On the morning of April 7, 2018, at the Klein Matterhorn cable car station above Zermatt in the Swiss Alps, Karl-Erivan Haub, the billionaire managing director of the German retail group Tengelmann, was seen passing through a tunnel on his way towards the slopes.
The station’s CCTV camera recorded the 58-year-old marathon runner, expert skier and mountaineer as he was getting ready for the Swiss army’s prestigious and notoriously tough ski mountaineering race, Patrouille des Glaciers, in which he had competed several times before.
Those images, however, were the last time he was seen. The fact that he had set off skiing on his own broke every rule in the Alpine book and surprised his coach, Julia Emmler, who later said she had always known
