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I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real-world cafe right here in New York City.
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And it's very empowering.
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Hey, everybody.
Chuck here on a Saturday with a little mystery, true crimey 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, because that's kind of what we do.
Much to 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 iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.
And there's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Yet another true life mystery edition.
A true life mystery.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
I don't want to say crime because 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'll 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.
Right.
And read it ourselves.
So we did find a Redditor who did something last year, who claims that he got information from Lars' mother, who you're going to meet Sandra,
Yeah.
She's not going to be on the show.
You're not going to really meet her, but 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 – you know, 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 without 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 going to 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.
People have 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 it's like When there's a book that's been written about it, published by, like a real publisher.
Like Beverly Cleary.
It's not just internet dudes.
Right.
But you know, a lot of times these more recent sort of missing person cases, it is just internet dudes.
So, you know, it is what it is.
And the dude that we're talking about is named Lars Matank.
And he's known as the most famous missing person on YouTube ever.
I hate that designation.
It's 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 something like InternetCon, but it wasn't that.
It was close to that.
I can't remember.
That almost put me off of YouTube forever.
We blocked our memory bank because we did our biggest show ever there in front of about 12 people.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
I'll think of it.
And, by the way, we should thank Dave Meichner, 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 Matank, 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.
VidCon.
VidCon, that's it.
It might as well have been called Internet Con.
Yeah.
But did you look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel for the place?
Yeah.
You know, looks like any lovely seaside hamlet.
Yeah.
And I couldn't get the impression of whether it was more like Destin or more like Panama City Beach.
It seems like a big party spot if that's what you're wondering.
Yeah.
Okay, but like it also looked like it was fairly like 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.
It'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 would go missing, he was born in February 1986 in northern Germany.
He was an only child.
He was a handsome kid, very popular.
He was athletic.
He was smart.
He did well in school.
After he graduated, he ended up getting a job at the GDF Suez Power Plant, about 100 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 will figure in, so put a pin in this.
His one big love was his football club, his soccer team that he followed, which is –
This is not how they would pronounce it, but the Werder Bremen Football Club.
Oh, really?
How would they pronounce it?
Well, it's always just a little more German.
Let's hear it.
Like the guy, the Redditor.
He narrates his own documentary and he said it in a way that I'm not even going to 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 100% sure.
But to kind of give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars Matank was, his dad had a stroke a couple of 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 100 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 to a week-long vacation at Golden Sands in Bulgaria in July, the end of June, beginning of July.
He wasn't going to go.
And his mom said, 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, the all-inclusive places, the cheap booze, plenty of drugs to be had.
Lars was the life of the party, according to his friends.
Yeah.
I saw 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 Schultz and Paul Roman.
But they were hanging out, going to the beach, playing soccer.
The one weird thing that I think people may have made too much about online as far as internet sleuthing goes.
His friends remarked that he didn't have much of an appetite on the trip, was eating like soup and salad and fruit, whereas they were.
You know, it was an all-inclusive 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 Redditor slash documentarian who said that he apparently had kind of gotten – he 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 of 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, R-O-K-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 countries, clubs and countries.
And there were some kids, I guess, who were recent high school graduates and were fans of FC Bayern, which is the rival to Werder Bremen.
And I guess they kind of got into it verbally only with Lars and his friends.
Yeah, and I 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.
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 because 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 you're a 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 partied some more.
But it didn't send up these huge alarms that he didn't come back that night.
So when he did show up again I don't know if it was 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 had 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, FC Bayern, that they'd gotten into it with at the bar earlier that night.
Because apparently they had said – this is just –, I only saw this in one place – that they had said that –.
They'd 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 an 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 – 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 sleuths.
I've seen people saying that he totally made up the story about the fight.
Right.
But that is all just people speculating online.
Yeah.
I know.
If you ever want to see people just take a piece of information and then spin it to the nth degree, the most extreme possible interpretation of it, you could do worse than hang out on the internet.
So he goes to a doctor.
He gets the diagnosis of a ruptured eardrum.
Apparently went and saw a specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should get surgery.
And Lars is 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.
Yeah.
And then this is sort of one of the keys is he was given an antibiotic named ceferoxime and he was given the strongest possible dosage, which was about I think it was 500 milligrams.
Wow.
Yes, and that's just a general, I think, a cephalexin-based antibiotic that doesn't really usually have many side effects.
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 there.
It's really interesting to look at.
But that has nothing to do with anything that Lars exhibited, any behavior he 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 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 I'm 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 Redditor who said that he spoke to the guys, to his mother, that his mother said 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 when he went to the specialist, the specialist said – wouldn't speak to him in English 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 eardrum is.
I was looking on the Internet.
