SYMHC Classics: History Mystery Double Feature

Published Oct 29, 2022, 1:26 PM

This 2015 episode features two troubling tales from the 1920s. First, newlyweds that vanished on what would have been a historic boating trip. Second, a family murdered by someone who may have been hiding in their house for weeks or months.

Happy Saturday. It is the last Saturday before Halloween. So today's classic is a particularly creepy episode. It is our October History Mysteries double feature. Many listeners have written into talking about how creepy they find this one. Uh so know that, and in it we talk about the disappearance of Glenn and Bessie Hyde as well as the hinter Kfik murders. So enjoy Happy Halloween. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly Frying and I'm Tracy be Wilson. So today, since we are officially in the Halloween season and in a Halloween mood, which I always am, We're gonna do something kind of similar to the two six Impossible episodes we've had in the past, but these are gonna be two, So it's kind of like a history Mystery to feature, and it's going to be two unsolved mysteries completely unrelated except for the fact that they both took place in the nineteen twenties and both of these topics have been requested by listeners. Both are really quite fascinating, but because of the open ended nature of each of them and a relative lack of evidence. Trying to piece together an entire episode on each would have involved a lot of speculation rather than actual history. So we're sticking to actual things we know for the most part, and you're getting a two for one. So also, I wanted to include a quick trigger warning. This episode does include the discussion of some rather gory and violent things, including violence against children. We're not going to get especially graphic about it. But if that's something that you're just not comfortable hearing about in any form, or if you have younger listeners that you would rather shield from that for the moment, the second story in our duo might not be for you. So first we're going to get started with the story of Glenn and Bessie Hyde, and this one was requested most recently by our listener Joseph. In ninety eight, newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hide decided to start their marriage by trying to make history. They're going to travel the entire length of the Grand Canyon by boat. So if that doesn't sound all that ambitious to you, please rest assured that, in fact, it was up to that point. Remember this is only forty five people had managed to travel the full length of the Grand Canyon by river, and a woman had never done it, and Bessie wanted to be the first, and Glenn wanted to be the fastest. The forty five who had successfully made the trip before the Hides had all done so in rowboats, some of them modified, but Glen and Bessie wanted to do it in a sweep scal Glenn, who was almost thirty at the time, had plenty of boating experience growing up. He boated on the skin A River in British Columbia with his family by canoe on a regular basis, and when Glen was twenty one, he and a friend had actually taken a six month trip down Canada's Peace River by canoe, and then he traveled on a sweep scoal with his sister from the Salmon River and I toh all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Bessie didn't have the same boating experience that Glen died. She was more of an artist than an outdoors woman, and she was a graduate of the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco. She was full of adventurous spirit and the pair met in February of nine seven on a passenger ship, and they got married a little more than a year later in twin Falls, Idaho, on April twelfth of That was an interesting date because it was also the sixteenth anniversary of the Titanic sinking, and it was also just one day after Bessie's divorced from her first husband was finalized. Part of their motivation for this daring honeymoon that often comes up is the idea that they could monetize a successful trip down the canyon. Two expeditions with film crews down the river in seven had garnered a lot of media attention, one of them because it went very poorly and required a rescue. If Bessie could make it down the river, she would make history as the first woman to do so, and if Glenn could do it in record time, opportunities like book deals and lecture bookings would probably follow. However, that is uh the commonly written about reason for all of this, But Brad Dimmock, who wrote a book about Glenn and Bessie titled Sunk Without a Sound, actually came into possession of a letter from Bessie to her aunt and uncle Ruth and Millard Haley after his book had been completed and published, and he uh posted this online with some commentary, And in this letter, Bessie writes excitedly about the trip, and there's not a single mention though about any of these ambitions in the way of publicity or book deals or fame. So it's entirely possible that that fame and moneymaking angle that is often retold in this whole story is one of those embellishments that has sort of grown around the story as time has moved the actual details out of clear focus. Glenn spent fifty dollars and two days putting together the boat, which they named Rain in the Face, and they prepped it with a bed, survival supplies, and journals awaiting their documentation of the journey. They did not pack any life jackets, and they started their journey