# The Truth Is So Awful... Detectives Didn't Believe It | 240

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 26 May 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5689115483.mp3

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## Transcript

[0:00] There's a particular kind of dread that creeps in when
[0:02] someone you love misses a phone call they always make.
[0:06] Not a meeting, not an appointment, just the routine
[0:09] check in that's so reliable you've stopped thinking about
[0:12] it. That's the dread Elaine Sobeck
[0:15] felt on the evening of November 16th, 1995 when her 27 year old
[0:21] daughter Linda didn't ring her back.
[0:24] Linda had called that morning to say she was running late for a
[0:27] quick photo shoot, but promised she'd phone again that night to
[0:31] nail down plans for a family BBQ the following weekend.
[0:36] She never did, and within 48 hours, a maintenance crew
[0:40] working the Angeles National Forest would find pictures of a
[0:44] smiling young woman tossed into a roadside trash bin.
[0:48] Soon, a freelance photographer would be telling a story to
[0:51] police that didn't quite add up. And the truth, when it came out,
[0:56] was far worse than anyone could have guessed.
[1:00] Linda Sobek had been chasing the same dream as half of Los
[1:03] Angeles County, and by the autumn of 1995, she was closer
[1:07] to catching it than most. Born in July of 1968 and raised
[1:12] in Lakewood, she'd spent roughly five years on the sidelines of
[1:16] the Coliseum as a Raideret, the Los Angeles Raiders cheer dance
[1:20] squad. She was named Raideret of the
[1:23] Year during her third season. At 5 foot 4, she was too short
[1:27] for runway work, but her looks made her a fixture and other
[1:31] forms of modeling, swimwear layouts, calendar shoots, car
[1:36] magazine spreads and more. She'd picked up bit parts on
[1:40] screen too, small rolls that paid the rent while she waited
[1:44] for the call that might actually change things.
[1:47] That phone call had come only days before she vanished, and
[1:50] she'd booked a recurring guest spot on Married With Children,
[1:54] the kind of credit that opens doors in Hollywood.
[1:58] A costume fitting for the show was on her calendar for the
[2:00] afternoon of November 16th, and she'd already told the producers
[2:05] she'd be a little late getting in because of the photo shoot.
[2:09] By that fall, Linda was sharing a four bedroom house in Hermosa
[2:13] Beach with three other women working in or around the
[2:16] entertainment business. She kept careful records of her
[2:20] bookings in a day planner she carried everywhere.
[2:23] Friends would later describe her as a model who treated the work
[2:26] like a business rather than a fantasy.
[2:29] She was the sort of person who told people where she was going,
[2:33] when she'd be back, and who she'd be with.
[2:36] Which is exactly what makes what happened next so chilling.
[2:43] The job had come together fast. Only a day earlier, Linda had
[2:47] taken a call from a photographer she'd worked with before.
[2:50] He was a tall, heavyset man named Charles Rathbun, then 38,
[2:55] who specialized in automotive shoots and had a small but
[2:59] legitimate looking portfolio with several car publications.
[3:04] Rathbun said he had a same day assignment to photograph a
[3:07] prototype Lexus sport utility vehicle and that he needed a
[3:11] model on the call sheet. He reportedly told her the
[3:14] assignment was for Auto Week magazine, which had a
[3:18] circulation of about 300,000 magazines per week at the time.
[3:23] This was, at least the way Rathbone sold it, a pretty big
[3:27] job for an up and coming model like Linda.
[3:31] The publisher of that magazine would later flatly contradict
[3:34] the claim, telling reporters that Auto Week didn't use models
[3:38] in its product shoots. It would later be confirmed that
[3:41] the assignment Rathbun had taken on with the manufacturer never
[3:45] involved any model at all. But here's the thing.
[3:49] He was an established photographer with a legitimate
[3:53] prototype Lexus, and a real assignment to take pictures of
[3:57] it. The job on his end was real,
[3:59] which presumably made the ruse all the more realistic.
[4:03] But he used that prototype to target Linda.
[4:07] Linda, of course, had no way of knowing any of that, and they
[4:10] agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning at a Denny's
[4:13] restaurant in Torrance. She woke up early on November
[4:18] 16th and made two calls. The first was to her mother.
[4:22] The second was to her Booker. Confirming the day's schedule.
[4:27] She told both women the same thing.
