death in 2006, when SH, who was then 19 or 20, broke things off, according to the court documents.

Bernadette Vander Meer, who worked at a Las Vegas hotel, had suspected that her husband was being unfaithful, prosecutors said.

In 2025, prosecutors received a second tip from the senior pastor of New Song at the time of Vander Meer’s death. The pastor, Barry Diamond, said “he believed the death was not an accident and that David pushed Bernadette.”

In July 2007, David Vander Meer received a life insurance payment of roughly $567,000, according to the court documents.

Bernadette Vander Meer was the fifth person to die on the notoriously treacherous Angels Landing Trail since 1983, according to news reports. As of 2024, at least 17 people had died on the trail, according to a 2025 study.

SH and David Vander Meer resumed their relationship two to three months after his wife’s death, and the couple married in 2008, the same year Vander Meer was fired from his job at New Song for providing alcohol to underage members of the youth ministry, according to court documents.

Their marriage, prosecutors said, was marred by “instability, emotional distance and ongoing infidelity.” SH told prosecutors that she had come to believe that Vander Meer was having an affair after finding condoms and hotel receipts. The couple divorced in 2014.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By John S.W. MacDonald/Nikki Boliaux
c. 2026 The New York Times Company