SYMHC Classics: History Mystery Double Feature

This 2015 episode features two troubling tales from the 1920s. First, newlyweds that vanished on what would have been a historic boating trip. Second, a family murdered by someone who may have been hiding in their house for weeks or months.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. It is the last Saturday before Halloween. So
today's classic is a particularly creepy episode. It is our
October History Mysteries double feature. Many listeners have written into
talking about how creepy they find this one. Uh so
know that, and in it we talk about the disappearance
of Glenn and Bessie Hyde as well as the hinter

(00:25):
Kfik murders. So enjoy Happy Halloween. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly Frying and I'm
Tracy be Wilson. So today, since we are officially in

(00:47):
the Halloween season and in a Halloween mood, which I
always am, We're gonna do something kind of similar to
the two six Impossible episodes we've had in the past,
but these are gonna be two, So it's kind of
like a history Mystery to feature, and it's going to
be two unsolved mysteries completely unrelated except for the fact
that they both took place in the nineteen twenties and
both of these topics have been requested by listeners. Both

(01:10):
are really quite fascinating, but because of the open ended
nature of each of them and a relative lack of evidence.
Trying to piece together an entire episode on each would
have involved a lot of speculation rather than actual history.
So we're sticking to actual things we know for the
most part, and you're getting a two for one. So also,
I wanted to include a quick trigger warning. This episode

(01:31):
does include the discussion of some rather gory and violent things,
including violence against children. We're not going to get especially
graphic about it. But if that's something that you're just
not comfortable hearing about in any form, or if you
have younger listeners that you would rather shield from that
for the moment, the second story in our duo might
not be for you. So first we're going to get
started with the story of Glenn and Bessie Hyde, and

(01:54):
this one was requested most recently by our listener Joseph.
In ninety eight, newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hide decided to
start their marriage by trying to make history. They're going
to travel the entire length of the Grand Canyon by boat.
So if that doesn't sound all that ambitious to you,
please rest assured that, in fact, it was up to

(02:14):
that point. Remember this is only forty five people had
managed to travel the full length of the Grand Canyon
by river, and a woman had never done it, and
Bessie wanted to be the first, and Glenn wanted to
be the fastest. The forty five who had successfully made
the trip before the Hides had all done so in rowboats,
some of them modified, but Glen and Bessie wanted to

(02:36):
do it in a sweep scal Glenn, who was almost
thirty at the time, had plenty of boating experience growing up.
He boated on the skin A River in British Columbia
with his family by canoe on a regular basis, and
when Glen was twenty one, he and a friend had
actually taken a six month trip down Canada's Peace River
by canoe, and then he traveled on a sweep scoal

(02:57):
with his sister from the Salmon River and I toh
all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Bessie didn't have
the same boating experience that Glen died. She was more
of an artist than an outdoors woman, and she was
a graduate of the California School of Fine Art in
San Francisco. She was full of adventurous spirit and the
pair met in February of nine seven on a passenger ship,

(03:19):
and they got married a little more than a year
later in twin Falls, Idaho, on April twelfth of That
was an interesting date because it was also the sixteenth
anniversary of the Titanic sinking, and it was also just
one day after Bessie's divorced from her first husband was finalized.
Part of their motivation for this daring honeymoon that often
comes up is the idea that they could monetize a

(03:42):
successful trip down the canyon. Two expeditions with film crews
down the river in seven had garnered a lot of
media attention, one of them because it went very poorly
and required a rescue. If Bessie could make it down
the river, she would make history as the first woman
to do so, and if Glenn could do it in
record time, opportunities like book deals and lecture bookings would

(04:03):
probably follow. However, that is uh the commonly written about
reason for all of this, But Brad Dimmock, who wrote
a book about Glenn and Bessie titled Sunk Without a Sound,
actually came into possession of a letter from Bessie to
her aunt and uncle Ruth and Millard Haley after his
book had been completed and published, and he uh posted

(04:25):
this online with some commentary, And in this letter, Bessie
writes excitedly about the trip, and there's not a single
mention though about any of these ambitions in the way
of publicity or book deals or fame. So it's entirely
possible that that fame and moneymaking angle that is often
retold in this whole story is one of those embellishments

(04:46):
that has sort of grown around the story as time
has moved the actual details out of clear focus. Glenn
spent fifty dollars and two days putting together the boat,
which they named Rain in the Face, and they prepped
it with a bed, survival supplies, and journals awaiting their
documentation of the journey. They did not pack any life jackets,
and they started their journey on October with a plan

(05:09):
to arrive in Needles, California on December nine. Yeah, so
at this point they had only been married about six months,
and initially the Hides did successfully navigate several sections of
the river. Several weeks into the journey. On November sixteenth,
they stopped at Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim
in order to get fresh supplies, and while there they
actually spoke with a Denver Post reporter about their adventure.

