Texas businessman Frederick Mueller won’t face a third trial on charges that he pushed his wife from a cliff and drowned her near their vacation home in Lake City in 2008.

Seventh Judicial District Attorney Dan Hotsenpiller filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the case against Mueller rather than go forward with a third trial that had been scheduled for January.

Hotsenpiller charged Mueller in 2012 with murdering his wife, Dr. Leslie Mueller. Mueller told investigators that she fell from a cliff when her dog was startled by a bluebird while they posed for a photo at a cliff edge. He said she then drowned in a small creek when the creek carried her downstream and she became lodged under a log.

Investigators and prosecutors said the evidence suggested Dr. Mueller fought with her husband as he pushed her and that she was then held down in the water. Investigators found discrepancies and suspicious details in his story from the beginning, but it took four more years of investigation before he was charged.

Mueller, of San Angelo, Texas, first went free after a Gunnison County jury deadlocked 11-1 with only one juror insisting on his guilt on one charge of first-degree murder. That trial lasted five weeks. In a second 12-day trial in Broomfield County in October, the jurors deadlocked eight to four, with the preponderance of the jurors finding Mueller guilty of second-degree murder.

“Two separate juries in two separate jurisdictions were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the defendant’s guilt,” said Hotsenpiller. “As prosecutors, we accept the highest burden of proof and the responsibility to be ministers of justice. After an extraordinary investigation and two jury trials presenting all evidence available to the people, it is my determination that a unanimous verdict is an unlikely outcome of a third trial.”

Hotsenpiller said he has no new evidence to present to another jury and was also considering the cost and the burden on potential jurors and the impact on the victim’s family in deciding not to take the case to another trial.

“The parents and children of Dr. Leslie Mueller had no involvement in the death of their daughter and mother. They do not wish to endure a third trial focused on the events of May 2008,” Hotsenpiller said in announcing his decision.