A profession of innocence is among the details in a jailhouse suicide note left by a former youth pastor recently charged with murder 20 years after his wife fell to her death.
“I was never afraid of legal action … because I didn’t kill her,” David Vander Meer wrote in the note released this week with redactions by the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.
Vander Meer, 49, was charged in June with murder and insurance fraud in connection with his then-wife Bernadette Vander Meer’s death in 2006 at Zion National Park, according to the Washington County, Utah, Attorney’s Office. He was arrested by Las Vegas police on June 22 and booked into the Clark County Detention Center, where he was found unresponsive in his cell two days later.
David Vander Meer “left a hand written suicide letter and a hand written will in his cell which has been photographed and impounded,” the police case report on his death said without revealing what they contained.
Vander Meer initially believed his arrest meant his life “was going to be inconvienced [sic] for a month or two,” images of the note released by police show. He went on to write:
