Selects: The Disappearance of Lars Mittank

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with a little mystery true crime episode, served up for you. It's the disappearance of Lars Metonk, and I think it's Metonk, and if I'm not mistaken, Josh and I probably pronounce it all sorts of ways,

'cause that's kind of what we do, much of the annoyance of many of you. We're very sorry, but I hope you enjoy it. - Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

(upbeat music) - Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Brian over there, and there's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know,

that another true life mystery edition. - A true life mystery. - Yeah, okay. I don't want to say crime, 'cause I'm not 100% sure crime was involved.

I'm sure it still falls under the umbrella of true crime,

“but it's a mystery, a disappearance, how about that?”

- Yeah, and this one can be frustrating to research, and this is our caveat in that this situation, as you will learn, happened in Bulgaria to a German man, and that's part of the reason it's hard to get great information. There are plenty of people on the internet

telling this story with different details, and it's just sort of one of those cases where, like we can't get our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops, and read it ourselves. So we did find a editor who did something last year,

who claims that he got information from Lars's mother, who you're gonna meet Sandra, not she's not gonna be on the show, you're not gonna really meet her, meet through our words, but you know who knows, this is someone on Reddit,

and all his sources were in German, so I couldn't double check those either. - Right, yeah, no, I mean, that's a caveat that works for just about any true crime or disappearance case, these days, just because there's so many people

who take a story and run it through their own grinder, and you know, like you said, little details, little facts get changed here, and then somebody else picks up the same fact with that double checking it, and now all of a sudden

it's all over the place, and you can't tell if that's because it's real, or because a bunch of people just repeated the same incorrect fact. So we're gonna definitely do our best,

but one of the things about this story is there are enough, you know, totally verified facts to it that, you know, you don't really need to get completely lost in the details, and people haven't gotten completely lost in the details,

but they've still not solved the case that hasn't helped anybody yet. So just the facts that are known are kind of strange enough.

“- Yeah, and I think it's always more comfortable for us”

when there's a book that's been written about it, published by like a real publisher. - Like Beverly Cleary. - That's not just internet dudes,

sort of missing person cases, it is just internet dudes.

So, you know, this is what it is. - And the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Metonk, and he's known as the most famous missing person on YouTube, because-- - I hate that. - He is pretty bad.

It should have probably just scared us off of this episode to begin with. - I know.

“- Because you remember what was the name of that con,”

the YouTube convention we went to that one time? - Oh, it was like internet con, but it wasn't that-- - It was close to that, I can't remember what that was. - Almost put me off of YouTube forever. - We blocked our memory bank, 'cause we did our biggest show

ever there in front of about 12 people. - Yeah, it was pretty bad. But-- - I don't think of it. - But by the way, we should thank Dave Meishner,

who's a listener who turned me on to this,

quite a while ago, so sorry, it took so long to get to Dave. - So we're talking again, we're talking about Lars Metonk, and he vanished from the face of the earth. As his mom put it, it was like the earth, just swallowed him up, back on July 8th, 2014,

in a town, a resort town in Bulgaria, on the Black Sea called Golden Sands, which looking at pictures of it, it looks like a pretty charming little place. - It's a big con.

- Big con, that's it.

“It might as well have been called internet con.”

- Yeah. - But did you look at pictures of Golden Sands as to get a feel for the place? - Yeah, it looks like any lovely seaside Hamlet. - Yeah, and I couldn't get the impression of

whether it was more like destined or more like Panama City Beach. - It just seems like a big party spot if that's what you're wondering. - Okay, but like it also looked like it was fairly clean

and well-run and not just like, you know, just whatever kind of thing. I don't know, I place it between the two from what I can tell. But that's where this event took place,

where the disappearance took place. There's actually Varna Bulgaria, which is the main town that Golden Sands resort beach town is right outside of. - Yeah, so as far as Lars,

the young man who had go missing, he was born in February 1986 in Northern Germany. He was an only child. He was handsome, kid, very popular. He was athletic.

