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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human Safeway and Albertsons have made saving easier than ever with great savings on family favorites this week. 16 ounce sweet strawberries are two for $5 member price. And don't miss the incredible deal on Signature select boneless skinless chicken breast value packs for $2.97 per pound limit. One plus medium avocados or mangoes are five for $5 member price. Fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
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If you know Los Angeles, there's a good chance you've heard of George Allen Hancock. He's the guy Hancock park was named for that fancy neighborhood between Hollywood and Midwilshire. He's also the reason you can visit the famous La Brea Tar Pits, which Hancock donated to Los Angeles county in 1916. Hancock was a lot of things. An oil scion, a railroad tycoon, a rancher, a millionaire, a philanthropist, a cello player in the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. He was also an oceanic explorer and marine scientist, perhaps best known for his expeditions to the Galapagos. In November 1934, aboard his trusted vessel, the Valero 3, with a group of Smithsonian researchers in tow, Hancock embarked on his most dramatic Galapagos expedition yet. Anchored off the island of Floriana on December 8, Hancock cabled following message to his business manager back in Hollywood, hysterical over the death of Dr. Friedrich Ritter. Frau Dorey is packing up to go back to Berlin. He was talking about Friedrich Ritter and Dori Strauss. They were originally from Germany, but they had been living on floriana for almost 66 years. They went there seeking a simpler life, an escape from modern society, a tropical utopia. But now Friedrich had died under curious circumstances. More on that later. Dory was headed back home and their plan to grow old together in an Eden of their own making had come to a tragic end. But there was more to the story because Friedrich and Dorey weren't the only Europeans who had fled civilization for the Galapagos, as the Los Angeles Times put it. Captain Hancock has reported that other deaths may have occurred on the lonely archipelago. The Baroness Eloise Boss Kid I Wagner Verborn, so self styled Empress of the island and her companion Robert Philipson are known to have left the so called Eden of the Pacific on July 5th last. Since then they have not been seen. Hancock had apparently sailed into a real life murder mystery. Part Agatha Christie, part Lord of the Flies. According to that same LA Times article, Friedrich and Dorey quote, dreamed of creating A new Garden of Eden. Then others came the deaths of Dr. Ritter, and others converted it into a Valhalla of disillusioned souls. Sounds like a real page turner. The type of tale that is, as they say, stranger than fiction. Welcome to Very special episodes, an iHeart's original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is the Galapagos Murders.
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Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason English. She's Dana Schwartz. He is Zarin Burnett. One of my favorite genres of information is things I Didn't Realize were named after people. So I'm excited already in the cold open to learn that Hancock park was named after someone.
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Yeah, yeah. I live near Griffith park, also in Los Angeles. A lot of things named after people out here.
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Well, almost all the parks named after people except for, like La Brea, which is named after Tar.
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I definitely did not know his legacy. And the full extent of this story, this was completely new to me.
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I feel like I dreamed this story, like having the elements of steel teeth, a place called Hell's Volcano, and a baroness nicknamed Crazy Panties. I'm like, come on, this is a Kevin. A dream.
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I could decide if I wanted to say Crazy Panties in the intro here, but.
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So I was actually researching a different project, sort of a murder that took place around World War II and going through the newspaper archives and I came across this headline that made me stop and I kept rereading it and I actually committed it to memory.
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That's Abbott Kaler, the author of Eden A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the dawn of World War II.
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It goes like, was Dr. Ritter, with his steel teeth poisoned in paradise? Was Baroness Eloise, otherwise known as Crazy Panties, murdered by one of her love slaves after she drove the other to his death? And why is Frau Ritter going back to what she once called Hell's Volcano? So I forgot all about the story I had been pursuing and was much more intrigued by the story. And who are these people? And who is Crazy Panties and who has steel teeth? It began a decade long obsession for
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me before getting to the Agatha Christie of it all. Let's start at the beginning.
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Okay, so Frederick Ritter was a doctor in Berlin. He was a World War I veteran and he was very traumatized by the war. He had nerve damage from gas inhalation and decided to go to medical school and invest in holistic healings and sort of devote his career to that. And he was working at a Berlin hospital when he met a woman by the name of Dorie Strach.
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Dori was Friedrich's patient. She suffered from multiple sclerosis.
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And now every other doctor told Dorie that she was incurable. Of course, Frederick says, you know what? You're choosing to be sick. You can actually cure yourself if you just put your mind to it.
