The Galapagos Murder: The Murder Mystery That Rocked the Equator
A tropic paradise...ideal for murder.
The Galapagos Islands are a scientist's haven. Home to rare creatures, it was made famous by Charles Darwin and is the ideal spot for study, relaxation...and murder?
In September 1929 two settlers arrived on the desolate island of Floreana. They dreamed of escaping it all and were living the dream, until an arrogant Baroness and her lovers arrived.
Turning an island paradise into a living hell, the Baroness suddenly disappeared without a trace. To this day, no one is sure what happened to her.
This is the story of love, paradise, betrayal, and murder. It will have you thinking twice before you ever yearn to escape to your own tropical paradise!
The Galapagos Islands are a scientist's haven. Home to rare creatures, it was made famous by Charles Darwin and is the ideal spot for study, relaxation...and murder?
In September 1929 two settlers arrived on the desolate island of Floreana. They dreamed of escaping it all and were living the dream, until an arrogant Baroness and her lovers arrived.
Turning an island paradise into a living hell, the Baroness suddenly disappeared without a trace. To this day, no one is sure what happened to her.
This is the story of love, paradise, betrayal, and murder. It will have you thinking twice before you ever yearn to escape to your own tropical paradise!
Buy Now!
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Excerpt
Introduction
The Galápagos Islands lie right on the Equator in the South Pacific Ocean, about six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, and nobody’s quite sure how long they’ve been there. The islands have been studied more by biologists than geologists and the most we know is that they’re volcanic, created – like Hawaii – by a “hot spot” under the Earth’s crust, and that as an island group they’re somewhere between 8 million and 90 million years old. The hot spot is still active and the two newest islands, Isabella and Fernandina, continue to grow as fresh lava periodically surges up from the depths of the Earth. These islands are right over the hot spot itself; the ones to their east are older, carried away from the subterranean fire by the slow movement of the Nazca Plate as it slides under South America. On the seabed a trail of even older islands, eroded away until their highest points are far below the surface, straggles towards a deep trench just off the Ecuadorean coast. The Galápagos hot spot has been creating islands for at least half a billion years and, eventually, they all reach the coast and get carried back down into the molten depths.
Floreana won’t be disappearing for a while. One of the smaller of the main islands, and further south than any but Española, it’s no longer volcanically active but probably was in the fairly recent past. Eleven miles long and nine wide, it’s mostly flat but in the center rises to the 2,100 foot peak of Cerro Pajas, the old volcano that formed the island long ago.
Volcanic rock breaks down into rich soil and despite their isolation the Galápagos Islands support a lot of life. Long ago they were colonized by iguanas, tortoises, rodents and various birds. Living in small numbers on separate islands these species, and the native plants, have gradually evolved into unique forms. Most tortoises are small but the Galápagos Tortoise is the size of a small sofa and weights up to 900 pounds; each subspecies lives on only one island. Iguanas are found throughout Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and along with other lizards have made it to the Galápagos too. There’s another type of iguana on the islands though – the world’s only marine lizard. It’s found on all the Galápagos islands and nowhere else in the world. The birds are unusual too. Darwin’s Finches – which aren’t really finches at all – are also unique to the islands, as is the Flightless Cormorant.
