Murder On The Mountain? He Left Her Alone In The Dark To Die

In 1986, a man named Scott McLean was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real and I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me, they're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Want to examine the backfire effect wherever you get your podcasts? On Carta Roy, the host of Murder True Crime Stories, if you listen to True Crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. Each episode takes a deep dive into history's most notorious murders, looking beyond the crime scene to focus on the people and communities impacted the most. There are cases solved or unsolved, the goal is simple, to understand why these stories still matter. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Follow Murder True Crime Stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Every town has a dark side. Grossglockner Mountain stands just under 12,500 feet above sea level. It's the highest point in Austria, and by nearly every measure, one of the most unforgiving places in the entire Alps. The name translates loosely to Great Bell, a nod to the curve of its summit ridge when you see it from far below in the valleys, and from a distance, it looks beautiful, almost sculpted. Up close though, there's nothing gentle about it. The Grossglockner sits deep inside the Hoho terrain range, and in winter, it becomes something close to a frozen hellscape. Wind speeds near the top routinely hit Hurricane Force, in temperatures with wind chill can drop to around -4, even -13 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of night. The upper ridge lines are narrow, exposed, and technical, demanding not just strong legs and lungs, but the kind of alpine experience you only get from years of cold and dangerous hours on routes, just like this one. It's in this setting, that one day in January of 2025, a couple decided to try and touch the top of Grossglockner together, but only one of them came back down alive, and the other was found the following morning, frozen to death. And what really went down out there is up for debate, and something you'll need to decide for yourself. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to Every Town, where today we're going on a scary and cold trek together to try and find out if this story is simply another tragedy that occurred on this peak, or if the person who made it back alive knows more than what they've told. So let's head on over to Austria now. This is left alone in the dark, fatal decision on the mountain. By the time she was 33, Kirsten Gertner had built a life around the mountains. To grow up in Salzburg, Austria, where the peaks are always sitting on the horizon, and over the years she chased them on countless tours and hikes. Her mom described her as energetic, always moving, always planning the next outing, and happiest when she was outside. So Kirsten wasn't exactly a novice out there, when she knew the type of terrain and understood the risks, and she loved that world anyway. But she definitely wasn't an expert climber by any means. And the man she was with that day was 36-year-old Thomas Plamberger from Innsbruck, and he moved through that same world, but in a very different way. Thomas was a professional chef by trade, but in the mountains he carried himself less, like a weekend hiker and more like a specialist. He'd already climbed grass-glockner four times, and three of those in winter conditions. Their friends would say he was confident up high, maybe a little too confident, and someone who set big objectives, and usually found a way to make them happen. For about a year before January of 2025, Kirsten and Thomas had been a couple both on and off the trail. Together they'd done several tours, but they were smaller, objective, single-day outings. Easier routes were the technical demand sat comfortably within Kirsten's experience. Tackling grass-glockner and winter was something else entirely, and both of them understood that. In the weeks before the climb, Kirsten sent Thomas a message that would later end up in court files. In it, she admitted in her own words that she completely lacked experience when he came to winter alpine climbing. That line will become one of the most haunting pieces of evidence in this case, because Kirsten knew that, and Thomas knew that, and they still went anyway. On January 18th, 2025, the two of them set off for grass-glockner. It was cold, but for a winter ascent, the conditions weren't unreasonable. They had their gear dialed in, ropes, crampons, headlamps, the plan was simple enough. Reach the summit and be back down the same day. But almost immediately, they made the first choice the prosecutors would later call the start of a cascade of errors, and they left about two hours later than they should have. In winter alpine climbing, timing isn't a suggestion; it's mad. A time you start, what time you reach the top, and how much daylight is left aren't just scheduled details. There what decide whether you get off that mountain alive. It's literally a life or death equation. If you start late, you're automatically pushing the most dangerous decisions into the dark, into the coldest hours when you're already exhausted, and the weather is almost always getting worse and not better. By early afternoon, they'd reach the spot on the Stoolgrot Ridge, and climbers casually call it the "Breakfast Spot." It's about 3,000 feet below the summit. It was around 2.30 pm. Even with the late start, this was their out. If they turned around there, they could have made it back down before dark. The window was narrow, but it still existed. Alpine experts who later went through the caves would point to this moment as the last realistic chance to abort safely, the last "real exit ramp" so to speak. They were already tired, and the terrain ahead was steeper and more exposed, and the afternoon light was slipping away. And Thomas later said Kirsten showed no signs of struggling there, but she seemed fine. Matt, they talked it over and agreed together to keep on going, so that's what they did. They pushed on past the "Breakfast Spot," and the sun kept dropping, and along with it, the temperature. The wind, which had been annoying, but manageable, lowered down, grew sharper and more aggressive as they gained elevation. The Stoolgrot Ridge only gets more exposed the higher you climb, and so what had started as a cold, but doable winter day was turning into something far more serious. By the time night fully settled in, they were high on the mountain, wrapped in a darkness that feels very different from anything at ground level. No city glow, no safety net, just