Dateline NBC - Cliffhanger

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

In this Dateline classic, when a young newlywed falls to her death from a 1,000-foot cliff questions emerge. Was it an accident, or was she pushed? Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on June 11, 2007.

Everybody asked what happened and everybody seemed to scratch their head when I said, I don't know. It was the question that wouldn't go away. The question that haunts many people even now. If you hear this story, can you know what happened? People would ask, hey, what happened to the case with the lady on the cliff? Her name was Wanda, the lady on the cliff. I dream about Wanda every single night. And in several of those dreams, I always thought and felt like Wanda was trying to tell me something. Wanda Darling. She was 23, just married and on a honeymoon drive. Wanda and her new husband had turned off the highway near Homer, Alaska,

to a remote clifftop overlooking a broad Alaskan bay, not a soul around, almost. At the very end of that dirt road, etched into the bluff, there lived a mystery writer, an author named Ron Hess. This is kind of the frontier. That's right. That's right. For Wanda, a frontier indeed. She was 4,000 miles from hometown Haleyville, Alabama, much further than she'd ever been before. It was 1997, a summer day. Ron Hess was the first to hear. He was shouting. He was very distraught. Hess was having lunch with his wife when a stranger came running down the road to his house.

He stopped about right in here and said, Help, my wife has fallen over the cliff. Hess drove the stranger back down the dirt road and parked. On the way, the man was so distraught, he vomited. Together, the two men rushed to the edge of the cliff and looked over. And then he got down on his hands and knees and said, It should have been me. It should have been me. Larry Coons, then an Alaska State Trooper, responded to the 911 call.

Came in at 12.32 p.m., remember it well. Remember the dispatcher saying, lady fell off a cliff. I said, what? Where? Trooper Coons rushed to the bluff where he learned the stranger's name was Jay Darling. He was very despondent. There was anguish on his face. Darling told Coons he and Wanda had been married just four months, were on a belated honeymoon, had stopped at the bluff on their way out of town. They were up there taking photographs. Wanda had fallen face forward down the cliff. Did he tell you how she fell? Yes, he did. She was taking photographs and she had tripped on a clump of grass.

Wanda fell a thousand feet down a cliff face studded with rubble and obstacles. Her body smashed into those obstacles all the way down. Virtually every bone was broken. Her last conscious moments would have been terrifying. And when she hit the bottom, she was dead. Jay Darling seemed so distraught, Kuhn sent him to the hospital. Then when he checked in on Darling later that day, he was struck that the man still seemed to think his wife might have survived the fall, at least briefly. He says, did you find Wanda? I said, yes.

What'd she say? What'd she say? What'd she say? But surely he knew that she had fallen to her death. Well, any logic and common sense, yes. He also asked the doctor if Wanda had said anything before she died. Maybe the man didn't know it was a thousand

feet down that cliff, that nobody could have survived such a fall. For Coons and his partner, there was still work to be done. We got down on our bellies and crawled out to the very edge of the cliff. And we both kind of peered over the edge there. I looked at him and he looked at me and I remember saying, this is bleeping odd.

Just getting close set off waves of vertigo. Why would newlywed sightseers have wandered way out there at all? This spot is so remote in relationship to the highway. It's down a dirt road that says road closed. There's two road closed signs. It's not visible from the roadway. And the Darlings had just driven right past a well-marked scenic overlook with a guardrail where the view was every bit as spectacular. They retrieved Wanda's body from the bottom of the cliff, and Koons couldn't get the thought of the young newlywed

out of his head. Wanda was somebody's daughter. She was part of somebody's family. Of course, dreadful accidents have implications far away. Jay Darling phoned the news of Wanda's death to a little town in northwestern Alabama called Haleyville, and reaction was instant that this was no accident at all. I knew. I called my supervisor and said, I've got to go home. Wanda's been killed. He's killed her.

Killed her? Not. There's a strange story to tell about a small town, an eager bride, and a man with a very surprising plan. When we found out about the plan to fake his death, I mean, that just made it worse. very surprising plan. When we found out about the plan to fake his death, I mean, that just made it worse. Wanda Wood Darling was on her honeymoon when her life came to a sudden and terrible end.

