Man left his girlfriend to freeze to death

[Trevordidit]

Man left his girlfriend to freeze when she was struggling on a mountain hike.

He's been found guilty of manslaughter.

So many aspects of his account don't make sense - AIBU to wonder if he did it on purpose?

News article

So just to be clear the charge and guilty verdict is manslaughter by gross negligence. That's the prosecution charge. That was upheld.

Sentence being 5 months suspended for three years.

The prosecution is appealing against the sentence.

What the defendant Thomas P and his defence team is appealing against is the guilty verdict of manslaughter by gross negligence and the sentence.

The way I read it he did

12.30 - there was some sort of garbled call that didn't clearly say they needed help but caused concern
The rescuers attempted to call him back between 12.30 and 12.50 but he had turned off the phone or put it into aeroplane mode
12.50 they sent a text message asking if they needed help and he replied by text - "no" - but didn't speak to them
The rescuers kept calling/texting but he didn't reply to these it was first at 3.30 am that he called them back having climbed the summit and down

If he was worried about phone battery, why would you not turn one off wifi and leave the other on? In a joint endeavour, you share the power surely? And surely he would have kept in touch with her while he was going down the mountain/once he’d got down if he thought she was alive.

Modern phones last bloody ages too if you’re not using them much. Since 7am I’ve made 3 calls (over 1 hour), done a fair bit of scrolling, read and replied to emails on a couple of accounts, taken some photos, and streamed 40 mins of music and an exercise app. My battery is still 75%.

Also why did they only have gummi bears with them? Was he in charge of food?

The more I read, the more disquieting I find this.

Kerstin's head light battery isn't seen on the website when Thomas P's battery is seen on descent.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/20/austria-climber-convicted-manslaughter-girlfriend-kerstin-g-grossglockner-mountain

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k1xkllknmo

It's seen on ascent here.

@Lunde It was this article I read, shared upthread:

https://www.climbing.com/news/austria-guilty-verdict-grossglockner-analysis/?scope=anon

where they say: 'The police officer who received Plamberger’s “unclear” 12:35 a.m. distress call also took the stand. “That was definitely not an emergency call,” said this officer, identified in court as “Mattias A.” He added that after the call, he tried to contact Plamberger several times, both by phone call and WhatsApp text messages. One of those messages read: “Do you need help now or not?” Mattias A. never received a response. “There was no indication that an emergency situation existed,” he said.'

However, I think it still doesn't make sense. Obviously replying 'no' is worse but either way it looks bad for him, I think.

That's incredibly clear. Thank you.

Why did he call if it wasn’t a distress call? The more I read, the more the story makes no sense

The Independent says according to Kronen Zietung but I’ve read the Kronen Zietung court reporting and it seems they haven’t understood the translation. The investigator said he got no response not that the bf replied no. Mine says Sent via WhatsApp at 00:49
The investigator added: “All our attempts to contact him went unanswered. Therefore, we assumed the situation was normal.” At 12:49 a.m., he sent the defendant a WhatsApp message asking, “Do you need help now, or not???” He received “no” reply. And the investigator emphasized again: “There was absolutely no indication that there was an emergency.”

Another climber who was on the route and met the couple (and later aborted his climb due to weather) contacted the Alpine Police about them. The phone numbers were then tracked (I don't know how this is done) and the Alpine Police called them several times.
Thomas phoned the Alpine Police number back at 00.35 (having not answered any calls). It's this call which he says was an emergency call but the Alpine policeman said Thomas never said it was an emergency.
After that the Alpine policeman sent WhatsApp messages asking if they needed help as the call hadn't been clear.
Thomas did not reply to those and did not phone again until 3.30 am when he reached the hut.

If, as he says, his call at 00.35 was an emergency call why didn't he reply to the WhatsApp messages and why didn't he call back again? If Kerstin was extremely slow and they kept having to have a break and certainly at the point where she couldn't go on any longer he'd have been on the phone again repeating that it was an emergency or he'd have answered the WhatsApp asking if he needed help saying "Yes, urgently" or whatever.
This is the most bizarre part of the whole thing.

And why not ring 140?? Kerstin had tried to do that hours and hours before.
Thomas could have rung 140 on numerous occasions.

The more I read about it, the more I wonder if he did go up the mountain intending to murder her in a way that allowed him to get away with it, having failed in his last attempt with a previous girlfriend.

“All our attempts to contact him went unanswered. Therefore, we assumed the situation was normal.”

If only they had gone looking for Kerstin.

There were attempts before and after the phone call at 00.35. After the phone call when Thomas phoned the Alpine policeman back he then did not answer any more calls or messages. According to the alpine policeman he said in the call he did not need help. Thomas now says otherwise.
The alpine policeman then sent a message asking whether he needed help or not and it was unanswered.
So they assumed the situation was normal because anyone who was in a dire situation and needed help would have answered that they needed help!

