Richard Gudenkauf walked his daughter down the aisle in September 1996 with a frown on his face.
The bride, Bernadette, looked radiant in her white dress and a matching pearl necklace. Her large eyes peeked out from behind the veil. Her mother, Laura Gudenkauf, watched her glowing daughter, happy that she was finally marrying the man she had met years earlier during a church theater production.
Bernadette and David Vander Meer pose on their wedding day, in 1996. Courtesy of Richard and Laura Gudenkauf.
From the beginning, Richard had a bad feeling about the boyfriend, David Vander Meer. He did not like the idea of David marrying his daughter, a young woman full of life, committed to her faith, and active in her community.
Bernadette was always a star in Richard’s eyes. But it was one night, in a crowded nightclub, when he truly understood how bright she could really be. In a corner there was a karaoke stage, where a small audience listened to amateur singers performing songs over the buzz of the rest of the place.
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Bernadette went up to sing and had barely sung four or five notes when silence took over the entire club. Everyone was captivated.
It was then that Richard knew she was really very good.
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Bernadette did everything possible to make her voice known, performing in character as Betty Boop and recording demo CDs with covers of songs by artists such as Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera, and Patti LaBelle. She had the voice to live up to it.
Bernadette poses with her father, Richard Gudenkauf. Courtesy of Richard and Laura Gudenkauf
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 house full of people
About 10 years later, Laura Gudenkauf had separated from Richard and was living with Bernadette and David, along with Vanessa, Bernadette’s sister, who had special needs.
Laura noticed that there were always teenagers hanging out at the house, members of the youth group that David led. Bernadette had noticed it too. And there was a young woman—whose initials were SH—who seemed to be getting especially close to David. She called the house frequently.
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The dazzling smile that Laura had seen on her daughter’s face on her wedding day had changed. Bernadette felt lonely and unfulfilled, married to a man who did not publicly express his love for her and who treated her as if she were not someone special, she wrote in letters that investigators would find years later. He paid more attention to the teenagers in his youth group, Bernadette told Laura.
Bernadette poses with her father, Richard Gudenkauf. Courtesy of Richard and Laura Gudenkauf
On one occasion, Laura saw Bernadette return home after a night shift as a waitress at a casino, where during breaks she would play the piano and sing for the customers, and her tips went directly to David. Laura saw that Bernadette was upset with her husband and saw her slam the bedroom door shut.
When Bernadette told David she wanted a divorce, the youth pastor asked her to think about appearances.
“What will people think?”, he asked his wife, as Laura would later tell investigators.
The couple stayed together. As their tenth wedding anniversary approached, they planned a trip to Zion National Park, in Washington County, Utah. Bernadette, an experienced hiker and adventure lover, was happy that she would finally have some alone time with her husband, surrounded by nature, as her mother knew.
Before the trip, Bernadette spoke with Laura about the life insurance policies she and David had. They had recently increased the death benefit coverage from approximately US$ 150,000 to US$ 600,000 each, money that, as David assured Bernadette, would help support Laura and Vanessa if anything were to ever happen to both of them.
While explaining that decision to her, Bernadette sat in front of a computer to show her mother a document. She typed a password. It didn’t work, so she tried again. It didn’t work either.
Then she turned to Laura and said: “David changed the password”.
The hike to Angel’s Landing
With headlamps illuminating the path in the pre-dawn darkness, David and Bernadette began the hike around 4:20 a.m. on August 22, 2006, in Zion National Park, as David would explain shortly after.
Located in southwestern Utah, the park is known for its stunning landscapes: the famous Virgin River running between towering canyon walls, sheer cliffs that give way to vast sandstone canyons, and challenging trails that draw adventurers to an unforgiving wilderness.
Visitors hike the Angel’s Landing trail at Zion National Park, in Utah, in 2025. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
David and Bernadette reached the highest part of Angel’s Landing, long one of the park’s most popular and demanding trails. The sunlight began to illuminate the landscape and the couple took off their headlamps, David would tell the detectives.