An accident, her husband claimed. Her own horrible stumble. But the people who knew Wanda best felt right away something in the story was all wrong. And I thought, oh my God, she would never fall from a cliff. He had pushed her. But why would her family have been so suspicious? Well, that was easy if you knew Wanda, they said. How would she have felt being anywhere near the edge of a thousand foot precipice like that?

Terrified. She held on to the rail when she walked downstairs. I mean, she could walk down four stairs and she would hold on to the railing. Yes, she would have never been close enough to fall. So suspicious. Yes, but Wanda's sisters Tammy Ward and Cindy Kalin seem to have many reasons for that in the story of the not-so-little girl who grew up poor on the outskirts of Haleyville,

Alabama. I remember her in kindergarten. Farrah Tittle was Wanda's friend from as far back as she can remember. There was a pine tree on the playground that had a swing on it, and sometimes the swing would go around the limb and be too high for the short kids to reach the swing. Wanda could always reach up and knock the swing back over the limb and help everybody out. But something else happened back then too. Wanda had a bad fall, broken arm, and grew up with a terrible fear of falling. And after that, I never saw her climb up on any type of playground equipment or picnic tables or anything. She was sweet, smart, school valedictorian. She worked at the local Piggly Wiggly for a time, then went on to become a registered nurse. Perfect for her, said her

friends, because she was a natural caregiver, always thinking about how to make somebody else's life better. Wanda was friends with everybody. It didn't matter if someone was 60 or if they were two years old. But she wanted something, too, for herself that seemed more remote with every passing year. She'd always told us she wanted to get married and have a family, always wanted to have a wedding in December, a big Christmas wedding. When Wanda went to the movies in Haleyville, it was not to hold hands with a boy in the dark.

The dating scene was everywhere. It was cruel. She had friends who were boys, but not boyfriends. She was taller than they were and bigger. Romance for her was apparently unattainable. And so when she called out of the blue one day to say there was this man and he had asked to marry her, her family was quite frankly stunned. I was home in December for Christmas, and she told me about him.

But now she called him a friend. And when I went back in March, Tammy told me they were getting married. And I said, I thought they were just friends. In December, they were just friends. Now they're getting married. Wanda had met Jay Darling while working at a hospital. He was a new physical therapist on staff. She thought he was handsome. She was talking about him being like a big old bear,

you know. I mean, she really, really liked the guy immediately. She was a bit smitten with the guy. She was smitten. But Farrah says the feeling back then was not mutual. And once when Wanda dropped in on Jay at home unannounced. He told her that he wanted her to leave, that she was getting on his nerves. And she was heartbroken. She came straight to my house. She was crying, embarrassed, hurt. Wanda's dream apparently crushed. Or was there more to the relationship than Wanda's family and friends knew?

Because just weeks later, they were stunned to discover Wanda and Jay eloped. Wanda told me that she was at home one day and Jay had called her from work and asked what she was doing. And she said, oh, not much. I think she'd just gotten up and started her day. And he told her to get ready that they were just going to go get married. And that's what they did. No long for a December wedding, no family or friends. But Jay wanted it his way, Wanda told Farrah. So that's what they did. And when it came to choosing where they would live, Wanda did what Jay wanted then, too. She left her nursing job in

Haleyville, Alabama, and moved 200 miles or so away from Wanda's family to Grenada, Mississippi. But when Wanda came back home to visit Farrah not long after her marriage, Farrah noticed bruises on her arms and legs, and her nose was broken. Her face looked terrible, and we asked Wanda what happened. My family was there, and we said, how'd you get these bruises? And Wanda said, oh, I was going to tickle Jay, and it surprised him, and he hit me, but he didn't mean to. The decision to move to Alaska was just as sudden. I didn't want her to go. On the phone the day before they left, Wanda promised her mother, Ollie Wood,

that they'd be back in a year or so after they'd made some money. But Ollie had a bad feeling. I said, I want you to tell Jay that he's taking my baby. He did take my baby off, and he didn't bring her back either. All of these things Wanda's family told Trooper Coons, who now was all the more determined to find out what had happened. Was it a fall? Or something far more sinister? Was it a push? Koons turned first to J. Darling for answers, interviewing him five times

in the two days after Wanda's death. At each time, he says, Darling's story of Wanda's fall changed a little. She was taking a picture when she lost her balance, or she tripped on a stake stuck in the ground, or he didn't see anything because he turned away. This does not smell right. Doesn't smell right at all. So Trooper Coons began to poke around for any motive Jay might have had for getting rid of Wanda. He called Wanda's mother Ollie. And that was the first thing I told him. There was a lot of insurance. Life insurance. Shortly after they were married, Trooper Coons discovered,

