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The Mysterious Disappearance of the Death Valley Germans · The conspiracy

0:00
Speaker 1: Death Valley sits at the northern end of the Mojave Desert,
0:03
Speaker 1: tucked between the Panamint and the Amargosa mountain ranges. And
0:07
Speaker 1: it holds the record for the highest reliably recorded air
0:11
Speaker 1: temperature ever measured on the surface of the earth. And
0:15
Speaker 1: the valley floor drops to 282 feet below sea level
0:18
Speaker 1: at its lowest point. And the combination of that depth,
0:22
Speaker 1: the reflective salt flats at its base, and the surrounding
0:25
Speaker 1: mountains that trap the air and prevent any meaningful circulation
0:30
Speaker 1: And the almost total absence of vegetation or moisture creates
0:34
Speaker 1: a heat environment that operates on a different scale than
0:38
Speaker 1: most people have any intuitive framework for.
0:42
Speaker 2: Pretty hot.
0:43
Speaker 1: And the park service manages the land and they do
0:46
Speaker 1: their best to keep visitors safe. But the valley is enormous,
0:50
Speaker 1: over 3,000 square miles. And there are corners of it
0:54
Speaker 1: so isolated that a person could be in serious trouble
0:57
Speaker 1: and be essentially invisible to the rest of the world.
1:01
Speaker 1: So on the afternoon of July 23rd, 1996, a woman
1:05
Speaker 1: named Cornelia Meyer paused inside a stone cabin deep in
1:09
Speaker 1: the back country of Death.
1:11
Speaker 2: Valley and picked up a pen. And the cabin had
1:14
Speaker 2: a guest log, the.
1:15
Speaker 1: Kind that remote wilderness shelters keep as a record of
1:18
Speaker 1: passing visitors. And she wrote a few lines in German,
1:22
Speaker 1: her name, the names of her family, and where they
1:25
Speaker 1: were headed next. but no one would ever see them again. Crime, conspiracy, cults,
1:33
Speaker 1: serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume,
1:36
Speaker 1: and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful,
1:38
Speaker 1: intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are talking about a very strange case,
1:45
Speaker 1: one that'll keep you on the edge of your seat.
1:48
Speaker 1: So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelt, go mock
1:50
Speaker 1: fight on the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust
1:52
Speaker 1: through the windshield into this mysterious case together. Let's take
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4:04
Speaker 2: And let's get back.
4:05
Speaker 1: To the video. So Egbert Rimkus was 34 years old
4:09
Speaker 1: in the summer of 1996, and by most accounts, he
4:12
Speaker 1: was the kind of person who approached life with a
4:15
Speaker 1: certain deliberate energy. He worked as an architect in Dresden
4:19
Speaker 1: in the former East Germany, and architecture suits a particular
4:23
Speaker 1: kind of mind, someone comfortable thinking in systems. who can
4:27
Speaker 1: hold a large structure in their head and move through
4:30
Speaker 1: it logically, who trusts planning specifically. But to understand Egbert,
4:36
Speaker 1: you have to understand Dresden in 1996, because the city
4:40
Speaker 1: he lived and worked in was still in the middle
4:43
Speaker 1: of a convulsion that had no real Western equivalent. Because
4:47
Speaker 1: when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of the
4:51
Speaker 1: world watched and celebrated. But for the people who actually
4:54
Speaker 1: lived in East Germany, What followed wasn't quite the liberation
4:58
Speaker 1: it looked like from the outside. And reunification triggered an
5:02
Speaker 1: economic collapse that wiped out millions of jobs almost overnight.
5:06
Speaker 1: Factories closed, credentials became worthless, and the agencies brought in
5:10
Speaker 1: to manage the transition were staffed almost entirely by West
5:14
Speaker 1: Germans operating under West German rules. And many East Germans
5:19
Speaker 1: didn't experience it as freedom. They experienced it as being
5:23
Speaker 1: taken over, basically. And there's actually a German word for
5:27
Speaker 1: the nostalgia that emerged from this period, Ostalgi. A mashup
5:31
Speaker 1: of Ost, meaning east, and Nostalgi. And it would describe
5:35
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people just genuinely felt.
5:38
Speaker 2: So for a.
5:39
Speaker 1: Professional like Egbert, the impact was specific. In GDR era
5:44
Speaker 1: architectural training, qualifications and professional networks became largely obsolete overnight.
5:51
Speaker 1: Building codes, construction standards, licensing requirements, and client structures all changed.
5:57
Speaker 1: And West German firms dominated the new market. Not to mention,
6:01
Speaker 1: he had just come through a pretty difficult divorce. The
6:04
Speaker 1: kind that leaves a mark even when it has the
6:07
Speaker 1: right outcome. And was in the middle of a custody
6:10
Speaker 1: dispute over his son, Georg, who was 11 at the time. Now,
6:15
Speaker 1: Georg lived primarily with his mother, Heike Weber, and the
6:19
Speaker 1: formal arrangements around his care were still being resolved.
6:23
Speaker 2: So work was steady, but it.
6:25
Speaker 1: Was still demanding, and life had a lot of moving parts,
6:28
Speaker 1: and most of them were in motion at once, so
6:30
Speaker 1: there was a lot going on. And his girlfriend, Cornelia Meyer,
6:34
Speaker 1: was 27 years old at this time, seven years younger
6:38
Speaker 1: than Egbert. And she had a four-year-old son named Max
6:42
Speaker 1: from a previous relationship. And she and Egbert had been
6:45
Speaker 1: building a life together that involved weaving two separate families
6:49
Speaker 1: into something functional and new. So by the summer of 1996,
6:53
Speaker 1: the four of them were operating as one unit, even
6:57
Speaker 1: if the legal and logistical edges of that unit were
7:00
Speaker 1: still being worked out. So this American road trip, in
7:04
Speaker 1: a sense, was a pressure valve. Three weeks away from
7:08
Speaker 1: the custody arrangements and the professional obligations and the particular
7:12
Speaker 1: weight of a city still finding its footing in a
7:15
Speaker 1: place that none of them had ever been and just
7:17
Speaker 1: full of landscapes that looked nothing like Germany, so it
7:20
Speaker 1: was exciting. But for an East German in 1996, America,
7:24
Speaker 1: and specifically the American West, meant something that is difficult
7:28
Speaker 1: to fully translate. because the fascination ran pretty deep, and
7:33
Speaker 1: it had very specific roots in Dresden itself. Carl May
7:37
Speaker 1: was the best-selling German author of the time, with something
7:40
Speaker 1: approaching 200 million copies of his work sold worldwide. And
7:44
Speaker 1: he wrote adventure novels set in the American West, stories
7:48
Speaker 1: about the Apache chief, Juanetu, and his German blood brother,
7:51
Speaker 1: Old Shatterhand, navigating the frontier with honor and skill. And
7:56
Speaker 1: May wrote every one of them without ever setting foot
7:59
Speaker 1: in North America. And his museum was housed in his villa, Shatterhand,
8:04
Speaker 1: in Redibul, which is a suburb of Dresden. Directly adjacent
8:08
Speaker 1: to the city, Egbert and Cornelia had grown up in.
8:12
Speaker 1: And the GDR government had suppressed May's books because the
8:15
Speaker 1: Nazis had embraced them, but pre-war copies circulated as treasured
8:20
Speaker 1: family possessions and never stopped being read. And the state
8:23
Speaker 1: film company DEFA produced at least 17 Indian-era filmy or
8:28
Speaker 1: red westerns between 1965 and 1983, casting Native Americans as
8:34
Speaker 1: heroes resisting capitalist oppression. And the most popular, Die Sonne
8:39
Speaker 1: des Grobenbarren, I butchered that, I'm sorry, sold over 9
8:45
Speaker 1: million tickets in a nation of 17 million people. That's
8:48
Speaker 1: pretty popular. So this subculture of Indian hobbyist clubs flourished
8:52
Speaker 1: across the GDR, with an estimated 40,000 members in hundreds
8:57
Speaker 1: of clubs. And the first Dresden Indian and cowboy club, Manitou,
9:01
Speaker 1: one of the oldest, was based in Egbert and Cornelia's
9:05
Speaker 1: own city, with its members building a mock frontier settlement
9:09
Speaker 1: called Stetson City in the woods outside Dredston. These people were,
9:13
Speaker 1: they were LARPing Western, American Western culture.