(05:33):
They also met up with Ellsworth and Emory Coleb, who
were well known boatman and even better known photographers who
had a studio on the cliff side. Emory Coleb wanted
to give them life jackets, but Glenn turned them down.
Cole would later say that it seemed like Bessie seemed
nervous and wanted to quit, but that Glenn was urging
her on, and famously, Bessie is quoted as saying, I

(05:55):
wonder if I'll ever wear pretty shoes again as she
looked at Emery's daughter's where. Then, when they returned to
the river with their resupply of provisions, they met up
with Adolph G. Sutro. This is not the Adolph Sutro
who was the mayor of San Francisco in the nineties.
It was, in fact his grandson, and Sutro asked if
he could ride along with them in their scow for

(06:17):
a day or so, and the Hides agreed, and Sutro
traveled the next eight miles of river with them. When
they dropped him off at Hermit Creek on November. It
would be the last time anyone saw them. Glenn and
Bessie did not arrive in Needles on December Nineth's plan.
When Glenn's expectant father, Roland Hyde, received no word of

(06:38):
their landing at the pre arranged date and location, he
immediately feared that something had gone wrong. Roland Hide launched
a massive search effort to find Glenn and Bessie. There
were search parties tasked with canvassing sections of the river,
so multiple searches were going on at one time in
different places. Native American trackers were recruited to see if

(06:58):
they could find any evidence of the pair moving over land,
and eventually even an aerial search was authorized by the
U S Secretary of Wars. They actually used military planes
to look for them. After days of searching, the Hide
scow was spotted in the aerial sweep and was sitting
in the middle of the river at mile two thirty seven.
Emory Colb and his brother joined Roland Hide, and the

(07:20):
trio traveled to Peach Springs, Arizona, where they hiked down
to the mouth of Diamond Creek, located at mile There
are boat sat awaiting repair the cold brothers took several
days to get the reclaimed boat water ready, and then
they headed to the location where the scow had been spotted.
Roland did not go with them. When they reached the

(07:41):
rain in the face, it was December. The boat was
completely intact. All of the supplies that Glenn and Bessie
had packed remained, and everything was tidy and stowed properly.
It did not look like it had been shifted about
in some sort of dangerous event. Uh. The Cold Brothers
photographed the scene then, being quite well now photographers, we
actually have some really good pictures in terms of capturing

(08:04):
what they found. And then they returned to Roland Hyde.
They gathered as much as they could take with them,
and they told him that it did not appear that
Glenn and Bessie had left their boat intentionally. Based on
Bessie's diary, which was found in the boat, the two
thirty two mile Rapid was likely the last section of
river that they ran. They had made it six hundred
miles on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The boat was

(08:27):
found just forty six miles from the mouth of the
Grand Canyon, and according to the details of the journal,
they had actually been ahead of schedule. Yeah, so they
had been moving along quite well. They were ahead of schedule.
They were very close to the end. Uh. But we
they were simply not there when they went to look

(08:48):
for them. And while I want to be clear when
I say that all of their supplies were stowed, they
were in the places you would expect them to be
during normal use, they weren't stowed like packed away, like
they had had left the boat and they were going
off somewhere else. But before we wrap up the Glen
and Bessie Hyde story, let's pause for a brief word
from one of our fabulous sponsors. Sounds good. It was

(09:16):
not long before most people and most news outlets declared
that the Newlyweds must be dead. Their bodies were not
ever found, though, although Roland later did return to search
for them. Yeah, he even went back the following winter
to search for them. He kind of looked in different
conditions hoping that he would find them, but nothing ever
turned up. So what happened to the newly Weds remains

(09:38):
a mystery, although, of course, in cases like this, numerous
theories have arisen. Where the hides murdered? Did they drown?
A few interesting possibilities have cropped up over the years
that kind of get repeated over and over. In nine one,
during a commercial boating trip, while the participants were sitting

(09:58):
around a campfire, an elderly woman claimed to be Bessie.
When the woman was questioned by one of the other
attendees about Glenn, she said she had stabbed him after
a fight and then hiked to Peach Springs, Arizona, and
gotten on a bus going east, where she started a
new life. Investigation unearthed a far more mundane story that
she was simply a retired lady who liked to pull

