November 6, 2025 • 45 mins
In 1996, a small group of German tourists disappeared in Death Valley National Park without a trace. Fifteen years later, the tenacity of one man solved the case.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I don't really think you could call it
part of our ongoing true crime suite, but certainly unsolved
mystery suite.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I think, yeah, semi solved mystery, I guess at this
point because we're talking about what's known as the Death
Valley Germans. Pretty good band name, but it's in fact
a very sad story from July nineteen ninety six when
a blended family of German tourists came to the United
States for a three week tour of California and Nevada
(00:46):
and we're never seen again alive.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, they just vanished into thin air, essentially in Death
Valley National Park and they've I mean, it's weird like essentially,
there was one guy who will meet later who got
it as close to solved as possible just from sheer determination.
But the family that you were talking about, they were
(01:10):
made up of Egbert Rimkus, who was thirty four. He
was an architect. He was the dad. George. I'm not
sure how to say George without an e. You took German?
Are you familiar? No?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I guess it's George Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He was eleven. He was Egbert's biological son. Connie Meyer,
Cornelia Connie Meyer, she was twenty seven. She was Egbert's girlfriend,
and Max was Connie's biological son from a previous relationship.
He was four and Egbert had gone through a fairly
difficult divorce recently. And so this trip was essentially meant
(01:45):
to be like a fun bonding experience for the four
of them, Yeah, to kind of form a family unit
in this new new reality, these new circumstances they were in.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So they got to LA on July eight eighth. They
had a return flight to Dresden, which is where they
were from, for July twenty seventh, and the on the
docket was about a week or so in the LA area,
head on over to Las Vegas for a few days,
go to Death Valley National Park, check that out, head
(02:19):
over to Yosemite from there, and then go back to
LA and fly home. It's a it's a pretty standard
little itinerary for that that kind of you know, three
week adventure.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I would say yes. And for the adventure, they rented
a car, a ninety six Plymouth Voyager minivan, and they
rented it from Dollar rent a Car. Being German, they
would have rented it from Dollar because that's the American
subsidiary of deutsch Mark rent a Car.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah huh.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And it was due back on the twenty sixth of July,
which is a day before their flight back to Germany. Right,
that's right. The problem is is Dollar rent a Car
never got their minivan back and the family didn't make
their flight to Germany. And not everybody noticed this. I mean,
certainly no one in America paid much attention. But remember
Egbert had an ex wife who was the mom of George,
(03:12):
and George's mom Heike, she was. She wanted to know
where her son was, so she alerted the authorities, and
very quickly Interpol put out an international alert for four
missing German tourists last seen in southern California. And here's
their itinerary. And it went absolutely nowhere. This is the
(03:34):
end of July, beginning of August nineteen ninety six, and
nothing happened for months.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah, I think about I guess until October twenty first,
when a ranger was flying around in a helicopter looking
for mess labs, and he said, hey, this is a
very remote part of Death Valley, even for Death Valley,
and there's a Plymouth Voyager minivan with three flat tires
(03:58):
that had clearly been you know, mired in the sand.
So immediately like, what is this thing? Once they figured
out who the family was and this was who was missing,
they were nowhere to be found. There were no signs
of life, there were no signs of death. There was
nothing at all. And so the mystery of the Death
Valley Germans was born right there in one of the
(04:21):
most inhospitable places on Earth.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, and the whole thing wouldn't be close solved or
close to being solved for another fifteen years. And for
those of us who aren't familiar with Death Valley, it's
a national park, like I said, that straddles California and Nevada,
and it is. It lives up to its name. It
(04:44):
doesn't have the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, but
it has the second highest, and it's very close. The
highest temperature ever recorded in Death Valley in the summer
of nineteen thirteen was one hundred and thirty four degrees
farent height. Yeah, fifty six point seven degrees celsius hot.
I think the record was in Elaziza, Libya, in nineteen
(05:05):
twenty two. It was only two and a half degrees
hotter than that. So clearly Death Valley is very hot.
And even in a regular summer it's still crazy hot.
And in nineteen ninety six in the summer, remember they're
in there hanging out in late July, which is the
height of the summer of Death Valley. The daily high
(05:25):
temperature the average was one hundred and twenty four degrees
height and ninety one was the low.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, so it's scorching hot, which is just you know,
it's very dangerous conditions, especially if you're not used in
that kind of thing, not prepared for that kind of thing. Apparently,
Death Valley is something that was I guess two days
ago years old when I found out is a very
popular tour site for Germans. There was a writer in
(05:55):
the nineteenth century name Karl My spelled m a y
writer had never been to Death Valley, but wrote a
bunch of hugely popular travel adventure books set in the
American Southwest, including Death Valley. Some were made into spaghetti westerns,
including one called The Valley of Death in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
But this dude, whom I've.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Never heard of, sold two hundred million books, so, like
you know, one of the top selling authors of all time.
And so Germans as a result, became fascinated with making
that trek out to Death Valley. And that's what this
family did.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, you didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I had never heard of this guy, had you No?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Okay, So this is popular with German tourists, but that's
not to say that all German tourists who go to
Death Valley die or get lost or even don't have
a good time. Like of course, yeah, it's a very
popular place. But people do die in Death Valley National
Park every year, every summer in particular, and between twenty
seven and twenty twenty four, sixty eight people died in
(06:55):
Death Valley. There's a lot of people who died simply
from being a exposed to the local weather. They died
of hyper thermia, most of them, I think twenty or
not most, but twenty percent died of hyperthermia, which if
you've ever been in a hot sauna that got too
hot for your comfort, that you imagine dying from that,
that's dying from hyperthermia. I think the rest who died
(07:19):
from exposure died from dehydration, because that can come on
really quick too.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So a day after this mini ban is discovered by
a helicopter and death Valley, the ranger came back with
the local sheriff on the ground to check it out.
Or maybe they flew out there, who knows, but at
any rate, at some point their feet were on the ground.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
They opened the van up. They, like I said, there
were three flat tires.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It was stuck up to its axles in the sand,
and they determined that it had driven for at least
a couple of hundred feet on the flat tires.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
The whole thing was covered in dust.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You know, clearly hadn't been seen by anyone else or disturbed.
That was the things you would expect to fine from
disappeared people on an adventurisfication like this, like their luggage
and their clothes like nothing really weird. Empty water bottles,
empty juice containers, a couple of unopened bottles of bud
Ice beer, which you remember that yeah, dates the thing
(08:14):
in the mid nineties. I was never into the ice beers.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
No, I think, if I remember correctly, it just it
got you more crunk than the average beer.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
I feel like that was how they sold it. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
I mean that was before things like high gravity beers
really came to the forefront. So maybe it was like,
you know, these things have an extra percentage of abb.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah. I think the slogan was bud ice, get you plastered.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I remember the dry beers too.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I thought it was fancy in college at one point
because I was drinking michelob dry.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Oh. At this point, speaking of fancy, I was drinking Zema.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Oh. I never went down the Zemer road.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Oh they were They went down easy.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
What was the flavor? What was it like a sprite?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yes, it was. It was close to that, Like it
wouldn't take a sip of zem and be like, that's right.
But that's probably the closest thing you could just mention
off the top of your head. Some people put jolly
ranchers in it too, to flavor it even further. It
also had a bit of like a dry like in
the sense that champagne can be dry. It had a
(09:16):
little bit of that nothing that you'd be like, wow,
it's a really dry drink. But yeah, and I think
ultimately it was malt liquor, which really could get you
plastered too.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I used to drink the Mickey's Big Mouths in college
and the occasional little giant Schlitz tall Boy can.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, those were the days. I keep it pretty simple
these days.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
But yeah, but you're right there. But Ice definitely dates
it to the mid nineties for sure, and they're like,
you said, this is kind of important. That's why I'm
going back to it. There were a couple of bottles
of unopened but ice beer still in the minivan.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, And then one of the just sort of small
clue as far as to show where they'd been, there
was a business card from the Seahorse Resort in San Clemente,
which is where they stayed while I guess seeing the
LA area, which is not super close to LA, so
I guess maybe they wanted to be between LA and
San Diego or something.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
I think they just saw pictures of the view and
were like there, maybe because the view is very nice.
So there was a guide book there too, in German,
a guidebook that they purchased or that was purchased at
the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley and like
I said, it was in German. And so they went
to the visitors center. Investigators did later, and they found
(10:34):
that on July twenty second, there were two German language
guide books sold at the visitor center at Furnace Creek
and none on July twenty third. So with that they
started to be able to begin to retrace their steps.