9:16
Speaker 2: Just like funny to think about.
9:19
Speaker 1: And the Stasi monitored these clubs so obsessively that their
9:22
Speaker 1: declassified files on the hobbyists reportedly fill an entire room
9:26
Speaker 1: from floor to ceiling. So for East Germans, the American
9:30
Speaker 1: West represented everything the GDR was not. Freedom, vastness, and
9:36
Speaker 1: the romance of just open space. And growing up behind
9:40
Speaker 1: a wall, you learned what a horizon looked like from
9:43
Speaker 1: photographs and films and novels set in a country you
9:46
Speaker 1: were forbidden to visit. So after reunification, actually going there
9:50
Speaker 1: wasn't just a vacation, it was the fulfillment of something
9:54
Speaker 1: that had been deferred for an entire generation. and Egbert
9:58
Speaker 1: had talked about the trip with colleagues at work, and
10:01
Speaker 1: he was excited in the particular way that planners get excited.
10:05
Speaker 1: He had thought about it very carefully, built out a schedule,
10:09
Speaker 1: and was looking forward to executing it. So they flew
10:13
Speaker 1: into Los Angeles on July 8, 1996, and the return
10:17
Speaker 1: flight to Dresden was booked for July 27, 19 days
10:22
Speaker 1: to cover a lot of ground. The itinerary they had
10:25
Speaker 1: put together was ambitious, but not unreasonably so for a
10:29
Speaker 1: family accustomed to European travel, where distances between major landmarks
10:34
Speaker 1: tend to be shorter than and the infrastructure between them
10:37
Speaker 1: is a lot denser. So they plan to spend time
10:39
Speaker 1: in San Clement, a coastal town about an hour south
10:42
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles before heading east to Las Vegas. And
10:46
Speaker 1: then from Las Vegas, the plan was to loop back
10:48
Speaker 1: west through Death Valley and then north through Yosemite National
10:53
Speaker 1: Park before returning to LA in time for their flight.
10:57
Speaker 1: So on paper, That worked. And where it started to
11:01
Speaker 1: come apart was in the details. And the first problem
11:04
Speaker 1: was financial. Because before leaving Germany, Egbert had arranged for
11:09
Speaker 1: his bank in Dresden to wire $ 1, 500 to a Bank
11:13
Speaker 1: of America branch in San Clement. A fairly standard procedure
11:17
Speaker 1: for international travel at the time. but the transfer was
11:20
Speaker 1: set to the wrong location. So the funds arrived at
11:24
Speaker 1: a Los Angeles branch he had no practical way to access.
11:28
Speaker 1: And he found himself in the United States significantly short
11:31
Speaker 1: of what he had budgeted for. So from Las Vegas
11:34
Speaker 1: on July 21st, staying at the Treasure Island Hotel, he
11:38
Speaker 1: faxed Heike Weber's, Georg's mother, or his ex-partner, requesting that
11:43
Speaker 1: she wire additional funds to cover the shortfall. But she
11:47
Speaker 1: would not respond. And the exact nature of that silence
11:50
Speaker 1: is not documented anywhere. But what is documented is that
11:53
Speaker 1: the money never came and that Egbert and Cornelia pressed
11:57
Speaker 1: on without it. So Egbert had just asked the woman
12:00
Speaker 1: at the center of his ongoing custody dispute to help
12:03
Speaker 1: him on a trip he had specifically planned as an
12:06
Speaker 1: escape from that dispute, and she said nothing, which isn't
12:10
Speaker 1: totally surprising. There's some bad blood there, I think. But nonetheless,
12:14
Speaker 1: absolutely sucked for Egbert and his family traveling in a
12:17
Speaker 1: completely different country.
12:19
Speaker 2: But what's weird is that her son, Georg, was there
12:22
Speaker 2: with him, with Egbert, his father.
12:25
Speaker 1: So you'd think that she would at least want to
12:26
Speaker 1: take care of him and make sure he was good,
12:28
Speaker 1: but she just didn't answer. So the projection had to
12:32
Speaker 1: land on multiple levels at once. And this matters because
12:36
Speaker 1: of the decisions it shaped later. So when the family
12:39
Speaker 1: arrived at Death Valley and at the Furnace Creek Inn,
12:42
Speaker 1: which is the park's main lodging option, with its reliable
12:45
Speaker 1: amenities and proximity to ranger services, it was beyond their budget.
12:49
Speaker 1: Because at the moment, they were camping and looking for
12:52
Speaker 1: a spot at a higher elevation where the temperatures would
12:54
Speaker 1: be more bearable, because this is literally the hottest place
12:58
Speaker 1: on earth in the middle of July. And they would
13:02
Speaker 1: do this camp, rather than staying close to the park's
13:05
Speaker 1: established infrastructure. So they arrived at Death Valley on July
13:10
Speaker 1: 22nd and stopped at the visitor center. And they picked
13:13
Speaker 1: up guidebooks printed in German, because the park offers materials
13:17
Speaker 1: in several languages for international visitors, and they looked around
13:21
Speaker 1: at some of the main landmarks near the valley floor.
13:23
Speaker 1: And there was no record of them consulting with a
13:26
Speaker 1: park ranger about their plans.
13:29
Speaker 2: And this isn't unusual.
13:30
Speaker 1: Most visitors don't seek out ranger consultations, especially if they
13:35
Speaker 1: think they have a reasonable handle on their itinerary, which
13:38
Speaker 1: as we know Egbert, that was just his thing. His
13:40
Speaker 1: thing was planning everything down to the most minute detail.
13:44
Speaker 1: But there is another layer here that is easy to miss.
13:48
Speaker 1: Because Egbert had grown up in a state where official
13:51
Speaker 1: maps were instruments of deliberate deception. Because the GDR cartographic policy,
13:57
Speaker 1: formalized by National Defense Council resolution in 1965, mandated that
14:02
Speaker 1: accurate topographic maps could only be held by the military,
14:07
Speaker 1: the Stasi, and a handful of other state organs. And
14:11
Speaker 1: every other map, the ones ordinary citizens used, were deliberately altered.
14:16
Speaker 1: Like direction and scale were distorted. And buildings were omitted.
14:21
Speaker 1: And landmarks were displaced by as much as three kilometers.
14:25
Speaker 1: And in some cases, entirely fictitious geographic features were inserted.
14:30
Speaker 2: The purpose was.
14:31
Speaker 1: To deny NATO any intelligence value for maps that might
14:35
Speaker 1: fall into Western hands. So the practical effect was that
14:38
Speaker 1: an East German grew up in a world where the
14:41
Speaker 1: map was never the territory, where the official document was always,
14:45
Speaker 1: in some sense, just a giant lie. So what that
14:49
Speaker 1: does to someone's relationship with cartography is complicated. and it
14:53
Speaker 1: might produce healthy skepticism, or it might produce something closer
14:57
Speaker 1: to exhausted acceptance, like a habit of reading maps without
15:01
Speaker 1: the cultural framework to truly interrogate them, if that makes sense.
15:05
Speaker 1: So basically, he had no reason to question the maps
15:08
Speaker 1: in America, because this is a completely different place where
15:11
Speaker 1: maps should be accurate, if that makes sense. So Egbert,
15:14
Speaker 1: working from a tourist guidebook map bought at a national
15:17
Speaker 1: park visitor center, had no particular reason to think it
15:20
Speaker 1: was anything other than accurate. Because the idea that an
15:23
Speaker 1: American national park map might be inaccurate for mundane reasons,
15:27
Speaker 1: like poor production, outdated conditions, a failure to communicate technical difficulty,
15:32
Speaker 1: was not a distinction he had the context to make.
15:35
Speaker 1: And the map he had bought would later be described
15:38
Speaker 1: by investigators and researchers as critically inaccurate for the area
15:44
Speaker 1: he was trying to navigate. It showed roads that were
15:47
Speaker 1: in far better condition than they actually were, and it
15:50
Speaker 1: failed to communicate the technical difficulty of certain routes.
