Prince Harry Loses His Daily Mail Case, Karmelo Anthony's Appeal Begins in the Austin Metcalf Murder, and the Angels Landing Death Reopened

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. Today's Thursday, July ninth, twenty twenty six. Three stories today, and they stretch from a courtroom in London to a mountaintop in Utah. We start with Prince Harry, who spent four years in a small fortune trying to prove the British tabloids came after him and just lost the whole thing all at once. Then we come home to Texas, where the young man convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf at a track meet has a new team of lawyers and a new plan, and where the headlines are telling you something the actual court filings don't quite say.

0:46 And then at the end, the hardest one, a woman named Bernadette Vandermere who went hiking on her anniversary almost twenty years ago and never came home, and the questions that stayed buried until last month. Let me walk you through it. Let's start in London, because a very big, very expensive legal fight ended this week and depending on who you ask, it was either a triumph for the free press or a whitewash of the century. Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex has spent the better part of the last four years at war with the British tabloid press, and on Tuesday in the High Court in London, he lost badly. Comprehensively. A judge known as Mister Justice Nicklin dismissed every single one of the ninety seven allegations that Harry and six other people had brought against Associated Newspapers, the company that publishes The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. Before I go further, let me be clear about what this case was and what it wasn't. Nobody was murdered here. This is a civil case, not a criminal one. But it's one of the biggest media trials in British history. It ran for eleven weeks and it just ended, so we're going to talk about it. Here's what Harry and the others said the Mail did to them, and it's a striking group of claimants. Prince Harry, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, the actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley, and a former Member of Parliament named Sir Simon Hughes. They accused the Male's

2:19 journalists of hacking their voicemails, tapping their phones, bugging their homes and their cars, paying corrupt police officers for information, and obtaining private records through deception blagging. They call it over there, serious stuff, career ending stuff. If it were true, the judge said it wasn't proven. Not one claim of the ninety seven survived. He went through them one by one and found that the Male's journalists had lawful explanations for how they got their stories, and he accepted their evidence as honest. And here's the part that really sank the claimant's ship. A lot of their case rested on one man, a former private investigator named Gavin Burrows, who had supposedly confessed to doing the dirty work. Except when it came time to stand behind that confession, Burrows fell apart.

3:07 He told the court the statement wasn't even really his. He called it, and I want to get this right, a pack of lies, and said it had been written up by Prince Harry's own legal researchers with a signature he didn't recognize as his own. When your star witness disowns his own confession and open court, you are in serious trouble and they were associated newspapers is calling this an overwhelming victory and a magnificent vindication of its journalism. Its supporters are calling it a win for every newspaper in the country and for the right of the press to report on the powerful. Harry sees it very differently. He and Baroness Lawrence put out a joint statement calling the ruling a complete and obvious whitewash, and their argument is not nothing. Other British courts have already found that private investigators were doing exactly this kind of illegal work at the same time for other news papers. Harry himself won a case against the Mirror Group back in twenty twenty three, and the publisher of The Sun paid him a settlement and a full apology last year. So Harry is asking, how does the same behavior get proven over there and dismissed over here. That's a fair question to ask.

4:17 It's also, in the end a question the judge answered with a four hundred and thirty six page ruling that said, in this case against this publisher, the evidence simply wasn't there. Wanting something to be true, feeling in your bones that it's true is not the same as proving it in a courtroom. That's not a flaw in the system. That is the system. And there's a real debate underneath all of this, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't there. There are people in Britain the campaign group hacked off, some voices in Parliament who look at this and say the press still isn't accountable enough, and they're already calling for a fresh public inquiry. And there are people who say this ruling proves the opposite, that a free press just successfully defended it self against the rich and the royal trying to muzzle it. Both of those things are being said loudly right now. You can decide which one you find more convincing. What I'll tell you is this, It cost more than fifty million pounds to find out both sides combined, and the fight over who pays that bill is coming later this month. This war has been very good for the lawyers. It usually is back here in the States now and to a case, a lot of you have been following with us since the spring.