That was the first clue that they were able to
kind of extrapolate from.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, so their second clue came when they found undevelop
roles of film and cameras, So sort of like the
end of the hangover, they were able to get those
developed and pieced together, you know, at least roughly by
way of the pictures they took, at least what they
had done on their trip, maybe even as we'll see
clues to where they like the last picture taken obviously
(11:17):
would be the most instructive. So from these pictures they
realized they stayed in San Clementy for a little while
seeing the La area, they drove up the California coast
and then over to Las Vegas, Nevada, and there they
stayed at the Treasure Island Hotel, which also dates this
in the mid nineties and there, they found that the father, Egbert,
(11:41):
had called his bank in Germany on July twelfth try
to have another fifteen hundred bucks wired to Bank of
American San Clemente, but they sent it to the wrong
bank and at Treasure Island. He you know, he was
clearly in need of some dough as he even faxed
his ex wife and said, hey, which also dates this,
can you send more money?
Speaker 3 (12:00):
And she never responded.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah. What I didn't get and I didn't see anyone
explain it is why he was just like, oh, well
they send it to the La branch of Bank of
America rather than San Clemente. I guess there's nothing I
can do to go get it. He just never went
and picked up the fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well maybe he didn't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, I mean I would still spend some time trying
to figure out where my fifteen hundred dollars. That's about
three thousand dollars in today's money, So it seems like
he just shrugged it off. From what from his actions,
I just think that's really strange.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I mean, also could have been one of those
things where where they're like, well, sir, we don't know
which banket's in, stop bothering us, and like we can find.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Out in a week. Yeah, it could be, and you know,
they had a schedule, so who knows.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah. So the long and short of it, though, is
they were low on funds now right. And Luckily, if
you're going to national parks like Death Valley and Yosemite
and the only thing you're doing after that is making
it back to the airport to turn in your car
and take your flight home, you can get by on
some pretty low funds. You can still buy some but
ice it wasn't particularly expensive, so they seem to kind
(13:07):
of be making their way low on funds, and that
actually helped track them a little bit further later on.
But there was one other clue too, and it was
an American flag and it had Butte Valley Stone Cabin
on its label. That's where it belonged to in Death Valley.
(13:28):
It's locally called the Geologist Cabin, and I think it
does what it says on the label, which is it
houses geologists who are conducting experiments out there. So there's
food there, there's water there, but they keep it locked.
If you're a geologist, it's kind of like a gas
station bathroom. You have to go get the key first
before you start using the geologist's cabin. So they seem
(13:49):
to have just taken the flag as maybe a souvenir
or something like that. Like I know, if I were
in the Black Forest and I came across the German flag,
I would take it and then take it back to
America as a souvenir.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, I guess that's what this was being used for
back then, because I think now you can actually stay there.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh really, Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
A you know, along the Appleachian Trail and just sort
of all over in national parks. They'll be like a
remote cabin that you know, you come, you can stay there.
There might be some food and water rations if you
need it, and you're the idea is that you're supposed
to leave something, yeah, and leave it better than you
found it, because I've seen pictures of people that you know,
in the twenty tens that have stayed there, and like
(14:31):
it's it's a destination for people who are into Death
Valley because it's super cool looking.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
It's out in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
It's like a stone cabin and it's on a lot
of people's list of like I want to go stay
at the geologists cabin. So I guess that just wasn't
the deal back then, right, because it was locked up
what I don't get, Well, we'll get.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
To what I don't get later. Okay, should we take.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
A break, Yeah, I think that's a good spot.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back
with more on the Death Valley Germans right after this.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Okay, Chuck, So where we left off, they had Pilford
the American flag from the geologist's cabin, and right, like,
all of this stuff, this is just the stuff they
found in the van. This is as far as the
search has gone. Yeah, And so the rangers of the
park start conducting their own investigation, and they go to
like Furnace Creek Ranch, which is a resort kind of upscale.
(15:48):
There's a campground, but you have to pay for all
those and there was no record of the family staying
at either of those places on July twenty second or
twenty third, or anytime. Really. One of the other things
they did was check logbooks. Apparently they pick up log
books even at sites that don't have anyone working there.
They'll still have a log book, and they struck gold
(16:10):
at one of them, the Warm Springs Mine log Book,
which is an abandoned mine above Death Valley in the mountains.
I guess on a ridge and you can get to it.
It's a road. There's a road that goes to it.
It's nothing that you would normally call a road, but
in Death Valley National Park it might as well be
a luxurious eight eight lane highway. It's gravel, it's rough,
(16:33):
but a Plymouth voyager can get on this road to
Warm Springs Mine. And in the logbook they got a
huge clue that would help track them down later.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, they signed it.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It was in German, apparently it was barely legible, and
it said we are going over the pass. Signed Connie, Egbert,
George and Max So On October twenty third, this is
two days after the minivan is found. They finally conduct
a big four day search looking for this family. About
(17:07):
two hundred and fifty plus people, a couple of helicopters,
eight horses. A lot of these were volunteers, but dozens
of them were trained search and rescue people. Right, no slouches,
No slouches. Well, there was one slouch, but he didn't
last long because it was Death.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Valleyene exactly, and the only evidence from this four day
search was an empty bottle of butt ice and a
butt print basically in the sand next to it, where
someone had clearly sat down and enjoyed that butt ice.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It was about one point seven miles away from the van.
And yeah, clearly somebody took a little break in the
shade and had that sweet, sweet extra potent ice, beear.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Right, and they could even figure when they probably figured
it was Egbert because the size of the butt print
was fairly large. Well that's how I saw it described.
I think that is. I think they're just saying larger
than say a woman's or a child's, which is the
only other people with them in this party. Right. But
(18:09):
it was on the east side of the bush, so
that if he was taking refuge from it in the shade,
that means that the sun would have been in the
western part of the sky, so he would have been
sitting there in late afternoon, which seems ludicrous to even
point out, but it would come into play later on.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So again in that visitor's log it says we're going
over the pass. The only pass near there is called
Mingle Pass M E and G E L. And if
you look on a map back in nineteen ninety six,
before you had you know, smartphones and things like that,
or people on the internet saying, hey, don't go this way, right,
it looks like it's pretty possible to drive from Warm Springs,
(18:48):
go through that Mingle Pass into an adjacent valley, and
then hit a dirt road toward Yosemite, which was their
next destination. They didn't know that, you know, they didn't
have knowledge that it wouldn't it wasn't going to be
just like a little sort of rocky path, but something
you really really need a four by four vehicle four
(19:09):
like full stop. It's not like, well maybe we can
make it in the Plymouth Voyager, Like you can't make
it down this road with anything other than a four
by four.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
And even that's dicey.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, I saw that. Not only do you need a
four by four, you need an experienced driver who has
who can get through this stuff too. Like you can't
just put some yahoo in a four by four and
expect them to make it. It's that dicey. Maybe a
winch yeah, probably, yeah, Yeah, you just like go from
Bowler to bowler winching yourself over the pass, right, Yeah,
(19:38):
So to get to the pass, you go by the
geologist station. And remember they had the flag from the
geologist station. So now they're really starting to retrace their footsteps.
The problem is is the van wasn't anywhere near the
road to Mingle Pass. As a matter of fact, it
wasn't really near anything that was a road, an actual
road in Death Valley. It was essentially like they just
(20:00):
drove through the middle of the desert, which is how
they found the van. So after this four day, very
extensive search by at least two hundred and fifty people,
all they found was the beer bottle at the bush
and the butt print that was it. Those were the
only physical clues that they found. And you know, there's
(20:21):
a lot of stuff going on in Death Valley at
any given time, in the whole area of southern California.
So these rescue groups got called off to other stuff,
and the park rangers went back about their business, and
the case just went totally cold for years and years
and years, And it probably would have stayed that way
if not for a guy named Tom Hood, who will
meet in a second. But in the interim that vacuum
(20:45):
between the end of the initial search and tom Ahood
picking this whole thing up. People just kind of came
up with their own theories to explain it because it
was just so they just vanished off of the face
of the earth.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
It seemed like, yeah, so you know, one of the
I guess it was probably the most popular theory, and
it makes sense in some ways, is that this was
an intentional disappearing, Like, hey, let's this family set it
up to make it look like they've been disappeared. Because
Egbert was he was going through a pretty rough custody
battle with his ex wife. It was a pretty contentious divorce,
(21:18):
and apparently there were rumors that he had talked to
his coworkers about like kind of dropping out and moving
to Costa Rica with his with his son. And so
people are like, yeah, this that they purposely disappeared so
he could just get away from his ex wife and
have soul custody of his son.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Right. One of the big problems with that is like,
if you're on a trip in la you could disappear
way more easily than in Death Valley. That's kind of
a dumb place to stage your disappearance.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You know, well, I mean, I think staging a disappearance
there is different than disappearing you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
I guess I do. What about psychos and crooks?
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Sure, you know they were they were looking for me
Labs out there by helicopter. So the idea that there
was a drug gang or just some ne'er do wells
out there, or just some random psychopath was rumors that circulated.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, it didn't hurt that the Barker Ranch where the
Manson family hung around, is not too far away. Yeah,
I guess some people are like, well, there you go.
