CA CA - Egbert Rimkus (dec'd), Cornelia Meyer, & 2 kids, Death Valley, 26 July 1996

[Bluecat]

Unlikely. Most probable is death by heat exposure. Temps even in October are over 100 degrees F. Wouldn't take long to overwhelm people who are unprepared.

 

[gaia227]

Unlikely. Most probable is death by heat exposure. Temps even in October are over 100 degrees F. Wouldn't take long to overwhelm people who are unprepared.

I agree it is most-likely death due to exposure. I was speculating IF there was foul play. Hopefully the ME will be able to establish COD.

 

[broadpath]

I think I've mapped out their path on Google Earth. This is pure speculation on my part.

BTW, GE has a feature to view previous images and there is an image of this area taken October 6th, 1995, just a few months before this catastrophe.

I think that 35 55'29N 117 04'55W is the cabin at Anvil Springs. They likely came here from the road to the North East. Apparently there is water (a spring) here and a living cottonwood tree. Many photos of the cabin are available if you enable "Geographic Web".

There is a triangular intersection of roads here. The road going South would have taken them to Mengel Pass. Assuming this was their goal, they made a tragic mistake by taking the road to the East. FWIW the road East from the cabin looks more worn than the road south. Especially on the 1995 image. Could the driver have assumed the most used road was the one to follow?

The road east goes directly into Anvil Spring Canyon where the Minivan got stuck. It looks like a fairly decent road goes into the canyon and then peters out in the wash at 35 54'44.70N 117 03'14.16"W. I wish I had the coordinates of where they found the van.

Up to this point you can imagine an adventurous soul saying "we can do this" and it doesn't seem too outrageously crazy.

But then it gets crazy. Instead of walking back the few miles to the cabin with water they apparently walked south into Goler Wash where the bones were found.

Maybe they had decided NOT to go on through Mengel Pass and to return by the way they'd come. That could explain why they went east from the cabin instead of south. But if a mistake was made it seems to be right there - they chose the wrong road to follow. Maybe they became confused by the heat. Maybe they were arguing and were distracted. Maybe they lost their bearings and read the map wrong. What happens to one's judgment when it is 120 degrees and a probably dehydrated person drinks a beer? (If you call Bud Ice beer).

The biggest mystery to me is why they went into Goler Wash instead of back to the cabin.

 

[kbl8201]

why do i have the feeling this is gonna show up next on "other victims" in the jaycee section

 

[4x4abc]

van was found at 35 55' 37.86N 117 01' 06.91W

remains were found around 35 49' 10.17N 116 57' 38.93W

 

[broadpath]

Summary:

Geologist's Cabin: 35 55'29"N 117 04'55"W, 4400 feet elevation
Van: 35 55' 37.86N 117 01' 06.91W, 3100' elevation
Remains: 35 49' 10.17N 116 57' 38.93W, 2400' elevation

Sunset (in Los Angeles) on 7/23/1996 was 8PM.
Moonrise was 1:19PM and it was up all night.
It was a new quarter moon that night.

Could they have waited in the van until sunset then followed the light of the moon to the west? That would possibly explain why they climbed over the 400' rise.

(Elevation taken from Google Maps "terrain" view)

By a straight line the van and remains are separated by 8 miles. From the van to the geologist's cabin was less than 4 miles but was uphill 1300 feet. Even though there is a difference of 700' from the van to the remains, there is no downhill path between them. They had to climb over a rise of approximately 3500', meaning they climbed 400' from the van elevation. I crawled the Google terrain map and if they had decided to go downhill the logical path would have lead them straight down Anvil Spring Canyon and back to the West Side Hwy.

The path they selected is not obvious. Maybe they were trying to find Barker Ranch. It's in the basic direction (west) they chose.

Of course, all of this is based on an assumption that the remains were found where they died and not dragged there by beasts. Does anyone know the nature of the remains? Was there a complete skeleton or just a part?

 

[4x4abc]

details:
Idyllwild Town Crier

by the way, moonset must have been around midnight - only the full moon will be visible all night

 

[broadpath]

Thank you for the link to the Town Crier. The blog says that Mahood and Walker, the two members of Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit who found the remains, will return this weekend (11/20 and 21) with about 100 additional searchers to look for more remains and information. The ID they found was Cornelia's. Her father has left a comment on the blog at the link you posted.

That blog doesn't mention the coordinates of the remains. Since you know the coordinates I'm assuming you know more about the find. Silly question, but was the wine bottle empty? Would you guess that Cornelia (assuming those were her bones) was holding the wine bottle when she passed?

 

[CrimeSolver]

Thanks for the details. Boy, these people sure made all the wrong decisions, including going in the wrong direction at each turn. Had they just gone south and then west through Mendel Pass, they might, with luck, have found their way to that cluster of communities around Searles Lake, but instead they went on a trek to nowhere. Tragic.

 

[4x4abc]

Since you know the coordinates I'm assuming you know more about the find.

broadpath,

no, I don't have any first hand knowledge of any of the locations. I have extrapolated the van position from images 4 and 10 of the photo gallery in this article, the distance to the cabin checks out with initial discovery report.
Image 4 was taken looking NW, image 10 was taken looking NNE - GoogleEarth confirms the backgrounds and thus the approximate location.

For the approximate discovery location I combined the following three known facts:
location 2-4 miles from reservation border, elevation 2500 ft, location from van 8-11 miles - the rest is GoogleEarth.

I have explored the area extensively over the last 25 years. The road from Sourdough Springs to Wingate Wash road passes pretty close (within 2 miles) to the projected discovery location. In fact, I had some work back there the same year of the family's disappearance. Too bad both of these historic roads are now closed. Sorry, did not want to hijack the thread.