15:53
Speaker 2: In any meaningful way.
15:54
Speaker 1: And to someone reading it without prior knowledge of the area,
15:58
Speaker 1: it looked like a reasonable set of options. So on
16:01
Speaker 1: July 23rd, rather than retracing their route back out to
16:05
Speaker 1: the main highway, Egbert identified what looked like a more
16:09
Speaker 1: direct path westward through the mountains. And from the valley,
16:13
Speaker 1: the Panamint Range rises steeply to the west, and there
16:17
Speaker 1: are a handful of routes through it, some paved and
16:20
Speaker 1: some not. And the one Egbert chose appeared to cut
16:23
Speaker 1: through the mountains and come out on the other side,
16:26
Speaker 1: saving them significant backtracking time and getting them to cooler
16:29
Speaker 1: elevation camping a lot sooner. And along the way, they
16:32
Speaker 1: stopped at the stone geologist's cabin near Anvil Spring, which
16:36
Speaker 1: was a structure that had stood in the backcountry for
16:38
Speaker 1: decades and is something of a landmark for the relatively
16:42
Speaker 1: small number of people who travel that far into the park.
16:46
Speaker 1: And the cabin has a guest log. and visitors are
16:49
Speaker 1: invited to sign it. Sir Cornelia stopped and wrote a
16:53
Speaker 1: few lines in German, like we said in the intro,
16:56
Speaker 1: and she would write four names, their destination, and she
16:59
Speaker 1: would also write, we are going through the pass. So
17:03
Speaker 1: a few days would go by, and the family would
17:05
Speaker 1: miss their flight on July 27th back to Dresden. And
17:08
Speaker 1: at first, this would have meant very little to anyone,
17:11
Speaker 1: because international travel in 1996 involved misconnections and change plans
17:17
Speaker 1: with some regularity, and there wasn't really a mechanism at
17:20
Speaker 1: this point that triggered an alert if you missed a flight.
17:23
Speaker 1: And the four of them were two adults and two children,
17:27
Speaker 1: and they had been moving through a foreign country without
17:30
Speaker 1: incident for three weeks. So the silence that followed their
17:33
Speaker 1: missed flight was just silence for a while. But back
17:37
Speaker 1: in Germany, family members and colleagues would have begun to notice.
17:41
Speaker 1: There was no postcards, no phone calls, no word at all.
17:45
Speaker 1: But tracing a family moving through the American West in
17:48
Speaker 1: the pre-smartphone era of 1996 was not a simple thing
17:50
Speaker 1: to do. And communication between German authorities and American ones
17:56
Speaker 1: took a lot of time. And the bureaucratic machinery of
17:59
Speaker 1: the international missing persons case moved slowly when there was
18:03
Speaker 1: no crime scene and no accident report and no last
18:07
Speaker 1: known location beyond a country the size of a continent.
18:11
Speaker 1: So Heike Weber, Georg's mother, the woman who had not
18:15
Speaker 1: responded to Egbert's facts from Las Vegas, was now waiting
18:19
Speaker 1: to hear from her son. And she had said nothing
18:22
Speaker 1: when the money was requested. And now she waited along
18:26
Speaker 1: with everyone else as the silence stretched from days into weeks.
18:31
Speaker 1: And by September, so from July to September, Dollar Rent-A-Car
18:36
Speaker 1: had finally reported the Plymouth Voyager to the Los Angeles
18:40
Speaker 1: Police Department as stolen. That was the car that they
18:43
Speaker 1: had rented to travel across the states. Because the family
18:46
Speaker 1: had checked it out on July 8th and never returned
18:49
Speaker 1: it and had gone completely dark. So Interpol issued an
18:53
Speaker 1: alert on the family. So the machinery was finally moving,
18:57
Speaker 1: but it had nothing to really work with. Four people
19:00
Speaker 1: had entered the United States, rented a car, and basically
19:04
Speaker 1: just vanished. And where they had gone and why and
19:08
Speaker 1: whether they had chosen to vanish or had something else
19:11
Speaker 1: entirely happened to them was not completely clear. But it
19:15
Speaker 1: was a routine helicopter patrol that broke that silence. And
19:19
Speaker 1: in late October of 1996, a park ranger was conducting
19:23
Speaker 1: an aerial survey of a remote section of Death Valley.
19:27
Speaker 1: Just one of the regular flyovers, the park service ran
19:30
Speaker 1: to look for illicit drug manufacturing operations, which had become
19:33
Speaker 1: a persistent problem in the more inaccessible corners of the
19:37
Speaker 1: Mojave during that era. And he was covering a stretch
19:40
Speaker 1: of backcountry when something caught his eye below. It was
19:44
Speaker 1: a vehicle sitting in a dry wash far from the road.
19:48
Speaker 1: So he brought the helicopter. lower and the dust that
19:51
Speaker 1: had accumulated on the van was not the light coating
19:55
Speaker 1: of a vehicle that had just been parked for a
19:56
Speaker 1: few hours. It was thick, an undisturbed layer of something
20:00
Speaker 1: that had been sitting in the same spot for a
20:03
Speaker 1: very long time. And three tires were flat and the
20:07
Speaker 1: rims were visibly damaged bent and scraped in a way
20:11
Speaker 1: that suggested the vehicle had been driven for some distance
20:14
Speaker 1: after the tires had already failed. And there were no
20:18
Speaker 1: footprints that he could see in the area. and there
20:21
Speaker 1: was no campfire remnants, and there was no indication that
20:24
Speaker 1: anyone was nearby or had been nearby recently. So the
20:28
Speaker 1: ranger landed and ran the plates. And he would see
20:31
Speaker 1: that Dollar Rent-A-Car reported stolen by LAPD in September. So
20:35
Speaker 1: he cross-referenced the rental records, and Egbert Rimkus and Cornelia Meyer,
20:41
Speaker 1: who were German nationals, were active on Interpol Alert. So
20:45
Speaker 1: the vehicle had been found, but the family was nowhere
20:49
Speaker 1: to be seen. So the search that followed was large
20:53
Speaker 1: by any standard. Over 200 search and rescue personnel were
20:58
Speaker 1: deployed to the area over five days. And at any
21:01
Speaker 1: given moment, roughly 45 of them were on the ground
21:04
Speaker 1: working through terrain that was miserable to move through even
21:08
Speaker 1: in late October. And eight horses were brought in to
21:11
Speaker 1: cover ground that was difficult on foot. and four helicopters
21:14
Speaker 1: ran continuous aerial sweeps, and the total cost came in
21:18
Speaker 1: somewhere above $ 80, 000 at the time, which.
21:21
Speaker 2: Is a lot of money.
21:22
Speaker 1: But they would find almost nothing. The most significant item
21:25
Speaker 1: recovered was a single beer bottle approximately a mile from
21:29
Speaker 1: the van.
21:30
Speaker 2: Beyond that, the.
21:31
Speaker 1: Search teams came up essentially empty. There was no clothing,
21:35
Speaker 1: there was no supplies, there was no indication of which
21:38
Speaker 1: direction the family had even traveled in, or when, or
21:41
Speaker 1: under what circumstances. And the van itself offered a little
21:45
Speaker 1: bit of evidence, as the destroyed rim suggested it had
21:48
Speaker 1: been driven for a significant distance on those flat tires
21:51
Speaker 1: before being abandoned. And it was buried to its axle
21:54
Speaker 1: in sand. consistent with the driver who had tried to
21:57
Speaker 1: power through loose terrain and had just gotten stuck. But
22:01
Speaker 1: the family themselves had left no trail that the search
22:04
Speaker 1: teams could follow. So the search was called off after
22:07
Speaker 1: five days, and the case settled into an uncomfortable status,
22:12
Speaker 1: not closed exactly, but without any viable path forward. So
22:17
Speaker 1: the family was listed as missing. The Interpol alert remained active.
22:22
Speaker 1: And that, for the better part of a decade and
22:24
Speaker 1: a half, was where things stood. And in the absence
22:28
Speaker 1: of a real explanation, other explanations tend to fill the space.
