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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Hi, listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting I know you'll love. Crime House and AE are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, the First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 40, 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is crime house.
- [00:54]
Daisy Egan
It's hard to say what actually makes a place haunted. Sometimes it's one terrible death. Sometimes it's a string of accidents that gives a spot a bad name. And sometimes a place just carries a feeling that people can never quite explain. The island of Floriana in the Galapagos qualifies. By all those definitions, nobody lived there at all until 1929, when a German couple showed up to build a little paradise free from everything they hated about the rest of the world. They wanted the place to themselves. No drama, no temptation, no people. And for about five years, they almost had it. Then it all came apart. But the experiment didn't just fail. People started disappearing. And those who survived could never agree on what happened.
- [01:57]
Carter Roy
People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House plus you'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. And like last time, I'm joined by Daisy Egan, host of Strange and Unexplained. If you haven't followed her show yet, you should definitely do that today. Right now. Once again, she'll introduce today's episode while I take you through the rest of the story. Then Daisy's sticking around at the very end for a longer conversation about what it all means. So be sure to stay with us.
- [03:15]
Daisy Egan
Thanks, Carter. I'M really happy to be back. This story has everything I love, just twists and turns and unexpected dark corners that you never see coming. People pretending to be who they're not, and just questions that are left completely unanswered. This is the second of two episodes on the Galapagos Affair, a chain of disappearances and death on the island of floriana in the 1930s. So last time Carter introduced us to the settlers. In 1929, a doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his partner Dora Strauch left Germany to start over on an empty island. Over the next few years, two more groups followed them, and one of those new arrivals, a woman who called herself a baroness, pushed her neighbors right to the edge. When we left off last time, the island was gripped by drought. The settlers were at each other's throats, and something was about to break. Today, Carter will take you through that breaking point. In a single year, the whole thing came undone. One death and disappearance after another. Almost 100 years later, the case is still officially unsolved, but almost everyone who studies it thinks there was foul play involved. This story goes to show that Hindsight really is 2020. He didn't know it at the time, but when Friedrich Ritter came to Floriana, he he wasn't escaping the worst of human nature. He was just putting it under a magnifying glass. And if you hold one of those still long enough in the right light, it starts a fire. All that and more coming up.
- [04:59]
Carter Roy
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- [06:19]
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- [07:41]
Carter Roy
By the start of 1934, there were nine people living on Floriana, and most of them couldn't stand each other. On one side of the island were Friedrich Ritter and Dora Strock, the doctor and his partner who'd come first back in 1929. Five years in, they were the old timers, still chasing Friedrich's dream of a self sufficient life built on raw vegetables, endless work and the philosophy of Nietzsche. A few miles away were the Wittmers. Heinz, his wife Margaret, their baby son Rolf, who'd been born right there on the island, and Heinz's teenage son Harry. The Wittmers weren't philosophers, they were practical people who kept their heads down and worked. And of the three households, theirs was the only one that actually functioned. And then there was the third household, the one that turned a tense little colony into something much worse. The person in charge of that last group was Eloise Verborn Wagner Busque. Everyone just called her the Baroness. She was 39 years old and she'd arrived with two younger men who followed her around like she owned them. Robert Philipson and Rudolf Lorentz. The trouble with the Baroness was that nobody could ever pin down who she actually was. She told the Wittmers she'd been a spy in Paris during the First World War, then a dancer in Constantinople, then the wife of a Wealthy baron. Another time, she said she'd been born rich in Austria and raised in the Middle east before marrying a French officer and becoming famous in Paris. None of her stories ever matched, and to this day nobody has confirmed a single one of them. Even her title was almost certainly invented. There was no baron anyone could ever find, just a beautiful woman who had decided she was nobility and dared the world to argue. Lorenz told a less glamorous version. He said she'd abandoned a French husband, learned to imitate high society in Paris nightclubs, and lied her way up the social ladder. And before they ever left Europe, the Baroness had talked her way into running the books for his shop. Within months, she'd quietly drained it of enough money to put him out of business. And still he followed her to the other side of the world. That was the one thing about the Baroness. Even the people she ruined couldn't seem to leave. And on Floriana she turned her antics all the way up. When ships came through, she'd march down to the water to greet them in a swimsuit, a pistol on one hip, a riding whip in her hand, and introduced herself as the Empress of Floriana. She insisted the whole island was hers, and she nearly made it official. When the governor of the Galapagos finally sailed in to settle the colonists endless disputes, the Baroness charmed him so completely that he handed her four square miles of land. Friedrich, Dora and the vitmers each got 50 acres. Afterwards, the Baroness even spent the following weeks as the governor's personal guest on his own island, while her neighbors were left to wonder what she'd talk him into next. On top of all that, the settlers were convinced she was stealing their mail. Their letters home had turned them into minor celebrities in the European press. But somewhere between Floriana and the newspapers, the stories started rearranging themselves to put the Baroness at the center. And the gifts that passing tourists left for the colony, including cans of milk meant for the Wittmer's new baby, had a habit of ending up at her door. Despite all the drama, or