[4:29] A quick shoot in the desert, back in time for the costume
[4:33] fitting. She walked out the door, met
[4:36] Rathbun at the Denny's and climbed into a black pre
[4:39] production Lexus Suva vehicle so new IT hadn't yet been released
[4:44] to dealerships. The plan, according to Rathbun,
[4:48] was to drive out to the El Mirage dry lake bed in the
[4:51] western Mojave, run a few hours of action shots and head home.
[4:57] The dry lake bed sits roughly 2 hours from the South Bay, a flat
[5:01] white expanse where automotive photographers love to shoot.
[5:05] Because there's nothing in the frame except sky and dust.
[5:09] Whatever happened that day didn't happen there.
[5:12] By the time Linda's mother started worrying, her daughter
[5:15] was already deep in the Angeles National Forest, north of Los
[5:19] Angeles. When Linda missed her costume
[5:23] fitting that afternoon, a close friend named Brooke Morales
[5:27] started calling around. Linda didn't ghost call sheets
[5:31] and she didn't miss bookings, so this was highly unusual to say
[5:35] the least. By the morning of November 17th,
[5:39] Elaine had filed a missing persons report with the Hermosa
[5:42] Beach Police Department. A small group of Linda's friends
[5:46] and former Raderet team mates had started running their own
[5:49] search, printing Flyers, working the phones and walking the
[5:54] neighborhoods near her house. The story got into the Los
[5:58] Angeles Times within 72 hours, and local television picked it
[6:03] up. A pretty former cheerleader
[6:06] vanished on her way to a photo shoot was the kind of story that
[6:10] didn't stay buried for long. Volunteers from the Montrose
[6:14] Search and Rescue Team were called out to comb the canyons
[6:18] north of the city, working off the theory that Linda had been
[6:22] driven somewhere remote. Nobody quite knew where to start
[6:26] looking, because nobody yet knew where she'd actually been.
[6:30] The break came not from the searchers, but from a county
[6:33] maintenance worker doing routine trash pickup along a forest Rd.
[6:36] north of the city. Sometime around November 18th,
[6:40] he came across an odd collection of items dumped into a roadside
[6:43] bin. There were photographs of a
[6:46] young woman posing professionally, a daily planner
[6:49] with the page for November 16th torn out, and a piece of paper
[6:54] that turned out to be a vehicle lease contract.
[6:58] The contract authorized A freelance photographer named
[7:01] Charles Rathbun to borrow a prototype Lexus for what the
[7:05] document described as an Auto Week assignment.
[7:09] The maintenance worker didn't think much of it at the time,
[7:11] but a few days later, watching the news, he saw the missing
[7:15] woman's face and recognized her instantly from the photos.
[7:20] He called the Sheriff's Department, and that call
[7:23] cracked the case open in roughly the time it took investigators
[7:26] to drive to Rathbun's apartment in Hollywood.
[7:29] He'd already returned the Lexus to the manufacturer on November
[7:33] 20th, but a forensic team got into it before it could be
[7:37] cleaned by the manufacturer. Despite obvious signs that the
[7:41] interior had been scrubbed carefully, technicians recovered
[7:45] traces of blood. They also recovered fibers and a
[7:49] pattern of soil consistent with the back roads of the Angeles
[7:53] National Forest. Rathburn, meanwhile, was at
[7:56] home, and he wasn't behaving like an innocent man.
[8:00] He told the first detectives who reached him that he'd met Linda
[8:03] for breakfast at the Denny's, decided she wasn't quite right
[8:07] for the shoot, and parted ways with her in the parking lot.
[8:11] Then, almost as an aside, he reportedly said something he had
[8:16] no business knowing. He told them he must have been
[8:19] the last person to see her alive.
[8:22] But here's the thing. Investigators hadn't even told
[8:26] her she was suspected to be deceased.
[8:29] Now, I probably don't have to tell you that this instantly
[8:32] made him the prime suspect in her disappearance.
[8:35] If he wasn't occupying that slot already.
[8:39] Charles Rathbun was a freelance photographer of the kind any
[8:42] modeling agent in Los Angeles would have called a known
[8:45] quantity. He'd shot for several legitimate
[8:48] publications, and he had both a portfolio and references.
[8:53] He was also, as it turned out, a man with a long shadow trailing
[8:57] behind him. Investigators digging into his
[9:00] background uncovered a 1979 incident in Ohio in which a
[9:05] young Kroger Co worker reported being assaulted in his home.
[9:09] He had invited her in to look at his photography and discuss
[9:13] modeling opportunities, but it was all a ruse.