black sky, snow, wind, and gravity. And there's a webcam on this mountain that recorded that night, and the footage you can see two small points of light, two headlamps, moving upward from around 6pm, inching their way higher. You can literally track their progress. And then, much later, in the early hours of the morning, something changes. Now, you see just a single light moving in a different direction, not toward the summit anymore, but down, toward the other side of the mountain. It's one light, and the other is gone. Sometime around 8.50 that night, the pair stopped making progress. They were roughly 150 feet from the summit, and Kirsten had made it almost the entire way, but wouldn't go any further. At that altitude, and those temperatures with the wind chill pushing things down, exhaustion isn't just being tired, it's a serious problem. And Thomas would later say her downturn felt sudden and unexpected. An expert who reviewed the case described her collapse as consistent with a mix of extreme physical fatigue in the early stages of hypothermia, possibly made worse by the fact that she'd recently been sick with a viral infection. Her body, already fighting something off, simply ran out of reserves. Her earlier in the climb, a rope had snagged, and cost them about an hour and a half of precious of their already late start, meant that by the time Kirsten's condition crashed, they had been moving and freezing darkness for hours. They had no warm food, no hot drinks, and, according to prosecutors, nothing more substantial to eat than a bag of gummy bears and a thermos of tea. Two partners badly under-prepared and now caught high on the mountain as the weather turned harder against them. And now, this is the point where the story splits. From here on out, there are two versions of what happened. We'll get back to the story in just a second, but first a quick thanks to today's sponsor, Fast Growing Trees. Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery. The thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. They've got fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and house plants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. It's like your local nursery, but anywhere you live, with more plants and you'll find anywhere else, and they actually help you pick options that work for your climate space and lifestyle. 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They both understood he needed to descend to raise the alarm if she was going to have any chance in making it through and she was clear and coherent when she told him to leave. In his telling, he didn't really have a choice, staying he says would have meant two deaths instead of one. But the other version which comes from prosecutors told a very different story about those same hours on the ridge. And their version, Kirsten wasn't a calm, clear-headed partner making a tough call. He was already disoriented, slipping into hypothermia in a no-condition to make a rational decision about anything. And then there's the detail that really undercuts the idea that Thomas left to get help in the best possible way. When he left his partner, he didn't he didn't cover up, he didn't place her in in a bivy sack or a sleeping bag or something that might have protected her from the wind in cold. He left her lying there in the wind in the cold with none of the emergency equipment they'd brought for an emergency. The judge would later say that if Plamberger had used that gear, if he'd simply sheltered her properly, Kirsten would almost certainly have survived until morning. When Thomas began his descent, the webcam picks up his single headlamp moving down the mountain around 2.30am. He'd first contacted police by phone at about 12.30am, telling them they needed assistance but describing the situation is under control and not life-threatening. The officer he reached reportedly told him that no rescue was possible in the dark and advised them to keep moving if they could. Investigators later alleged that at some point, Thomas put his phone on silent and missed multiple calls from rescue services trying to reach him. Once the storm occurred, he failed to call promptly, he failed to make clear calls, he didn't respond to return calls from rescue services, and then when he left. Earlier that night around 11 p.m., a rescue helicopter had actually flown near their position. Thomas didn't try to signal it. He would later say that at that point, they were not yet in serious difficulty. By the time he finally connected with mountain rescue, made it clear how bad things really were and it was close to 3.30am in the morning. A helicopter attempt went out around 7.10am but the winds were too strong. They had to abort and send ground teams up instead. Those rescuers climbed on foot toward the ridge when they finally reached Kirsten Gertner. Around 10 a.m., it was already dead. At the moment Kirsten was found, this is when the investigation really began. Police pulled everything they could get their hands on. Phone records, GPS tracks from their sports watches, timestamps from the mountain webcams, photos from that day. 11 months of painstaking reconstruction, when they put it all together, it looked very, very bad. On paper, the mistake started stacking up so much it almost felt intentional. There was the late start, the decision not to turn back at the breakfast spot. The snagged rope cost them 90 crucial minutes. The delay in clearly alerting rescue services, the failure to use the emergency blanket, the missed chance to signal the helicopter. Then there were the questions about gear and preparation. Kirsten arrived and saw ski boots instead of the rigid alpine boots the terrain demanded, bringing a split board, and great for riding down powder, but completely wrong for steep icy mixed climbing. On top of all that, they carried almost no food. Most people wouldn't even step foot on a golf course without a beef jerky stick or granola bar. These two had gummy bears. 