5:40 Last month, we sat with you through the verdict in the Carmelo Anthony trial. If you're just joining the show, here's the short version, and then we'll get to what's new. On June ninth, a jury in Collin County, Texas found nineteen year old Carmelo Anthony guilty of murder for stabbing seventeen year old Austin Metcalf in the chest at a high school track meet in April of last year. Both boys were seventeen at the time it happened. That same jury that same day sentenced Carmelo Anthony to thirty five years in prison. They rejected his claim that he acted in self defense. Austin Metcalf died under a team tent in the rain, in the arms of his twin brother.

6:20 I'm not gonna let you forget that, because everything that happens after this, every motion, every appeal, every headline, happens because Austin isn't here anymore. Now here's the news. Anthony has a new legal team. His family brought in a group of attorneys working pro bono, led by a Dallas lawyer named Russell Wilson and including Gary Bledsoe, who heads the Texas chapter of the NAACP, to handle the appeal. And on Tuesday, that team filed two motions and look, I'm gonna be honest with you, because the way this got reported in some places is not quite the way it reads on paper. If you saw a headline this week dreaming that a convicted killer is making some entitled bid to be freed from prison, that is not what these filings actually say. Nobody is walking out the door.

7:10 What his lawyers filed is a motion for a new trial and a separate motion asking the judge who ran the first one, Judge John Roach, to step aside from whatever comes next. So what are the grounds? The new trial motion, interestingly, doesn't attack the conviction head on, It attacks how the trial was run. The defense says the public was improperly shut out, that seating was limited, that people had to line up before dawn, that an overflow courtroom was closed once testimony started, and that a gag order the judge issued on his own ten months before the trial kept the whole pre trial process out of public view. They also claimed there was an off the record agreement to keep certain evidence out character material prior history on both sides, and that the agreement broke down in a way that hurt them. They want a hearing on all of it. And then there's the request to remove the judge. This is the part I find genuinely worth talking about. Two days after he handed down that thirty five year sentence, Judge Roach went on television. He sat for an interview, and when a reporter asked him whether the jury got it right, he said, quote, yeah, they did. He defended his own rulings, including his decision to dismiss three black potential jurors, saying he followed the law to a tee. He gave a statement to another outlet defending his courtroom access decisions. He wrote a public letter thanking his community and calling the trial one of the great honors of his judicial career. Here's the thing,

8:40 that case is not actually over. There are still post trial motions pending in front of that same judge, including now emotion asking for a whole new trial. And Anthony's lawyers are making a simple argument, how is a judge supposed to fairly rule on whether a trial was fair after he's gone on TV and told the world that it was. That's not a wild argument. There's a reason judges usually don't take a victory lap while a case is still live. None of that means he's right. It means It's a real question, and it's going to get decided, probably not by Roach himself, but by a regional administrative judge who'll look at the recusal request and decide whether it even gets a hearing. This is the slow machinery of the appeals process starting to turn. It could take months, it could take years, and I want to be square with you about something. Emotion for a new trial is not a new trial. Most of these get denied. Carmelo Anthony is a convicted murderer today and he will almost certainly still be won tomorrow. But the process is the process, and it applies to everybody, the people you're rooting for and the people you're not. Austin Metcalf's family has to sit through every bit of it. Again, that's the part nobody puts in the headline. Our last story today is the hardest one, and I want to give it the

10:12 room it deserves. It's about a woman named Bernadette Vandermere, and it starts almost twenty years ago. August twenty second, two thousand and six. Bernadette was twenty nine years old. She and her husband David drove to Zion National Park in Utah to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Before sunrise, the two of them hiked up Angels Landing. If you've never seen it, it is one of the most famous and most exposed trails in the country, a narrow spine of rock with sheer drops on either side and chains bolted into the stone to hold on to. Bernadette, by every account from the people who knew her, was a strong, experienced hiker. Her own father called her a mountain goat.