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

Rimkus, 34, disappeared from Inyo County, California on July 22, 1996, along with his ten-year-old son Georg Weber, his girlfriend Cornelia Meyer, and Cornelia's four-year-old son Max Meyer. The four were all tourists from Germany and they disappeared while visiting Death Valley. They were presumed to have become lost in the desert and died of exposure, but extensive searches turned up no indication of their whereabouts.

In November 2009, bones from two human adults were found in Death Valley National Park. Nearby was identification linked to the missing tourists. In June 2010, some of the bones were identified as Rimkus's. Other bones were identified as coming from an adult female, presumably Cornelia Meyer, but they were too dry to render enough DNA for analysis. No bones from human children have been recovered.

http://www.charleyproject.org/resolved.html


Rest in peace, Egbert.
​

 

[Kat]

van was found at 35 55' 37.86N 117 01' 06.91W

remains were found around 35 49' 10.17N 116 57' 38.93W

Hi 4X4. thank you for that information.

Did anyone ever plug those coordinates into a map so we could have a look? I'd do it but I'm at a loss for those things.

Rest in peace to the four. Prayers for their families.

FWIW, I am not familiar with Death Valley. I am familiar with the extreme environment of the Chihuahuan Desert. (I adore the desert, it is in my heart and we plan to return to live out our years in the desert). It is my understanding that Death Valley is much more of an extreme environment.

Unfortunately, every year people lose their life in that extreme environment. When the ambient temp is that high, and the humidity as low as it is in the desert, one can dehydrate without any exertion.

Add into that a naivete about that environment, the requirement of water just to function for each individual and you have disaster. So many don't realize that even if they don't feel sweat on thier bodies (when the environment is that dry your persperation will evaporate before you feel it wet on your skin) they are rapidly depleting their internal hydration.

I'm so sorry that these four lost their lives in the desert. Prayers again to their families.

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

I just plugged them into Google maps. Not sure about the accuracy because I am clueless about coordinates. But this is what Google maps shows.

Coordinates from 4x4

A - Vehicle Location
B- Remains Location

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...35,-116.916504&spn=0.527331,1.234589&t=h&z=10

 

[moonstone]

Detailed Story of the Search and Findings. A good, though tragic, read.

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/...nt-for-the-death-valley-germans/introduction/

• Introduction, July 23, 1996
• The original search and interim years
• I get sucked in (It never seems crazy at the beginning)
• A pretty stupid day hike, 10/27/2009
• I concoct a theory
• “Tom, we have some bones here….”, 11/11 – 12/2009
• Intermission
• The Big Search, 12/5 – 6/2009
• The craziest day hike, ever, 3/23/2010
• Up the N3 canyon, 4/15/2010
• Water Carriers, 10/30/2010
• A whole lotta nuthin’, 11/13-14/2010
• Epilogue

 

[Romulus]

Other bones were identified as coming from an adult female, presumably Cornelia Meyer, but they were too dry to render enough DNA for analysis. No bones from human children have been recovered.

Who knows of the remains of the boys what it was; chances are buried somewhere in the sand in the desert; we hope that some how manage to extract the DNA from the alleged remains of woman.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

Other bones were identified as coming from an adult female, presumably Cornelia Meyer, but they were too dry to render enough DNA for analysis.
​

If they had her skull, and therefore presumably a few teeth, they could carry out isotope analysis to determine where the owner had grown up. With any luck this would show a profile consistent with Germany. Not as conclusive as DNA but how many other people of German origin are likely to have been lost in that area?

 

[MelmothTheLost]

In Dresden, Germany, the families and friends of the four tourists had expected them to return home by July 29.

A few posters have wondered why this group seemed to be so naive and foolhardy.

Since the family and friends of both adults were in Dresden, it seems very likely that both the adults were from there too. That would make them "Ossies", East Germans who had only been able to travel freely since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. If so they were probably new to international travel, possibly in the "excited puppy" stage of exploring a suddenly much bigger world, and focused more on the possibilities than the dangers, so yes - naive and really not thinking that there were environments out there that were radically more hostile than those they had grown up with.

They, or at least Egbert, probably knew enough to know in theory just how hostile Death Valley could be but not enough to really understand in practice how and why, and how to recognise danger and to keep safe.

It's all very well to imagine you know what 125[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]°[/FONT]F is like, but you can't understand it until you've experienced it.

 

[Elainera]

I just stumbled upon this story as it was mentioned in another thread and found a good long article here:

https://medium.com/@this.and.that/t...valley-germans-companion-reading-79a7836d7c55

It is called a 'companion reading' to the story posted on otherhand.org, posted above by moonstone.

Has many maps that show their path and clear up many questions raised here. Explains why they did not go through Mengle Pass but instead chose to turn east towards Anvil Canyon. Also explains why they turned south after their car got stuck. It is assumed they were trying to reach the South China Lake Naval Center military boundary, roughly 9 miles south of Anvil Canyon, hoping to find help there. They must have thought that was their best shot. And they almost made it there (but would not have found anyone there anyway).

I was wondering why there were never any remains of the children found - the two adults seems to have been found fairly close together. I think it might be possible that the children died earlier and Egbert and Connie buried them and went on alone.

A very tragic case. Yes they made mistakes but I feel they fought hard for their lives, and ultimately lost.

 

[Ozoner]

I was wondering why there were never any remains of the children found - the two adults seems to have been found fairly close together. I think it might be possible that the children died earlier and Egbert and Connie buried them and went on alone.

I don't think they would have had any way to dig graves. They may have left the children somewhere if the children became too echausted to continue. Scavenging animals could also explain why the children weren't found.