He was smart, he did well in school. After he ended up, after he graduated, he ended up getting a job at the GDF Suez Power Plant about a hundred miles from where he grew up, fixing small electrical machines.

He was an engineer. And it seemed like he had a really good life and he enjoyed his job. He loved, and this little figure in, so put it pin in this.

His one big love was his food ball club, his soccer team that he followed, which is, you know, this is not how they would pronounce it, but the Verder Brimman football club. - Oh, really, how would they pronounce it?

- Well, it's always just a little more German.

Let's see it now. (laughing) Like the guy, the editor, he narrates his own documentary and he said it in a way that I'm not even gonna attempt. - Oh, okay, all right, fine.

So that whole football club thing actually plays a role in this because it may be at the center of his disappearance. We're not a hundred percent sure. But to kind of give you an idea

of what kind of guy, Lars Matank was, or Matank was, his dad had a stroke a couple years before he disappeared, and his mom had to take care of his dad full-time. Lars was an only child, and he would come home, I guess about a hundred miles from where he lived and worked.

Almost every weekend to help take care of his dad, which is not every guy in their late 20s would do that, you know. And apparently he was dedicated enough that his mom had to kind of encourage him to go along with five other friends of his two week-long vacation

at Golden Sands in Bulgaria in July. The end of June beginning of July. He wasn't gonna go in his mom's,

“"No, you should totally go, you deserve a week off like this."”

So he went. - Yeah, so it's a big party scene, like I said, it is well-known for young people from all over Europe going to take advantage of the resort deals, all inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs

to be had. Lars was the life of the party, according to his friends. Yeah, that's not anywhere from three to five friends. I know for sure, two guys, and I think these were his high school mates

who were most prominent, named Tim Schult, and Paul Roman. But they were hanging out that go into the beach, playing soccer. The one weird thing that I think people may have made too much about online, as far as internet slew thing goes,

on the trip, was eating like soup and salad and fruit, whereas they were, you know, it was an all-oclusive resort, so they were just like feasting on everything.

“And I think they thought it was odd that he wasn't,”

but I don't make a whole lot about that. - Yeah, neither did that one redder, slash documentary, who said that he apparently had kind of gotten had been on a health kick. So he was kind of watching what he ate a little more.

- Yeah, some people have been like, there's your answer right there, that explains it all.

- Yeah, basically, so, I mean, the week went by pretty uneventfully.

I think one of his friends later said on TV or in an interview that it went by really quick. On one, I think the second to last day, they went to watch a World Cup match. The World Cup in Brazil was going on at the time,

and you may not know this about Europe, but they're really crazy about soccer, so much so that they have their own word for it, football, which is goofy, but that's the way it goes. And so they went to this bar, rock bar, or okay, B-A-R,

which sounds like a cool place.

“And they watched a match, I think Costa Rica and the Netherlands.”

And while they were there, there were a bunch of soccer fans there watching this from all different clubs and countries.

And there were some kids, I guess, who were high school graduates

and were fans of FC Bayern, which is the rival to Verder Bremen, and I guess they kind of got into it, verbally, only, with Lars and his friends. - Yeah, and also saw places that there was actual physical confrontation.

- Oh, yeah. - We don't know for sure, but we do know that it wasn't the biggest deal, and it wasn't the big fight that happened later on. - Great.

- After this night out, the guys apparently go to this McDonald's, which is kind of an open air order at the open air window, kind of thing, and Lars didn't want to eat, 'cause I guess he was on that health kick. And he sort of just stood nearby,

while his two buddies were ordering.

They got their food, they turned around, he wasn't there. They don't see him for the rest of the night, but like I said, it's sort of like spring break party central, so if one of your friends disappears for the night, and your bunch of dudes, you might just think like,

"All right, well, you know, maybe he ended up meeting somebody, "or maybe he just went out and partyed some more, "but it didn't send up these huge alarms, "that he didn't come back that night." - Yep, so when he did show up again,

I don't know if his later that night or the next morning, he said that he had been beaten up, actually, jumped by three or four Bulgarian guys, and that he had gone to duck when one of them threw a punch, and it actually taken a punch in his ear,

which is a terrible place to get punched. And he said that he was quite convinced that it was those kids, those high school kids who were fans of Bayern, F.C. Bayern, that they got into it with at the bar earlier that night, because apparently they had said, "I only saw this in one place,

"that they had said that they had shouted that it's easy "to pay somebody to beat other people up in Bulgaria." And so this happened close enough and close enough proximity to that other altercation that he just assumed, that's why those guys jumped him.