22:32
Speaker 1: And the story of the Death Valley Germans circulated in
22:36
Speaker 1: true crime communities and internet forums through the late 1990s
22:39
Speaker 1: and 2000s, attracting theories that cold missing persons cases reliably generate.
22:45
Speaker 1: And the most persistent was that the family had deliberately
22:49
Speaker 1: staged their own vanishing to start over somewhere else. Costa
22:53
Speaker 1: Rica was the most commonly cited destination. And Egbert had
22:57
Speaker 1: apparently mentioned the country to colleagues at work as a
23:00
Speaker 1: kind of fantasy, a place where you could start fresh
23:04
Speaker 1: somewhere warm and far from German family courts. So the
23:07
Speaker 1: suggestion was that the road trip had been a cover
23:10
Speaker 1: for a planned disappearance. a way to exit one's life
23:14
Speaker 1: and quietly re-enter another beyond the reach of anyone who
23:17
Speaker 1: might come looking. And there is a surface logic to
23:20
Speaker 1: this that dissolves under any real examination. As for people
23:24
Speaker 1: successfully relocating internationally and faking their own deaths in 1996
23:29
Speaker 1: would have required false documentation, an established network in their
23:33
Speaker 1: destination country, and enough cash to sustain themselves without triggering
23:38
Speaker 1: some sort of financial trail that Interpol routinely monitors. It's
23:42
Speaker 1: a lot. It's not just easy to disappear, even if
23:44
Speaker 1: it was the 90s. But these were people who had
23:47
Speaker 1: arrived in the United States short of funds, right? Because
23:50
Speaker 1: they had been unable to get a wire transfer sent
23:53
Speaker 1: to the correct bank branch, even. and had been scrambling
23:56
Speaker 1: financially for much of the trip, it seemed. And the
23:59
Speaker 1: van's physical condition told its own story. Rims ground down
24:02
Speaker 1: from miles of driving on flat tires, an axle buried.
24:06
Speaker 2: In the sand.
24:07
Speaker 1: That kind of evidence just doesn't really seem staged, you know?
24:11
Speaker 1: And the other theories that circulated were less grounded even still.
24:15
Speaker 1: because there was the proximity to Barker Ranch, where Charles
24:19
Speaker 1: Manson and members of his family had been arrested in 1969,
24:24
Speaker 1: located within the Panamint Range, which led some to propose
24:28
Speaker 1: that the family had encountered desert cultists, but this required
24:32
Speaker 1: just completely ignoring the fact that Manson's case was 25
24:36
Speaker 1: years old and the ranch had no active occupants at
24:40
Speaker 1: this point. And then there's the government conspiracy angle. suggesting
24:44
Speaker 1: the family had stumbled onto a military secret, circulated without
24:48
Speaker 1: ever cohering into anything that actually engaged with what the
24:52
Speaker 1: evidence at the van site was telling investigators. But again,
24:56
Speaker 1: just reaching, it's a stretch. But the physical evidence was
25:00
Speaker 1: clear about one thing. Whatever happened to this family happened
25:04
Speaker 1: after the van stopped on foot and in one of
25:09
Speaker 1: the most remote corners of the California desert.
25:12
Speaker 2: In July.
25:14
Speaker 1: But which direction they had gone, nobody knew. And without that,
25:18
Speaker 1: the case had nowhere to go. And it might have
25:22
Speaker 1: stayed exactly where it was indefinitely if it had not
25:26
Speaker 1: been for Tom Mahood. Let's take a quick pause to
25:29
Speaker 1: talk about something I have been guilty of.
25:31
Speaker 2: And if you're anything like me, I know you have
25:35
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25:40
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Speaker 1: for sponsoring the video and making sure I stay on
26:46
Speaker 1: top of my health. And let's get back to the video.
26:48
Speaker 1: Now Mahoud was not a law enforcement officer. He wasn't
26:51
Speaker 1: a park ranger and he wasn't a professional investigator of
26:54
Speaker 1: any kind, really, just a guy. But he was actually
26:57
Speaker 1: a software engineer and a volunteer member of the Riverside
27:01
Speaker 1: Mountie Rescue Unit based out of the Palm Springs area
27:05
Speaker 1: who had spent years helping search for missing hikers and
27:08
Speaker 1: lost tourists in the desert ranges of Southern California.
27:11
Speaker 2: So he had some experience.
27:13
Speaker 1: And he first encountered the Death Valley Germans story in
27:16
Speaker 1: the summer of 2008, browsing desert forums online. And he
27:20
Speaker 1: would come across a report in a mountain rescue newsletter,
27:23
Speaker 1: and he would note it, and he would move on.
27:26
Speaker 1: And he later described being quickly diverted by more piano-playing cats.
27:31
Speaker 2: Those were the days. 2008, man. Simpler times.
27:35
Speaker 1: But that case would stay with him. And in early 2009,
27:38
Speaker 1: he joined the RMRU as a formal member. And in
27:42
Speaker 1: September of that year, he attended a search and rescue
27:45
Speaker 1: tracking course in Ridgecrest and was put in contact with
27:49
Speaker 1: Debbie Brittenstein, a member of the China Lake Mountain Rescue Group,
27:54
Speaker 1: who had been on the original 1996 search and had
27:58
Speaker 1: kept extensive documentation ever since. And he spent nearly four
28:02
Speaker 1: hours with a private investigator named Emmett Harder, who had
28:05
Speaker 1: worked the case independently and handed over a lengthy report.
28:09
Speaker 1: And Mahoud gathered everything he could find. And through years
28:13
Speaker 1: of search and rescue work, Mahoud had developed a particular
28:16
Speaker 1: way of thinking about missing persons in wilderness environments. And
28:20
Speaker 1: he developed the ability to set aside what searchers thought
28:23
Speaker 1: a lost person should have done and focus instead on
28:26
Speaker 1: what a frightened, disoriented, physically compromised person actually tends to do.
28:33
Speaker 1: So really putting themselves in their shoes. And this distinction
28:36
Speaker 1: really matters because lost people are not rational actors working
28:41
Speaker 1: from complete information. They are people in crisis, filtered through
28:46
Speaker 1: fear and exhaustion and whatever assumptions they brought with them
28:51
Speaker 1: into that situation. So understanding where a lost person went
28:54
Speaker 1: means understanding what the world looked like through their eyes
28:59
Speaker 1: at the moment they made their decisions. Not what it
29:02
Speaker 1: should have looked like to someone with better information, because
29:05
Speaker 1: hindsight's 20-20, but what it actually looked like to them.
29:10
Speaker 1: And as Mahoud worked through the case, a significant gap
29:12
Speaker 1: became apparent. And the official 1996 search had focused heavily
29:17
Speaker 1: on the terrain between the van and the main roads,
29:20
Speaker 1: because these were the logical routes back to civilization. But
29:23
Speaker 1: what it had not focused on in any meaningful way
29:26
Speaker 1: was the terrain to the south. in the direction of
29:29
Speaker 1: the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. And the search teams
29:33
Speaker 1: appeared to have treated that direction as a low priority,
29:36
Speaker 1: on the assumption that if the family had walked toward
29:39
Speaker 1: the naval base, they would have eventually reached the perimeter
29:42
Speaker 1: and been helped. So they assumed if they walked that way,
29:45
Speaker 1: they definitely would have been found. Mahoud understood why that
29:49
Speaker 1: assumption had been made. He also understood that it required
29:52
Speaker 1: the family to have accurate knowledge of what China Lake
29:55
Speaker 1: actually was. And there was no particular reason to believe
29:58
Speaker 1: that they did. Because the China Lake Naval Weapons Center
30:01
Speaker 1: is the largest land holding of the United States Navy.