It’s unknown when people first discovered the islands. Pottery fragments and other debris suggest native South American peoples had visited there, but the earliest sighting by Europeans was on March 10, 1535, when a lost Spanish ship carrying the Bishop of Panama landed there. By 1570 they were being marked on maps as “Insulae de los Galopegos,” the Islands of the Tortoises. English explorer and occasional pirate Richard Hawkins visited in 1593. More English pirates arrived in the late 17th century, using the islands as a base for their raids on Spanish treasure galleons carrying gold and silver down the coast; the buccaneers haunted the Galápagos until the middle of the 18th century. By then whalers were also using the islands, filling their water casks there and stocking up on meat. The pirates had released goats on the islands and they bred rapidly, creating a food resource for the sea raiders, but the whaling ships preferred to capture the giant tortoises. The lumbering reptiles could survive for months without food or water; ships could keep hundreds of them alive in the hold, slaughtering them when meat was needed. As the Pacific whaling industry grew tortoise numbers plummeted and several subspecies were completely wiped out. Fur traders also pillaged the islands, decimating the seal population. More invasive species arrived too; the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, hoping to wipe out the goats the pirates ate, unleashed feral dogs on the islands and later sailors released cattle and pigs. Cats and rats came ashore from the ships, and foreign plant species were introduced. All this had a serious effect on the island ecosystems; the cattle and goats ate the vegetation the tortoises relied on, while cats, dogs and pigs raided their nests. Nobody knows exactly how many species became extinct.
Floreana suffered more than most. On October 22 1819 a crewman from the American whaling ship Essex started a fire as a prank; unfortunately it was the middle of the dry season and it spread out of control, devastating most of the island.[i] A group of tortoise hunters from the Essex were trapped and had to run through the fire to escape, and the captain was furious. Threatening dire punishments if he ever caught the culprit he ordered the Essex back to sea and she sailed out towards the catching grounds in the southern Pacific. A year later – whalers routinely made two or three year voyages – she launched her whaleboats to pursue a pod of sperm whales 2,000 miles west of the Galápagos. Suddenly a large whale broke away from the boats, headed straight for the ship and slammed his forehead into her hull.[ii] The Essex sank in ten minutes and the twenty men on board had to escape in the whaleboats. In the end twelve died; several were eaten by their starving shipmates. In 1841 Herman Melville, on his first voyage on the whaler Acushnet, heard the tale and was inspired to write Moby Dick.
The fire didn’t wipe out all life on Floreana, because several whalers reported collecting tortoises there over the next few years. It did cause immense damage though because when Thomas Nickerson, the former cabin boy of the Essex, returned there years later the island was still a wasteland of ash. The vegetation recovered slowly and several unique animal species probably disappeared in the fire.
In September 1835 a small British warship, the 10-gun sloop HMS Beagle, arrived in the Galápagos and began a five-week exploration of the islands. Many Royal Navy sailors thought HMS Beagle was an unlucky ship; within weeks of being launched in 1820 she had been declared redundant and left to rot at anchor for five years. Refitted as a survey ship she sailed to South America in May 1826 for a four-year voyage, which was interrupted in 1828 when her captain became depressed and shot himself. By the time the ship reached Montevideo she needed urgent repairs, after which she resumed her mission under a new captain, Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy. Off the coast of Tierra del Fuego a group of locals stole one of the ship’s boats and FitzRoy took four of them hostage as a reprisal, then brought them back to England. In 1831 the disintegrating ship was fully rebuilt and modified to make her less dangerous in bad weather, then sailed for South America again in December that year. FitzRoy was worried though. The captain of a warship lived a stressful life and, even in a vessel as cramped as the Beagle (she was only 90 feet long and 24 feet wide) was very isolated from the junior officers and crew. Captain Stokes, his predecessor, had killed himself after cracking under the strain and FitzRoy’s uncle had cut his own throat in 1822;[iii] the young captain was convinced that he was at risk of suicide too.[1] To reduce the risk he decided to take a “gentleman companion,” who unlike the crew it would be acceptable for him to socialize with. There was also the chance of killing two birds with one stone here – on his first voyage he’d been frustrated by the lack of a geologist in the crew, and if he could find one to come with him it would help with the surveying as well as his own sanity. After a couple of false starts he did, although the young man he found was usually seasick and spent as little time as possible on board the ship; he preferred to ride overland between ports, rejoining the Beagle whenever she anchored. In between he chased wildlife, studied the land, nearly killed himself trying to throw a bolas and helped put down an armed rebellion. He couldn’t ride to the Galápagos though; he had to sail there. So when FitzRoy landed on Floreana on September 23, 1835 he brought with him, rather green and glad to be back on dry land, Charles Darwin.
