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The Mysterious Case Of The Death Valley Germans · The conspiracy

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