Jay had taken out two separate insurance policies on his life and two on Wanda's life, totaling a million dollars in coverage for each of them. But there was more. Before she married Jay, Wanda had bought a $60,000 policy of her own, naming her parents as beneficiaries. She felt good about that because she just felt like she was trying to prepare for the worst. And Jay immediately wanted her to change the beneficiary on that policy to himself. So she did. She did, but she wasn't happy about it. Now Koons thought he might be on to

something, and he knew he was when friend Farrah Tittle passed on a story Wanda had told her, that Jay was planning something highly illegal. Jay indicated to Wanda that he was going to buy a kayak and fake his own death in the Gulf of Mexico. This was shocking information. If Farrah was right, Jay had come up with the ultimate scam, a plan to fake his own death, then hide in another country until the insurance was paid to his compliant wife. Did you advise her about what to do? Yeah, she was really worried, and I told her I just thought that was crazy. Why didn't she walk the other way?

Why didn't she leave him at that point? I think that she probably thought she could talk him out of it. Now, this was very strange. A man tells others about his plan to fake his own death in order to collect insurance, and then his brand new wife falls off a cliff? Who has a plan to fake their death, and then, oops, somebody just falls off a cliff. People don't just fall off cliffs. By now, how suspicious were you?

Pretty darn suspicious. The more Trooper Coons learned, the more he became convinced that Jay Darling had killed his new wife. But though Coons had found what he believed was a motive for murder, there was no physical evidence on the bluff that would prove it. The wall of evidence he was building against Darling was circumstantial, and hard as he tried, he couldn't quite make a case strong enough to satisfy the DA. Koons, who was advised to stop working on the case, took it home with him. I made a lot of personal phone calls from my house, and I guess one could construe that

as being obsessed. But it wasn't obsession. It was tenacity. Back in Haleyville, Alabama, members of Wanda's circle fumed just as they had when her broken body was brought home.

You wanted to punish Jay. I wanted to punish Jay. I can't even explain my reaction because I've only felt that way one time, but it was almost just like a storm in my head. I took a gun to the funeral home, and I thought, I'm going to kill him. I'm just going to kill him. A lot of anger in that comment. Yeah, there's a lot of anger in me.

I'll save that for one person. Then finally, in 1998, Trooper Coons brought Darling's insurance scam, the one that began with the plan to fake his own death, to the attention of the FBI. And in 2002, Darling was charged, not with murdering Wanda, but with mail fraud for trying to claim insurance money after her death. He pleaded guilty. The sentence, 40 months in prison. End of story? Well, not quite. Because finally in 2005,

just as Darling was completing the sentence imposed for insurance fraud, a grand jury decided there was enough evidence to charge Darling with murder. Darling was back in Homer, Alaska, facing a jury, along with former friends, now testifying for the prosecution. Did he show any remorse? No, he didn't seem grief-stricken or anything. The story of Wanda Darling and her strange, sad demise had become a local legend of sorts in Homer, Alaska. And over the years, the way many people heard the story,

Wanda had met her and courtesy of a push from her husband, Jay Darling. He did it for the insurance money, they'd say. But did he? Now in Homer's little courthouse, a trial was about to begin and trials play by different rules than backyard gossip. Time was an enemy for the prosecutors of J. Darling. By the time they gathered to try him, Wanda had been in her grave for almost nine years. Memories fade. Evidence can degrade. Still in the modest Homer Courthouse, brick by brick, the prosecutors set about reassembling

that wall of circumstantial evidence for first-degree murder. There, investigator Larry Koons, courtesy of the prosecutor Crandon Rendell, finally had the chance to tell a jury what he'd discovered, beginning with the motive, money. In that third interview, was there any discussion about life insurance? Yes, there was. What did Mr. Darling say about that? He said they had about a million dollars of life insurance. In fact, in the months before Wanda's death, he'd bought two policies.