He set up his camera with the intention of capturing Bernadette’s silhouette against the sunrise as she stood near the edge of the steep cliff. David took a few photographs of the landscape and waited a few seconds for each image to finish exposing. Seeing that the backpacks appeared in the frame, he picked them up and walked about 1.5 to 3 meters, he would later recall to investigators.
Then, a scream.
When David turned around, as he would later recount, Bernadette was no longer there.
The 911 call was received around 6:20 a.m. David told emergency crews that his wife had fallen while they were hiking.
Bernadette, at just 29 years old, was declared dead.
Shortly after, the detectives asked David if he had ever been unfaithful to his wife. He replied that he had not.
Falls by hikers had been recorded in Zion before. But accidents in that part of Angel’s Landing were rare, and only a few cases, over the years, were considered suspicious or classified as suicides.
There were no other witnesses to interview.
The investigators concluded that Bernadette’s death was an accident.
A substantial insurance payment
So many people wanted to attend Bernadette’s memorial service that an additional room had to be opened. During the funeral, David sat on the other side of the church, separated from Bernadette’s parents, next to members of her youth group.
Richard and Laura were suspicious of their daughter’s death. They believed she was too experienced a hiker to have simply fallen, especially with the dawn light illuminating the trail.
In addition, there were the slamming doors, the calls from the teenager in David’s youth group, and the changing of the computer password. But Laura was devastated by grief and continued living in David’s house, trapped in a state of depression and fear.
Over time, Richard’s impact and sadness transformed into a desire for revenge that he felt deep down. He had many friends, but as the months passed, his anger turned him into someone unpleasant. His friends stopped calling him.
Realizing that they could no longer go on living like this, Bernadette’s parents decided to leave the matter in God’s hands and did their best to move on with their lives. Laura hardly saw David at the house anymore. Over time, he moved out and his late wife’s family lost touch with him.
David Vander Meer. Courtesy of Richard and Laura Gudenkauf
In 2007, David received approximately US$ 567,439 from life insurance and began to lead a life of luxury: he bought cars and paid for trips for members of his youth group, investigators would later say.
Laura, according to her own testimony, never received a cent.
The following year, David was leading a youth group at another church, under the supervision of Pastor Barry Diamond. Barry fired David after receiving reports that the youth leader was hosting parties for teenagers, offering them alcohol, and allowing them to gamble at his home, as he would later testify to the authorities.
But it would be years before it became clear that those unauthorized parties barely scratched the surface of the serious accusations David would face.
A pastor makes an explosive revelation
In 2022, a former member of a youth group led by David alerted authorities that David had used his position to “groom” minors, including a young woman with whom he was having a sexual relationship when Bernadette died, investigators would later point out.
Investigators from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Utah identified the young woman as SH and interviewed her by phone, noting in a report that it was necessary to follow up on the case. But no one did. The investigation was shelved once again.
Then, last October, more than 19 years after Bernadette’s fall, Barry Diamond, David’s former boss, contacted the Washington County District Attorney’s office with a shocking accusation, as investigators would later describe it.
Bernadette’s death was not an accident, the pastor said. He believed that David had pushed her.
Bernadette Vander Meer had a taste for adventure. Courtesy of Richard and Laura Gudenkauf
Investigator Jessica Bate, a lieutenant with the county district attorney’s office, began working on the case. She spoke with Diamond, who for years had unsuccessfully tried to get authorities to investigate David, Barry would later tell the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Barry told the investigator about former members of the youth group, now adults, who over the years had approached him to tell him stories about David’s inappropriate behavior. Some said they felt traumatized.
“The boys,” as Diamond kept calling them, were afraid of David then and are still afraid of him now.
Jessica began interviewing them.
Again and again, the name of SH came up.
In December, Bate interviewed SH. And the story that David had told detectives years earlier began to fall apart.
A phone, an apartment, and an omen
SH told Bate that she had met David when she was 14 years old. She explained that, over time, the youth group pastor, who was about nine years older than her, began to pay more attention to her: a gift, a hug, a hand on her knee.
Error en la traducción: the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not NoneTypeThe teenager noticed that Bernadette was suspicious. On one occasion, SH recalled, Bernadette pounded hard on the church door looking for David. He instructed SH to tell Bernadette that he was not there, she stated.
