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- [00:02]
Brett
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- [01:02]
Alice
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- [01:34]
Brett
He gave me a book on art forgery. I found myself drawn to these old masters.
- [01:43]
Alice
How did these artists take paint from a palette, arrange it on a canvas? I began to unlock the secrets.
- [01:53]
Brett
I was a storehouse of knowledge of
- [01:56]
Alice
how to create an illusion, present it to a experienced expert, manipulate his mind and convince him, and bring him to the inevitable conclusion that the painting is genuine.
- [02:14]
Brett
We flooded the market with my paintings and I couldn't believe what I did.
- [02:20]
Alice
I couldn't believe it.
- [02:21]
Brett
Then the dominoes started falling and eventually the FBI were led to my door. They uncovered a mountain of evidence against me, but they never actually got you.
- [02:35]
Alice
At this point, you've sold a lot.
- [02:36]
Brett
You've got like a million dollars in cash.
- [02:38]
Alice
You sold one painting for 717,000.
- [02:42]
Brett
Why did it go away? Why did you never get indicted? And how are we having this conversation? I guess it's the greatest story of all. To hear how Ken Parenti made millions in art forgery, dodged the Mafia and the FBI, subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger
- [02:59]
Alice
show and check out episode 282 in
- [03:02]
Brett
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. I'm brett. And I'm alice and we are the prosecut. Today on the Prosecutors. The word yahi is entirely meaningless in all languages except to one man, Gunther Stahl. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my co host, Alice.
- [04:19]
Alice
Is that an entire Liz Meaningless word except in one language? Except in one language.
- [04:26]
Brett
It's probably entirely meaningless, even the way
- [04:29]
Alice
you said it, really.
- [04:30]
Brett
But it means mysterious, maybe in Dutch, which is close to German. And we're in Germany today, so I will take that.
- [04:42]
Alice
So what you guys missed was Brett rehearsing this word. I didn't know he was going to pick this one for like 10 minutes. Stephanie.
- [04:49]
Brett
Trying to ruin me.
- [04:50]
Alice
So he cares. He cares. When you send these words in, boy, does he care. And I get to sit here and laugh at his pronunciation. But it sounds so Dutch. Sounds so good in a southern accent.
- [05:01]
Brett
I just don't know why all these words have to be so hard. Why don't you send me, like, a nice straightforward word with like one syllable and easily pronounceable monosyllabic Anglo word? Geez, it say G. You know, that would be great. Anyways, Hope springs eternal.
- [05:20]
Alice
Hope springs eternal. Next episode.
- [05:21]
Brett
Hope springs eternal. So, Alice, always good to see you. Always exciting to start one of these new cases. And this one, as you all know, my favorite cases are just mysteries. I know a lot of y' all love the murders. A lot of y' all love our deep dives and dig trials and innocence claims and all that stuff. And I get it, that's a lot of fun. But my favorite cases are just pure mysteries where something strange happens and we are left to grasp at the true meaning in more ways than one. In this case.
- [05:58]
Alice
Oh, a teaser. No, I agree. And we've been on a roll. I think we are proving all the naysayers who say we cannot be short and pithy with all these one episode cases. So look at us try to do this in one episode. I think we can. And it's a good mystery. This is a really good mystery.
- [06:17]
Brett
So this case takes us to Germany. I don't know. Last time we were in Germany was the last time we were in Germany when we did Hunter Kaifeck Hinterkaifeck.
- [06:26]
Alice
Oh, I think. What, like, was that season one or two?
- [06:30]
Brett
Like season one? Yeah. Year one of the podcast. We're back in Germany. We're in West Germany because we're also going back into the 80s when west and East Germany existed, into Westphalia. So this is exciting. Those of you who are in Germany, I hope you enjoy this one. If you have any thoughts on this case, we'd love to hear from you. But going back to 1984 when 34 year old Gunther Stoll was living with his wife in Anshausen, West Germany, he was a food engineer by trade, which by the way, you know, I feel like food shouldn't be engineered. I mean, maybe it's just me. I think the fact that we have
- [07:10]
Alice
living in the wrong times, all the food we eat is engineered. I actually think about this. I'm like, I understand crossing, you know, like cara oranges. Have you had these before? They did not exist when we were children. I don't. I think it's one of the engineered oranges.
- [07:24]
Brett
Do you know, like those like cotton candy grapes.
- [07:26]
Alice
Cotton candy grapes, which I actually don't like because they're way too sweet and they're like engineered. I'm like, I know this is also how nature works, but is this healthy? Like should grapes actually have this much sugar in it? I don't know.
- [07:39]
Brett
Well, Gunther, you know, was probably on the cutting edge of this because it was 1984. So food engineer probably just meant like he added the dye that made the Fruit Loops bright red. But any event, he was a food engineer. He was in a period of unemployment and he also was having some issues. Now, like so many mysteries, we have very little about what happened before the events we're going to discuss, which is kind of disappointing because I think it would probably illuminate a lot of things. But all we really know is that going into the period of October 25th and 26th of 1984, he had been experiencing some mental health issues. He had been plagued by a moderate case of clinical paranoia. Now this is always described as a moderate case though. I'm going to tell you what he was thinking. Seems pretty serious to me. I don't know, maybe it's just me.
- [08:34]
Alice
I was going to say paranoia in general. I don't know if there's moderate cases. It's kind of like I have a touch of anxiety. I'm like any type of anxiety is pretty anxious, right? Anxious, anxious thing.
- [08:45]
Brett
And well, and in this case, according to Gunther's wife and his close friends and family, he was very nervous, he was anxiousy, jumpy because he believed that they were out to get him. Now he never gave many details on who they were, but nonetheless he seemed to be truly concerned for his safety and you know, sometimes. Are you paranoid or just right? Whatever his mental state was, it would all come to pass. One night, he was sitting home with his wife, and he suddenly had an epiphany, one that would ultimately lead to his untimely death and create an enduring mystery that has far outlived him, one we are going to discuss today.
- [09:40]
Alice
So let's go back to October 25, 1984. On that evening, Gunther Stoll. He's sitting at home with his wife, cozy in his armchair, but suddenly he jumped up and yelled, I don't know how to say this. I don't speak German. Not a lick of German. So I'm sorry for how I'm going to pronounce this. But suddenly Gunther jumps up and he yells, jekyll mir in lichtof, which loosely translates to now I get it. So I'm really sorry. I know that's not what it sounds like in German. I did my best. But he jumps up. He's. There's nothing going on. He's not having a conversation. This is not. He's not trying to figure out some sort of puzzle. He just jumps up and out, says, now I get it. So Google Translate actually says, now a light goes on for me is the literal translation.
- [10:31]
Brett
This is so, like, poetic.
- [10:33]
Alice
Poetic, yes. Wow. You can see quite literally a light bulb going off. But that's what he yells out when he does this. He quickly reaches for a piece of paper and a pen and he jotted down the phrase Yahtzee. Spelled in all caps, Y, O, G, T, Z E. Or he wrote y o6t, ze. So it's debated whether he intended to write a g or a6. But almost as quickly as that epiphany began, it seemingly ended when Gunther crossed out the phrase he had just written down. Yog Z. For what it's worth, it looks like a G to me, but G to the first power.