Wanda and Jay were covered for a million each, plus another policy on Wanda for $60,000. Former insurance agent Jan Staton said Jay tried to get even more, but it was denied. Why didn't the company approve the $3 million? Financial statements and medical history. Staton said Darling called her repeatedly in the months before Wanda's death to see if the million-dollar policy she sold him had been approved. How many calls do you think he made to you, inquiring about it? Inquiring anywhere from 15 to 20.

An old friend of Darling's, a man named Mike Rabb, testified that he overheard some of Jay's calls to the insurance companies in the days before Wanda's death. Jay certainly seemed to be planning something, he said. The tone was a policy in effect, was the paperwork on the way, things along that line. What kind of policy? Life insurance. Rabb told the prosecutor there were three or four such calls in his presence, but none when Wanda was in the room.

Would he wait until his wife left the room? Yes, she'd be in the restroom or stepped out. The prosecutor said the accumulation of insurance policies became far more suspect when put together with Darling's scheme to fake his own death. Ex-girlfriend Lisa Eddins said she knew Jay married Wanda to pull off his scheme. What did he say? He said he would have to be married and that he was going to have a kayaking accident. Go ahead.

And that he would disappear and this wife would be the grieving wife for however long it took the insurance company to deliver the money. But, said Mike Rabb, a little problem developed for Jay. After he married Wanda, she seemed to have changed her mind about playing along. I take it Wanda wasn't a willing participant. And so, suggested the prosecutor, Jay's plan to get that insurance money may have changed. From faking his own death in a kayaking accident to using the same method, killing Wanda. Do people commonly kayak in water with two or three foot chop? Not if they can help it. The boat captain testified that the day before Wanda died, Jay ignored his pointed warning about kayaking in the choppy water.

The two went out even though Wanda was a complete novice, and unlike Jay, was not wearing a wetsuit, and when, sure enough, they capsized, Jay got back into the kayak, but Wanda could not. She spent more than an hour unprotected in that cold Alaskan water. Jay threw her a rope and towed her to shore, But hypothermia threatened when she, not Jay, flagged down a passing boat for help. It was just a day later that Wanda did die. Not in the water, but over that cliff. And the day after that, after Wanda was already dead, Jay called the insurance agents, but left out one important detail.

Did he happen to mention his wife? I asked how their trip was going, and response, as far as I can recall, was everything. They were having a great time. Then, a couple of days later, Darling called the agent again. What did Mr. Darling say in his second phone call? He was advised, letting me know that Wanda was deceased. And he wanted to know what procedures he needed to do as far as the policy was concerned. What did he say? How did his wife become deceased?

He told me she fell off a cliff. He wanted to know how to get the process started for the life insurance for the death benefit amount. But remember, Darling was holding more than just one insurance policy on Wanda's life. An agent for the second company, a man named Thomas White, testified that Darling called him too the day after Wanda went off the cliff, but didn't reveal that anything was awry until a second call three days later. On Thursday, when he called, he said, Mr. White, oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that Wanda passed away.

She slipped and fell off a mountain last Sunday. I said, what? And he said, yep, I was just too distraught and forgot about it. And when the prosecutor asked Darling's friend, Mike Radd, about Darling's attitude toward his dead wife, Wanda. Did he show any remorse? No, he didn't seem grief-stricken or anything. And Rad said soon after Wanda's death, Jay was talking about spending that insurance money.

He spoke about trips, that we could take these trips to Tibet, Nepal, these trekking, you know, sort of outdoorsy. When did this discussion occur? In the weeks after her death. The prosecution turned to Darling's ex-girlfriend to show how Darling told conflicting stories about what happened to Wanda on that cliff. They were taking pictures and he was going back to take a picture of her and when he turned back around she was just not there. And then a few days later

she said he called again with a completely different story. Now he was claiming Wanda had killed herself. He then went on to tell me that he saw her jump off the cliff. But why would she do that? He said that Wanda was very depressed and upset.

So many stories, only one could be true. Jay Darling had already admitted that he tried to defraud life insurance companies out of a small fortune. Did he also murder his trusting young bride just to get his hands on the money? Now, the defense was going to tell its own very different story of the death of Wanda Darling. Surely the simplest explanation is she got a little push from behind. If you think that's simple, Keith, then you may have a talent for crime. The problem was your client did have a talent for crime. Not for killing people, not for injuring people, not for hurting people. The difference between a con man and a killer is night and day. It was almost nine years after Wanda Darling took that terrible fall from a cliff in Homer, Alaska.