I mean, apparently there was no other explanation for it. So that was his story. He showed up with a injured ear in the story that he had been jumped by some local Bulgarians. - Yeah, and his friends apparently didn't necessarily believe that story, because he wasn't, you know, he didn't have black eyes or a bloody nose or anything.

He looked fine, and he was acting fine. So they weren't too sure about that story. Again, with the internet slew, so I've seen people saying that he totally made up the story about the fight, but that is all just people speculating online.

I know, if you ever want to see people just take a piece of information and then spin it to the end degree, the most extreme possible interpretation of it, that you could do worse than hang out on the internet. (laughs)

So he goes to a doctor. He gets the diagnosis of a ruptured ear drum. Apparently, he went and saw a specialist at a hospital

“who confirmed it, said you should get surgery,”

and large as, like, great, but I'm not getting that here. I'm going to go back home to Germany if I'm going to get surgery. And then this is sort of one of the keys, is he was given an anti-biotic name, a Sephiroth sign, and he was given the strongest possible dosage, which was about, I think, it was 500 milligrams.

Yes, and that's just a general, I think, a Sephirlex in based antibiotic,

And if it does have side effects, it's typically something like an upset

stomach.

“I saw that there's a condition where it turns huge patches of your skin,”

very dark all over the place, almost like your highlights have been shaded. It's really interesting to look at, but that's, that's, has nothing to do with any other, anything that, that Lars exhibited, any behavior exhibited. It's just antibiotics. I mean, if you've ever taken antibiotics, you know that there's not really

usually many side effects to it. Right.

So, Lars catches, well, again, different information.

I saw that his friends were going to stay with him. He insisted they leave, so his friends eventually do catch that original flight out. And Lars stays behind, you know, because of his ear. He was a little concerned about, obviously, with changes in the atmosphere and on pressurization on a plane, he didn't think it was a good idea.

And not sure if that original doctor told him that might have been a problem, but he knew it was going to be a problem. So a little bit about that original doctor, I saw that from the, the, the editor who said that he spoke to the guys to his mother, that his mother said that that Lars said that the doctor didn't really treat him.

“The first one did, and said you should go to a specialist, but then he went to the specialist,”

was a specialist said, like, wouldn't speak to him in English and, and Lars felt he had mocked him. And that apparently, Sandra thought that that was really significant because that was not a word that Lars typically used, but he still managed to get the antibiotic from the doctor. The thing about the perforated or ruptured ear drum is, I was looking on the internet, it turns out. And the National Health Service says that if you have a perforated ear drum,

it would probably actually make flying more comfortable, not more dangerous. So I can understand Lars being worried about that, not being a trained medical professional, but if he's encountering at least three other medical professionals in Bulgaria, you would think one of them would be like, actually, no, that's, you're, you're actually better off flying like this or it would at the very least be like, you don't have to worry about that at all.

It's not, that's not a thing. Interesting. Yeah. That's so too. All right, well, let's take a break, and we will come back and talk about what happened after his friends left Lars alone in Bulgaria right after this. You know, Rold Dal, the writer who thought I'd willing Wonka, Matilda and the BFG, but did you know he was also a spy?

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I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years,

Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure,

the expectations, and the real work with the women shaping culture right now.

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and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are in your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja. Each week I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being in It Girl isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it.