- [11:18]
Brett
All right, so he has this epiphany. The light goes off for him, and then he crosses this word out, but he's not done at this point. He jumps up from where he's seated, he goes outside, he gets into his Volkswagen Golf Mk, and sure, as if you've ever experienced a Golf, rather small car, two door, like most European vehicles, pretty tiny, and heads for his favorite pub. Because what are you gonna do when you've had an epiphany? What better time than to head down to the pub and have yourself a pint? He goes to the Papillon, which is Papillon Pub. Sounds delightful. Located in Nearby Wilmsdorf. So he gets to the pub shortly before 11pm and he orders a beer. But before he could even take a sip. This is the true tragedy of this case. Before he could even take a sip of the beer, he collapses to the ground, whacking himself on the face as he failed. Now this was bizarre because witnesses would describe him as anxious or possibly even distressed. But no one thought he appeared drunk. And there's no evidence he had been drinking up to this point. But for whatever reason, he collapses and hits his head. At this point he doesn't stick around for questions or any kind of help he comes to and he immediately leaves the pub, gets back into his car and starts heading ostensibly in the direction of home at around 11.30pm so about
- [12:54]
Alice
an hour and a half after leaving the pub, it's now crossing into the next day, October 26, at 1:00am so Stoll is spotted again, but this time in his childhood town of Hagerselbach, roughly 10 km from Wilmsdorf. Not home, but rather childhood home. He shows up at the doorstep of an elderly woman who he'd known from his time living back in Hagersold Lock. So he knew this elderly woman from, you know, way back in his childhood. Now, considering it's one in the morning, the woman does not let him into the house, but she did talk to him briefly. He was paranoid and he was clearly incoherent. Now he warned the woman that something horrible was going to happen that very night. Look, even if I knew you, Brett, even if you came up to my door at 1am and you're speaking kind of in an anxious manner, saying something terrible is going to happen, but you don't seem all together yourself. I probably would be pretty freaked out and I may not be taking you seriously. I'll think something's happened, right? So the woman is worried for him and she advises Gunther to go home or to his parents house. But he's not well. Now he nods in agreement and he leaves her steps.
- [14:06]
Brett
So at this point, Gunther, he gets back in his Golf and he drives off. That brings us to three o'clock in the morning. Now we don't know what exactly happened over those two hours, but what we do know is, is that at about 3 o' clock in the morning on October 26, two truckers were driving along the Autobahn A45 when they spotted a Volkswagen Golf in a ditch near the Hagen Sud exit, which is roughly 62 miles from Hagersselbach. So you know, at this point, let's see, Hagersilbach was 10 kilometers from Wilmsdorf. He's now 62 miles. We're mixing our distances, but whatever, what can we say?
- [14:54]
Alice
We're doing our best.
- [14:56]
Brett
Yeah, from Hagers. So Box. So he's just. It's unclear where he's going or why he's going there, but he's headed off. And as they approach the crash site, they both reported seeing an injured man wearing a white jacket walking away from the scene. So just a orient you, these two guys driving along the road, they see the car in the ditch and there's a guy what looks like a man who looks like he's injured, wearing a white jacket, walking away from the scene. But this is not Gunther, because this is going to get even stranger. One of the truckers goes over to the car to investigate while the other goes to report the crash on the nearest roadside telephone. Remember, it's 1984, no cell phones. If you're going to report the crash, you got to go report it somewhere else. And they had these roadside telephones which were fairly common back then. And even now in some places you'll have these emergency phones. So he heads off to do that. You know, the other guy, he goes down to the Golf and he probably expects to find it empty. Like he doesn't know who this guy in the white jacket is, but he probably thinks that's the driver. But what he sees is something very strange indeed. Gunther stole is still in the vehicle. He. He is obviously seriously injured, but even stranger, he's naked and he's in the passenger seat. So he's not in the driver's seat, he's not wearing any clothes and he's very injured. Now he is clinging to life, but he is still able to speak to this trucker. And he tells him that there had been four other people in the car with him. Though he was careful to add these people were not his friends. Now let's go ahead and tell you, it's this a little strange because as we said, that means five people in the Gulf that would be of tight fit. They really piled in there and they
- [16:48]
Alice
found them in the last two hours in the middle of the night between 1 and 3am Right?
- [16:53]
Brett
So he goes on to say that he was traveling with these four strangers who he didn't know when they, quote, beat him loose, which I assume is like some sort of German idiom, right? So they beat him up and they leave him alone in the car. He doesn't really explain how the crash happens. So there's a little bit of A gap there, but he's saying there's four men. And the truckers, they didn't see four men, but they did see one person walking off.
- [17:21]
Alice
So remember, the other trucker had gone to report this crash. And at that point, an ambulance arrived to transport Stoll to the nearest hospital. But unfortunately, he was very injured. So much so that he succumbed to his injuries. En route to the hospital, an investigation into Stoll's death began, and it was quickly determined that his cause of death was vehicular manslaughter. Strangely, his autopsy determined that he was actually run over by a different vehicle and that he was naked when he was run over. Police believed that someone had run Stoll over at a different location and then placed him in the passenger seat of his own car. But that's about as far as they got in the investigation. Police were never able to determine the identities of the four people reportedly with Stoll, nor were they able to find the man seen walking away from the scene. Stoll's shoes were located in his vehicle, but his clothes were never found. They were also not able to obtain a copy of the Yahtzee note, as Stoll's wife had thrown away the piece of paper earlier that evening, unaware of its significance. Instead, she recreated it from memory for the police after the fact. However, we don't have a confirmed image of that recreation, but there are three images of this Yahtzee phrase that often circulate. So note, none of these are what Stoll wrote. None of these are what Stoll's wife wrote. And Stoll's wife is the only other person who saw the note, but she did recreate it, and others saw the recreation at one point.
- [18:57]
Brett
So we're going to put these on the website prosecutors podcast.com if you want to see them all in one place, or obviously you can Google it. We'll describe them for you if you're listening. If you're watching now, if you're a patron, you're watching now. I'm putting them up on the screen, but essentially what they appear to look like. And once again, these are all recreations, but I would love to see the recreation that his wife did. That would be a little bit closer. Right. But what appears to be is why. And in the recreations, a lot of the recreations, the why is very prominent. It's very clearly why. We're going to get to a recreation later on where it's not another thing. If you're German, I would be curious because one thing that people have speculated is that some of these could be numbers. So, for instance, there's a Y and then there's an O. But people have speculated maybe that's a zero. You know, in the United States, we don't often really differentiate between O's and zero. Sometimes you put a slash through it, but a lot of times you would just draw it. I'm curious in Germany, how you would write these letters and would you actually mistake them? If you write in about that later on, we'll be sure to read that in a future episode. But Y, O, or zero G, then what appears to be like an apostrophe or an accent mark or something after the G, which I would also be curious, if you're in Germany, what that might signify. Then a T, then a Z, sometimes depicted as having a slash through it, sometimes not, and sometimes depicted as quite obviously a Z. And sometimes looking more like it might be a 2 then E. So this is commonly read as yoxi, which is what we've been saying, though it could be YOG or possibly even YO6. And another recreation that people have done of this is with a sort of less obvious letters, more numbered, where if you flip it upside down, it could be 027906. And the accent mark would be a comma between 027 and 906, which could be all sorts of things. Could be a number, could be coordinates. I don't know what it could be, but these are possibilities for what this is. Unfortunately, we're speculating about this, and we're going to speculate later about what the meaning might be, but we don't actually have. The original is destroyed forever. There may be a recreation somewhere in German police files, but what we're relying on are recreations of a recreation.