[9:17] Unfortunately, though, for reasons that aren't quite clear,
[9:21] he was never prosecuted for this crime.
[9:25] They found a pattern of accusations stretching across
[9:27] the Midwest, including a stint as a student at Ohio State
[9:31] University, that overlapped with the 1994 disappearance of an OSU
[9:37] freshman. He had an address in the Lansing
[9:40] area that overlapped with the 1993 disappearance of a young
[9:43] Michigan model named Rose Larner.
[9:47] Closer to home, Rathbun's name had come up at least once in
[9:50] connection with the 1992 case of Kimberly Pandelios.
[9:56] She was a young Southern California model whose body had
[9:59] been found in the same general region under broadly similar
[10:03] circumstances. He'd never been charged in any
[10:07] of those cases, and other suspects would eventually
[10:10] surface in some of them, but the resemblance to what had just
[10:13] happened to Linda was hard to ignore.
[10:17] In the Larner and Pandelios cases specifically.
[10:20] Other people were eventually charged and convicted, but it's
[10:24] clear that the cops already had him pinned as a potential serial
[10:27] predator while detectives were still working out how to
[10:31] approach him. Rathbun made the next move
[10:34] substantially easier. While under surveillance, he
[10:38] reportedly fired a weapon in his own driveway, a shot that
[10:42] ricocheted and grazed the arm of a female acquaintance who was
[10:45] with him at the time. That gave Los Angeles
[10:48] authorities grounds to enter the residence, conduct a search and
[10:52] detain him. I've said it once before, and
[10:55] I'll say it again, we're very lucky that criminals tend not to
[10:59] be the brightest people around. Perhaps, though, it's not an
[11:03] intelligence issue, but rather hubris, the belief that no
[11:07] matter what they do, they're untouchable.
[11:10] At any rate, I just can't imagine that he wouldn't have at
[11:13] least thought he might have been under police surveillance at the
[11:16] time. But I'm getting off track here.
[11:20] Inside they found a massive cache of weaponry, ammunition,
[11:24] restraints, packing tape, and bottles of alcohol bundled into
[11:29] what looked unsettlingly like a kit.
[11:32] They also found photographs of women they couldn't immediately
[11:35] identify. The theory developed that
[11:38] Charles Rathbun was keeping these pictures as some sort of
[11:42] trophy related to his previous victims.
[11:45] I'll get into this more in a moment, but somewhat
[11:48] surprisingly, this actually may not have been the case.
[11:52] Or, I should say, it's never been proven that this is what
[11:56] these photos were. Once he was in custody,
[12:01] Rathbun's account of November 16th began evolving in real
[12:04] time, which generally isn't the behavior of a man with nothing
[12:08] to hide. The first version was the one
[12:11] he'd already given that they had parted ways at the Denny's.
[12:16] The second version was that he'd taken Linda out to the desert
[12:19] after all, and she'd been struck and fatally injured by the
[12:23] Lexus. He claimed that he leapt into
[12:26] the driver's seat to demonstrate a high speed turn and lost
[12:29] control of the vehicle while doing doughnuts.
[12:33] He was, of course, getting slightly closer to the truth
[12:35] with this one, but he was trying to frame it all as an accident.
[12:40] Just a big mistake. The medical examiner who
[12:44] eventually examined the body would find no broken bones,
[12:48] consistent with a vehicle strike.
[12:51] The third version was that the contact had been intimate and
[12:54] the asphyxiation had been accidental, the kind of thing
[12:57] that happens in consensual encounters that go wrong.
[13:01] The 4th version was that there had been an argument and a
[13:04] struggle, and that the asphyxiation had still somehow
[13:07] been accidental, just under different circumstances.
[13:12] Each version was offered as if it were the first, and each one
[13:15] steered detectives a little further from the only piece of
[13:18] evidence that mattered, the location of Linda's body.
[13:22] If they had her body, they could prove what actually happened to
[13:26] her, and detectives had a hunch that there was nothing
[13:29] accidental about Linda's fate. Then the lead detective, Raul
[13:34] Saldana, did something brilliant to get justice for Linda and her
[13:38] family. He implied that he agreed that
[13:41] it was all one big, awful accident, but that Linda's
[13:45] family needed her body so that they could lay her to rest.
[13:49] Somehow, Rathbun bought this hook, line, and sinker, and this
[13:53] would be his unraveling. On November 24th, 8 days after
[13:59] she'd vanished, Rathbun finally agreed to lead detectives into
[14:03] the Angeles National Forest. He took them to a shallow grave
[14:08] on a wooded slope and watched as deputies dug.