(10:20):
people's legs. Yeah, it seems really cool, and it's one
of those things I always have to chuckle a little
bit if you read sort of brief descriptions of this.
They'll talk about all of the possibilities, but they never
talked about the more mundane things that get turned up
if you look more closely, of course. Uh. And then
later in ninety six, a skull with a bullet hole

(10:41):
in it was found on Emery Coleb's property, and rumors
started to circulate that it could be Glenn's. However, forensics
ruled out that possibility. That man who I don't believe
has ever been identified. Had died no earlier according to
these to testing the nineteen seventy two, and he was
only twenty two at the time, so he and not
possibly have been Glenn. Another river guy, a woman named

(11:04):
Georgie Clark, died in and among her belongings was found
the Hide's marriage certificate, so question coming up was she Bessie.
There was also a birth certificate indicating that her name
was Bessie d Ross, not Georgie, which has also fields
some speculation, but none of these claims have been substantiated. Yeah,

(11:26):
a number of historians have weighed in on it, and
after closer investigation, they really don't feel like this is
the real deal. I don't think the documents are authentic
or right um or that like, possibly one is but
not the other. It would be weird if Bessie had
vanished on the river and she happened to have her

(11:48):
birth certificate and marriage certificate with her, Like those aren't
things you take on a boating trip. At least it's
not anything I would take on a boating trip. But uh,
those are just food for thoughts. So we really don't know.
The you know, speculation will probably go on forever because
at this point we are almost a hundred years out,

(12:08):
We're ninety years out or so, and you know, we're
not not likely going to get any big answers on
those uh. And that brings us to the second of
our sort of creepy story double feature. This is uh
insanely creepy in my opinion. It's also often very requested.

(12:29):
Most recently it was requested by our listeners Stacy. And
while it is a great story and one that I
have always found fascinating and have debated about trying to
put a standalone episode together around it, there just really
is not enough to go on. Uh. So that's the
scoop on this one. We are talking about the hint
Kfic murders. This is a long standing unsolved crime and

(12:51):
it's one of the most famous in German history. So
the word Hinterkfic I think part of the reason that
this one gets so much excitement is it it sounds
exotic because it's foreign to any English listeners, but English
speaking listeners. But in fact that is actually the name
of the farm where these murders took place, hinter If.
I'm remembering my very sloppy appreciation of German correctly usually

(13:14):
means behind Uh, and this was behind an area that
would have been called Kfeck. This farmstead was about three
from grubern Uh and that was in the Bavarian municipality
of Vangen which is now the municipality of Vadhoven. And
the farm was about a kilometer away from the town
of k Fix. So, like I said, the name literally
meant behind Kfik and it was a relatively isolated farmstead

(13:38):
living at hinterkfe in N when this happened, where a farmer,
Andreas Gruber, who was sixty three, his wife Cazilia, who
was seventy two, their daughter Victoria aged thirty five, who
was a widow, and Victoria's two children, all len also
named Kazia who was seven and Joseph, who was two.

(13:59):
In addition to family, a brand new maid named Maria Bumgartner,
age forty four was at the farm as well, and
we mean we mean super brand new. She had started
work the very day that these events were going to
talk about came to a crescendo. The previous made that
they had had had quit rather abruptly six months prior.

(14:20):
In the autumn of the story goes that she very
frankly told them that she believed that the farm was haunted,
that she wanted to leave right away, and she believed
that because she heard noises, both footsteps and voices, she
claimed coming from the attic. On March, Andreas Gruber made

(14:40):
an odd discovery. He found footprints in the snow leading
from the edge of the forest to his farm. There
was no matching set leading back into the woods. My
heart is beating a little faster having read that sentence.
He also found evidence that someone had tried to pick
the lock on his garage. He told his neighbors that

(15:01):
he had found a strange paper left at the house
and had heard strange noises in the attic. A set
of keys had also vanished. And upon hearing about these
strange events, we should include the grouper check them out.
He looked in the attic and he found nobody, and
he you know, looked around for his keys, and he
tried to think of any way that the newspaper could

(15:21):
have gotten I believe it was on his porch, uh,
But he never found anybody or anything. He just kind
of shrugged it off. So when he was telling his
neighbors about these strange events. One of them actually offered
him a revolver for self defense because it sounded really
creepy to them, but Grouper actually turned that offer down.
I'm just gonna imagine that somebody walked really carefully in

(15:44):
their same footprints on the way back from the house
to the edge of the forest. On Saturday, April one,
the younger, because he missed school. On April second, the
entire family failed to appear at church, which was extremely unusual.
On Monday, April three, because he was once again absent

(16:05):
from school, and when the postman attempted to deliver mail
that day, he noticed Saturday's mail was still in the box.
When nobody answered his knock, he just left that day's mail.
A mechanic named Albert Hofner went to the farm on
April four to complete some repairs to a piece of
machinery that he had been contracted to do, and he knocked.

