The Mystery of the Death Valley Germans

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't really think you could call it part of our ongoing true crime suite, but certainly Unsolved Mystery Suite, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, semi-solved mystery, I guess, at this point, because we're talking about what's known as the Death Valley Germans.

Speaker 3 Pretty good band name, but it's in fact a very sad story from July of 1996 when a blended family of German tourists came to the United States for a three-week tour of California and Nevada and were never seen again alive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they just vanished into thin air essentially in Death Valley National Park.

Speaker 1 And there's, I mean, it's weird. Like, essentially, there was one guy who we'll meet later who got it as close to solved as possible just from sheer determination.

Speaker 1 But the family that you're talking about, they were made up of Egbert Rimkus, who was 34. He was an architect.
He was the dad.

Speaker 1 George, I'm not sure how to say George without an E. You took German, are you familiar?

Speaker 3 No, I guess it's George.

Speaker 1 Okay. He was 11.
He was Egbert's biological son.

Speaker 1 Connie Meyer, Cornelia Connie Meyer, she was 27. She was Egbert's girlfriend.
And Max was Connie's biological son from a previous relationship. He was four.

Speaker 1 And Egbert had gone through a fairly difficult divorce recently.

Speaker 1 And so this trip was essentially meant to be like a fun bonding experience for the four of them to kind of form a a family unit in this new you know new reality these new circumstances they were in yeah so uh they got to la

Speaker 3 on july 8th um they had a return flight to uh dresden which is where they were from for july 27th and the the on the docket was about a week or so in the la area uh head on over to las vegas for a few days um go to death valley national park check that out uh head over to yosemite from there, and then go back to LA and fly home.

Speaker 3 It's a pretty standard little

Speaker 3 itinerary for that kind of three-week adventure, I would say.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And for the adventure,

Speaker 1 they rented a car, a 96 Plymouth Voyager minivan,

Speaker 1 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 Deutschmark Rent a Car.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was due back on the 26th of July, which is the day before their flight back to Germany, right?

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 1 The problem is, is Dollar Renticar never got their minivan back, and the family didn't make their flight to Germany. And not everybody noticed this.

Speaker 1 I mean, certainly no one in America paid much attention. But remember, Egbert had an ex-wife who was the mom of George.
And George's mom, Heike,

Speaker 1 She was, she wanted to know where her son was. So she alerted the authorities.

Speaker 1 And very quickly, Interpol put out an international alert for four missing German tourists last seen in Southern California.

Speaker 1 And here's their itinerary. And it went absolutely nowhere.
This was the end of July, beginning of August, 1996, and nothing happened for months.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think about,

Speaker 3 I guess, until October 21st when a ranger. was

Speaker 3 flying around in a helicopter looking for meth 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

Speaker 3 that had clearly been, you know, mired in the sand.

Speaker 3 So immediately, they're like, What is this thing?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so the mystery of the Death Valley Germans was born right there in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the whole thing wouldn't be solved or close to being solved for another 15 years.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 It lives up to its name.

Speaker 1 It doesn't have the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, but it has the second highest, and it's very close.

Speaker 1 The highest temperature ever recorded in Death Valley in the summer of 1913 was 134 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah.
56.7 degrees Celsius. Hot.

Speaker 1 I think the record was in El Aziza, Libya in 1922. 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.

Speaker 1 And in 1996, in the summer, remember, they're in there hanging out in late July, which is the height of the summer of Death Valley.

Speaker 1 The daily high temperature, the average, was 124 degrees Fahrenheit and 91 was the low.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so it's scorching hot, which is just, you know, it's very dangerous conditions, especially if you're

Speaker 3 not used to that kind of thing, not prepared for that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There was a writer in the 19th century named Carl Mai, spelled M-A-Y,

Speaker 3 German 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.

Speaker 3 Some were made into spaghetti westerns, including one called The Valley of Death. in 1968.
But this dude, whom I've never heard of, sold 200 million books.

Speaker 3 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 1 Yeah. You didn't know that?