I guess there's some one hundred year old Manson family
member that they ran across who killed them. Yeah, And
then there was a This was the probably the most
conspiracy theory minded of the conspiracy theories or the theories of
(22:36):
what happened to them. Not too far away in the
middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere is
the China Lake Naval Weapon Center, which is a military
testing range. I've seen top secret. It seems to be
quite top secret. And of course anytime you have a
top secret military testing facility in the middle of nowhere,
people are like they're doing crazy stuff there Yeah, and
(22:59):
the idea was the Eggbert either being a curious person,
was drawn to the site. This is the real reason
he wanted to go to Death Valley so he could
sneak into China Lake Naval Weapon Center and see what
they were working on. Or perhaps he was a spy
or something like that, and that the family had gotten
caught trying to get into the weapon center and had
(23:19):
either been sent to like a ghost prison or killed
and buried in the desert. Who knows what the government
will do when they're this was the technology bandied about
on the internet when their hybrid propulsion systems are at.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Risk, Yeah, some random German shows up.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, But also, I mean, could you get more vague
than hybrid propulsion? Like what's a propelling? What is it
a hybrid of Yeah, but it's just so like futuristic sounding.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
I was driving down the highway the other day and
I saw a pickup truck next to me that had
a I don't know what it was. It was a
military green like something or other like it was in
the It was in the bed of a pickup truck.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
On like a on a pallette.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
But you know, it had a screen and buttons and
it was square and it was clearly military. And then
I looked at I can't remember the name of the
company that was transporting it, but I looked up the
company and it said, like, you know, we manufacture things
for the for the war fighter.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I was like, what the hell is that next to
me on the highway.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Maybe it was a military issue chicken coop.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
It might have been something.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
It was probably something that silly because these guys were
just driving it in a pickup truck. There were no
they didn't look armed.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I mean, they may have been armed, but it's not
like it was surrounded by humbies or something like that.
But it was definitely something weird to see.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
You know, I'm curious. Hopefully one of our listeners can
can tell us what that probably was.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, it was like a trash compactor or something.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Okay, so this is where it would have been left,
Like he was looking for high propulsion. They ran across
the meth manufacturers. He intentionally staged the disappearance. That's just
that was it. Like everybody was like, there were probably
never going to figure out what happened to him. But
there was this one guy who I mentioned earlier who
found out about this. His name's Tom Mahood. He's a
(25:18):
retired civil engineer. He lives in Orange, California, and he
he got bored in his retirement and started looking for
things to do and did a whole bunch of different stuff.
But one of the things he did was desert exploration,
which is a very specific kind of hiking exploration, Like
you can find yourself in real trouble really quickly in
the desert, So it takes it's a certain set of skills, right,
(25:42):
And so Tom Mahood had this, and he got interested
in the story of the Death Valley Germans, and he
put those two things together and he became kind of
obsessed with solving the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
That sounds like a pretty good place for a second break. Hey, yes,
where he met Tom Behood and he's going, guys, cut
to break build attention.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I was going to say, I think Tomahood would approve too.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
All right, We'll be right back with more on Tomahood
right after this. All right, So Tomahood is on the scene.
(26:40):
Like Liam Neeson, he has a particular set of skills,
and he had heard about this case in two thousand
and eight. For the first time, and in two thousand
and nine, thirteen years after their disappearance, he said, you
know what, I'm taking it upon myself to figure out
what happened to this family. He went out to the site.
(27:01):
He went out to where the van was found. He
brought a camera. He retraced the steps all the way
to the beer bottle bush. That butt print was long gone.
I like to think that Tom maybe sat in that
spot and had a butt ice if he could get
his hands on any. In two thousand and nine, he
looked around headed back home. When he got home, he
(27:22):
was looking at the maps, he was looking at the pictures,
and he said, wait a minute, I have a theory
about how they ended up there and where they might
have gone.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah, and remember that four day search was really thorough.
Like if you read Tomhood's blog otherhand dot org, he
has an extensive, multi part description of this whole thing,
the case, his search, all that stuff called Hunt for
the Death Valley Germans. It's totally worth reading. But on
(27:53):
this he praises the search like he's like, yes, this
was a really good search, but they didn't search everywhere.
One of the places they didn't search was south the
reason they didn't search south is because there's nothing there.
He would have to be a complete idiot to try
to go south. The only thing there is China Lake
Naval Weapon Center, and that is really remote. It's in
(28:16):
the middle of nowhere. Then he started to try to
think about why somebody would go south, and he put
himself in the mindset of some German tourists visiting America
in a national park, and that's how he ended up
cracking the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
That's right. So he.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Was like, they're low on money, so that's a bit
of a clue or an indicator of what they might do.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah, they didn't have a lot of time.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
It was July twenty second and they needed to be
back to la in four days, and they still wanted
to go to Yosemite that was on their itinerary. So
there was a time crunch, there was a money crunch.
And then one of the last pictures on the camera,
you know, I mentioned obviously the last ones would be
the most instructive as to pinpointing where they were. What
they were doing was sunset and Death Valley, and the
(29:00):
rangers said, hey, this is we know the sunset. That's
Hannahpau Canyon on the west side of Death Valley, and
we know it was taken on July twenty second, because
it was you know, pictures were dated, and that was
the night they arrived at the park. We knew that
they couldn't afford to camp out at Furnas Creek or
get a room at that hotel. And so, you know,
(29:21):
like most national parks, I guess all of them, there
are places where you can back country camp for free.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Just you know, there are areas and.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
A lot of times you have to like apply and
fill out a little thing so they know where you are.
But you can camp in the back country at Hannapac Canyon.
And this is just not a very touristy area as
far as Death Valley goes. It's the east side is
more tourist friendly. And this is again on the west side.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, hours and hours away from the welcome center. At
least have you been to Death Valley? I have not.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I did a TV commercial for a couple of days
in Death Valley.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Okay, So it's huge, right.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Yeah, I mean I was just in one little tiny part.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Of it, obviously, but it's massive.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Please, it looks big on a map.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Okay, so this clue to Hannahpau Canyon kind of showed
I guess being in the mindset of Egbert kind of
helped Tom Mahood figure out what their next move would be.
And so if you look at a map and you're
in Hannahpau Canyon and you're trying to get to Yosemite,
it would make sense to go this route past the
(30:25):
Warm Springs mind toward Mangle Pass right. And so he
knows now that he's kind of in Egbert's head because
it's all this stuff is kind of making sense to
him now why they did what they did. Ultimately, again,
they're trying to look for the fastest, cheapest way to
get to Yosemite from Death Valley. So they went by
(30:46):
the geologists cabin again not open for business at the time,
and Mahood essentially says that he probably thought it was
a visitor center or something like that, but it wasn't.
So they continued on and as they were driving to
Mango Pass, they came upon roads that were like, Okay,
this is not a good road. This is not even
(31:07):
a gravel road. This is kind of rough. But the
minivan can take it if I drive slowly if I
drive carefully, And Egbert was doing a fairly good job,
it seems. But when they got to Mengo Pass, which
is all they had to do was cross Mango Pass,
make it a little further and they could take a
road to Yosemite. But when they got there, they were
(31:28):
stop dead in their tracks. There was just no way
to pass it.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, not eating that sweet sweet Plymouth Voyager. If this
episode isn't sponsored by butt Ice and Plymouth Voyager, then
we're doing something wrong.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Yeah, yeah, we need a time machine.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I guess it could live alongside the twenty twelve Camra probably.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, the nineteen ninety six Plymouth Lager.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
It's really are your future. And then just the sound
of a butt Ice cat being twisted off.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And somebody glugging it and then hitting the ground, and.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
So they realized that they can't get through there. There's
the only way to go is back.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
It would have been around you know, between twelve thirty
and one thirty PM by this point, at least one
hundred and five degrees. So they backtracked to that geologist cabin.
It's still locked. And this is what I meant earlier,
when what I don't understand what at this point, I
don't understand why they didn't break into this cabin. This
(32:26):
is dire circumstances and get some food and water.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Here's the thing, Tomahood explains us really well. He was saying, no,
these are German tourists, they're safe in America. They're in
a national park. To them, it was not a dire
situation yet that they were still on track. They were
just having a little trouble and the map that they
had was misleading them all over the place. So he,
(32:54):
being in Egbert's head, said, Egbert made the decision rather
than go drive all the way back to the visitors
center to get out of the park in a way
that you know how to do, but that's going to
cost you many, many hours, and it's going to take
a really long time to get to Yosemite. Why would
you not follow these roads on the map that are
(33:15):
essentially a shortcut to use. It's going to take hours
off of your trip. If the map shows a road there,
why would you not take it? And the problem is
their map showed them roads that either were really misleading
and weren't really roads, or weren't roads at all. That
was the map that Egbert was dealing with, and that
was what ultimately got them killed.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, the one thing I couldn't find was what the
gas situation was like in that car.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I didn't see that either.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I'd look too, because that would have really factored in obviously,
because if you've ever taken out West road trips or
anywhere in the world where there's just few and far
between gas stations that I mean, I almost got trapped
a couple of times low on.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Gas, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, that's nerve wrecking.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
So we don't know the gas situation. He's in his
head speculating the stuff. Seems pretty logical to me. The
shortcut that they took started off pretty easy. They're almost
lured into it because they felt like, all right, this
plymouth voyager, I know this car, it can take it.
