atop a cliff. but romance turned to danger. she fell from the edge. i would call this an accidental death. but whas it? she said that if anything happens to me, you ll know who did it. a mystery of nearly 20 years heads into court and the husband is on the precipice. did you kill your wife, jody? i did not. what happened on the cliffs edge? hello and welcome to dateline. when police got word that someone had fallen off a cliff, they weren t surprised. the place was known to be dangerous. but even they could not guess that it would take almost 20 years to find out what really happened to a woman out on an evening hike with her husband. here s chris jansen. every couple has it. a shared song, a favorite movie, or maybe a special place. stephen scharf says that for his wife and him jody, this was it. two rocks forming a lover s chair on the edge of a cliff. that was our spot. we would bring a couple of long chairs, a cooler, and she would bring her work
homicide. in time the detectives moved on to other cases. stephen shark moved on. to 14 years after his wife s death he remarried. tina says he d been a loving, ideal husband. it was like we were to puzzle pieces made for each other where each of us complemented and completed the other person. but even in this happy new life he says, he s never forgotten about jody. but he might have been surprised to learn that someone else was thinking over to after all these years. bergen county s prosecutor was eager to visit old case files. among them an unexplained death here in the cliffs of the palisades so many years ago. the death of jody charles. it was this renewed push since 2002 to look into cold cases. this man covered the trial for the record newspaper in new jersey. on one hand he says, it didn t seem like the prosecutor had any reason to pursue the cold case. in terms of hard evidence it
knocked him off his feet. i believe i said an accident occurred, and i said was it an accident? and he put his head down any said, no. he believed there was a stunning confession. he ran to tell the other detectives, including detective . but they had just spent hours grilling the man. we weren t getting that feeling, that a re-interview at that point would ve done anything. the detective still believe they could find salad evidence to implicate stephen scharf, but they didn t. we took it as far as we could. go ahead and bend, the cause of death at the time was listed as undetermined. so officially it wasn t a homicide. in time the detectives moved on to other cases. stephen shark moved on. to 14 years after his wife s death he remarried. tina says he d been a loving, ideal husband. it was like we were to puzzle pieces made for each other where each of us complemented and completed the other person. but even in this happy new life he says he never forgotten