Episode 5 - Can AI Make Us Move Better?: Revolutionising Fitness and Mobility with Mike Cardno

When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. "Saggregation and the day integration at night." "It was like surfing on another world." Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero? "Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him." Charlie's place from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas. At our 2026 I Heart Country Festival presented by Capital One. See Kane Brown, part from a column. "The man that you need." Riley Green, "This girl." Shabluzy, "Dillon Scott," "Russel Dickerson," "Retchon Wilson," "Chase Matthew," "Lorin Elena," "Tickets are on sale now." Get yours before they sell out at Ticketmaster.com. Hey everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legaly Brunette Podcast. Each week we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legaly Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. "Sagregation and the day integration at night." It was like sipping on another world. Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know Los Angeles, there's a good chance you've heard of George Allen Hancock. He's the guy Hancock Park was named for. That fancy neighborhood between Hollywood and Midwilshire. He's also the reason you can visit the famous LeBrayette Harp It, which Hancock donated to Los Angeles County in 1916. Hancock was a lot of things. An oil sion, a railroad tycoon, a rancher, a millionaire, a philanthropist, a cello player, in the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. He was also an oceanic explorer and marine scientist, perhaps best known for his expeditions to the Galapagos. In November 1934, aboard his trusted vessel, the Valero III, with a group of Smithsonian researchers in tow, Hancock embarked on his most dramatic Galapagos expedition yet. Anchored off the island of Floriana on December 8, Hancock cabled following message to his business manager, back in Hollywood. Historical over the death of Dr. Friedrich Ritter. Frau Dory is packing up to go back to Berlin. He was talking about Friedrich Ritter and Dory Strauss. They were originally from Germany, but they had been living on Floriana for almost six years. They went there seeking a simpler life, and escaped from modern society, a tropical utopia. But now Friedrich had died under curious circumstances, more on that later. Dory was headed back home, and their plan to grow old together in an Eden of their own making had come to a tragic end. But there was more to the story, because Friedrich and Dory weren't the only Europeans who had fled civilization for the Galapagos. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Captain Hancock has reported that other deaths may have occurred on the lonely archipelago. The Baroness Eloise, boss Kidd Evogner-Vereborn, self-styled Empress of the island, and her companion Robert Phillipson are known to have left the so-called Eden of the Pacific on July 5th last, since then they have not been seen. Hancock had apparently sailed into a real life-merger mystery. Part Agatha Christie, part Lord of the Flies. According to that same LA Times article, Friedrich and Dory "dreamed of creating a new garden of Eden than others came. The deaths of Dr. Ritter and others converted it into a Valhalla of disillusioned souls. Sounds like a real page-turner. The type of tale that is, as they say, stranger than fiction." Welcome to very special episodes and I Heart's original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is The Galapagos Murders. Welcome back to very special episodes. I'm Jason English. She's Dana Schwartz. He is Zaryn Bernette. One of my favorite genres of information is things I didn't realize were named after people, so I'm excited already in the cold open to learn that Hancock Park was named after someone. Yeah. Yeah. I live near Griffith Park also in Los Angeles. A lot of things named after people out here. Well, almost all the parks named after people, except for like a LeBrea, which is named after Char. I definitely did not know his legacy and the full extent of this story. This was completely new to me. I feel like I dreamed this story. Like having the elements of steel teeth, a place called Hell's Volcano and a barren-is nickname, Crazy Panties. I'm like, come on, this is a cuffly dream. I could decide if I wanted to say Crazy Panties in the intro here. So I was actually researching a different project, sort of a murder that took place around World War Two, and going through the newspaper archives. And I came across this headline that made me stop, and I kept rereading it, and I actually committed it to memory. That's Abbott Kailer, the author of Eden Undone, a true story of sex, murder, and utopia at the dawn of World War Two. It goes like this. Was Dr. Ritter with his steel teeth poisoned