March 28, 2026 • 43 mins
In 2014, a young German man walked into an airport in Bulgaria with a flight booked, then suddenly ran out leaving all his posessions behind, never to be heard from again. This classic episode tells the story of Lars Mittank.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Chuck here on a Saturday with a little
mystery true crime episode served up for you. It's the
disappearance of Lars Metonk and I think it's me Tonk
And if I'm not mistaken, Josh and I probably pronounced
it all sorts of ways because that's kind of what
we do, much to the annoyance of many of you.
We're very sorry, but I hope you enjoy it. Welcome
(00:27):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry
and this is Stuff you Should Know at another True
Life Mystery edition.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
A True Life Mystery.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, Okay, I don't want to say crime because I'm
not one hundred percent sure crime was involved. I'm sure
it still falls under the umbrella of true crime, but
it's a mystery, a disappearance, how about that?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah? And this one is this can be frustrating to research.
And this is our caveat in that this situation, as
you will learn, happened in Bulgaria to a German Man
and that's part of the reason it's hard to get
great information. There are plenty of people on the Internet
telling this story with different details, and it's just sort
(01:29):
of one of those cases where like we can't get
our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops and
read it ourselves. So we did find a redditor who
did something last year who claims that he got information
from Lars's mother, who you're going to meet, Sondra. She's
not gonna be on the show. You're not going to
(01:49):
really meet her meet through our words. But you know
who knows this is someone on Reddit and all his
sources were in German, so I couldn't double check those either, right.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, No, I mean that's that's a caveat that works
for just about any true crime or disappearance case these days,
just because there's so many people who you know, take
it in a story and run it through their own grinder,
and you know, like you said, little details, little facts
get changed here, and then somebody else picks up the
same fact without double checking it, and now all of
a sudden, it's all over the place, and you can't
(02:23):
tell if that's because it's real or because a bunch
of people just repeated the same incorrect facts. So We're
gonna definitely do our best. But one of the things
about this story is there are enough, you know, totally
verified facts to it that you know, you don't really
need to get completely lost in the details. People have
(02:47):
gotten completely lost in the details, but they've still not
solved the case. That hasn't helped anybody yet, So just
the facts that are known are kind of strange enough.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, And I think it's it's always more comfortable for
us when it's like when there's a book that's been
written about it, published by like a real publisher.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Like Beverly Cleary.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It's not just internet dudes. But you know, a lot
of times these more recent sort of missing person cases,
it is just internet dude.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So you know, yeah, it is what it is. And
the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Matonk
and he's known as the most famous missing person on
YouTube because.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I hate that he is.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
It's pretty bad almost. It should have probably just scared
us off of this episode to begin with. The because
you remember what was the name of that con, the
YouTube Convention. We went to that one time.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Oh, it was like Internet con, but it wasn't that.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It was close to that I can't remember. That almost
put me off of YouTube forever.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
We blocked our memory bank as we did our biggest
show ever there in front of about twelve people. Yeah,
it was pretty bad, but I'll think of it. But
by the way, we should thank Dave Meischner, who's a
listener who turned me onto this quite a while ago.
So sorry it took so long to get to Dave.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So we're talking again. We're talking about Lars matonk and
he vanished from the face of the earth. As his
mom put it, it was like the earth just swallowed him up.
Back on July eighth, twenty fourteen, in a town, a
resort town in Bulgaria on the Black Sea called Golden Sands, which,
looking at pictures of it, it looks like a pretty
(04:34):
charming little place. Big con, that's it. It might as
well have been called Internet Con. Yeah, but did you
look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel
for the place?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, you know, looks like any lovely seaside hamlet.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah. And I couldn't get the impression of whether it
was more like Deston or more like Panama City Beach.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I just couldn't. It seems like a big party spot,
if that's what you're wondering.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, But like it also looked like it was fairly
like clean and well run and not just like you know,
just whatever kind of thing. I don't know, I place
it between the two from what I can tell, But
that's where that's where this event took place, where the
disappearance took place. It's actually Varna, Bulgaria, which is the
(05:21):
main town that Golden Sands Resort beach town is right
outside of.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah. So as far as Lars, the young man who
would go missing, he was born in February nineteen eighty
six in northern Germany. He was an only child. He
was a handsome kid, very popular. He was athletic, he
was smart. He did well in school. After he ended up.
After he graduated, he ended up getting a job at
(05:47):
the GDFSUS power plant about one hundred miles from where
he grew up, fixing small electrical machines. He was an
engineer and it seemed like he had a really good
life and he enjoyed his job. He loved and this
will figure in so put a pin in this. His
one big love was his football club, his soccer team
(06:08):
that he followed, which is in you know, this is
not how they would pronounce it, but the Verder Bremen
football club.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Oh really, how would they pronounce it?
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Well, it's always just a little more German, let's see,
you know, like the guy the Redditor, he narrates his
own documentary and he said it in a way that
I'm not even going to attempt.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Oh okay, all right, fine, So that whole football club
thing actually plays a role in this because it may
be at the center of his disappearance. We're not one
hundred percent sure, but to kind of give you an
idea of what kind of guy Lars Metank was. Metank was.
His dad had a stroke a couple of years before
(06:49):
he disappeared, and his mom had to take care of
his dad full time. Lars was an only child, and
he would come home I guess about one hundred miles
from where he lived and worked almost every weekend to
help take care of his dad, which is not every
guy in their late twenties would do that, you know.
And apparently he was dedicated enough that his mom had
(07:12):
to kind of encourage him to go along with five
other friends of his two week long vacation at Golden
Sands in Bulgaria in July, the end of June beginning
of July. He wasn't going to go, and his mom said, no,
you should should totally go. You deserve a week off
like this, So he went.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah. So it's a big party scene. Like I said,
it is well known for young people from all over
Europe going to take advantage of the resort deals, all
inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs to be had.
Lars was the life of the party. According to his friends,
(07:53):
I saw her anywhere from three to five friends. I
know for sure two guys, and I think these were
his high school mates who were most prominent, named Tim
Schultz and Paul Roman. But they were hanging out, going
to the beach playing soccer. The one weird thing that
I think people may have made too much about online
as far as internet sleuthing goes, is his friends remarked
(08:15):
that he didn't have much of an appetite on the trip,
was eating like soup and salad and fruit, whereas they were,
you know, as an all inclusive resort, so they were
just like feasting on everything. And I think they thought
it was odd that he wasn't, but I don't make
a whole lot about that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, neither did that one reditor or slash documentary and
who said that he apparently had kind of gotten had
been on a health kick, so he was kind of
watching what he ate a little more. Yeah, some people
have been like, there's your there's your answer right there
that explains it at all. Yeah, basically, So, I mean
(08:49):
the week went by pretty uneventfully. I think one of
his friends later said on TV or in an interview
that it went by really quick. On one of the
I think that's second to last day, they went to
watch a World Cup match. The World Cup in Brazil
was going on at the time, and you may not
know this about Europe, but they're really crazy about soccer,
(09:11):
so much so that they have their own word for
it football, which is goofy. But that's the way it goes.
And so they went to this bar rock bar or Okbaar,
which sounds like a cool place, and they watched the match,
i think Costa Rica and the Netherlands. And while they
were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans. They're
(09:33):
watching this from all different clubs and countries, and there
were some kids I guess who were recent high school
graduates and were fans of FC Byron, which is the
rival to Verder Bremen, And I guess they kind of
got into it verbally only with Lars and his friends.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, and I also saw places that there was actual
physical confrontation. Oh yeah, you don't know for sure, but
we do know that it wasn't the biggest deal and
it wasn't the big fight that happened. Later on, after
this night out, the guys apparently go to this McDonald's
which is kind of an open air order at the
(10:16):
open air window kind of thing, and Lars didn't want
to eat because I guess he was on that health kick,
and he sort of just stood nearby while his two
buddies were ordering. They got their food, they turned around,
he wasn't there. They don't see him for the rest
of the night. But like I said, it's sort of like,
you know, spring break party central. So if one of
(10:36):
your friend disappears for the night and you're a bunch
of dudes, you might just think like, all right, well,
you know, maybe he ended up meeting somebody, or maybe
he just went out and partied some more. But it
didn't send up these huge alarms that he didn't come
back that night.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, So when he did show up again, I don't
know if it was later that night or the next morning,
he said that he had been beaten up, actually jumped
by three or four Bulgarian guys, and that he had
gone to duck when one of them threw a punch
and had actually taken a punch in his ear, which
(11:13):
is a terrible place to get punched. And he said
that he was quite convinced that it was those kids,
those high school kids who were fans of Byron FC
Byron that they'd gotten into it with at the bar
earlier that night, because apparently they had said, this is
just I only saw this in one place that they
had said that they had shouted that it's easy to
(11:36):
get to pay somebody to beat other people up in Bulgaria.