Speaker 3 I had never heard of this guy, had you? No. No, okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, of course, it's a very popular place. But people do die in Death Valley National Park every year, every summer in particular.
And between 2007 and 2024, 68 people died in Death Valley.

Speaker 1 That's a lot of people who died simply from being exposed to the local weather. They died of hyperthermia, most of them.

Speaker 1 I think 20 or not most, but 20% died of hyperthermia, which if you've ever been in a hot sauna that got too hot for your comfort,

Speaker 1 imagine dying from that. That's dying from hyperthermia.
I think the rest

Speaker 1 who died from exposure died from dehydration because that can come on really quick too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 So a day after this minivan is discovered by a helicopter in Death Valley, the Ranger came back with a local sheriff on the ground to check it out.

Speaker 3 Or maybe they flew out there, who knows? But at any rate, at some point, their feet were on the ground.

Speaker 3 They opened the van up. They, like I said, there were three flat tires.

Speaker 3 It was stuck up to its axles in the sand. And

Speaker 3 they determined that it had driven for at least a couple of hundred feet on the flat tires. The whole thing was covered in dust, you know, clearly hadn't been

Speaker 3 seen by anyone else or disturbed.

Speaker 3 That was the things you would expect to find from disappeared people on an adventurous vacation like this, like their luggage and their clothes, like nothing really weird.

Speaker 3 Empty water bottles, empty juice containers, a couple of unopened bottles of bud ice beer. You remember that? Yeah, it dates this thing in the mid-90s.
I was never into the ice beers.

Speaker 1 No, I think if I remember correctly, it just got you more crunk than the average beer.

Speaker 3 I feel like that was how they sold it. Who knows? I mean, that was before things like high-gravity beers really came to the forefront.

Speaker 3 So maybe it was like, you know, these things have an extra percentage of ABV.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the slogan was, butt ice, get you plastered.

Speaker 3 I remember the dry beers, too. I thought it was fancy in college at one point because I was drinking Michelob Dry.

Speaker 1 Oh, at this point, speaking of fancy, I was drinking Zima.

Speaker 3 Oh, I never went down the Zima road.

Speaker 1 Oh, they were, they went down easy.

Speaker 3 What was the flavor? What was it? Like a sprite?

Speaker 1 Yes, it was, it was close to that. Like you wouldn't take a sip of Zima and be like, that's sprite.
But that's probably the closest thing you could just mention off the top of your head.

Speaker 1 Some people put Jolly Ranchers in it, too, to flavor it even further.

Speaker 1 It also had a bit of like a

Speaker 1 dry, like in the sense that champagne can be dry. It had a little bit of that.
Nothing that you'd be like, wow, it's a really dry drink.

Speaker 1 And I think ultimately it was malt liquor, which really could get you plastered too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I used to drink the Mickey's Big Mouths in college

Speaker 3 and the occasional little giant Schlitz tall boy can. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, those were the days. I keep it pretty simple these days.

Speaker 1 But yeah, but you're right. That Butt Ice definitely dates it to the mid-90s for sure.
And like you said, this is kind of important. That's why I'm going back to it.

Speaker 3 There were a couple of bottles of unopened Butt-Ice beer still in the minivan yeah uh and then one other 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 uh i guess seeing the la area which is um not super close to la so i guess maybe they wanted to be between la and san diego or something i don't know i think they just saw pictures of the view and were like there maybe because the view is very nice

Speaker 1 so um there was a guidebook 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.

Speaker 1 And so they went to the visitor center. Investigators did later.

Speaker 1 And they found that on July 22nd, there were two German language guidebooks sold at the visitor center at Furnace Creek and none on July 23rd.

Speaker 1 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 3 Yeah. So their second clue came when they found undeveloped rolls of film and cameras.

Speaker 3 So sort of like the end of the hangover, they were able to get those developed and piece together, you know, at least roughly by way of the pictures they took at least,

Speaker 3 what they had done on their trip, maybe even as we'll see, clues to where they, like the last picture taken, obviously would be the most instructive.