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Dori was intrigued by this enigma of a man. He also frightened her, not because of his appearance, but because of his demeanor. She thought Friedrich seemed strangely absent of any amiability or compassion, but he was exceedingly charismatic. So much so that Dorrie began to think of him as one of the world's great geniuses. A mutual infatuation blossomed. And then a romance. It was a scandalous romance, not just because of the whole doctor patient thing, but because Friedrich and Dorri were both married. Friedrich told Dorri about his ambition to abandon modernity for a new life on some faraway island. Dori convinced Friedrich to take her with him. They each filed for divorce, but with a twist. They encouraged their spouses to marry one another, if not for love, then at least for the domestic convenience. And that's exactly what their spouses did.
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This is 1929. The Weimar Republic was falling at this time. Hitler was just starting to come into power, and of course, in the United States in October of 1929. So just a few short months after Dorian Frederick arrived in the Galapagos, the stock market crash crashes sending the world into a depression. Things became quite dire everywhere.
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It seemed like Friedrich and Dori had gotten out of dodge at just the right time. Then again, they knew that life in the Galapagos wouldn't be easy.
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If people don't know much about the Galapagos, they might envision this sort of idyllic, golden sand waving, palm trees, lush vegetation, which could not be further from the truth. The Galapagos are barren. A lot of the islands don't have any fresh water and aren't able to sustain any life at all. You know, humans have never been on a few of them, especially at this time period. And I think that Frederick fancied himself this sort of philosopher. He was the successor to Nietzsche in his mind, and he wanted that sort of dark challenge.
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Floriana was in the same southernmost part of the Galapagos. Friedrich and Dorey chose it because of its fresh water source, which would at least be enough to get a garden going. The island had a history of pirates, most notably the Irish seafarer Patrick Watkins, a drunken, murderous, all around terrifying character who'd become marooned on Floriana in 1807. Friedrich and Dorie spent their first night in one of the caves where Watkins had lived more than a century earlier.
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Dory was a very suspicious woman and sort of saw premonitions and dark foreboding signs everywhere she looked, and she was sure that the ghost of Patrick Watkins was haunting them as soon as they came to the island, and she got the sense that the island was not quite welcoming of them.
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Friedrich and Dori built a house about two and a half miles inland from the beach. It took a good 45 minutes to get there on foot, Walking uphill over jagged rocks formed by ancient lava. Their home had a porch, a kitchen, sleeping quarters, even a makeshift outdoor shower with fresh water piped from the nearby spring, which also supplied water to their crops. They christened their homestead freedo, a portmanteau of their names. Sounds charming until you consider the swarms of ants, the menacing wild boar, and the sand fleas that would burrow into Dory's skin, making her feet feel like they were on fire. Remember the earlier reference to Friedrich's teeth? He had had them removed and replaced with a set of steel dentures because, well, there were no dentists on Floriana. Then there was the matter of communicating with the outside world.
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The louvers would come from the mainland. There were people who made their living by going to separate islands and going back to the mainland and delivering goods back and forth and so on. You know, they were sort of at the mercy of the ship's schedules. There is a barrel called post office bay that was set up during the piracy times, where people would leave letters in this barrel down on the shore near the ocean, and passing ships would pick up the mail, take it to its destination. So it was sort of this primitive mail system. They did have contact with the outside world, but it was very infrequent and frustrating, I think, for them.
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One day in January 1930, an unexpected visitor arrived on Floriana. The Chicago radio tycoon Eugene macdonald.
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If you had money during this time period, the fashionable thing to do was to build these great exploratory yachts equipped with all the latest modern equipment to do some oceanic investigation. And he fancied himself this sort of rugged explorer. And he was going to go to the Galapagos islands and, you know, pick up rare flora and fauna and animals, and sort of maybe he would look for pirate treasure and he would report back. So he shows up in Floriana and sees the one thing he did not expect, which was Dorian Frederick. He had no idea that human beings were actually living on this island. He was shocked.
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Dori and Friedrich spoke with MacDonald about their utopian experiment. They talked about how wonderfully it was going, how life on Floriana was great, how they expected to live there for the rest of their days. In hindsight, they may have wished they'd kept their mouths shut, because now the cat was out of the bag. MacDonald went back to Chicago and told the press all about the remarkable couple he had encountered at the ends of the earth. That's when Friedrich and Dorey experienced the 1930s equivalent of going viral. Their stories splashed in newspapers from Los Angeles to New York, York to Berlin. Here's the Cincinnati Inquirer.