I think the negatives need to be discussed and they need to be told to people who maybe don't do this

every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Lars's buddies go back home to Germany. Lars is left there by himself, which is pretty key as far as understanding that they weren't worried about him. He wasn't behaving weird. He seemed fine. He seemed like Lars. Otherwise, one of them probably would have

raised some sort of alarm bells. And being like, hey, maybe we should stay here. But they said he seemed relaxed. He was in a good mood. And so they took off. Being summer, Lars had a hard time getting a hotel room, because everything was booked up and he was staying on extra. So he ends up having to check into the hotel color Varna, which was a really CD place that this cab driver takes him to apparently a lot of drug dealers, a lot of sex workers, but that was kind of the only place

available. And we don't know a lot about what happened that night other than these phone calls and texts that he exchanges with his mom. So one thing though about the hotel color I looked at it, a trip advisor gives it a four out of five. And booking.com has it at seven point eight out of ten.

“And it is definitely cheap. I think rooms are like 25 American dollars a night,”

which is suspiciously cheap. And that yeah, there is like probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like a traphouse hotel or anything like that. But it was the fact that it was only option. I think kind of tells you quite a bit too about it. Sure. So he goes to this hotel he checks in. Apparently the person behind the counter made a copy, a photo copy of his credit card. And according to his mother, that did not sit very well with Lars. And at 11 p.m. after he's checked

into the hotel, he calls his mom. I think it's the first phone first of many phone calls that

evening. And he tells her that he wants her to block his credit card because he's kind of sketched out by this hotel here who has made a photo copy of his card. He's worried that they're going to use it for fraud. And he can just unfreeze it when he gets back. That's the first phone call he makes. Yeah, there ends up being another call where he has left the hotel. He said that he was hiding on a hill. And I think he even said that he was at risk of falling. So it must have been

sort of some sort of a really steep type of situation I guess. But he said that there were four men after him that were trying to kill him or that intended to kill him at least. And he said, don't call me back because my phone, I don't want my phone to ring. I'm not sure I knew he didn't have his smartphone with him. He left that at home and brought sort of a cheaper phone. So I don't know if it didn't have a way to turn the ring or off or not. Or if he was just not thinking clearly. But

he said not to call him back. He eventually texts his mom. What is Seraphim 500, which was at any biotic, which you might think it means like he's feeling weird. And what is this I've taken? That to me says that if he was behaving weirdly or experiencing some different behavior,

“that he guessed that that's what it was. That's the only explanation for that because they found that”

he had taken three of them. So he knew that he had that in his system, which I guess if he was acting weird, maybe that's what he thought it was. That's what sticks out to me. Yeah, and I think it was either that night or the following morning when he asks, I think it was the following morning. She had booked a flight home for him. He doesn't get back in touch with her, which really worries her. But the next morning he does get back in touch. This is two days after

this bar fight. She's relieved. He says he's going to go to the airport and can he get 500 euros

Yeah, supposedly there's a real detail in there that it was Western Union. Well, what makes Western Union important?

So his mother had never heard of Western Union and Lars hadn't either, but apparently he talked

to another German tourist at the airport who had told him to use it and he was able to describe to his mom how to use Western Union in a way that she understood how to use Western Union after he explained it, which said to his mom that he had his wits about him. He wasn't out of his mind. He wasn't wasted on drugs or anything like that. He was much with it mentally. All right, so he and I saw two different things here. Either his mom urged him to go to the

airport doctor just to make sure he's good to fly or there was some requirement that he do so. But either way, he goes to the airport medical center and this is where things get a little

confusing because it's really all over the place, whether or not he goes in right away or whether

he goes in later, but he apparently calls his mom, tells her, hey, they said I shouldn't fly or drive, but he hadn't even gone to see the doctor at that point. And then once he does see the doctor, the doctor ends up giving a few different versions of what happened while he was in there, which

“is either, you know, some people think that looks really shady. I think it could have just been like”

at the time, this doctor, you know, you're not making some really big mental notes about this random patient that comes in. Like, this guy is going to be an international mystery in an hour. Yeah, so, you know, it could have been innocent that he's story changed or it could be JD. It could be, so from, from what I saw that the doctor changed the story three times and that an airline employee came in. And then later it was an airport employee came in, which I think kind

of across the internet became a construction worker because that the airport had recently undergone or was undergoing renovations. And then that, I guess the third story was that the doctor said that no one had come in and that Lars had excused himself to go to the toilet,

and did not come back. The doctor was expecting him to come back and he just never came back.

