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I, Detective Antonio Iglesias, was investigating the disappearance of Kaylee Jenner, the young heiress to a multimillionaire. The case seemed strange from the outset: a group of mountaineers had returned from their expedition, but she had not. From the available information, it was known that the woman had received an inheritance a year before her disappearance: property and substantial sums of money, including in a crypto wallet.
In the police reports, it all looked like a routine accident in the mountains. But my intuition told me: something wasn’t right here.
I remember that day well, when the first entry appeared in my notebook: ‘Possible motive – inheritance. Check whether there is a link between the cryptocurrency and this trip, which can only be described as an “alpine divorce”.’
That evening, scrolling through my TikTok feed, I came across a video discussing the chilling term ‘alpine divorce’. People wrote that this term refers to when a partner deliberately leads someone into a dangerous environment and leaves them without help. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be an extreme trip to the mountains or diving. I looked for similar posts on X and Instagram. The discussion there was even more active.
The next day, I found an old literary reference. In 1893, the British writer Robert Barr wrote a short story called ‘An Alpine Divorce’. It’s the story of a man who takes his wife to the Swiss Alps to push her off a cliff and pass it off as an accident. I thought: over a hundred years have passed, but the idea doesn’t seem to have gone away and is still in demand.
The modern ‘Alpine divorce’ looks much simpler. All you need to do is leave a person alone in the mountains, underwater, in the jungle or in the desert. I decided to test my hypothesis and retrace the entire route of that mountaineering group. A week of searching, a cold wind in my face and endless mountain passes. At times, it seemed to me that the case was already lost and no one would ever know the truth. But I stubbornly checked the coordinates against the map and my notes.
On the eighth day of my journey, I saw an old, dilapidated shepherd’s hut. Thick smoke was billowing from the roof, and the door was ajar. When I went inside, a faint female voice came from the darkness. Kylie Jenner was sitting in the corner. She looked exhausted, but – she was alive. When I gave her water from my flask, she quietly said that she’d been deliberately left in the mountains following a row over an inheritance.
That evening, as the rescue helicopter evacuated us both to hospital, I noted to myself: sometimes, even the most brutal stories involving the division of property among heirs can have a happy ending.
