Wife of former youth pastor who plunged 1,200 from Utah peak told friend she feared husband was having affair

The wife of a former pastor who died after a suspicious fall from a Utah mountaintop told her friend she believed her husband was having an affair, just weeks before her death.

Kathy Page a close friend and former youth group leader of Bernadette Vander Meer, shared details about their final face-to-face meeting — a lunch together about a month before Bernadette’s tragic death at Zion National Park in 2006.

Bernadette’s husband David Vander Meer was arrested and charged with the murder 20 years after his wife’s death — but died three days later after killing himself in his jail cell.

She plunged 1,200 feet from the famed Angels Landing peak in the Utah national park — a spot notorious for inexperienced hikers slipping and falling to their deaths.

Bernadette, however, was not an inexperienced hiker, friends said.

“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,” her pal Page told PEOPLE.

“Then she mentioned that she thought that David was cheating on her,” she continued.

She did not say if she believed Bernadette had confronted her husband about her suspicions.

Page said she didn’t want to pry, and couldn’t remember if Bernadette had told her the name of her husband’s mistress, whom she said later turned up at the funeral.

“I got there to the funeral, and [the mistress] was sitting near David and I was just appalled,” she said.

Page said she suspected David’s involvement in Bernadette’s death from the start, as she was a strong climber.

“She used to go up there… It was like every weekend or something, but she loved to hike, and she was outdoorsy, and she was smart,” she said.

Page described how her initial relief and happiness at David’s arrest changed when she learned he had taken his own life while awaiting his first court appearance, which she put down to his guilt.

“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 said.

“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 went on.

“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,” she said.

“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,” she went on.

David was rushed to a hospital “to be treated for self-sustained injuries,” where he was pronounced dead, the Las Vegas Police Department said in a news release.

His exact cause of death will be determined by the Clark County Coroner’s Office, according to police.