30:05
Speaker 1: Over a million acres of high desert that exists primarily
30:09
Speaker 1: as a testing and bombing range. And unlike other security
30:13
Speaker 1: models that are usually like fences and patrols, their security
30:17
Speaker 1: model was just geography. Because the land surrounding it is
30:21
Speaker 1: so remote and inhospitable that the Navy has historically relied
30:26
Speaker 1: on the environment itself to deter unauthorized access. Because this
30:30
Speaker 1: place is called Death Valley for a reason. And there
30:33
Speaker 1: were actually no regular patrols of the outer perimeter. But
30:37
Speaker 1: on the map, particularly on the map being read by
30:40
Speaker 1: someone from Europe, where military installations are fenced, guarded, and staffed,
30:47
Speaker 1: what it looked like was a military base. And military
30:51
Speaker 1: bases meant people. And people meant help. And if the
30:55
Speaker 1: family had read the map that way, South looked like
30:59
Speaker 1: the best direction that made the most sense, which meant
31:03
Speaker 1: that was almost certainly the direction they had gone. And
31:07
Speaker 1: if that was the direction they had gone, a search
31:09
Speaker 1: that had focused everywhere except the South had not actually
31:13
Speaker 1: looked for.
31:14
Speaker 2: Them at all.
31:15
Speaker 1: So Mahud booked a trip to Death Valley. So in
31:19
Speaker 1: late October of 2009, 13 years after the family disappeared,
31:24
Speaker 1: Mahud drove out to the area alone and made what
31:27
Speaker 1: he later described as a pretty stupid day hike to
31:30
Speaker 1: the van's last known position. And he wanted to stand
31:34
Speaker 1: where they had stood, look at what they had seen,
31:37
Speaker 1: and understand in three dimensions what the map had shown
31:41
Speaker 1: them in two. So he stood at the side of
31:44
Speaker 1: the van and he walked to the spot where the
31:46
Speaker 1: single beer bottle had been found by the 1996 search team,
31:50
Speaker 1: about a mile and a half from the van, And
31:53
Speaker 1: he looked south, and the terrain fell away toward a
31:56
Speaker 1: wide alluvial fan, beyond which the ridgeline of the China
32:00
Speaker 1: Lake boundary rose in the distance, which was eight or
32:03
Speaker 1: nine miles away on the map. But in the desert,
32:06
Speaker 1: in July, that distance would be everything. So two days later,
32:11
Speaker 1: sitting at home with his maps, the theory started to crystallize.
32:15
Speaker 1: And he wrote about it afterwards saying, it was like
32:18
Speaker 1: viewing one of those optical illusions where an image suddenly
32:21
Speaker 1: pops out. Everything just fell into place and became visible.
32:25
Speaker 1: I suddenly saw a way the Germans could have ended
32:28
Speaker 1: up where the van was found through a series of reasonable,
32:32
Speaker 1: honest mistakes and why they might have set out for
32:35
Speaker 1: the South. I was always acutely aware that I might
32:39
Speaker 1: have done exactly the same thing were I in their situation?
32:43
Speaker 1: And he began explaining an expedition. But most of the
32:46
Speaker 1: people he contacted actually declined. And one person said yes,
32:50
Speaker 1: and it was his RMRU teammate, Les Walker. And they
32:54
Speaker 1: carried a personal locator beacon and a spot satellite tracker
32:58
Speaker 1: that reported their position in near real time to a
33:01
Speaker 1: public webpage, which was a direct line of communication with
33:04
Speaker 1: the outside world that the Rimkus Meyer family never had.
33:08
Speaker 1: So on November 11th, In 2009, the two of them
33:12
Speaker 1: started into the backcountry in the late morning, and they
33:15
Speaker 1: visited the van site, and they located the old bottle find,
33:18
Speaker 1: and they pushed south toward a search area Mahoud had
33:21
Speaker 1: mapped as a wide alluvial fan roughly a mile and
33:24
Speaker 1: a half across, bounded by ridges, and his pack, loaded
33:29
Speaker 1: with water and overnight supplies, weighed close to 65 pounds.
33:32
Speaker 1: And his first impression of the search area was, uh-oh.
33:36
Speaker 1: His words, not mine. And he would say that this
33:39
Speaker 1: will take at least several trips to cover. So they
33:42
Speaker 1: camped that night at the northwest corner of the fan
33:44
Speaker 1: in the desert dark. And day two began at 7 a.m.
33:48
Speaker 1: And they moved south along the western edge of the fan,
33:51
Speaker 1: traveling several hundred yards apart, communicating by radio. So they
33:54
Speaker 1: were separated but moving in the same direction. And at 8.43 a.m.,
33:58
Speaker 1: Les radioed in. Because he had found a wine bottle
34:03
Speaker 1: two liters red. and fragments of a label still visible.
34:07
Speaker 1: And Mahoud noted the GPS coordinates and they kept moving.
34:11
Speaker 1: And a few minutes later, Les called again, because there
34:14
Speaker 1: was something in the bushes that looked like toilet paper.
34:18
Speaker 1: And it was pages from a daily planner. And the
34:20
Speaker 1: paper weathered and brittle after 13 years printed in German.
34:26
Speaker 1: And then there was the call that changed everything. And
34:28
Speaker 1: it was when he would say, Tom, we have some
34:31
Speaker 1: bones here. And Mahoud reached Les at 9.14 a.m. at
34:36
Speaker 1: the base of the north-facing cliff at the edge of
34:38
Speaker 1: a small hill. And it was one of the only
34:41
Speaker 1: shaded spots for miles in any direction. And on the
34:44
Speaker 1: ground nearby, scattered across a radius of roughly 150 meters
34:49
Speaker 1: from the cliff face, were things a family carries.
34:53
Speaker 2: A passport.
34:54
Speaker 1: A bank ID card, the photograph still legible after 13
34:58
Speaker 1: years in the desert sun, and a toothbrush, and the
35:01
Speaker 1: remains of a small shoe and a wallet. And Mahoud
35:05
Speaker 1: would open the wallet, and every ID card inside bore
35:09
Speaker 1: the same name, Cornelia Meyer. And the bones were close by.
35:15
Speaker 1: Two sets of adult remains, bleached white by years of
35:19
Speaker 1: direct sun, scattered by wind and most likely by animals.
35:24
Speaker 1: Egbert and Cornelia had made it eight or nine miles
35:28
Speaker 1: from wherever the van had been broken down over rough
35:32
Speaker 1: ground in street shoes in the July heat. And you
35:37
Speaker 1: have to know that in July, like there's been reports
35:39
Speaker 1: of people's soles of their shoes being melted because the
35:43
Speaker 1: sand is so hot. And Mahoud stood there for a
35:49
Speaker 1: And he wrote about it later saying, quote, to reach
35:51
Speaker 1: this spot required them to have hiked eight or nine
35:54
Speaker 1: miles over rough terrain in street shoes in July. In
35:58
Speaker 1: my mind, they had earned a lot of respect for
36:00
Speaker 1: this accomplishment.
36:02
Speaker 2: This was a tough group.
36:04
Speaker 1: So they had hiked roughly nine miles back to the truck,
36:07
Speaker 1: roughly 14 miles total that day. Emma Hood found a
36:11
Speaker 1: sliver of cell signal and made the call. So they
36:14
Speaker 1: reached the Furnace Creek Visitor Center at 5.02 p.m., two
36:18
Speaker 1: minutes after closing, and a ranger met them out back.
36:21
Speaker 1: And the next morning, Mahoud flew out to the site
36:24
Speaker 1: in a Navy Seahawk helicopter alongside law enforcement, including an
36:28
Speaker 1: FBI agent, and guided them to the location using his
36:32
Speaker 1: personal GPS. And in December of 2009, a formal multi-agency
36:37
Speaker 1: evidence search was mounted with roughly 27 searchers, tracking dogs,
36:42
Speaker 1: and helicopter support. And DNA extracted from deep within one
36:45
Speaker 1: of the adult bones was matched to Egbert Rimkus, with
36:49
Speaker 1: high confidence in May of 2010. And the female remains,
36:53
Speaker 1: identified by the surrounding documentation and the wallet, could not
36:57
Speaker 1: yield conclusive DNA after 13 years of desert exposure. but
37:01
Speaker 1: we can safely assume that that was Cornelia. So the
37:05
Speaker 1: families were contacted in Dresden, and Heike Weybohr, Georg's mother,
37:10
Speaker 1: the woman who had not responded to the facts from
37:12
Speaker 1: Las Vegas, learned that her son was deceased. Whatever she
37:17
Speaker 1: had allowed herself to believe in the years of silence
37:20
Speaker 1: or refused to believe, she now had the answer. And
37:24
Speaker 1: Georg Rimkus, 11 years old in July of 1996, had
37:28
Speaker 1: walked into the desert with his father and had not
37:31
Speaker 1: come back. And remains consistent with children were found in
37:35
Speaker 1: the same general area where the adults had been located
37:38
Speaker 1: because the years of summer heat cycles in Death Valley
37:41
Speaker 1: had degraded the children's remains to a degree that made
37:44
Speaker 1: positive DNA identification impossible with the technology and samples available
37:49
Speaker 1: at the time. And a subsequent trip Mahoud made in
37:52
Speaker 1: March of 2010 turned up German health insurance cards in
37:56
Speaker 1: Cornelia's and Max's names, and a set of European house
38:00
Speaker 1: keys in the surrounding terrain. And Interpol's missing persons database
38:04
Speaker 1: still carries active entries for Georg Rimkus.