[14:11] They found Linda, and the autopsy concluded that she'd
[14:15] been asphyxiated and that she had also sustained blunt force
[14:19] trauma to the head. She had been subjected to other
[14:23] forms of disturbing assault beyond what initially passed for
[14:27] the central crime. Her blood alcohol level was
[14:30] measured at almost twice the threshold for legal
[14:33] intoxication. The case went to trial in Los
[14:37] Angeles County in the autumn of 1996 and ran for roughly 5
[14:42] weeks. The prosecution didn't have an
[14:45] eyewitness, but it didn't need one.
[14:47] It had the photographs in the trash, the planner, the lease
[14:50] contract, the cleaned car that wouldn't quite come clean, the
[14:54] changing stories, and the comment about being the last
[14:58] person to see her. They also had the implements
[15:01] found in the apartment and the body Rathbun himself had LED
[15:05] detectives to. The jury returned guilty
[15:08] verdicts on all counts, and on December 16th, 1996, Charles
[15:13] Rathbun was sentenced to life in a California State prison
[15:17] without the possibility of parole.
[15:21] What's never been formally answered, and what remains an
[15:24] unsolved mystery, is whether Linda Sobek was the first young
[15:28] woman he did this to, or only the last.
[15:32] Investigators in Ohio, Michigan, and California spent years
[15:36] trying to clear or close the cases his movement seemed to
[15:40] brush up against. However, a handful of those
[15:43] cases have since resolved without his name attached.
[15:47] The Pandillos case in particular was eventually solved with a
[15:50] different suspect entirely, which complicates the easy
[15:54] serial predator narrative that built up around Rathbun.
[15:58] Personally, I don't think Linda was his first victim, but
[16:01] proving that seems incredibly difficult at this point.
[16:05] That said, it's possible that his other criminal activities
[16:09] were simply all leading up to this event, that he'd wanted to
[16:12] take a life but for whatever reason hadn't done so until he
[16:16] met Linda. What isn't in dispute is that
[16:20] Linda Sobek, on the last morning of her life, did everything
[16:23] anyone could reasonably ask. She told her mother where she
[16:27] was going and confirmed the day's schedule with her Booker.
[16:31] She hadn't put her trust in someone who wasn't a known
[16:34] quantity. She was going on a professional
[16:37] shoot with a real photographer. Unfortunately, it still wasn't
[16:41] enough because the man waiting for her at that Denny's had been
[16:45] quietly rehearsing for the moment for longer than anyone
[16:48] yet realized. Three friends are having drinks
[16:55] in a heated garage in rural Wisconsin, and two of them are
[16:59] listening to the third tell hunting stories.
[17:02] Then, mid conversation, the third one calmly says he hopes
[17:06] they'll forgive him if he has to put them both down, and he's
[17:10] reaching for the weapon before the sentence is finished.
[17:13] The town of Germania sits West of Tigerton in Shawano County,
[17:17] Wisconsin. It's the kind of place where
[17:20] deer season is a real season on the calendar, and where folks
[17:24] down the road from each other tend to know one another's
[17:27] pickup trucks. Rick Roundy lived there, and the
[17:32] evening of November 12th, 2025 carried the same low key rhythm
[17:37] that defined a lot of his nights.
[17:40] Roundy had a detached garage on his property, and inside it he'd
[17:44] built a small bar. It wasn't fancy, there were a
[17:48] few stools and not much more. It was somewhere to land after a
[17:53] day in the woods. That night, his closest hunting
[17:57] partner was over the man court documents would later refer to
[18:01] only as victim #2. The two had planned on talking
[18:06] through stories from the deer season and unwinding.
[18:10] Just regular stuff, nothing special.
[18:14] The third man at the bar was Brent Hoffman.
[18:17] He was 74, lived just down the road, and had haunted with both
[18:22] of them for more than a decade. By victim #2's account, Hoffman
[18:27] had always been a bit of an oddball, A hermit, a bit weird,
[18:32] but never trouble. Not once in all those years on
[18:36] adjoining hunting land had there been a fight or a flare up, or
[18:41] even a sharp word between them. Hoffman showed up that evening
[18:46] with a big iron on his hip, and the surviving hunter would later
[18:50] tell investigators that he seemed to be drinking heavily by
[18:53] the time he sat down. That wasn't unusual in itself,
[18:57] and Hoffman was often pretty heavy into the bottle by the
[19:00] time the men got together. The three of them poured drinks
[19:04] and settled in around the bar. They talked deer hunting, the
[19:09] way men in northern Wisconsin do when the weather starts to turn.
