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About this Episode
In 2014, a young German man walked into an airport in Bulgaria with a flight booked, then suddenly ran out leaving all his posessions behind, never to be heard from again. This classic episode tells the story of Lars Mittank.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
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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 I Heart Radio.
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 is, this 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.
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, not, 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.
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 it in 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 going to definitely do our best.
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.
Yeah.
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, it's not just internet
dudes, but you know, a lot of times these more recent sort of missing person cases, it
is just internet dudes.
So, you know, that 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 he is pretty bad.
It should have probably just scared us off of this episode to begin with, but because
you remember, what was the name of that con?
The YouTube convention we went to that one time.
Oh, it was something like internet con, but it wasn't that.
It was close to that.
I can't remember the guys.
They almost put me off of YouTube forever.
We blocked our memory bank as we did our biggest show ever there in front of about 12
people.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
I don't think of it.
And by the way, we should thank Dave Meishner, who was 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 8, 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.
But did you look at pictures of Golden Sands to get a feel for the place?
Yeah.
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.
I just couldn't.
It seems like a big party spot if that's what you're wondering.
Okay.
But 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.
It was 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 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 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 it pin in this.
His one big love was his football club, his soccer team that he followed, which is,
and, you know, this is not how they would pronounce it, but the Verder Bremen Football Club.
Oh, really?
How would they pronounce it?
Well, it's always just a little more German, you know, like the guy, the editor, 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 or 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 two 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, all inclusive places, the cheat booze,
plenty of drugs to be had.
Lars was the life of the party, according to his friends, as I saw it 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.
But the one weird thing that I think people may have made too much about online, as far
as internet sleuthing goes, is 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 documentary 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, 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 OKBAR, 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, all
different clubs and countries.
And there were some kids, I guess, who were recent high school graduates, and were fans
of FC Bayern, which was 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, 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.
Yeah.
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 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, this is just, I only saw this in one place, that they
had said that they had shouted that it's easy to get 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, there's 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's loose, I've seen people saying that like 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
anthroprotation of it, that 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, he went and saw a specialist at a hospital who confirmed it, said you should
get surgery and large, it's 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 antibiotic named Sephiroc
Sime.
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 Sephalexan-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.
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, 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 redditor 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, the specialist said, like, 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.
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, it's not a thing.
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.
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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.
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.
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 four
out of five, and booking dot 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, and
that 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 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 hotelier 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 a smartphone with him.
He left that at home and brought sort of a cheaper phone.
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 Serafam 500, which was at any biotic, which you might
think 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 differing behavior,
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, wired moneygrammed
or whatever.
Western Union.
I don't know.
Did 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.
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'd 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 the friend and 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 history changed or it could be
shady.
It could be.
So from what I saw that the doctor changes 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 and apparently really freaked out if that
version is correct, really freaked out Lars, who was already obviously feeling a little
bit paranoid.
Sure.
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.
It's a little frustrating, you do not know the exact truth, but no matter what happens,
we do know that he's 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 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.
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 I 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 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 was 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.
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 investigation
and she was 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 and 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
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 them 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'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 it home with what happened from there and
then some of the theories about what happened to Large Metalk.
In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move
faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.
And T-Mobile knows all about that.
They're now the best network, according to the experts at Euclospede tests.
And they use that network to launch SuperMobile.
The first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security,
and seamless satellite coverage.
That's right.
With SuperMobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.
With the network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity
even in times of high demand.
With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data,
private for you, your team, and your clients.
And with seamless coverage from the world's tallest satellite to mobile constellation,
your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.
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So Chuck, just to recap, Lars Matonk 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 except for his son speculating that she saw
him checking his pocket.
I thought that was very confusing, but I saw it 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 it on a Yale article.
It's basically everywhere that his wallet, passport, and phone were left behind.
That's a really good point, like we're totally 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 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 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, they didn't necessarily even know what was going on if they saw this
flyer, or maybe they didn't even run it on the evening news.
Yeah.
And so if it was three weeks, four weeks after the disappearance that news started to
really spread, or maybe news never really spread, if you were a driver and you were
when 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.
So there's, it's possible there's people out there with information who just aren't,
aren't, don't know 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 and that she had decided that that, that was
according to that documentary and who knows, we really need to get Sandra Metonk 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 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 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 within the first year in Germany.
Yeah.
It's not even in Germany, but among German citizens, yeah, I thought it would be a lot
higher than that, but that's actually not bad as far as I can tell.
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 large.
Like she does this kind of frequently.
There was one where a guy turned up in Brazil who looks a lot like large, but disheveled
with the beard and his hair kind of crazy.
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 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
out in the woods somewhere still and just hasn't been found and is dead probably by now.
Yeah, 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's
why he's still out there just in his never contacted her.
Another theory is that 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 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 Matonk 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 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
or to, 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, 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 to Brandon Berg, I guess.
And he said later on, he didn't know about the Lars Matonk 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 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 beyond the lookout among Lars Matonk 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, enjoyed his job, was a pretty happy guy and loved
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.
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 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.
What's 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 a radic 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 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.
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.
Well, if you want to know more about Lars Matonk, 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 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 say 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 facts he's learned from you guys, which I had already forgotten.
Nice.
And the picture.
Is it 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.
I am.
It looks like I'm passing out though.
I'm kind of slumped over.
That's awesome.
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 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.
For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app.
Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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