maybe because of it, the public couldn't get enough of Floriana. Wealthy travelers began rerouting their yachts to the island just to lay eyes on the place. Of course, the Baroness thought they were there to see her. She liked to say, the man isn't born who can resist me. And it turned out one of those visitors set out to prove her right. A millionaire captain named Alan Hancock sailed in aboard a research yacht called the Valero and was so taken with the Baroness that he decided to Make a movie. It was a short silent adventure called the Empress of Floriana. Starring the Baroness as a pirate queen who lords over the island and toys with the men who fall for her. Philipson was cast as her on screen lover. But behind the glamour and the newspapers, her own household was was a place of fear. She ran it like a tiny kingdom and refused to do a stitch of work herself. Lorentz did the hunting, the farming, the cooking and the waiting on her hand and foot whenever something went wrong. Philipson, the baroness favorite, was the one she sent to beat him for it. The Vitmers who lived nearby watched it happen. They'd see Lorenz stumbling through the brush, thinner every week, covered in bruises and worse, he started showing up at their door just to get away. He told them plainly that he thought the other two were going to kill him. And the Vitmers weren't the only ones who saw it. Visiting sailors and scientists described the same thing. A small, sickly man who'd been turned into a servant. A for the other two, more than one of them used the same word for what Lorentz had become. A slave. He confided the same fear in Dora who took it to Friedrich. But Friedrich wanted nothing to do with it. He had already written a long formal complaint to the governor of the islands about the Baroness and as far as he was concerned, that was that. Floriana was supposed to be his escape from other people's problems, not a place to wade into them. What made it worse was that Friedrich was changing too. By now the drought that had set in the previous fall was relentless, dragging on month after month. The streams shrank, the crops failed, and the doctor who'd preached patience, patience and self control started taking the strain out on Dora, lecturing her for hours and by her own account, hitting her when she made a mistake. There was a meanness creeping into the whole island. When a wild boar started raiding Friedrich's garden, the vegetarian doctor hunted it down and shot it and took to calling it the satanic bore, as if the island itself had sent it. The island wasn't softening anybody, it was sanding them down to whatever was underneath. By the time the drought was at its worst, Friedrich wanted nothing more than to be rid of the Baroness. But the moment that turned Friedrich against her for good, good happened earlier, back in the fall of 1933. Back then, the arrival of an outsider still felt like a bright spot. And that September, a German journalist named Werner Buchman sailed in with two other people. His handsome brother in law, a man named Linda, and an Armed Ecuadorian soldier. By then, the Baroness had another man in her household, a young Dane named Canood Arendse, who'd come to the islands to fish and ended up as her gamekeeper. The Baroness pounced on the visitors. She charmed Boekman, then talked the whole group into an afternoon hunt for the island's wild cattle. She arranged everyone around the field, the guests, and canoed in one cluster, Philipson off to the side herself at an angle, and told them to wait for her signal before anyone fired. When she finally gave the order, there were two shots. No cattle went down, but Canood did hit in the stomach. The Baroness was hysterical, accusing the others of trying to kill someone. While everyone argued, one of them ran for Friedrich. The doctor decided the wound was too serious to move the man, so they nursed him out in the open for days, waiting for a ship that could carry him to a hospital. And while he waited, Friedrich did some detective work. Based on the angle of the wound, he figured out that the soldier couldn't have fired the shot that hit Canute. The journalist and his brother in law hadn't fired at all. And Philipson was carrying a revolver loaded with the wrong kind of bullet. That left exactly one person. Friedrich was certain the baroness was the one who pulled the trigger. She called it an accident, and maybe it was. But then Linda pulled free Friedrich aside with a much darker idea. Right before the hunt, the Baroness had bragged to Linda about a little hobby of hers. She said she liked to shoot animals in the leg, just so she could nurse them back to health and make them depend on her. And it wasn't only animals she talked about that way. Linda had been standing right next to Canute when the shot went off. He'd come away thinking he was the real target, that the Baroness had meant to hurt him, not kill him, so he'd have no choice but to stay close while she healed him. It may sound far fetched, but Friedrich had watched this woman operate for over a year and he didn't think it was far fetched at all. At first he thought the Baroness was a nuisance. Now he saw her as something else, a danger to everything he'd built. As for Canud Arendse, the next ship carried him off to a hospital on the mainland, where he recovered. He settled there and never set foot on Floriana again. Though he'd later say, to everyone's surprise, that he'd had a good time with the Baroness and would go back if he ever got the chance. But the people still on Floriana were not having a good time. And within months, the person at the center of it all, the baroness herself, would be the first to vanish. Have you noticed your sheets slipping off the corners lately? Or maybe your pillows just feel flat and unsupportive? 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- [20:43]
Professor Lindsay Cormack
the government gets a bad reputation, but did you know that? The roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, the letter in your mailbox, that's all government, too. I'm Professor Lindsay Cormack, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Government that Doesn't Suck alongside Professor Greg Jackson, who you may know from the hit podcast History that Doesn't Suck. Each episode we dig into the surprising story of an American institution, from the origins of the Internet, to the National Park Service to the GI Bill, and so much more. You'll hear the stories behind them, plus a conversation with an expert who knows it inside and out. This is the real history of how we built the country under your feet, and you'll never look at any of it the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:34]
Carter Roy
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.