on October with a plan to arrive in Needles, California on December nine. Yeah, so at this point they had only been married about six months, and initially the Hides did successfully navigate several sections of the river. Several weeks into the journey. On November sixteenth, they stopped at Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim in order to get fresh supplies, and while there they actually spoke with a Denver Post reporter about their adventure. They also met up with Ellsworth and Emory Coleb, who were well known boatman and even better known photographers who had a studio on the cliff side. Emory Coleb wanted to give them life jackets, but Glenn turned them down. Cole would later say that it seemed like Bessie seemed nervous and wanted to quit, but that Glenn was urging her on, and famously, Bessie is quoted as saying, I wonder if I'll ever wear pretty shoes again as she looked at Emery's daughter's where. Then, when they returned to the river with their resupply of provisions, they met up with Adolph G. Sutro. This is not the Adolph Sutro who was the mayor of San Francisco in the nineties. It was, in fact his grandson, and Sutro asked if he could ride along with them in their scow for a day or so, and the Hides agreed, and Sutro traveled the next eight miles of river with them. When they dropped him off at Hermit Creek on November. It would be the last time anyone saw them. Glenn and Bessie did not arrive in Needles on December Nineth's plan. When Glenn's expectant father, Roland Hyde, received no word of their landing at the pre arranged date and location, he immediately feared that something had gone wrong. Roland Hide launched a massive search effort to find Glenn and Bessie. There were search parties tasked with canvassing sections of the river, so multiple searches were going on at one time in different places. Native American trackers were recruited to see if they could find any evidence of the pair moving over land, and eventually even an aerial search was authorized by the U S Secretary of Wars. They actually used military planes to look for them. After days of searching, the Hide scow was spotted in the aerial sweep and was sitting in the middle of the river at mile two thirty seven. Emory Colb and his brother joined Roland Hide, and the trio traveled to Peach Springs, Arizona, where they hiked down to the mouth of Diamond Creek, located at mile There are boat sat awaiting repair the cold brothers took several days to get the reclaimed boat water ready, and then they headed to the location where the scow had been spotted. Roland did not go with them. When they reached the rain in the face, it was December. The boat was completely intact. All of the supplies that Glenn and Bessie had packed remained, and everything was tidy and stowed properly. It did not look like it had been shifted about in some sort of dangerous event. Uh. The Cold Brothers photographed the scene then, being quite well now photographers, we actually have some really good pictures in terms of capturing what they found. And then they returned to Roland Hyde. They gathered as much as they could take with them, and they told him that it did not appear that Glenn and Bessie had left their boat intentionally. Based on Bessie's diary, which was found in the boat, the two thirty two mile Rapid was likely the last section of river that they ran. They had made it six hundred miles on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The boat was found just forty six miles from the mouth of the Grand Canyon, and according to the details of the journal, they had actually been ahead of schedule. Yeah, so they had been moving along quite well. They were ahead of schedule. They were very close to the end. Uh. But we they were simply not there when they went to look for them. And while I want to be clear when I say that all of their supplies were stowed, they were in the places you would expect them to be during normal use, they weren't stowed like packed away, like they had had left the boat and they were going off somewhere else. But before we wrap up the Glen and Bessie Hyde story, let's pause for a brief word from one of our fabulous sponsors. Sounds good. It was not long before most people and most news outlets declared that the Newlyweds must be dead. Their bodies were not ever found, though, although Roland later did return to search for them. Yeah, he even went back the following winter to search for them. He kind of looked in different conditions hoping that he would find them, but nothing ever turned up. So what happened to the newly Weds remains a mystery, although, of course, in cases like this, numerous theories have arisen. Where the hides murdered? Did they drown? A few interesting possibilities have cropped up over the years that kind of get repeated over and over. In nine one, during a commercial boating trip, while the participants were sitting around a campfire, an elderly woman claimed to be Bessie. When the woman was questioned by one of the other attendees about Glenn, she said she had stabbed him after a fight and then hiked to Peach Springs, Arizona, and gotten on a bus going east, where she started a new life. Investigation unearthed a far more mundane story that she was simply a retired lady who liked to pull people's legs. Yeah, it seems really cool, and it's one of those things I always have to chuckle a little bit if you read sort of brief descriptions of