Representing the federal government, US attorney Paul A. Katz wrote in a pretrial brief, “The United States will demonstrate that this tunnel has a remarkable safety record over its 50-year life.” He noted that the three cyclists had taken their engines out of gear and were coasting on the downhill slope at speeds much faster than are recommended for the tunnel.
So how did this case turn out? I did my best to find the answer. When the Lexis/Nexis database contained no record of the trial, I contacted the US District Court in Phoenix, who told me that a case this old is no longer in an accessible file. The record of it, should it still exist on paper, is locked away in a warehouse that probably resembles the one at the end of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. I could pay an exorbitant fee to have someone dig it out, but there is a good possibility it’s not there at all. I even tried to contact Bieghler through his Facebook page, but to date he has not responded. Sadly, the Arizona Republic did not report on the outcome either. We can only conclude that the case was settled quietly, perhaps even out of court, and that the end result did not warrant a great deal of fanfare.
In 1986, James F. Cooke of Colorado City, Arizona, rode his bicycle into the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel behind three friends, Helaman, Heber, and Guy Barlow, at about 3:45 p.m. on a sunny April 11. Seconds later, he crossed into the oncoming traffic lane and ran into the concrete south wall. A physician and registered nurse treated him at the scene of the accident, and park ranger emergency medical technicians summoned an ambulance to take him to the Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George. Later, the nature of his injuries made doctors decide to airlift him to a hospital in Las Vegas. He died there of his injuries two days later.
By this time accidents in the tunnel had become a common occurrence, although only the ones described above resulted in fatalities. Most of the accidents involved large vehicles like trailers, motor homes, and tour buses, methods of transportation that were not part of the American experience back in the 1920s when designers first imagined the passageway through Zion’s rock walls.
In early 1989 the Federal Highway Administration conducted a study that determined that large modern conveyances like trailers and trucks could not get around the tunnel’s curves without crossing the center line. This put all oncoming traffic at risk, causing other vehicles to swerve into the tunnel walls or to collide head-on with these big rigs. A complete overhaul of the tunnel was neither practical nor affordable, so as the park’s spring 1989 season began, the National Park Service put new rules in place to control traffic and ensure the safety of motorists. These rules are still in effect.
Today the park posts rangers at either end of the tunnel, so that they can convert traffic to one-way when larger vehicles have to pass through. Truckers and drivers of large recreational vehicles (eleven feet, four inches tall or taller, and seven feet, 10 inches wide or wider) pay a fifteen-dollar tunnel permit fee for this service when they enter the park—and nearly thirty thousand drivers of oversized vehicles now pay this fee each year, making this a solution that funds itself. As rangers are stationed at the tunnel only during daylight hours (you can find the schedule at www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/the-zion-mount-carmel-tunnel.htm), drivers of large vehicles need to plan their trip through the tunnel when this one-way service is available.
In addition, the park prohibits the largest vehicles from using the tunnel at all: If your trailer, RV, or truck is more than thirteen feet, one inch tall, weighs more than fifty thousand pounds, or is more than forty feet long, you cannot drive it through the Zion–Mt. Carmel tunnel. Finally, pedestrians and bicycles are not allowed in the tunnel at all, and vehicles are not permitted to stop in the tunnel for photos (or for any other reason other than tied-up traffic).
Only three deaths have been reported in the tunnel since the stepped-up safety regulations went into effect, and all of these involved motorcycles. On July 16, 1994, twenty-nine-year-old Marco Dyer entered the tunnel on his way west, lost control of his vehicle, and slammed into the tunnel’s south wall. When park EMTs arrived minutes later, Dyer already had no pulse and had stopped breathing, and his pupils were fixed and dilated. He did not respond to aggressive attempts to resuscitate him. Dixie Regional Medical Center directed the emergency team to stop attempting to resuscitate the victim.
A nearly identical accident took place almost ten years later, on March 28, 2004, when two motorcyclists died in the tunnel. Colin Robert Morrow of St. George and Aaron J. Padilla of Salt Lake City, both twenty-one years old, crashed into the wall of the tunnel at about 5:45 p.m. They were about eight hundred feet inside the tunnel when they reached the first curve and veered into oncoming traffic, hitting the wall a second later. State trooper Kevin Davis, interviewed by the Associated Press, said that the two men were traveling at “excessive speed” as they entered the tunnel, where the speed limit is twenty-five miles per hour. He also noted that the men were wearing helmets, though this did not save their lives in this case.
These were the last fatalities in the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel as of this writing. It’s worth noting that in 2014, a group of eight bicyclists made an illegal attempt to cycle through the tunnel on a crowded Friday afternoon, refusing the shuttle service arranged for them by the park. While four other cyclists in the group rode the shuttle, the eight biked off into the tunnel, apparently expecting to find that the shuttle was nothing more than an attempt to curtail their fun.
Instead, two of the cyclists ran into a tunnel wall and crashed.
“As soon as we rounded the corner, it was like pitch black,” one of the cyclists told officials later, as reported in a Fox 13 news article. “That’s when it happened . . . he was just lying there.”