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In the lonely Galapagos, far off the coast of South America, a German doctor and a woman companion have been leading
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the lives of the Crusoes and the Sacramento Bee.
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Both gave up civilization for a back to nature like Adam and Eve existence
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and the Idaho statesmen.
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Alone on burned and fire blackened rocks 600 miles west of the Americas, A physician and philosopher, Friedrich Ritter of Berlin, Germany, will live his own life hereafter and with his helpmate Dorie Ritter, try to find on a desert island the peace that a modern civilization denies.
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And on and on and on.
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Everybody, especially in a bleak time like the depression, is just sort of, you know, awed by this idea and the fact that two people tried to do this. And it actually kind of sparked inspiration for people who wanted to flee their miserable lives at this time. You know, they're all suffering from the Great Depression. And what a dream it would be to actually flee civilization, start anew where money doesn't have any meaning or value. It just seemed like an idyllic thing to do. And of course the reality was very different. But now everybody knew about Dorian Frederick's experiment and they were not going to be alone for much longer.
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The media exposure encouraged other wealthy explorers to plot their own Galapagos expeditions. Lured by the prospect of meeting Floriana's Adam and Eve, George Allen Hancock first visited in 1931. He brought along a whole crew of scientists to study the island's exotic animals and flora. But he ended up being much more interested in the island's two exotic humans.
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We passed to the southward across the equator to the Galapagos Islands, which are located 600 miles west of Ecuador. We anchor at Black Beach Anchorage, Charles island, also known as Floriana, and are met by Dr. Ritter and Frau Dora Kerwin. They are greeting Captain Hancock and Dr. Schmidt who follows him out of the skiff as old friends. Just as soon as we have loaded up the donkey, we will begin a trek of 45 minutes. From Bat Beach Anchorage to Frito, their hermit home, they wear no clothing at all except when visitors arrive on their island.
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He befriended Dorian Frederick and really developed an interesting relationship with them. He became their closest confidant. They would tell Hancock things that they wouldn't tell each other.
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Hancock left the island knowing he would remain in touch with this world famous couple. Indeed, this would not be his last time on Floriana. His fascination was only just beginning. In the meantime, thousands of miles away, several other Utopia seekers were hatching plans to find follow in Friedrich and Dor's footsteps. The island, now a global sensation, would never be the same. Back in Germany, a couple named Heinz and Margaret Wittmer were were growing restless. Hitler was consolidating power and Heinz, a former military official in the Weimar Republic, worried about becoming a target of the Nazis. Plus the Wittmers figured that a tropical climate and fresh ocean air might benefit young Harry Wittmer, Heinz's sickly son from his first marriage. They read about Dory and Friedrich's adventures in the Galapagos. Then they booked passage to Floriana with no intention of looking back. Before establishing their own homestead. The Wittmers made the limb busting trek to Frido to pay their respects to Friedrich and Dori. Margret, by the way, was five months pregnant.
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Dori was kind of at first excited by the prospect of having a female friend. At this point, her relationship with Frederick is very volatile. Some days he's great, some days he's incredibly cruel. And she thought it might be nice to have a female confidant on the island. But the two women meet and it does not go well. Dory looks at Margaret and says what kind of idiot would want to give birth on this remote island? And Margaret looks at Dory and says what kind of idiot quotes Nietzsche On a remote island? Who cares? So they really just had two different temperaments and two different ideas of what living on Floriana should be.
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Meanwhile in Paris, a highborn Austrian woman was dreaming about starting her own new life on Floriana. The woman's legal name was a mouthful and a bit different than the one printed in those newspaper reports we quoted earlier.
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Antonia Henrica Jolie Wagner Wareborn Busquet, AKA
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the Baroness, AKA Crazy Panties.
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And she of course also had her of Frederick and Dory. And she would later claim that God came to her in a dream and ordered her to go to Floriana and conquer it. It was her island for the taking. And she decided to heed this, leaving behind her very colorful life in Paris. There's all Kinds of rumors swirling about her. You know, she is married to a French war hero, but she has orgies. She has these two lovers, Rudolph and Robert, living with her. There was rumors that she was stealing money from her own shop and not paying her debtors. There's rumors that men fought duels over her. There's rumors that she actually killed somebody in Paris and that's the reason she wanted to leave. But she's this woman of mystery. She's very charismatic, sort of a seductress, and very sure that she is going to go to Floriana and sort of conquer the island.