We think of Darwin as a stooped old man, weakened by years of illness and almost hidden behind a bushy white beard. When he visited the Galápagos he was only 26, though, and he was tall, powerful and energetic. He’d already been on several of the islands and seen the tortoises there, and he busily searched for more on Floreana. It’s often claimed that all he found was empty shells. In fact Darwin reported that there was a penal colony of two to three hundred Ecuadorean political prisoners on the island and, although there were plenty of wild goats and pigs in the regrown forests, most of the meat they ate came from tortoises.[iv] While on Floreana – which he called by its English name of Charles Island – he also met the islands’ vice governor; Nicholas Lawson – Norwegian by birth, British by choice and naturalization, and now working for the government of Ecuador – had been on Floreana to inspect a whaling ship, and now he spent some time with Darwin. The islands and the small penal colony didn’t need much government so Lawson had a lot of spare time, and he’d spent much of it learning about the wildlife. The tortoises were different on each island, he explained; show him a tortoise – even the shell – and he could tell you right away what island it came from. Darwin was mainly a geologist at the time and only dabbled in biology, but what Lawson was saying interested him because he’d noticed that each island also had its own species of mockingbird. He was too busy exploring to think much about that at the time, but 24 years later he published a book that caused a bit of excitement for a while.
The convicts Darwin saw had been on Floreana since Ecuador claimed the islands in 1832 (and had eaten all the island’s tortoises by 1850) and they were the first attempt at setting up a permanent colony on the Galápagos. It wasn’t a success, but the Ecuadoreans kept trying. Other settlers came and went over the decades, but few stayed long (except the convicts, who didn’t get to choose). In 1925 a group of 22 Norwegians arrived; four years later only two remained, running a fishing boat together with an Ecuadorean settler.[v] In June 1929 they left too, admitting defeat after their fishing sloop was blown 30 miles north to another island, Santa Cruz, in a storm. Floreana was left deserted once more – but not for long.
In September 1929 two new settlers arrived on the desolate island. A bizarre couple, more visitors would soon be drawn by the ideals they promoted. Minor fame finally came to Floreana – and in its wake, mystery and tragedy.
Chapter 1
Friedrich Ritter was born in Wollbach, in Germany’s Black Forest region, on May 24, 1886. The Black Forest is very different from the exposed equatorial island of Floreana. Nearly 250 miles from the nearest coast, it’s an area of rolling hills, sandstone cliffs and dark, brooding pine forests, scattered with pocket size fields and tiny villages. Officially part of the small town of Kandern, Wollbach is a collection of a few dozen houses and three old mills two and a half miles to the south. In winter the surrounding hills mean the sun rises late and sets early, and in late December there’s barely eight hours of daylight. The houses have steeply pitched roofs to shed heavy snow. Friedrich grew up in the strict, conservative society of a German village where beatings at home and school were part of life, hard work was expected and the surrounding forests seem to swallow both sound and light. He was a weak boy, often unwell, and in many ways it was a miserable life for him. He spent his free time wandering in the forests, developing a love of the silent woods and the animals that lived there.[vi]
Although sickly Friedrich was both a keen reader and good with his hands; his father, who worked as a carpenter as well as running a village store, taught him how to work with wood. He had mechanical aptitude too. Once, when his mother was out, he dismantled her sewing machine – which fascinated him – and reassembled it. Later in his life he liked to tell people how it had worked better after he rebuilt it. When he wasn’t studying or learning practical skills he enjoyed reading, especially adventure stories. Among his favorites were Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the frontier novels of J. Fenimore Cooper. His intelligence was obvious, and after leaving school he applied for a place at the university in Freiburg, twenty miles to the north. He was accepted, and moved into a student lodging house to begin his studies.