in paradise? Was Baroness Eloise otherwise known as Crazy Panties, murdered by one of her love slaves after she drew the other to his death? And why is Fraud Ritter going back to what she once called Hell's Volcano? So I forgot all about the story I had been pursuing and was much more intrigued by the story. And who are these people and who is Crazy Panties and who is steel teeth began a decade-long obsession for me? Before getting to the Agatha Christie of it all, let's start at the beginning. Okay, so Frederick Ritter was a doctor in Berlin. He was a War War One veteran, and he was very traumatized by the war. He had nerve damage from gas inhalation and decided to go to medical school and invest in holistic healings and sort of devote his career to that. And he was working at a Berlin hospital when he met a woman by the name of Dory Stratch. Dory was freedric patient. She suffered from multiple sclerosis. And now every other doctor told Dory that she was incurable. Of course, Frederick says, "You know what, you're choosing to be sick. You can actually cure yourself if you just put your mind to it." Dory was intrigued by this enigma of a man. He also frightened her, not because of his appearance, but because of his demeanor. She thought Friedrich seemed strangely absent of any amoebability or compassion. But he was exceedingly charismatic. So much so that Dory began to think of him as one of the world's great geniuses, a mutual infatuation blossomed, and then a romance. It was a scandalous romance, not just because of the whole doctor-patient thing, but because Friedrich and Dory were both married. Friedrich told Dory about his ambition to abandon modernity for a new life on some faraway island. Dory convinced Friedrich to take her with him. They each filed for divorce. But with a twist, they encouraged their spouses to marry one another. If not for love, then at least for the domestic convenience. And that's exactly what their spouses did. This is in 1929. The Weimar Republic was falling at this time. Hitler was just starting to come into power, and of course, in the United States, in October of 1929, so just a few short months after Dory and Friedrich arrive in the Galapagos, the stock market crashes, sending the world into a depression. Things became quite dire everywhere. It seemed like Friedrich and Dory had gotten out of Dodge at just the right time. Then again, they knew that life in the Galapagos wouldn't be easy. If people don't know much about the Galapagos, they might envision this sort of idyllic goal. wild and sand, waving palm trees, lush vegetation, which could not be further from the truth. The Glapcoes are barren. A lot of the islands don't have any fresh water and aren't able to sustain any life at all. Humans have never been on a few of them, especially at this time period. And I think that Frederick fancy himself the sort of philosopher. He was the successor to Michi and his mind. And he wanted that sort of dark challenge. Floriana was in the southern most part of the Glapcoes. Frederick and Dory chose it because of its fresh water source, which would at least be enough to get a garden going. The island had a history of pirates. Most notably the Irish, seafarer, Patrick Watkins, a drunken, murderous, all-around terrifying character who'd become marooned on Floriana in 1807. Frederick and Dory spent their first night in one of the caves where Watkins had lived more than a century earlier. Dory was a very suspicious woman and sort of saw premonitions and dark, foreboding signs everywhere she looked. And she was sure that the ghost of Patrick Watkins was haunting them as soon as they came to the island. And she got the sense that the island was not quite welcoming of them. Frederick and Dory built a house about two and a half miles inland. From the beach, it took a good 45 minutes to get there on foot, walking uphill over jagged rocks formed by ancient lava. Their home had a porch, a kitchen, sleeping quarters, even a makeshift outdoor shower with fresh water piped from the nearby spring, which also supplied water to their crops. They christened their homestead, Frito, a portmanteau of their names. Sounds charming, until you consider the swarms of ants, the menacing wild boar, and the sand flees that would burrow into Dory's skin, making her feet feel like they were on fire. Remember the earlier reference to Friedrich's teeth? He had had them removed and replaced with a set of steel dentures, because, well, there were no dentists on Floriana. Then there was the matter of communicating with the outside world. The livers would come from the mainland. There were people who made their living by going to separate islands and going back to the mainland and delivering goods back and forth and so on. You know, they were sort of at the mercy of the ship's schedules. There was a barrel