Ep. 112 | The Death Valley Germans

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