Speaker 3 So from these pictures, they realized they stayed in San Clemente for a little while, seeing the LA area. They drove up the California coast and then over to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Speaker 3 And there they stayed at the Treasure Island Hotel, which also dates this in the mid-90s.

Speaker 3 And there they found that the father, Egbert, had called his bank in Germany. on July 12th, tried to have another $1,500 wired to Bank of America in San Clemente, but they sent it to the wrong bank.

Speaker 3 And at Treasure Island, he,

Speaker 3 you know, he was clearly in need of some dough. He even faxed his ex-wife and said, hey, which also dates this, can you send more money? And she never responded.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what I didn't get, and I didn't see anyone explain it, is why he was just like, oh, well, they sent it to the LA branch of Bank of America rather than San Clemente.

Speaker 1 I guess there's nothing I can do to go get it. He just never went and picked up the $1,500.

Speaker 3 Well, maybe he didn't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I would still spend some time trying to figure out where my $1,500, that's about $3,000 in today's money.
So it seems like he just shrugged it off from his actions.

Speaker 1 I just think that's really strange.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, it also could have been one of those things where they're like, well, sir, we don't know which bank it's in.

Speaker 1 Stop bothering us.

Speaker 3 And like, we can find out in a week.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it could be.

Speaker 3 And, you know, they had a schedule, so who knows?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the long and short of it, though, is they were low on funds now. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can still buy some butt ice. It wasn't particularly expensive.

Speaker 1 So they seemed to kind of be making their way low on funds.

Speaker 1 And that actually helped track them a little bit further later on.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's locally called the geologist's cabin, and I think it is, it does what it says on the label, which is it houses geologists who are conducting experiments out there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You have to go get the key first before you start using the geologist's cabin. So they seem to have just taken the flag as maybe a souvenir or something like that.

Speaker 1 Like I know if I were in the Black Forest and I came across a German flag, I would take it

Speaker 1 and then take it back to America as a souvenir.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I guess that's what this was being used for back then, because I think now you can actually stay there.

Speaker 1 Oh, really?

Speaker 3 Yeah, as like a,

Speaker 3 you know, along the Appalachian Trail and just sort of all over in national parks, there'll be like a remote cabin that, you know, you come, you can stay there.

Speaker 3 There might be some food and water rations if you need it. And you're supposed to, the idea is that you're supposed to leave something and leave it better than you found it.

Speaker 3 Because I've seen pictures of people that, you know, in the 2010s that have stayed there. And like, it's, it's a destination for people who are into Death Valley because it's super cool looking.

Speaker 3 It's out in the middle of nowhere. 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 geologist's cabin. So I guess that just wasn't the deal back then.

Speaker 3 Right. Because it was locked up.
What I don't get,

Speaker 3 well, we'll get to what I don't get later.

Speaker 3 Okay. Should we take a break?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's a good spot.

Speaker 3 All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back with more on the Death Valley Germans right after this.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 3 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 7 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

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Speaker 9 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 11 Go to public.com/slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 10 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 15 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 17 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 18 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 22 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 23 Crypto Trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 22 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Chuck, so where we left off, they had pilfered the American flag from the geologist's cabin. And like all of this stuff, this is just the stuff they found in the van.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 22nd or 23rd or any time, really.

Speaker 1 One of the other things they did was check logbooks. Apparently, they pick up log books, even at

Speaker 1 sites that don't have anyone working there, they'll still have a logbook.

Speaker 1 And they struck gold at one of them, the Warm Springs Mine Logbook, which is an abandoned mine above Death Valley in the mountains, I guess on a ridge. And you can get to it.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 eight-lane highway.

Speaker 1 It's gravel, it's rough, but a Plymouth Voyager can

Speaker 1 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 Yeah, they signed it. It was in German.
Apparently, it was barely legible. And it said, we are going over the pass.

Speaker 3 Signed, Connie, Egbert, George, and Max.