Modern Germany is famous for its scientific achievements and superb engineering, but that’s a recent thing. From the fall of the Roman Empire until the rise of Prussian dominance in the 19th century, which became complete with the establishment of the German Empire under Otto Von Bismarck in 1871, Germany was a patchwork of small states and had a reputation in Europe for being socially and technologically backwards. A swarm of minor princes and dukes ruled the tiny countries and wasted their resources building palaces and squabbling with each other. Some cities objected to this and managed to break free, so the unhappy land was studded with an assortment of free cities; these tended to thrive. Hamburg, for example, was the heart of the Hanseatic League, a trading network of free cities that dominated commerce from Calais to the Baltic, and along the river Rhine, for over 400 years. Nuremberg was an art center that played a huge part in the Renaissance in northern Europe. Freiburg chose a different route to influence; it became a center of advanced education.
[1] He was. In 1865, after being refused a promotion, he followed his uncle’s example and cut his own throat with a razor.
[i] Nickerson, Thomas; Account of the Ship Essex Sinking, 1819-1821
http://www.galapagos.to/TEXTS/NICKERSON.HTM
[ii] Faiella, Graham; Moby Dick and the Whaling Industry of the 19th Century, p. 27
[iii] Pratchett, Terry; Cohen, Ian; Stewart, Jack; The Science of Discworld III – Darwin’s Watch pp. 120-121
[iv] Darwin, Charles; The Voyage of the Beagle, p. 357
[v] Treherne, John; The Galapagos Affair
[vi] Treherne, John; The Galapagos Affair
The Galápagos Islands lie right on the Equator in the South Pacific Ocean, about six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, and nobody’s quite sure how long they’ve been there. The islands have been studied more by biologists than geologists and the most we know is that they’re volcanic, created – like Hawaii – by a “hot spot” under the Earth’s crust, and that as an island group they’re somewhere between 8 million and 90 million years old. The hot spot is still active and the two newest islands, Isabella and Fernandina, continue to grow as fresh lava periodically surges up from the depths of the Earth. These islands are right over the hot spot itself; the ones to their east are older, carried away from the subterranean fire by the slow movement of the Nazca Plate as it slides under South America. On the seabed a trail of even older islands, eroded away until their highest points are far below the surface, straggles towards a deep trench just off the Ecuadorean coast. The Galápagos hot spot has been creating islands for at least half a billion years and, eventually, they all reach the coast and get carried back down into the molten depths.
Floreana won’t be disappearing for a while. One of the smaller of the main islands, and further south than any but Española, it’s no longer volcanically active but probably was in the fairly recent past. Eleven miles long and nine wide, it’s mostly flat but in the center rises to the 2,100 foot peak of Cerro Pajas, the old volcano that formed the island long ago.
Volcanic rock breaks down into rich soil and despite their isolation the Galápagos Islands support a lot of life. Long ago they were colonized by iguanas, tortoises, rodents and various birds. Living in small numbers on separate islands these species, and the native plants, have gradually evolved into unique forms. Most tortoises are small but the Galápagos Tortoise is the size of a small sofa and weights up to 900 pounds; each subspecies lives on only one island. Iguanas are found throughout Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and along with other lizards have made it to the Galápagos too. There’s another type of iguana on the islands though – the world’s only marine lizard. It’s found on all the Galápagos islands and nowhere else in the world. The birds are unusual too. Darwin’s Finches – which aren’t really finches at all – are also unique to the islands, as is the Flightless Cormorant.
