Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: The Galapagos Affair 1

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

In 1929, a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch, sailed to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos to escape what they believed was the worst of human nature. For two years, they had the place to themselves. Then, drawn by Friedrich's articles in the European press, other settlers began to follow. A practical German family arrived in 1932, then a self-styled Austrian Baroness with two younger lovers, who declared the island her personal kingdom and announced plans for a luxury hotel. Within months, the tiny colony was buckling under jealousy, accusations, and the kind of grudges that have nowhere to go on an island just a few miles wide. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy is joined by Daisy Eagan, host of Strange and Unexplained, to trace the rise of the so-called paradise, the strange settlers who built it, and the slow unraveling that would soon turn the Enchanted Islands into one of the strangest unsolved cases of the 20th century.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting. I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends,

and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. Every so often, somebody decides the world is too much. Too loud, too cruel, too crowded. And they go looking for a place to disappear. Most of us take a long weekend. But in 1929, a German doctor.

and the woman he loved went looking for a place where the rest of the human race could never reach them. They found it on a speck of volcanic rock in the Pacific, an island called Floriana in the Galapagos. Now the Galapagos have a nickname that goes back centuries. Sailors called them Las Encanadas, the enchanted islands, not because they were charming, but because they seemed to move. Ships would sail straight for them and watch them vanish into the mist, like the islands didn't want to be found. And yet, people kept finding them. In fact, a place that seemed to swallow ships whole turned out to be exactly what a certain kind of person was looking for. Somewhere the rest of the world couldn't follow. But there's a pattern to Floriana that's hard

to ignore. People kept coming here to start over, and one by one, the island found ways to make sure they never left. That German doctor and the woman he loved were only the beginning. Others read about their escape and came chasing the same dream, until a handful of strangers were all sharing one tiny island, and it didn't take long for paradise to turn on them. By 1934, the little colony on Floriana was falling apart. People were vanishing. Bodies were turning up in the strangest places or not turning up at all. And almost 100 years later, nobody can tell you for sure what happened.

People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show.

And for early, ad-free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or tap try-free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. And I have some exciting news. For the next two episodes, I'll be joined by a very special guest, Daisy Egan, host of Strange and Unexplained. Thanks for having me, Carter. I'm really excited to be here. I don't know anything about this story, and I can't wait to hear all about it.

It is incredible. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. Now, that's exactly what I wanted to hear, in fact, for these episodes. For everyone listening, if you're not already following strange and unexplained, go do that right now. Every week, Daisy digs into the stories that sit just past the edge of what we can explain. Hauntings, vanishings, the case. that don't add up. She brings real curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism to these stories,

which is exactly the right way to come at this one. Yeah, like I told you before when we were chatting, I came into this knowing pretty much nothing at all. I'm sure it ends the same way most cults do, but I cannot wait to hear the ins and outs. Oh my, it is astonishing. This case has receipts and unfortunately almost no answers. So here's how this is going to work. Daisy is going to introduce these next two episodes. I'll take you through the story, and then she's coming back at the end of Part 2 for a longer conversation once you've heard the whole thing. You are not going to want to miss that. Now let's get into it.

This is the first of two episodes on the Galapagos Affair, a chain of disappearances and deaths among a tiny group of European settlers who moved to a remote island in the Pacific in the early 1930s. They came looking for paradise. What they found was something else entirely. Today, Carter's going to introduce you to these settlers, starting with the idolistic doctor and his partner who started at all. He'll walk you through what happened when more people followed them to the island, and how a place that was supposed to be an escape from human nature ended up bringing out the worst of it. Next time, Carter gets into the heart of the story, what actually happened to these people and the wildly different accounts, survivors gave once it was all over. Each one had a version that made them look innocent, and someone else looked guilty. None of them ever lined up, and almost a hundred years later,

this case is still unsolved. All that and more? Coming up. Before anyone in our story ever set foot on Floriana, the island already had a reputation, and it wasn't a good one. The Galapagos are a chain of islands off the coast of Ecuador, sitting right on the equator. They're famous now for two things. One is Charles Darwin, who studied the wildlife there in the 1830s and used what he saw to develop his theory of natural selection. The other is the animals themselves. The marine iguanas, the blue-footed boobies, and the giant tortoises, the biggest in the world that sometimes live past 100. The animals thrived. because no one bothered them.