What the doctor didn't know if that was in fact what happened, was that Lars wasn't coming back because he was sprinting through the airport and running out of the airport and into the surrounding countryside. Yeah, and in the version where someone does come in, what that means is, is that literally a human being, another person walks into the examination room and apparently really freaked out if that version is correct, really freaked out Lars who was already obviously

feeling a little bit paranoid and was like, what is this person doing in here in the one version of the story the doctor tries to explain, hey, it's just a construction guy or know this is an airline employee that's going to actually walk you to the plane. It's a little frustrating you do not know the exact truth, but no matter what happens, we do know that he sprinted from the airport

“because that part is actually on YouTube and on CCTV and that's why he's the most famous”

disappeared person on YouTube because it's very compelling to watch this young kid drop all and you don't see him drop his stuff, but clearly he walks in with a backpack and a duffle bag and he sprints with nothing in his hands at like full, you know, 21-year-old athletic gallop out of there as if someone is chasing him. Yeah, so but there's a couple of weird things about it if you watch the video and again you can go anywhere on the internet and see this. I think it was a good 30

seconds of it cut together that he is running in the airport and then when he gets outside he kind of like walks and then jogs a little bit and runs some more, but then I saw somebody on, I think it was read it too on a different post. Their unresolved mysteries group is just really good. But somebody pointed out that if you watch him he's not really like looking behind him. He's not, he's not looking to see somebody coming after him and it kind of puts a different spin on things because you do

think, well surely he's running for his life, but if you're running for your life, it does seem like you would be a lot more concerned about who is coming after you and would probably look behind you a little more. He doesn't quite do that actually. It's a very strange run, but it's also not like

“the run of a person who's out of their mind. That's what stood out to me is that he doesn't seem”

to at all be out of his mind. Yeah, and another couple of details here that was tough to verify. Supposedly in the doctor's office he said, I don't want to die here. I have to get out of here.

Sandra evidently saw, she went over there to do her own investigating. Obviously right after it happened and supposedly saw footage directly from the airport that had a lot of different stuff that was not included in the footage that went to the police. And she said in the footage that she saw was that when he leaves the airport, he stands there like checks his pocket as if he's checking to make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff. It kind of looks around and

orient himself for a minute, like should I go this way? Should I go that way? If you look at other places on the internet and you just look at that footage, it looks like he just bolstered from the airport

and then continues to either kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks his pockets,

never orient himself at all. Yeah, so he actually walks within 20 feet of a couple of cops who are standing talking to another in the parking lot. He walks past them. He goes behind a sand pile

“and then eventually goes over, I think, is it actually on camera him going over the fence or is”

it just presumed that he went over the fence? No, it's on camera, but it's one of the things where it's like they had to circle and highlight him because he's so far in the distance. But he goes over a barbed wire fence into a full bloom sunflower field, which are very, very tall and literally disappears, never to be seen again. No, and on the other side of that sunflower field,

very importantly is the A2 highway. So who knows what happened and then beyond that, there's a lot of

woods. I wouldn't call it like the most densely forested place on earth, but there's a pretty decent size woods around there. There's also a lot of farm fields too that's exposed and out in the open, but there's a highway on the other side of it. And that's to me is extremely important. All right, should we take another break? Yes. All right, we're going to take another break and bring at home with what happened from there and then some of the theories about what happened to large metac.

“Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend in over a decade?”

Think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age? What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year? He's still smelled of podium champagne and expensive friction. And how did a 2023 event called Waga Getting change the paddock forever? That day is just seared into my memory. I'm culture writer and F1 expert Lily Hermann and these are just a few of the questions I'm tackling on no grip, a Formula One culture podcast that dives into

the under-explored pockets of the sport. In each episode a different guest tonight will go deeper into the wacky mishab scandals and sagas, both on the track and far away from it, that have made F1 a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to no grip on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on

the streets of New York over the years, well I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women shaping

“culture right now. As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated. So you have to work”

extra hard and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are in your integrity. I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja. Each week I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being in It Girl isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it. I think the negatives need to be discussed and they need

to be told to people who maybe don't do this every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Real Doll, the writer who found up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before? He wrote his stories? I must have been.

Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters

of his extraordinary controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful

Americans, and he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, because I was a spy. Did you know Doll got cozy with the Roosevelt? Play poker with Harry Truman,

where he worked alongside Walt Disney, an Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever,

“and what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?”

The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roll Doll on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, just to recap, Lars Matank has fled, there's a really good way to put it. The airport, leaving behind in the doctor's office, all of his stuff, including his wallet, phone, and passport. Now is that verified?

I saw that basically everywhere, including him for his own speculating that she saw him checking

his ideas. I thought that was very confusing, but I saw him in the sun, which I realized is not the most credible source, but sadly, it is one of the most credible sources when it comes to researching

“this case. I saw a Yale article. It's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone”

were left behind. I mean, that's a really good point. We're totally we're lost in the sunflower field, as far as that stuff concerns. We don't know. We got to get our hands on the police report. And even that, I read when Lars' mom hired a Bulgarian lawyer as an investigator, they got weird conflicting information about what was found with him or not, or what was left behind by him or not. So even his mom probably couldn't say for certain what was there.

Yeah, I get the picture that it was a frustrating experience working with the Bulgarian police. Seems like the Germany got involved with Interpol, but they had some frustrations as well. There's some speculation that they intentionally kind of kept the story on the download, because they didn't want it to affect tourism. Yeah, I could see that. Other people say that, well, maybe not that, but it just wasn't widely known. It was some German kid. It wasn't all

over the newspapers. And so people, you know, they didn't necessarily even know what was going on. If they saw this flyer, or they maybe not have, maybe they didn't even run it on the evening news. Yeah, and so like if it was three weeks, four weeks after the disappearance that like news

started to really spread, or maybe news never really spread, if you were a driver and you gave a

kid a ride on the A2 highway outside of the airport, you might not have ever put two and two together, or if you saw some kid running through a field into the woods, you might not have ever heard of Lars Metank either. So there's, it's possible there's people out there with information who just aren't, aren't, don't know to, to cough it up. Although that's probably exceedingly unlikely these days because of the exposure that the story's gotten. Yeah, one interesting tidbit

is that they did find that those 500 euros were untouched in his account. And I don't think we

“mentioned, I think some people speculate the fact that it was 500 euros on the nose and that it was”

Western Union, and he had never used it meant that he was being told by somebody to get 500 euros

wired via this way. Yeah. But again, that's just Internet speculation. Well, I also saw that it was his mom's decision. He just asked her to wire him some money. Some money. He had decided that that, that was according to that documentary and who knows, we really need to get Sandra Metank on here, dude. One of the cool things that happened through his mother investigating this is various leads came in over the years like, hey, there's this guy this week's German. He could be

Lars. She would go check it out. There's this other guy. Over the years, she has ended up finding 15 German expatriates in Bulgaria. Some were addict, some were mentally ill. Some were actually reunited with her family, some didn't want to be reunited. But she found all these people. So like every time that happened, it gave her hope that even though the chances, you know, with a case like this is if you don't find this person within the first, you know, a few days or the first week,

it's like very slim to no chance. All of these things gave her hope that she could, if she just kept at it, that she might eventually find her son. Yeah. I was really surprised to see that there was a stat in here that said that something like only 3% of missing persons cases aren't resolved

I thought it would be a lot higher than that. But that's that's actually not bad,

“as far as I can tell. Yeah. So yeah. One of those people, by the way, who was found that was thought”

to be, there's like a whole thing where people are following this case. In any time,

something ends up on the internet, it ends up being passed along to Sandra Matank, who will basically

post on her Instagram, like, hey, this was sent from this town. Can somebody go see if they can find this homeless guy and get me more pictures of him so we can figure out if it's Lars. Like, she does this kind of frequently, there was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who looks a lot like Lars, but disheveled with the beard and his hair kind of crazy. Yeah. And that turned out to be a different man who was missing from British Columbia named Anton Pilpa, who was reunited with this

family after five years. And they think that he hitchhiked and walked from British Columbia down to

“Brazil and then kind of lived around Rio, I think Rio, on his own for a while, during a mental break.”