[19:13] By every account given to the Shawano County Sheriff's Office,
[19:17] nothing about that conversation was tense and nothing was off
[19:21] color or accusatory. There was no buried grudge
[19:25] surfacing and there were no disputes between any of them.
[19:29] It was just an ordinary night. Then, without warning, Hoffman
[19:34] said something that made the air go cold, according to the
[19:38] criminal complaint. He told the other two quote.
[19:41] I hope you'll excuse me if I have to kill you guys.
[19:45] Victim #2 told deputies. The comment came out of nowhere
[19:49] that Hoffman had never said anything remotely like it
[19:52] before. Then, after delivering his
[19:55] seemingly quote UN quote polite statement, Hoffman started
[19:59] blasting. The shots came without build up
[20:02] or warning, and they caught Ricky Roundy as he came around
[20:05] the corner of the garage. Roundy went down.
[20:09] The surviving victim watched it happen, then bolted into the
[20:13] main house and locked the door behind him.
[20:16] He grabbed A Ruger that he kept on the property, loaded it.
[20:20] And sat down on an Ottoman near a glass door.
[20:23] And from there he called the cops.
[20:26] The dispatcher could hear everything.
[20:29] Victim #2 told the operator that a man named Brent had shot his
[20:33] friend, that he didn't know if his friend was still alive.
[20:38] He told her that if Brent tried to come into the house, he'd
[20:40] shoot. The 911 call captured the next
[20:44] several seconds in real time. Glass shattered the victim fired
[20:49] by the district attorney's later account.
[20:51] Twice he told the dispatcher he thought Brent had gone down.
[20:56] Police later determined that Hoffman had pursued victim #2
[21:00] from the garage to the main house and had tried to get
[21:03] inside. The surviving man had fired
[21:06] through the glass pane of the door, sending shards into
[21:09] Hoffman's face and head. By the time deputies pulled into
[21:13] the driveway, the man who'd opened fire in the garage ambush
[21:17] needed serious medical attention.
[21:20] And I have to say, the mug shot of Brent Hoffman is horrific,
[21:24] and I've never really seen an injury like that before.
[21:27] It appears as though this was caused by glass shattering into
[21:30] his eyes, though it's not entirely clear from the
[21:34] reporting on it so far. When Shawano County deputies
[21:38] arrived, they found a man propped against the side of the
[21:41] house, bleeding from his face. He identified himself as Brent,
[21:47] and he denied having a weapon, but then admitted he had an
[21:50] empty holster on his hip. He asked the deputy why he'd
[21:54] been shot by the cops, and the deputy told him that police
[21:57] hadn't fired a single round, according to the report.
[22:01] Hoffman responded with thank you and I love you, the kind of
[22:07] phrase a person says when they're either deeply confused
[22:10] or trying to play a role. Inside the detached garage,
[22:14] deputies found Ricky Roundy. Sadly, he'd succumbed to
[22:18] multiple shots, according to the autopsy referenced in the
[22:22] complaint, and there was nothing the first responders could do
[22:25] for him at the Shawano County Jail.
[22:29] When officers told him he was being processed for slaying his
[22:32] friend, he reportedly responded that he'd never hurt anybody.
[22:37] Shawano County District Attorney Gregory Parker didn't dance
[22:41] around what the file showed. He told the court plainly that
[22:46] what had happened in that garage was a slaying in cold blood.
[22:50] Hoffman was charged with first degree intentional homicide as
[22:54] well as the same sort of charges for what he attempted to do to
[22:58] victim #2. At his 1st court appearance on
[23:02] November 18th, 2025, the state asked for $1,000,000 cash bond.
[23:08] Hoffman's attorney, Eric Mcalek, argued for 1/4 of that, telling
[23:14] the court that the facts of the case were perplexing and that
[23:17] his client didn't appear to be a flight risk.
[23:20] The judge sided with the prosecution and Hoffman was also
[23:24] ordered to have no contact with the victims families and no
[23:28] contact with the surviving hunter.