Speaker 3 So on October 23rd, this is two days after the minivan is found. They finally conduct a big four-day search looking for this family.
About 250-plus people, a couple of helicopters, eight horses.

Speaker 3 A lot of these were volunteers, but dozens of them were trained search and rescue people.

Speaker 1 Right. No slouches.

Speaker 15 No slouches.

Speaker 3 Well, there was one slouch, but he didn't last long because it was Death Valley.

Speaker 1 They like go of them, Eugene.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And the only evidence from this four-day search was an empty bottle of Bud Ice

Speaker 3 and a butt print, basically, in the sand next to it, where someone had clearly sat down and enjoyed that Bud Ice. It was about 1.7 miles away from the van.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 yeah, clearly somebody took a little break in the shade and had that sweet, sweet, extra-potent iced beer. Right.

Speaker 1 And they could even figure when,

Speaker 1 they probably figured it was Egbert because the size of the butt print was fairly large.

Speaker 1 Well, that's how I saw it described. I think

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 But 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.

Speaker 1 So he would have been sitting there in late afternoon, which seems ludicrous to even point out, but it will come into play later on.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's right. So

Speaker 3 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-N-G-E-L.

Speaker 3 And if you look on a map back in 1996, before you had, you know, smartphones and things like that, or people on the internet saying, hey, don't go this way. Right.

Speaker 3 It looks like it's pretty possible to drive from Warm Springs, go through that Mingle Pass into an adjacent valley and then hit a dirt road toward Yosemite, which was their next destination.

Speaker 3 They didn't know, you know, they didn't have the knowledge that

Speaker 3 it wasn't going to be just like a little sort of rocky path, but something you really, really need a 4x4 vehicle for, like full stop. It's not like, well, maybe we can make it in the Plymouth Voyager.

Speaker 3 Like you can't make it down this road with anything other than a 4x4. And even that's dicey.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I saw that not only do you need a 4x4, you need an experienced driver who has, who can get through this stuff too. Like you can't just put some Yahoo in a 4x4 and expect them to make it.

Speaker 1 It's that dicey.

Speaker 3 Maybe a winch.

Speaker 1 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you just go from bowler to bowler, winching yourself over the pass, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The problem is, is the van wasn't anywhere near the road to Mengele Pass. As a matter of fact, it wasn't really near anything that was a road, an actual road in Death Valley.

Speaker 1 It was essentially like they just drove through the middle of the desert, which is how they found the van. Yeah.
So after this four-day, very extensive search by at least 250 people,

Speaker 1 all they found was the beer bottle at the bush. and the butt print.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That was it.
Those were the only physical clues that they found. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in Death Valley at any given time in the whole area of Southern California.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it probably would have stayed that way if not for a guy named Tom Mahood, who we'll meet in a second.

Speaker 1 But in the interim, That vacuum between the end of the initial search and Tom Hood picking this whole thing up,

Speaker 1 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, it seemed like.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like, hey, let's, this family set it up to make it look like they've been disappeared. Because Egbert, he was going through a pretty rough custody battle with his ex-wife.

Speaker 3 It was a pretty contentious divorce. 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

Speaker 3 son. And so people are like, yeah, they purposefully disappeared so he could just get away from his ex-wife and have sole custody of his son.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 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, you know?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I think staging a disappearance there is different than disappearing. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I guess I do.

Speaker 1 What about psychos and crooks?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 You know, they were looking for meth labs out there by helicopter. So the idea that there was a drug gang or just some ne'er-do-wells out there

Speaker 3 or just some random psychopath was rumors that circulated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it didn't hurt that the Barker ranch where the Manson family hung around

Speaker 1 is not too far away. So I guess some people are like, well, there you go.
I guess there's some hundred-year-old Manson family member that they ran across who killed them.

Speaker 1 And then there was a, this was probably the most conspiracy theory minded of the conspiracy theories or the theories of what happened to them.

Speaker 1 Not too far away in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere, is the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which is a military testing range. I've seen top secret.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the idea was that Egbert, either being a curious person, was drawn to the site.