this. They'll talk about all of the possibilities, but they never talked about the more mundane things that get turned up if you look more closely, of course. Uh. And then later in ninety six, a skull with a bullet hole in it was found on Emery Coleb's property, and rumors started to circulate that it could be Glenn's. However, forensics ruled out that possibility. That man who I don't believe has ever been identified. Had died no earlier according to these to testing the nineteen seventy two, and he was only twenty two at the time, so he and not possibly have been Glenn. Another river guy, a woman named Georgie Clark, died in and among her belongings was found the Hide's marriage certificate, so question coming up was she Bessie. There was also a birth certificate indicating that her name was Bessie d Ross, not Georgie, which has also fields some speculation, but none of these claims have been substantiated. Yeah, a number of historians have weighed in on it, and after closer investigation, they really don't feel like this is the real deal. I don't think the documents are authentic or right um or that like, possibly one is but not the other. It would be weird if Bessie had vanished on the river and she happened to have her birth certificate and marriage certificate with her, Like those aren't things you take on a boating trip. At least it's not anything I would take on a boating trip. But uh, those are just food for thoughts. So we really don't know. The you know, speculation will probably go on forever because at this point we are almost a hundred years out, We're ninety years out or so, and you know, we're not not likely going to get any big answers on those uh. And that brings us to the second of our sort of creepy story double feature. This is uh insanely creepy in my opinion. It's also often very requested. Most recently it was requested by our listeners Stacy. And while it is a great story and one that I have always found fascinating and have debated about trying to put a standalone episode together around it, there just really is not enough to go on. Uh. So that's the scoop on this one. We are talking about the hint Kfic murders. This is a long standing unsolved crime and it's one of the most famous in German history. So the word Hinterkfic I think part of the reason that this one gets so much excitement is it it sounds exotic because it's foreign to any English listeners, but English speaking listeners. But in fact that is actually the name of the farm where these murders took place, hinter If. I'm remembering my very sloppy appreciation of German correctly usually means behind Uh, and this was behind an area that would have been called Kfeck. This farmstead was about three from grubern Uh and that was in the Bavarian municipality of Vangen which is now the municipality of Vadhoven. And the farm was about a kilometer away from the town of k Fix. So, like I said, the name literally meant behind Kfik and it was a relatively isolated farmstead living at hinterkfe in N when this happened, where a farmer, Andreas Gruber, who was sixty three, his wife Cazilia, who was seventy two, their daughter Victoria aged thirty five, who was a widow, and Victoria's two children, all len also named Kazia who was seven and Joseph, who was two. In addition to family, a brand new maid named Maria Bumgartner, age forty four was at the farm as well, and we mean we mean super brand new. She had started work the very day that these events were going to talk about came to a crescendo. The previous made that they had had had quit rather abruptly six months prior. In the autumn of the story goes that she very frankly told them that she believed that the farm was haunted, that she wanted to leave right away, and she believed that because she heard noises, both footsteps and voices, she claimed coming from the attic. On March, Andreas Gruber made an odd discovery. He found footprints in the snow leading from the edge of the forest to his farm. There was no matching set leading back into the woods. My heart is beating a little faster having read that sentence. He also found evidence that someone had tried to pick the lock on his garage. He told his neighbors that he had found a strange paper left at the house and had heard strange noises in the attic. A set of keys had also vanished. And upon hearing about these strange events, we should include the grouper check them out. He looked in the attic and he found nobody, and he you know, looked around for his keys, and he tried to think of any way that the newspaper could have gotten I believe it was on his porch, uh, But he never found anybody or anything. He just kind of shrugged it off. So when he was telling his neighbors about these strange events. One of them actually offered him a revolver for self defense because it sounded really creepy to them, but Grouper actually turned that offer down. I'm just gonna imagine that somebody walked really carefully in their same footprints on the way back from the house to the edge of the forest. On Saturday, April one, the younger, because he missed school. On April second, the entire family failed to appear at church, which was extremely unusual. On Monday, April three, because he was once again absent from school, and when the postman attempted to deliver mail that day, he noticed Saturday's mail was still in the box. When nobody answered his knock, he just left that day's mail. A mechanic named Albert