It turns out, and the National Health Service says, that if you have a perforated eardrum 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, you're actually better off flying, like this.
Or would at the very least be like, you don't have to worry about that at all.
It's not a thing.
Interesting.
Yeah, I thought 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.
I became a millionaire overnight, but lost everything that actually mattered.
Wait a minute, Sophia.
Did you just say he lost everything?
That's right.
It's inheriting too much drama week on the OK Storytime 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 their hands out.
One sibling wants me to fund their whole lifestyle.
Another vanished for four years and suddenly reappeared, and my girlfriend is already giving my money away.
Hold on, Sophia.
So the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out the door.
And that's just the beginning.
He makes a plan, sets up a trust, and finally thinks he has everything under control.
Okay, so things work out then?
Let's just say the people he trusted the most are the ones who ended up shocking him the most.
So does the money end up being worth going through all that?
To find out, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, a longtime tech journalist.
And consider my new podcast, Mostly Human, your bridge to the future.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.
Anyone can build an app.
And it's very empowering.
Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future.
And we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.
What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating this AI companion, they're actually dating the companies that create this.
We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history.
And let's be honest, that can be messy.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment.
Mostly Human will show you how.
My goal is to give you the playbook so you can benefit.
The reason I say agency is because if we can give power back to people, then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marangini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County, as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, so Lars' 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 been like, hey, maybe we should stay here.
But they said he seemed relaxed.
He was in a good mood.
And so they took off.
So, 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 seedy 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 there.
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.
TripAdvisor gives it a 4 out of 5, and Booking.com has it at 7.8 out of 10.
And it is definitely cheap.
I think rooms are like $25 American dollars a night, which is suspiciously cheap.
Yeah.
Yeah, there is like probably some criminal activity there, but that it's not like –
It's not like a trap house hotel or anything like that.
But it was – the fact that it was his 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 photocopy 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 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 hotelier who has made a photocopy 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.
Yeah.
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 ringer 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 that antibiotic, which –
You might think it means like he's feeling weird and like, what is this I've taken?
That, to me, says that if he was behaving weirdly or experiencing some differing 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.
You know, 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 wired, you know, money-grammed or whatever?
Western Union.
Do they have Western Union over there?
Yeah, supposedly there's a real detail in there in 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 very much with it mentally.
Yeah.
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 –
And 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 his story changed or it could be shady.
Yeah.
It could be.
So 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 the airport had recently undergone or was undergoing renovations.
And then 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.
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 that literally, a human being, another person, walks into the examination room.
Yeah.
And apparently really freaked out, if that version is correct.
Really freaked out Lars, who was already obviously feeling a little bit paranoid.
Sure.
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 no?
This is an airline employee that's going to actually walk you to the plane.
Yeah.
Uh, it's very compelling to watch this uh young kid drop all and you don't see him drop his stuff.
But clearly he walks in with a backpack and a duffel 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 there's 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 Reddit 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 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.
Right.
That was 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.
Don't know if that's true or not, but supposedly that's what he said.
And then the mom, 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, checks his pocket as if he's checking to make sure he has his passport and his wallet and stuff, and kind of looks around and orients 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 bolts from the airport and then continues to either kind of walk or jog and never stops, never checks his pockets, never orients himself at all.
Yeah.
So he actually walks within 20 feet of a couple of cops who are standing talking to one another in the parking lot.
He walks past them.
He goes behind a sandpile 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 those 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 sized 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, to me, is extremely important.
All right.
Should we take another break?
Yes.
All right, we're going to take another break and bring it home with what happened from there and then some of the theories about what happened to Lars Mittok.
I'm Lori Siegel, a longtime tech journalist.
And consider my new podcast, Mostly Human, your bridge to the future.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.
Anyone can build an app.
And it's very empowering.
Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future.
And we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.
What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating this AI companion, they're actually dating the companies that create this.
We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history.
And let's be honest, that can be messy.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment.
Mostly Human will show you how.
My goal is to give you the playbook so you can benefit.
The reason I say agency is because if we can give power back to people, then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I became a millionaire overnight, but lost everything that actually mattered.
Wait a minute, Sophia.
Did you just say he lost everything?
That's right.
It's inheriting too much drama week on the OK Storytime 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 their hands out.
One sibling wants me to fund their whole lifestyle.
Another vanished for four years and suddenly reappeared, and my girlfriend is already giving my money away.
Hold on, Sophia.
So the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out the door.
And that's just the beginning.
He makes a plan, sets up a trust, and finally thinks he has everything under control.
Okay, so things work out then?
Let's just say the people he trusted the most are the ones who ended up shocking him the most.
So does the money end up being worth going through all that?
To find out, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marincini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County, as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So Chuck, just to recap, Lars Matonk has fled is 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 in the sun.