And that's because, for most of human history, almost nobody wanted to live there. The islands are beautiful with a warm, tropical climate. They're also volcanic, dry and short on fresh water. To early sailors, they didn't feel like paradise at all. In fact, the sailors had a name for them, Las and Canadas, the enchanted islands. The currents and the thick sea mist here were,

so treacherous that ships could lose sight of land for hours as if the place kept slipping out from under them. To an exhausted crew running low on water, the Galapagos didn't feel enchanting. They felt bewitched. And the few who did try to live there, it usually didn't end well for them. The first known resident of Floriana was an Irish sailor named Patrick Watkins, who got marooned on the island around 1807. He survived for two years, growing vegetables and trading them to passing whalers, mostly for rum. By the time another ship's captain wrote about him, Watkins had basically gone feral. He was wild-haired, sunburned, half-naked, and according to the captain, terrifying to look at. When Watkins finally left, he talked five sailors into boarding a stolen boat with him and rowing for

the mainland. The boat reached Ecuador, but only Watkins was still on it. The other five men had simply vanished somewhere out on the open water. No one ever learned what happened to them. Now, I'll be honest with you, this is exactly the kind of detail that makes a place like Floriana feel cursed. But there's nothing supernatural about a barren island being hard to survive on. people ran out of water, people turned on each other, that's not a ghost story, that's just what isolation does to human beings. But it does set the stage, and long before our settlers arrived, Floriana was already a place where people came to escape the world and then quietly disappeared from it.

Things started to change around 1920. Ecuador wanted to strengthen its claim to the Galapagos and the government needed money, so it made an offer to Europeans. Come settle the islands and will give you free land and tax exemptions. The people who took that deal were not your average families. They tended to be political outcasts, members of religious fringe groups, and dreamers chasing a simpler life. Most of them headed for the two largest islands, San Cristobal and Santa Cruz, where supply ships came through every few months and small farming communities could just about survive.

But not everyone wanted to build a community. One couple wanted the opposite. They didn't want neighbors or supply ships or a village. They wanted to cut themselves off completely from what they saw as the evils of humans. human society. Their names were Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Dora Strouk. Of the two of them, Friedrich was the clear leader. He was born in Germany in 1886, and from a young age, he felt like an outsider. He was smaller than the other boys and got sick more often, which left him feeling weak and insecure. school made it worse. The teachers in his town were harsh and for whatever reason, Friedrich was a favorite

target. He later said that one day when he was eight years old, a teacher hit him so hard it scarred him for life. Somehow he pushed through all of it. He finished school and started studying medicine. He came out of his shell and in 1906 at 20 years old, while he was still in school, he married a singer named Mila. With his help, Mila's career took off and for a while, they were happy. Then in 1914, World War I broke out. Friedrich, who was 28, volunteered for the front lines. The war changed him forever. He never said much about what he saw in the trenches. Whatever it was, it was worse than anything as rough childhood. had prepared him for. He came home convinced that human nature was fundamentally broken,

that whenever different groups of people tried to live side by side, violence was inevitable. To him, society itself was the disease. But for a while, after the war, he tried to go back to normal. He became a doctor like he'd planned, and that's when things started to come apart. his wife Mila wanted to stop singing. She wanted to settle down, have children, and run a household. To most people in the 1920s, that would have sounded completely ordinary. To Friedrich, it was a betrayal. He believed traditional family life corrupted the soul, and he refused to allow it.

He also still wanted her income from singing, so he pushed her to keep performing and give up the idea. of kids. Mila gave in, but the marriage was hollow now. There was never any room to compromise with Friedrich. He took the hardest possible line on everything. He believed, among other things, that people could cure their own illnesses through sheer willpower. It's a strange belief for a doctor, but Friedrich dressed it up in the psychological language of the day. He didn't reject medicine outright, he preached something he called the power of thought, the idea that the mind could overcome the body. And that message landed hard with one of his patients. A woman in her mid-20s

named Dora Strouk. Dora had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that can cause muscle weakness, fatigue, and problems with coordination. She was also unhappily married to a man twice her age, and she dreaded the idea of spending her life as a housewife. When she told Friedrich all this, he didn't brush her off. He listened. He told her she didn't have to accept the life she'd been handed, not her marriage and not even her illness. And he understood her restlessness, because he felt it too. The two of them started spending long afternoons together on the roof of his medical practice, looking up at the sky and talking about running away from the city to live somewhere wild and free. It didn't take long for

