A former team medic for Manchester City died falling 100 metres from a Lake District ridge where he proposed to his wife 27 years earlier.
Dr Jamie Butler, from Altrincham in Greater Manchester, fell from the Striding Edge section of Helvellyn when hiking with his wife, Margaret, last year. They had returned to the mountain to find the exact spot where he had asked Margaret to marry him in 1994.
An inquest heard the 54-year-old must have fallen from the mountain amid misty conditions and poor visibility on 2 November.
When the couple reached Striding Edge, a rocky scramble before Helvellyn’s summit, Margaret was too tired to continue and so her husband carried on alone, according to a report from the Messenger newspaper in Trafford.
In a statement read in the inquest, she described seeing her husband walk off into mist. After a while she shouted after him but received no response and called the police, “concerned something had happened to him”.
Mountain rescuers were scrambled to search for the walker and found his body below the ridge. He was found with significant injuries, including a fractured skull, and was later pronounced dead.
Butler was well known around the north-west for his work as a sports doctor. After qualifying as a doctor at the University of Liverpool in 1993 he worked at the English Institute of Sport (EIS) and Sale Sharks Rugby Club. He became a medic for Manchester City football club in 2007 and was promoted to senior medical officer in 2009.
In 2011, he was cleared of wrongdoing after the defender Kolo Touré was given a six-month ban after testing positive for drugs, according to MailOnline.
The inquest heard Butler was facing unspecified historical “allegations” and had been suspended from practice at the time of his death. His doctor said he had shown no intent to take his own life.
The coroner, Kirsty Gomersal, accepted a postmortem finding that Butler died as a result of multiple injuries from the fall.
Delivering her conclusion, she said: “In my judgment, a conclusion of accidental death is the most appropriate for me to reach. Although there had been allegations against him, he was determined to clear his name and his doctor was sure there was no suicidal intention.”
Margaret Butler paid tribute to her husband. “Jamie was a loving husband with two twin boys who he adored,” she said.
“He will be forever missed. He died doing what he loved.”
