New Revelation: A close friend has broken her silence about what Bernadette Vander Meer said shortly before the f@tal incident on a Utah mountain
Kathy Page had lunch with Bernadette “Bernie” Vander Meer a month before she was killed by her husband David Vander Meer while hiking in Utah
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David and Bernadette Vander Meer.Credit : Courtesy Laura Gudenkauf
Kathy Page was a youth leader when she first met Bernadette “Bernie” Vander Meer at a church in Las Vegas.
She was in her late twenties and Bernadette was just 13 or 14 years old at the time, but the two still became fast friends.
“We just hit it off,” Page tells PEOPLE. “I just thought this little girl’s got something special about her. And she just was a lovely girl.”
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That friendship came to a tragic end in 2006 when Bernadette died at the age of 29 after plummeting 1,200 feet off Angels Landing — a rock formation in Utah’s Zion National Park she was visiting with her husband David Vander Meer to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.
The death was initially ruled an accident until June 22, 2026, when 20 years after that fatal fall David was arrested and charged with his wife’s murder.
One month before her death, Page says she had lunch with Bernadette, who allegedly shared her suspicions about her husband’s affair, unaware that it would drive him to push her off a cliff to her death just a few weeks later.
Page says that she and Bernadette developed a “very close friendship” over the years and stayed in touch even after she married David and joined another church.
“I would sit there and say, ‘You’re like my daughter.’ And she’d say, ‘No, I’m like your little sister,'” Page recalls of her time with Bernadette.
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Murder on a. Mountaintop.
They would make a point to catch up from time to time, she says, which is why the two met for lunch that month.
“It was just us just talking like friends, old friends. I was asking about her job because she was now working as a cocktail server and it was weird. The conversation was a good time, good girlfriends getting together, but I felt like she was holding back on some of the things,” Page says.
“Then she mentioned that she thought that David was cheating on her.”
Page says she didn’t want to pry and can’t remember if Bernadette told her the name of David’s mistress at that time or if she heard it from someone else, but she is certain she knew the woman’s identity before her late friend’s memorial service because of what she claims she saw that day.
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“I got there to the funeral, and [the mistress] was sitting near David and I was just appalled,” Page recalls.
She also says that she suspected David in Bernadette’s death from the start, a gut instinct she attributes to being married to a police officer.
At the same time, she says it wasn’t feasible to think that the young woman fell.
“She used to go up there, I wouldn’t say often. It was like every weekend or something, but she loved to hike and she was outdoorsy and she was smart,” Page says. “She was smart. She’s not a flake.”
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The initial relief and happiness that Page and many of Bernadette’s friends felt after David’s arrest quickly changed with the news that he had taken his own life while awaiting his first court appearance, she says.
“I was, ‘Justice for Bernie,’ when he got caught and I thought, ‘This is going to be one trial that I’m going to be following. I’m going to sit in the courtroom and stare at him,'” she says. “That was my intention. And then getting up the next morning and hearing that he killed himself, I was like, ‘Oh, well, I guess he didn’t want to go through a trial.'”
Page says she thinks that David had been living with his guilt for years.
“When I had heard that he was married three times after Bernie, all I could think of is you’ve been walking around with this guilt eating at you and you did stuff to distract. You became a yoga instructor so that you could breathe in and think happy namaste thoughts and clear out your bad juju inside of you. You married other people to distract from what you did. That’s how I felt,” Page says. “And then at the same time, I had a sadness because I thought he was a son. He was a brother. And maybe he had family and there’s people that are sad because he did that.”
And Page says, despite having to say goodbye to Bernadette 20 years ago, she remains one of the most singular people she has ever met in her life.
“She was exceptional. In my 64 years of life, you see people and you just go, ‘They’re the most loveliest person. They’re so sweet, kind, and giving,'” Page explains. “You meet all these lovely people in this world. Bernadette was above that. She was almost an angel on earth. That’s how I felt. I felt inferior to her, if that makes any sense. As a youngster, she never said an unkind word. Always encouraging to everybody, always loving to everybody, never mad, never snapped at anybody.”
“She was a kind, loving soul,” Page says.