- [21:42]
Daisy Egan
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- [22:07]
Carter Roy
By the spring of 1934, Floriana had been in a drought for half a year. The streams were nearly Gone. And the household that had it worst was the Baroness's. The Wittmers could hear the three of them screaming at each other most nights. Lorentz looked like he was starving. He told the Wittmers he was desperate to leave the island and never come back, but that the baroness wouldn't give him the money for a ticket. He was convinced she was holding him there on purpose, because if he ever reached the mainland, he could tell the world what she really was. And there may have been a colder logic to how she treated him. The Baroness had a habit that should have frightened everyone around her. She liked to wound animals just so she could nurse them back to health and make them depend on her. The man who studied this case the longest came to believe she'd been playing a version of the same game which, with Lorentz keeping him sick and broke and trapped so he could never quite get away. If that's true, she badly misjudged him, because a cornered man with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous kind there is. One night that March, he finally snapped, after another fight about money, Lorenz smashed open the cupboard where the Baroness kept her cash and her last few valuables. Philipson and the Baroness knocked him out cold. For the next couple of days, he drifted around the island, nursing his injuries. The Wittmers had had enough. They went to Friedrich and Dora and tried to get everyone to band together and finally do something about the Baroness. But Friedrich refused, and without him there was no united front. So once again, they did nothing. And yet, within days, the Baroness was gone. Here's what the Wittmers said happened. According to them, in late March, Lorenz turned up at their house, begging to stay the night. They let him. The next day, the Baroness came by and coaxed him back home with her, the same way she always had. Then, on March 27, 1934, the Baroness made an announcement. She told Margaret that she and Philipson had a chance to leave, that a private yacht was taking them to Tahiti and they weren't sure when they'd be back. She said Lorenz could look after their things. And just like that, the Baroness and Robert Philipson were gone. Their belongings were still in the house. The two of them were never seen again. But here's the problem with that story. Nobody else on the island saw a yacht. Not the Wittmers, not Friedrich, not Dora. For a luxury boat to anchor off Floriana and carry away two people, somebody would have noticed. And for months afterward, sailors passing through the Galapagos kept an eye out for any record of that yacht or any sign the Baroness had ever reached Tahiti. They never found a thing. No yacht, no baroness, no Philipson. It was like the ship had never existed at all. And neither had they. And then there were the things the Baroness left behind. She didn't just leave furniture. She left her luggage and the possessions she treasured most, Including a beloved copy of one of her favorite books. But it wasn't just keepsakes. This was a woman who had hauled tons of building material across the Pacific to raise a luxury hotel on Floriana. She'd spent years performing the part of a worldly aristocrat and ruling the island as its self declared empress. The idea that she'd walked away from all of it overnight, without a word, leaving her empire half built and her treasures sitting on the sand, made no sense at all. But if there was no yacht, then where did the Baroness go? Friedrich and Dora told a different story. They said that one day in March, around noon, they heard a woman scream. A long, unmistakable scream. And then nothing. By some accounts, there was a gunshot too. It sounded like it came from the direction of the Baroness's house. Dora wrote later that the second she heard that scream, she knew. And that the silence afterward was somehow worse than the scream itself. Friedrich figured someone was hurt and he started gathering his medical bag. But no one ever came for him. So in true Friedrich fashion, he stayed home and minded his own business. When Margaret finally brought him the news about the cruise to Tahiti, Dora was overjoyed. She'd hated the Baroness more than anyone, and she danced around the house and broke out the hot chocolate she'd been saving for a special occasion. But Friedrich wasn't celebrating. He didn't believe a word of it, especially since no ship passed by that day at all. He was sure something terrible had happened and that his neighbors knew exactly what. From there, the suspicion just curdled. Privately, Friedrich and Dora decided the Wittmers, working with Lorentz, had killed the Baroness and Philipson and covered it up. The Wittmers privately decided the doctor was acting awfully strange himself, waltzing into the Baroness empty house and helping himself to her things. Decades later, the man who investigated all this most carefully, the historian John Trehearn, weighed every version of events and came down close to where Friedrich and Dora had. He