@Dewey_Finn
Thanks for finding the story!
I read this article, and I wonder how much oxygen deprivation played into the man’s attitude. He seemed insensitive to his girlfriend’s plight, and belligerent with the rescue helicopter. Not to mention they did not seem to prepare with snacks, water, etc. (IIRC). Dehydrated, hungry, oxygen deprived, and personality problems all add up to poor judgement. Not that I excuse him, and those who knew him thought he wasn’t really the person to take someone up in the mountains. I have met many people like him, who want to tough it out, and who often, somewhere down the road, toughed it out one times too many.
@knavette57
Well, that’s possible. But it is the second time this happened to him. He took shelter in a hut and let his girlfriend die alone. The first time the girlfriend survived …and was no longer his girlfriend. The second time even the lack of oxygen should not have wiped out his memory completely.
I don’t know, but I see a pathological pattern here.
True, many people climb mountains, get into trouble, and don’t leave others to die. The Everest stories always fascinate me, in that the climbers try to help one another when problems occur. I also recalled that she was the one who tried to call for help, and it seemed as though he interfered with that…not normal, cruel, in fact.
On further review, Alpine Divorce proper should refer to somebody suiciding to frame an SO for murder. Not to someone killing their SO, nor to someone abandoning their SO in the hope / reasonable expectation that the elements will kill the SO.
Quite the plot twist.
Hypothermia is marked by poor judgement. In my repeated experiences of hypothermia, each time I afterwards thought “I should have stopped and warmed up”. Each time, the slow thinking “wiped out my memory completely”.
Yes, that’s correct. In current usage, the term “alpine divorce” is used differently than in Barr’s story. In my original post, I mentioned the story to explain the origin of the term and then pointed out its current usage. My question was whether there had been any cases in the U.S. similar to the one on the Großglockner—cases that came to the attention of the courts where one partner left the other completely helpless. Apparently, there were no such cases there; at any rate, no doper has described such a case.
That’s not entirely accurate. There have been quite a few cases in which climbers on Mount Everest have walked past dying climbers without offering any help. Often, it’s a matter of making the most of a short window of time to reach the summit on schedule, and some climbers don’t want to jeopardize their chance of reaching the summit by providing first aid. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the norm.
In the Großglockner case, the man was convicted because he had sent the rescue helicopter away and then turned off his phone. He descended to a hut, where he spent the night without calling for help for his companion. And it was the second time he had left a partner behind. If all of this is due to hypothermia, perhaps he should refrain from high-altitude mountaineering trips.
Something is not following. The case I mentioned was in Hawaii with a Maui doctor. The New Yorker article is about someone in Austria.
It is probably the Großglockner case I mentioned above, it was in the press everywhere, even in the NYT.
Yup. Quite a lot of this thread has been about the Austrian case. If you were talking about a different case i missed that.
Well, now, I mentioned something that seems to apply upthread, unless you want to discount it because it’s a father and daughter and not a couple, and it was the woman who left, and not the man, but it seems consistent with the definition you gave.
@Earl_Snake_Hips-Tucker
Yes, that does indeed fit the picture. It seems strange to go hiking with a 92-year-old in an area where you could get lost. The woman apparently gave a credible explanation that she did not intentionally give the wrong directions. But no one will ever really know what actually happened between the two of them.
This story is not an Alpine divorce, but it shares some traits.
About thirty years ago, a woman in the office where I worked died in a tragic accident. She and her husband were working on their house when she fell from a ladder.
We were devastated. An ‘in memorium’ was made in the company newsletter, to which her husband (who also worked for the company in a different office) made a heart-rending reply in the next newsletter, thanking everyone for their thoughts.
A month or two passed.
Then it came out in the news that the husband had murdered his wife. She had left notes in her desk and safe at work, labeled along the lines of “To be opened in the event of my sudden or unexplained death or disappearance”. This led to a police investigation, resulting in the husband’s arrest and conviction. I can’t remember what additional evidence the police found, but it was sufficient to convict.
They had no children, and lived in a large three-storey house in the suburbs. The autopsy revealed that she hadn’t died immediately. The husband left after the fall to let her die.
Importantly, this was in an intelligence agency, so the husband would have had to have a ‘need-to-know’ to gain access to his wife’s safe, to destroy the notes. Smart move on her part.
@F.U.Shakespeare
Yes, it’s very similar to the “Alpine Divorce”—the only thing missing is the high-mountain setting.
What I find lacking in both Barr’s original story and your story is that the women didn’t leave their husbands sooner. Both suspected they were going to be killed—so why did they get involved in the first place? Why didn’t they leave their husbands? In the end, they “won,” so to speak—the man was exposed as the murderer. But what good does that do them now that they’re dead?
In the “modern” version of Alpine Divorce, where the women are left helpless, it’s different. Most of them—assuming they survive—break up with these men.
After I posted, I googled the case and learned I’d remembered some details incorrectly.
The couple did have children, who were away for the day. The husband claimed that while she was on the ladder cleaning the gutters, they had argued over her suspicions of his infidelity, and that he had kicked the ladder in anger. He pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and did five years in prison.
That seems really lenient to me. I’m guessing he took advantage of the fact that she wasn’t there, and claimed that he hadn’t intended to kill her (e.g. “I just wanted to scare her”, or some such bull). In any event, leaving her to die would seem to make a murder charge more appropriate.
In answer to your question about why she didn’t leave him, the presence of children may have complicated that.
Whole lotta people are stuck in bad relationships and lack either the means, or the gumption, to leave. And that’s before you add dependent kids to the mix.
He sent mail (not sure if it was email or letters, I don’t remember) to multiple coworkers saying goodbye.
Which makes it difficult to know if it is intentional, unless there’s clear evidence, or someone left behind.
From Google Translate
Karrer [mountain guide] makes it clear: Mistakes happen on the mountain every day – regardless of gender or experience.