(16:27):
He didn't get any answer, and he saw no one,
but he knew what he had to do, so he
went ahead and repaired the feeding machine. It took him
about five hours, and during that time he saw no one,
and he left and he didn't mention to neighbors as
he left. Hey, I didn't see any of the groupers,
but I was there and I fixed their machine, so
let them know. And that's where things started to get

(16:50):
a little suspicious. So later in the afternoon of April four,
neighbors finally decided to check in on the groupers. Nobody
had seen any of them for several days. When nobody
answered any of their knocks or calls, they noticed that
the barn doors were locked, so they broke in. And
before we get to the barn discovery and so truly

(17:10):
creepy and probably unsettling for some listeners elements of this
story that come out after that, we're gonna pause for
a sponsor break so we don't have to drop it
right into the middle of any gruesome discussion. So what
these neighbors found in this barn that they broke into

(17:32):
was horrifying, to say the least. In the barn were
four corpses. These were the bodies of Andreas Cazelia, the
elder Victoria, and the child Casilia. The bodies had been
covered over with straw, and then an old door had
been placed on top of it. Further investigation revealed that
the maid Maria Baumgartner and the tiny Joseph had been

(17:53):
murdered in the farmhouse. A young man was sent by
bicycle to von Get to summon the authority. By the
time the investigators got there, though, there was already a
crowd milling about contaminating evidence. If you like crowds, should
always listen to our podcast because this is a recurring theme.
The crowd came and they tromped all over everything. When

(18:15):
we time travel, that can be our Our entire mission
is to go tell crowds not to go contaminate evidence.
So allegedly some of the crowd were even in the
kitchen making snacks for other people. Yeah, so, needless to say,
evidence was going to be pretty dicey at that point.

(18:36):
Autopsies were carried out on site in the barn I
believe by Dr Johann Baptiste al Muler, and it was
determined that on the night of March thirty one, the
six people had each been brutally attacked with blows to
the head. Despite some of the contamination of the evidence,
investigators were able to piece things together enough to come

(18:57):
to the conclusion that the four members of the family
had been killed in the barn had been lured there
one by one in some way as a sort of
tramp and kind of lured in and jumped. Andreas's wife,
Cazelia and their daughter Victoria also showed signs of strangulation
in addition to their head wounds. The younger Cazelia had
pieces of her own hair clenched in her right hand.

(19:22):
It was postulated that she had not died instantly like
the others have, and that that the others had and
that she may have torn out her own hair in
dismay or shock. The heads of all of the bodies
were removed by Dr. Al Mueller and sent to Munich
for additional investigation, since that was the area that seemed

(19:42):
to have sustained the death blows, and these heads were
also allegedly handled by a clairvoyant. Eventually that was brought
in by authorities in a desperate attempt to get any
sort of lead in the case. Neither the examiners in
Munich nor any of the psychics discovered anything new in
the handling of the victims heads. Numerous details, aside from

(20:03):
the grizzly killings, made the discovery of the Hinokapic murders
really unsettling. While the family had been killed on the
night of March thirty one, in the days between then
and the discovery on April four, neighbors had seen smoke
coming from the farmhouse chimney. Additionally, the animals on the
farm had been cared for during that time, and the

(20:24):
cows had been milked. It was as though the killer
or killers made himself at home for a while after
brutally dispatching with the family, and given the fact that
Gruber had lost a set of keys and found a
random newspaper just prior to the murders, it's entirely possible
that the killer may have made himself at home for
a while before the events on March thirty one. While

(20:46):
the robbery was initially suspected as the motive, there were
large sums of cash that were easily found in the
house and had obviously been left behind. There were also
some roof tiles that appeared to have been drawn back
into two places, one over the barn roof went on
the barn roof and one over the farmhouse. And if

(21:06):
I understand descriptions and looked at the photos correctly, there
was kind of one big roof that covered the barn,
and then there was like a courtyard that had a roof,
and then it also continued over to the house, but
over the barn and over the house, tiles had been
removed so that an intruder that was hidden could have
had pretty easy views of both the whole farmstead and

(21:28):
the family, depending on where they were positioned. So this
family had had problems before they were murdered. They were
a well known family, but not really that popular in
the community. Andreas in particular had a bad reputation for
a number of reasons. One was that he was abusive
to his wife. He also was believed to have had