But eventually they descended into an volcanyon, and this is
(34:20):
where the road becomes a wash.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
It's a dry creek bed.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Dried creek beds are you know, there's a lot of sediment,
a lot of loose gravel, a lot of sand, and
it's really easy to get stuck in one of those.
I've been stuck in one of those, and the only
way to kind of to avoid getting stuck is just
to keep that thing going forward as quickly as you can.
Not dangerous, obviously, but just kind of keep those wheels
going forward. Which you don't want to do is stop.
(34:45):
And it looks like that's what Egbert was doing, was
trying to go pretty quickly through that gravel. And that's
ultimately what how he got those tires, you know, popped right.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
How they ended up in the middle of the sand
up to their axle is there is a fork right
behind them, and the fork veered to the They took
the veer I think to the left and realized, oh no,
we want to go to the right. This left isn't
actually the road, and he tried to cut over through
the I guess median between them, and that was just
(35:18):
nothing but sam that they got stuck in. So now
they're stuck. And Tom Hood makes the case that they
still didn't view this as a survival situation. Yet this
is a deeply inconvenient issue that surely they could get
help with, right. I mean, again, they're in a national park,
but they're four miles from the geologist's cabin. That's something
(35:39):
they could do. But again, this is totally in the
wrong direction, and they're hoping to find somebody a little
closer to help them pull their van out of out
of trouble and get some new tires. So this is
where they think that Egbert walked off with a bottle
of butt ice and sat in the shade and tried
to figure out what to do next.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, I mean clear, he'sn't worried about survival if he's
drinking a beer, because that will dehydrate you even further.
I'm not sure if Egbert knew that, but he's German.
Plenty of beer over there, you would think he would
know that. And again, in his defense too, now that
I'm coming around to this idea, he may not have
even known, like who knows what you can see in
the window of that geologist cabin if they were like,
(36:20):
you know, big water bottles or something within plane view
or not, So he may not have thought like, hey,
maybe we should go back there and get some rations
at least, because he may not have seen any again,
just speculating here, but directly south of that site again
is that China Lake Military base. And what Tomhood reckoned was, Hey,
(36:41):
maybe he knew about this base and maybe he figured,
at least it will be people there. Maybe there's a
perimeter fence with cameras, maybe there's some dudes patrolling the perimeter.
But at the very least, even if it's a top
secret place, we could probably go get some help or
something and they could drive us out of here.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, you know, show up at the fence of a
secret military base. They're going to come to us. Essentially
makes a lot of sense. And on the map that
Egbert was using, the border of the China Lake Naval
Weapon Center is marked off. So to him it looked
like that fence, that perimeter fence was just a few
(37:19):
miles walk from where they were now where the van
was stuck right right. The reason why they didn't search
south in the initial four day search was because China
Lake doesn't have a perimeter fence. It's so isolated in
(37:39):
the middle of this very deadly desert that they're like,
if you try to hike to us, you're going to die.
You're so dead. We don't even need to put up
a fence. And so this is Tomahood figuring this out. Like,
if you are in Europe and you go to a
military installation, there's going to be a fence, it's going
to be patrolled, and that would be a really smart
idea to take the shortcut to the military installation to
(38:02):
get help. Unfortunately, it was just doomed not to work
out because there was no fence whatsoever. And at some
point Egbert figured that out, and then it started to
sink in that they were in really big trouble.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, so Tomahood wants to find at least some human remains.
At this point he's I don't want to get in
toma Hood's head, but and say like he was obsessed,
but he was very much into the idea of finding
out what happened to this family.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Let's just say that.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
He got his friend Les Walker and said, all right,
let's get together another team. Let's go search south.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
This time.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
About an hour after they started this search, he found
an empty wine bottle under a bush. He said, here's
another clue. Then he found a crumpled up piece of paper.
He thought it might have been toilet paper at first,
it turned out it was pages from a daily planner
in German. So he said, I'm really the trail is
hot at this point, like literally in figure And not
(39:02):
too long after that, his Buddy Less radios and says Tom,
we have some bones here.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah. So I guess less Walker had come to the
base of a cliff that was about thirty feet tall,
and it would make sense that this is where you
would find the bones of somebody stranded in the desert
because it was the only place that was offering shade. Yeah,
and the bones were strewn about, they were sun bleached.
But the thing that gave it away that these were
(39:28):
definitely the family, the remains of the family, Cornelia's wallet
was found with them, like all the credit cards had
her name on it, and so Less and Tom left
the bones in situ, but they took the wallet because
they were afraid that they were going to be taken
for a couple of local yahoos who were trying to
who came up with a wild story. But now they
(39:50):
had physical proof that they had discovered the Death Valley
Germans and that got things moving really quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
So this was nine miles from that abandoned mini van,
and so to make it nine miles and that kind
of heat really speaks a lot to their tenacity trying
to get out of there and trying to save themselves.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Very very sad with young kids too. Yeah, I mean Max.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Was four years old, right, Yeah, that's just yeah, devastating
to think about. There were, like you mentioned, four miles
from the border of that naval base, and they were
headed in the right direction, like they were kind of
doing the right thing to what they thought was a
reasonable idea of rescue, you know, looking back, they you know,
they got those bones DNA tested. I think they were
(40:37):
positively matched with only Egbert, is that right, Yeah, But
that's not to say that it wasn't Connie. It's obviously Connie.
They there were no confirmed remains of the children. That
part is very troublesome to me.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Still.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, the closest they found was a small shoe that
it was so it was so beaten up that it
could have been Kani's shoe. It could have been a
woman's small shoe, but it also could have been a
kid's shoe. So that's the only physical evidence they found
they could possibly be linked to the kids. The bones
were distributed all over in this kind of one site
(41:15):
at the base of the cliff, because it was there
was a wash I think on either side of the cliff.
So over the course of all these years, fifteen years,
the rains and the ensuing torrents of water would have
essentially spread the bones out. I don't know that that
would have done anything just to the kid's bones. I
(41:37):
don't know. Maybe there were so light that they got
carried away and spread and dispersed even further. I'm not sure.
But it is sad that they never found the kid's
remains too.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah, and I just can't imagine anything more terrifying than
being with your family like that and slowly dying of
sunstroke and dehydration and Malnutrition's just over the course of
knows how many days.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
You know, it's brutal.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, The thing that gets me is that, like thinking
of what it must have been like for Egbert to
climb some ridge and be able to see for dozens
of miles and see that there was no perimeter fence anywhere,
and for it to just hit you then and then
you have to walk back and I guess tell your
(42:22):
girlfriend like, yeah, we're in trouble.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
We salute to you Tom Mahood for picking this case
up and bringing about some sort of resolution. Obviously feels
awful for his ex wife back in Germany, and you
know that her son was taken from her and on
this fun sort of bonding trip and never came home.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
It was just just a very sad story.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
It is, Yeah, And I mean that's as close to
saulved as it gets, and it seems pretty solid.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Well, since we don't have anything more to say about
the death Valley Germans except rested in peace all four
of you, I think it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
This is about the Far Side.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
We did an episode on Gary Larson's great cartoon The
Far Side and got a lot of great feedback.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
It's clearly a beloved.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Cartoon that we heard from a lot of people that
just really enjoyed our tribute. Hey, guys, The Parside was
also a huge part of my comedy experience in my
middle school to high school years. Been happy to share
it with my son, who's eleven, who laughs out loud
or sometimes says, I don't get this one. Your podcast
made me think about how polarizing the humor of The
par Side can be, and sometimes you just don't get
it or don't really like it. My mom always thought
(43:32):
it was such a dumb comic, but would see me
laughing on and on reading the Far Side.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Galleries one day.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
She had the paper first and really liked the Far
Side from that day and laughed out loud and said, oh, Pete,
you're gonna love this one. And it was Grandma Worm
telling the little worms how Grandpa got the axe and
made them, you know, chopped up.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Into little worms. And I said, it's okay, but she
was insistent, don't you get it. I get it. He
cut himself into more worms.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
My mom was so mad about my reaction that she
couldn't talk to me for a couple of hours. But
I think that's what's so brilliant about Gary Larson. Any
single cartoon could be the funny thing ever to a
particular person and not so much to another, even if
they love it. Thanks so much for the show, guys,
and the countless hours that you've given to entertain me
and my family.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
And that is from Pete. And hello to Pete and
your family and your eleven year old son.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yeah, hello, Pete, thank you for that. Yeah. We've got
a lot of people send in their favorite Far Sides.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Yeah it was fun.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yep, thanks to everybody who wrote in about the Far Side.