Hofner went to the farm on April four to complete some repairs to a piece of machinery that he had been contracted to do, and he knocked. He didn't get any answer, and he saw no one, but he knew what he had to do, so he went ahead and repaired the feeding machine. It took him about five hours, and during that time he saw no one, and he left and he didn't mention to neighbors as he left. Hey, I didn't see any of the groupers, but I was there and I fixed their machine, so let them know. And that's where things started to get a little suspicious. So later in the afternoon of April four, neighbors finally decided to check in on the groupers. Nobody had seen any of them for several days. When nobody answered any of their knocks or calls, they noticed that the barn doors were locked, so they broke in. And before we get to the barn discovery and so truly creepy and probably unsettling for some listeners elements of this story that come out after that, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break so we don't have to drop it right into the middle of any gruesome discussion. So what these neighbors found in this barn that they broke into was horrifying, to say the least. In the barn were four corpses. These were the bodies of Andreas Cazelia, the elder Victoria, and the child Casilia. The bodies had been covered over with straw, and then an old door had been placed on top of it. Further investigation revealed that the maid Maria Baumgartner and the tiny Joseph had been murdered in the farmhouse. A young man was sent by bicycle to von Get to summon the authority. By the time the investigators got there, though, there was already a crowd milling about contaminating evidence. If you like crowds, should always listen to our podcast because this is a recurring theme. The crowd came and they tromped all over everything. When we time travel, that can be our Our entire mission is to go tell crowds not to go contaminate evidence. So allegedly some of the crowd were even in the kitchen making snacks for other people. Yeah, so, needless to say, evidence was going to be pretty dicey at that point. Autopsies were carried out on site in the barn I believe by Dr Johann Baptiste al Muler, and it was determined that on the night of March thirty one, the six people had each been brutally attacked with blows to the head. Despite some of the contamination of the evidence, investigators were able to piece things together enough to come to the conclusion that the four members of the family had been killed in the barn had been lured there one by one in some way as a sort of tramp and kind of lured in and jumped. Andreas's wife, Cazelia and their daughter Victoria also showed signs of strangulation in addition to their head wounds. The younger Cazelia had pieces of her own hair clenched in her right hand. It was postulated that she had not died instantly like the others have, and that that the others had and that she may have torn out her own hair in dismay or shock. The heads of all of the bodies were removed by Dr. Al Mueller and sent to Munich for additional investigation, since that was the area that seemed to have sustained the death blows, and these heads were also allegedly handled by a clairvoyant. Eventually that was brought in by authorities in a desperate attempt to get any sort of lead in the case. Neither the examiners in Munich nor any of the psychics discovered anything new in the handling of the victims heads. Numerous details, aside from the grizzly killings, made the discovery of the Hinokapic murders really unsettling. While the family had been killed on the night of March thirty one, in the days between then and the discovery on April four, neighbors had seen smoke coming from the farmhouse chimney. Additionally, the animals on the farm had been cared for during that time, and the cows had been milked. It was as though the killer or killers made himself at home for a while after brutally dispatching with the family, and given the fact that Gruber had lost a set of keys and found a random newspaper just prior to the murders, it's entirely possible that the killer may have made himself at home for a while before the events on March thirty one. While the robbery was initially suspected as the motive, there were large sums of cash that were easily found in the house and had obviously been left behind. There were also some roof tiles that appeared to have been drawn back into two places, one over the barn roof went on the barn roof and one over the farmhouse. And if I understand descriptions and looked at the photos correctly, there was kind of one big roof that covered the barn, and then there was like a courtyard that had a roof, and then it also continued over to the house, but over the barn and over the house, tiles had been removed so that an intruder that was hidden could have had pretty easy views of both the whole farmstead and the family, depending on where they were positioned. So this family had had problems before they were murdered. They were a well known family, but not really that popular in the community. Andreas in particular had a bad reputation for a number of reasons. One was that he was abusive to his wife. He also was believed to have had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Victoria, and many believed that young Joseph was in fact his child. It's pretty easy math to note that Joseph had been born about five years after Victoria's husband