Larry Kuhn's dogged investigation had finally made it to a trial. In my opinion, it was probably one of the most egregious acts of domestic violence. But remember, there are two sides to every story. James McComas was Jay Darling's defense attorney, a man who agreed he was representing an admitted crook, but not a killer. Looks pretty bad for this guy. That's the basis of suspicion that might lead investigators to want to find evidence in the case. The suggestion that you're making, and really that they've made all along, is that that's enough. And it's not enough when you understand the surrounding circumstances.

McComas set out to show the jury, piece by piece, that Jay's behavior was not as suspicious as it may have seemed. Why take a private road to a lonely bluff? Because, says McComas, they were simply exploring, like tourists do. What about all those conflicting stories he told about exactly what happened? That he saw her fall, that he didn't see her fall, that she was taking a picture and lost her balance, that she was picking a flower and tripped? Why did he tell conflicting stories about what happened on that cliff? Because he didn't know the why. That's the reason.

And Jay Darling pled guilty to what it was he did. He made false representations to try and get a large insurance scheme so he could fake his own death. And he pled not guilty to what he didn't do. He never murdered that woman. Obviously, Jay Darling had hired a persuasive attorney. But as McComas laid out his defense, would a jury agree? Is it reasonably possible that Wanda Darling fell because she passed out or fainted at the bluff? That would be possible. Now this was very unusual. Defense attorney McComas called Norm Thompson, the medical examiner who performed Wanda's autopsy. Generally, the medical examiner testifies for the prosecution in murder cases. Was there sufficient evidence for you to conclude

whether or not this was, in manner of death, a homicide. No, there was insufficient evidence to consider this a homicide. Another option that you could have picked would have been an accident. Was there sufficient evidence on that? There was insufficient evidence to conclude that this was an accident. The most important testimony in this entire trial was Norman Thompson, who ruled the manner of death not a homicide, but undetermined. In fact, McComas offered a completely different possibility, that it wasn't Jay Darling who killed Wanda, but perhaps heartburn medication. It was very, very, very effective,

but because it killed people, it had to be taken off the market. Pharmacologist James O'Donnell testified that Wanda's medication, Propulsed, was taken off the market in 2000, three years after she died. O'Donnell told the jury that Propulsed could have caused a type of heart attack that's untraceable after death, or... Chest pain, rapid heartbeat, chest palpitations, dizziness, anxiety, weakness, feigning. Defense Attorney McComas raised the possibility that Wanda could have become dizzy while standing at the cliff's edge. He introduced records to show she'd been hospitalized several times in the year before her death for some of the very symptoms Dr. O'Donnell described.

Of course, there was no way to prove that propulsed had anything to do with her death. But was it possible? Did Wanda have an increased risk of falling? Yes, in my opinion, she did. The prosecution countered with Wanda's own doctor, who rejected out of hand the idea that propulsed had anything to do with her illness or her death. All her symptoms were from her anemia. Once we treated her for anemia, she was not having any more symptoms. But the question had been raised. Was it something other than a push that sent Wanda tumbling down that cliff?

Yes, I'll only swear or affirm that the testimony... And remember how Darling's good friend Mike Rabb had told the jury about Darling's insurance scam, about the calls to agents when Wanda was out of the room, about plans to spend the insurance money on a good time? The defense set out to convince the jury that Rabb should not be believed, that he'd been threatened by investigators, eventually telling them just what they wanted to hear. You said, I don't think he murdered her. I really don't. And then they accused you of possibly being complicit.

Yeah, there was a little guy pointing his finger, and he said he didn't want to get you two. Mitigating evidence? Maybe. But Darling still had a lot to answer for. If the defense had any chance of breaking down that long-standing suspicion that Jay Darling had murdered his wife, if it had any chance of destroying the brick-by-brick assembly of circumstantial evidence, then Darling himself would have to sit up there in the witness box

and look the jury in the eye and sell his version of what happened that day up on the block. A risky thing to do. Mr. Darling, did you push Wanda Darling off the bluff in Homer here on Sunday, the 24th of August, 1997? Nine long years after Wanda Darling fell or was pushed from the cliff on Bluff Road, the jury finally had its chance to look into the eyes of the man accused of killing her. Could they believe him? Would you briefly tell us what feelings you had for Wanda, darling? I loved Wanda. We were best friends. She loved me. Did he really love her? And what did he actually see when his wife went off the cliff? I turned around to walk back up

and go take Wanda's picture, and I got part of the way back up to her, and she just fell off the bluff. Did you push her or hit her or whack her with a bat or do any physical act to cause her to go over the bluff? No, I did not. How did you feel when you saw Wanda Darling fall off the edge of that cliff? Astounded. Astounded. Astounded. What did you feel about the loss of her? Well, I didn't know that she was lost yet.