thought the likeliest answer was Lorenz. Starved, beaten, and certain the Baroness would never let him off the island alive. Lorentz turned on her and Philipson killed them and hid the bodies somewhere on Floriana. Maybe he had help, maybe not. But whatever happened, he Covered it up well enough that no one ever found a trace. It's the version that quietly accounts for everything. The yacht nobody saw the scream. Dora heard the prized possessions left behind on a beach, but it was never proven. And on an island where everyone had a reason to lie, it never will be. At the time, though, nobody said any of it out loud. Instead, they divided up the lost woman's belongings. Friedrich bought the good stuff at rock bottom prices. The Wittmers took the rest, and Lorentz sold off whatever he could because he had exactly one goal. Get off this island. In April, the rains finally came and the drought broke. For one strange moment, the islanders even celebrated together. A boat came in, owned by a wealthy traveler who'd read about the famous baroness and wanted to meet her in person. He was stunned to hear she'd vanished. The traveler should have been Lorentz's ride out. The boat was leaving for the mainland the next morning. It was the chance Lorentz had been waiting months for, but. But he turned it down. He said it was too soon, that he needed more time to gather his things. It was a strange call for a man who'd been desperate to leave. But maybe with the baroness finally gone, the island didn't feel like a prison anymore. Whatever the reason, Rudolph Lorentz let his rescue sail away without him. And he would spend the rest of his very short life regretting it. Through the summer of 1934, the people left on Floriana settled into an uneasy quiet. Authorities from the bigger islands came to ask questions about the baroness and her companion. But there was no body, no weapon, no crime scene, and nobody who'd even admit to seeing a thing. Just two people who used to be there and suddenly weren't. So the officials took their statements, looked around, and sailed home. What else could they do? You can't arrest an entire island on a feeling. That's why the investigation went nowhere. Still, the rumors didn't fade. They circled Rudolf Lorentz, who kept talking about going home to Germany. But for months, there was no way off the island. Then, on July 10, a fishing boat dropped anchor. Another journalist had come to dig into the story of the vanished baroness. And Lorentz saw his opening. By the time the reporter was done asking questions, Lorenz had packed everything he owned and bought a spot on the boat. After two years in the Galapagos, he was finally leaving. The others watched his ship shrink into the horizon and hoped the whole nightmare was sailing off with him. It wasn't. A few weeks later, a letter came back to Floriana with news Lorentz had hired the boat's captain, a Norwegian fisherman named Nugarud, to take him to San Cristobal, where he could catch a ferry to the mainland. They stopped first at a larger island at Santa Cruz, and there Lorenz spotted another ship, one headed straight for the mainland. He didn't want to wait. He begged Nugurud to set out again right away and catch it. The captain didn't want to. The water was rough and it was Friday the 13th. Bad luck for sailors. But Lorenz pushed and offered more money, and Nugarud gave in. The two men, along with a young Ecuadorian boy who crewed the boat, left Santa Cruz that afternoon. That was the last time anyone saw them alive. Months later, that scientific expedition I mentioned, the one aboard the Valero, made a grim discovery on Marcina, a barren island to the north. The same crew that had filmed the Baroness holding court just months earlier now found two bodies mummified by the sun on the black volcanic sand. Nearby sat a crude little skiff, but no oars. The men had raised a makeshift mast with a signal flag, and scattered around them were the remains of a bird and a sea lion they'd managed to kill and eat. There was food on Marcina. There was just no fresh water. They died of thirst in sight of the sea, waiting for a rescue that never came. The bodies were Rudolph Lorenz and Captain Nugarud. The boy and the boat were never found. Lorenz had spent two years trying to escape Floriana. He made it about 100 miles, and Marcina was the wrong direction entirely. They'd been headed the opposite way. Nobody's ever explained how they ended up there. It just doesn't add up. For Dora, it was proof of something. She had started to believe there was any an evil at work on Floriana, that the island was punishing them all for trying to live there. And whatever darkness was at play, it didn't end when the Baroness vanished. Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. And Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay. Sitting around waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chumba Casino. Social casino, slots, bingo, solitaire. Plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a rain delay slow you down? Play now@chumbacasino.com let's Chumba. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW prohibited by law 21 terms and conditions apply.