And so this happened close enough and close enough proximity
to that other altercation that he just assumed that's why
those guys jumped him. I mean, there's apparently there was
no other explanation for it. So that was his story.
He showed up with an injured ear in the story
(11:56):
that he had been jumped by some local Bulgarians.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yeah, and his friends apparently didn't necessarily believe that story
because he wasn't you know, he didn't have black eyes
or a bloody nose or anything. He looked fine and
he was acting fine, so they weren't too sure about
that story. Again, with the internet, slose, I've seen people
saying that like he totally made up the story about
the fight. But that is all just people speculating online.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
I know, if you ever want to see people just
take a piece of information and then spin it to
the n degree the most extreme possible interpretation of it,
that you could do worse than hang out on the internet.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So he goes to a doctor, he gets the diagnosis
of a ruptured ear drum. Apparently went and saw a
specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should
get surgery, and Lars is like, great, but I'm not
getting that here. I'm going to go back come to
Germany if I'm going to get surgery.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
And then this is sort of one of the keys
is he was given biotic name cepheroxyme and he was
given the strongest possible dosage, which was about I think
it was five hundred milligrams.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, and that's just a general I think a cephalexin
based antibiotic that doesn't really usually have many side effects,
and if it does have side effects, it's typically something
like an upset stomach. I saw that there's a condition
where it turns huge patches of your skin very dark
all over the place, almost like your highlights have been shaded.
(13:34):
It's really interesting to look at. But that has nothing
to do with any other anything that Lars exhibited, any
behavior exhibited. It's just antibiotics. I mean, if you've ever
taken antibiotics, you know that there's not really usually many
side effects to it.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Right, So Lars catches well, again, different information. I saw
that his friends were going to stay with him. He
insisted they leave. So his friends eventually do catch that
original flight out and Lars stays behind, you know, because
of his ear. He was a little concerned about obviously,
(14:16):
with changes in the atmosphere and on pressurization on a plane.
He didn't think it was a good idea. And I'm
not sure if that original doctor told him that might
have been a problem, but he knew it was going
to be a problem.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So a little bit about that original doctor. I saw
that from the redditor who said that he spoke to
the guys to his mother, that his mother said that
that Lars said that the doctor didn't really treat him.
The first one did and said you should go to
a specialist. But then when he went to the specialist,
a specialist said like wouldn't speak to him in English,
(14:48):
and Lars felt he had mocked him, and that apparently
Sondra thought that that was really significant because that was
not a word that Lars typically used. But he still
managed to get the antibiotic from doctor. The thing about
the perforated or ruptured ear drum is I was looking
on the internet, it turns out, and the National Health
(15:09):
Service says that if you have a perforated ear drum,
it would probably actually make flying more comfortable, not more dangerous.
So I can understand Lars being worried about that, not
being a trained medical professional, but if he's encountering at
least three other medical professionals in Bulgaria, you would think
one of them would be like, actually, no, you're actually
(15:31):
better off flying like this, or would at the very
least be like, you don't have to worry about that
at all. That's not a thing interesting yeah, so too.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
All right, well, let's take a break and we will
come back and talk about what happened after his friends
left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this, all right,
(16:19):
so Lars's buddies go back home to Germany. Lars is
left there by himself, which is pretty key as far
as understanding that they weren't worried about him. He wasn't
behaving weird. He seemed fine. He seemed like Lars. Otherwise
one of them probably would have raised some sort of
alarm bells and been like, hey, maybe we should stay here,
(16:40):
but they said he seemed to relaxed, he was in a
good mood, and so they took off. Being summer, Lars
had a hard time getting a hotel room because everything
was booked up and he was staying on extra, so
he ends up having to check into the Hotel Color
of Varna, which was a really cdy place that this
(17:02):
cab driver takes him to, apparently a lot of drug dealers,
a lot of sex workers, but that was kind of
the only place available, And we don't know a lot
about what happened that night other than these phone calls
and texts that he exchanges with his mom.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
So one thing though about the hotel color I looked
at it. Trip Advisor gives it a four out of
five and booking dot Com has it at seven point
eight out of ten. And it is definitely cheap. I
think rooms are like twenty five American dollars a night,
which is suspiciously cheap. And that yeah, there is like
probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like
(17:38):
it's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that.
But it was the fact that it was his only
option I think kind of tells you quite a bit
too about it. Sure, So he goes to this hotel
he checks in. Apparently the person behind the counter made
a copy, a photo copy of his credit card, and
according to his mother, that did not sit very well
(17:59):
with Lar. And at eleven PM, after he's checked into
the hotel, he calls his mom, I think it's the
first phone first of many phone calls that evening, and
he tells her that he wants her to block his
credit card because he's kind of sketched out by this
hotelier who has made a photo copy of his card.
(18:20):
He's worried that they're going to use it for fraud
and he can just unfreeze it when he gets back.
That's the first phone call he makes.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, there ends up being another call where he has
left the hotel. He said that he was hiding on
a hill, and I think even said that he was
at risk of falling, So it must have been sort
of some sort of a really steep type of situation,
I guess. But he said that there were four men
after him that were trying to kill him, or that
(18:49):
intended to kill him at least, And he said, don't
call me back because my phone. I don't want my
phone to ring. I'm not sure I knew he didn't
have his smartphone with him. He left that at home yea,
and brought sort of a cheaper phone, So I don't
know if it didn't have a way to turn the
ringer off or not, or if he was just not
thinking clearly, but he said not to call him back.
He eventually texts his mom what is Sarah? Fom five hundred,
(19:12):
which was that antibiotic which you might think means like
he's feeling weird and like, what is this?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I've taken that to me says that if he was
behaving weirdly or experiencing some different behavior that he guessed
that that's what it was. That's the only explanation for that,
because they found that he had taken three of them,
so he knew that he had that in his system,
(19:40):
which I guess if he was acting weird, maybe that's
what he thought it was. That's what sticks out to me.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Yeah, and I think it was either that night or
the following morning. When he asks, I think it was
the following morning. You know, she had booked a flight
home for him. He doesn't get back in touch with her,
which really worked. He's her. But the next morning he
does get back in touch. This is two days after
this bar fight. She's relieved. He says he's going to
(20:07):
go to the airport and can he get five hundred
euros wired, you know, money grammed or whatever?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Western you know what?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Did they have Western Union over there?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah? Supposedly there's a real detail in there and that
it was Western Union.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, what's the what makes Western Union important?
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So his mother had never heard of Western Union and
Lars hadn't either, But apparently he talked to another German
tourist at the airport who had told him to use it,
and he was able to describe to his mom how
to use Western Union in a way that she understood
how to use Western Union after he explained it, which
said to his mom that he had his wits about him.
He wasn't out of his mind, he wasn't wasted on
(20:49):
drugs or anything like that. He was very much with
it mentally.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
All right. So he and I saw two different things here.