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It was October 1932 when the Baroness arrived in Floriana with her two young lovers, Robert Philipson and Rudolf Lorenz, who seemed more like manservants. She didn't exactly make a good first impression on Dory and Friedrich or the Wittmers. The baroness wasn't just haughty. There was something menacing about her. She bragged about how she was going to turn Floriana into the next Miami, with plans to build a grand hotel catering to American millionaires. She dipped her feet into the Wittmers drinking basin. When Heinz objected to her plan to share the family's fresh water supply, she brandished a pistol. Overall, she acted like a domineering aristocrat, although, for what it's worth, she actually was one.
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Nobody believes that she's actually a baroness. The irony being that she really is actually a baroness. In my research, I discovered that she earned the title from her grandfather. She came from a well to do family, not incredibly rich, but well to do, well connected, and certainly a respectable family. Immediately she just seems like she's going to bring ruin to everybody. Dorie writes in her diary that, you know, one way or another, this woman is going to cause the sort of death of our civilization here.
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The baroness settled into her own island compound, a sort of hedonistic pleasure den called Hacienda Paradiso. As time went on, the tensions between Floriana's motley inhabitants continued to escalate.
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So one of the biggest areas of contention is the explorers. So Hancock and his crew would come and visit, and of course they always brought gifts. They brought, you know, clothing and materials and tools and seeds and canned food and all of these things. And the settlers, you know, on Floriana started to fight over this. They would figure out ways to try to get Hancock not to visit the other ones or to give them more goods than somebody else. But it became a battle that just only grew more heated over time.
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Like when the baroness stole milk from The Wittmers, literally little bundle of joy.
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Hancock, when he visits, brings a lot of gifts for the baby. Tins of milk. The Baroness, at one point, she steals the entire supply that Hancock had brought for this baby.
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At the same time, visitors who offered the Baroness no benefit were met with hostility.
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There was one incident where a friend of Dorian Frederick's, who they knew from their beginning days on the island, came to hunt perfectly within his rights to do this on Floriana. But she meets him down at the shore with Rudolph and Robert and guns drawn, says, you're on my island. Get off my island.
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In another frightening incident, the Baroness actually fired a shot.
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The Baroness, she had a hobby of wounding animals and then nursing them back to health in the hope that they would remain forever loyal to her. So at one point she decides to test this theory on humans. And she always had an eye on the handsome young visitor to her. And there was one man in particular named Lind who caught her fancy. And they go out on a hunting trip with the idea that she was going to shoot Lind and nurse him back to health and of course he was going to fall in love with her. Well, she ends up shooting the wrong person and you know, it becomes sort of another incident where Frederick and Hines are just out of their minds with concern that this woman is going to going to kill them all.
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Friedrich and Heinz appealed to the governor of Ecuador about this crazy woman wreaking havoc on the island. Their plan backfired. When the governor visited Floriana. The Baroness charmed him into her good graces. He even invited her to accompany him on a vacation. In fact, the Baroness seemed to grow bolder by the day. She wanted to expand her fame beyond the newspaper headlines to break into Hollywood and become an actress. She convinced George Hancock to bring a film crew and shoot a silent movie about her. The movie's plot was based on a rumor that she had kidnapped a newlywed couple and chained them up as captors on the island. They called it the Empress of Floriana.
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You'll have to pardon our motion picture director who is bringing up the rear. Accustomed to trekking only along Hollywood Boulevard, he was not accustomed to seven miles of Galapagos lava. Fortunately, the home of the Viennese Baroness Wagner Bosque was not far away. Perhaps you remember reading about the so called Queen of the Galapagos Island. She is not beautiful, but yet attractive enough to have lured two European men to share her exile.
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The Baroness wasn't the only malevolent force threatening floriana in early 1934. The island was hit by a drought. Crops failed, animals died, Streams slowed to a trickle. Paradise was beginning to feel more like an inferno. As conditions deteriorated, so did Friedrich and Dorri's relationship. Friedrich was a controlling partner at turns critical and cruel. After several years cohabitating in the middle of nowhere, Dorey began to nurture a rebellious streak to defy Friedrich's will. She was realizing that she had her own things to say, her own decisions to make, and her own life to live. A similar dynamic was playing out over at the Hacienda Paradiso. Rudolph Lorenz was fed up with the baroness's tyranny, not to mention the preferential treatment she lavished on Rudolf's rival, Robert Philipson. Rudolph had grown increasingly miserable. Desperate to leave the island, he often sought refuge at Frito or the Wittmers Bavarian style cottage.