Speaker 1 This is the real reason he wanted to go to Death Valley, was so he could sneak into China Lake Naval Weapons 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 weapons center and had either been

Speaker 1 sent to like a

Speaker 1 ghost prison or killed and buried in the desert. Who knows what the government will do when they're,

Speaker 1 this is the

Speaker 1 technology bandied about on the internet when their hybrid propulsion systems are at risk.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Some random German shows up.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But also, I mean, could you get more vague than hybrid propulsion? Like, what's it propelling? What is it a hybrid of?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's just so like futuristic sounding.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 I was driving down the highway the other day and I saw a pickup truck next to me that had a,

Speaker 3 I don't know what it was. It was a military green like

Speaker 3 something or other. Like it was in the

Speaker 3 bed of a pickup truck on like a

Speaker 3 on a pallet.

Speaker 3 But, you know, it had a screen and buttons and it was square

Speaker 3 and it was clearly military.

Speaker 3 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 warfighter.

Speaker 1 Huh. I was like, what the hell is that next to me on the highway? Maybe it was a military issue chicken coop.

Speaker 3 It might have been something. It was probably something that silly because these guys were just driving it in a pickup truck.
There were no,

Speaker 3 they didn't look armed. I mean, they may have been armed, but it's not like it was surrounded by Humvees or something like that.
But it was definitely something weird to see, you know.

Speaker 1 I'm curious. Hopefully one of our listeners can tell us what that probably was.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was like a trash compactor or something.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is where it would have been left. Like, he was looking for hybrid propulsion.
They ran across some meth manufacturers. He intentionally staged the disappearance.

Speaker 1 That's just, that was it. Like, everybody was like, we're 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.

Speaker 1 His name's Tom Mahood. He's a retired civil engineer.
He lives in Orange, California. And he

Speaker 1 got bored in his retirement and started looking for things to do and did a whole bunch of different stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it takes a certain set of skills, right?

Speaker 1 And so Tom Mahood had this and he got interested in the story of the Death Valley Germans and he put those

Speaker 2 support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 3 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 7 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

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Speaker 15 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash cash account switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously go to public.com slash sysk and earn an uncapped one percent bonus when you transfer your portfolio that's public.com slash sysk paid for by public investing all investing involves risk of loss including loss of principal brokerage services for u.s listed registered securities options and bonds and a self-directed account are offered by public investing inc member finra and sipc crypto trading provided by zero hash complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 28 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

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Speaker 1 The universe is full of mysteries. Black holes, quantum physics, galaxies.
On TikTok, millions of people are learning more about the universe around them every day.

Speaker 1 Scientists break down complex theories, demonstrate experiments, and connect dots between the cosmos and our daily lives.

Speaker 1 One scroll might reveal the concepts on the fabric of space-time, the next an optical illusion. It's discovery on a massive scale where millions learn something new every day.

Speaker 1 Two things together, and he became kind of obsessed with solving the whole thing.

Speaker 3 That sounds like a pretty good place for our second break, eh?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 We met Tom Mahood, and he's going, guys, cut the break, build the tension.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I think Tom Mahood would approve, too.

Speaker 3 All right. We'll be right back with more on Tom Mahood right after this.

Speaker 3 All right, so Tom Mahood is on the scene.

Speaker 3 Like Liam Neeson, he has a particular set of skills,

Speaker 3 and he had heard about this case in 2008 for the first time.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 in 2009, 13 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That butt print was long gone.

Speaker 3 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 2009.

Speaker 3 He looked around, headed back home.

Speaker 3 When he got home, he 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 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And remember, that four-day search was really thorough. Like if you read Tom Hood's blog, otherhand.org, he has an extensive multi-part

Speaker 1 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 this, he praises the search.

Speaker 1 Like, he's like, 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.

Speaker 1 He would have to be a complete idiot to try to go south.