The alpine police and mountain rescue will not send teams up a mountain if someone has said in a call they do not need help. They put their own lives at risk to rescue people. They are not going to send a team up Großglockner looking for a couple of climbers who have said they do not need help because the lives of the mountain rescue volunteers are at stake every time they go out.

If Thomas had said they needed help they would have sent a team straight up there. No question about it. But he said they didn't so no team was sent.

Exactly this. People seem so divided between “he should be jailed for a long time” and those saying she should have looked after herself and this will adversely affect climbers. But I wonder if the ones worrying about their climbs are thinking of the rescue teams who deal with explainable injuries and deaths daily and don’t go looking to prosecute people over them.

The rescuers in the helicopter must have been so traumatised to be waved away from helping someone whose body they later had to recover in a horrible state. How awful for them. Then dealing with this guy who was composed and couldn’t offer any reasonable explanation for not engaging with them, rescuers who had to keep seeking him out to see if they needed help.

From reading the court reporting he seems to just keep saying it was an exceptional situation to everything in the same way people say no comment in police interviews.

Is it possible the judge does not fully believe the emergency responders version?
It seems odd he would call them and say he didn't need help. Why call? What if he did say he needed help but the other guy mis reported? And Thomas thought they were on their way?.

But that doesn't explain why he failed to answer his phone when rescuers are calling to get more information

@Warmlight1 I had wondered that. What if it's the emergency services covering their backs because they didn't act when they should have? But I struggle to believe that if he really was asking for help at 00:35 that he would have just left it at that. You'd be constantly checking your phone, calling back, texting etc to find out what was going on, and at the very least you'd call again before you left to confirm what you were doing and get an eta for help arriving. It doesn't seem plausible to me that he was actively seeking help at that point given the rest of his behaviour.

It was a big mistake that they appointed this particular judge (Hofer) for the trial. They should have used a jury or at least a judge who wasn't so heavily involved in the climbing community.

This judge had seen climbing accidents himself and works also as a mountain rescuer. There were concerns that there would be bias even before the trial began!
Speculation was that Hofer would be biased against the boyfriend - the judge must have been aware of this. Could this have influenced him to give a light sentence because he didn't want to be accused of being biased against the boyfriend?

The judge had witnessed climbing accidents - was he lenient because he was thinking about his own experiences and wouldn't have wanted to be judged harshly about them?

I will not be surprised if there is a retrial. There's too much risk that bias affects the judgement and now people are questioning the verdict. Using a jury would have been better.

It really is as though he was saying the equivalent of ‘no comment’ all the way through. And that is suspicious as hell.

’Why didn’t you wrap her in the blanket and bivouac’?
’Why didn’t you call for help when she was struggling?’
’why did you ignore phone calls from the emergency services ?’
’why was your phone on silent if you were trying to get help? ’
’why, if you left her to get help at 2am, did you not actually call for help until 3.30?’

He basically answered no comment to all the above questions. Yet the judge seems to have glossed over all that. Far too lenient.

Yep, same. Particularly in light of the message Kerstin sent to her mum at 6.30 (or some early evening time) telling them they were down safely. I wonder if he sent that? Or told her to send it, knowing what he had planned.

If he DID do this deliberately, I bet he didn't expect it to go to trial at all. Most situations when one in a climbing team dies don't.

I really hope there's a retrial. I'm not a legal expert (obviously) but the sentence is incredibly lenient and as I said above, the judge seems to have given Thomas P the benefit of the doubt on multiple occasions.

That could be explain the panicked 149 call from her phone. One digit out. He saw what she was doing. Took her phone and then messaged her Mum..otherwise why did she make no further calls when she was in such trouble?? Is there any info on when her phone ran out of battery?

Would this also explain the lack of food…who takes just gummy bears for a whole day and night hike. Almost like he was trying to exhaust her. And she had viral pneumonia…

We should be on this case..

The message to her DM was several hours earlier, as I understand it. So way before the 149 call, which I agree was a panicked attempt to save herself.

So much about this just doesn’t add up. I definitely think she’d died before he left her, hence there being no attempt to cover her.

I need to go back and check timelines but I thought her 149 call was at 5.30pm which struck me as early. Then the message to her Mum around 6.30.

But I’m not 100 % on that.

I just checked, and:

"Her phone records revealed that at 5:22 p.m., she dialed the number 149. The number for emergency services in Austria is 140, and on most cell phone displays, the number 9 is next to the number zero. It’s not exactly proof she meant to call for aid. Furthermore, Gurtner made no further attempts to call this or any other number. But it’s unclear why someone would attempt to dial a three-digit number in the first place.
This call also stands in confusing contrast to a text she sent to her mother less than an hour later, at 6:07 p.m. Gurtner wrote: “we’re down.”