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The Baroness would actually stage physical fights between Rudolph and Robert. Robert, being the much bigger man, would always emerge victorious. And it wasn't just this physical abuse. The baroness verbally abused him, insulted him, threatened him to the point where Rudolph often just left the Hacienda Paradiso and would go stay with Margaret for a few days. Then he would bounce around and go to Dory's for a few days. With the drought happening, with everybody's crops failing, with Rudolph being cast aside, and confiding in Dory and Margaret about what's going on with the baroness, with Friedrich becoming increasingly cruel to Dory, with Dory rebelling, everything is starting to come to a head.
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It was as if Dory's premonitions that very first night in the spooky pirate cave were coming true. The island seemed to be turning against them. You could almost feel it in the broiling air. And yet there was nothing anyone could do. The only thing to do, really, was to wait for something else to happen. No one knew what that something was, but they had every reason to believe that it wouldn't be good. Okay, this is where the story really starts to get strange and convoluted. So stay with us. Here's Abbott Kahler.
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In March 1934, Dorie claims that she and Frederick were sitting at Frito. It was incredibly hot. They were just relaxing. And suddenly there was a gunshot and a woman's scream. And this is something that Dorie would insist that she heard later on, but it's not something that anybody else on the island heard. And it became sort of an important point in the mystery of what exactly happened on that day and in that month in Floriana.
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After the alleged gunshot and scream, the plot Thickened.
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Dory's telling. One day Margaret comes to Frito and says the Baroness and Robert are gone. They went off on an English boat with some friends. They went off to Tahiti. I don't know if they're coming back. And Dory thought this was strange, according to Dory. And everybody made a pilgrimage down to the Hacienda Paradiso to see exactly what was going on. And strangely enough, all of the Baroness and Philipson's things are still there. The thing is, I don't think Margaret believed it. I think that Rudolph is the one who told her that they had sailed off to Tahiti. It didn't really make sense to Margaret. Usually everybody in the island would know if a big ship was passing through, they would have seen it. Margaret, I think, you know, didn't know quite what to believe at this point. But she also didn't want to get Rudolph in trouble.
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Friedrich had his own theories about what had happened to Robert and the baroness. Or at least he knew what he wanted everyone to think he believed.
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Friedrich started to make the claim that Heinz had murdered the Baroness and Robert Philipson. And he was very vocal about this. But he was also vocal about the idea that the Baroness and Robert Phillipson walked into the ocean and decided to drown themselves. There was all kinds of theories that Frederick was saying. It seemed like with each new person he had a different, different theory about what had happened to them.
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As for Dory, she was suspicious of Rudolph from the get go. He had the clearest motive. After all, no one on the island was a fan of the baroness. Except maybe for Robert. But no one had been more abused by her than Rudolph. Dory didn't think he could have done it on his own. He was a small guy. It would have been difficult for him to single handedly overpower the Baroness and Robert, let alone contend with the dead weight of their corpses.
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I think that Dori starts suspecting that Frederick actually is the one who helped Rudolph dispose of the Baroness and Philipson. She never says this. I think, you know, it would be too terrible for her to admit. But I think she thought that that was the most likely scenario. And in the end decided to help him cover up this story by telling the story of this mysterious scream and gunshot in the middle of the day.
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In July, Rudolf finally got his wish to leave Floriana. A Norwegian fisherman offered him a ride on his boat back to the mainland. From there he could arrange passage to Germany. Rudolf's companions bid him farewell, knowing they would probably never see him again. Meanwhile, Hancock caught Wind of the latest developments, he had received panicked letters from Friedrich and Dory. He'd even received a letter from Robert's father, asking Hancock whether it is possible for you to inquire on my behalf if anybody could inform unfortunate parents of the fate of their only son. Hancock decided to go to Floriana to see if he could get to the bottom of it and to continue his Galapagos research while he was there. Two birds, one stone. Shortly before Hancock was set to depart on the Valero 3, he received some startling news.
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He gets a telegram that tells him that two bodies have been found on Martina island, which is in the northern part of the Galapagos and completely barren, has no fresh water source. So it's really strange that two bodies have washed up there.
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Two missing people, two dead bodies. Surely it wasn't a coincidence. Hancock and his Smithsonian researcher pals sailed straight for Marchena Island. The solution to the mystery of Robert and the Baroness seemed within their grasp.