And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, strongly
recommend it's a good one, and if you want to
be like Pete and send us a good email like
he did, you can send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I don't really think you could call it
part of our ongoing true crime suite, but certainly unsolved
mystery suite.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I think, yeah, semi solved mystery, I guess at this
point because we're talking about what's known as the Death
Valley Germans. Pretty good band name, but it's in fact
a very sad story from July nineteen ninety six when
a blended family of German tourists came to the United
States for a three week tour of California and Nevada
(00:46):
and we're never seen again alive.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, they just vanished into thin air, essentially in Death
Valley National Park and they've I mean, it's weird like essentially,
there was one guy who will meet later who got
it as close to solved as possible just from sheer determination.
But the family that you were talking about, they were
(01:10):
made up of Egbert Rimkus, who was thirty four. He
was an architect. He was the dad. George. I'm not
sure how to say George without an e. You took German?
Are you familiar? No?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I guess it's George Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He was eleven. He was Egbert's biological son. Connie Meyer,
Cornelia Connie Meyer, she was twenty seven. She was Egbert's girlfriend,
and Max was Connie's biological son from a previous relationship.
He was four and Egbert had gone through a fairly
difficult divorce recently. And so this trip was essentially meant
(01:45):
to be like a fun bonding experience for the four
of them, Yeah, to kind of form a family unit
in this new new reality, these new circumstances they were in.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So they got to LA on July eight eighth. They
had a return flight to Dresden, which is where they
were from, for July twenty seventh, and the on the
docket was about a week or so in the LA area,
head on over to Las Vegas for a few days,
go to Death Valley National Park, check that out, head
(02:19):
over to Yosemite from there, and then go back to
LA and fly home. It's a it's a pretty standard
little itinerary for that that kind of you know, three
week adventure.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I would say yes. And for the adventure, they rented
a car, a ninety six Plymouth Voyager minivan, and they
rented it from Dollar rent a Car. Being German, they
would have rented it from Dollar because that's the American
subsidiary of deutsch Mark rent a Car.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah huh.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
And it was due back on the twenty sixth of July,
which is a day before their flight back to Germany. Right,
that's right. The problem is is Dollar rent a Car
never got their minivan back and the family didn't make
their flight to Germany. And not everybody noticed this. I mean,
certainly no one in America paid much attention. But remember
Egbert had an ex wife who was the mom of George,
(03:12):
and George's mom Heike, she was. She wanted to know
where her son was, so she alerted the authorities, and
very quickly Interpol put out an international alert for four
missing German tourists last seen in southern California. And here's
their itinerary. And it went absolutely nowhere. This is the
(03:34):
end of July, beginning of August nineteen ninety six, and
nothing happened for months.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah, I think about I guess until October twenty first,
when a ranger was flying around in a helicopter looking
for mess labs, and he said, hey, this is a
very remote part of Death Valley, even for Death Valley,
and there's a Plymouth Voyager minivan with three flat tires
(03:58):
that had clearly been you know, mired in the sand.
So immediately like, what is this thing? Once they figured
out who the family was and this was who was missing,
they were nowhere to be found. There were no signs
of life, there were no signs of death. There was
nothing at all. And so the mystery of the Death
Valley Germans was born right there in one of the
(04:21):
most inhospitable places on Earth.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, and the whole thing wouldn't be close solved or
close to being solved for another fifteen years. And for
those of us who aren't familiar with Death Valley, it's
a national park, like I said, that straddles California and Nevada,
and it is. It lives up to its name. It
(04:44):
doesn't have the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, but
it has the second highest, and it's very close. The
highest temperature ever recorded in Death Valley in the summer
of nineteen thirteen was one hundred and thirty four degrees
farent height. Yeah, fifty six point seven degrees celsius hot.
I think the record was in Elaziza, Libya, in nineteen
(05:05):
twenty two. It was only two and a half degrees
hotter than that. So clearly Death Valley is very hot.
And even in a regular summer it's still crazy hot.
And in nineteen ninety six in the summer, remember they're
in there hanging out in late July, which is the
height of the summer of Death Valley. The daily high
(05:25):
temperature the average was one hundred and twenty four degrees
height and ninety one was the low.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, so it's scorching hot, which is just you know,
it's very dangerous conditions, especially if you're not used in
that kind of thing, not prepared for that kind of thing. Apparently,
Death Valley is something that was I guess two days
ago years old when I found out is a very
popular tour site for Germans. There was a writer in
(05:55):
the nineteenth century name Karl My spelled m a y
writer had never been to Death Valley, but wrote a
bunch of hugely popular travel adventure books set in the
American Southwest, including Death Valley. Some were made into spaghetti westerns,
including one called The Valley of Death in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
But this dude, whom I've.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Never heard of, sold two hundred million books, so, like
you know, one of the top selling authors of all time.
And so Germans as a result, became fascinated with making
that trek out to Death Valley. And that's what this
family did.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, you didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I had never heard of this guy, had you No?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Okay, So this is popular with German tourists, but that's
not to say that all German tourists who go to
Death Valley die or get lost or even don't have
a good time. Like of course, yeah, it's a very
popular place. But people do die in Death Valley National
Park every year, every summer in particular, and between twenty
seven and twenty twenty four, sixty eight people died in
(06:55):
Death Valley. There's a lot of people who died simply
from being a exposed to the local weather. They died
of hyper thermia, most of them, I think twenty or
not most, but twenty percent died of hyperthermia, which if
you've ever been in a hot sauna that got too
hot for your comfort, that you imagine dying from that,
that's dying from hyperthermia. I think the rest who died
(07:19):
from exposure died from dehydration, because that can come on
really quick too.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So a day after this mini ban is discovered by
a helicopter and death Valley, the ranger came back with
the local sheriff on the ground to check it out.
Or maybe they flew out there, who knows, but at
any rate, at some point their feet were on the ground.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
They opened the van up. They, like I said, there
were three flat tires.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It was stuck up to its axles in the sand,
and they determined that it had driven for at least
a couple of hundred feet on the flat tires.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
The whole thing was covered in dust.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You know, clearly hadn't been seen by anyone else or disturbed.
That was the things you would expect to fine from
disappeared people on an adventurisfication like this, like their luggage
and their clothes like nothing really weird. Empty water bottles,
empty juice containers, a couple of unopened bottles of bud
Ice beer, which you remember that yeah, dates the thing
(08:14):
in the mid nineties. I was never into the ice beers.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
No, I think, if I remember correctly, it just it
got you more crunk than the average beer.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
I feel like that was how they sold it. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
I mean that was before things like high gravity beers
really came to the forefront. So maybe it was like,
you know, these things have an extra percentage of abb.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah. I think the slogan was bud ice, get you plastered.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I remember the dry beers too.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I thought it was fancy in college at one point
because I was drinking michelob dry.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Oh. At this point, speaking of fancy, I was drinking Zema.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Oh. I never went down the Zemer road.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Oh they were They went down easy.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
What was the flavor? What was it like a sprite?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yes, it was. It was close to that, Like it
wouldn't take a sip of zem and be like, that's right.
But that's probably the closest thing you could just mention
off the top of your head. Some people put jolly
ranchers in it too, to flavor it even further. It
also had a bit of like a dry like in
the sense that champagne can be dry. It had a
(09:16):
little bit of that nothing that you'd be like, wow,
it's a really dry drink. But yeah, and I think
ultimately it was malt liquor, which really could get you
plastered too.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I used to drink the Mickey's Big Mouths in college
and the occasional little giant Schlitz tall Boy can.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, those were the days. I keep it pretty simple
these days.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
But yeah, but you're right there. But Ice definitely dates
it to the mid nineties for sure, and they're like,
you said, this is kind of important. That's why I'm
going back to it. There were a couple of bottles
of unopened but ice beer still in the minivan.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, And then one of the just sort of small
clue as far as to show where they'd been, there
was a business card from the Seahorse Resort in San Clemente,
which is where they stayed while I guess seeing the
LA area, which is not super close to LA, so
I guess maybe they wanted to be between LA and
San Diego or something.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
I think they just saw pictures of the view and
were like there, maybe because the view is very nice.
So there was a guide book there too, in German,
a guidebook that they purchased or that was purchased at
the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley and like
I said, it was in German. And so they went
to the visitors center. Investigators did later, and they found
(10:34):
that on July twenty second, there were two German language
guide books sold at the visitor center at Furnace Creek
and none on July twenty third. So with that they
started to be able to begin to retrace their steps.
That was the first clue that they were able to
kind of extrapolate from.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, so their second clue came when they found undevelop
roles of film and cameras, So sort of like the
end of the hangover, they were able to get those
developed and pieced together, you know, at least roughly by
way of the pictures they took, at least what they
had done on their trip, maybe even as we'll see
clues to where they like the last picture taken obviously
(11:17):
would be the most instructive. So from these pictures they
realized they stayed in San Clementy for a little while
seeing the La area, they drove up the California coast
and then over to Las Vegas, Nevada, and there they
stayed at the Treasure Island Hotel, which also dates this
in the mid nineties and there, they found that the father, Egbert,
(11:41):
had called his bank in Germany on July twelfth try
to have another fifteen hundred bucks wired to Bank of
American San Clemente, but they sent it to the wrong
bank and at Treasure Island. He you know, he was
clearly in need of some dough as he even faxed
his ex wife and said, hey, which also dates this,
can you send more money?