10:54 The idea of her simply falling off never sat right with him, but that is whatever was told. David's account was that he was setting up a photo of Bernadette with the sunrise behind her, that he turned to move their backpacks out of the shot, and that when he turned back she was gone. She fell roughly twelve hundred feet. It was ruled an accident, the case was closed, and for the better part of two decades that was the end of it. A tragedy, a widower, a life cut short on a beautiful morning. Except the officers who worked the park that day never quite bought it, and neither, it turns out, did some of the people who knew David Vandermere. Here's how it came apart. Investigators say a tip came in a few years back, and then another one last October, this one from David's former boss, the senior pastor at the church where David had worked as a youth pastor. That pastor told authorities flatly, I don't think this was an accident. I think David pushed her, and the Washington County Attorney's Office reopened the file. What their investigate, a lieutenant named Jessica Bate, says she found is laid out in a sworn affidavit. And I need you to hear the word alleged on every single piece of this, because David Vandermere was never tried and never convicted of anything. And I'll explain why in a minute.

12:16 According to that affidavit, David Vandermir had been carrying on a secret relationship with a girl from his own youth group, a child he was supposed to be protecting. Investigators alleged the grooming began when she was around fourteen years old, and that it later became a sexual relationship a man in a position of trust and a kid who trusted him. The affidavit says that before Bernadette died, David told this young woman that the only way the two of them could ever be together was if Bernadette was not alive. And then there's the money. The affidavit says David had raised the couple's life insurance from around one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to six hundred thousand not long before the trip, and that after Bernadette's death, he collected a payout of more than half a minut million dollars. Investigators also went back to the physics of that morning, and the timeline David gave about photographing the sunrise didn't hold up because by their calculation, the sun wasn't going to rise for more than half an hour after he said he was taking that picture. So last month, on June twenty second, US marshals arrested David Vandermere in Las Vegas, Utah.

13:22 Prosecutors charged him with murder and with insurance fraud. Nearly twenty years later, Bernadette's family finally believed they were going to get a courtroom a reckoning answers under oath. They never got it. Three days after his arrest, David Vandermir died in custody at the jail in Las Vegas of self inflicted injuries. His extradition hearing was scheduled for that very morning. When it was called, the judge had to tell the courtroom that the defendant was dead. And this is where I have to be careful with you and honest with you, because David Vandermir never stood trial. He was never convicted. Everything I just told you comes from an affidavit written by the people trying to prosecute him.

14:05 It is one side of a case that will now never be tested in front of a jury, never challenged by a defense, never decided by twelve people who heard all of it. He is presumed innocent, and he will stay that way permanently because the process that was supposed to sort truth from allegation ended the day he did. For Bernadette's family, that's a complicated kind of ending. Her parents, Richard and Laura, told a Las Vegas reporter that his death is about as close to justice as they are going to get, and that they feel some relief at not having to sit through a trial, But you could hear the hollowness in it too. Her father had wanted him to sit in a cell and actually think about what he'd done. Now there is no verdict, no accountability with a stamp on it, just a woman who went up a mountain on her anniversary and didn't come down, and a set of questions that stayed buried for almost twenty years while everyone moved on. Somebody should have looked harder in two thousand and six the officers who felt it was off, Somebody should have listened to them. Nobody was paying attention to Bernadette Vandermere for a very long time.

15:10 We are saying her name. Now. That's the show for today. If something in here moved you, bernadette story, or Austin's or the bigger question of whether the powerful ever really get held to account, do me a favor and share this episode with somebody. Tell a friend. Word of mouth is the entire reason a show like this survives, and it costs you nothing but a text message. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop us a comment. Tell me what you think, who you think we got right, who we got wrong, and what you want us to follow next. I read them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime and justice. Take care of the people around you and do better. A few important notes before we go David Vandermere was charged with murder and insurance fraud, but died before any trial. He was never convicted, and the allegations against him come from law enforcement filings that were never tested in court. He is presumed in a sense.

16:06 In the Carmelo Anthony case. The motions for a new trial and for the judge's recusal are requests that have not yet been ruled on his murder conviction and thirty five year sentence currently stand. In the Prince Harry matter, all ninety seven claims were dismissed by the court and questions of legal costs remain to be decided. Reporting in these cases draws on court records, sworn affidavits, and multiple news outlets. Some details come from single sources and may be updated as the case is developed. This episode discusses suicide. If you are someone you know is struggling, help is available in the US. You can call or text nine to eight eight at any time. Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media.