- [21:48]
Alice
I mean, that's not much to go on, right? I mean, this is farther than primary evidence, not even secondary evidence. So there's very little to go on in this case. Except I will say at first you all may have been thinking. Because I was thinking the first time I read this, oh, he's just a guy who's having a mental episode. Like Yahtzee. Doesn't mean anything. He hits his head so that maybe he was concussed as well as having a mental episode. And he's just kind of this crazy man having an episode and then crashed his car in the ditch. Except for the fact that his autopsy really does show. Cause you can imagine maybe he stripped himself naked and. And imagines he's with four other people. But the fact that he was run over while Naked with someone else's car. And then someone put him in the passenger seat of his car and left him there with these truckers. Seeing someone walk away, that's the part that makes it so mysterious, because otherwise I would probably file this away as a very unfortunate mental episode that ended in someone's death.
- [22:50]
Brett
And, you know, you think about this sort of last message type thing. We've seen this before. So when we did Ray Rivera way back early in the podcast, we talked about in that case, Ray Rivera seemed to be suffering from some sort of mental issues, some sort of mental illness. Unclear exactly what it was. People debate that and dispute it. I think it's pretty clear that he was. And one of the things he left were writings, fairly extensive writings, much more than Yahtzee, taped to the back of his computer before he died. What appeared to be a suicide, though some people have thought might have been murder. And very similar in some ways. Paranoid thinks people are following, thinks people are out to get him, write something down, disappears. Nobody can find him. He's then found dead in strange circumstances. A very similar case. Another case we did was the Brandon Lawson case, which you may recall has. It's not a writing, it's a 911 call. Very unusual, strange, evocative 911 call where you have him giving this message to a 911 operator that kind of like Yahtzee. You can't even understand what the words are at times. You can't even really follow what he's trying to say. And you certainly can't put it together in any sort of coherent narrative. A lot of people thought all sorts of things were happening. We speculated that probably, unfortunately, he was under the influence of some drugs, was hallucinating, and probably just died in the wilderness. That was later confirmed. His body was found not very far away from his truck. Took several years to do it. A lot of searching because it's oftentimes just difficult to find. People found his body. Very obvious that he wasn't shot, he wasn't murdered, he died in the elements, and there was nothing to what he said. I feel like this is really difficult for us. We all want to make sense out of chaos. We do it all the time. You look up at a cloud and you see a rabbit. I mean, there's not really a rabbit there, right? That's something we do. It's part of being human. It has some advantages. If you're out in the wild, you're trying to tell whether or not that's a tiger in the bush or Just a bush, you know, it's important, but we're always looking for that. And it bothers us when we can't find order. We have that here. You have this very sort of chaotic thing, this chaotic story and this note. And you think if we could just figure out this note, we would know what happened. But very difficult to do, especially given that we don't even have the original. So as Alice said, there's not a whole lot to go on here. We have what the truckers saw, we have what Gunther said right before he died. And we have the note. And the story sort of goes cold. And for 40 years it was the source of a lot of speculation, a lot of conspiracy theories really trying to figure out what happened. And then in April of 2025, so just last year, the case was actually closed. And the way it was closed and the revelations from the closure have in some ways raised more questions and answers and have led some to wonder whether maybe Gunther really was involved in something. And there's some sort of COVID up going on. Because what the police will tell us is completely different from what they said way back in 1984. So the Hagen police presented an update on the case. They had decided to reinvestigate this whole case. For some reason they're gonna reinvestigate it. And they determine the Gunther stoles injuries actually did not match up with him being driven over. Which let me just say that doesn't seem like something you would get wrong if you were the pathologist. Like that seems like something that has some very obvious hallmarks.
- [26:51]
Alice
Like tire treads are different than the tire. You know, like, just like the injuries
- [26:56]
Brett
to your body from being run over would think would be very specific. And if you get run over, unless something really strange has happened, then that means somebody else is involved. And then you have the other indicators of someone else being involved. You have the guy wandering off and you have Gunther talking about four people. But now the police are saying, never mind, no, no, he wasn't run over. So they go out and they reconstruct the event. And in fact they determine not only was he not run over, they say he died as the result of a single vehicle accident. You know, maybe some of you are thinking about the Silkwood case, right, where we talked about that a lot. It's always interesting when you have these RE examinations which we've discussed in other cases, because you do a RE examination and you think there is an obvious difficulty in determining something based on photographs and reports versus the people who were on scene. And the people on scene were saying one thing, and now you have the police saying something different.
- [28:11]
Alice
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- [35:47]
Brett
So what caused the accident is unknown, but the investigation concluded that Gunther was not wearing a seat belt when his car left a 45 and hit a patch of trees. According to them, the force of the crash then catapulted him into the passenger seat. So he gets into this wreck and he's thrown from the driver's seat into the passenger seat.
- [36:11]
Alice
I mean, I'm no physicist. That just seems like a strange way to fall, right? I mean, most people who are not wearing their seatbelts get catapulted from their seats, but usually through the windshield rather than sideways.
- [36:25]
Brett
Well, and I will note there is a photograph of this vehicle available and. And it shows very clear damage to the center of the hood. And one would think if you hit the trees and you're not wearing a seatbelt and you hit something dead on, such that it collapses in the center of your hood, that that would throw you out through the windshield. I mean, that's. We see that all the time. That happens all the time. But instead you have this very strange circumstance where Gunther is not thrown through the windshield, but he's thrown into the passenger seat, which seems a little strange. And I'll just note they don't find his clothes. So was he driving naked, which is absolutely possible, I guess.
- [37:13]
Alice
No, no. He did have his shoes on.
- [37:15]
Brett
He did have. That's a good.
- [37:16]
Alice
Or at least he had his shoes in the car.
- [37:18]
Brett
The shoes were in the car.
- [37:19]
Alice
But maybe the force of the catapult removed his shoes of the only thing that he was driving.
- [37:24]
Brett
Now look, that's possible, right? And we've been talking about how he's having these mental issues. He's having these mental breaks. We have two hours that are unaccounted for. And he wasn't that far away. I mean, remember, he goes, he sees this lady that he knows at around 1am he sees her in Hagerselbach. He's only 62 miles away from Hagersselbach when these truckers find him two hours later. So it would have taken him about an hour to get there. Golf doesn't drive very fast. Even though he's on the Autobahn. He's putt putting along it. Take him an hour to get there, but he's got an hour that's unaccounted for. Could he have removed his own clothes? Sure. You see that oftentimes We've seen that in several cases where people apparently have removed their own clothes. The Jason Landry case we talked about, where Jason Landry, he's driving home, he gets into a car wreck. We end up finding his clothes in his backpack not far away from the accident. The police didn't even bother the search, so they didn't see it. He hasn't been found since. But unless you think he was abducted and then forced to undress, I think most people Think he hit his head and then took his clothes off. And remember whatever was going on with Gunther, we have multiple sort of incidents here. You've got his prior mental issues, you've got Yahsi. Then you got his collapse, his sort of unaccountable collapse in the pub. Then he hits his head, then he takes off. So he's got a lot going on, which maybe could have led to him being unclothed. But as Alice notes, the only clothes you're fighting in his car are shoes. Where'd everything else go?
- [39:04]
Alice
There was at least one other stop right where the clothes were left.
- [39:08]
Brett
Exactly. And as we're going to see, the police are going to continue to poo poo this theory that maybe there are other people involved. But wherever he's going, would it be that crazy that he runs into somebody, you know, that somebody sees him throwing his clothes in a bush or whatever, taking his clothes off. So we have the police, they're now saying he was not run over, he was in a car accident. His injuries are from that accident. But he's not thrown out of the car, which is often what happens and often causes a lot of injuries. Instead, he's thrown in the passenger seat where he is found.