called Post Office Bay that was set up during the piracy times, where people would leave letters in this barrel down the shore near the ocean, and passing ships would pick up the mail, take it to its destination, so it was sort of this primitive mail system. They did have contact with the outside world, but it was very infrequent and frustrating, I think, for them. One day in January 1930, an unexpected visitor arrived on Floriana, the Chicago radio tycoon Eugene McDonald. If you had money during this time period, the fashionable thing to do was to build these great exploratory yachts equipped with all the latest modern equipment to do some oceanic investigation, and he fancied himself this sort of rugged explorer, and he was going to go to the Galapagos Islands and pick up rare flora and fauna and animals and sort of maybe he would look for pirate treasure and he would report back. So he shows up on Floriana and sees the one thing he did not expect, which was Dorian Frederick. He had no idea that human beings were actually living on this island. He was shocked. - Dorian Frederick spoke with McDonald about their utopian experiment. They talked about how wonderfully it was going, how life on Floriana was great, how they expected to live there for the rest of their days. In hindsight, they may have wished they'd kept their mouths shut, because now the cat was out of the bag. McDonald went back to Chicago and told the press all about the remarkable couple he had encountered at the ends of the earth. That's when Friedrich and Dorian experienced the 1930s equivalent of going viral. Their story splashed in newspapers from Los Angeles to New York to Berlin. Here's the Cincinnati inquirer. - In the lonely Galapagos, far off the coast of South America, a German doctor and a woman companion have been leaving the lives of the Crusades. And the Sacramento Bee. - Both gave up civilization for a back to nature like Adam and Eve existence. - And the Idaho statesmen. - Alone on burned and fire black and rocks, 600 miles west of the Americas, a physician and philosopher, Friedrich Ritter of Berlin, Germany, will live his own life here after. And with his help made Dorian Ritter, try to find on a desert island, the peace that a modern civilization denies. - And on, and on, and on. - Everybody, especially in a bleak time like the Depression, is just sort of, you know, awed by this idea and the fact that two people tried to do this. And it actually kind of sparked inspiration for people who wanted to flee their miserable lives at this time. You know, they're all suffering from the Great Depression. And what a dream it would be to actually flee civilization, start a new, where money doesn't have any meaning or value. It just seemed like an idyllic thing to do. And of course, the reality was very different. But now everybody knew about Dorian Friedrich's experiment, and they were not gonna be alone for much longer. - The media exposure encouraged other wealthy explorers to plot their own Galapagos expeditions, lured by the prospect of meeting Florianna's Adam and Eve. George Allen Hancock first visited in 1931. He brought along a whole crew of scientists to study the island's exotic animals and flora. But he ended up being much more interested in the island's two exotic humans. - We passed to the southward across the equator to the Galapagos island, which are located 600 miles west of Ecuador. We anchor at Black Beach Anchorage, Charles Island, also known as Florianna, and are met by Dr. Ritter and proud Dora Kerwin. They are greeting Captain Hancock and Dr. Schmidt who follows him out of the skiff as old friends. Just as soon as we have loaded up the donkey, we will begin a track of 45 minutes from Black Beach Anchorage to pre-do their hermit home. They wear no clothing at all, except when visitors arrive on their island. - He'd be friend at Dorian Friedrich and really developed an interesting relationship with them. He became their closest confidant. They would tell Hancock things that they wouldn't tell each other. - Hancock left the island, knowing he would remain in touch with this world-famous couple. Indeed, this would not be his last time on Florianna. His fascination was only just beginning. In the meantime, thousands of miles away, several other utopia seekers were hatching plans to follow in Friedrich and Dorian's footsteps. The island, now a global sensation, would never be the same. - Sackrigation and the day integration at night. - When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. - We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping on another world. - Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it. - You saw the KKK? - Yeah, it was dressed up in that uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. - Charlie was an example of power, the head of crush