Man, so some of the theories over the years that have been formed,

the one that seems most obvious to me is that along with the ear injury, there was some sort of a head injury, maybe a concussion left untreated that led to erratic behavior and paranoia, maybe, and that, you know, once he had left and had no money and no phone and no passport, he sort of was just sort of perhaps lost his memory and lost in Bulgaria and still lost in Bulgaria. Yeah, that's entirely possible, especially if it was a head injury that was getting worse and worse by the

hour that could definitely explain the erratic behavior of leaving his stuff and running through the airport and jumping the fence into a sunflower field. Because if you think about it,

“everything up to that point, you can explain by him being intimidated in a hotel he didn't feel”

comfortable in by some guys who aimed to rob him. And even if those guys didn't aimed to rob him, just him thinking that they were going to rob him explains everything else up to that point. The thing that makes it inexplicable as far as I'm concerned is him leaving the airport the way they did and potentially leaving everything behind. That throws everything out the window and actually

makes the idea of a traumatic brain injury a lot more possible in my mind. The problem is if that's

what happened to him, it's really possible that he's up there out in the woods somewhere still and just hasn't been found and is dead probably by now. Yeah, our supposed to get up just wanted into a town and assimilated. Well, his mom apparently does believe that he's still out there of which is why she tries to shake down every lead she can but thinks that he does have memory loss and that that's right. He's still out there just in his never contacted her. Another theory is that

you know, maybe everything he said is true, maybe there were men following him, maybe it had something to do with that fight and these guys that may or may not have been hired to beat him up. Apparently the human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem and maybe you know a young handsome fit man like Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and that he really like had every right to be anxious and nervous because otherwise he seemed like he was okay. It's all

very confusing and frustrating. I can't imagine what Sandra Matanke has been going through for these years. Oh dude, just can't even. I mean, when you don't have closure like that, your imagination's left to just fill in whatever blanks and you know in a situation like that people's imaginations tend to to go to the darkest places. I can't imagine the stuff that she's come up with or that people have suggested to her too, you know, being caught up in it and for

getting like this is the mom, like this is real to her. This is her life. This isn't just something on the internet. What about the trucker? Oh, so that's one of the leads that there was a trucker in what where was it Brandon Berg? The trucker. So there was a trucker that in 2019 picked up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove them all the way to Brandon Berg, I guess. He said later on, he didn't know about the Lars Matanke case at the time, but he said later on he found out about it

and said, oh man, that's gotta be the kid that I picked up. His mom shook down the story and I don't think that she ever got in touch with the truck driver. The truck driver was just like,

a beyond the lookout among, you know, Lars Matanke watchers in Brandon Berg from that story.

Yeah. There was enough stuff like that that kept her going. Totally. I saw there was another

“one about a man in Dusseldorf that the whole thing lasted for about two hours. That's how fast”

things get done. She posted pictures that somebody had sent her of a man, a homeless man in Dusseldorf and asked for more pictures and they within two hours, the cops in Dusseldorf had picked the guy up and verified that it was not Lars. Yeah. I mean, I think the head injury and loss of memory, like he would want to get back to Germany by all accounts. He had a good life. A joy to his job was a pretty happy guy and love Germany. So like the idea of him choosing to stay there

of his own like sound mind just doesn't seem likely at all. No. And unfortunately that really

strongly suggests foul play as a possibility too. The fact that he has not turned up, he has every reason to like you say turn, turn back up again, get back to his life. Yeah. I saw that this on the State Department's website for Bulgaria and human trafficking, like Bulgaria does have a human trafficking problem, but it seems to be typically targeting Bulgarians, especially Romani people who end up getting forced to beg on the streets or forced into hard labor