- [39:41]
Alice
So he did die from injuries. And they'll say that he died from car accident injuries. This is very peculiar because you would think that this is the most miraculous way to actually get hit, where he doesn't go through the windshield. The windshield, if you look at the picture, is not. I don't think it's smashed.
- [39:59]
Brett
It doesn't look like it's smashed.
- [40:01]
Alice
It doesn't look like it's smashed. So in other words, there's no blunt force trauma from catapulting off the windshield, let's say. And so he somehow essentially like rolled to the passenger side seat, but that action, which did not break any windshields, was enough to kill him. That's really peculiar too, because it's not just the positioning of where he is or the lack of clothes. It's also that whatever led him to, I wouldn't even say catapult. I'd say, like, essentially roll into the passenger seat was enough to kill him.
- [40:32]
Brett
Yeah, and. And I just gotta say, like. And it's a. It's a small car. So I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here. We spend a lot of time talking about how most conspiracy theories are false. But when you just read what the police are telling you, it doesn't seem to line up with anything we've heard up to this point, this is not like a. A slight variation or. Well, we always thought this was a possibility, and now the police have been able to confirm it. It's a. Everything we knew for 40 years. If you listen to a true crime podcast Before April of 2025, the story you'll get is completely different because they didn't have any of this information, and it's completely different. It couldn't be more different. Right then the police say that they are able to determine that there was no foreign DNA in the car. Now, I got lots of questions.
- [41:20]
Alice
I got a lot to say about that. 1984, they don't know DNA. They don't know to collect DNA. So even if they knew to collect DNA, they didn't have the foresight to know where to collect collect DNA. So the fact that they have no foreign DNA in the car only tells me that it's 1984, and DNA is so barely understood at that point that unless there are, like, buckets of someone else's blood, which I'm not even sure they could totally tell it was someone else's blood, at that point, they would have known to collect it. So for an April 2025 reinvestigation to definitively say there's no foreign DNA seems like a wild grasp that can't possibly be rooted in that case file.
- [41:58]
Brett
I mean, I don't think maybe I'm wrong. And unfortunately, they didn't release the report. This is just. There's a lot of public reporting on this. They made a lot of public statements about it. I really wish police departments, when they did something like this, they would release a full report. That's so helpful when they do that and you're able to read it and really understand what they're trying to say. You know, in this case, I don't think there's any way they kept that car for 40 years. Maybe they did. You know, maybe that car has been sitting in a German police lot through reunification, through 40 years of change, just sitting somewhere. And then in 2025, they're like, oh, we should see if there's any DNA in it. Maybe that happened. And if you're in Germany and you have more information on this, would love to hear it. We'll do a whole update on this case when the Germans write in. It's the Germans when they write in. But I don't think they did that. And if they didn't do that, number one, even if they did, even if they did keep the car for that long, I don't think there's any guarantee that anybody was trying to preserve DNA because they didn't even know what DNA was. So I don't know why they'd be doing that. So like Alice said, and even if they had blood, all that would tell you is there was no blood from someone else in the car. And Gunther doesn't say anyone was in the car with him when the wreck happened. I mean, this is a little weird, right? Like, it's possible that they went somewhere, the guys got out, he's trying to get away, and that's when he loses control. That's a possibility. Right. For instance. But assuming they didn't keep the car, even if they did keep the car, I don't think there's any way they would be able to say there's no DNA in that car. They certainly didn't swab for DNA at the time. So I don't know how you say this, I don't know how you say this. Even if you had the car, I don't know how you say it, but I don't think they had the car. So the whole thing feels. I'm not gonna say it's a cover up, because why would you cover up something that happened in 1984 with a 2025 report that doesn't even really make sense? It's not like people, honestly, you could
- [43:51]
Alice
just close the case and no one would know anything, right? Because it's not like it was at the forefront and the police close cases all the time and it's just like administrative.
- [43:59]
Brett
And honestly, doing this just brought more attention to the case. Because before this it was just people who, who were interested in quirky little mysteries out of West Germany who talked about this. All of a sudden you're gonna have this big report on it that's gonna bring more attention to it. So it doesn't make any sense that you're doing this as some sort of COVID up. But it also feels very strange. And I think you should look at reinvestigations with the same skepticism you might look at the initial investigation. Because there's no reason to think, well, we're all perfect now. We made so many mistakes back in 1984, but now we're perfect. So if we did a re investigation, well, then it's. That's what happened. Can't trust those original guys. So I don't know, I just think it's a little strange. But nevertheless, they closed the case. Now it is one of the most unfulfilling closures you're gonna have because they do not explain what Yahsee means. In fact, they say it's completely irrelevant. And maybe they're right. They basically say, look, he had some sentimental break. He got into an accident, he died. Whatever happened before, completely irrelevant. You know, it's kind of like Maura Murray. Maura Murray got into a car wreck and walked into the woods and died. Whatever happened before that, completely irrelevant, doesn't really matter. Okay. I mean, maybe.
- [45:12]
Alice
Right.
- [45:13]
Brett
But kind of weird that just so happened to happen on the same day anyway. So it has nothing to do with it. They don't believe any of these men existed because they say, you know, he's suffering from paranoia and depression. He's been acting strangely. He probably hallucinated all four men. The problem with that, the trucker saw somebody. Like the truckers, very specifically say they saw a man in a white jacket who appeared to be injured walking away from the area of the wreck. Maybe a coincidence, but that's a lot of specificity. Man injured, white jacket. It's not just they might have seen something in the distance moving. They actually saw a man. No explanation for that from the police either. They also just say, that's a question. So the official position of the German police is mystery solved. Nothing to see here. He died in a single car accident.
- [46:08]
Alice
While the rest of us are lurking around and say, is the solved in the room with us? Well, since they didn't, in my mind, solve it, let's try to dig a little bit deeper, because maybe this is nothing more than a man who had an unfortunate mental episode, stripped off all his clothes, got into a wreck somehow, and maybe the person in a white jacket was just a good Samaritan trying to see if he could help. A little curious, because other good Samaritans were driving cars, and this person was not reported to be from another car and has never come forward to say I was a good Samaritan. He clearly was very injured. Even though he was alive. I walked away, didn't call the police. Right, so let's dig a little bit deeper then, because though the police said Yahsi had nothing to do with this, it is the start of kind of a domino effect of what ultimately led to his death that night. He was just at home. If he would have just stayed at home with his wife, none of this would have happened. Right. But he said a light bulb went off in his head. He got it. And up until this point, remember, he had been experiencing paranoia, and he had thought that they. We don't know who they is, are getting him and on October 25, when he shot up and said, I got it, he wrote down something that looked like Yahtzee. So what does Yahtzee mean? This may not be a surprise to you, but yah does not mean anything in any language. So obviously, deciphering exactly what it could mean is difficult, especially because people aren't even in agreement that Yahsi is what Gunther wrote. The part most in question is the letter G, which many people speculate may have been a 6. Yet others have speculated the O could be a 0 and that the Z is a 2. In other words, this is generally what it looks like, but we're not even sure if it's letters or numbers. So if all of these are correct, that would make Gunther's message y06t2e not a word, but a mix of letters and numbers. And the thing with that is that does mean something. That's the call sign to a Romanian radio station. But there's no known connection to this radio station. So it's possible that. I mean, there's actually so many iterations, right? Every letter could be multiple different things. Is it just possible that somehow this happens to be the Romanian radio station call sign, or did it mean something more? Now, yet other people speculate that maybe this is the license plate number, and maybe the car was connected to his death. Maybe he knew something and he wrote this down, and it was not a word or a radio call station sign, but rather a license plate. Now, this did happen hours before he was killed. So at the time, a foreshadowing. It's unlikely. I don't even know my own license plate number, to be honest. So for him to foresee that he was going to be killed, maybe run over by another car, and write down the.