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But when they got there, upon investigating, Captain Hancock finds a body which he recognizes as that of Nugerud, a sailor who died clutching a coil of rope. 25ft away was the desiccated body of
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Lorenzo, as in Rudolph Lorenz, whom we
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last saw feeding the donkey in the company of the baroness. These men had died of thirst and not of hunger, for all about was food to be had.
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Like the pirate Patrick Watkins before them, Rudolf and the Norwegian fishermen found themselves marooned in the Galapagos. Except they'd washed ashore on the wrong island. Because Markena had no fresh water supply. Help had come too late for this unlucky pair. If Rudolph harbored any secrets about the fate of his missing companions, he had taken them to the grave. Now Hancock really had a mystery on his hands for Marchena. He raced to Floriana aboard the Valero. When Hancock arrived, he found Dory on the beach. Sobbing.
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She tells Hancock that Frederick has died. And she recounts this very strange story that begins with the fact that they finally gave up all pretense of being vegetarians and decide that they have to kill and eat one of their chickens. So Frederick is, as Dory tells it, he was preparing the chicken, and by the time they went to eat it several days later, it did not smell good. Dory claims to have taken one bite and thrown it out. But Frederick ate all of the chicken and, you know, suddenly afterward was exhibiting signs of being in distress. He started slurring his words. He couldn't talk, his breathing began labored, and Dorie just didn't know what to do. According to her story, she sat there as he got sicker and sicker. Another day passed. And finally when he seemed to be on his deathbed, she decides to go over and find. And it's quite a walk for Dory. You know, she has multiple sclerosis. She has a bad leg that pains her when she walks on it for a long time. And she goes to Margaret and says, you know, Frederick's in trouble. And Margaret immediately goes back with Dory to Frito to see what's going on with Frederick.
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The two women sat with Friedrich in his final hours.
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Dori and Margaret have very conflicting stories about much of what happened on Floriana. But I think their stories on what happened to Frederick are the most drastic and interesting. Dorie claims that Frederick reached up to her, looked at her with loving eyes, sort of conveyed to her silently that he would be with her always and how much love they shared in this very tender moment. And Margaret says that Frederick said, I curse you with my dying breath. And then he died.
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Two of Floriana's nine permanent residents were now dead. Another two were presumed dead. Hancock listened to the surviving residents stories and tried to make sense of it all. Dory's worst fears had come true. Floriana was no Eden. It was a place of death and destruction. Six years earlier, she had had every intention of spending the rest of her life here. Now all she wanted was to go home. On December 7, Dorie made one last walk from Frito to Black Beach. As her belongings were loaded into a dinghy that would transport her to the Valero, she said goodbye to the Wittmers. Then, with tears, tears in her eyes, she took Hancock's hand and left Floriana forever. On board the ship, Hancock sent a cable to Los Angeles with an update about her condition. Dorie, leaving on Valero 3 for trans ship to Germany, was hysterical but improving. As the Valero sailed back to the mainland, Floriana became engulfed in yet another media frenzy. The intrigue swirling around this group of eccentric European exiles was simply too good to be true.
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A tropical paradise like this on the equator holds the solution to the mysterious deaths of two castaways on a desert isle in the trackless Pacific. The Galapagos Islands, scene of the tragedy, are 500 miles due west of Ecuador, to which they belong. These last motion pictures made of the weird colony show you the only ones who know the mystery of the Galapagos tragedy. Among the group of colonists was Alfred Lorenz, reported as one of the castaways found dead. Lorenz companions on the island were Baroness de Wagner of Vienna and Robert Philipson, shown here. After a quarrel with Lorenz, they vanished. Are they dead or alive? What is the fate of this Empress of Eden?
- [37:09]
C
While journalists feasted on the story, the Ecuadorian authorities conducted an investigation. Hancock provided Dori with two Spanish speaking translators who may have helped finesse her account. She was cleared of suspicion. On the journey home, Dorie became less withdrawn. She felt as if a burden had been lifted. She was finally free from Floriana, from Friedrich's domination, and from the dark chain of events that had shattered her faith in Utopia. As for the official inquiries, they just
- [37:48]
F
ruled Frederick's death as an accident or natural causes. Nothing nefarious. She wasn't charged with anything. And the Baroness and Philipson? You know, nobody knows. There was no conclusion drawn at all since their bodies were never found. So there's not really any more investigating they could do.