I thought, wow, this is horrible. In an effort to prove their relationship was genuine, Jay read a card Wanda gave him on Valentine's Day, 1997. It says, I know I can always count on you to be there for me. You know me better than people I have known for years. I think that's pretty neat. P.S. For the record, I do consider you my best friend. Two months later, they were married. What were the reasons that you got married? One of the reasons was that she was willing to go along with this fake my own death insurance scheme. The bigger reason was that I wanted her around me. But what about those bruises and broken nose

friends saw soon after the marriage? A play fight accident, said Jay. She touched me kind of in the pork chops, and I was real relaxed. And when she did that, I went like that and jerked my elbows back, and my elbow hit her in the nose and kind of cracked her on the bridge of the nose. Was he believable? Remember how Wanda's family and friends told of her almost lifelong dread of heights? Jay had known her only a year or so. Took her up to a remote cliff edge a thousand feet up with uncertain footing and no guardrail. And told the jury.

Wanda was not afraid of heights. She was normally cautious. What was she afraid of? She was afraid of falling down. She was afraid of the ground moving under her feet. And what about that near miss the day before Wanda's death when she and Jay were tossed into the bay while kayaking? I thought, what the hell? Sorry. And that was the first thought that went through my mind, like, what's going on here? And then once we're in the water, it's like, well, damn, this is cold water.

Other than that, it was, you know, kind of, let's get back in the boat and get out of here. Darling's attorney says this was not attempted murder. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was Jay Darling saving Wanda's life. Had Jay not towed her to shore, he said, she certainly would have died. Were you scared? Yeah. Was Wanda scared? Yeah.

Back at the hotel that evening, Jay said, Wanda was furious. I told her, well, listen, you know, if we can't get past this, if this is just going to destroy our friendship, this is going to tear us apart, then we haven't been married that long, and maybe we can just get an annulment. Okay, and what did she say in response to that? Nothing. Okay. Did you want to annul the marriage that you had with Wanda? No, I didn't.

Maybe Wanda was so distraught at the thought of losing him, said Darling, that she threw herself off the cliff. And yet, the day after Wanda's fall, or jump, he neglected to tell those insurance agents that she was dead. Was that some deliberate effort at concealment or something? No, I'd gotten about two or three hours of sleep at most the night before. And why did he call again and again to check on the insurance? Simple said, darling, he has attention deficit disorder, causing compulsive behavior, and had barely slept the night after Wanda died. In response, the prosecutor seemed barely able to contain his disbelief. So you attribute the reason that you forgot to tell him or you didn't tell him was because of your lack of sleep? Yeah. But the lack

of sleep didn't prevent you from calling him to ask him where the policy was? That's true. So you remembered that with two or three hours sleep? I'd been thinking about that for three days. But you forgot about the fact your wife was dead? Yeah, I wasn't thinking about it. I don't think I forgot. I just had this one thing in my mind, this hyper-focus. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't want to call this guy. The hyper-focus, Mr. Darling, and the hyper-focus was the insurance.

The call, yeah. Money.-focus, Mr. Darling, and the hyper-focus was the insurance. Uh, the call, yeah. Money. It was about the policy. And the prosecutor confronted Darling about his question to Trooper Coons and a doctor the day Wanda went off the cliff. Were you worried about whether or not she might have said something if she wasn't quite dead when she hit bottom? There would be no reason for me to be worried. There was no reason for me to be worried. There was no reason for me to be worried. The jury listened very carefully.