the relationship to turn romantic. When Dora's husband found out and tried to put a stop to it, she flatly refused to end the affair. Eventually, he gave up trying. By then, Dora only had eyes or her doctor and only had eyes for might be underselling it. By every account, Dora was completely devoted to Friedrich. To her, he was a genius and a philosopher and her soulmate all in one. She put him on a pedestal so high, it's hard to imagine anyone living up to it. For his part, Friedrich saw Dora as his one true student, the only person who really understood him, the one person who gave him the validation he craved.

They needed each other in a way that wasn't entirely healthy, but it was real and soon they started talking about leaving, not just the marriages they were both unhappy in, but everything. The city, Germany, civilization itself, to go live alone on some remote patch of wilderness, and start over with nothing but each other in Friedrich's ideas. It was a beautiful dream, but the reality was a lot more complicated. By the late 1920s, Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Doris Strouk had spent two years in Berlin imagining the same impossible future, leaving behind their marriages, their country, in the modern world itself to start over alone somewhere wild.

Plenty of people would have left it at that. A fantasy they talked about and never acted on. Friedrich and Doro were not those people. By 1929, they'd even picked the spot. Floriana Island, an uninhabited stretch of the Galapagos about 30 miles from the nearest settlement. The only thing left to figure out,

was their spouses. Neither of them actually dislike the people they were married to. They just felt trapped. So they came up with a solution that's honestly hard to believe. They'd swap. Friedrich's wife, Mila, could go live the traditional settled life she wanted with Dora's husband. Getting Dora's husband to agree turned out to be the easy part.

Mila was the holdout. At first, she wanted nothing to do with moving in with an older man she'd never even met, but the only other option was clinging to a marriage to a man who didn't want her. In the end, she gave in. Back home, the whole arrangement was a scandal. Friedrich didn't care. He was leaving it all behind. There's one more detail from those final weeks that tells you everything about him.

him. Before they left, Friedrich pulled out all of his teeth on purpose. He figured there'd be no dentist on Floriana, so rather than risk a toothache a thousand miles from help, he had a set of stainless steel dentures made instead. When Dora's own teeth started to go bad on the island later, the two of them ended up sharing that single metal set. It's a grim. image, but it's the perfect snapshot of Friedrich Ritter, a man so certain he could outthink nature that he'd reach for a pair of pliers to prove it. On July 4, 1929, Friedrich and Dora boarded a boat bound for Ecuador. They arrived that August, only to learn the next ship to the Galapagos wouldn't leave for another month. They'd sold off everything they owned to pay for the

trip, so they spent those weeks barely scraping by, stretching the last of their money. Finally, on September 19, 1929, they set foot on Floriana. From the water, it wasn't much to look at. A thorny beach, a small patch of forest, a few herds of wild cattle wandering amongst the giant tortoises. But to Friedrich and Dora, it was heaven. They found a spot downstream from one of the island's few freshwater springs, and they built a home. They named it, Frito, a blend of their two names, with Friedrichs, of course, going first.

After years of dreaming, they'd finally done it. They had the solitude they'd been chasing. Dora later wrote that their first night on the island was the happiest of her life. It wouldn't stay that way. for long. Living off the land turned out to be a lot harder than they'd imagined. They were alone with no doctor but Friedrich, no supplies but what they'd carried,

and nothing but their own two hands. Friedrich wanted to get to work immediately, and Dora was happy to follow his lead. They found their water source, built a rough hut, and turned to the hardest problem of all, food. Both of them were strict vegetarians, by principle, and that ruled out the wild cattle and the fish, so they lived on guava, pigeon peas, and whatever else they could grow or forage, plus a stash of seeds they'd brought from Germany

to start a small farm. A lot of people would have quits, plenty of settlers before them had, but Friedrich and Dora were true believers, convinced that grit alone could carry them through, And slowly, it sort of did. After 18 months of relentless work, they had something close to a real home. They washed their clothes and they cooked over an open fire with homemade tools. A cargo ship came by every six to eight months to collect their mail and trade for basic goods. Now and then, colonists from other islands would stop by. But here's the thing nobody back in Germany knew.