- [38:06]
C
Back in Germany, with Hitler now fully in power, Dori settled into a different society than the one she had left in 1929. To make ends meet, she took on speaking gigs and published a memoir. Many of its details diverged from a competing memoir published by Margaret Vidmer. Which of the two books offers the more truthful account? We'll never know for sure. Dorie died of complications from multiple sclerosis on May 11, 1943, at the age of 42. By then, Hancock had stopped returning Dorie's letters, which had grown increasingly desperate due to her failing health and lack of funds. Hancock did, however, continue his exploration of the Galapagos. Scientists who accompanied him on his missions often wondered just how much he knew about the chilling events of 1934. One of these researchers later wrote, it was the general understanding that the only one of Hancock, Hancock's people who had gotten the whole story of what happened to the Baroness and Philipson was Captain Hancock and that what he knew would die with him. The happy ending in this story belongs to the Wittmers. They remained on Floriana and lived a fulfilling life, including the birth of a second child, a daughter named Ingeborg Florianita Abbott. Kaler met Florianita when she traveled to the island during research for Eden Undone. She toured both hotels the Wittmers had established. And she visited the storied pirate caves where Friedrich Dorey and the Wittmers all sheltered before building their homes.
- [40:07]
F
So you were saying that the Ritter's a six kilometers from here?
- [40:10]
H
Yeah, the six kilometers from Ritter.
- [40:13]
F
Okay. And here's the second bedroom of the pirate cave. That's really cool. So if they got into a fight, they could kick Heinz over Here
- [40:25]
C
Eden Undone was published in September 2024. One year later, Ron Howard released his film Eden, starring Jude Law as Friedrich, Vanessa Kirby as Dorrie, and Ana de Armas as the Baroness. During a CBS interview, Howard said he first learned of the story while vacationing on the Galapagos with family.
- [40:48]
J
I didn't stop talking about it and started reading about it, and, you know, and there are accounts by the survivors, and they contradict each other. The screenwriter Noah Pink and I started working on it four or five years ago in more detail, you know, and we've tried to fill in some of the gaps.
- [41:04]
C
Abbott Kaler knows the feeling. After immersing herself in this story for more than a decade, she has her own ideas about what really happened on Floriana nearly a century ago and about the lessons to be learned from this wild and tragic saga.
- [41:22]
F
I think that Dory intentionally let Frederick die. I think that Rudolph did kill the Baroness and Robert Philipson with Frederick's help. The big mystery to me is, what did they do with the bodies? You know, and that's something that people on Floriana still talk about to this day. I think one of the lessons of this tale is that utopia is subjective, which makes Utopia impossible. If everybody has a different version of Utopia, it's impossible to create it. You can sort of always imagine the idea that you can escape your problems if you only just change your location. But, of course, your problems just go right along with you. They're inescapable. Utopia is impossible because human beings are fallible. And I do think Dory should have heeded the warning of Floriana in the beginning.
- [42:14]
D
All right, well, this one actually has been a movie, but, Zarin, if you want to cast your own version, there's no reason why we can't try to top Ron Howard here.
- [42:23]
C
Yeah. Cast a better version.
- [42:25]
F
I.
- [42:25]
E
Honestly, guys, I have to admit, I saw The Ron Howard 2025 Eden, and I looked at his cast, and I was like, darn, he really nailed it up. Yeah. I mean, that was like Jude Law for Dr. Friedrich Ritter and then, like, Vanessa Kirby for Frau Dora Strauss and Ana de Armas as Crazy Panties, AKA Baroness Eloise. I was like, those are all strong. I don't think I can top this one. So I mostly focused on the quote about Utopia is subjective, which makes Utopia impossible. And I thought, that's one of the coolest quotes we've done yet.
- [42:54]
D
Does anyone have any very special moment or character discussion for this one?
- [42:58]
E
I do actually have one is when Baroness Eloise, AKA Crazy Panties, when she steals milk from a baby. I was like, wow.
- [43:06]
C
I mean, it's gonna be the baroness. If someone is in the episode, who is a baroness, it's like, okay, you know, we should be paying attention.
- [43:13]
E
Yeah, it has to be her.
- [43:17]
A
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zarin Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs. Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Additional editing by Mary Dew. Voice actor is Chris Childs. Original Music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Social clips by Yarberry Media. Our executive producer is Jason English. Berry Special episodes is a production of I heart Podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.
- [44:12]
F
Guaranteed Human.