Either his mom urged him to go to the airport
doctor just to make sure he's good to fly, or
there was some requirement that he do so. But either way,
he goes to the airport medical center. And this is
where things get a little confusing, because it's really all
(21:17):
over the place, whether or not he goes in right
away or whether he goes in later. But he apparently
calls his mom tells her, hey, they said I shouldn't
fly or drive. But he hadn't even gone to see
the doctor at that point. And then once he does
see the doctor, the doctor ends up giving a few
different versions of what happened while he was in there,
(21:37):
which is either, you know, some people think that looks
really shady. I think it could have just been like
at the time, this doctor, you know, you're not making
some really big mental notes about the random patient that
comes in.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Like, this guy's going to be an international mystery in
an hour.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, So you know, it could have been innocent that
his story changed, or it could be shady.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
It could be so so from what I saw, that
the doctor changes story three times, and that an airline
employee came in, and then later it was an airport
employee came in, which I think kind of across the internet,
became a construction worker because that the airport had recently
undergone or was undergoing renovations. And then I guess the
(22:21):
third story was that the doctor said that no one
had come in, and that Lars had excused himself to
go to the toilet and did not come back. The
doctor was expecting to come back. He just never came back.
What the doctor didn't know if that was in fact
what happened was that Lars wasn't coming back because he
was sprinting through the airport and running out of the
(22:43):
airport and into the surrounding countryside.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah. And then the version where someone does come in.
What that means is is that literally a human being,
another person walks into the examination room and apparently really
freaked out. If that version is correct, really freaked out Lars,
who was already obviously feeling a little bit paranoid sure,
(23:07):
and was like, what is this person doing in here?
In the one version of the story, the doctor tries
to explain, Hey, it's just a construction guy, or no,
this is an airline employee that's going to actually walk
you to the plane. It's a little frustrating to not
know the exact truth, but no matter what happens, we
do know that he sprinted from the airport because that
(23:27):
part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV, and that's
why he's the most famous disappeared person on YouTube, because
it's very compelling to watch this young kid drop all
and you don't see him drop his stuff, but clearly
he walks in with a backpack and a duffel bag
and he sprints with nothing in his hands at like
(23:50):
full twenty one year old athletic gallop out of there,
as if someone is chasing him.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah so, but there's a couple of weird things about it.
If you watch the video, and again you can go
anywhere on the internet and see this. I think it's
a good thirty seconds of it cut together, that he
is running in the airport, and then when he gets
outside he kind of like walks and then jogs a
little bit and runs some more. But then I saw
somebody on I think I was read it too on
(24:18):
a different post. Their Unresolved Mysteries group is just really good.
But somebody pointed out that if you watch him, he's
not really like looking behind him. He's not looking to
see somebody coming after him, And it kind of puts
a different spin on things because you do think, well,
surely he's running for his life, but if you're running
(24:38):
for your life, it does seem like you would be
a lot more concerned about who was coming after you
and would probably look behind you a little more. He
doesn't quite do that. Actually, it's a very strange run,
but it's also not like the run of a person
who's out of their mind. That was what stood out
to me, is that he doesn't seem to at all
(24:59):
be out of his mind.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, and another couple of details here that was tough
to verify. Supposedly, in the doctor's office he said, I
don't want to die here. I have to get out
of here. Don't know if that's true or not, but
supposedly that's what he said, and then the mom Sondra
evidently saw. She went over there to do her own investigating,
(25:26):
obviously right after it happened, and supposedly saw footage directly
from the airport that had a lot of different stuff
that was not included in the footage that went to
the police, And she said in the footage that she
saw was that when he leaves the airport, he stands
there like checks his pocket as if he's checking to
make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff,
(25:49):
and kind of looks around and orients himself for a minute,
like should I go this way? Should I go that way?
If you look at other places on the internet and
you just look at that footage, it looks like he
just bolts from the airport and then continues to either
kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks
his pockets, never orients himself at all.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Yeah, So he actually walks within twenty feet of a
couple of cops who are standing talking to on another
in the parking lot. He walks past them, he goes
behind a sampile, and then eventually goes over I think
is it actually on camera him going over the fence
or is it just presumed that he went over the fence.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
No, it's on camera, but it's one of those things
where it's like they had to circle and highlight him
because he's so far in the distance. But he goes
over a barbed wire fence into a full bloom sunflower field, yeah,
which are very very tall and literally disappears, never to
be seen again now.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And on the other side of that sunflower field, very
importantly is the A two highway, so who knows what happened.
And then beyond that there's a lot of woods. I
wouldn't call it like the most densely forested place on earth,
but there's a pretty decent sized woods around there. There's
also a lot of farm fields too that's exposed and
out in the open. But there's a highway on the
(27:05):
other side of it, and that's, to me, is extremely important.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
All right, should we take another break? Yes, all right,
we're going to take another break and bring it home
with what happened from there and then some of the
theories about what happened to Lars Matonk.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So Chuck. Just to recap Lars Motonk has fled is
a really good way to put it. The airport, leaving
behind in the doctor's office all of his stuff, including
his wallet, phone in passport.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Now is that verified.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I saw that basically everywhere, including.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Except for his speculating that she saw him checking as.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, I didn't. I thought that was very confusing. But
I saw it in the sun which I realized is
not the most credible source, but sadly it is one
of the most credible sources when it comes to researching
this case. I saw it on a Yale article. It's
it's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were
(28:29):
left behind. But I mean, that's a really good point,
like we're totally we're lost in the sunflower field. As
far as that stuff concerns, we we don't know. We
got to get our hands on the police report, and
even that I read when when Lars's mom hired a
Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator, they got weird conflicting information
(28:55):
about you know, what was found with him or not,
or what was what was left behind him or not,
So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what
was there.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, I get the picture that it was a frustrating
experience working with the Bulgarian police it seems like Germany
got involved with Inner Pole, but they had some frustrations
as well. There's there's some speculation that they intentionally kind
of kept the story on the download because they didn't
want it to affect tourism.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, I could see that.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Other people say that. Well maybe not that, but it
just wasn't widely known it was some German kid. It
wasn't all over the newspapers, and so people, you know,
they didn't necessarily even know what was going on if
they saw this flyer, or they maybe not. Maybe they
didn't even run it on the evening news.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, and so like if it was three weeks, four
weeks after the disappearance, that like news started to really spread,
or maybe news never really spread. If you were a
driver and you gave a kid a ride on the
eighth two highway outside of the airport, you might not
have ever put two and two together. Or if you
saw some kid running through a field into the woods,
(30:09):
you might not have ever heard of Lars Metonk either.
So it's possible there's people out there with information who
just don't know to cough it up, although that's probably
exceedingly unlikely these days because of the exposure that this
story's gotten.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, one interesting tidbit is that they did find that
those five hundred euros were untouched in his account, and
I don't think we mentioned. I think some people speculate
the fact that it was five hundred euros on the
nose and that it was Western Union and he had
never used it meant that he was being told by
(30:49):
somebody to get five hundred euros wired via this way.
But again that's just internet speculation.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision.
He just asked her to wire him some money, some
money she had decided that that was according to that
documentarian who knows, we really need to get Sondra matonk
On here, dude.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
One of the cool things that happened through this through
his mother investigating this is various leads came in over
the years, like hey, there's this guy that speaks German,
he could be Lars. She would go check it out.