- [35:49]
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- [36:24]
Carter Roy
By late 1934, Floriana had nearly emptied out the Baroness and Philipson had vanished that march and Lorentz and his captain were dead. Out of everyone who'd come to the island to start over, only two households were left, and Friedrich and Dora were in real trouble. The April rains had come too late to save their garden, and even though they finally had water, by November they were running out of food. Their chickens had died, which meant they didn't have any eggs either. So Friedrich, the man who'd built his entire philosophy on self denial, made a rare exception. He decided they should cook and eat the dead chickens rather than waste them. Both of them could tell the meat had already turned, but according to Dora, Friedrich insisted it would be safe if they boiled it long enough. It was the first time in five years that the strict vegetarian had agreed to eat meat, and it would be the last real decision he ever made. They both ate it. Doris said she ate more than he did, but Friedrich was the only one who got sick. By the next morning, his tongue was so swollen he could barely talk, and he was doubled over in pain. Dora didn't go for help. She tended to him herself. It wasn't until the following day that she finally ran to the Wittmers. Margaret hurried over with some rubber tubing, hoping to pump his stomach. One look told her it was already too late. And this is where the two households tell their last irreconcilable story. According to Dora, Friedrich's final hours were tender. They'd grown closer than ever in the last few months. She nursed him with love, and he died at peace. According to Margaret, it was the opposite. She said that whatever Friedrich once felt for Dora had hardened into something cold. When Margaret tried to give him morphine, he fought her. And she said he glared at Dora from across the room and flinched whenever she came close. We don't know which version is true. We do know that Friedrich died in November 1934, and that he kept his strange, dark sense of humor right to the end. As he lay dying, he scribbled notes on scraps of paper about the irony of it all. A man who had built his whole life around never eating meat, killed by a few bites of spoiled chicken. After everything the island had thrown at him, the drought, the baroness, the disappearances, this was how it ended. Not with a gunshot, but with a bad meal. But Margaret described one more note. She said that with the last of his strength, Friedrich reached for his pencil and wrote a final message aimed straight at Dora. It read, I curse you with my dying breath. And here's what gnawed at Margaret. Dora had waited more than a day to come get help. And Dora claimed she'd eaten the same spoiled meat as Friedrich, maybe more, and never got sick at all. To Margaret, the conclusion was obvious. After years of being controlled and beaten by this man, Dora had finally poisoned him. Dora denied it to her dying day. There was never any proof. And there was a third possibility. Nobody could rule out either. The doctor aboard the Valero, hearing Dora describe the symptoms, doubted it was the chicken at all. To him, the creeping paralysis sounded less like food poisoning and more like an aneurysm. A stroke that simply happened to strike at an odd, coincidental moment. No autopsy was ever done. So all we're left with is one more death on Floriana that nobody could explain. And one more story with two endings. Whatever happened in that house, it broke Dora. She became convinced that Friedrich's ghost was on the island and that if she stayed, she'd be next. So she left. She climbed onto the first boat that would take her and never looked back. Back in Germany, she spent her remaining years trying and failing to get Friedrich's philosophical writings published. She did manage to publish one book of her own in 1935, a memoir of the island called Satan Came to Eden. It was her version of events, and 90 years later, it still doesn't line up with Margaret Vitmer's. In 1943, Dora died in her early 40s of complications from multiple sclerosis, the same disease Friedrich had once promised her she could cure with nothing but the power of her own mind. By her own account, his ghost had followed her the whole way home. That left the Vitmers. Of the eight original people who'd been on Floriana, they were the only ones still standing. And against all odds, they didn't just survive, they put down roots. A few years after everything happened, Margaret gave birth to a daughter on the island. The family built a small hotel on the beach for the rare travelers who wandered through on the very thing the Baroness had bragged about for years and never actually managed to build. And baby Rolf, the first child ever born on Floriana, grew up to start a cruise company that still carries tourists through the galapagos today, the one family that kept its head down and its mouth shut, turned the island that swallowed everyone else into a home. But even they didn't get out unscathed. In 1951, Harry, the sickly boy they'd carried halfway around the world hoping the climate would heal him, drowned in a boating accident. He was in his early 30s. Hinds died in 1963. Margaret lived on, the last keeper of the island's secrets. For decades afterward, reporters and filmmakers came asking what really happened to the Baroness, to Philipson, to Friedrich? She never said. She liked to answer them with an old Spanish proverb quote, a closed mouth admits no flies. But she also couldn't resist the occasional wink. Over the decades, Margaret loved to drop hints that she knew far more than she was letting on. Just never quite enough to give anything away. She turned her silence into a kind of performance and kept it up for 66 years. Margaret Wittmer died in the year 2000 at the age of 95. And whatever she knew, she took it to the grave. There's one last turn in this story, and fittingly, it belongs to the Baroness. She never got her grand hotel and her body was never found. But she did, in the end, get the fame she'd spent her whole life chasing. Remember Alan Hancock, the millionaire with the movie camera? He finished his little pirate film in the spring of 1935, about a year after she vanished. The Empress of Floriana premiered in a Los Angeles theater. The Baroness up on the screen, queen of a make believe island that finally did exactly what she told it to. For one night in front of a picture paying audience, Eloise Verborn, Wagner Bousquet was finally the star she'd always insisted she was. She just wasn't there to see it. And the footage outlived every one of them. Hancock's reels of the colony sat in a university archive for the better part of a century. When they finally resurfaced, they captured the only moving images that exist of any of these people. Friedrich and Dora working the garden they'd carved out of the brush. The vitmers outside their cave, the Baroness laughing for the lens. They're all still there, flickering and alive, long after the island had swallowed every last one of them. Decades on, that footage would anchor a documentary that sent a new generation digging back into the case, arguing all over again about what really happened on floriana. Today, around 100 people live on Floriana, and the stories never quite went away. On quiet nights, some say they've seen figures near the site of Friedrich Ritter's.