him. - From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now, listen to Charlie's place on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. - You saw the KKK? - The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. (gentle music) Back in Germany, a couple named Hintz and Margaret, and Vittmer were growing restless. Hitler was consolidating power, and Heintz, a former military official in the Vimar Republic, worried about becoming a target of the Nazis. Plus, the Vittmer's figured that a tropical climate and fresh ocean air might benefit young Harry Vittmer, Heintz's sickly son from his first marriage. They read about Dory and Friedrich's adventures in the Galapagos. Then they booked passage to Floriana with no intention of looking back. Before establishing their own homestead, the Vittmer's made the "limbusting" trek to Frito to pay their respects to Friedrich and Dory. Margaret, by the way, was five months pregnant. Dory was kind of at first excited by the prospect of having a female friend. At this point, her relationship with Friedrich is very volatile. Some days he's great, some days he's incredibly cruel, and she thought it might be nice to have a female confidant on the island. But the two women meet, and it does not go well. Dory looks at Margaret and says, "What kind of idiot would want to give birth on this remote island?" And Margaret looks at Dory and says, "What kind of idiot quotes Nietzsche on a remote island who cares?" So they really just had two different temperaments and two different ideas of what living on Floriana should be. Meanwhile, in Paris, a high-born Austrian woman was dreaming about starting her own new life on Floriana. The woman's legal name was a mouthful, and a bit different than the one printed in those newspaper reports we quoted earlier. Antonia Henrika Jolie Wagner-Weirborn, Basket, aka the Baroness, aka Crazy Pantes. And she, of course, also had heard of Friedrich and Dory, and she would later claim that God came to her in a dream and ordered her to go to Floriana and conquer it. It was her island for the taking, and she decided to heed this, leaving behind her very colorful life in Paris. There's all kinds of rumors swirling about her, you know, she is married to a French war hero, but she has orgies, she has these two lovers root up at Robert living with her. There was rumors that she was stealing money from her own shop and not paying her debtors. There's rumors that men fought doles over her, there's rumors that she actually killed somebody in Paris, and that's the reason she won the leave. But she's this woman of mystery, she's very charismatic, sort of a seductress, and very sure that she is going to go to Floriana and sort of conquer the island. It was October 1932 when the Baroness arrived in Floriana with her two young lovers, Robert, Philippsin, and Rudolf Lorenz, who seemed more like man servants. She didn't exactly make a good first impression on Dory and Friedrich or the Vittmers. The Baroness wasn't just haughty, there was something menacing about her. She bragged about how she was going to turn Floriana into the next Miami, with plans to build a grand hotel catering to American millionaires. She dipped her feet into the Vittmers drinking basin. When Hines objected to her plan to share the family's fresh water supply, she brandished a pistol. Overall, she acted like a domineering aristocrat, although for what it's worth, she actually was one. Nobody believes that she's actually a Baroness, the irony being that she really is actually a Baroness. In my research, I discovered that she earned the title from her grandfather. She came from a well-to-do family, not incredibly rich, but well-to-do, well-connected, and certainly a respectable family. Immediately, she just seemed like she's going to bring ruin to everybody. Dory writes in her diary that, you know, one way or another this woman is going to cause the sort of death of our civilization here. The Baroness settled into her own island compound, a sort of hedonistic pleasure den called Hacienda Paradiso. As time went on, the tensions between Florianas' moply inhabitants continued to escalate. So one of the biggest areas of contention is the explorers. So Hancock and his crew would come and visit, and of course they always brought gifts. They brought, you know, clothing and materials and tools and seeds and canned food and all of these things. And the settlers, you know, on Florianas started to fight over this. They would figure out ways to try to get Hancock not to visit the other ones or to give them more goods than somebody else, but it became a battle that just only grew more heated over time. Like when the Baroness stole milk from the bitmer's little bundle of joy. Hancock, when he visits, brings a lot of gifts for the baby, tens of milk. The Baroness, one point, he's still the entire supply