It’s unknown when people first discovered the islands. Pottery fragments and other debris suggest native South American peoples had visited there, but the earliest sighting by Europeans was on March 10, 1535, when a lost Spanish ship carrying the Bishop of Panama landed there. By 1570 they were being marked on maps as “Insulae de los Galopegos,” the Islands of the Tortoises. English explorer and occasional pirate Richard Hawkins visited in 1593. More English pirates arrived in the late 17th century, using the islands as a base for their raids on Spanish treasure galleons carrying gold and silver down the coast; the buccaneers haunted the Galápagos until the middle of the 18th century. By then whalers were also using the islands, filling their water casks there and stocking up on meat. The pirates had released goats on the islands and they bred rapidly, creating a food resource for the sea raiders, but the whaling ships preferred to capture the giant tortoises. The lumbering reptiles could survive for months without food or water; ships could keep hundreds of them alive in the hold, slaughtering them when meat was needed. As the Pacific whaling industry grew tortoise numbers plummeted and several subspecies were completely wiped out. Fur traders also pillaged the islands, decimating the seal population. More invasive species arrived too; the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, hoping to wipe out the goats the pirates ate, unleashed feral dogs on the islands and later sailors released cattle and pigs. Cats and rats came ashore from the ships, and foreign plant species were introduced. All this had a serious effect on the island ecosystems; the cattle and goats ate the vegetation the tortoises relied on, while cats, dogs and pigs raided their nests. Nobody knows exactly how many species became extinct.
Floreana suffered more than most. On October 22 1819 a crewman from the American whaling ship Essex started a fire as a prank; unfortunately it was the middle of the dry season and it spread out of control, devastating most of the island.[i] A group of tortoise hunters from the Essex were trapped and had to run through the fire to escape, and the captain was furious. Threatening dire punishments if he ever caught the culprit he ordered the Essex back to sea and she sailed out towards the catching grounds in the southern Pacific. A year later – whalers routinely made two or three year voyages – she launched her whaleboats to pursue a pod of sperm whales 2,000 miles west of the Galápagos. Suddenly a large whale broke away from the boats, headed straight for the ship and slammed his forehead into her hull.[ii] The Essex sank in ten minutes and the twenty men on board had to escape in the whaleboats. In the end twelve died; several were eaten by their starving shipmates. In 1841 Herman Melville, on his first voyage on the whaler Acushnet, heard the tale and was inspired to write Moby Dick.
The fire didn’t wipe out all life on Floreana, because several whalers reported collecting tortoises there over the next few years. It did cause immense damage though because when Thomas Nickerson, the former cabin boy of the Essex, returned there years later the island was still a wasteland of ash. The vegetation recovered slowly and several unique animal species probably disappeared in the fire.
In September 1835 a small British warship, the 10-gun sloop HMS Beagle, arrived in the Galápagos and began a five-week exploration of the islands. Many Royal Navy sailors thought HMS Beagle was an unlucky ship; within weeks of being launched in 1820 she had been declared redundant and left to rot at anchor for five years. Refitted as a survey ship she sailed to South America in May 1826 for a four-year voyage, which was interrupted in 1828 when her captain became depressed and shot himself. By the time the ship reached Montevideo she needed urgent repairs, after which she resumed her mission under a new captain, Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy. Off the coast of Tierra del Fuego a group of locals stole one of the ship’s boats and FitzRoy took four of them hostage as a reprisal, then brought them back to England. In 1831 the disintegrating ship was fully rebuilt and modified to make her less dangerous in bad weather, then sailed for South America again in December that year. FitzRoy was worried though. The captain of a warship lived a stressful life and, even in a vessel as cramped as the Beagle (she was only 90 feet long and 24 feet wide) was very isolated from the junior officers and crew. Captain Stokes, his predecessor, had killed himself after cracking under the strain and FitzRoy’s uncle had cut his own throat in 1822;[iii] the young captain was convinced that he was at risk of suicide too.[1] To reduce the risk he decided to take a “gentleman companion,” who unlike the crew it would be acceptable for him to socialize with. There was also the chance of killing two birds with one stone here – on his first voyage he’d been frustrated by the lack of a geologist in the crew, and if he could find one to come with him it would help with the surveying as well as his own sanity. After a couple of false starts he did, although the young man he found was usually seasick and spent as little time as possible on board the ship; he preferred to ride overland between ports, rejoining the Beagle whenever she anchored. In between he chased wildlife, studied the land, nearly killed himself trying to throw a bolas and helped put down an armed rebellion. He couldn’t ride to the Galápagos though; he had to sail there. So when FitzRoy landed on Floreana on September 23, 1835 he brought with him, rather green and glad to be back on dry land, Charles Darwin.