9 distinct errors by the prosecution's count. Any one of them in isolation might have been written off as a bad call made under stress. Taken together though, they argued, it wasn't just poor judgment anymore. It was a pattern of negligence so extreme that it crossed over into criminal behavior. The trial opened in Innsbruck in February of 2026. It was presided over by Judge Norbert Hauffer, and in this case, who he is outside the courtroom actually mattered. Hauffer is an experienced climber himself and serves as an emergency mountaineer rescuer. Mahi knew, in a very practical way, what the ridge feels like in winter, and what options you really have up there, and what a responsible seasoned mountaineer is expected to do when things start to go wrong. When Thomas pleaded not guilty, he told the court he loved Kirsten, and he was devastated by her death and that every decision on the mountain had always been made together. The defense's argument was that the pair were equal partners and they planned a trip together, had a similar skill level, and thus, you know, one wasn't anymore responsible for the other. He said he'd never seen himself as a leader or a guide, just as her partner. In his telling, the situation deteriorated faster than anyone could have predicted. The weather caught them off guard and he did everything he could to save, at least one of them. Now, here's the part that's probably going to surprise a lot of you. Well, there were some surprises in the trial which was presented by a judge. One of them was that the deceased climber's mother testified saying her daughter's boyfriend shouldn't be blamed for the death. She was angry that the media kept painting her daughter as some naive girl who'd been dragged up a mountain she couldn't handle. In her eyes, that was an insult. And Kirsten was strong, stubborn when she wanted to be and made her own decisions, which wasn't a tag along. It wasn't like she followed her boyfriend up there blindly with no idea what was happening. In Gertrude and Kirsten's father even had a letter read aloud in court. In it, they stated clearly that their daughter had acted of her own free will and that they did not blame Thomas for her death. But then, came the moment that shifted the whole mood in that courtroom. Late in the trial, a surprise witness took the stand. A woman named Andrea B, one of Thomas's ex-girlfriends, and they dated briefly in 2023 and during that time, had also gone on mountain tours together. Andrea described one particular outing a nighttime descent on Grossglockner. And she had a remarkably similar story to tell about how he'd done the same thing to her on the same mountain about two years before. So they'd put on a trip to the same peak in the summer and they had an argument and he'd left her on the mountain and she'd had to find her way down alone. She said, Thomas thought she was moving too slowly and went on ahead, disappearing into the dark. At some point her headlamp failed, and suddenly she was alone on the mountain, in the dark, crying and screaming for him, and he was nowhere to be found. That she said was the last time she ever climbed with him. She added that, whenever she showed fear on their climbs, Thomas didn't comfort her, he just grew impatient. The defense denied her version of events, but the prosecution seized on it. To them this wasn't just a story about character, it was a pattern. They argued that Plamburger was not a man who made one catastrophic mistake under impossible pressure. He was someone who, when a woman on a mountain couldn't keep up, had a habit of moving on, of pushing ahead and not looking back. Whether that's a fair reading is something you can argue about, Andrea survived, Kirsten did not. The situations weren't identical, and the stakes on that winter night with Kirsten were far higher. But the fact remained, the same man on the same mountain had already been accused once of leaving a partner alone in the dark. For the prosecution, that was very hard to file under bad luck and tragic coincidence. So, one of the court decide, guilty of grossly negligent manslaughter. And Thomas was given a five-month suspended sentence and a fine of 9,400 euros, no prison time. In delivering the verdict, the judge told him that Kirsten had trusted him completely, and she had literally placed her life in his hands and that, if he had acted differently, she would almost certainly still be alive. If he had wrapped her in the emergency gear, if he communicated clearly with rescuers, if he had signaled that helicopter. The judge said Thomas's mountaineering skills were galaxies away from Kirsten's. He wasn't just the more experienced partner, in every practical sense he was responsible for. Man, didn't take that responsibility seriously. Clearly. So what really makes this case so hard to file away neatly is either tragic accident or crime is the fog around those final, hardest questions. Was Kirsten really clear-headed when she told Thomas to go? Or was she already slipping into hypothermia, confused, disoriented, and saying things she couldn't fully understand? And did Thomas honestly believe the situation was still manageable when he called police and said they were fine? Or deep down was something else pushing those choices. Ego. Denial. Fear of admitting how bad it had gotten. What was actually running through his mind when he stepped past that Bivic sack without opening it? When he watched that helicopter sweep across the sky and didn't raise his arm. When he walked down the far side of that mountain in the small hours of the morning, well, his girlfriend lay in the dark above him. How concerned was he? Well, we're never going to fully know, heck, he might not even really know. That's the problem with stories like this. They don't unfold in front of cameras or crowds, and they happen in blackness and minus temperatures. In thin air, when bodies are drained and brains are running on fumes. And plan burger says he was overwhelmed, acting on instinct and making the only choices he thought he had. And prosecution says those choices weren't random at all, but they fit a pattern of negligence and at a basic level, a man who chose himself. Kirsten Gertner was 33 years old, and she loved the mountains when she trusted the person beside her. And she got within 150 feet of the highest summit in her country before her body finally hit its limit. The person she trusted most in that moment made a series of decisions that a judge would later say sealed her fate. Was it murder? Was it a tragic accident? It was something in between, something in the gray space, between love and carelessness. Between bad luck and bad judgment, between a man overwhelmed, and a man who should have known better. And Kirsten Gertner wrote in a message days before she died that she lacked experience in winter tours, who knew the stakes and trusted the person with her to manage them, paid for that gray space with her life. And so that's it for today's episode of Every Town. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more dark true crime content, we'll look around as we got a whole lot of strange stories we get into. And I'll stay safe out there in this wild and crazy world. Remember to come back here next week for another episode of Every Town filled with strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.