Cliffhanger

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

HOMER, ALASKA - It was the question that wouldn’t go away. The question that haunts many people even now.

Lary Kuhns: People would ask, ‘Hey, whatever happened to that case with the lady on the cliff?’

Her name was Wanda — “the lady on the cliff.”

Jay Darling: Everybody asked what happened. And everybody seemed to scratch their head when I said, ‘I don’t know’.

Farrah Tittle: I dreamed about Wanda every single night. And in several of those dreams, I always felt like Wanda was trying to tell me something.

Wanda Darling was 23 and just married. She was on a honeymoon drive.

Wanda and her new husband had turned off the highway near Homer, Alaska, to this remote cliff top overlooking a broad Alaskan bay with not a soul around.

Almost.

At the very end of that dirt road etched into the bluff lived a mystery writer named Ron Hess.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: This is kind of the frontier in a way.

Ron Hess, writer: That’s right. That’s right.

For Wanda it was a frontier indeed.  She was 4,000 miles from her hometown of Haleyville, Alabama. She was farther from home than she had ever been before.

It was a summer day in 1997. Ron Hess was the first to hear.

Ron Hess: 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.

Ron Hess: 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.

Ron Hess: And then he got down on his hands and knees and said, ‘It should have been me. It should have been me.’

Alaska state trooper Lary Kuhns responded to the 911 call.

Lary Kuhns, state trooper: It came in at 12:32pm… [I] remember the dispatcher saying, ‘Lady fell off a cliff.’ I said, ‘What? Where?’

Trooper Kuhns rushed to the bluff, where he learned the stranger’s name was Jay Darling.

Lary Kuhns: He was very despondent… There was anguish on his face.

Darling told Kuhns he and Wanda had been married just four months and were on a belated honeymoon. They had stopped at the bluff on their way out of town, he said.

Lary Kuhns: They were up there taking photographs. And Wanda had fallen face forward down the cliff.

Keith Morrison: Did he tell you how she fell?

Lary Kuhns: 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, Kuhns sent him to the hospital.

Then, when he checked on Darling later that day, he was struck that the man still seemed to think his wife might have survived the fall—although perhaps briefly.

Lary Kuhns: He says, ‘Did you find Wanda?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘What’d she say?’

Keith Morrison: What’d she say?

Lary Kuhns: ‘What’d she say?’

Keith Morrison: And surely he knew that she had fallen to her death.

Lary Kuhns: 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 no one could have survived such a fall.

For Kuhns and his partner, there was still work to be done.

Lary Kuhns: 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 in the troopers.

Why would newlywed sightseers have wandered way out here at all?

Lary Kuhns: 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 Kuhns couldn’t get the thought of the young newlywed out of his head.

Lary Kuhns: 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 this little town by the tracks in northwestern Alabama called Haleyville.

And the reaction was instant and it was shocking: That this was no accident at all.

Cindy Kaelin: I knew. I called my supervisor and said, ‘I’ve got to go home, Wanda’s been killed. He’s killed her.’

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