Speaker 1 The only thing there is China Lake Naval Weapons Center, and that is really remote it's in the middle of nowhere and 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 that's right so he uh was like they're low on money so that's a that's a bit of a clue or an indicator of what they might do yeah They didn't have a lot of time.

Speaker 3 It was July 22nd, and they needed to be back to LA in four days. And they still wanted to go go to Yosemite.
That was on their itinerary.

Speaker 3 So there was a time crunch. There was a money crunch.

Speaker 3 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 and what they were doing, was sunset in Death Valley.

Speaker 3 And the Rangers said, hey, this is, we know the sunset. That's Hannepaw Canyon on the west side of Death Valley.
And we know it was taken on July 22nd because it was, you know, pictures were dated.

Speaker 3 And that was the night they arrived at the park.

Speaker 3 we knew that they couldn't afford to camp out at Furnace Creek or get a room at that hotel and so you know like most national parks or I guess all of them there are places where you can backcountry camp for free just you know they're areas and 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 backcountry at Hannepa Canyon and this is just not a very touristy area as far as Death Valley goes.

Speaker 3 It's the east side is more tourist friendly and this is again on the west side.

Speaker 1 Yeah, hours and hours away from the welcome center. At least, have you been to Death Valley? I have not.

Speaker 3 I did a TV commercial for a couple of days in Death Valley.

Speaker 1 Okay, so it's huge, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I was just in one little tiny part of it, obviously.

Speaker 1 But it's massive. Please do.

Speaker 3 It looks big on a map. Okay, there you go.

Speaker 1 So this clue to Hanapaw 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.

Speaker 1 And so if you look at a map and you're in Hanapaw Canyon and you're trying to get to Yosemite, it would make sense to go this route past the Warm Springs mine toward Mengel Pass, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, again, they're trying to look for the fastest, cheapest way to get to Yosemite from Death Valley. So they went by the geologist cabin, again, not open for business at the time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And as they were driving to Mengel Pass, they came upon roads that were like, okay, this is not a good road. This is not even a gravel road.
This is...

Speaker 1 kind of rough, but the minivan can take it. If I drive slowly, if I drive carefully.

Speaker 1 um and egbert was doing a fairly good job it seems but when they got to mengel pass which is all they had to do was cross mengle pass make it a little further and they could take a road to yosemite but when they got there they were stopped dead in their tracks um there was just no way to pass it yeah not even that sweet sweet plymouth voyager uh if this episode isn't sponsored by butt ice and plymouth voyager then we're doing something wrong yeah yeah we need a time machine i guess uh it could live alongside the 2012 camry probably.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the 1996 Plymouth Flutter. It's really

Speaker 1 future.

Speaker 3 And then just the sound of a butt-ice cap being twisted off.

Speaker 1 And somebody glugging it and then hitting the ground.

Speaker 3 So they realize that they can't get through there. They have, there's the only way to go is back.
It would have been around, you know, between 12.30 and 1.30 p.m.

Speaker 3 by this point, at least 105 degrees. So they backtracked to to that geologist's cabin.
It's still locked. And this is what I meant earlier when what I don't understand.

Speaker 3 What at this point, I don't understand why they didn't break into this cabin. This is dire circumstances and get some food and water.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing. Tomahood explains this really well.

Speaker 1 He was saying, no, these are German tourists. They're safe in America.
They're in a national park.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, he, being in Egbert's head, said Egbert made the decision rather than go drive all the way back to the visitor 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.

Speaker 1 Why would you not follow these roads on the map that are essentially a shortcut to Yosemite? That's going to take hours off of your trip. If the map shows a road there, why would you not take it?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That was the map that Egbert was dealing with, and that was what ultimately got them killed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the one thing I couldn't find was what

Speaker 3 the gas situation was like in that car.

Speaker 1 I didn't see that either.

Speaker 3 I looked too, because that would have really factored in, obviously, because

Speaker 3 if you've ever taken out west road trips or anywhere in the world where there's just few and far between gas stations,

Speaker 3 I mean, I almost got trapped a couple of times, low on gas, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's nerve-wracking.

