It was a moment of frozen desperation 12,460 feet above the world, where the thin Alpine air turns to ice and the margin for error vanishes. Now, Thomas Plamberger—the man a court deemed criminally responsible for his partner’s death—has revealed the final words spoken by Kerstin Gurtner before she was left to perish on the jagged spine of Austria’s highest peak.
“She told me to go,” Plamberger maintains. It is a haunting defense of a decision that has seen him convicted of gross negligent manslaughter…