[23:31] He was also ordered to surrender all weapons forbidden from
[23:35] travel outside Wisconsin and to maintain absolute sobriety while
[23:40] the case moved forward. Those last terms wouldn't be
[23:43] necessary since, as it turned out, he wasn't going to post
[23:47] bail and instead he sat rotting in the slammer through the
[23:50] winter and into the spring. On May 21st, 2026, Hoffman
[23:57] appeared in court again and entered a plea of not guilty to
[24:00] both counts. Roundy's family released a
[24:04] statement through a spokesperson in the days after his passing.
[24:08] They described him as a wonderful man whose untimely
[24:11] loss had devastated everyone close to him, thanked the
[24:14] community for the outpouring of support, and asked plainly for
[24:19] privacy. The legal filing stacking up
[24:22] across Shawano were by then doing all the talking for them.
[24:28] For me, I think the most unsettling part of the file is
[24:31] the absence at the center of it. Since there's no motive in the
[24:34] criminal complaint and no precipitating argument, the
[24:38] surviving hunter sat across from investigators and told them
[24:42] plainly that he could not think of a single thing that could
[24:46] have turned the evening into a sudden act of violence.
[24:50] Hoffman himself, in his own words to deputies, denied that
[24:54] anything had happened at all. In most cases like this, even
[24:59] the ones that look senseless on a headline, you can usually
[25:02] trace the evening backward and find the snag the moment
[25:06] something tightened. This case doesn't appear to have
[25:09] one, at least not yet. Three men sat down to have a
[25:14] drink and talk about deer, and only two of them got to walk out
[25:18] of that garage. Personally, and this is just
[25:22] speculation on my part, I do have to wonder if there was some
[25:26] sort of conflict brewing underneath that hasn't come to
[25:29] the surface yet. I have to question whether
[25:32] Hoffman may have began acting bizarrely as some sort of cover
[25:36] for the true 'cause of the attack or as a potential I'll
[25:40] thought out defense. Some people have this false idea
[25:44] that if you just act crazy or deranged enough, you'll somehow
[25:48] escape legal culpability for your actions.
[25:52] Or perhaps I'm just looking for some way to explain a truly
[25:54] random and disturbed act and somehow make it make sense.
[26:02] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy, with my usual reminder to hit that
[26:05] subscribe button and the notification bell if you're
[26:08] enjoying my content. Also, don't forget to share this
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[26:14] content, cold cases, and mysteries.
[26:21] On October 21st, 1996, a park Ranger pushing into one of the
[26:26] more remote canyons of Death Valley spotted something
[26:29] glinting in the wash. It was a green minivan sunk to
[26:33] its axles, 3 tires flat. The doors were closed and the
[26:38] keys were gone. Inside he found German language
[26:42] brochures and an American flag that seemed to be entirely out
[26:45] of place. The four people who'd driven the
[26:48] van into the Canyon were already long gone, and for the next 13
[26:53] years, nobody would know what had really happened to them.
[26:59] The family had touched down at Sea Tac airport on July 8th,
[27:02] 1996, then connected to Los Angeles, where they collected
[27:07] the keys to a brand new Green Plymouth Voyager.
[27:11] There were four of them, all from Dresden in the former East
[27:14] Germany. Egbert Rimkus was 34, an
[27:18] architect with the love of the outdoors and at least one prior
[27:21] trip to the American Southwest behind him.
[27:25] His girlfriend Cornelia Meyer was 27.
[27:29] Each had brought one child along, Egbert's 11 year old son
[27:33] George Weber and Cornelia's four year old son Max Meyer.
[27:38] They had a return flight booked from LAX on July 27th, giving
[27:43] them about 2 1/2 weeks to roam the western parks.
[27:47] On July 22nd, they pulled into Death Valley and stopped at the
[27:51] Furnace Creek Visitor Center, where they picked up a German
[27:55] language park guide. That night they camped near
[27:59] Telescope Peak in Hanaba Canyon, already well off the standard
[28:04] tourist track. The next morning, they headed
[28:07] deeper into the Backcountry. They poked around an abandoned
[28:11] mining settlement called Warm Spring.
[28:13] Cornelia signed the dusty visitor logbook on behalf of all
[28:17] four of them. Underneath the signatures, she
[28:20] added a short note in German, and the translation amounts to a
[28:23] casual line saying they were heading over the pass.
[28:27] The pass almost certainly was. Mengele Mangle Pass is one of
[28:32] the more punishing roots in a region that is famous for its
[28:35] inhospitable environment. It's a rugged 4 wheel drive
[28:38] track that climbs out of Butte Valley over a saddle of broken
[28:42] rock and drops into Golar Wash on the far side.