Speaker 3 (12:00):
And she never responded.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah. What I didn't get and I didn't see anyone
explain it is why he was just like, oh, well
they send it to the La branch of Bank of
America rather than San Clemente. I guess there's nothing I
can do to go get it. He just never went
and picked up the fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well maybe he didn't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, I mean I would still spend some time trying
to figure out where my fifteen hundred dollars. That's about
three thousand dollars in today's money, So it seems like
he just shrugged it off. From what from his actions,
I just think that's really strange.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I mean, also could have been one of those
things where where they're like, well, sir, we don't know
which banket's in, stop bothering us, and like we can find.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Out in a week. Yeah, it could be, and you know,
they had a schedule, so who knows.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah. So the long and short of it, though, is
they were low on funds now right. And Luckily, if
you're going to national parks like Death Valley and Yosemite
and the only thing you're doing after that is making
it back to the airport to turn in your car
and take your flight home, you can get by on
some pretty low funds. You can still buy some but
ice it wasn't particularly expensive, so they seem to kind
(13:07):
of be making their way low on funds, and that
actually helped track them a little bit further later on.
But there was one other clue too, and it was
an American flag and it had Butte Valley Stone Cabin
on its label. That's where it belonged to in Death Valley.
(13:28):
It's locally called the Geologist Cabin, and I think it
does what it says on the label, which is it
houses geologists who are conducting experiments out there. So there's
food there, there's water there, but they keep it locked.
If you're a geologist, it's kind of like a gas
station bathroom. You have to go get the key first
before you start using the geologist's cabin. So they seem
(13:49):
to have just taken the flag as maybe a souvenir
or something like that. Like I know, if I were
in the Black Forest and I came across the German flag,
I would take it and then take it back to
America as a souvenir.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, I guess that's what this was being used for
back then, because I think now you can actually stay there.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh really, Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
A you know, along the Appleachian Trail and just sort
of all over in national parks. They'll be like a
remote cabin that you know, you come, you can stay there.
There might be some food and water rations if you
need it, and you're the idea is that you're supposed
to leave something, yeah, and leave it better than you
found it, because I've seen pictures of people that you know,
in the twenty tens that have stayed there, and like
(14:31):
it's it's a destination for people who are into Death
Valley because it's super cool looking.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
It's out in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
It's like a stone cabin and it's on a lot
of people's list of like I want to go stay
at the geologists cabin. So I guess that just wasn't
the deal back then, right, because it was locked up
what I don't get, Well, we'll get.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
To what I don't get later. Okay, should we take.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
A break, Yeah, I think that's a good spot.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back
with more on the Death Valley Germans right after this.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Okay, Chuck, So where we left off, they had Pilford
the American flag from the geologist's cabin, and right, like,
all of this stuff, this is just the stuff they
found in the van. This is as far as the
search has gone. Yeah, And so the rangers of the
park start conducting their own investigation, and they go to
like Furnace Creek Ranch, which is a resort kind of upscale.
(15:48):
There's a campground, but you have to pay for all
those and there was no record of the family staying
at either of those places on July twenty second or
twenty third, or anytime. Really. One of the other things
they did was check logbooks. Apparently they pick up log
books even at sites that don't have anyone working there.
They'll still have a log book, and they struck gold
(16:10):
at one of them, the Warm Springs Mine log Book,
which is an abandoned mine above Death Valley in the mountains.
I guess on a ridge and you can get to it.
It's a road. There's a road that goes to it.
It's nothing that you would normally call a road, but
in Death Valley National Park it might as well be
a luxurious eight eight lane highway. It's gravel, it's rough,
(16:33):
but a Plymouth voyager can get on this road to
Warm Springs Mine. And in the logbook they got a
huge clue that would help track them down later.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, they signed it.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
It was in German, apparently it was barely legible, and
it said we are going over the pass. Signed Connie, Egbert,
George and Max So On October twenty third, this is
two days after the minivan is found. They finally conduct
a big four day search looking for this family. About
(17:07):
two hundred and fifty plus people, a couple of helicopters,
eight horses. A lot of these were volunteers, but dozens
of them were trained search and rescue people. Right, no slouches,
No slouches. Well, there was one slouch, but he didn't
last long because it was Death.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Valleyene exactly, and the only evidence from this four day
search was an empty bottle of butt ice and a
butt print basically in the sand next to it, where
someone had clearly sat down and enjoyed that butt ice.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It was about one point seven miles away from the van.
And yeah, clearly somebody took a little break in the
shade and had that sweet, sweet extra potent ice, beear.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Right, and they could even figure when they probably figured
it was Egbert because the size of the butt print
was fairly large. Well that's how I saw it described.
I think that is. I think they're just saying larger
than say a woman's or a child's, which is the
only other people with them in this party. Right. But
(18:09):
it was on the east side of the bush, so
that if he was taking refuge from it in the shade,
that means that the sun would have been in the
western part of the sky, so he would have been
sitting there in late afternoon, which seems ludicrous to even
point out, but it would come into play later on.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So again in that visitor's log it says we're going
over the pass. The only pass near there is called
Mingle Pass M E and G E L. And if
you look on a map back in nineteen ninety six,
before you had you know, smartphones and things like that,
or people on the internet saying, hey, don't go this way, right,
it looks like it's pretty possible to drive from Warm Springs,
(18:48):
go through that Mingle Pass into an adjacent valley, and
then hit a dirt road toward Yosemite, which was their
next destination. They didn't know that, you know, they didn't
have knowledge that it wouldn't it wasn't going to be
just like a little sort of rocky path, but something
you really really need a four by four vehicle four
(19:09):
like full stop. It's not like, well maybe we can
make it in the Plymouth Voyager, Like you can't make
it down this road with anything other than a four
by four.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
And even that's dicey.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, I saw that. Not only do you need a
four by four, you need an experienced driver who has
who can get through this stuff too. Like you can't
just put some yahoo in a four by four and
expect them to make it. It's that dicey. Maybe a
winch yeah, probably, yeah, Yeah, you just like go from
Bowler to bowler winching yourself over the pass, right, Yeah,
(19:38):
So to get to the pass, you go by the
geologist station. And remember they had the flag from the
geologist station. So now they're really starting to retrace their footsteps.
The problem is is the van wasn't anywhere near the
road to Mingle Pass. As a matter of fact, it
wasn't really near anything that was a road, an actual
road in Death Valley. It was essentially like they just
(20:00):
drove through the middle of the desert, which is how
they found the van. So after this four day, very
extensive search by at least two hundred and fifty people,
all they found was the beer bottle at the bush
and the butt print that was it. Those were the
only physical clues that they found. And you know, there's
(20:21):
a lot of stuff going on in Death Valley at
any given time, in the whole area of southern California.
So these rescue groups got called off to other stuff,
and the park rangers went back about their business, and
the case just went totally cold for years and years
and years, And it probably would have stayed that way
if not for a guy named Tom Hood, who will
meet in a second. But in the interim that vacuum
(20:45):
between the end of the initial search and tom Ahood
picking this whole thing up. People just kind of came
up with their own theories to explain it because it
was just so they just vanished off of the face
of the earth.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
It seemed like, yeah, so you know, one of the
I guess it was probably the most popular theory, and
it makes sense in some ways, is that this was
an intentional disappearing, Like, hey, let's this family set it
up to make it look like they've been disappeared. Because
Egbert was he was going through a pretty rough custody
battle with his ex wife. It was a pretty contentious divorce,
(21:18):
and apparently there were rumors that he had talked to
his coworkers about like kind of dropping out and moving
to Costa Rica with his with his son. And so
people are like, yeah, this that they purposely disappeared so
he could just get away from his ex wife and
have soul custody of his son.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Right. One of the big problems with that is like,
if you're on a trip in la you could disappear
way more easily than in Death Valley. That's kind of
a dumb place to stage your disappearance.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You know, well, I mean, I think staging a disappearance
there is different than disappearing you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
I guess I do. What about psychos and crooks?
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Sure, you know they were they were looking for me
Labs out there by helicopter. So the idea that there
was a drug gang or just some ne'er do wells
out there, or just some random psychopath was rumors that circulated.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, it didn't hurt that the Barker Ranch where the
Manson family hung around, is not too far away. Yeah,
I guess some people are like, well, there you go.