- [49:26]
Brett
He's psychic.
- [49:27]
Alice
The psychic license plate number seems a little unlikely.
- [49:32]
Brett
Yeah, a little bit.
- [49:33]
Alice
A little bit. Now, there's also a problem that German license plates actually begin with a city code, which doesn't match what he wrote down at all. So while in principle you could probably imagine a license plate at this time in Germany, this wouldn't have matched any license plate.
- [49:52]
Brett
So another popular theory is that the message was related to his work as a food engineer or was scientific in some way, had something to do with his science background. Some people have said, look. Yah, see is an anagram for zygote. There you go. Solved it. So, zygote, you might be thinking, well, why would you write zygote? Why would you write an English word? Well, it's not an English word, it's Greek. And zygote would be the same in German. So if for some reason he's thinking about zygotes, but they don't write zygote down. Maybe he wrote yahsi. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but that's, you know, people. People doing the best they can. A little bit of a stretch. Maybe this is some sort of genetic modification thing, which would be a little early. And it's 1984, so I don't know
- [50:39]
Alice
that they didn't even know DNA.
- [50:40]
Brett
Yeah, I don't know that. Gunther, food science engineer, is thinking about some sort of, like, chimeric DNA food thing, and that's what he's doing. And then some people thought maybe it's somehow a reference to something that Gunther was aware of or witnessed in his job, and he's trying to think of a way to convey it. And that's what the eureka moment was. This is how he's going to convey to the world what he's seen, though, if that's what he's trying to do, it hasn't worked.
- [51:15]
Alice
So along the same lines, others have pointed to the last three letters of this message. Tze. Now, TZE is a flavoring used in yogurt. So it's possible that Gunther knew what it was. But it's not clear what sort of meaning that would have been here because there is this kind of like apostrophe or comma between the first three letters and the second three letters. But what's a yog? Flavoring? Yogurt flavoring. Maybe that's what it is. But again, that's not clear that this would have any sort of meaning. The biggest issue with the Yahtzee note in general, obviously, is that we're only relying on Stoll's wife's memory of these strange string of letters. Since this note was thrown away, there's no way to confirm if this was even what it said, because at this time, I mean, she didn't think it was important enough to save. And it probably wasn't, because he was probably spouting off a bunch of paranoid things at this time anyway. And so we don't even know that it's Yahsee or any iteration of what it looked like. That's just what she remembers. And even if we could determine the meaning of this note, police don't believe this has anything to do with his
- [52:26]
Brett
death, which, like I said, is very unfulfilling. Okay, so we know the official view before we get to Our theories. We know the official view of what happened here when the police. Let's talk about some alternative theories. And this is a case. We're going back to our roots because there are people who believe that what actually happened here was an alien abduction. And this is a timely episode because, you know, the United States government is releasing all these files about aliens. It's the biggest non story ever. But nevertheless, a lot of you are following that closely. And, hey, maybe it all will be revealed. Maybe somewhere in those files is Gunther Stole's abduction. Some people believe that he could have been abducted by aliens. And there are a few things that actually suggest that might have been what happened. Number one, there are hours unaccounted for that evening when the abduction could have occurred. Missing time is a very common thing in alien abductions. You see it a lot because that's when you're up in the mothership and then, you know, you're driving along, it's nine o', clock, you blink, and all of a sudden it's midnight. And you're like, what happened? Well, that you were being tested on by the aliens and they put you back in the car and you didn't even know. And you lost all this time. So that's a possibility. Gunther lost that time also. What is Gunther? He's naked. And everybody knows when aliens abduct you, the first thing they do is take off all your clothes. Because they're into that. Aliens, they're into that. So they, you know, wear his clothes. On some planet on the other side of the galaxy, you're never going to find them because they took them with them. They didn't take his shoes, they just took his clothes. So there you go. That also points to alien abduction. They drop him back in the car, he's freaking out. He's probably trying to get away. He's naked. He doesn't know why. How could those four people fit in that small car? Because they were tiny little aliens, little green men in the car. They weren't friends, but they weren't people either. Those are the aliens, and that's what happened to him, and that's how he died. And maybe Yahtzee was somehow related to the aliens. I don't know exactly how, but could have been. And maybe that's why they got him, because he knew about the aliens. Watch out. If you're looking through the files, search for Yahtzee, see if it comes up. Maybe that's the name of their planet, for all I know. Anyways, so that's the possibility. Alien Abductions.
- [55:04]
Alice
But I will say I am pretty much an expert on alien abductions at this point. Usually when you lose time, you lose a little bit more than just like an hour or two.
- [55:13]
Brett
So it's true.
- [55:14]
Alice
He didn't lose like 30 years, whatever, or even like six weeks. He lost a couple hours. And to be honest, when I get lost, that's about the amount of time it takes me to find my way back. So small things, I'm not gonna say I don't believe, but there's not actually like, it's not your typical loss of time, shall we say. And they left his shoes on. I guess they don't have to test his feet, just the rest of his
- [55:37]
Brett
body, you know, feet. Aliens don't like feet. Now, one thing I'll say, and Alice points this out and this is true. The missing time, even if you're not talking about alien abductions, is often focused on in this case because there is time that's hard to account for. And you can imagine any number of things were happening during that period. Recall a few things. Number one, he didn't have Google Maps. So particularly given that he seems to be driving to different locations, there's no telling what route he took. Just because he's 60 miles away doesn't mean he drove 60 miles straight. That's the first thing. Second thing, he seems to be driving erratically. It's not as if, for instance, we know he left work that day and it's a 15 minute drive and he didn't arrive for two hours. And we're trying to figure out what happened for that hour and 45 minutes. It's not a situation like that. He's not going anywhere in particular. We have no idea where he was headed when the wreck happened. So saying there's missing time, I think is probably just incorrect. I think what really happened is either walked around his hometown for a while before he got back in the car and drove off, or he drove aimlessly until he either met the people who were responsible for his death or was in this accident.
- [56:58]
Alice
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- [61:07]
Brett
Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use.
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Alice
It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted.
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Brett
Start your free trial@shopify.com Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium
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Alice
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Brett
It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [61:36]
Alice
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com. So it's obviously aliens. But in case it wasn't aliens, we'll talk about another theory. And that is the one that has kept this mystery alive for 40 years. And that's murder and conspiracy, right? So people remain unsatisfied with the investigator's official determination in this case. And you can see why there's a lot of unanswered questions. I still don't understand how someone catapults into the passenger side seat without a seatbelt, but not through the windshield. Now remember, witnesses do say they saw someone walking away from the scene in that white jacket there Was also other witnesses who recalled seeing a hitchhiker in the area that night. Now, if these witness sightings were to be believed, Someone could have murdered Stoll that night and staged it to look like an accident. Many believe the motivation here would have been related maybe to his work as a food engineer. They really wanted the yogurt flavoring recipe. And I say that because we talked about the current conspiracy about NASA scientists or astronauts or whatnot. I'm not saying that a food engineer isn't like the sexiest kind of person to be murdering for conspiracy theories. But it's not totally clear what, like, state secrets he may be holding or food engineering secrets he may be holding that would make him the target of this murder plot. But nonetheless, people think that perhaps he was being targeted for his work. Now, maybe Stoll just saw something he shouldn't have. Maybe he saw the beginnings of genetic engineering for food and he didn't. He was going to be a whistleblower. Now, the problem with this theory is that there's really no basis for believing that Stoll had any insider knowledge of anything nefarious in the food industry. And at the time of his death, he wasn't even employed. He was paranoid, he was unemployed. He was probably honestly spiraling because he was unemployed, because he had to sit at home all the time. You know, we've being in a regular kind of rhythm, Such as having a job can do wonders for one's mental health. And the opposite is true too. So he wasn't even employed at this time. He probably. If he had any knowledge, what was he gonna do with it? He didn't even have a job. So he may have been murdered, but I don't know that he was the target of some massive conspiracy to silence him because of his knowledge in the food engineering business.
