Twelfth Issue: Murder in the Galapagos

 

 

The information in this week’s newsletter is actually NOT from Wikipedia, at least not most of it. Wikipedia has articles on what happened and who is who, but I found one article here that actually explains everything that I used as my main source. I’m going to make it a little shorter though, I hope.

 

 

 
There’s an island in the Galapagos called Floreana. When Charles Darwin saw it in 1835, nobody really lived there. The island served as a post office and stopping point for merchants and pirates in the area. There was a small cave and a house for shelter, but nobody really stayed there permanently.  In 1928, a German couple decided they would move to Floreana and make their own little utopia. (Side note: I took a class on utopias and dystopias in grad school and it was fascinating to me. Utopias are supposed to be better than dystopias but they often end up to being worse. Utopias can never be utopias for everyone, the very idea is subjective. It’s just interesting. Cults, communes, utopias. Dystopias aren’t as interesting because they’re real life. I can’t even be as excited for the TV version of the Handmaid’s Tale anymore because it’s too real. Anyway.)
 
So the German couple was called Dr. Frederick Ritter and Dore Strauch. Dr. Fred treated Dore for multiple sclerosis, and they fell in love. They both hated ‘bourgeoisie domesticity’, which should give you an idea of the kind of people they were, mainly the doctor but also Dore. The doctor told her that she could overcome her illness by just … willpower (great doctor, am I right?), and the two of them left their spouses and families to run off to Floreana together. Dr. Fred also removed his teeth before he went on the trip. He wanted to know if his gums would toughen up in the wilderness. Once they got to the island, Dore’s teeth all rotted and had to be pulled out (with GARDENING TOOLS) and they shared a single pair of stainless steel false teeth the doctor made. They were also nudists. See what I mean about utopias being subjective? Who is like oh yeah let’s pull all my teeth out with a pair of shears and then share metal teeth with my husband it’s a UTOPIA? Weirdos.

 

 

 
That's them, above, wearing clothes. Anyway, sometimes the couple had visitors because people would still pass through the bay which was called Post Office Bay. People would go back home and talk about the weirdos and they became famous in Europe as a ‘modern day Adam and Eve’. White Europeans are so WEIRD. Sorry but also I am not sorry.
 
This fame did not work out so great because another German couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer read about them and wanted to go to the island and try to copy them. They had a son with them, Harry, and Margret was pregnant with another child. They hoped that once they got there the doctor would help deliver the baby and be friends with them. When they got to the island though, they found out that Dr. Fred and Dore did not like them at all. They thought they were super common and domestic and ordinary and not as high minded as they were. They wouldn’t let the Wittmers stay near them so they had to go live in the pirate cave. Margret didn’t like Dore either, she said she was stuck up and a snob, trying to prove how smart she was by quoting Nietzsche (Margret wrote her own memoir about the island too). Below is a nice picture of the Wittmers.

 

 

 
The doctor and Dore were shit at living off the land. They were vegetarians and survived on whatever gifts people coming through on ships and boats brought them. The Wittmers were actually self-sustainable, and meat-eaters, living off the land pretty well. I’m on their side. Things were going okay, nobody was friends but nobody was enemies either, and then the Baroness arrived.
 
The Baroness was Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn. She was rich, Austrian, probably not a real baroness, and she brought three guys with her – her lovers Alfred Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Phillipson, and a servant from Ecuador. She wanted to build a luxury resort, which horrified both the Wittmers and the Ritters. The Baroness would do things like “abusing donkeys, stealing the Wittmers’ land, rice, and boat, and keeping servile gigolos”. Scandalous!! So that’s why the Witters didn’t like her – the doctor and Dore didn’t like her because she was stealing their thunder and took gifts that used to go to them from passing boats.Here's a picture of the Baroness and her many dudes.

 

 

 
The Baroness even shot a random visitor ‘accidentally’ on a hunting trip! There were a ton of tourists and journalists coming by and the ‘Eden’ was no longer really a utopia if it ever really had been. She made a movie of herself called The Empress of Floreana, and one of her lovers, Alfred, kept showing up at the Ritter’s and the Wittmer’s houses saying he was being mistreated – he even got into a fight with Robert a few times in front of them. Then one day, the Baroness and Robert both disappeared!!! The Wittmers and the Ritters had different theories about this.
 
Dore said that she heard a shriek, and then a few days later Alfred and Margret Wittmer both came and told them that the Baroness and Robert had been picked up by a millionaire’s yacht and went off to the South Seas. Dore didn’t believe this. She would have seen a yacht. She thought they had been murdered, and saw that the Baroness’s tablecloth was now on the Wittmer’s table. The doctor backed up his wife’s theory and wrote to the press about it. They thought Heinz Wittmer did it. Meanwhile, Margret Wittmer thought that the Ritters did it. Nothing really came of any of this though.
 
In 1933, the island was struck by a year-long drought. The doctor and Dore decided to start eating meat since it was so hard to find food. They found dead chickens and ate them but the doctor got sick and died – this was just five months after the Baroness disappeared. Margret didn’t believe that Dore’s husband had died of food poisoning because how could it be that Dore and the doctor both ate the chicken but Dore was still healthy and fine? Margret also said that in the Doctor’s final moments he wrote “I curse you with my dying breath” and gave the paper to Dore. Dore doesn’t mention this in her memoir. Margret also said that Dore said something about a secret that the Doctor had with Alfred (presumably about the Baroness’s death). Basically each woman accused the other of murder in her memoir.
 
Alfred decided to leave Floreana as soon as he could and caught the first boat. They ended up marooned on a tiny Galapagos island with no water, and died of thirst. He should have waited to leave the island, probably, but his rush was understandable whether he killed his lover and her other lover or not. After the doctor died, Dore went back to Germany. The Wittmers stayed on the island – their son died in an accident a few years later, but the second child, born on the island, Rolf, operated a Galapagos yachting company.
 
If you’re interested in learning more about this story, there’s a documentary called The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden. You can also read Margret Wittmer and Dore Strauch’s memoirs. Who do you think really killed the Baroness? Or maybe she never died and really did just leave the island. We’ll probably never know.