I guess there's some one hundred year old Manson family
member that they ran across who killed them. Yeah, And
then there was a This was the probably the most
conspiracy theory minded of the conspiracy theories or the theories of
(22:36):
what happened to them. Not too far away in the
middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere is
the China Lake Naval Weapon Center, which is a military
testing range. I've seen top secret. It seems to be
quite top secret. And of course anytime you have a
top secret military testing facility in the middle of nowhere,
people are like they're doing crazy stuff there Yeah, and
(22:59):
the idea was the Eggbert either being a curious person,
was drawn to the site. This is the real reason
he wanted to go to Death Valley so he could
sneak into China Lake Naval Weapon Center and see what
they were working on. Or perhaps he was a spy
or something like that, and that the family had gotten
caught trying to get into the weapon center and had
(23:19):
either been sent to like a ghost prison or killed
and buried in the desert. Who knows what the government
will do when they're this was the technology bandied about
on the internet when their hybrid propulsion systems are at.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Risk, Yeah, some random German shows up.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, But also, I mean, could you get more vague
than hybrid propulsion? Like what's a propelling? What is it
a hybrid of Yeah, but it's just so like futuristic sounding.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
I was driving down the highway the other day and
I saw a pickup truck next to me that had
a I don't know what it was. It was a
military green like something or other like it was in
the It was in the bed of a pickup truck.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
On like a on a pallette.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
But you know, it had a screen and buttons and
it was square and it was clearly military. And then
I looked at I can't remember the name of the
company that was transporting it, but I looked up the
company and it said, like, you know, we manufacture things
for the for the war fighter.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I was like, what the hell is that next to
me on the highway.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Maybe it was a military issue chicken coop.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
It might have been something.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
It was probably something that silly because these guys were
just driving it in a pickup truck. There were no
they didn't look armed.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I mean, they may have been armed, but it's not
like it was surrounded by humbies or something like that.
But it was definitely something weird to see.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
You know, I'm curious. Hopefully one of our listeners can
can tell us what that probably was.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, it was like a trash compactor or something.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Okay, so this is where it would have been left,
Like he was looking for high propulsion. They ran across
the meth manufacturers. He intentionally staged the disappearance. That's just
that was it. Like everybody was like, there were probably
never going to figure out what happened to him. But
there was this one guy who I mentioned earlier who
found out about this. His name's Tom Mahood. He's a
(25:18):
retired civil engineer. He lives in Orange, California, and he
he got bored in his retirement and started looking for
things to do and did a whole bunch of different stuff.
But one of the things he did was desert exploration,
which is a very specific kind of hiking exploration, Like
you can find yourself in real trouble really quickly in
the desert, So it takes it's a certain set of skills, right,
(25:42):
And so Tom Mahood had this, and he got interested
in the story of the Death Valley Germans, and he
put those two things together and he became kind of
obsessed with solving the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
That sounds like a pretty good place for a second break. Hey, yes,
where he met Tom Behood and he's going, guys, cut
to break build attention.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I was going to say, I think Tomahood would approve too.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
All right, We'll be right back with more on Tomahood
right after this. All right, So Tomahood is on the scene.
(26:40):
Like Liam Neeson, he has a particular set of skills,
and he had heard about this case in two thousand
and eight. For the first time, and in two thousand
and nine, thirteen years after their disappearance, he said, you
know what, I'm taking it upon myself to figure out
what happened to this family. He went out to the site.
(27:01):
He went out to where the van was found. He
brought a camera. He retraced the steps all the way
to the beer bottle bush. That butt print was long gone.
I like to think that Tom maybe sat in that
spot and had a butt ice if he could get
his hands on any. In two thousand and nine, he
looked around headed back home. When he got home, he
(27:22):
was looking at the maps, he was looking at the pictures,
and he said, wait a minute, I have a theory
about how they ended up there and where they might
have gone.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah, and remember that four day search was really thorough.
Like if you read Tomhood's blog otherhand dot org, he
has an extensive, multi part description of this whole thing,
the case, his search, all that stuff called Hunt for
the Death Valley Germans. It's totally worth reading. But on
(27:53):
this he praises the search like he's like, yes, this
was a really good search, but they didn't search everywhere.
One of the places they didn't search was south the
reason they didn't search south is because there's nothing there.
He would have to be a complete idiot to try
to go south. The only thing there is China Lake
Naval Weapon Center, and that is really remote. It's in
(28:16):
the middle of nowhere. Then he started to try to
think about why somebody would go south, and he put
himself in the mindset of some German tourists visiting America
in a national park, and that's how he ended up
cracking the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
That's right. So he.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Was like, they're low on money, so that's a bit
of a clue or an indicator of what they might do.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah, they didn't have a lot of time.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
It was July twenty second and they needed to be
back to la in four days, and they still wanted
to go to Yosemite that was on their itinerary. So
there was a time crunch, there was a money crunch.
And then one of the last pictures on the camera,
you know, I mentioned obviously the last ones would be
the most instructive as to pinpointing where they were. What
they were doing was sunset and Death Valley, and the
(29:00):
rangers said, hey, this is we know the sunset. That's
Hannahpau Canyon on the west side of Death Valley, and
we know it was taken on July twenty second, because
it was you know, pictures were dated, and that was
the night they arrived at the park. We knew that
they couldn't afford to camp out at Furnas Creek or
get a room at that hotel. And so, you know,
(29:21):
like most national parks, I guess all of them, there
are places where you can back country camp for free.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Just you know, there are areas and.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
A lot of times you have to like apply and
fill out a little thing so they know where you are.
But you can camp in the back country at Hannapac Canyon.
And this is just not a very touristy area as
far as Death Valley goes. It's the east side is
more tourist friendly. And this is again on the west side.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, hours and hours away from the welcome center. At
least have you been to Death Valley? I have not.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I did a TV commercial for a couple of days
in Death Valley.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Okay, So it's huge, right.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Yeah, I mean I was just in one little tiny part.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Of it, obviously, but it's massive.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Please, it looks big on a map.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Okay, so this clue to Hannahpau Canyon kind of showed
I guess being in the mindset of Egbert kind of
helped Tom Mahood figure out what their next move would be.
And so if you look at a map and you're
in Hannahpau Canyon and you're trying to get to Yosemite,
it would make sense to go this route past the
(30:25):
Warm Springs mind toward Mangle Pass right. And so he
knows now that he's kind of in Egbert's head because
it's all this stuff is kind of making sense to
him now why they did what they did. Ultimately, again,
they're trying to look for the fastest, cheapest way to
get to Yosemite from Death Valley. So they went by
(30:46):
the geologists cabin again not open for business at the time,
and Mahood essentially says that he probably thought it was
a visitor center or something like that, but it wasn't.
So they continued on and as they were driving to
Mango Pass, they came upon roads that were like, Okay,
this is not a good road. This is not even
(31:07):
a gravel road. This is kind of rough. But the
minivan can take it if I drive slowly if I
drive carefully, And Egbert was doing a fairly good job,
it seems. But when they got to Mengo Pass, which
is all they had to do was cross Mango Pass,
make it a little further and they could take a
road to Yosemite. But when they got there, they were
(31:28):
stop dead in their tracks. There was just no way
to pass it.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, not eating that sweet sweet Plymouth Voyager. If this
episode isn't sponsored by butt Ice and Plymouth Voyager, then
we're doing something wrong.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Yeah, yeah, we need a time machine.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I guess it could live alongside the twenty twelve Camra probably.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, the nineteen ninety six Plymouth Lager.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
It's really are your future. And then just the sound
of a butt Ice cat being twisted off.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And somebody glugging it and then hitting the ground, and.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
So they realized that they can't get through there. There's
the only way to go is back.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
It would have been around you know, between twelve thirty
and one thirty PM by this point, at least one
hundred and five degrees. So they backtracked to that geologist cabin.
It's still locked. And this is what I meant earlier,
when what I don't understand what at this point, I
don't understand why they didn't break into this cabin. This
(32:26):
is dire circumstances and get some food and water.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Here's the thing, Tomahood explains us really well. He was saying, no,
these are German tourists, they're safe in America. They're in
a national park. To them, it was not a dire
situation yet that they were still on track. They were
just having a little trouble and the map that they
had was misleading them all over the place. So he,
(32:54):
being in Egbert's head, said, Egbert made the decision rather
than go drive all the way back to the visitors
center to get out of the park in a way
that you know how to do, but that's going to
cost you many, many hours, and it's going to take
a really long time to get to Yosemite. Why would
you not follow these roads on the map that are
(33:15):
essentially a shortcut to use. It's going to take hours
off of your trip. If the map shows a road there,
why would you not take it? And the problem is
their map showed them roads that either were really misleading
and weren't really roads, or weren't roads at all. That
was the map that Egbert was dealing with, and that
was what ultimately got them killed.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, the one thing I couldn't find was what the
gas situation was like in that car.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I didn't see that either.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I'd look too, because that would have really factored in obviously,
because if you've ever taken out West road trips or
anywhere in the world where there's just few and far
between gas stations that I mean, I almost got trapped
a couple of times low on.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Gas, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, that's nerve wrecking.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
So we don't know the gas situation. He's in his
head speculating the stuff. Seems pretty logical to me. The
shortcut that they took started off pretty easy. They're almost
lured into it because they felt like, all right, this
plymouth voyager, I know this car, it can take it.