that Hancock had brought for this baby. At the same time, visitors who offered the Baroness no benefit were met with hostility. There was one incident where a friend of Dorian Fredericks, who they knew from their beginning days on the island, came to hunt perfectly within his rights to do this on Florianna, but she beats him down at the shore with Rudolf and Robert and Guns Drawn says you're on my island, get off my island. In another frightening incident, the Baroness actually fired a shot. The Baroness, she had a hobby of wounding animals and then nursing them back to health and the hope that they would remain forever loyal to her. So at one point, she decides to test this theory on humans. And she always had an eye on the handsome young visitors who would come. And there was one man a particular name, Lind, who caught her fancy and they go out on a hunting trip with the idea that she was going to shoot Lind and nurse him back to health and of course he was going to fall in love with her. Well, she ends up shooting the wrong person and you know it becomes sort of another incident where Frederik and Heinz are just out of their minds with concern that this woman is going to go to kill them all. Friedrich and Heinz appealed to the governor of Ecuador about this crazy woman wreaking havoc on the island. Their plan backfired. When the governor visited Florianna, the Baroness charmed him into her good graces. He even invited her to accompany him on a vacation. In fact, the Baroness seemed to grow bolder by the day. She wanted to expand her fame beyond the newspaper headlines to break into Hollywood and become an actress. She convinced George Hancock to bring a film crew and shoot a silent movie about her. The movie's plot was based on a rumor that she had kidnapped a newlywed couple and changed them up as captors on the island. They called it the Empress of Florianna. You'll have to pardon our motion picture director who was ringing up the rear. A custom detracting only along Hollywood boulevard, he was not accustomed to seven miles of Galapagos lava. Fortunately the home of the Viennese Baroness Borgner Bascay was not far away. Perhaps you remember reading about the so-called queen of the Galapagos island. She is not beautiful, but yet attractive enough to have learned to European men to share her exile. The Baroness wasn't the only malevolent force threatening Florianna. In early 1934, the island was hit by a dret. Crops failed. Animals died. Streams slowed to a trickle. Paradise was beginning to feel more like an inferno. As conditions deteriorated, so did Friedrich and Dory's relationship. Friedrich was a controlling partner at turns critical and cruel. After several years cohabitating in the middle of nowhere, Dory began to nurture a rebellious streak to defy Friedrich's will. She was realizing that she had her own things to say, her own decisions to make, and her own life to live. A similar dynamic was playing out over at the Hacienda Paradiso. Rudolph Lorenz was fed up with the Baroness's tyranny, not to mention the preferential treatment she lavished on Rudolph's arrival, Robert Phillipson. Rudolph had grown increasingly miserable. Desperate to leave the island, he often sought refuge at Frido or the Vitmer's Bavarian-style cottage. The Baroness would actually stage physical fights between Rudolph and Robert. Robert, being the much bigger man, would always emerge victorious. And it wasn't just this physical abuse. The Baroness verbally abused him, insulted him, threatened him. To the point where Rudolph often just left the Hacienda Paradiso and would go stay with Margaret Perfidés, and it would bounce around and go to Dory's for a few days. With the drought happening, with everybody's crops failing, with Rudolph being cast aside and confiding in Dory and Margaret about what's going on with the Baroness, with Friedrich becoming increasingly cruel to Dory, with Dory rebelling, everything is starting to come to a head. It was as if Dory's premonitions that very first night in the Boogie pirate cave were coming true. The island seemed to be turning against them. You could almost feel it in the broiling air. And yet there was nothing anyone could do. The only thing to do really was to wait for something else to happen. No one knew what that something was, but they had every reason to believe that it wouldn't be good. The segregation and the day integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, it was dressed up in that uniform. They had the crush in. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's place. This is writer Strong, with a podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. Those nature, trees, and praying, and drugs. No, I am not your guru. Back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. You can now binge all episodes of The Red Weather on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, this is where the story really starts to get strange and convoluted, so stay with us. Here's Abbott Kailer. In March 1934, Dory claims that she and Frederick were sitting at Frito. It was incredibly hot. They were just relaxing. And suddenly, there was a gunshot and a woman's scream. And this is something that Dory would insist that she heard later on, but it's not something that anybody else in the island heard. And it became sort of an important point in the mystery of what exactly happened on that day and in that month in Florida. After the alleged gunshot and scream, the plot thickened. And Dory's telling, "When day Margaret comes to Frito," and says the Baroness and Robert are gone. They went off at an English boat with some friends. They went off to Tahiti. I don't know if they're coming back. And Dory thought this was strange, according to Dory. And everybody made a pilgrimage down to the Hacienda Parade, so to see exactly what was going on. And strangely enough, all of the Baroness and Phillips and things are still there. The thing is, I don't think Margaret believed it. I think that Rudolph is the one who told her that they had sailed off to Tahiti. It didn't really make sense to Margaret. Usually, everybody in the island would know if a big ship was passing through. They would have seen it. Margaret, I think, didn't know quite what to believe at this point. But she also didn't want to get Rudolph in trouble. Friedrich had his own theories about what had happened to Robert and the Baroness. Or at least he knew what he wanted everyone to think he believed. Friedrich started to make the claim that Hines had murdered the Baroness and Robert Phillips in. And he was very vocal about this. But he was also vocal about the idea that the Baroness and Robert Phillips in walked into the ocean and decided to drown themselves. There was all kinds of theories that Frederick was saying. It seemed like with each new person, he had a different theory about what had happened to them. As for Dory, she was suspicious of Rudolph from the get-go. He had the clearest motive, after all. No one on the island was a fan of the Baroness, except maybe for Robert. But no one had been more abused by her than Rudolph. Dory didn't think he could have done it on his own. He was a small guy. It would have been difficult for him to single-handedly overpower the Baroness and Robert. But alone contend with the dead weight of their corpses. I think that Dory starts suspecting that Frederick actually is the one who helped Rudolph dispose of the Baroness in Phillips. She never says this. I think it would be too terrible for her to admit. But I think she thought that that was the most likely scenario. And in the end, decided to help him cover up this story by telling the story of this mysterious scream and gunshot in the middle of the day. In July, Rudolph finally got his wish to leave Floriana. A Norwegian fisherman offered him a ride on his boat back to the mainland. From there he could arrange passage to Germany. Rudolph's companions bid him farewell, knowing they would probably never see him again. Meanwhile, Hancock caught wind of the latest developments. He had received panicked letters from Frederick and Dory. He'd even received a letter from Robert's father, asking Hancock, quote, "Whether it is possible for you to inquire on my behalf, if anybody could inform unfortunate parents of the fate of their only son." Hancock decided to go to Floriana to see if he could get to the bottom of it. And to continue his Galapagos research while he was there. Two birds, one stone. Shortly before Hancock was set to depart on the Valero 3, he received some startling news. He gets a telegram that tells him that two bodies have been found on Marchana Island, which is the northern part of the Galapagos, and completely barren has no freshwater source, so it's really strange that two bodies have washed up there. Two missing people. Two dead bodies. Surely it wasn't a coincidence. Hancock and his Smithsonian researcher pals sailed straight for Marchana Island. The solution to the mystery of Robert and the Baroness seemed within their grasp. But when they got there. Upon investigating, Hancock finds a body which he recognizes as that of Nugorud, a sailor, who died clutching a coil of rope. 25 feet away was the desiccated body of Lorenzo. As in Rudolph Lorenz, whom we last saw feeding the donkey in the company of the Baroness, these men had died of thirst and not a hunger for all about was food to be had. Like the pirate, Patrick Watkins before them, Rudolph and the Norwegian fisherman found themselves marooned in the Galapagos. And they'd washed ashore on the wrong island, because Marquana had no fresh water supply. Help had come too late for this unlucky pair. If Rudolph harbored any secrets about