(21:51):
an incestuous relationship with his daughter Victoria, and many believed
that young Joseph was in fact his child. It's pretty
easy math to note that Joseph had been born about
five years after Victoria's husband had died, so he definitely
was not a child of that marriage, because remember he
was two when this happened. And at the time of
Joseph's birth, a neighboring farmer named Lauren Schlittenbauer was named

(22:13):
as the father of Joseph. But this actually became a
really contentious issue and Schlittenbauer actively claimed that Andreas had
fathered his own grandchild. As for suspects, there's a fairly
popular theory that Victoria may not have been a widow
after all, and that her husband committed the murders. Carl
Gabriel died in the trenches in France during World War One,

(22:34):
and you'll occasionally find site that will say things like
but his body was never recovered. There are plenty of
eyewitness accounts of him being killed at the Battle of
nu Villa on December twel so it's really sensationalism. But unfortunately,
it's also all too common for the bodies of soldiers
to go unrecovered in wartime yep uh. There are some

(22:59):
financial reason that people point to as like what would
have been his motivator or that he was angry about
the incest. Again, in a case like this, where there
is not much to go on, it's very easy to
fill in the blanks with fanciful thoughts. Another popular theory
names that neighbor Lauren Schlittenbauer as the likely killer due
to his entanglement with Victoria, because there is some pretty

(23:22):
significant indicators that he and Victoria did have some sort
of sexual relationship, um, and this battle that he had
with Andreas over whether or not he had fathered Victoria's
youngest child. There's also some assertions in there that he
may have planned to marry Victoria, but that Andreas was
very jealous of her and would not allow her to

(23:43):
do so. So there is a lot of drama connected
to the Schlittenbauer possibility. The Grouper family and Maria Baumgartner
were interred at wide Offen, their heads were never returned
from Munich, and their beliefs to have been lost during
World War two. Yeah, ironically, I have never really dug

(24:05):
up much that attaches any sort of creepiness to the
loss of these six heads. Uh. People just tend to
write it off. As you know, world War two, there
were lots of crazy things happening, and it's entirely possible
that that was simply destroyed. Uh. What's also interesting is
that during the initial investigation, no murder weapon was found,

(24:26):
even though on the autopsy report it does suggest that
it was a pickaxe. However, when the buildings at the
farmstead were torn down a year after all of these events,
a madic was allegedly found and a matic is similar
to an ice pick. It has a long handle and
it has a head that has a cutter on one
end and either an axe blade or a pick on
the other. A man who sometimes worked as a hand

(24:49):
on the farm identified the matic as belonging to Gruber.
It was when he owned and had in fact made,
was normally stored with the rest of the tools and
equipment and the tool shed. Yes, so by virtue of
it and not having been found when everything happened in
the initial investigation happened, and only being turned up a
year later when they raised the buildings, it does kind

(25:12):
of point to it having been out of place, but
we don't know. And while dozens of people were questioned
in the case, more than a hundred, no official suspect
was ever named. Uh. This case has been reopened at
various points throughout the years. It has never been solved, though,
I believe in two thousand seven there was a university
group that did a study of it where they tried

(25:32):
to apply modern forensics to what they had and they
came up with who they feel is the most likely killer,
but they did not name that person out of respect
for the fact that there are surviving relatives of that person,
and it would kind of just be dredging up something
that couldn't be proven and could potentially taint the family name.
But we basically don't know what happened. We don't know

(25:53):
if someone was living in their attic for six months,
because remember their previous maid had said quite some time
before the murder that she heard voices and weird noises,
or if this was just a one day event that happened.
I will also tell you this as a warning if
you go looking for this online. There are some pretty

(26:13):
graphic images taken of the crime scenes. So if that
is not something you are comfortable looking at or can stomach,
I would not google search this particular thing. Don't google
it at all. Like the thing is that here are
some images about they're extremely, extremely horrifying, and they are
literally the first thing that comes up when you google it. Uh.

(26:37):
It reminds me of creepy stories that keep circulating around
the Internet at various times, where people are like, I
just discovered someone who has been secretly secretly living in
this tiny compartment that was in our walls, and yeah, yeah,
it is a very creepy thing. I mean, it's kind
of I think one of the reasons that people, I

(26:57):
don't want to say love to tell this story because
that sounds horrid. Fine, but there is a certain fascination
with it. And part of it is that it combines
so many of the key elements of like a good
scary story. You know. One, there is some gruesome murders too.
There is this possibility that there is a person watching
people for a long time unnoticed. And three there is

(27:18):
all of this weird drama around love triangles and you know, paternity,
and there's just it has all of the ingredients for
a good drama. Say so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U

(27:39):
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History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
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(28:00):
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