Error en la traducción: the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not NoneTypeDavid never spoke of a future with SH, except on one occasion, when he told her: “The only way they could be together was if Bernadette was not alive,” SH told Bate.
That phrase remained etched in SH’s memory for years.
On August 20, 2006, a Sunday, SH met with David at church and told him that she had met a young man of her same age. Their relationship had to end. The next day, David and Bernadette left for Zion.
After Bernadette’s fall, SH found himself in the living room of David’s house along with other members of the youth group, sitting “shiva”—a term usually associated with a Jewish tradition of mourning—because that is what David had requested, he told Bate.
Then, between two and three months after Bernadette’s death, SH and David “resumed a sexual relationship,” she told the investigator. And after David was fired from his position as pastor in 2008, David and SH were married in a private ceremony so that he could use her health insurance, she claimed.
Two years later, they celebrated a public wedding.
The marriage ended and, by 2014, they had already divorced. Around that time, David said that “everything… they had during their marriage came from Bernadette’s life insurance,” SH told Bate.
A suspicious sunrise
The Angel’s Landing trail in Zion National Park. Mehmet Demirci/Redux.
As the story David had told investigators all those years before began to crumble, Jessica Bate started gathering more evidence: phone records, electronic and handwritten notes that Bernadette had written, and the testimonies of agents who were at Zion National Park the day she fell.
Another agent began collecting a different type of information about August 22, 2006. Using data from NASA and other public databases, he determined that the sun rose around 6:54 a.m. that day, more than half an hour after David’s 911 call. Due to the rugged terrain of the park, the sun would not have been visible at Angel’s Landing until even later, the agent indicated.
The version that David had presented to the detectives after Bernadette’s fall—that the sunlight was beginning to illuminate the place when he and his wife reached the summit—began to lose credibility.
Then, Bate met with the superintendent of Zion National Park to review the deaths that occurred near Angel’s Landing since the 1980s and discovered that, of the 17 documented deaths, the only ones that occurred approximately at the place where Bernadette fell had been considered suspicious or classified as suicides.
Bate compiled his findings into an affidavit to support an arrest warrant, which he signed on June 16, and the Washington County District Attorney’s Office charged David with murder for the death of Bernadette and with insurance fraud. He was arrested on June 22 and booked into the Clark County Detention Center.
But days later, when the hearing on his extradition was about to begin, a judge made another shocking revelation in court in the case of the former youth pastor, who was facing two serious charges.
A sense of closure
Hours before he was due to appear in court, officers found David Vander Meer unconscious in his cell, along with a suicide note and a handwritten will, Las Vegas police reported without disclosing their contents. David was transported to a hospital with injuries that authorities said were self-inflicted, where he was pronounced dead.
Jessica Bate said she could not comment on the case until it was officially closed. But that same day, the investigator called Laura Gudenkauf to inform her of David’s death. Laura said that at first she felt sadness and then relief upon realizing that they would not have to face the ordeal of a long judicial process.
Richard Gudenkauf experienced a mix of emotions. He did not expect to feel sadness. David’s family did not deserve to go through this, he explained; they are good people. As for David, Richard hoped that due process would give him time to reflect on what happened to Bernadette, but he feels a certain satisfaction knowing that he is gone.
Barry Diamond, the former pastor who helped reopen the investigation, was left speechless when Jessica broke the news to him. There are no winners in this story, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but he has no regrets about coming forward: Bernadette deserves justice.
Meanwhile, two weeks later, the official cause and manner of David’s death remained pending. His family could not be reached for comment.
The case that Bate brought against David will not end in a conviction, but, after a slow trickle of worrying signs over the years—a bad feeling on a beautiful wedding day, a hand on a knee that lingered longer than it should have, parties with teenagers, and calls from a student—Bernadette’s parents feel that they have finally found clarity.
They hope that their daughter’s story, who has since passed away, will help raise awareness about the patterns that so often go unnoticed when an adult working with minors takes advantage of their position of authority.
And, amidst the avalanche of news about David’s death, they hope that people remember Bernadette: the light that radiated from her since she was little, her dedication to faith, and all the joy she shared with her beautiful voice.