the fate of his missing companions, he had taken them to the grave. Now Hancock really had a mystery on his hands. For Marchana, he raced to Floriana aboard the Valero. When Hancock arrived, he found Dory on the beach, sobbing. She tells Hancock that Frederick has died. And she recounts this very strange story on the begins with the fact that they finally gave up all pretense of being vegetarians and decide that they have to kill and eat one of their chickens. So Frederick is, as Dory tells it, he was preparing the chicken and by the time they went to eat it several days later, it did not smell good. Dory claims to have taken one bite and thrown it out. But Frederick ate all of the chicken. And, you know, suddenly afterward was exhibiting signs of being in distress. He started slaring his words. He couldn't talk. His breathing became labored. And Dory just didn't know what to do according to her story. She sat there as he got sicker and sicker. Their day passed and finally, when he seemed to be on his deathbed, she decides to go over and find Margaret. And it's quite a walk for Dory. She has multiple scores. So she has a bad leg that pains her when she walks on it for a long time. And she goes to Margaret and says, you know, "Frederks in trouble." And Margaret immediately goes back with Dory to Frito to see what's going on with Frederick. The two women sat with Friedrich in his final hours. Dory and Margaret have very conflicting stories about much of what happened on Floreonit. But I think their stories on what happened to Frederick are the most drastic and interesting. Dory claims that Frederick reached up to her, looked at her with loving eyes, sort of conveyed to her silently that he would be with her always and how much love they shared in this very tender moment. And Margaret says that Frederick said, "I curse you with my dying breath." And then he died. Two of Floreonit's nine permanent residents were now dead. Another two were presumed dead. Hancock listened to the surviving residents' stories and tried to make sense of it all. Dorey's worst fears had come true. Floriana was no Eden. It was a place of death and destruction. Six years earlier, she had had every intention of spending the rest of her life here. Now all she wanted was to go home. On December 7, Dorey made one last walk from Frito to Black Beach. As her belongings were loaded into a dinghy that would transport her to the Valero, she said goodbye to the Vitmers. Then with tears in her eyes, she took Hancock's hand and left Floriana forever. On board the ship Hancock sent a cable to Los Angeles with an update about her condition. Dorey leaving on Valero 3 for Transship to Germany was hysterical but improving. As the Valero sailed back to the mainland, Floriana became engulfed in yet another media frenzy. The intrigue swirling around this group of eccentric European exiles was simply too good to be true. A tropical paradise like this on the equator holds the solution to the mysterious deaths of two castaways on a desert aisle in the trackless Pacific. The Gallupegos Islands, scene of the tragedy, are 500 miles due west of Ecuador to which they belong. These last motion pictures made of the weird colony show you the only ones who know the mystery of the Gallupegos tragedy. Among the group of colonists was Alfred Lorenz reported as one of the castaways found dead. Lorenz companions on the island were Balanist de Wagner of Vienna and Robert Phillips and shown here. After a quile with Lorenz they vanished. Are they dead or alive? What is the fate of this Empress of Eden? While journalists feasted on the story, the Ecuadorian authorities conducted an investigation. Hancock provided Dory with two Spanish-speaking translators who may have helped finesse her account. She was cleared of suspicion. On the journey home, Dory became less withdrawn. She felt as if a burden had been lifted. She was finally free from Floriana, from Friedrich's domination, and from the dark chain of events that had shattered her faith in Utopia. As for the official inquiries. They just ruled Friedrich's death as an accident or natural causes, nothing nefarious. She wasn't charged with anything. And the Baroness in Phillips and nobody knows. There was no conclusion drawn at all since their bodies were never found, so there's not really any more investigating they could do. Back in Germany, with Hitler now fully in power, Dory settled into a different society than the one she had left in 1929. To make ends meet, she took on speaking gigs and published a memoir. Many of its details diverged from a competing memoir published by Margaret Vidmer, which of the two books offers the more truthful account, will never know for sure. Dory died of complications from multiple sclerosis on May 11, 1943 at the age of 42. By then, Hancock had stopped returning Dory's letters, which