- [64:17]
Brett
Yeah. And so I guess that brings us to our theories in this case. I will say this. I've been interested in this case for a long time. I followed it when the new revelations came out from the German police. Was very disappointed in what they said. But I mean, look, I think we all have to acknowledge that probably what happened here is Gunther was going through some sort of mental break and had an accident and got into a wreck. That it probably is what happened, and that's how he died. He probably was spiraling all day. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever know what yahsee means. I just. I think only he knew and he's no longer with us. In fact, we don't even have the original message But I. I do think there's an alternative that to me, is a little bit more satisfying. And I want to. I want to suggest that as a possible theory. And. And I'm interested to hear what Alice thinks about this. So I do think he was suffering from mental illness. He was spiraling. I have no idea what the oxy thing means. You know, it could be he was. It's a code for something that only he realized. You know, it could be one of those things. I don't know if this ever happened to you, Alice. Do you ever have a dream and. And in the dream, the dream, it feels like you've stumbled upon something brilliant? This happens to me sometimes as a writer. Like, I'll have a dream and I'll be like, wow, that storyline and that dream was awesome. I should write that down so that I can write that story later. And I'll wake up and I'll write it down right when I wake up and I'll go back to sleep. Then I wake up the next morning and I read what I wrote. And I think, this just makes no sense. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why I thought that was so brilliant. But this is just crap, right? Has that ever happened to you? Anything like that?
- [66:10]
Alice
All the time. And not even in sleep. Like, I'll be in, like, school pickup line. I'm like, I got to write this word down. And I put it in my notes in my phone. I read it later. I'm like, I thought that was a good word. Like, yeah, that's not good at all.
- [66:23]
Brett
Yeah. And I have written myself notes and looked at them later and had no idea what they mean. Like, I've looked at the notes which are supposed to remind me to do something, remind me something, and read them. Be like, I have no idea. That might as well have been an alien who wrote that, because I don't know what. That. That wasn't me. That was some earlier iteration of me that no longer exists. And I think everybody's had that experience, and it could have been something like that. And the fact that he is in paranoia and he's dealing with mental illness makes it even worse that it's absolutely inexplicable to us. And maybe it would have been inexplicable to him, but I think what we can say is that was going on. He goes to the pub. Maybe there's something physically wrong with him that we don't really even know. Maybe he's not eating. Like, why did he collapse? Could Be a lot of things. He could have been not eating, could have been not sleeping. It could have been some sort of mental health issue. Could have been some sort of physical, undiagnosed thing that even to this day, we don't know, causes him to collapse. He hits his head. Now we have, you know, building on things. He then drives to his hometown, which is a strange decision. He goes to this old woman's house. He talks about something terrible is going to happen tonight. Where are his clothes? I think the simplest answer for that is somewhere between that old lady and where he ended up. He just takes his clothes off. Maybe he throws them out the window. Maybe throws them in a lake. Maybe throws them on the side of the road. And it's in a place 60 miles away from where he ends up. That if somebody found him or saw him, they would have no idea what those clothes signify, why they're there. They would just think, wow, that's weird. There's some clothes on the side of the road. There's some clothes in the forest, right? So I think he leaves to go wherever he's gonna go. Which I don't think he necessarily knows. I think he takes his clothes off. I think he leaves his shoes on. I think at some point, this is my. I don't know that I think this, but this is my theory that fits the facts that we know. I think at some point he pulls that car over on the side of the road. And he gets out of the car. And I think he's walking around naked except for his shoes, in the middle of the road. And I think somebody hits him. I think the police are wrong to say that he wasn't run over. I think that initial thought was correct. I think they hit him. I think they actually knock him out of his shoes. I think four guys get out of the car that hit him. They find him. He's, like, delirious. I think they get his shoes, throw him in his car, which is parked on the side of the road. I think they put him in the passenger seat and they decide to stage an accident. I think the other three guys then drove down the road a little bit. The guy in the white jacket is either in the car and starts it moving towards some trees and then jumps out or whatever. He gets it going towards those trees. He gets out of the car. The car crashes. Gunther still in the passenger seat, because that's where he was. Because the guy driving was one who directed it to the cars. He then gets up, he starts walking back to where his buddies have parked just down the road. It's at that point the truckers show up. They see him walking away. He gets in the car with his buddies, they drive off, they never speak of it again. The initial review is actually correct. He was hit by a car. But then 40 years later, the police look at it again and they decide, you know what? Much more likely is no one else was involved. This was just an accident. Could his injuries have been consistent with an accident? Yeah, so that's what we're gonna say. That's kind of what I think happened. I think it fits with the facts and it fits with independent facts other than just what Gunther is saying. And it means the men in the man in the white jacket are not just unrelated or hallucinations. There was something connected to him, but still, ultimately it's the mental illness that led to his death.
- [70:02]
Alice
Yeah, I know we didn't talk about this beforehand, but as I was going through the facts, it hued very closely to that. I think everything leading up to what ultimately killed him. And I think it was someone else, whether it was intentional or it was an accident. And likely it was an accident because I think he took off all his clothes. He probably. Maybe he thought he had ants all over himself or he thought that someone was going to come get him. And this way they couldn't find him if he didn't have his clothes on because they were tracking him from earlier. And he is quite literally like dancing in the middle of the road. Not dancing, dancing, like joyfully, but because he is having a mental episode. And it's 3am or 2am and a car veers around and they. Those guys were probably drinking because if they're out at 2 or 3am, they're probably coming back from the pub themselves. And they may not have actually been thinking in their right mind, which is why they decide to stage an accident that doesn't really look like an accident in the sense that they put their victim in the passenger seat. Like it probably would have been better if they put him in the driver's seat and pushed his car in the direction, you know, put his foot on the. On the gas or something like that. But I think that they were probably impaired and they were gonna get in more trouble than just hitting a person. Maybe they were all drunk or something like that. I don't know if it was four people. Could have been two people. And he was seeing double. He had hit his head earlier in the night. I think the yogzi, the going to the pub, the hitting his head, the Driving off the going and talking to the woman who he knew from his hometown, but kind of knew, not really knew. It's not like it was a childhood best friend or even his parents. All of that was just a mental episode. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, I've had several people in my life go through very intense periods of paranoia. And I don't know if this is the hallmark of paranoia, but at least in my experience, the people who are in the midst of paranoia, they can still speak to me and they see me. It's not like they can't see me, but always they're out to get me. That is something, I think, that is very common in the paranoia. You're being watched, like the Truman show, or the government has bugged all your phones, or we're all in some sort of Hunger Games where everyone is against you and we're all colluding against you. So every whisper, every phone call is something against you. And the paranoia is immense. And while that person can still do things like drive and walk and write and even talk to you, like look you in the eyes and talk to you, they are living in a different world than the one that you see. And I think everything was part of this immense. Even if it was moderate paranoia earlier, I think something happened and we don't know. The mind is an incredibly mysterious thing. I think the fact that he had moderate paranoia doesn't mean he had moderate paranoia that night. I think it was a ramp up to the immense paranoid break that he had in that moment and that he stripped off his own clothes and he didn't take off his shoes because he was probably outside of his car and it would hurt to walk barefoot. And so he probably stripped off his clothes in a frenzy, and that that was somehow going to save him or that was part of the plan to make sure they didn't get him. And what happened next was either nefarious or an accident. The only way I can see it, nefarious, is there's this weird person dancing in the middle of the road, and you're with a bunch of guys in the car, and you're all drunk, and you're like, what if we try to hit that doofus who was in the car? Doesn't matter. I do think he was hit by someone else because he did not catapult from the driver's seat to the passenger seat and die from those injuries. I think he did see something. Whether it was four people, two people. I think it was more than one person, because I agree with you. The person who was Walking away injured. They may have been injured from the initial hit. When they hit Gunther. Or it may have been this staged crash. But they clearly were able to get away. So likely there was someone else. And I think this is incredibly sad. But really, I don't think there's a conspiracy or a mystery. That Gunther was having a mental episode. It is a mystery who tried to cover this up. But I think it was probably something like an accident. And they freaked out.