38:08
Speaker 2: And Max Meyer.
38:09
Speaker 1: This is not because there is any serious question what
38:13
Speaker 1: actually happened to them, or any real uncertainty about where
38:16
Speaker 1: they had ended up. But it's just a bureaucratic reality
38:20
Speaker 1: of forensic identification, because without a confirmed DNA match, the
38:24
Speaker 1: cases cannot be formally closed. But we know almost for
38:28
Speaker 1: certain that four people died in that desert. Egbert, Cornelia, Max,
38:35
Speaker 1: and Georg. But even with all that information, there's still
38:38
Speaker 1: the question as to how exactly they got there. How
38:43
Speaker 1: did they end up nine miles from a van? And
38:47
Speaker 1: how did the van end up where they were going?
38:49
Speaker 1: And with Mahoud's help, we have a pretty good idea.
38:52
Speaker 1: And the answer starts two weeks earlier on a mountain
38:56
Speaker 1: road in the Panamint Range. Because the pass Cornelia wrote
39:00
Speaker 1: about in the guest log is known as Mengel Pass.
39:04
Speaker 1: And Mengel Pass, as any park ranger or experienced desert
39:08
Speaker 1: traveler could have told them, is not a road. It
39:11
Speaker 1: is one of Death Valley's most technical, demanding four-wheel drive routes.
39:16
Speaker 1: a trail through boulder fields, loose rock, and steep grades
39:21
Speaker 1: that require high clearance and low-range four-wheel drive, and an
39:25
Speaker 1: experienced driver who knows exactly what they are getting into.
39:29
Speaker 1: And the trail climbing toward it from the valley side
39:33
Speaker 1: earns its difficult rating through sheer accumulated hostility. And the
39:37
Speaker 1: surface is a mixture of loose rock, embedded boulders, deep ruts,
39:41
Speaker 1: and sections of exposed bedrock where the trail narrows to
39:45
Speaker 1: a width that requires precise tire placement. And the grade
39:49
Speaker 1: in certain sections is steep enough that a vehicle without
39:52
Speaker 1: low-range four-wheel drive and meaningful ground clearance will simply lose
39:56
Speaker 1: traction and stop or begin sliding backward. An experienced driver
40:01
Speaker 1: in a V8 Land Rover Defender with locking differentials, a
40:05
Speaker 1: two-speed transfer case, and tires aired down to 25 PSI
40:10
Speaker 1: has written that crossing the pass required all of that firepower.
40:14
Speaker 1: And Tom Mahoud put it simply, saying, quote, a Plymouth
40:18
Speaker 1: Voyager could not surmount Mengel Pass. The vehicle had 5.3
40:24
Speaker 1: inches of ground clearance, highway tires, a front-wheel drive automatic transmission.
40:29
Speaker 2: And no traction control.
40:32
Speaker 1: Unquote. But the map showed a line through the mountains
40:35
Speaker 1: and a line through the mountains looked like a way through.
40:39
Speaker 1: So Egbert made that choice and the family made a
40:42
Speaker 1: significant distance up toward the pass before the terrain defeated them.
40:46
Speaker 1: And at some point, Egbert would have felt the vehicle
40:50
Speaker 1: grounding out on the rocks and would hear the undercarriage scraping.
40:54
Speaker 1: and felt the front wheels spinning without purchase on the
40:58
Speaker 1: loose surface. And at some point, the calculus would have
41:01
Speaker 1: become very clear. The pass was not happening. So.
41:06
Speaker 2: they turned around.
41:08
Speaker 1: And on the way back, the map presented what looked
41:11
Speaker 1: like an alternative, because Anvil Canyon Road branched off from
41:15
Speaker 1: the route they had driven in on and appeared to
41:17
Speaker 1: offer a more direct path back toward the valley, a
41:21
Speaker 1: shortcut that would save them from retracing the full length
41:24
Speaker 1: of the trail they had already driven on, which was
41:28
Speaker 1: Very rough, as we now know.
41:29
Speaker 2: All right, let's.
41:30
Speaker 1: Take a quick pause to talk about something I am
41:33
Speaker 1: genuinely obsessed with, and you guys know this if you've
41:36
Speaker 1: been listening to my podcast for basically any amount of time,
41:39
Speaker 1: and those are Lola blankets. I actually have a Lola
41:43
Speaker 1: blanket in every room of my house, if not more
41:46
Speaker 1: than one. And everybody in the house loves them, from
41:49
Speaker 1: my husband to my seven dogs and four cats. There's
41:53
Speaker 1: always somebody using one. And when I have company come over,
41:56
Speaker 1: they always ask where I got my Lola blankets. And
41:59
Speaker 1: since I got tired of my animals always using my
42:01
Speaker 1: Lola blankets, luckily, Lola created a whole collection just for pets.
42:07
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42:11
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42:15
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42:19
Speaker 2: I cannot say that enough.
42:21
Speaker 1: Usually I have an issue with them like wandering around
42:23
Speaker 1: the house, but they are glued to their beds at
42:26
Speaker 1: all times.
42:26
Speaker 2: It's awesome.
42:27
Speaker 1: Because it's plush, it holds its shape, and it regulates
42:31
Speaker 1: temperature year round. And the cover is removable and machine washable,
42:35
Speaker 1: so that's always great. And it's also shed free and
42:39
Speaker 1: double stitched, so it's built to last. So my dogs
42:42
Speaker 1: now have their own Lolas, and I finally got mine back.
42:46
Speaker 1: So it's really just a win-win. And obviously, as you
42:49
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Speaker 2: And let's get back to it.
43:37
Speaker 1: Now, Anvil Canyon takes its name from a group of
43:40
Speaker 1: Mormon pioneers who spent the better part of two months
43:42
Speaker 1: wandering the area in the 19th century, searching for a
43:46
Speaker 1: gold deposit that someone had supposedly located there on a
43:49
Speaker 1: previous expedition. But they found nothing. And when they finally
43:53
Speaker 1: gave up and left, they threw the heavy iron anvil
43:57
Speaker 1: they had hauled all the way in behind them unwilling
44:00
Speaker 1: to carry it back through the terrain that had already
44:03
Speaker 1: cost them so much. So the road that had once
44:06
Speaker 1: cut through the canyon had been functionally closed to vehicle
44:09
Speaker 1: traffic for years before the family arrived. And it was
44:13
Speaker 1: named Anvil because these Mormons had no desire to carry
44:16
Speaker 1: any weight back because of how horrible the terrain was.
44:19
Speaker 1: So it was just a recipe for disaster. But nowhere
44:23
Speaker 1: on the map did it say any of this. but
44:25
Speaker 1: the surface had deteriorated to the point where it was
44:28
Speaker 1: no longer a road in any meaningful sense. It was
44:32
Speaker 1: a dry wash in some sections and a boulder field
44:36
Speaker 1: in other. And throughout its length, it was the kind
44:38
Speaker 1: of surface that punished any vehicle that did not have
44:41
Speaker 1: the ground clearance and suspension to absorb what it was
44:44
Speaker 1: throwing at them. And the minivan was already damaged from
44:48
Speaker 1: the attempt at Mengel Pass, and its tires, as we know,
44:51
Speaker 1: were the standard all-season highway tires that come on rental
44:54
Speaker 1: vehicles with no reinforcement against the sharp volcanic rock that
44:58
Speaker 1: lines the canyon floor. So making what seemed like the
45:02
Speaker 1: reasonable choice to Egbert, he would turn onto Anvil Canyon
45:06
Speaker 1: Road and would just keep driving. And the sand is
45:09
Speaker 1: what did it most likely. Because Canyon washes in that
45:13
Speaker 1: part of Death Valley, accumulate deep deposits of fine sand
45:17
Speaker 1: between the rock sections, and a two-wheel drive vehicle that
45:20
Speaker 1: hits a sand patch at low speed will often sink
45:23
Speaker 1: into it and stop.
