Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You know Roald Dahl.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Lars Mittank in Bulgaria?
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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.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances leading to Lars' disappearance?
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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 at another True Life Mystery edition. A true life mystery. Yeah. 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 we can't get our hands on Bulgarian case files from the cops. Right. 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.
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 ā 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 knowā 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 facts. 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.
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Chapter 4: How did Lars' friends react to his sudden behavior change?
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.
Yeah.
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, yeah. 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.
Yeah.
VidCon, that's it. It might as well have been called InternetCon. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What details are known about Lars' medical condition before he vanished?
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 ā and this will figure in, so put a pin in this. His one big love was his futbol club, his soccer team that he followed, which is ā and 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.
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Chapter 6: What theories exist regarding Lars' disappearance?
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 ā 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. 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 ā
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Chapter 7: How did Lars' mother continue to search for him after his disappearance?
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 ā 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 ā It went by really quick. On, 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. Yeah.
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. Right. 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.
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Chapter 8: What role did social media play in the search for Lars Mittank?
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, you know, 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 ā this is just ā I only saw this in one place ā that they had said that ā 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, 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 sleuths, I've seen people saying that, like, 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.
Yeah.
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. Yes. And that's just a general, I think, a cefalexin-based antibiotic dose. that doesn't really usually have many side effects. And if it does have side effects, it's typically something like an upset stomach.
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