[28:46] Locals who know the area will tell you that even modified off
[28:49] road vehicles get hung up on it. A rented suburban minivan was,
[28:54] to put it mildly, the wrong machine for the job.
[28:58] The family had been pushing their luck for hours by then.
[29:02] Before tackling the pass, they'd stopped at Butte Valley's
[29:05] geologist's cabin, a tiny stone refuge built around 1930 by a
[29:11] prospector named ASA Russell. When investigators later got
[29:15] inside the abandoned van, they found a small American flag
[29:19] tucked among the family's belongings.
[29:22] That flag had been taken from the cabin where it usually flew
[29:26] as an informal marker for anyone who happened to find the place.
[29:31] What happened after they crested Mengele has to be inferred
[29:36] because no one saw them alive again.
[29:39] The likeliest scenario is that they descended the western side,
[29:43] realized the terrain was even worse than what they'd just come
[29:46] through, and decided to loop back rather than retrace their
[29:50] steps. Their German language map showed
[29:53] a tempting shortcut back into the main valley through a place
[29:56] called Anvil Spring Canyon. On paper, the Canyon Rd.
[30:01] appeared perfectly navigable, but on the ground, it absolutely
[30:05] wasn't. When the Ranger spotted the
[30:08] Plymouth Voyager that day, it was sitting in the wash of Anvil
[30:12] Canyon, about 2 1/2 miles below Willow Spring.
[30:16] The vehicle was lodged up to its axles in soft sand, and both
[30:20] rear tires were flat, as was the front left.
[30:25] Tracks in the wash showed the family had tried to keep driving
[30:28] for at least 200 feet after the rear tires failed, gouging the
[30:32] bare rims into the Canyon floor before the van gave up.
[30:37] Inside, the scene was almost domestic.
[30:40] There were clothes and toys, the German park guide, toiletries,
[30:45] food wrappers and that little American flag from the geologist
[30:49] cabin. The keys were gone, which meant
[30:53] whoever had walked away from the van had done so deliberately.
[30:57] They locked up the way a tourist locks up at a trailhead before
[31:01] heading off for a quick look around.
[31:04] Except the look around in this case was an attempt to walk out
[31:08] of one of the harshest landscapes in North America in
[31:12] the middle of July. The search was substantial, and
[31:16] helicopters crisscrossed the canyons for days.
[31:19] Ground teams swept the most obvious escape routes on foot,
[31:23] working their way back up toward Butte Valley and N toward Warm
[31:27] Spring. Those were the corridors any
[31:30] experienced desert hiker would have considered, but they turned
[31:34] up nothing. The official theory eventually
[31:37] hardened around the idea that the German family had walked one
[31:40] of those familiar routes and succumbed to the heat.
[31:44] They had later been buried under sand or debris by a flash flood,
[31:48] and with no remains and no leads, the case went cold.
[31:52] And that's where this case would have likely stayed forever but
[31:56] for the obsession of one man. But I'll get to that in a brief
[32:00] moment. Back in Germany, the families of
[32:04] Egbert and Cornelia were left in the worst kind of limbo.
[32:07] Bank balances stopped moving and the credit cards never
[32:10] registered another charge. The return flight from Los
[32:14] Angeles to Frankfurt on July 27th left without any of them
[32:19] aboard, and the rental company eventually reported the Green
[32:23] Voyager as overdue. There was no ransom demand and
[32:27] no bodies, just an empty van rusting in a Canyon 9000
[32:32] kilometers from home. Tabloids in Europe floated
[32:36] theories that the family had faked their own disappearance or
[32:40] had been caught up in some crime ring, but none of it held
[32:44] together. The bleakest possibility was
[32:47] always the likeliest, though it perhaps doesn't move papers in
[32:50] the way a crime ring does. Four people had vanished into a
[32:54] desert that swallows people regularly, and the trail had
[32:57] gone stone cold because the environment swallowed them up.
[33:02] That's where things would have stayed if not for a retired
[33:04] aerospace engineer named Tom Mahood.
[33:07] He's a search and rescue volunteer in Southern California
[33:11] with a serious interest in cold cases.
[33:14] In 2009, after digging through the Inyo County sheriff's
[33:18] records and spending months going over topographic maps, the
[33:22] light bulb went off. Mahood came around to a
[33:26] conclusion the original searchers had ruled out as a
[33:28] waste of time. The official assumption was that
[33:32] the German family wouldn't have walked S further into the
[33:35] wilderness because no rational person familiar with the area
[33:39] ever would. Mahood thought that was exactly
[33:43] the assumption that had doomed the search.