45:24
Speaker 2: And the instinctive.
45:25
Speaker 1: Response is to give it more gas, to get out
45:29
Speaker 1: of the sand, to try to power through the loose
45:31
Speaker 1: surface before momentum dies. And in a front wheel drive
45:35
Speaker 1: minivan with all its weight over the wrong axle, what
45:39
Speaker 1: that more likely produced was spinning and spray and a
45:43
Speaker 1: surge forward just far enough to hit something solid underneath.
45:47
Speaker 1: So the first tire would go and then the second
45:49
Speaker 1: tire would pop. And by the time the third popped,
45:52
Speaker 1: the vehicle had been driven for approximately two more miles
45:56
Speaker 1: on just rims, grinding through rock and sand, the metal
46:00
Speaker 1: just eating into the canyon floor with every single yard.
46:04
Speaker 1: And two miles on three flat tires is not carelessness.
46:08
Speaker 1: It is the decision of someone who understood, at some level,
46:11
Speaker 1: that stopping was the worst-case scenario. That as long as
46:15
Speaker 1: the vehicle kept moving, they were getting closer to something,
46:18
Speaker 1: even if what they were getting closer to was unclear.
46:22
Speaker 1: And eventually, even that calculation would break down. And the van,
46:26
Speaker 1: ground to a halt, buried to its axle in sand
46:29
Speaker 1: and the rims destroyed beyond any hope of being driven
46:31
Speaker 1: any further. in a section of Anvil Canyon that had
46:35
Speaker 1: seen essentially no vehicle traffic in years. The engine may
46:41
Speaker 1: have still run at that point, and the family was
46:44
Speaker 1: physically unharmed as far as we know at that point,
46:47
Speaker 1: but they were now stranded in one of the most
46:49
Speaker 1: remote locations in the continental United States of America in
46:53
Speaker 1: the middle of July with temperatures above 120 degrees Fahrenheit
46:57
Speaker 1: and climbing. with whatever water they had in the vehicle
47:03
Speaker 1: and no way to call anyone. And what Egbert did
47:06
Speaker 1: next was take out his map and try to think.
47:09
Speaker 2: Through their options.
47:11
Speaker 1: So from where the van sat, there were three plausible
47:14
Speaker 1: directions to move in, and each had a logic visible
47:17
Speaker 1: from looking at the map. And the first option was
47:20
Speaker 1: to head east, back toward the main valley and Badwater Road,
47:23
Speaker 1: the paved highway that carries regular tourist traffic. But the
47:26
Speaker 1: problem was the distance, because Badwater Road was approximately 17
47:30
Speaker 1: miles away, and in normal conditions, that would represent a
47:34
Speaker 1: long but manageable hike. But across the floor of Death
47:37
Speaker 1: Valley in July, at temperatures where the ground surface was
47:40
Speaker 1: registering close to 130 degrees Fahrenheit with limited water, And
47:46
Speaker 1: to children, it was something else entirely. And the second
47:50
Speaker 1: option was to just turn back west, retrace some of
47:53
Speaker 1: the ground they had already covered, and make for the
47:56
Speaker 1: geologist's cabin roughly four miles in that direction. And the
48:00
Speaker 1: cabin had running water and shelter, and it was a
48:02
Speaker 1: place where other travelers occasionally passed through. And four miles
48:07
Speaker 1: was manageable even in significant heat, and the water at
48:10
Speaker 1: the cabin would have bought them time to wait.
48:13
Speaker 2: But the downside was.
48:14
Speaker 1: Just uncertainty because there was no way to know how
48:17
Speaker 1: long it might be before another person came through. So
48:20
Speaker 1: the third option was to head south toward the perimeter
48:23
Speaker 1: of China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which appeared on the
48:26
Speaker 1: distance on the map of around eight to nine miles.
48:30
Speaker 1: And to Egbert, a military installation meant a perimeter. A
48:34
Speaker 1: perimeter meant people, and in his experience, in anyone's experience
48:38
Speaker 1: in Central Europe, that was simply what military bases were
48:42
Speaker 1: as we went over. And he had no way of
48:44
Speaker 1: knowing what we now know, that the base's security wasn't
48:48
Speaker 1: fences and guards, it was just desert. But nine miles
48:52
Speaker 1: felt doable, and the military felt like safety.
48:55
Speaker 2: So he chose south.
48:57
Speaker 1: And you know, from a distance of nearly 30 years now,
49:00
Speaker 1: to look at the options Egbert had and see clearly
49:03
Speaker 1: that the cabin was the right choice, only four miles
49:07
Speaker 1: and running water, a place where people occasionally passed, the
49:10
Speaker 1: logic of staying close to a known resource and waiting
49:13
Speaker 1: is obvious when you are examining it in a comfortable
49:16
Speaker 1: room with complete information. And without a four-year-old and an
49:20
Speaker 1: 11-year-old and a frightened partner and the weight of the
49:22
Speaker 1: responsibility for all of it in 120 degree heat. But
49:25
Speaker 1: heat does things to cognition, right? And sustained exposure to
49:29
Speaker 1: extreme temperatures degrades decision-making in measurable ways. Reaction time slows,
49:35
Speaker 1: risk assessment becomes impaired, and the ability to hold multiple
49:39
Speaker 1: variables in mind simultaneously just diminishes. So by the time
49:43
Speaker 1: Egbert was standing next to this disabled van trying to
49:46
Speaker 1: decide which direction to walk, he was almost certainly already
49:50
Speaker 1: dehydrated and already running on heat-stressed physiology and already operating
49:56
Speaker 1: under conditions that made clear thinking considerably harder than it
50:00
Speaker 1: would normally be. Because we know he was a planner,
50:04
Speaker 1: a person who trusted systems and defaulted to structure when
50:07
Speaker 1: things got difficult.
50:09
Speaker 2: And the map said.
50:10
Speaker 1: There was a military installation nine miles south. And his
50:14
Speaker 1: experience said military installations meant people. And his training as
50:18
Speaker 1: a problem solver said that people meant help. So he
50:21
Speaker 1: made the decision that his available information and his experience
50:25
Speaker 1: and his current state of mind produced. Then the family
50:29
Speaker 1: walked south, as we know, into the desert, away from
50:32
Speaker 1: the cabin and away from water, into a terrain that
50:36
Speaker 1: had no interest whatsoever in meeting them halfway. And we
50:39
Speaker 1: know from what Mahoud found that they made it eight
50:42
Speaker 1: or nine miles. And we know they made it to
50:45
Speaker 1: the base of a shaded north-facing cliff, one of the
50:48
Speaker 1: only patches of shade for miles. And we know they
50:52
Speaker 1: still had their documents and their wallets in Cornelia's daily planner.
50:56
Speaker 1: And they were organized enough and determined enough to carry
50:59
Speaker 1: those things that far. And then the desert and the
51:03
Speaker 1: distance and the heat and the absence of water finished
51:06
Speaker 1: what the blown tires had started.
51:08
Speaker 2: And there are.
51:09
Speaker 1: Things about their final hours that will never be known
51:12
Speaker 1: with any sort of precision. And nobody knows exactly when
51:16
Speaker 1: they left the van or whether they spent a night
51:18
Speaker 1: or two trying to wait it out at first. And
51:21
Speaker 1: nobody knows how much water they had when they started
51:24
Speaker 1: walking or how they divided it up or what point
51:27
Speaker 1: it ran out. But what we know is that children
51:30
Speaker 1: do dehydrate faster than adults and they have less physiological
51:35
Speaker 1: reserve and no ability to moderate their own distress or
51:38
Speaker 1: push through discomfort the way a determined adult can.