- [74:20]
Brett
And I'll say this. The one thing I believe absolutely is the case is there was someone else in the car when the accident happened. And I think the person in white. In the white jacket was that person. Whether it was what we just described or the hitchhiker. Somebody, a hitchhiker was in that car with him. And it happened. Like, I don't think the truckers made that up. I think they made up seeing a man in a white jacket. Who appeared to be injured. Walking away from the scene of the crime. And it amazes me that the German police so easily dismiss that.
- [74:49]
Alice
Especially when it's two independent truckers who don't know each other. Nor do they know Gunther.
- [74:53]
Brett
Right.
- [74:54]
Alice
That's incredibly powerful.
- [74:56]
Brett
So it's possible Gunther picked this guy up. I mean, I guess if somebody stopped to pick me up and they were naked. I'd have to make a real hard decision about whether or not. How desperate am I for a ride, you know? I mean, I don't know exactly what happened there. I just think there's more to this. I think there's more to this than what we have. And Gunther's paranoia led to it. But as we discussed, many times. Being paranoid can put you in a place where something terrible can happen to you. And, you know, we talked about. And I can't remember his name. And maybe you can remember his name. Or maybe someone in the chat can remember his name. The man, he was from Canada. He ends up in Nashville. He's murdered. Very strange situation. We covered the case.
- [75:47]
Alice
It's not the guy who ended up in army fatigues in Washington.
- [75:50]
Brett
No, that's David Lewis. He came from Texas. This is a guy who. He was. And normally, I can remember this Blair Adams. Sorry, just took a second. So Blair Adams is a man from Canada. And what's crazy about these cases, We've covered so many of these sort of great mystery cases. So many of them are tied to mental illness. It's really sad. Some of the greatest mysteries in true crime. Are really just mental illness. And they're mysteries because we can't understand what Happened. And it's so weird and unusual because it's someone who's suffering from mental illness. Blair Adams, as you may recall, very paranoid, visited a neighbor's house in the middle of the night, much like this, saying that someone was after him. Then goes on a cross country drive, ends up in Knoxville, Tennessee, dead next to a construction site in a very strange circumstance. And we talked about what happened there. Was it that someone really was after him and tracked him all the way there and murdered him? Or did he, in his very paranoid, unusual state, run into someone and something happened and he ended up dead? And I think that's what we have here. We have a man who was extremely vulnerable, extremely apt to suffer something bad happening to him, who may have either put himself in a circumstance where an accident was inevitable. There was that case this week, the man who jumped over the fence at Denver Airport and ran onto the active Runway and got hit by a plane and killed. You know, that's obviously someone who was in a very bad state, who put themselves in a very bad place and ended up being killed. Could have been something like that. Could have been someone taking advantage of someone in that bad state. But what I am convinced of is that the German police's explanation is incomplete. I just don't think that's exactly what happened. Even if they're right to point to the mental illness as the main problem.
- [77:55]
Alice
Yeah, like you said, maybe it was purely administrative. They wanted to close out cases. But I think it doesn't do any justice to mental illness or to what happened here, obviously. And if anything, it's feeding the conspiracy theories in a case that I think unfortunately is not a conspiracy, is just mental illness.
- [78:12]
Brett
All right, guys, well, love to hear your thoughts on this, particularly if you're in Germany, what your thoughts are on this case, the German police, their position on this case, the letter, the note, what does YOGSI mean to you? Do you have any insight on what might have been written? Was it numbers, was it letters? Just really fascinated to hear your thoughts. So please shoot us an email, prosecutors podmail.com and like I said, we'll do a follow up either here or on legal briefs with whatever you give us. Shoot us a message on social media at prosecutors, pod on all the various social media things. If you want to bring your thoughts to the gallery on Facebook, do that. It's a great place. You'll have a lot of fun there. If you want to watch us record these and sort of see these pictures, you know, sort of live, please join our patreon it's only $3 a month. You get to watch us record these episodes and you get the episodes early and ad free. Now, if you want the episodes early and ad free, but you don't want to join Patreon. We also have Apple subscriptions. And as we always say, regardless, if you want to join any of those things, you will always get our episodes. Eventually with ads that will happen. So you can do that for free. I know times are tight for a lot of folks. All right, let's answer a question. So Never Trust Bow Ties. It's a interesting name.
- [79:39]
Alice
I like that.
- [79:40]
Brett
Never Trust Bow Ties. Never Trust Bow Ties wants to know. We hear often about how expensive the death penalty is. However, it's also used as a bargaining chip to get defendants to plea, which saves money. Do you think in the grand scheme of things, it's a wash for states and have it by saving the resources for those trials. What do you think, Alice?
- [80:02]
Alice
I don't think you have the death penalty just to be able to have a bargaining chip. And I think the cost of it is not because the death penalty is expensive, but because of what's built up around it. The courts have really messed up how we deal with the appeals. And the death penalty itself has created kind of this machine that where we don't execute people. So then it ends up being very expensive. I don't think we should have the death penalty just so we have something to dangle over people for purposes of plea deals. I think we should have the death penalty for the most heinous of crimes because it is the deserving punishment and there's no rehabilitation. It is that heinous. That person shouldn't be here. But I don't think that it should purely exist just for bargaining purposes. Of course, that's a side effect when you have something that serious that it ends up being a bargaining chip that you can use. But I don't like the argument that it only should exist so that we can have something worse on the table that'll make people come to the table. Because every single case, we shouldn't force plea deals, and nobody forces plea deals. These types of cases end up having typically immense amount of evidence against the person. Everyone is entitled to a trial no matter how great the evidence is against you. And that shouldn't be a cost savings mechanism, if that makes sense. There's the effects of having this and whatnot. Because when we talk about life and death, I don't like to think about it as like an economic game of how we can save Money with it. It is true that it is incredibly expensive, but I haven't done the economics at all. It kind of makes me queasy to do an economic model of how much money it could be saving us because people are scared to death, get the death penalty, and therefore take a plea deal.
