Former Youth Pastor Charged in Wife's 2006 Death Dies in Jail

David Vander Meer, a 49-year-old former youth pastor, had been in a Las Vegas jail for two days when corrections officers found him unresponsive in his cell on June 24, 2026. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day. The sheriff told reporters David had died by suicide by hanging himself.

Weeks later, Las Vegas Metro Police published his final letter. It was three pages, handwritten and heavily redacted.

“I know how bad it looks,” David wrote. “The additional allegations I have heard about are largely false, but not entirely. They paint a picture that can’t be escaped. They spell conviction.”

On August 22, 2006, David was working as a youth pastor at New Song Christian Church in Las Vegas, which he had set up years earlier with his brother and wife, Bernadette Vander Meer. The couple were experienced hikers, and for their 10-year wedding anniversary, they went to Zion National Park in Utah to climb Angels Landing, a dramatic rock formation overlooking Zion Canyon.

But just moments after reaching the summit, Bernadette plunged 1,200 feet to her death. David told authorities and loved ones that he had briefly turned away from Bernadette as he prepared to take a photo of her when he heard a gasp. When he turned back, he said, she had disappeared.

For decades, David’s explanation of Bernadette’s death wasn’t entirely accepted. Her family didn’t trust David, and the authorities weren’t convinced either. However, there was no evidence to implicate him, and her death was ultimately ruled an accident. David went on to remarry multiple times and switched careers: First he worked as a guidance counselor, then he became a yoga instructor. 

Then, on April 6, 2022, a tip arrived at the Washington County Attorney’s Office in Utah that put the Vander Meer case under an entirely different light.

The tip alleged that David used his position as a pastor to groom teenagers and conduct a sexual relationship with a youth group member. That led authorities to David’s second wife, known in court documents only as SH.

SH told investigators she met David at New Song in 2002 as a member of his youth group when she was 14 years old. She said she and Meer didn’t begin a sexual relationship until 2004, after SH reached Nevada’s legal age of consent (16).

The relationship was kept a secret. While David and Bernadette lived frugally at their home, he was paying for an apartment for SH to live in, court documents allege. According to SH, David told her that the only way for them to be together was if his wife was “not alive.”

Over time, David made arrangements that prosecutors say were part of a plan to kill Bernadette in order to be with SH. On March 11, 2005, he took out $150,000 life insurance policies for himself and Bernadette, and eight months later, he increased those policies’ coverage to $550,000 each.

The day before David and Bernadette’s trip to Angels Landing, SH told prosecutors, she ended her relationship with David to pursue a relationship with a boy at New Song. But some months after Bernadette’s death, David and SH re-established their relationship, and by 2008, they were married.

In July 2007, after Bernadette’s death was officially ruled an accident, David was able to cash out; he received a payment of roughly $567,000. In 2008, David started a new job at his old church, Legacy Vineyard Church, now closed. The former head pastor, Barry Diamond, said he rehired David because “it wasn’t under bad circumstances that he had left.”

“We felt very bad for what happened with Bernadette,” Diamond told The Las Vegas Review-Journal, “and never really at that point thought anything suspicious about David at all.”

But the job opportunity quickly soured. Along with buying cars and a house for SH, prosecutors alleged David used Bernadette’s life insurance payout to take his youth group on trips or throw parties at his house, where the teenagers could gamble and drink alcohol.

After Diamond learned of the parties, he fired David. After that, Diamond said, church members came forward about how David’s conduct left them traumatized, and that he had interacted with them inappropriately. At least one had a sexual relationship with him.

“A lot of those kids are afraid of [David],” Diamond said. 

By 2014, David and SH were divorced. During the following years, while suspicions and accusations continued to circle around him in Las Vegas and Utah, he went on to marry and divorce twice more.

The 2022 tip prompted investigators in Utah to interview SH, Diamond and others connected to David. From there, they were able to craft a case accusing him of deliberately pushing Bernadette off a cliff.

Finally, in June 2026, Utah prosecutors charged him with murder and insurance fraud over Bernadette’s death. On June 22, authorities arrested him at the yoga studio where he worked in Summerlin, Nev.

He died by suicide while in custody at Clark County Detention Center, where corrections officers claimed he had been up and alert about 30 minutes before they found him face down on the ground. In the note he left behind, David maintained his innocence but felt that the evidence against him was impossible to overcome.

Addressing a person whose name was redacted, he said that the person “doesn’t deserve to be a part of my past failures, and this current mess. None of my family does.”

“I love you all!” he wrote.