Were these skillful excuses? Or could they believe Jay Darling's story of what happened to Wanda all those years ago? Now it was their turn. The trial, the string of accusations, the litany of denial, had drawn a crowd of spectators to Homer's little courthouse for three weeks running. Now each side had one last chance to persuade the jury. If he's found guilty, Jay Darling could spend the rest of his life in prison. If not guilty, he'd walk out of the courthouse a free man. Well, is our guy and I would submit to you that the evidence in this case has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Darling killed

his wife. He killed her for the money. The cause of death fall from a coastal cliff the manner of death undetermined. There's not enough evidence to say homicide or accident. Reasonable doubt. And now it was time. The jurors left the courtroom. Wanda's family waited. Yeah, it was bad. It was very nerve-wracking. Nerve-wracking, too, for the jurors who would choose. Well, the whole town watched them. Three of them, Paula Snell, Rick Bates, and Sandra Stark, agreed to tell us what happened. Well, we kept going back to what was the scenario at the top of the bluff, trying to crystallize, well, what happened? And then as part of it, what proof do we have? Back and forth they went. Did he push her? Did he want her dead? Everybody in the room thought what happened.

In some fashion thought he probably pushed her or had something to do with her going over. Or a few of them wondered, was it something else? I went more of thinking that possibly she did get lightheaded and maybe she did faint. And what did they make of the kayaking incident the day before Wanda's death? Did Jay try to kill Wanda that day? If that was his plan, that would have been the perfect time to do it. Mr. Darling, did you push Wanda Darling off the bluff in Homer here on Sunday, the 24th of August, 1997? No, I did not.

And what about Jay Darling's testimony? Had it helped him or hurt him? I felt he was an individual that could say certain things and believe them himself, but they were not what I would call the truth. For three days, they reviewed the evidence, counted the votes again and again, and finally, agreement.

Under the case name and caption, State of Alaska v. J.R. Darling... J.R. Darling and Wanda's family steeled themselves for the verdict. We, the jury, duly impaneled and sworn to try the above-entitled cause to find the defendant, J.R. Darling, not guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree as charged in... Not guilty?

It was like all the air got let out of the room. There was an audible, and how could you type of an attitude. What's that feeling? Anger. You can't describe it. Hurtful. Devastating.

Pain. Waited for nine years for him to pay for what he did to my sister. And then he's walked away. And Trooper Coons, who had spent nine years doing what he could to keep the case alive? When they said, not guilty. Pissed off. Shame. Not on me, on them.

Shame on them. If the issue was proof beyond a reasonable doubt, that doesn't mean proof beyond all doubt. Jay Darling's attorney was ecstatic. Every effort was made to turn what is almost certainly an accident into an act of murder. And fortunately, the backstop of our system, and it's never the judge, and it's never the lawyers, it's the jury. The jury prevented that from happening.

But were members of the jury happy about what they had done? No, they were not. As you became aware, all of you in the jury room, that it was going to be a not guilty verdict, what was the feeling? Deep sorrow. Yeah, because you didn't feel like there was any justice for Wanda and her family,

but you couldn't sentence someone that you didn't feel there was enough evidence to show that he actually did something. Do you think that Jay Darling was innocent? Do I think he's innocent? Absolutely not. But is he guilty? Not by evidence that'll hold up to the standards that we needed to meet. After the verdict was read, Jay Darling walked away a free man and encountered in the parking lot the man who'd been chasing him all these years,

Officer Larry Koons. So what'd you do? I had to do it. I had to ask him. I says, hey, Jay. And he looked at me. Jay's a big guy. He looked at me as though I was there to take his life. He seemed frightened. I said, relax, Jay. Relax, man. I can't get you.

I said, but I got to know. You got to tell me. How'd you do it? And his eyes got big. He says, no, no, no. You don't understand. You don't understand. I didn't kill her. It was an accident.

I said, sure it was. Sure. Larry Coons had been waiting nine years. You know, we're trained to come out of the academy. You don't get emotionally involved. But we're humans. We're not robots. And, you know, with... It matters.

Wanda's family. Jay Darling never collected a dime on any of those insurance policies. And he died in 2018. Jay Darling never collected a dime on any of those insurance policies. And he died in 2018. As for Larry Coons, after the troopers, he became an investigator with the Homer Police Department and has since retired. And up near Bluff Road in Homer, up through the scrub and the wind at the top of that terrible precipice, a small wooden cross marked the place, remembering Wanda Darling. I still dream about her from time to time, but every single day I think about her, and I think about all the people's lives that are affected because she's not here. Wanda just

tried to be good, and it was sincere and truthful, and you don't replace people like that.