51:42
Speaker 2: And Max was only four years old. It was only four.
51:46
Speaker 1: So whatever Egbert and Cornelia were able to do in
51:49
Speaker 1: those final miles, the outcome for a four year old
51:52
Speaker 1: in those conditions without water was not one they could
51:55
Speaker 1: have altered at all. And Georg was 11, old enough
51:58
Speaker 1: to understand that things were wrong and old enough to
52:01
Speaker 1: feel the weight of the fear, but not old enough
52:04
Speaker 1: for that understanding to make any physical difference. So by
52:08
Speaker 1: the time the children were gone, The parents were themselves
52:11
Speaker 1: too far gone to change direction, even if a change
52:15
Speaker 1: had still been possible. And this is the part of
52:18
Speaker 1: this horrible case that resists any kind of narrative tidiness.
52:24
Speaker 2: Or real conclusion.
52:25
Speaker 1: It is just simply what happened to four innocent people
52:30
Speaker 1: in a very hot place when the distance between where
52:33
Speaker 1: they were and where they needed to be turned out
52:36
Speaker 1: to be greater than what they had left to cover
52:39
Speaker 1: it with.
52:39
Speaker 2: And I mean, hindsight's 20-20. We could look back and say,
52:43
Speaker 2: why didn't they do this?
52:44
Speaker 1: Or why didn't they do that? But really putting yourself
52:47
Speaker 1: in their shoes, they made reasonable decisions. Egbert made reasonable decisions.
52:52
Speaker 1: And I think that's what's so scary about it. But luckily,
52:55
Speaker 1: changes were made after this. And since 1996, Death Valley
52:58
Speaker 1: National Park has made specific measurable changes to the way
53:04
Speaker 1: it communicates risk to backcountry visitors, changes that address precisely
53:09
Speaker 1: the failure points in this case. Between 2020 and 2021,
53:14
Speaker 1: the park installed 31 new entrance signs at backcountry road
53:18
Speaker 1: access points across the park. And in 1996, many of
53:22
Speaker 1: the junctions that the Rimkoos-Meyer family passed through were completely unmarked.
53:27
Speaker 1: So the park now publishes explicit guidance that reads like
53:31
Speaker 1: a direct response to what happened to Egbert and his family.
53:35
Speaker 1: Don't rely on maps alone. If your vehicle breaks down,
53:38
Speaker 1: stay with it and mark it visibly for aircraft. Most
53:42
Speaker 1: rental car agreements prohibit driving on unpaved roads and multilingual
53:46
Speaker 1: heat warning signs now appear at popular locations alongside advisories
53:51
Speaker 1: that medical helicopter evacuation becomes impossible when air temperatures exceed
53:56
Speaker 1: 115 degrees Fahrenheit. because the air is too thin to
54:00
Speaker 1: support rotor lift, and a daily road conditions report goes
54:03
Speaker 1: out each morning to every park contact point. And there
54:06
Speaker 1: is now a dedicated page for real-time Death Valley road conditions,
54:10
Speaker 1: and the park recommends that backcountry travelers carry satellite communication devices,
54:15
Speaker 1: which is technology that did not exist.
54:17
Speaker 2: In any accessible form in 1996.
54:19
Speaker 1: So whether any of these changes are sufficient is a
54:23
Speaker 1: completely different question. Because every year, someone still underestimates something,
54:28
Speaker 1: and the death toll accumulates slowly, one or two or
54:32
Speaker 1: three at a time, in incidents that follow patterns that
54:36
Speaker 1: have by now become familiar. And what the Park Service
54:39
Speaker 1: cannot fully solve is the problem that got the Rimkus
54:42
Speaker 1: and Meyer family killed. which was the gap between what
54:46
Speaker 1: map shows and what the terrain actually is, combined with
54:50
Speaker 1: the visitor who has no framework for knowing the difference.
54:54
Speaker 1: And what makes this case so difficult is the structure
54:57
Speaker 1: of what happened to them. The way the story is
55:00
Speaker 1: built from just a sequence of individual decisions, each one
55:05
Speaker 1: understandable on its own terms, that accumulated into an outcome
55:09
Speaker 1: none of them could have foreseen from any single point
55:12
Speaker 1: along the way. With the wire transfer that went to
55:15
Speaker 1: the wrong bank, just a mundane bureaucratic error, and the
55:18
Speaker 1: ex-wife who didn't respond to a fax, just the ordinary
55:22
Speaker 1: friction of difficult separation, And not speaking to a ranger
55:26
Speaker 1: is just what most tourists do. And the decision to
55:29
Speaker 1: cut through the mountains rather than backtrack was a decision
55:32
Speaker 1: any time-conscious traveler might make when a map shows a
55:35
Speaker 1: viable alternative. And turning onto Anvil Canyon Road followed from
55:40
Speaker 1: being turned back at the pass. And accelerating through the
55:43
Speaker 1: sand was just instinctive. And continuing on flat tires was
55:47
Speaker 1: the decision of someone who understood that stopping in that
55:49
Speaker 1: location was worse than the damage being done.
55:52
Speaker 2: And the walk south was.
55:54
Speaker 1: The logical conclusion of everything that came before it, just
55:58
Speaker 1: filtered through a lifetime of understanding what a military installation
56:02
Speaker 1: looks like, and understanding that was entirely correct and entirely
56:07
Speaker 1: wrong about this particular desert, and only this particular desert
56:11
Speaker 1: at the same time. But there is no point where
56:14
Speaker 1: Egbert Rimkus did something that a reasonable person could not understand.
56:19
Speaker 1: No moment of obvious recklessness or willful disregard for safety.
56:24
Speaker 2: Just decisions shaped by.
56:26
Speaker 1: The ones before it with an extremely unfortunate outcome. And
56:31
Speaker 1: Tom Mahoud wrote about this in the years he spent
56:33
Speaker 1: working through the case, saying, quote, I believe there are
56:36
Speaker 1: sometimes situations in which individuals can end up finding themselves
56:40
Speaker 1: in great peril without making grossly bad decisions. Unquote. In
56:45
Speaker 1: the geologist's cabin where Cornelia signed the guest log is
56:48
Speaker 1: still standing, and the Park Service has maintained it as
56:51
Speaker 1: a historical structure, and her entry, four names, a destination
56:55
Speaker 1: written in the summer heat, is preserved in the case files.
56:59
Speaker 1: And the van was removed from Anvil Canyon in the
57:01
Speaker 1: weeks following the 1996 search. And the canyon is still
57:05
Speaker 1: closed to vehicle traffic. And Mengel Pass is still there,
57:09
Speaker 1: still rated one of the most demanding four-wheel drive routes
57:12
Speaker 1: in the park, still crossed occasionally by experienced drivers who
57:16
Speaker 1: know exactly what they're getting into. And the stretch of
57:19
Speaker 1: the desert where Mahoud found the wallet and the bones
57:22
Speaker 1: looks more or less as it did in July of 1996.
57:26
Speaker 1: There isn't a marker and there's no memorial and there's really.
57:29
Speaker 2: Nothing to indicate that anything even happened there.
57:32
Speaker 1: But Georg would be 40 years old now and Max
57:35
Speaker 1: would be 33.
57:36
Speaker 2: And that is the end of this case.
57:39
Speaker 1: It's just absolutely heart-wrenching to think of just being in
57:44
Speaker 1: a new place and just not knowing how... what to
57:48
Speaker 1: do and how it works and how the maps just
57:51
Speaker 1: let them down and everything, everything just let them down
57:54
Speaker 1: in every single situation. And it just led to such
57:58
Speaker 1: a brutal end for all of them. So, I mean,
58:00
Speaker 1: my heart goes out to the family. I know it's
58:02
Speaker 1: been 30 years now, but it is a very, very
58:05
Speaker 1: heart wrenching case. Um, and you guys, you guys brought
58:08
Speaker 1: it up for me to deep dive into. So if
58:11
Speaker 1: you have any other cases you want me to look into,
58:14
Speaker 1: let me know, and I will see your beautiful face
58:17
Speaker 1: in the next one. Stay safe out there, okay?
58:19
Speaker 2: Bye.