There's this other guy. Over the years, she has ended
up finding fifteen German expatriates in Bulgaria. Some were atticts,
(31:33):
some were mentally ill, some were actually reunited with her family,
some didn't want to be reunited. But she found all
these people, so like every time that happened, it gave
her hope that even though the chances, you know, with
a case like this is if you don't find this
person within the first a few days or the first week,
it's like very slim to no chance, all of these
(31:55):
things gave her hope that she could if she just
kept at it, that she might eventually find her son.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I was really surprised to see that there was
a statin here that said that something like only three
percent of missing persons cases aren't resolved within the first
year in Germany, not even in Germany, but among German citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I thought it would be a lot higher than that,
but that's actually not bad as far as I can tell. So, yeah,
one of those people, by the way, who was found
that was thought to be there's like a whole thing
where people are following this case, and anytime something ends
up on the internet, it ends up being passed along
(32:37):
to Sondra Matonk, who will basically post on her Instagram like, hey,
this was sent from this town. Can somebody go see
if they can find this homeless guy and get me
more pictures of them? So we can figure out if
it's Lars. Like she does this kind of frequently. There
was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who
looks a lot like Lars, but disheveled with the beard
(32:59):
and his haircut kind of crazy. Yeah, And that turned
out to be a different man who was missing from
British Columbia named Anton Pilpa, who was reunited with his
family after five years. And they think that heke hitch
hiked and walked from British Columbia down to Brazil and
then kind of lived around Rio. I think Rio on
(33:21):
his own for a while during a mental break man.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
So some of the theories over the years that have
been formed, the one that seems the most obvious to
me is that along with the ear injury, there was
some sort of a head injury, maybe a concussion left
untreated that led to erratic behavior and paranoia maybe, and
that you know, once he had left and had no
(33:49):
money and no phone and no passport, he sort of
was just sort of perhaps lost his memory and lost
in Bulgaria and still lost in Bulgaria.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, that's entirely possible, especially if it was a head
injury that was getting worse and worse by the hour.
That could definitely explain the erratic behavior of leaving his
stuff and running through the airport and jumping the fence
into a sun flower field, because if you think about it,
(34:20):
everything up to that point you can explain by him
being intimidated in a hotel he didn't feel comfortable in
by some guys who aim to rob him, And even
if those guys didn't aim to rob him, just him
thinking that they were going to rob him explains everything
else up to that point. The thing that makes it
(34:41):
inexplicable as far as I'm concerned, is him leaving the
airport the way they did and potentially leaving everything behind.
That throws everything out the window and actually makes the
idea of a traumatic brain injury a lot more possible
in my mind. The problem is that if that's what
happened to him, it's really possible that he's up there,
(35:01):
you know, out in the woods somewhere still and just
hasn't been found and is dead probably by now.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, Or I suppose he could have just you know,
wandered into a town and assimilated.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Well. His mom apparently does believe that he's still out there,
which is why She tries to shake down every lead
she can, but thinks that he does have memory loss
and that that's why he's still out there just and
has never contacted her.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Another theory is that, you know, maybe everything he said
is true, Maybe there were men following him. Maybe it
had something to do with that fight, and these guys
that may or may not have been hired to beat
him up. Apparently the human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem,
and maybe you know, a young, handsome, fit man like
(35:49):
Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and
that he really like had every right to be anxious
and nervous, because otherwise he seemed like he was okay.
It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what
Soandra Matonk has been going through for these years.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
So dude, just can't even I mean, when you had
when you don't have closure like that, your imagination's left
to just fill in whatever blanks. And you know, in
a situation like that, people's imaginations tend to go to
the darkest places. I can't imagine the stuff that she's
come up with or that people have suggested to her too,
you know, being caught up in it and forgetting like
(36:27):
this is the mom, Like this is real to her,
this is her life. This isn't just something on the internet.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
So what about the trucker.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Oh so that's one of the leads that there was
a trucker in uh, what where was it? Brandenburg? The trucker.
So there was a trucker that in twenty nineteen picked
up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove them all the
way to Brandenburg, I guess. And he said later on
he didn't know about the Lars Matonk case at the time,
(36:56):
but he said later on he found out about it
and said, oh man, that's got to be the kid
that I picked up. And so his mom shook down
the story, and I don't think that she ever got
in touch with the truck driver else. The truck driver
was just like, here's what I think, but I can't
say either way, and I don't know where he went.
So there's like a be on the lookout among you know,
(37:19):
Lars Matonk watchers in Brandenburg from that story.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, there was another stuff like that that kept her
going totally.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I thought there was another one about a man in
Dusseldorf that the whole thing lasted for about two hours,
that's how fast things get done. She posted pictures that
somebody had sent her of a man, a homeless man
in Dusseldorf, and asked for more pictures than they Within
two hours, the COPT and Dusseldorf would picked the guy
up and verified that it was not Lars.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think the head injury and loss
of memory, like, he would want to get back to Germany.
By all accounts, he had a good life, enjoyed his job,
was a pretty happy guy and loved Germany. So like
the idea of him choosing to stay there of his
own like sound mind, just doesn't seem likely at all.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
No, and unfortunately that really strongly suggests foul play as
a possibility. To the fact that he has not turned up,
he has every reason to, like you say, turn back
up again, get back to his life. Yes, I saw
that this on the State Department's website for Bulgarian human trafficking. Like,
Bulgaria does have a human trafficking problem, but it seems
(38:29):
to be typically targeting Bulgarians, especially Romani people who end
up getting forced to beg on the streets are forced
into hard labor if you're a man, that it doesn't
necessarily target tourists, and I think the Bulgarian officials would
probably not put up with that because it would harm
tourism so dramatically. So it's fairly unlikely that like a
(38:53):
blonde German guy named you know, Lars would be would
end up begging on the streets of France at the
behest of the bulgar and mafia. And I also saw
another theory that he was a drug mule and he
flipped out and was scared he was gonna get caught
and ran out of the airport. What really kind of
undermines that theory is that no drugs were found in
(39:15):
his stuff, So it's possible he took drugs. A lot
of people are like, well, clearly he was on drugs,
Like why else would you do that. That's a possibility
as well. But again, if you really look at some
of his behavior, it, yes, the fact that he ran
out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's
erratic behavior, but if you look at the way he
(39:36):
was behaving during that erratic behavior, he's not acting erratic,
if that makes any sense. It's just it's one of
the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to
you and Dave Meischner for coming up with this one.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Yeah. I knew nothing about it until Dave saent it.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So way to go, Dave. Yeah, we need to spend
more time on YouTube. I guess we totally missed this one.
You can go back to VidCon right you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Nope?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
All right, Well, if you want to know more about
Lars matonk go out and solve the mystery, will you
at least for his dear mother's sake? And since we
said his dear mother's sake, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I'm going to call this this is another kid writing in.
This is actually from dad. My son Hans colored a
picture of you podcasting today. None prompted nice. Which did
you see this picture?
Speaker 2 (40:28):
No? I got to bring it up.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
It was very cute, which I thought was awesome. I
said we should send it to Josh and Chuck, and
his eyes lit up. He wrote out what he wanted
to type in an email to you, and I thought
it was better to just send you his note. I've
been listening to the show for the last ten years
or so, and introduce my son a few months ago.
We read books before bed, including yours, and then listen
to the podcast as he falls asleep. I'm thankful that
(40:50):
I'm able to share this with Hans. He's a smart
kid with incredible memory, so we'll often bring up facts
he's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten.
Nice and the picture what is adorable?
Speaker 2 (41:02):
What's the name of the guy who sent it?
Speaker 1 (41:04):
I'm looking for Sam Okay And it's a picture with
magic marker and you are sitting upright at a table.
And he actually nailed it because you're on the left.
Uh huh, you know back in the before times when
we were actually in our studio. Yeah, he has it right.
You're on the left. I'm on the right. I am
(41:24):
it looks like I'm passing out though I'm kind of
slumped over. But he's got two little microphones and then
two little pieces of paper with a handwritten thing that
says notes, pointing at the paper and says, I listen
to your show almost every night. And then there's a
handwritten letter which is great, which I'll read as best
(41:44):
I can. I love your show, Chuck and Josh. Today,
I listened to your SYSK about Earwax. I told my
mom and had some of your tips. Hey, have you
guys made a football episode like touchdown? But if not,
can you make one? I listen to almost all the
episodes except ones that my parents don't let me watch.
(42:06):
I also have your book. I have read some of
the chapters in it and they are great. I like
that you guys have different types of episodes, like short
stuff and just regular episodes. I'm your biggest fan. I'm
the second grade. Yours, sincerely, and that is Hans's last
name redacted because he's a kid.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Hans. That was amazing. I'm going to find the picture.
I haven't been able to find it yet, but that
was a beautiful letter. And you have a super cool name.
By the way.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yes, I love it, and thank you Dad, Sam and
whoever else is in the family helping to support the show.