- [46:19]
Daisy Egan
Grave.
- [46:20]
Carter Roy
For years, visitors have reported strange other worlds sounds, a kind of braying, drifting down from a small volcano in the middle of the island. Well, maybe that's just the wind moving through volcanic rock. Maybe it's the kind of story people tell each other on a lonely island after dark. The same way sailors once swore these islands could move and vanish in the mist. Or maybe Floriana really did keep something. Dora believed it did. She spent her last years certain the place was cursed and that she'd only escaped it because of a single boat ride. We'll probably never know for certain who killed the Baroness or Philipson. We'll never know whether Dora poisoned Friedrich or how Lorentz ended up dying of thirst on the wrong island. Everyone who could have told us is gone. All we have left are their diaries, their memoirs and their lies. But maybe Friedrich Ritter was right about one thing. He believed human nature was the real danger, the worst of us, something to be feared and escaped. And the story of Floriana proved him right. But it also proved you can't escape it. Friedrich built a paradise, filled it with people, and that turned out to be the same thing as building a trap. He thought the danger was out there in the world he was running from. But it had been sitting in the boat beside him the whole time. And now I want to bring Daisy Egan back in because this is exactly the kind of case her show was built for. So, Daisy, thanks for sticking around. And I know we were talking before some about, like, exactly the instinct that takes him to the island in the first place is. Which is like all of us, I think, especially with modern society, though it's amazing to think modern society back then still did the same thing without all the technology we have now, where you're just like, I just want to get away. Would it be better?
- [48:34]
Daisy Egan
Right? Yeah. Is the grass greener on the other side? You know, I grew up reading My side of the Mountain, which I just reread recently.
- [48:44]
Carter Roy
I don't remember what it's about. I just remember, like, as soon as you say that, I'm like, oh, oh, my God, I forgot about my side of the mountain.
- [48:51]
Daisy Egan
Yeah. You know, it's this young boy, I think he's younger than my kid is. He's got too many brothers and sisters, and he goes and lives in a hollowed out tree in the Adirondacks, you know, makes friends with a beaver. I don't know. And like, you know, it's paradise. Of course, it was written in a very different time. Like, at one point, this like, male wanderer comes and just, like, stays with him for a bit, which. That would never fly today.
- [49:16]
Carter Roy
Yeah, totally.
- [49:17]
Daisy Egan
You know, and eventually his family, like, finds him and they all come and move there and he's like, oh, no, what have I done? And I know, like, I wouldn't survive. I wouldn't last two days.
- [49:25]
Carter Roy
I mean, that instinct. I remember growing up in mountains, Montana. And, like, you know, when you're off playing in the woods, you're like, what if this was it?
- [49:31]
Daisy Egan
Oh, yeah.
- [49:31]
Carter Roy
And then even I was in Africa at one time, and I was like, I'm going to go. I think the animals will recognize me, like, once I get in the wild. So I took off on a bike into this national forest. I was so stupid and dangerous. Like, I'm like, I'm going to find a chimp on the ground at night. And, like, got in there and I was just like, oh, I'm. You know, like, ran into chimps, baboons, and was like, what am I doing? Like, not surprising. They're like, no. Our reaction is not like, welcome, old friend. This is not a fair. I'm like, oh, I can't live 20 minutes out here without all my gear and protection.
- [50:03]
Daisy Egan
I mean, that's like. That's the thing with, like, lost. I'm like, man, these people look so good, you know? I would be. Day three. I'd be covered in pimples. Just stinky and hairy and oily and gross and their breath, forget about it.
- [50:17]
Carter Roy
Oh, well, like, speaking of breath, I mean, the fact that he pulled out his teeth. His teeth as. And, like. And then they, you know, they have one set. He made one set of dentures which they eventually share, you know, as we know. Yeah. And it's just like, what? How is this better?