Speaker 3 So we don't know the gas situation. He's in his head speculating this stuff.
Seems pretty logical to me.

Speaker 3 The shortcut that they took started off pretty easy. They were almost lured into it because they felt like, all right, this Plymouth Voyager, I know this car.
It can take it.

Speaker 3 But eventually they descended into Anvil Canyon, and this is where the road becomes awash. It's a dry creek bed.

Speaker 3 Dry 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.

Speaker 3 And the only way to kind of... to avoid getting stuck is just to keep that thing going forward as quickly as you can.

Speaker 3 Not dangerous, obviously, but just kind of keep those wheels going forward, which you don't want to do is stop.

Speaker 3 And it it looks like that's what Egbert was doing was trying to go pretty quickly through that gravel and that's ultimately what uh how he got those tires you know popped right where how they ended up in the the middle of the sand up to their axle is there was a fork right behind them

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he tried to cut over through the, I guess, median between them. And that was just nothing but sand that they got stuck in.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I mean, again, they're in a national park, but they're four miles from the geologist's cabin.

Speaker 1 That's something they could do. But again, this is totally in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 And they're hoping to find somebody a little closer to help them pull their van out of trouble and get some new tires.

Speaker 1 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 3 Yeah, I mean, clearly he's worried about survival if he's drinking a beer

Speaker 3 because that will dehydrate you even further. Not sure if Egbert knew that, but he's German.
Plenty of beer over there. You would think he would know that.

Speaker 3 And again, in his defense, too, now that I'm coming around to this idea, he he may not have even known, like, who knows what you can see in the window of that geologist cabin,

Speaker 3 if there were like, you know, big water bottles or something within plain view or not. So he may not have thought, like, hey, maybe we should go back there and get some rations at least

Speaker 3 because he may not have seen any. Again, just speculating here.

Speaker 3 But directly south of that site, again, is that China Lake military base. And what Tom Mahood reckoned was, hey, maybe he knew about this base and maybe he figured at least there will be people there.

Speaker 3 Maybe there's a perimeter fence with cameras. Maybe there's some dudes patrolling the perimeter.

Speaker 3 But at the very least, even if it's a top secret place,

Speaker 3 we could probably go get some help or something and they could drive us out of here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If we show up at the fence of a secret military base, they're going to come to us, essentially. Makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1 And on the map that Egbert was using, the border of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center is marked off.

Speaker 1 So to him, it looked like that fence, that perimeter fence was just a few miles walk from where they were now,

Speaker 1 where the van was stuck, right?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 The reason why they didn't search south

Speaker 1 in the initial four-day search was because China Lake doesn't have a perimeter fence. It's so isolated.

Speaker 1 in the middle of this very deadly desert that they're like, if you try to hike to us, you're going to die.

Speaker 1 You're so dead, we don't even need to put up a fence. And so, this is Tomahood figuring this out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that would have been a really smart idea to just take the shortcut to the military installation to get help.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, it was just doomed not to work out because there was no fence whatsoever.

Speaker 1 And at some point, Egbert figured that out, and then it started to sink in that they were in really big trouble.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so Tomahood wants to find at least some human remains at this point. He's,

Speaker 3 I don't want to get in Tom Mahood's head, but

Speaker 3 and say like he was obsessed, but he was very much into the idea of finding out what happened to this family. Let's just say that.

Speaker 3 He got his friend, Les Walker, and said, all right, let's get together another team. Let's go search south this time.

Speaker 3 About an hour after they started this search, he found an empty wine bottle under a bush. He said, said, here's another clue.
Then he found a crumpled up piece of paper.

Speaker 3 He thought it might have been toilet paper at first.

Speaker 3 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 and figuratively.

Speaker 3 And not too long after that, his buddy Les radios and says, Tom, we have some bones here.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I guess Les Walker had come to the base of a cliff that was about 30 feet tall.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the bones were strewn about, they were sun bleached, but the thing that gave it away that these were definitely the family, the remains of the family,

Speaker 1 Cornelia's wallet was found with them. Like all the credit cards had her name on it.