We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yep. Well, if you want to get in touch with us,
like Hans, maybe try drawing a picture. What are you
waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off
to us here at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio, more podcasts,
My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, Chuck here on a Saturday with a little
mystery true crime episode served up for you. It's the
disappearance of Lars Metonk and I think it's me Tonk
And if I'm not mistaken, Josh and I probably pronounced
it all sorts of ways because that's kind of what
we do, much to the annoyance of many of you.
We're very sorry, but I hope you enjoy it. Welcome
(00:27):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry
and this is Stuff you Should Know at another True
Life Mystery edition.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
A True Life Mystery.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, Okay, I don't want to say crime because I'm
not one hundred percent sure crime was involved. I'm sure
it still falls under the umbrella of true crime, but
it's a mystery, a disappearance, how about that?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah? And this one is this can be frustrating to research.
And this is our caveat in that this situation, as
you will learn, happened in Bulgaria to a German Man
and that's part of the reason it's hard to get
great information. There are plenty of people on the Internet
telling this story with different details, and it's just sort
(01:29):
of one of those cases where like we can't get
our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops and
read it ourselves. So we did find a redditor who
did something last year who claims that he got information
from Lars's mother, who you're going to meet, Sondra. She's
not gonna be on the show. You're not going to
(01:49):
really meet her meet through our words. But you know
who knows this is someone on Reddit and all his
sources were in German, so I couldn't double check those either, right.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, No, I mean that's that's a caveat that works
for just about any true crime or disappearance case these days,
just because there's so many people who you know, take
it in a story and run it through their own grinder,
and you know, like you said, little details, little facts
get changed here, and then somebody else picks up the
same fact without double checking it, and now all of
a sudden, it's all over the place, and you can't
(02:23):
tell if that's because it's real or because a bunch
of people just repeated the same incorrect facts. So We're
gonna definitely do our best. But one of the things
about this story is there are enough, you know, totally
verified facts to it that you know, you don't really
need to get completely lost in the details. People have
(02:47):
gotten completely lost in the details, but they've still not
solved the case. That hasn't helped anybody yet, So just
the facts that are known are kind of strange enough.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, And I think it's it's always more comfortable for
us when it's like when there's a book that's been
written about it, published by like a real publisher.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Like Beverly Cleary.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It's not just internet dudes. But you know, a lot
of times these more recent sort of missing person cases,
it is just internet dude.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So you know, yeah, it is what it is. And
the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Matonk
and he's known as the most famous missing person on
YouTube because.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I hate that he is.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
It's pretty bad almost. It should have probably just scared
us off of this episode to begin with. The because
you remember what was the name of that con, the
YouTube Convention. We went to that one time.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Oh, it was like Internet con, but it wasn't that.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It was close to that I can't remember. That almost
put me off of YouTube forever.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
We blocked our memory bank as we did our biggest
show ever there in front of about twelve people. Yeah,
it was pretty bad, but I'll think of it. But
by the way, we should thank Dave Meischner, who's a
listener who turned me onto this quite a while ago.
So sorry it took so long to get to Dave.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So we're talking again. We're talking about Lars matonk and
he vanished from the face of the earth. As his
mom put it, it was like the earth just swallowed him up.
Back on July eighth, twenty fourteen, in a town, a
resort town in Bulgaria on the Black Sea called Golden Sands, which,
looking at pictures of it, it looks like a pretty
(04:34):
charming little place. Big con, that's it. It might as
well have been called Internet Con. Yeah, but did you
look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel
for the place?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, you know, looks like any lovely seaside hamlet.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah. And I couldn't get the impression of whether it
was more like Deston or more like Panama City Beach.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I just couldn't. It seems like a big party spot,
if that's what you're wondering.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, But like it also looked like it was fairly
like clean and well run and not just like you know,
just whatever kind of thing. I don't know, I place
it between the two from what I can tell, But
that's where that's where this event took place, where the
disappearance took place. It's actually Varna, Bulgaria, which is the
(05:21):
main town that Golden Sands Resort beach town is right
outside of.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah. So as far as Lars, the young man who
would go missing, he was born in February nineteen eighty
six in northern Germany. He was an only child. He
was a handsome kid, very popular. He was athletic, he
was smart. He did well in school. After he ended up.
After he graduated, he ended up getting a job at
(05:47):
the GDFSUS power plant about one hundred miles from where
he grew up, fixing small electrical machines. He was an
engineer and it seemed like he had a really good
life and he enjoyed his job. He loved and this
will figure in so put a pin in this. His
one big love was his football club, his soccer team
(06:08):
that he followed, which is in you know, this is
not how they would pronounce it, but the Verder Bremen
football club.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Oh really, how would they pronounce it?
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Well, it's always just a little more German, let's see,
you know, like the guy the Redditor, he narrates his
own documentary and he said it in a way that
I'm not even going to attempt.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Oh okay, all right, fine, So that whole football club
thing actually plays a role in this because it may
be at the center of his disappearance. We're not one
hundred percent sure, but to kind of give you an
idea of what kind of guy Lars Metank was. Metank was.
His dad had a stroke a couple of years before
(06:49):
he disappeared, and his mom had to take care of
his dad full time. Lars was an only child, and
he would come home I guess about one hundred miles
from where he lived and worked almost every weekend to
help take care of his dad, which is not every
guy in their late twenties would do that, you know.
And apparently he was dedicated enough that his mom had
(07:12):
to kind of encourage him to go along with five
other friends of his two week long vacation at Golden
Sands in Bulgaria in July, the end of June beginning
of July. He wasn't going to go, and his mom said, no,
you should should totally go. You deserve a week off
like this, So he went.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah. So it's a big party scene. Like I said,
it is well known for young people from all over
Europe going to take advantage of the resort deals, all
inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs to be had.
Lars was the life of the party. According to his friends,
(07:53):
I saw her anywhere from three to five friends. I
know for sure two guys, and I think these were
his high school mates who were most prominent, named Tim
Schultz and Paul Roman. But they were hanging out, going
to the beach playing soccer. The one weird thing that
I think people may have made too much about online
as far as internet sleuthing goes, is his friends remarked
(08:15):
that he didn't have much of an appetite on the trip,
was eating like soup and salad and fruit, whereas they were,
you know, as an all inclusive resort, so they were
just like feasting on everything. And I think they thought
it was odd that he wasn't, but I don't make
a whole lot about that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, neither did that one reditor or slash documentary and
who said that he apparently had kind of gotten had
been on a health kick, so he was kind of
watching what he ate a little more. Yeah, some people
have been like, there's your there's your answer right there
that explains it at all. Yeah, basically, So, I mean
(08:49):
the week went by pretty uneventfully. I think one of
his friends later said on TV or in an interview
that it went by really quick. On one of the
I think that's second to last day, they went to
watch a World Cup match. The World Cup in Brazil
was going on at the time, and you may not
know this about Europe, but they're really crazy about soccer,
(09:11):
so much so that they have their own word for
it football, which is goofy. But that's the way it goes.
And so they went to this bar rock bar or Okbaar,
which sounds like a cool place, and they watched the match,
i think Costa Rica and the Netherlands. And while they
were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans. They're
(09:33):
watching this from all different clubs and countries, and there
were some kids I guess who were recent high school
graduates and were fans of FC Byron, which is the
rival to Verder Bremen, And I guess they kind of
got into it verbally only with Lars and his friends.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, and I also saw places that there was actual
physical confrontation. Oh yeah, you don't know for sure, but
we do know that it wasn't the biggest deal and
it wasn't the big fight that happened. Later on, after
this night out, the guys apparently go to this McDonald's
which is kind of an open air order at the
(10:16):
open air window kind of thing, and Lars didn't want
to eat because I guess he was on that health kick,
and he sort of just stood nearby while his two
buddies were ordering. They got their food, they turned around,
he wasn't there. They don't see him for the rest
of the night. But like I said, it's sort of like,
you know, spring break party central. So if one of
(10:36):
your friend disappears for the night and you're a bunch
of dudes, you might just think like, all right, well,
you know, maybe he ended up meeting somebody, or maybe
he just went out and partied some more. But it
didn't send up these huge alarms that he didn't come
back that night.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, So when he did show up again, I don't
know if it was later that night or the next morning,
he said that he had been beaten up, actually jumped
by three or four Bulgarian guys, and that he had
gone to duck when one of them threw a punch
and had actually taken a punch in his ear, which
(11:13):
is a terrible place to get punched. And he said
that he was quite convinced that it was those kids,
those high school kids who were fans of Byron FC
Byron that they'd gotten into it with at the bar
earlier that night, because apparently they had said, this is
just I only saw this in one place that they
had said that they had shouted that it's easy to
(11:36):
get to pay somebody to beat other people up in Bulgaria.