- [50:35]
Daisy Egan
Oh, God, it's like Angela's ashes. Yeah. I don't want your teeth. I'm all set. But also just the fact that he took a woman who was already vulnerable, you know, she had Ms. She already relied on him for whatever. So she was sort of like the perfect victim, you know, Completely.
- [50:54]
Carter Roy
It's somebody who's like, oh, I'm gonna create my whole world, but in order for it to be real, I need at least one person who totally believes it, too. But then this sort of servitude, and then it's crazy because, like, the baroness kind of has the same relationship. You're like, oh, this is. What this island is drawing here is like, people with that kind of fantastical thinking.
- [51:14]
Daisy Egan
When I was 9 or 8 or however old I was, you know, my best friend and I, we were in Prospect park in Brooklyn, and we just, like, walked away. You know, her parents were hit. Nobody was paying attention. And we were like, we're gonna run away. You know, it was 20 minutes or however long it was. And we were like, well, we better get back because we're hungry. Like, when you're eight or nine, you know, you think, I'm gonna go ride my bike off into the veldt and, you know, live with the chimpanzees. But then, like, you know, your frontal lobe develops, and you're like, let me take that thought out, right? To how would that would end. And most of us are like, I. I can't go do that. So it takes a really specific kind of person to be, like, cool, I'm gonna yank out all my teeth and
- [51:55]
Carter Roy
then follow through my deep philosophies of living. And, like, I think nature in the world will order itself according to how I think it ought to be.
- [52:05]
Daisy Egan
The hubris and the narcissism of, like, obviously, I can make this work. Like, humans have clearly never made it work here, but it's because they weren't me.
- [52:14]
Carter Roy
Totally. And then the excitement that the two people with the Baroness and Friedrich, and even though he's not the one that ends up probably, you know, doing her in just, like, eventually. Like, oh, yeah. Once you end up with a few people like that, somebody's gonna be like, this is not working. You can't impose your will.
- [52:30]
Daisy Egan
Yeah. And of course, once the two of them are dead, like, I'm sure people were like, oh. Oh, no. Oh, too bad.
- [52:37]
Carter Roy
You know, like, I guess I'll divide her stuff up and see what we can take is kind of what happens now as far as, like, places, because part of this story is, like, did they pick a cursed place to begin with because it hasn't been populated? And, like, you know, sailors at the time, you know, find it dangerous because there's not much there. And, like, they disappear in the mist. So it's already a place. You know, in your experience with strange unexplains, like, yeah. What is your take on places being cursed or not cursed or what that could be?
- [53:09]
Daisy Egan
Listen, my mind has changed over the five years that I've done this show. You know, originally I was very skeptical, and now I'm like, I'm a little less so. But I think that, like, humans need to be a factor in order to make a place haunted or cursed. I think, like, if that's a thing that really happens, I think it's because of what we do, the harms that we cause to other people and to the land. And so if it's cursed, I think there would have had to have been some human presence there. So I don't think it was cursed. I think that just people are dumb, you know, and these people in particular. And a woman who thinks she's a baroness. Like, I just covered last season, I covered a woman named Cassie Chadwick from the similar timeframe a little earlier, who conned men out of millions of dollars just by saying, oh, I'm Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. And they were like, cool. Bet. Here's a bunch of money. Nobody bothered to ask Andrew Carnegie. And when they finally did, he was like, this is a joke, right? Like, I'm not even gonna grace this with a response. And when she ended up in prison, like, she didn't even last a year. She was like, I can't. This is. Where's my bedding? Where's my silk sheets? Where's my food? A woman who thinks she's a baroness, who's conned all these people out of my. She. How long does she think she's gonna last?
- [54:34]
Carter Roy
There totally. No. And it's. But it is. It's. You see, it's like, oh, the same mentality that starts down that road, thinks it can go forever and you can just pull more people in. Like, I've conned one. Oh, it looks like two people. Why can't I con everybody else who comes forward? And then there's a weird, like, kind of, you know. Because at one point, she ends up kind of getting granted the majority of the island by the governor. Because of course he comes out.
- [54:59]
Daisy Egan
Who is the governor of the Galapagos? Like, what?
- [55:03]
Carter Roy
That's totally. Which force? Exact. I mean, that in itself is like, what kind of bureaucracy is this? But pretty wild west loose. Because he's like, well, she seems awesome. So, yeah, her. And you're like, ah, this is how it. And I think you're totally right with curse. Like, right. The natural elements of isolated scarce drought. At some point, you're like, those are just really bad conditions. You put some humans in there who are misintentioned. And like, yeah, that's going to look like a curse. Because, like, anybody goes here, bad things happen. It's like, yeah, because that's a pretty tough setup.