had died, so he definitely was not a child of that marriage, because remember he was two when this happened. And at the time of Joseph's birth, a neighboring farmer named Lauren Schlittenbauer was named as the father of Joseph. But this actually became a really contentious issue and Schlittenbauer actively claimed that Andreas had fathered his own grandchild. As for suspects, there's a fairly popular theory that Victoria may not have been a widow after all, and that her husband committed the murders. Carl Gabriel died in the trenches in France during World War One, and you'll occasionally find site that will say things like but his body was never recovered. There are plenty of eyewitness accounts of him being killed at the Battle of nu Villa on December twel so it's really sensationalism. But unfortunately, it's also all too common for the bodies of soldiers to go unrecovered in wartime yep uh. There are some financial reason that people point to as like what would have been his motivator or that he was angry about the incest. Again, in a case like this, where there is not much to go on, it's very easy to fill in the blanks with fanciful thoughts. Another popular theory names that neighbor Lauren Schlittenbauer as the likely killer due to his entanglement with Victoria, because there is some pretty significant indicators that he and Victoria did have some sort of sexual relationship, um, and this battle that he had with Andreas over whether or not he had fathered Victoria's youngest child. There's also some assertions in there that he may have planned to marry Victoria, but that Andreas was very jealous of her and would not allow her to do so. So there is a lot of drama connected to the Schlittenbauer possibility. The Grouper family and Maria Baumgartner were interred at wide Offen, their heads were never returned from Munich, and their beliefs to have been lost during World War two. Yeah, ironically, I have never really dug up much that attaches any sort of creepiness to the loss of these six heads. Uh. People just tend to write it off. As you know, world War two, there were lots of crazy things happening, and it's entirely possible that that was simply destroyed. Uh. What's also interesting is that during the initial investigation, no murder weapon was found, even though on the autopsy report it does suggest that it was a pickaxe. However, when the buildings at the farmstead were torn down a year after all of these events, a madic was allegedly found and a matic is similar to an ice pick. It has a long handle and it has a head that has a cutter on one end and either an axe blade or a pick on the other. A man who sometimes worked as a hand on the farm identified the matic as belonging to Gruber. It was when he owned and had in fact made, was normally stored with the rest of the tools and equipment and the tool shed. Yes, so by virtue of it and not having been found when everything happened in the initial investigation happened, and only being turned up a year later when they raised the buildings, it does kind of point to it having been out of place, but we don't know. And while dozens of people were questioned in the case, more than a hundred, no official suspect was ever named. Uh. This case has been reopened at various points throughout the years. It has never been solved, though, I believe in two thousand seven there was a university group that did a study of it where they tried to apply modern forensics to what they had and they came up with who they feel is the most likely killer, but they did not name that person out of respect for the fact that there are surviving relatives of that person, and it would kind of just be dredging up something that couldn't be proven and could potentially taint the family name. But we basically don't know what happened. We don't know if someone was living in their attic for six months, because remember their previous maid had said quite some time before the murder that she heard voices and weird noises, or if this was just a one day event that happened. I will also tell you this as a warning if you go looking for this online. There are some pretty graphic images taken of the crime scenes. So if that is not something you are comfortable looking at or can stomach, I would not google search this particular thing. Don't google it at all. Like the thing is that here are some images about they're extremely, extremely horrifying, and they are literally the first thing that comes up when you google it. Uh. It reminds me of creepy stories that keep circulating around the Internet at various times, where people are like, I just discovered someone who has been secretly secretly living in this tiny compartment that was in our walls, and yeah, yeah, it is a very creepy thing. I mean, it's kind of I think one of the reasons that people, I don't want to say love to tell this story because that sounds horrid. Fine, but there is a certain fascination with it. And part of it is that it combines so many of the key elements of like a good scary story. You know. One, there is some gruesome murders too. There is this possibility that there is a person watching people for a long time unnoticed. And three there is all of this weird drama around love triangles and you know, paternity, and there's just it has all of the ingredients for a good drama. Say so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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