Dora was miserable. No matter how much they built, Friedrich's mind was always on the next task. He rarely talked except to give orders or lecture her on his philosophy. She still worshipped him, but after a year and a half with no other company, she was starving for an actual conversation. And there was a deeper problem. Friedrich was her teacher and her partner, but he was a cold. old one. He didn't show much warmth and allegedly he even beat her. Mostly, he complained

about her health. Remember, Dora had multiple sclerosis. Some days her symptoms made it impossible to do the heavy labor the island demanded. That frustrated Friedrich to no end. He promised her she could beat the disease with her mind and pushed her to work even on days she could barely stand. So Dora blamed herself. She decided her body was failing because she wasn't strong enough and Friedrich's coldness

drove the point home. And you can imagine how lonely that was. Which is why on January 3rd, 1932, she was overjoyed when a ship full of visitors anchored off the island. It turned out Friedrich and Dora

were famous and they had no idea. Back in Germany, one of their relatives had leaked their letters home to the newspapers. For a couple of years now, sensational stories had been spreading about the doctor and his mistress living naked in the wilderness, building some kind of unholy little Eden far from civilization. And naturally, people were curious. This particular group was a scientific expedition, and they expected to find a pair of wild eccentrics. Instead, they met two well-spoken intellectuals, and they spent a perfectly pleasant afternoon together.

For Dora, it was a lifeline. For Friedrich, it was an intrusion. He was especially upset to learn he was a laughingstock back home. Still, the visitors won him over a little. They left the couple some gifts, a stove, oil for a lamp, and soap, and Friedrich waved them off warmly enough. Then he told Dora he hoped those would be the last guests for a while. But he didn't get his wish, and in a way it was his own fault.

After that first visit, Friedrich stude, he'd given up the world, but it aided him that the world was gossiping about him. So he started writing articles about his life on the island, partly to set the record straight, partly to spread his philosophy. The mail ship carried them off, and they ran in German newspapers months later. Unsurprisingly, that only fed the fire. The articles pulled in more attention, not less. Over the next couple of years, a steady stream of wealthy travelers and scientific parties rerouted their voyages just to gawk at the famous hermits.

One regular was an American millionaire named Alan Hancock, who came down on his own research yacht more than once, and that was only the beginning. By the summer of 1932, Friedrich and Dora had been on the island for nearly three years. Their garden was thriving. The weather was good. It should have been another perfect day in, paradise. But on August 28th of that year, Friedrich looked out at the ocean and saw the thing

he dreaded most. A small boat crossing the horizon, dropping anchor right off his beach. There wasn't supposed to be a ship for months, so Friedrich and Dora knew right away something was off. They hurried down to the shore and watched a family climb out of a dingy. They were Heinz and Margaret Vitmer, and Heinz's 12-year-old son from an earlier marriage, a boy named Harry. Friedrich took one look and scowled.

His newspaper articles had done their job a little too well. Heinz Whitmer had read Friedrich's writing and been inspired by it. Harry's health had been failing back in Germany, and Heinz couldn't afford a long time. hospital stay. He decided what the boy really needed was a change of climate. Fresh air and hard work, exactly like the famous Dr. Ritter prescribed. Of course, you can't call ahead to an island with no phones. So the Vitmers did what Friedrich and Dora had done. They sold everything and took a leap of faith. The Vitmers clearly expected a warm welcome. They didn't

get one. Friedrich was especially rattled to learn that Margaret was pregnant. They'd assume that having a doctor on the island was a stroke of luck. Surely he'd help deliver the baby and share what he knew. It was the opposite. Friedrich and Dora were deeply unimpressed with their new neighbors. Hines and Margaret weren't intellectuals. Margaret in particular was exactly the kind of down-to-earth, traditional wife and mother that Friedrich had spent his whole life railing against, and the family had no grand philosophy. They'd mostly come on a hope and a prayer. But it was too late for second thoughts.

The next ship was months away, and the Vitmers had no money for a trip home anyway. They were staying. Friedrich decided to draw a line early on, rather than let the Vitmers settle near Frida, he marched them inland to an old cave near another freshwater spring. A century earlier, that same cave had sheltered pirates. The area is known today as Asilo de la Paz,

which translates a little too optimistically to Haven of Peace. It wasn't a terrible spot, aside from a long walk to the beach, and the Vittmers got the message fast. This was not the dream the newspapers had sold them, and their only neighbors couldn't stand them. So they did the only thing they could. They dug in, scratching out a life with almost no help from Friedrich and Dora. And here's the thing, they were good at it, really good. Where Friedrich preached survival, the Vitemers actually survived.