And so this happened close enough and close enough proximity
to that other altercation that he just assumed that's why
those guys jumped him. I mean, there's apparently there was
no other explanation for it. So that was his story.
He showed up with an injured ear in the story
(11:56):
that he had been jumped by some local Bulgarians.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yeah, and his friends apparently didn't necessarily believe that story
because he wasn't you know, he didn't have black eyes
or a bloody nose or anything. He looked fine and
he was acting fine, so they weren't too sure about
that story. Again, with the internet, slose, I've seen people
saying that like he totally made up the story about
the fight. But that is all just people speculating online.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
I know, if you ever want to see people just
take a piece of information and then spin it to
the n degree the most extreme possible interpretation of it,
that you could do worse than hang out on the internet.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So he goes to a doctor, he gets the diagnosis
of a ruptured ear drum. Apparently went and saw a
specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should
get surgery, and Lars is like, great, but I'm not
getting that here. I'm going to go back come to
Germany if I'm going to get surgery.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
And then this is sort of one of the keys
is he was given biotic name cepheroxyme and he was
given the strongest possible dosage, which was about I think
it was five hundred milligrams.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yes, and that's just a general I think a cephalexin
based antibiotic that doesn't really usually have many side effects,
and if it does have side effects, it's typically something
like an upset stomach. I saw that there's a condition
where it turns huge patches of your skin very dark
all over the place, almost like your highlights have been shaded.
(13:34):
It's really interesting to look at. But that has nothing
to do with any other anything that Lars exhibited, any
behavior exhibited. It's just antibiotics. I mean, if you've ever
taken antibiotics, you know that there's not really usually many
side effects to it.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Right, So Lars catches well, again, different information. I saw
that his friends were going to stay with him. He
insisted they leave. So his friends eventually do catch that
original flight out and Lars stays behind, you know, because
of his ear. He was a little concerned about obviously,
(14:16):
with changes in the atmosphere and on pressurization on a plane.
He didn't think it was a good idea. And I'm
not sure if that original doctor told him that might
have been a problem, but he knew it was going
to be a problem.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So a little bit about that original doctor. I saw
that from the redditor who said that he spoke to
the guys to his mother, that his mother said that
that Lars said that the doctor didn't really treat him.
The first one did and said you should go to
a specialist. But then when he went to the specialist,
a specialist said like wouldn't speak to him in English,
(14:48):
and Lars felt he had mocked him, and that apparently
Sondra thought that that was really significant because that was
not a word that Lars typically used. But he still
managed to get the antibiotic from doctor. The thing about
the perforated or ruptured ear drum is I was looking
on the internet, it turns out, and the National Health
(15:09):
Service says that if you have a perforated ear drum,
it would probably actually make flying more comfortable, not more dangerous.
So I can understand Lars being worried about that, not
being a trained medical professional, but if he's encountering at
least three other medical professionals in Bulgaria, you would think
one of them would be like, actually, no, you're actually
(15:31):
better off flying like this, or would at the very
least be like, you don't have to worry about that
at all. That's not a thing interesting yeah, so too.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
All right, well, let's take a break and we will
come back and talk about what happened after his friends
left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this, all right,
(16:19):
so Lars's buddies go back home to Germany. Lars is
left there by himself, which is pretty key as far
as understanding that they weren't worried about him. He wasn't
behaving weird. He seemed fine. He seemed like Lars. Otherwise
one of them probably would have raised some sort of
alarm bells and been like, hey, maybe we should stay here,
(16:40):
but they said he seemed to relaxed, he was in a
good mood, and so they took off. Being summer, Lars
had a hard time getting a hotel room because everything
was booked up and he was staying on extra, so
he ends up having to check into the Hotel Color
of Varna, which was a really cdy place that this
(17:02):
cab driver takes him to, apparently a lot of drug dealers,
a lot of sex workers, but that was kind of
the only place available, And we don't know a lot
about what happened that night other than these phone calls
and texts that he exchanges with his mom.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
So one thing though about the hotel color I looked
at it. Trip Advisor gives it a four out of
five and booking dot Com has it at seven point
eight out of ten. And it is definitely cheap. I
think rooms are like twenty five American dollars a night,
which is suspiciously cheap. And that yeah, there is like
probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like
(17:38):
it's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that.
But it was the fact that it was his only
option I think kind of tells you quite a bit
too about it. Sure, So he goes to this hotel
he checks in. Apparently the person behind the counter made
a copy, a photo copy of his credit card, and
according to his mother, that did not sit very well
(17:59):
with Lar. And at eleven PM, after he's checked into
the hotel, he calls his mom, I think it's the
first phone first of many phone calls that evening, and
he tells her that he wants her to block his
credit card because he's kind of sketched out by this
hotelier who has made a photo copy of his card.
(18:20):
He's worried that they're going to use it for fraud
and he can just unfreeze it when he gets back.
That's the first phone call he makes.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, there ends up being another call where he has
left the hotel. He said that he was hiding on
a hill, and I think even said that he was
at risk of falling, So it must have been sort
of some sort of a really steep type of situation,
I guess. But he said that there were four men
after him that were trying to kill him, or that
(18:49):
intended to kill him at least, And he said, don't
call me back because my phone. I don't want my
phone to ring. I'm not sure I knew he didn't
have his smartphone with him. He left that at home yea,
and brought sort of a cheaper phone, So I don't
know if it didn't have a way to turn the
ringer off or not, or if he was just not
thinking clearly, but he said not to call him back.
He eventually texts his mom what is Sarah? Fom five hundred,
(19:12):
which was that antibiotic which you might think means like
he's feeling weird and like, what is this?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I've taken that to me says that if he was
behaving weirdly or experiencing some different behavior that he guessed
that that's what it was. That's the only explanation for that,
because they found that he had taken three of them,
so he knew that he had that in his system,
(19:40):
which I guess if he was acting weird, maybe that's
what he thought it was. That's what sticks out to me.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Yeah, and I think it was either that night or
the following morning. When he asks, I think it was
the following morning. You know, she had booked a flight
home for him. He doesn't get back in touch with her,
which really worked. He's her. But the next morning he
does get back in touch. This is two days after
this bar fight. She's relieved. He says he's going to
(20:07):
go to the airport and can he get five hundred
euros wired, you know, money grammed or whatever?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Western you know what?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Did they have Western Union over there?
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah? Supposedly there's a real detail in there and that
it was Western Union.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, what's the what makes Western Union important?
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So his mother had never heard of Western Union and
Lars hadn't either, But apparently he talked to another German
tourist at the airport who had told him to use it,
and he was able to describe to his mom how
to use Western Union in a way that she understood
how to use Western Union after he explained it, which
said to his mom that he had his wits about him.
He wasn't out of his mind, he wasn't wasted on
(20:49):
drugs or anything like that. He was very much with
it mentally.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
All right. So he and I saw two different things here.