[33:45] Since they weren't behaving rationally and they weren't
[33:48] familiar with the environment, they were exhausted, panicking
[33:52] foreign tourists with no sense of scale in a landscape unlike
[33:56] anything back home in Europe. The fact that they took a van on
[34:00] such an expedition should have perhaps been the first clue that
[34:04] all rationality should be tossed.
[34:06] Aside from the vans location, the topography offers a
[34:11] deceptive view, a wash that seems to lead somewhere, and
[34:16] mountains that look closer than they are.
[34:18] Add into this the fact that even rational and experienced hikers
[34:23] in these sorts of situations make what appear to be
[34:26] paradoxical decisions. If they'd seen the outline of
[34:30] the China Lake Naval Weapons Station marked off to the South
[34:33] on their map, they might have convinced themselves they could
[34:36] hike out that way. The reality is that the route is
[34:40] roughly 25 miles of brutal, waterless desert, an absolute
[34:44] wasteland. On November 12th, 2009, Mahood
[34:50] and a fellow hiker named Les Walker were working a search
[34:54] grid in that exact direction. When Walker called over, he had
[34:58] found bones. Scattered around them were items
[35:02] the searchers recognized from old case photos, a Sprite
[35:06] bottle, fragments of clothing, sandals, the spine of a German
[35:11] English Dictionary, and a wine bottle.
[35:15] Again, some of these items really give you clues that this
[35:18] family wasn't properly provisioned for what they were
[35:22] attempting to do. Meyer's passport was still
[35:25] legible after 13 years in the open, as was her bank card.
[35:30] The two adult skeletons were later identified through their
[35:33] belongings and through dental records sent over from Germany.
[35:38] Other remains were also recovered in the same area, but
[35:42] had been too long exposed to the desert sun for a positive
[35:45] identification. From the location of the remains
[35:50] and from a trail of discarded personal items scattered between
[35:53] the van and the final site, it's possible to roughly sketch the
[35:57] family's last hours on foot. They had walked roughly 6 miles
[36:02] cross country in extreme heat, away from any reliable water
[36:06] sources. They had carried what they could
[36:08] grab from the vehicle, and the four year old almost certainly
[36:12] had to be carried himself for long stretches by one of the
[36:14] adults. They appear to have stopped at
[36:17] one point, possibly to wait out the worst of the daytime heat in
[36:21] the shadow of a rock outcrop, before pushing on toward an
[36:25] empty horizon. The final site sits in a shallow
[36:29] wash with partial shade, but no real escape from temperatures
[36:34] that climb well past 120°F by mid afternoon.
[36:40] The straight line distance from that final resting site to the
[36:43] nearest paved Rd. today is still more than a dozen miles of open
[36:47] desert without a single reliable spring along the way.
[36:52] In the end, the disappearance of the Death Valley Germans was
[36:56] almost certainly not a crime, but a brutal lesson in how
[36:59] deceptive desert danger can be. From a map, the route may have
[37:04] looked survivable. From the van, the mountains may
[37:08] have looked close, the wash may have looked like a path, and the
[37:13] open horizon may have suggested rescue was only a hard walk
[37:16] away. But the valley doesn't reveal
[37:19] its scale. Honestly, distances stretch,
[37:23] heat destroys judgment, shade is rare, and a dry Canyon that
[37:29] looks passable can become a trap.
[37:32] The family had already driven deep into terrain their vehicle
[37:35] was never meant to handle, and once the van failed, every
[37:39] choice became worse than the last.
[37:42] Theories about escape, foul play or criminal involvement made for
[37:47] dramatic speculation, but the evidence points to something
[37:51] simpler and sadder. These were 4 tourists
[37:55] overwhelmed by an unforgiving landscape.
[37:58] But of course that undersells what happened to a certain
[38:01] degree. While two of these people ought
[38:04] to have known better, I can't help think of Max and George in
[38:08] those last moments, and how unfair and tragic the entire
[38:12] event was. But that's not really to blame
[38:15] the parents here either, at least not fully, since education
[38:19] about the danger of desert environments is remarkably poor.
[38:24] Deserts are some of the most inhospitable places on earth,
[38:28] and even well provisioned experienced hikers perish fairly
[38:31] frequently in situations like this.
[38:34] I can't help but think that today such a tragedy could have
[38:37] been avoided by a simple quick Google search, but sadly
[38:42] information was harder to come by at the time.

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