had grown increasingly desperate due to her failing health and lack of funds. Hancock did, however, continue his exploration of the Galapagos. Scientists who accompanied him on his missions often wondered just how much he knew about the chilling events of 1934. One of these researchers later wrote, quote, "It was the general understanding that the only one of Hancock's people who had gotten the whole story of what happened to the Baroness and Phillipson was Captain Hancock. And that what he knew would die with him." The happy ending in this story belongs to the Vidmers. They remained on Floriana and lived a fulfilling life, including the birth of a second child, a daughter named Ingborg Florianita. Abbott Kaeler met Florianita when she traveled to the island during research for Eden Undone. She toured both hotels the Vidmers had established, and she visited the storied pirate caves where Friedrich Dory and the Vidmers all sheltered before building their homes. So you were saying that the. where there's a six kilometers from here? Yeah, the six kilometers from here. Okay. And here's the second bedroom of the pirate cave. That's really cool. So if they got into a fight, they could kick Hines over here. Eden Undone was published in September 2024. One year later Ron Howard released his film, Eden, starring Jude Law as Friedrich, Vanessa Kirby as Dory, and Anadarmus as the Baroness. During a CBS interview, Howard said he first learned of the story while vacationing on the Galapagos with family. I couldn't stop talking about it and started reading about it and, you know, there are accounts by the survivors and they contradict each other. The screenwriter Noah Pink and I started working on it four or five years ago in more detail, you know, and we've tried to fill in some of the gaps. Abbott Kaeler knows the feeling. After immersing herself in this story for more than a decade, she has her own ideas about what really happened on Florianita nearly a century ago. And about the lessons to be learned from this wild and tragic saga. I think that Dory intentionally let Friedrich die. I think that Rudolph did kill the Baroness and Robert Phillips in with Friedrich's help. The big mystery to me is what did they do with the bodies? You know, and that's something that people on Florianita still talk about to this day. I think one of the lessons of this tale is that Utopia is subjective, which makes Utopia impossible. If everybody has a different version of Utopia, it's impossible to create it. You can sort of always imagine the idea that you can escape your problems if you only just change your location. But of course, your problems just go right along with you. They're inescapable. Utopia is impossible because human beings are fallible. And I do think Dory should have heated the warning of Florianita in the beginning. All right. Well, this one actually has been a movie, but Zaryn, if you want to cast your own version, there's no reason why we can't try to top run Howard here. Yeah, cast a better version. I honestly, guys, I have to admit, I saw the run Howard 2025 Eden and I looked at his cast and I was like, darn, he's really down the road. Yeah, I mean, that was like Jude Law for Dr. Friedrich Ritter and then like Vanessa Kirby for Froudera Strauss and On a Day Armist as crazy panties, AKA Baroness Eloise. I was like, those are all strong. I don't think I can top this one. So I mostly focused on the quote about utopia is subjective, which makes utopia impossible. And I thought that's one of the coolest quotes we've done yet. Does anyone have any very special moment or character discussion for this one? I do actually have one is when Baroness Eloise aka crazy panties when she steals milk from a baby. I was like, wow. I mean, it's going to be the Baroness of someone is in the episode, is a Baroness. It's like, okay, you know, we should be paying attention. Yeah, it has to be her. Very special episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Danish Warx, Zaryn Burnett and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo, editing and sound design by Chris Childs, mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher, additional editing by Mary Doe. The voice actor is Chris Childs, original music by Elise McCoy, show logo by Lucy Kintenea, social clips by Yard Berry Media. Our executive producer is Jason English. Very special episodes is a production of I Heart Podcasts. Segregation and the day integration at night. Charlie was an example of Powell, they had to crush him. Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Riders Strong and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. Those nature, trees and praying and drugs. Listen to The Red Weather on the I Heart Radio app. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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