Either his mom urged him to go to the airport
doctor just to make sure he's good to fly, or
there was some requirement that he do so. But either way,
he goes to the airport medical center. And this is
where things get a little confusing, because it's really all
(21:17):
over the place, whether or not he goes in right
away or whether he goes in later. But he apparently
calls his mom tells her, hey, they said I shouldn't
fly or drive. But he hadn't even gone to see
the doctor at that point. And then once he does
see the doctor, the doctor ends up giving a few
different versions of what happened while he was in there,
(21:37):
which is either, you know, some people think that looks
really shady. I think it could have just been like
at the time, this doctor, you know, you're not making
some really big mental notes about the random patient that
comes in.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Like, this guy's going to be an international mystery in
an hour.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, So you know, it could have been innocent that
his story changed, or it could be shady.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
It could be so so from what I saw, that
the doctor changes story three times, and that an airline
employee came in, and then later it was an airport
employee came in, which I think kind of across the internet,
became a construction worker because that the airport had recently
undergone or was undergoing renovations. And then I guess the
(22:21):
third story was that the doctor said that no one
had come in, and that Lars had excused himself to
go to the toilet and did not come back. The
doctor was expecting to come back. He just never came back.
What the doctor didn't know if that was in fact
what happened was that Lars wasn't coming back because he
was sprinting through the airport and running out of the
(22:43):
airport and into the surrounding countryside.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah. And then the version where someone does come in.
What that means is is that literally a human being,
another person walks into the examination room and apparently really
freaked out. If that version is correct, really freaked out Lars,
who was already obviously feeling a little bit paranoid sure,
(23:07):
and was like, what is this person doing in here?
In the one version of the story, the doctor tries
to explain, Hey, it's just a construction guy, or no,
this is an airline employee that's going to actually walk
you to the plane. It's a little frustrating to not
know the exact truth, but no matter what happens, we
do know that he sprinted from the airport because that
(23:27):
part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV, and that's
why he's the most famous disappeared person on YouTube, because
it's very compelling to watch this young kid drop all
and you don't see him drop his stuff, but clearly
he walks in with a backpack and a duffel bag
and he sprints with nothing in his hands at like
(23:50):
full twenty one year old athletic gallop out of there,
as if someone is chasing him.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah so, but there's a couple of weird things about it.
If you watch the video, and again you can go
anywhere on the internet and see this. I think it's
a good thirty seconds of it cut together, that he
is running in the airport, and then when he gets
outside he kind of like walks and then jogs a
little bit and runs some more. But then I saw
somebody on I think I was read it too on
(24:18):
a different post. Their Unresolved Mysteries group is just really good.
But somebody pointed out that if you watch him, he's
not really like looking behind him. He's not looking to
see somebody coming after him, And it kind of puts
a different spin on things because you do think, well,
surely he's running for his life, but if you're running
(24:38):
for your life, it does seem like you would be
a lot more concerned about who was coming after you
and would probably look behind you a little more. He
doesn't quite do that. Actually, it's a very strange run,
but it's also not like the run of a person
who's out of their mind. That was what stood out
to me, is that he doesn't seem to at all
(24:59):
be out of his mind.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, and another couple of details here that was tough
to verify. Supposedly, in the doctor's office he said, I
don't want to die here. I have to get out
of here. Don't know if that's true or not, but
supposedly that's what he said, and then the mom Sondra
evidently saw. She went over there to do her own investigating,
(25:26):
obviously right after it happened, and supposedly saw footage directly
from the airport that had a lot of different stuff
that was not included in the footage that went to
the police, And she said in the footage that she
saw was that when he leaves the airport, he stands
there like checks his pocket as if he's checking to
make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff,
(25:49):
and kind of looks around and orients himself for a minute,
like should I go this way? Should I go that way?
If you look at other places on the internet and
you just look at that footage, it looks like he
just bolts from the airport and then continues to either
kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks
his pockets, never orients himself at all.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Yeah, So he actually walks within twenty feet of a
couple of cops who are standing talking to on another
in the parking lot. He walks past them, he goes
behind a sampile, and then eventually goes over I think
is it actually on camera him going over the fence
or is it just presumed that he went over the fence.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
No, it's on camera, but it's one of those things
where it's like they had to circle and highlight him
because he's so far in the distance. But he goes
over a barbed wire fence into a full bloom sunflower field, yeah,
which are very very tall and literally disappears, never to
be seen again now.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And on the other side of that sunflower field, very
importantly is the A two highway, so who knows what happened.
And then beyond that there's a lot of woods. I
wouldn't call it like the most densely forested place on earth,
but there's a pretty decent sized woods around there. There's
also a lot of farm fields too that's exposed and
out in the open. But there's a highway on the
(27:05):
other side of it, and that's, to me, is extremely important.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
All right, should we take another break? Yes, all right,
we're going to take another break and bring it home
with what happened from there and then some of the
theories about what happened to Lars Matonk.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So Chuck. Just to recap Lars Motonk has fled is
a really good way to put it. The airport, leaving
behind in the doctor's office all of his stuff, including
his wallet, phone in passport.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Now is that verified.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I saw that basically everywhere, including.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Except for his speculating that she saw him checking as.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, I didn't. I thought that was very confusing. But
I saw it in the sun which I realized is
not the most credible source, but sadly it is one
of the most credible sources when it comes to researching
this case. I saw it on a Yale article. It's
it's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were
(28:29):
left behind. But I mean, that's a really good point,
like we're totally we're lost in the sunflower field. As
far as that stuff concerns, we we don't know. We
got to get our hands on the police report, and
even that I read when when Lars's mom hired a
Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator, they got weird conflicting information
(28:55):
about you know, what was found with him or not,
or what was what was left behind him or not,
So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what
was there.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, I get the picture that it was a frustrating
experience working with the Bulgarian police it seems like Germany
got involved with Inner Pole, but they had some frustrations
as well. There's there's some speculation that they intentionally kind
of kept the story on the download because they didn't
want it to affect tourism.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, I could see that.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Other people say that. Well maybe not that, but it
just wasn't widely known it was some German kid. It
wasn't all over the newspapers, and so people, you know,
they didn't necessarily even know what was going on if
they saw this flyer, or they maybe not. Maybe they
didn't even run it on the evening news.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, and so like if it was three weeks, four
weeks after the disappearance, that like news started to really spread,
or maybe news never really spread. If you were a
driver and you gave a kid a ride on the
eighth two highway outside of the airport, you might not
have ever put two and two together. Or if you
saw some kid running through a field into the woods,
(30:09):
you might not have ever heard of Lars Metonk either.
So it's possible there's people out there with information who
just don't know to cough it up, although that's probably
exceedingly unlikely these days because of the exposure that this
story's gotten.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, one interesting tidbit is that they did find that
those five hundred euros were untouched in his account, and
I don't think we mentioned. I think some people speculate
the fact that it was five hundred euros on the
nose and that it was Western Union and he had
never used it meant that he was being told by
(30:49):
somebody to get five hundred euros wired via this way.
But again that's just internet speculation.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision.
He just asked her to wire him some money, some
money she had decided that that was according to that
documentarian who knows, we really need to get Sondra matonk
On here, dude.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
One of the cool things that happened through this through
his mother investigating this is various leads came in over
the years, like hey, there's this guy that speaks German,
he could be Lars. She would go check it out.
There's this other guy. Over the years, she has ended
up finding fifteen German expatriates in Bulgaria. Some were atticts,
(31:33):
some were mentally ill, some were actually reunited with her family,
some didn't want to be reunited. But she found all
these people, so like every time that happened, it gave
her hope that even though the chances, you know, with
a case like this is if you don't find this
person within the first a few days or the first week,
it's like very slim to no chance, all of these
(31:55):
things gave her hope that she could if she just
kept at it, that she might eventually find her son.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I was really surprised to see that there was
a statin here that said that something like only three
percent of missing persons cases aren't resolved within the first
year in Germany, not even in Germany, but among German citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I thought it would be a lot higher than that,
but that's actually not bad as far as I can tell. So, yeah,
one of those people, by the way, who was found
that was thought to be there's like a whole thing
where people are following this case, and anytime something ends
up on the internet, it ends up being passed along
(32:37):
to Sondra Matonk, who will basically post on her Instagram like, hey,
this was sent from this town. Can somebody go see
if they can find this homeless guy and get me
more pictures of them? So we can figure out if
it's Lars. Like she does this kind of frequently. There
was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who
looks a lot like Lars, but disheveled with the beard
(32:59):
and his haircut kind of crazy. Yeah, And that turned
out to be a different man who was missing from
British Columbia named Anton Pilpa, who was reunited with his
family after five years. And they think that heke hitch
hiked and walked from British Columbia down to Brazil and
then kind of lived around Rio. I think Rio on
(33:21):
his own for a while during a mental break man.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
So some of the theories over the years that have
been formed, the one that seems the most obvious to
me is that along with the ear injury, there was
some sort of a head injury, maybe a concussion left
untreated that led to erratic behavior and paranoia maybe, and
that you know, once he had left and had no
(33:49):
money and no phone and no passport, he sort of
was just sort of perhaps lost his memory and lost
in Bulgaria and still lost in Bulgaria.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, that's entirely possible, especially if it was a head
injury that was getting worse and worse by the hour.