- [55:34]
Daisy Egan
Yeah. And like, in terms of Friedrich dying, you know, after eating the chicken, like, I think that's not necessarily causation. And so I could see him being like, well, we ate chicken and, you know. And so now I'm poisoned. Or. That's what she thought. But I think, you know, it just. It just so happened that he ate some chicken. Look, maybe his body wasn't acclimated to it, or maybe there was a weird bacteria or whatever. But, like, he just died.
- [56:03]
Carter Roy
Totally. And I think exactly, like, oh, they cooked. It wasn't. Yeah, it may have been bad. And, like, don't eat bad chicken. Like, for sure.
- [56:09]
Daisy Egan
Right.
- [56:10]
Carter Roy
But, like, no, she survived. Like, there's a. And if your body hasn't had meat in 10 years, like, a. Could have a weird reaction.
- [56:16]
Daisy Egan
Yeah.
- [56:16]
Carter Roy
Also, you clearly haven't had nutrients for the years you've been here, so your body is already on the edge. So, like. Oh, yeah. Could you have then had a stroke or aneurysm?
- [56:26]
Daisy Egan
What proteins were they eating? Nothing. Like eggs. Were they eating the eggs?
- [56:29]
Carter Roy
They did have some eggs. That's when they finally. Yeah, yeah, right. Ate the chickens. Is the. And when they're like, oh, they can't lay eggs. Cause the chickens were dying because of the drought. So it's like. Yeah. Also just this. The idea of choosing a place like, oh, there's no people here because it's impossible to live here. Yeah. Then I'll go and I'll live there.
- [56:51]
Daisy Egan
I'll fix it. I'll be better. I mean, I try to grow tomatoes. And like, last year there was some weird thing with the rain. It was too much rain. It wasn't enough rain. I don't know what happened, but they all grew out, you know, split, and I couldn't. Like, that's here in Rhode island, you know.
- [57:08]
Advertisement Voice
Totally. Right.
- [57:09]
Carter Roy
Like, it's so hard. You're like, oh, this is like, yeah, who knows what the. I mean, the droughts for years. What it is before it's hard pack earth. There a lot of. It's like kind of volcanic islands. Just like, it's so hard to make enough food to sustain yourself in that way without the help of. And you're still getting supplies from ships. So it's like. It's not even like you could survive out there, you know, if you had the option. Yeah. What are. I guess, what are your parameters for what the desert island would have to. Have to get you to be like, all right, go live. How Deserty versus house. Like, I mean, Rhode Island's an island. Maybe you're on your desert island.
- [57:46]
Daisy Egan
I mean, I get used to my creature comforts pretty, pretty quickly. You know, sometimes when I think about, like, past lives, I think I must have been, you know, in a hunter gatherer society. And it was a slog, man.
- [58:00]
Carter Roy
It was hard, totally easy to romanticize, like, or, you know, not that one necessarily romanticized, but in the way of, like, get away and be just like early people. Like, who dreamed of television? Yeah. Who dreamed of electricity? Who dreamed of fire? Who dreamed of bread?
- [58:15]
Daisy Egan
Right, Exactly. Like, you know, the agricultural revolution happened and everyone was like, oh, this is great. Now we have all this food and it's like, no, no, no. Now you just have to tend to these crops all the time and live in one place, and the water's gonna run out and the earth's gonna get depleted. Like, this sucks.
- [58:33]
Carter Roy
Totally, totally.
- [58:34]
Daisy Egan
I don't know what it would have to be. I'd have to have. I'd have to have a private chef.
- [58:41]
Carter Roy
Yeah, private chef. Private island. Now we see where that goes, too.
- [58:45]
Daisy Egan
Yeah, exactly.
- [58:46]
Carter Roy
Well, thank you so much for. It was my pleasure joining the show today. That is awesome. And if today's episode got under your skin at all, you need to listen to Daisy's show, Strange and Unexplained. Written and hosted by Tony award winner Daisy Egan, It's a journey into the uncomfortable and the unknowable that will leave you both laughing and sleeping with the lights on. Every week, she dives into a true story that fascinates and terrifies in equal measure. Hauntings, vanishings, and the cases that refuse to be explained. Go follow Strange and Unexplained, wherever you're listening right now. Thanks again, Daisy, for joining us. That was so fun.
- [59:23]
Daisy Egan
Oh, my God, it was great. Thank you so much for having me. What a delight.
- [59:34]
Carter Roy
Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder True crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two. Plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Friday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler Butler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Panadon, Natalie Pertzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Tara Wells, Roman DiAngelo and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting I know you'll love. Crime house and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.