“if you're a man that it doesn't necessarily target tourists. And I think the Bulgarian officials”

would probably not put up with that because it would harm tourism so dramatically. So it's fairly unlikely that like a blonde German guy named Lars would be would end up begging on the streets of France at the behest of the Bulgarian mafia. And I also saw another theory that he was a drugmule and he flipped out with scared who's going to get caught and ran out of the airport. What saw drug thing too? What really kind of undermines that theory is that no drugs were found in his

stuff. So it's possible he took drugs, a lot of people are like well clearly he was on drugs, like why else would you do that? That's a possibility as well. But again if you really look at some of his behavior, the fact that he ran out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's a erratic behavior. But if you look at the way he was behaving during that erratic behavior, he's not acting erratic if that makes any sense. It's just it's one of the most bizarre

mysteries I've ever heard. So kudos to you and Dave Meishner for coming up with this one. Yeah, I knew nothing about it until Dave's in it. So way to go Dave. Yeah, we need to spend more time on YouTube, I guess we could totally miss this one. So you can go back to VidCon. Right,

“you got anything else? Nope. All right. Well, if you want to know more about Lars Metanke,”

go out and solve the mystery. Well, you at least for his dear mother's sake. And since we said his dear mother's sake, it's time for listen to mail. I'm going to call this. This is another kid right now. This is actually from Dad. My son Hans colored a picture of you podcasting today. Unprompted. Nice. Which did you see this picture? No, I got to bring it up. It was very cute. Which I thought was awesome. I said, we should send it to Josh and Chuck and his eyes

lit up. He wrote out what he wanted to type and an email to you. And I thought it was better to just send you his note. I've been listening to the show for the last 10 years or so and introduced my son a few months ago. We read books before bed, including yours. And then listen to the podcast as he

falls asleep. I'm thankful that I'm able to share this with Hans. He's a smart kid with incredible

memory. So we'll often bring up FACCies learn from you guys, which I had already forgotten. Nice. And the picture. What's the trouble? What's the name of the guy who sent it? I'm looking for Sam. Okay. And it's a picture with magic marker and you are sitting up right at a table and he actually nailed it because you're on the left. You know, back in the before times when we were actually in our studio. He has it right. You're on the left. I'm on the right. I am, it looks like I'm

passing out though. I'm kind of slumped over. But he's got two little microphones and then two little pieces of paper with a handwritten thing that says notes pointing at the paper. Uh-huh. And it says I listen to your show almost every night. And then there's a handwritten letter, which is great, which I'll read. Uh, it's best I can. I love your show, Chuck and Josh. Today, I listen to your S.Y.S.K. about earwax. I told my mom and uh, and had some of your tips. Uh, hey, have you guys

made a football episode like Touchdown? But if not, can you make one? I listen to almost all the episodes, except ones that my parents don't let me watch. Uh, I also have your book. I have read some of the chapters and they're great. Uh, I like that you guys have different types of episodes,

yours sincerely. And that is Hans, last name redacted because he's a kid.

Hans, I was amazing. I'm going to find the picture. I haven't been able to find it yet, but that

was a beautiful letter and you have a super cool name by the way. Yes, I love it. And thank you, Dad, Sam, and whoever else is in the family helping to support the show, we really appreciate it.

“Yep. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Hans, maybe try drawing a picture.”

What are you waiting for? We love pictures. You can send them off to us here at [email protected].

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Could this have happened in city hall? Somebody tell me that. A shocking public murder.

“This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.”

A screen get down, get down, those are shots. A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery

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That's right. And it gets worse. It's an eriting too much drama week on the okay story-time podcast. So we'll find out soon. This person writes, I just inherited a fortune after losing my mom. And now my girlfriend's entire family is coming out of nowhere with her hands out. And my girlfriend is already giving my money away. So the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out the door. Find out out ends. Listen to the okay story-time podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast mostly human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion, add a real world cafe right here near a city. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.

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