One of the injured cyclists was a fifty-one-year-old man from West Jordan, who was rushed by ambulance to a hospital. The other declined medical care.
“They were in a bad spot, and only two of the bikers had little flashers,” the cyclist who made a statement went on. “I thought, ‘Someone else is going to get killed.’” He went back to the eastern end of the tunnel to alert rangers to stop traffic and get help. “That was my first thought cause I didn’t want anybody else to get hurt. It was really stupid what we’d done . . . I think we all learned our lesson and we now have to pay the price.”
The eight rogue bicyclists received violation notices from the park rangers.
Chapter 7
Due Process: Deaths by Suspicious Circumstances
James and Patricia Bottarini arrived in Zion National Park in May 1997, on what James told family members he planned as a “second honeymoon” for the couple. Married nearly a decade and living in Medford, New Jersey, the two had recently appeared tense to their friends and neighbors, and Patty’s sister, Carolyn Howard-Jones, suspected that they had run into some bumps in the road in their marriage. No one knew anything for certain, however, and when the Bottarinis headed out to Las Vegas on May 7 for a vacation involving some wilderness exploration in Zion, none of them suspected that anything untoward would happen to Patty.
On May 9, 1997, the Bottarinis got up, had breakfast, and started up the four-mile Observation Point trail. “The hike from the Weeping Rock Trailhead to Observation Point is a Zion classic, and the viewpoint at the end of the trail is an iconic image of Zion National Park,” notes Joe Braun on his trail information website, Joe’s Guide to Zion National Park. The eight-mile round-trip hike “involves a lot of unrelenting uphill on a hard paved trail that was blasted out of the canyon walls . . . While this hike isn’t as exposed or fear-inducing as Angels Landing, with an elevation gain of over 2,100 feet, Observation Point is a more strenuous workout.”
They made it about three-quarters of the way to the top of the peak when they stopped for a snack and a few minutes of admiring the already spectacular view. At that point they decided they’d had enough of climbing and were too tired to reach the top, so they turned around and started back.
What exactly ha
ppened next became the center of speculation and an investigation that continued for more than half a decade.
James would tell authorities and a courtroom that he got ahead of Patricia on the narrow trail, walking fifteen feet or more in front of her. “Something had alerted me to turn around,” he said in an account of the event five years later, “whether she had called me or whatever.” He said he turned to see Patty lying facedown on the sloped ledge. She was scrambling to get back up when she lost her footing. James said that in the space of about two seconds, he saw her slip away over the edge and disappear. “She was sliding down,” he said. “There was nowhere for her to stop.”
At that moment Donald and Glenda Cox of Amarillo, Texas, were somewhat lower on the series of switchbacks leading up the trail. They had already hiked to the top and were on the descent when they paused to rest, and they heard “scuffling” sounds coming from about a mile above them. They looked up to see rocks falling off the cliff—and then, to their astonishment, they saw Patricia Bottarini fall over the edge. She was “cartwheeling like a cheerleader,” Donald Cox said. Patricia’s fall happened just a second or two after the sounds he and his wife had heard above them.
Glenda Cox grabbed her binoculars and tried to find where Patricia had landed, and the two of them waited to hear cries from above or some evidence that the falling woman had been with a companion on the trail. “We were waiting for someone to yell,” Donald said. “Somebody had just fallen off a cliff, and we anticipated that somebody would do something, would say something.”
After several minutes it became clear to the Coxes that it was up to them to report the incident. They rushed to the trailhead, got in their car, and drove to the park’s visitor center to alert rangers to what they had seen.
Meanwhile, a group of six hikers from Phoenix—Robert Falk, Mike Fulton, their female hiking partners, and two others—stopped suddenly on the Observation Point trail when they encountered a confused and visibly shaken James Bottarini coming toward them. James told them that his wife had fallen and he could not find her. Fulton offered him a topographical map, but in a moment the group realized that this was not a case of someone wandering away. James didn’t express any “sense of panic or urgency,” Fulton said later. The rattled husband seemed unable to help them make plans to search for Patty, and he didn’t say much—but his voice quivered and his hands trembled, sure signs that something was terribly wrong.
Falk would tell authorities later that James did not call out Patty’s name as they searched for her, leaving that task to him. He seemed distracted and disoriented, and did not help significantly with the search. When Falk hoisted himself up on a ledge covered with loose soil, he came upon something he would never forget: Patricia’s body, broken and bloody where she had fallen some five hundred feet from the trail above.
“It was not something anyone should see,” he testified in court more than five years later. “It was instantly a situation where I knew we wouldn’t be able to help her.” He immediately did his best to keep James from seeing his wife’s condition. “I turned to [Jim] and said something to the effect of, ‘Jim, it’s not good, don’t come up here.’”
Falk knelt down to check to see if Patty was breathing and heard James’s footsteps behind him. He knew that James was looking at the body, but the man showed little emotion at seeing his wife this way. “He did, however, pick up a rock and throw it at a pack of vultures circling overhead,” the Deseret News noted in its coverage of the incident. When Falk determined that someone should head back to find authorities and report the accident, James told him that he “needed to stay” with his wife. Falk dispatched his girlfriend and others to run back to the trailhead three miles away and go find help; when he returned to James, he noted that James had replaced Patty’s shorts, which had come off in the fall.