They were practical, tireless, and they learned. Over the next few weeks, the chill between the two households thawed just a little. Friedrich still kept his distance, and he still flatly refused to be Margaret's doctor, but the two families reached a kind of truce. There was even a moment where it seemed like they might all coexist. Then, on October 15, 1932, another boat that shouldn't have been there drifted toward the beach. and when three new arrivals stepped onto the sand, nobody could hide their dismay.

On October 15, 1932, three new settlers landed on Floriana, bringing the island's population to eight. Three years earlier, Friedrich Ritter and Doris Strouk had come here to get away from human society. Now there was a whole little neighborhood, whether they liked it or not. and the woman in charge of this latest group was something else entirely.

Her full name was Eloise Verborn Wagner Buske, but she called herself the Baroness. She was 39 years old, and she'd arrived with two much younger men, both in their 20s, Robert Philipson and Rudolph Lawrence, and almost right away she'd gotten on everyone's nerves. Without asking anyone, she set up camp right across the stream from the Vitmer's Cave. She announced that she intended to build a luxury hotel on the island,

a resort for wealthy American friends, which she planned to call Hacienda Paradiso, Paradise Ranch. I want to be careful with the Baroness because she's the easiest person in this story to turn into a cartoon. the truth is, we know surprisingly little about who she really was before Floriana, and a lot of what she said about herself turned out to be invented, so it's hard to know where the real woman ended and the character began. But what the other settlers saw was a woman who treated her two young companions, like servants,

and told stories so wild that people assumed she was joking. She wasn't. She informed the others more or less on arrival that the entire island of Floriana now belonged to her. Friedrich was appalled. Coming to the Galapagos to build a resort and make money was the exact opposite of everything he believed. And from the moment the Baroness landed, he was convinced she was going to wreck his whole experiment. He turned out to be right. He just had no idea how.

Exactly a month after the baroness arrived, two settlers from a larger island stopped by Floriana to hunt. People did this from time to time. The wild cattle were free for the taking, and nobody minded, least of all Friedrich and Dora, who didn't eat meat anyway. But when the baroness heard a gunshot, she came charging out to confront the hunters with Robert at her side.

Both of them were armed. She had a revolver. He had a rifle. She screamed at the bewildered men that the whole island was hers and that they'd just killed one of her animals. Then she allegedly ordered Robert to beat them. He managed to rip the shirt off one of them before the two hunters bolted into the woods

and ran straight for Frito. When the hunters told Friedrich what had happened, he was furious. but Friedrich is no fighter, so instead of confronting the baroness, he wrote a strongly worded letter about her and asked the hunters to deliver it to the governor of the Galapagos. And then he sat there and hated himself for it. The entire point of Floriana was to live beyond society and its rules. Now here he was appealing to a government official to settle a dispute because one woman had

turned his paradise into something else entirely. His grand mission was unraveling, and it had taken just a handful of neighbors to do it. And the worst part was that the letter didn't change anything. The baroness carried on exactly as before, and the family that lived closest to her, the Vittmer's, was about to go through something far more frightening than a property dispute. The baby was due at the end of the year, and Margaret would be giving birth in a cave, with no real medical supplies beyond bandages and soap. The family hadn't spoken to Friedrich about the pregnancy since the day they'd met, but when Margaret went into labor on December 30, 1932, her husband Heinz insisted on calling the doctor. Margaret refused.

For two full days, she labored in the back of the cave trying to deliver the baby herself. By New Year's, she was in serious trouble. At one point, while Heinz was out hunting, the pain got to be too much. Margaret staggered out of the cave to scream for him and fainted in the woods. When she came to a few minutes later, she could hear a baby crying in the grave. grass beside her. It was a boy. Heinz raced back, cut the umbilical cord, scooped up the baby and got his wife back to bed. The newborn was somehow perfectly healthy. Margaret was not. After a couple more hours of agony, she finally begged Heinz to go get Friedrich. The run to Frito took Heinz

nearly an hour. Then another hour to convince Friedrich to come and gather his supplies. By the time the two men reached Margaret, three hours had passed since she'd asked for help. She was barely hanging on. It's not entirely clear what was wrong, but Friedrich decided he had to operate immediately. And for once, the Vitmer saw a different side of him. The cranky philosopher was gone. He was a careful, competent doctor. That didn't make it any easier. He had no anesthetic. He had to operate on Margaret while she was fully awake.

