Death Leap Over Nevada a Bizarre Stunt Gone Wrong?

When the handsome, well-dressed man walked into her Las Vegas office, identified himself as a physician from Germany and said he wanted her to accompany him on a plane ride, Charlotte Richards figured she was being asked to officiate another wedding. Richards, a notary public and ordained minister who runs three wedding chapels in the gambling mecca, agreed.

She said she was sure her hunch was right when the man brought two video camera operators along to record the Tuesday night flight over the pitch-black Nevada desert.

It was only then that what had seemed like a romantic outing turned suddenly to horror.

Without warning, the man opened the door of the small plane and flung himself out into the darkness--and fell 10,000 feet to his death.

On Wednesday, searchers found a body in the rugged terrain south of Las Vegas that they believe is that of the man who chartered the plane.

At first, the death seemed to be a suicide. But Las Vegas Metro Police said it now appears to have resulted instead from a bizarre stunt that went awry.

After looking at videotapes made before the man leaped, Police Lt. Paul Conner concluded that “from the way he handled himself, this guy was some kind of entertainer. . . . But why he did it, no one knows.”

Richards and others aboard the Cessna 210 said they saw no evidence that the man--dressed in evening clothes--was wearing a parachute when he left the plane. But investigators reported that the man whose body was found in the desert was wearing a “very lightweight” parachute attached to a harness concealed beneath his dinner jacket--a parachute that apparently failed to open.

Investigators said the victim was a Pittsburg, Calif., resident. His identity was withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Richards said the man--”very nice looking, very clean, very well dressed”--had walked into her office last week, showed her an authentic-looking German passport that identified him as Dr. Joseph Herms, 35, and told her, speaking with a slight accent, that he wanted to hire her.

“He said he wanted me to come with him on an aircraft,” Richards recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t really tell you why. It’s sort of a surprise.’ I thought he probably wanted a surprise wedding,” she said. “He had a big roll of money and traveler’s checks. He said he’d pay me whatever I wanted.”

Richards said that despite some misgivings, she arrived as agreed at the Hughes Executive Air Terminal about 8:30 Tuesday night to find the man waiting with the two camera operators. She said the man positioned her, a housekeeper she had brought along for companionship and the pilot in front of the single-engine plane and had the camera operators record the scene while he stood alongside with a microphone and identified them.

“I told him that he reminded me of a nervous groom,” Richards said.

“He said, ‘I feel like a lion in a cage.’

“I told him to let himself out.

“He said, ‘I’m going to.’ ”

Once aboard, the man sat next to her, Richards said, and told the pilot to climb above 7,000 feet and head toward Searchlight, a small Nevada town about 35 miles south of Las Vegas.

“I figured that we were going to land somewhere and pick up the bride,” Richards said. “Then, all of a sudden, he turned to me and said, ‘Will you marry me?’

“I said, ‘You mean, will I perform your marriage ceremony?’

“He said, ‘No, I want you to marry me .’ ”

Richards said the man then stripped off his expensive wristwatch and handed it to her.

“He told me that he wanted me to hold it with both hands,” she recalled. “He told them to turn on the cameras. . . . Then he said something like, ‘Thank you,’ and he got up, opened the door and sort of slid out of the plane.

“The last thing I saw was his face. All I could see in it was fear.”

For a moment, Richards said, the five still aboard the plane sat frozen in stunned silence.

“It was like a movie,” she said. “But when you saw it with your own eyes, you knew it wasn’t a movie.”