Except for his mom speculating that she saw him checking his...
Yeah, I thought that was very confusing.
But I saw it in The Sun, which I realize 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 it on a Yale article.
It's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were left behind.
But, I mean, that's a really good point.
Like we're totally – we're lost in the sunflower field as far as that stuff concerns.
We don't know.
We've 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.
You know 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.
It seems like 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 Metonk either either.
So um 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 this 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.
She had decided that that was according to that documentary.
And who knows?
We really need to get Sondra Matonk on here, dude.
One of the cool things that happened through this – through his mother investigating this is various leads came in over the years like hey, there's this guy that speaks 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 addicts.
Some were mentally ill.
Some were actually reunited with their families.
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 few days or the first week,
It's like very slim to no chance.
All of these things gave her hope that 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 within the first year in Germany.
Yeah.
Not even in Germany, but among German citizens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought it would be a lot higher than that, but that's, that's actually not 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.
And anytime something ends up on the Internet, it ends up being passed along to Sandra Matonk.
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 his 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 aim 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, you know, out in the woods somewhere still and just hasn't been found and is dead, probably by now.
Yeah, or I suppose he could have just wandered into a town and assimilated.
Well, his mom apparently does believe that he's still out there which is why she tries to shake down every lead she can but thinks that he does have memory loss and that that's why he's still out there and has 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 human trafficking in Bulgaria is a problem and maybe a young handsome, fit man like Lars could have been a target for human trafficking and that he really 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 Matank 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 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 forgetting.
Like this is the mom, like this is real to her.
This is her life.
This isn't just something on the internet.
So what about the trucker?
Oh, so that's one of the leads that there was a trucker in – where was it?
Brandenburg?
Yeah.
So there was a trucker that, in 2019, picked up a hitchhiker in Dresden and drove him all the way to Brandenburg, I guess.
And –
And he said later on – he didn't know about the Lars Matant case at the time, but he said later on he found out about it and said oh man, that's got to be the kid that I picked up.
And so his mom shook down the story, and I don't think that – she ever got in touch with the truck driver, or else the truck driver was just like.
Here's what I think, but I can't say either way, and I don't know where he went.
So there's like a be on the lookout among you know Lars Matonk watchers in Brandenburg from that story.
Yeah.
But it's 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 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 –
He would want to get back to Germany.
By all accounts, he had a good life, enjoyed his job, was a pretty happy guy, and loved Germany.
So the idea of him choosing to stay there, of his own sound mind, just doesn't seem likely at all.
No, and unfortunately that really strongly suggests foul play is a possibility too.
The fact that he has not turned up, he has every reason to, like you say, turn back up again, get back to his life.
I saw that on the State Department's website for Bulgarian 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,
Yeah. 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 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 drug mule and he flipped out and was scared he was going to get caught and ran out of the airport.
Yeah.
I saw a 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—
Yes, the fact that he ran out of the airport and jumped over a fence, that's 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 one of the most bizarre mysteries I've ever heard.
So kudos to you and Dave Meichner for coming up with this one.
Yeah, I knew nothing about it until Dave said it.
Way to go, Dave.
Yeah, we need to spend more time on YouTube, I guess.
We totally missed this one.
So we can go back to VidCon.
Right.
You got anything else?
Nope.
All right.
Well, if you want to know more about Lars Matank, go out and solve the mystery, will you?
At least for his dear mother's sake.
And since we said his dear mother's sake, it's time for Listener Mail.
I'm going to call this.
This is another kid writing in.
This is actually from...
Dad, my son Hans colored a picture of you podcasting today.
Nice.
Unprompted.
Nice.
Which, did you see this picture?
No, I got to bring it up.
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 in 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 facts he's learned from you guys which I had already forgotten.
Nice.
And the picture is adorable.
What's the name of the guy who sent it?
I'm looking for it.
Sam.
Okay.
And it's a picture with magic marker, and you are sitting upright 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.
Yeah.
He has it right.
You're on the left.
I'm on the right.
It looks like I'm passing out, though.
I'm kind of slumped.
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.
Nice.
It says, I listen to your show almost every night.
And then there's a handwritten letter, which is great, which I'll read as best I can.
I love your show, Chuck and Josh.
Today, I listened to your SYSK about earwax.
I told my mom and had some of your tips.
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.
I also have your book.
I have read some of the chapters in it, and they are great.
I like that you guys have different types of episodes, like short stuff and just regular episodes.
I'm your biggest fan.
I'm the second grade, yours sincerely.
And that is Hans, last name redacted because he's a kid.
Hans, that 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 Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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I'm Laurie 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 at a real world cafe right here in New York 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.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.
Anyone can build an app.
And it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
How 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.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins.
But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test ones.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mangini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an I Heart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