Speaker 1 And so Les 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 of local Yahoos who were trying to who came up with a wild story.

Speaker 1 But now they had physical proof that they had discovered the Death Valley Germans, and that got things moving really quickly.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so this was nine miles from that abandoned minivan. So to make it nine miles in that kind of heat

Speaker 3 really speaks a lot to their tenacity trying to get out of there and trying to save themselves. Very, very sad.

Speaker 1 With young kids, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 3 Max was four years old, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 that's just yeah devastating to think about um they were like you've mentioned four miles from the border of that naval base uh 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 um

Speaker 3 they uh you know they they got those bones dna tested uh i think they were positively matched with only Egbert, is that right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 But that's not to say that it wasn't Connie.

Speaker 3 It's obviously Connie.

Speaker 3 There were no confirmed remains of the children.

Speaker 3 That part is very troublesome to me still.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the closest they found was a small shoe that

Speaker 1 it was so beaten up that it could have been Connie's shoe. It could have been a woman's small shoe, but it also could have been a kid's shoe.
So

Speaker 1 that's the only physical evidence they found that could possibly be linked to the kids.

Speaker 1 The bones were distributed all over in this kind of one site at the base of the cliff because it was,

Speaker 1 there was a wash, I think, on either side of the cliff.

Speaker 1 So, over the course of all these years, 15 years,

Speaker 1 the rains and the ensuing torrents of water would have essentially spread the bones out.

Speaker 1 I don't know that that would have

Speaker 1 done anything just to the kids' bones. I don't know.
Maybe they were so light that they got carried away and spread and dispersed even further.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure, but it is sad that they never found the kids' kid's remains, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I just can't imagine anything more terrifying than being with your family like that and slowly dying of

Speaker 3 sunstroke and dehydration and malnutrition. It's just over the course of who knows how many days, you know, it's brutal.

Speaker 1 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 tell your girlfriend like

Speaker 3 yeah we're in trouble uh we salute to you Tom Mahood for uh picking this case up and and bringing about some sort of resolution uh obviously they feel awful for his uh ex-wife back in Germany you know that her son was taken from her and on this fun sort of bonding trip and never came home.

Speaker 3 It was just a very sad story. It is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I mean, that's as close to solved as it gets, and it seems pretty solved.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Agreed.

Speaker 1 Well, since we don't have anything more to say about the Death Valley Germans, except rest in peace, all four of you, I think it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 3 This is about the far side. We did an episode on Gary Larson's great cartoon, The Far Side, and got a lot of great feedback.
It's clearly a beloved

Speaker 3 cartoon that we heard from a lot of people that just really enjoyed our tribute. Hey guys, The Farside was also a huge part of my comedy experience in my middle school to high school years.

Speaker 3 I've been happy to share it with my son who's 11, 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 far side can be.

Speaker 3 And sometimes you just don't get it or don't really like it. My mom always thought it was such a dumb comic, but would see me laughing on and on reading the far side galleries.

Speaker 3 One day she had the paper first. and really liked the far side from that day and laughed out loud and said, oh, Pete, you're going to love this one.

Speaker 3 And it was grandma worm telling the little worms how grandpa got the axe and made them,

Speaker 3 you know, chopped up into little worms. And I said, eh, it's okay.
But she was insistent. Don't you get it? And I said, ma, I get it.
He cut himself into more worms.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Any single cartoon could be the funniest thing ever to a particular person and not so much to another, even if they love it.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much for the show guys and the countless hours that you have given to entertain me and my family and that is from Pete. And hello to Pete and your family and your 11-year-old son.

Speaker 1 Yeah, hello Pete.

Speaker 1 Thank you for that. Yep, we got a lot of people sending their favorite far sides.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was fun.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you want to be like Pete and send us a good email like he did, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 3 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 7 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 1 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 9 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 11 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

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Speaker 19 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 1 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

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Speaker 1 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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