But eventually they descended into an volcanyon, and this is
(34:20):
where the road becomes a wash.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
It's a dry creek bed.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Dried creek beds are you know, there's a lot of sediment,
a lot of loose gravel, a lot of sand, and
it's really easy to get stuck in one of those.
I've been stuck in one of those, and the only
way to kind of to avoid getting stuck is just
to keep that thing going forward as quickly as you can.
Not dangerous, obviously, but just kind of keep those wheels
going forward. Which you don't want to do is stop.
(34:45):
And it looks like that's what Egbert was doing, was
trying to go pretty quickly through that gravel. And that's
ultimately what how he got those tires, you know, popped right.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
How they ended up in the middle of the sand
up to their axle is there is a fork right
behind them, and the fork veered to the They took
the veer I think to the left and realized, oh no,
we want to go to the right. This left isn't
actually the road, and he tried to cut over through
the I guess median between them, and that was just
(35:18):
nothing but sam that they got stuck in. So now
they're stuck. And Tom Hood makes the case that they
still didn't view this as a survival situation. Yet this
is a deeply inconvenient issue that surely they could get
help with, right. I mean, again, they're in a national park,
but they're four miles from the geologist's cabin. That's something
(35:39):
they could do. But again, this is totally in the
wrong direction, and they're hoping to find somebody a little
closer to help them pull their van out of out
of trouble and get some new tires. So this is
where they think that Egbert walked off with a bottle
of butt ice and sat in the shade and tried
to figure out what to do next.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, I mean clear, he'sn't worried about survival if he's
drinking a beer, because that will dehydrate you even further.
I'm not sure if Egbert knew that, but he's German.
Plenty of beer over there, you would think he would
know that. And again, in his defense too, now that
I'm coming around to this idea, he may not have
even known, like who knows what you can see in
the window of that geologist cabin if they were like,
(36:20):
you know, big water bottles or something within plane view
or not, So he may not have thought like, hey,
maybe we should go back there and get some rations
at least, because he may not have seen any again,
just speculating here, but directly south of that site again
is that China Lake Military base. And what Tomhood reckoned was, Hey,
(36:41):
maybe he knew about this base and maybe he figured,
at least it will be people there. Maybe there's a
perimeter fence with cameras, maybe there's some dudes patrolling the perimeter.
But at the very least, even if it's a top
secret place, we could probably go get some help or
something and they could drive us out of here.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, you know, show up at the fence of a
secret military base. They're going to come to us. Essentially
makes a lot of sense. And on the map that
Egbert was using, the border of the China Lake Naval
Weapon Center is marked off. So to him it looked
like that fence, that perimeter fence was just a few
(37:19):
miles walk from where they were now where the van
was stuck right right. The reason why they didn't search
south in the initial four day search was because China
Lake doesn't have a perimeter fence. It's so isolated in
(37:39):
the middle of this very deadly desert that they're like,
if you try to hike to us, you're going to die.
You're so dead. We don't even need to put up
a fence. And so this is Tomahood figuring this out. Like,
if you are in Europe and you go to a
military installation, there's going to be a fence, it's going
to be patrolled, and that would be a really smart
idea to take the shortcut to the military installation to
(38:02):
get help. Unfortunately, it was just doomed not to work
out because there was no fence whatsoever. And at some
point Egbert figured that out, and then it started to
sink in that they were in really big trouble.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, so Tomahood wants to find at least some human remains.
At this point he's I don't want to get in
toma Hood's head, but and say like he was obsessed,
but he was very much into the idea of finding
out what happened to this family.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Let's just say that.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
He got his friend Les Walker and said, all right,
let's get together another team. Let's go search south.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
This time.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
About an hour after they started this search, he found
an empty wine bottle under a bush. He said, here's
another clue. Then he found a crumpled up piece of paper.
He thought it might have been toilet paper at first,
it turned out it was pages from a daily planner
in German. So he said, I'm really the trail is
hot at this point, like literally in figure And not
(39:02):
too long after that, his Buddy Less radios and says Tom,
we have some bones here.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah. So I guess less Walker had come to the
base of a cliff that was about thirty feet tall,
and it would make sense that this is where you
would find the bones of somebody stranded in the desert
because it was the only place that was offering shade. Yeah,
and the bones were strewn about, they were sun bleached.
But the thing that gave it away that these were
(39:28):
definitely the family, the remains of the family, Cornelia's wallet
was found with them, like all the credit cards had
her name on it, and so Less and Tom left
the bones in situ, but they took the wallet because
they were afraid that they were going to be taken
for a couple of local yahoos who were trying to
who came up with a wild story. But now they
(39:50):
had physical proof that they had discovered the Death Valley
Germans and that got things moving really quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
So this was nine miles from that abandoned mini van,
and so to make it nine miles and that kind
of heat really speaks a lot to their tenacity trying
to get out of there and trying to save themselves.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Very very sad with young kids too. Yeah, I mean Max.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Was four years old, right, Yeah, that's just yeah, devastating
to think about. There were, like you mentioned, four miles
from the border of that naval base, and they were
headed in the right direction, like they were kind of
doing the right thing to what they thought was a
reasonable idea of rescue, you know, looking back, they you know,
they got those bones DNA tested. I think they were
(40:37):
positively matched with only Egbert, is that right, Yeah, But
that's not to say that it wasn't Connie. It's obviously Connie.
They there were no confirmed remains of the children. That
part is very troublesome to me.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Still.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, the closest they found was a small shoe that
it was so it was so beaten up that it
could have been Kani's shoe. It could have been a
woman's small shoe, but it also could have been a
kid's shoe. So that's the only physical evidence they found
they could possibly be linked to the kids. The bones
were distributed all over in this kind of one site
(41:15):
at the base of the cliff, because it was there
was a wash I think on either side of the cliff.
So over the course of all these years, fifteen years,
the rains and the ensuing torrents of water would have
essentially spread the bones out. I don't know that that
would have done anything just to the kid's bones. I
(41:37):
don't know. Maybe there were so light that they got
carried away and spread and dispersed even further. I'm not sure.
But it is sad that they never found the kid's
remains too.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah, and I just can't imagine anything more terrifying than
being with your family like that and slowly dying of
sunstroke and dehydration and Malnutrition's just over the course of
knows how many days.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
You know, it's brutal.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, The thing that gets me is that, like thinking
of what it must have been like for Egbert to
climb some ridge and be able to see for dozens
of miles and see that there was no perimeter fence anywhere,
and for it to just hit you then and then
you have to walk back and I guess tell your
(42:22):
girlfriend like, yeah, we're in trouble.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
We salute to you Tom Mahood for picking this case
up and bringing about some sort of resolution. Obviously feels
awful for his ex wife back in Germany, and you
know that her son was taken from her and on
this fun sort of bonding trip and never came home.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
It was just just a very sad story.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
It is, Yeah, And I mean that's as close to
saulved as it gets, and it seems pretty solid.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Well, since we don't have anything more to say about
the death Valley Germans except rested in peace all four
of you, I think it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
This is about the Far Side.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
We did an episode on Gary Larson's great cartoon The
Far Side and got a lot of great feedback.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
It's clearly a beloved.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Cartoon that we heard from a lot of people that
just really enjoyed our tribute. Hey, guys, The Parside was
also a huge part of my comedy experience in my
middle school to high school years. Been happy to share
it with my son, who's eleven, who laughs out loud
or sometimes says, I don't get this one. Your podcast
made me think about how polarizing the humor of The
par Side can be, and sometimes you just don't get
it or don't really like it. My mom always thought
(43:32):
it was such a dumb comic, but would see me
laughing on and on reading the Far Side.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Galleries one day.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
She had the paper first and really liked the Far
Side from that day and laughed out loud and said, oh, Pete,
you're gonna love this one. And it was Grandma Worm
telling the little worms how Grandpa got the axe and
made them, you know, chopped up.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Into little worms. And I said, it's okay, but she
was insistent, don't you get it. I get it. He
cut himself into more worms.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
My mom was so mad about my reaction that she
couldn't talk to me for a couple of hours. But
I think that's what's so brilliant about Gary Larson. Any
single cartoon could be the funny thing ever to a
particular person and not so much to another, even if
they love it. Thanks so much for the show, guys,
and the countless hours that you've given to entertain me
and my family.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
And that is from Pete. And hello to Pete and
your family and your eleven year old son.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yeah, hello, Pete, thank you for that. Yeah. We've got
a lot of people send in their favorite Far Sides.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Yeah it was fun.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yep, thanks to everybody who wrote in about the Far Side.
And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, strongly
recommend it's a good one, and if you want to
be like Pete and send us a good email like
he did, you can send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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