- [81:46]
Brett
Yeah. So I'll just say this. I find a lot of the arguments against death penalty be really stupid. And the cost one is one of them because it's either worth it or it's not. Like I don't actually care how much it cost, number one. Number two, I think the cost argument is a little fake because it builds in things like litigation costs, which includes things like the amount the lawyers who are getting paid. Those lawyers gonna work for the state no matter what. It's just whether they're doing the death penalty case or doing something else. I also think if you got rid of the death penalty and you go to life without parole, you already have the anti death by incarceration movement. That's what they call it, death by incarceration. You're gonna have the same thing. If you're. Whatever your maximum punishment is. I think you're going to see the same type of litigation costs. I don't actually think it saves money. You make a good point about. I do think it's nice when people like Bryan Kohberger can plead guilty and spare the family that kind of pain. You know, like, I often wonder if Richard Allen, if the death penalty had been on the table, would we have avoided all of this? Would we have avoided the fake innocence movement? Would we have avoided the pain of the trial? Would we have avoided the appeals? I think at the end of the day, if you want to think about the death penalty, you want to decide whether or not you're for the death penalty, don't. The dollars and cents and all that stuff. Come on. We waste so much money in this country, it's barely even worth discussing the cost. You need to decide for yourself whether or not you think someone like you, we just had. I mean, we've. We've intentionally avoided discussing this case. But the Tanner Horner case, the murder of Athena Strand, absolutely horrific case. No question he did it. He is 100% guilty. He pled guilty. The only question was whether he got the death penalty. To me, that should be your touchstone as a person. You either think he should get the death penalty or you don't. And if you don't, then I think you should be against the death penalty because that is a man who brutally murdered A child. And we know he did it. There's no question about it. For me, the death penalty is. I don't think you can have a just society without the death penalty. That's just my position on this. It's my opinion. I think when something like that happens, when someone murders a child like that, if you as a society cannot impose a death penalty on that person, then you have failed that child and you don't actually believe in justice. And I mean, I will go so far as to say there's some cowardice in that society because that society is not willing to face the awesome horrific idea of killing someone as society killing someone, taking their life, because that is what justice demands. I think that is a massive burden on society to do that. But I think if you want to have a truly just society, you have to face that head on and say, yes, in cases like that, we're going to do that. Now, how you structure it, how you avoid innocent people from receiving it, those are all debates I think we can all have. But I think if you want to be for. Against the death penalty, do it on a purely moral basis. Don't get sucked into these like, well, it's really expensive. I mean, yeah, justice is expensive. It's a price worth paying. If you believe that's justice, if you believe that's justice, then that's like the primary job of society. Everything else is gravy, you know, providing justice, defending the people. Those are the primary things you want your government to do for you. That's what you give up when you enter into society. Fundamentally, what you give up when you enter into society is the right to seek vengeance on those who wrong you. That is a fundamental piece of the social contract. You're agreeing that the vendettas that destroyed Sicily, we're not doing that anymore. We're giving that over to the government. We're giving up our right of revenge, and we're trusting in the justice system to seek justice for us. That is like the key. And, you know, seeking justice in the preamble to the Constitution, it's like the first thing that's mentioned. So to me, decide whether or not you think it's necessary for justice if you do support it. If you don't oppose it. That's how I think you should look at the death penalty. All right, on that easy, simple question. Let us know what you think about the death penalty. Okay? All right, guys. Well, this has been fun as always. Probably next week we'll do something. I mean, it's always sad when someone dies. And obviously Gunther Stoll died, and that's a very sad thing for him and his family, and I hate that it happened. But probably we're going to talk about something even more depressing next week. Alice, do you have any thoughts before we sign off for now.
- [86:27]
Alice
You know, I think you made a really good point earlier about how many of the true crime cases that we cover are actually not about crime at all, but about mental illness. And in these cases, because they're so sad, and this is 40 years ago, it doesn't change the devastation that his wife faced and those who loved him faced. But especially in these cases of paranoia, it is so difficult because, like I said earlier, you can continue to exist in your world. You just have, like, an added element where you're seeing the same things that the rest of us are seeing, but they have different import or different interpretation as to what's happening. Two people whispering and laughing are not just friends having a conversation. They're, you know, part of a government conspiracy out to get you. Because of that, it's incredibly difficult to spot and to get help. But if you are able to be there for each other and to see this, you know, there were people with him at the bar that night. No one may have understood how important this was. If someone had seen him dancing around down the side of the road without his clothes on, recognizing that this was, you know, someone who was deeply in need of help, or maybe instead of just sending him away that night, maybe someone calling his parents directly and saying, hey, maybe you need to come and get him. Maybe there could have been a different outcome for Gunther. But those are all the buts that we can't answer now. But what we can do is, as we've said so many times before, mental illness comes in so many forms. And I don't think that our justice system or really even our society that we live in, in the United States here fully knows how to deal with mental illness in a way that is compassionate and treats the person with dignity. And while we're hopefully figuring this out, I know there are many of you who listen to this podcast who are part of trying to create, you know, a system that is better suited to dealing with people with mental illness. My only answer, the only way I know how to help fill those gaps right now is community. Something that is very tenuous and has become much less common since COVID And really, even before COVID really, since social media and smartphones, is to put down phones and look at each other more often. Because I do think that we have to be the answer to spotting the vulnerabilities of those around us. It's probably not going to be a doctor who first spots it because at least in my experience, it's been the struggle of those who have recognized the paranoia to help drag that person into treatment. But they're not going to see a doctor about their paranoia because they don't see that as the problem. So I guess this is a very long winded way of saying thank you for being part of this community and take these cases and instead of just looking at how sad and tragic they are to look forward and how you can be a part of answers for different outcomes for the other gunthers that may be out there.
- [89:32]
Brett
And there's a reason Lisa Lam was the first case we did. People used to ask, like our prosecutors, why are you doing? There's not even a trial in that case. We picked that case as our first case for a reason. Because it exemplifies in so many ways this problem and this issue. And it is one that drives so much of what we see in these cases and really in the justice system in general. Alright, guys, well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Let us know what you think, particularly if you're in Germany. But we'll be back next week with a new case. But until then, I'm Brett And I'm Alice and we are the prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm Alice and we are the prosecutor prosecutors. The private practice lawyers.
- [90:42]
Alice
All right, let's stop this because I know we have ads. Okay, so there's a family of birds that are living like in. They have a nest and the birds have hatched. That's the word. But there's like a mom and a dad. I didn't know that. I thought just the one of the state route. But anyways, there's like a mom and a dad. At least two adult birds and the little birds have hatched. Kids are like fascinated. They named the birds today. Would you like to guess what these birds names are?
- [91:05]
Brett
Tweety and Beaky.
- [91:28]
Alice
Sam. That would be normal names. Okay, so. So the mom's name. Well, let's start with the dad's name because that fits with what you just said. Dad's name. Flappy.
- [92:16]
Brett
Flappy.
- [92:19]
Alice
Mom's name. Can you guess if the dad's name is Flappy, what would the mom's name be? You're never gonna guess it. Okay, it's Theodosia.
- [93:09]
Brett
Hello and welcome to Pluto Foe. If you know the name of the movie, you'd like to see? Just stream it for free on Pluto tv, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long.
- [93:19]
Alice
Catch.
- [93:20]
Brett
Anchorman. The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Fantastic. Men in Black, one through three. That's what I'm talking about. Mean girls. Shut up. Titanic. I'm the king of the world. And so much more. For showtimes, press Nothing. They're free 24 7.
- [93:35]
Alice
That is so fast.
- [93:36]
Brett
On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.