As they sat together and waited for rangers to arrive, Falk learned that the Bottarinis had two young sons, one three years old and one nine months old. James put his head in his hands and cried for a time, and he expressed concern about what it would take to remove Patty’s body from the ledge.
National Park Service ranger Brett McGinn was the first to arrive on the scene, finding Falk and James Bottarini waiting for him. James seemed “emotionally separated” from what was going on, McGinn said. “I had questions as to James Bottarini’s attitude and demeanor. He seemed to be detached and disinterested from what was going on.” James barely spoke as the rescue workers recovered Patricia’s body, though he broke down and cried when he mentioned his children and how difficult this would be for them.
Special agent Pat Buccello described a similar observation of Bottarini as she questioned him at the scene. At first she mistook Falk for the husband, because he seemed more worried and upset than Bottarini. Then she and the park rangers on the scene began to realize that something very strange had taken place here. “We all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Nobody falls off Observation Point Trail,’” she said. She went so far as to check park records later that day, and found she was right: There had been no accidents on this trail in the past thirty years, and no fatalities in the sixty years the trail had been open.
The following day, as detectives began to piece together what happened, they realized that they might have a case against James Bottarini.
They interviewed Carolyn Howard-Jones and asked her if she thought her sister was the victim of an accident. “I could not say yes, and I could not say no,” she told them. She said that when James told her of Patty’s death, “It was very matter of fact. It was as if he was reading something off of a piece of paper.” He told her two different stories: First, he said the couple was hiking the Angels Landing trail when he suddenly heard Patricia call out, and turned to see that she had fallen. Later, James told her that they were hiking the Observation Point trail and when he heard her slip, he turned around to see her sliding off the edge and “screaming” for him to do something.
Soon investigators discovered that Patricia had made James the beneficiary of a $250,000 life insurance policy and more than $1 million in her share of her family’s California real estate business. On the day Patricia died and again a few weeks later, James told Buccello the name of the life insurance company and the amount of Patricia’s coverage, but in a taped phone conversation with Buccello in July, he denied that he knew any of this information and said he hadn’t even known Patricia had life insurance.
Five days after Patricia’s fall, investigators discovered an unusual blood spot about eight feet down the cliff. No impact marks preceded that particular spot, although Washington County undersheriff Peter Kuhlmann found drag marks at five feet and twenty-five feet from the blood spot. He found these to be “consistent with what I would expect to see in a fall,” he said. The one blood spot with no drag marks, however, suggested that Patricia may not have slid off the edge and tumbled down the slope; she might have sailed through the air before hitting the ground, as if she had been pushed.
Howard-Jones began to take a stand against James, refusing to allow him to stay at her Oceanside, California, home the week after Patty’s death when he arrived there for her memorial service. Six months later, she refused to sign a letter saying that Patty’s death was accidental. Patty’s relatives challenged her will, filing a lawsuit to prevent any of the family trust from being disbursed to James, but their case was dismissed in October 2000.
With evidence pointing to the possibility of foul play, the federal government charged Bottarini with interstate domestic violence, making false statements to a federal officer, and four counts of mail fraud for attempting to collect on the insurance policy. If he was found guilty of the domestic violence charge, he faced the possibility of a lifetime prison sentence. The federal government did not have the authority to charge Bottarini with murder—that was up to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, and Washington County attorney Eric Ludlow told the Deseret News that he was “monitoring
” the case, and would wait for the results before deciding whether to charge Bottarini in his wife’s death.
When at last the case went to trial in federal court in November 2002—five years after Patricia’s death—jury members were chosen based on their ability to walk the trail to Observation Point and see firsthand where Patricia had fallen. They made the five-hour bus trip from Salt Lake City, where the trial took place, to stand at the spot where Patricia had reached the end of her life and draw their own conclusions about how she had died.
The prosecution described James as “a systematic gambler who bet he could get away with murder.” It portrayed him as a schemer who began his plot to kill his wife eight months before she died, when the couple took out life insurance policies and she prepared a will that favored James. The man was a controlling husband, the prosecution continued, with a risky investment business that was on the rocks. US attorney Richard Lambert also noted that Patricia was an excellent athlete, but that she had “a terrible fear of heights.”
The defense dismissed all of these accusations, especially the ones that showcased Bottarini’s demeanor on the day his wife died. James had behaved like a man in shock, said defense attorney Ronald Yengich. “If he had planned this, he would have been bawling all over the place,” he said, underscoring that James’s reaction to Patricia’s death was inconsistent with someone who planned to kill his wife.
The prosecution presented evidence of James’s penchant for gambling, including the frequency of his trips to Las Vegas while he lived in California—fifty-three visits between 1990 and 1994—and his accumulated losses of more than $73,000 between January 1995 and April 1997. Friends and family, however, testified that the Bottarinis both came from affluent families and did not have debt issues or a flamboyant lifestyle.
Death in Zion National Park Page 12