The pain was unimaginable. But Margaret refused to give Friedrich the satisfaction of hearing her cry out. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was spite. Maybe both. Either way, she got through the whole thing without making a sound. When it was over, the two families had a new respect for each other.

Friedrich had saved Margaret's life, and he wouldn't take a cent for it. He said he was simply impressed by how brave she'd been. The Vitmers named the baby Rolf. He was born on January 1, 1933, and was the first child born. born on Floriana, and is often described as the first documented birth in the Galapagos. For a little while, that baby actually softened things on Floriana. Even the baroness came by with some clothes for him, and Orr was thrilled that the island finally had a native-born citizen.

Those good feelings lasted about a month. On January 26, 1933, a scientific, expedition came by on its annual visit. A year earlier, there had only been two settlers to meet. Now the visitors were stunned to find eight people on the island, and even more stunned to learn that none of them got along. The scientists, against Friedrich's wishes, invited all eight residents aboard their ship. Almost immediately, the Baroness and Dora got into it. The argument got so heated that the crew had to physically pull the two women apart. And that was just the warm-up. Right before the ship left, a second fight broke out. The visitors had brought gifts that were

originally meant for Friedrich and Dora, since they hadn't even known the other settlers existed. But the baroness demanded the goods be split evenly. Friedrich refused. In the end, he and Dora kept everything for themselves. It was a petty move, and it broke his own rules. In his writing, Friedrich condemned greed and the hunger for possessions. But the second arrival wanted to share, he took it all just to spite her. With attitudes like that, on a tiny island, the tension wasn't going anywhere. As 1933 wore on, the feud just kept getting worse.

The Baroness stayed public enemy number one. grading on Friedrich and Dora, and especially the Vittmer's next door. Now, here's one example of why. The Vittmers once bought a bag of rice from the supply ship, using a tiny bit of the cash they had left, a nest egg that was nearly gone. On the day the ship came in, the baroness offered to go down to the beach

and pick up their goods for them. The Vitmer said yes, figuring it was just a neighborly favor. But Margaret said that when they went to collect, their rice, the baroness tried to charge them a storage fee for holding it at her place. When they refused to pay, she simply kept the rice. For the Vitmers, that was the last straw. They had almost no money, and losing that rice meant losing food they badly needed. The baroness never even apologized. She just carried on like nothing had happened. And then things got even worse.

The weather turned on all of them. The rainy season was supposed to come at the end of 1933. It didn't. Month after month went by with no rain. And Floriana's fresh water started to run dry. By the spring of 34, the conflict was reaching a boiling point. In March, the crops began to wither. The Baroness and her two men were hit hardest of anyone because they had the worst land.

From their cave, the Vintmers could hear the three of them screaming at each other through the night. And in the mornings, they noticed Rudolph walking around with a black eye and bruises. Things at the Baroness's camp were clearly going very wrong. Finally, Heinz walked down to Frito to talk to Friedrich and Dora. He argued that the settlers should band together and do something about the baroness. He said she was out of control and somebody had to rein her in. Friedrich and Dora shook their heads. This was exactly the kind of mess they'd come to Floriana to avoid.

They wanted no part of it. Heinz left in a huff. But Heinz was right. Things had gone too far to ignore. Within weeks, people on that island would start to vanish. One settler would walk off and never be seen again. Another would turn up dead in a place that made no sense, and the survivors would spend the rest of their lives telling stories that never quite fit together.

Friedrich Ritter had come to Floriana certain that he had. human beings packed together would always turn to violence. He had built his whole life around escaping that fate. In the end, on his own remote little island, with only seven other people for company, he was about to be proven right. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories.

Come back next time for Part 2. on the Galapagos Affair and all the people it affected, and Daisy Egan from Strange and Unexplained, will be right here with me to help untangle it. Murder True Crime Stories is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios here at Crimehouse. We want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today,

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This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Roman DiAngelo, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting.

I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first first. 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.