That could definitely explain the erratic behavior of leaving his
stuff and running through the airport and jumping the fence
into a sun flower field, because if you think about it,
(34:20):
everything up to that point you can explain by him
being intimidated in a hotel he didn't feel comfortable in
by some guys who aim to rob him, And even
if those guys didn't aim to rob him, just him
thinking that they were going to rob him explains everything
else up to that point. The thing that makes it
(34:41):
inexplicable as far as I'm concerned, is him leaving the
airport the way they did and potentially leaving everything behind.
That throws everything out the window and actually makes the
idea of a traumatic brain injury a lot more possible
in my mind. The problem is that if that's what
happened to him, it's really possible that he's up there,
(35:01):
you know, out in the woods somewhere still and just
hasn't been found and is dead probably by now.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, Or I suppose he could have just you know,
wandered into a town and assimilated.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Well. His mom apparently does believe that he's still out there,
which is why She tries to shake down every lead
she can, but thinks that he does have memory loss
and that that's why he's still out there just and
has never contacted her.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Another theory is that, you know, maybe everything he said
is true, Maybe there were men following him. Maybe it
had something to do with that fight, and these guys
that may or may not have been hired to beat
him up. Apparently the human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem,
and maybe you know, a young, handsome, fit man like
(35:49):
Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and
that he really like had every right to be anxious
and nervous, because otherwise he seemed like he was okay.
It's all very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what
Soandra Matonk has been going through for these years.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
So dude, just can't even I mean, when you had
when you don't have closure like that, your imagination's left
to just fill in whatever blanks. And you know, in
a situation like that, people's imaginations tend to go to
the darkest places. I can't imagine the stuff that she's
come up with or that people have suggested to her too,
you know, being caught up in it and forgetting like
(36:27):
this is the mom, Like this is real to her,
this is her life. This isn't just something on the internet.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
So what about the trucker.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Oh so that's one of the leads that there was
a trucker in uh, what where was it? Brandenburg? The trucker.
So there was a trucker that in twenty nineteen picked
up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove them all the
way to Brandenburg, I guess. And he said later on
he didn't know about the Lars Matonk case at the time,
(36:56):
but he said later on he found out about it
and said, oh man, that's got to be the kid
that I picked up. And so his mom shook down
the story, and I don't think that she ever got
in touch with the truck driver else. The truck driver
was just like, here's what I think, but I can't
say either way, and I don't know where he went.
So there's like a be on the lookout among you know,
(37:19):
Lars Matonk watchers in Brandenburg from that story.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, there was another stuff like that that kept her
going totally.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I thought there was another one about a man in
Dusseldorf that the whole thing lasted for about two hours,
that's how fast things get done. She posted pictures that
somebody had sent her of a man, a homeless man
in Dusseldorf, and asked for more pictures than they Within
two hours, the COPT and Dusseldorf would picked the guy
up and verified that it was not Lars.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think the head injury and loss
of memory, like, he would want to get back to Germany.
By all accounts, he had a good life, enjoyed his job,
was a pretty happy guy and loved Germany. So like
the idea of him choosing to stay there of his
own like sound mind, just doesn't seem likely at all.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
No, and unfortunately that really strongly suggests foul play as
a possibility. To the fact that he has not turned up,
he has every reason to, like you say, turn back
up again, get back to his life. Yes, I saw
that this on the State Department's website for Bulgarian human trafficking. Like,
Bulgaria does have a human trafficking problem, but it seems
(38:29):
to be typically targeting Bulgarians, especially Romani people who end
up getting forced to beg on the streets are forced
into hard labor if you're a man, that it doesn't
necessarily target tourists, and I think the Bulgarian officials would
probably not put up with that because it would harm
tourism so dramatically. So it's fairly unlikely that like a
(38:53):
blonde German guy named you know, Lars would be would
end up begging on the streets of France at the
behest of the bulgar and mafia. And I also saw
another theory that he was a drug mule and he
flipped out and was scared he was gonna get caught
and ran out of the airport. What really kind of
undermines that theory is that no drugs were found in
(39:15):
his stuff, So it's possible he took drugs. A lot
of people are like, well, clearly he was on drugs,
Like why else would you do that. That's a possibility
as well. But again, if you really look at some
of his behavior, it, yes, the fact that he ran
out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's
erratic behavior, but if you look at the way he
(39:36):
was behaving during that erratic behavior, he's not acting erratic,
if that makes any sense. It's just it's one of
the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to
you and Dave Meischner for coming up with this one.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Yeah. I knew nothing about it until Dave saent it.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So way to go, Dave. Yeah, we need to spend
more time on YouTube. I guess we totally missed this one.
You can go back to VidCon right you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Nope?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
All right, Well, if you want to know more about
Lars matonk go out and solve the mystery, will you
at least for his dear mother's sake? And since we
said his dear mother's sake, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I'm going to call this this is another kid writing in.
This is actually from dad. My son Hans colored a
picture of you podcasting today. None prompted nice. Which did
you see this picture?
Speaker 2 (40:28):
No? I got to bring it up.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
It was very cute, which I thought was awesome. I
said we should send it to Josh and Chuck, and
his eyes lit up. He wrote out what he wanted
to type in an email to you, and I thought
it was better to just send you his note. I've
been listening to the show for the last ten years
or so, and introduce my son a few months ago.
We read books before bed, including yours, and then listen
to the podcast as he falls asleep. I'm thankful that
(40:50):
I'm able to share this with Hans. He's a smart
kid with incredible memory, so we'll often bring up facts
he's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten.
Nice and the picture what is adorable?
Speaker 2 (41:02):
What's the name of the guy who sent it?
Speaker 1 (41:04):
I'm looking for Sam Okay And it's a picture with
magic marker and you are sitting upright at a table.
And he actually nailed it because you're on the left.
Uh huh, you know back in the before times when
we were actually in our studio. Yeah, he has it right.
You're on the left. I'm on the right. I am
(41:24):
it looks like I'm passing out though I'm kind of
slumped over. But he's got two little microphones and then
two little pieces of paper with a handwritten thing that
says notes, pointing at the paper and says, I listen
to your show almost every night. And then there's a
handwritten letter which is great, which I'll read as best
(41:44):
I can. I love your show, Chuck and Josh. Today,
I listened to your SYSK about Earwax. I told my
mom and had some of your tips. Hey, have you
guys made a football episode like touchdown? But if not,
can you make one? I listen to almost all the
episodes except ones that my parents don't let me watch.
(42:06):
I also have your book. I have read some of
the chapters in it and they are great. I like
that you guys have different types of episodes, like short
stuff and just regular episodes. I'm your biggest fan. I'm
the second grade. Yours, sincerely, and that is Hans's last
name redacted because he's a kid.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Hans. That was amazing. I'm going to find the picture.
I haven't been able to find it yet, but that
was a beautiful letter. And you have a super cool name.
By the way.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yes, I love it, and thank you Dad, Sam and
whoever else is in the family helping to support the show.
We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yep. Well, if you want to get in touch with us,
like Hans, maybe try drawing a picture. What are you
waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off
to us here at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio, more podcasts,
My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
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Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Betrayal Season 5
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com