We think of Darwin as a stooped old man, weakened by years of illness and almost hidden behind a bushy white beard. When he visited the Galápagos he was only 26, though, and he was tall, powerful and energetic. He’d already been on several of the islands and seen the tortoises there, and he busily searched for more on Floreana. It’s often claimed that all he found was empty shells. In fact Darwin reported that there was a penal colony of two to three hundred Ecuadorean political prisoners on the island and, although there were plenty of wild goats and pigs in the regrown forests, most of the meat they ate came from tortoises.[iv] While on Floreana – which he called by its English name of Charles Island – he also met the islands’ vice governor; Nicholas Lawson – Norwegian by birth, British by choice and naturalization, and now working for the government of Ecuador – had been on Floreana to inspect a whaling ship, and now he spent some time with Darwin. The islands and the small penal colony didn’t need much government so Lawson had a lot of spare time, and he’d spent much of it learning about the wildlife. The tortoises were different on each island, he explained; show him a tortoise – even the shell – and he could tell you right away what island it came from. Darwin was mainly a geologist at the time and only dabbled in biology, but what Lawson was saying interested him because he’d noticed that each island also had its own species of mockingbird. He was too busy exploring to think much about that at the time, but 24 years later he published a book that caused a bit of excitement for a while.
The convicts Darwin saw had been on Floreana since Ecuador claimed the islands in 1832 (and had eaten all the island’s tortoises by 1850) and they were the first attempt at setting up a permanent colony on the Galápagos. It wasn’t a success, but the Ecuadoreans kept trying. Other settlers came and went over the decades, but few stayed long (except the convicts, who didn’t get to choose). In 1925 a group of 22 Norwegians arrived; four years later only two remained, running a fishing boat together with an Ecuadorean settler.[v] In June 1929 they left too, admitting defeat after their fishing sloop was blown 30 miles north to another island, Santa Cruz, in a storm. Floreana was left deserted once more – but not for long.
In September 1929 two new settlers arrived on the desolate island. A bizarre couple, more visitors would soon be drawn by the ideals they promoted. Minor fame finally came to Floreana – and in its wake, mystery and tragedy.
Chapter 1
Friedrich Ritter was born in Wollbach, in Germany’s Black Forest region, on May 24, 1886. The Black Forest is very different from the exposed equatorial island of Floreana. Nearly 250 miles from the nearest coast, it’s an area of rolling hills, sandstone cliffs and dark, brooding pine forests, scattered with pocket size fields and tiny villages. Officially part of the small town of Kandern, Wollbach is a collection of a few dozen houses and three old mills two and a half miles to the south. In winter the surrounding hills mean the sun rises late and sets early, and in late December there’s barely eight hours of daylight. The houses have steeply pitched roofs to shed heavy snow. Friedrich grew up in the strict, conservative society of a German village where beatings at home and school were part of life, hard work was expected and the surrounding forests seem to swallow both sound and light. He was a weak boy, often unwell, and in many ways it was a miserable life for him. He spent his free time wandering in the forests, developing a love of the silent woods and the animals that lived there.[vi]
Although sickly Friedrich was both a keen reader and good with his hands; his father, who worked as a carpenter as well as running a village store, taught him how to work with wood. He had mechanical aptitude too. Once, when his mother was out, he dismantled her sewing machine – which fascinated him – and reassembled it. Later in his life he liked to tell people how it had worked better after he rebuilt it. When he wasn’t studying or learning practical skills he enjoyed reading, especially adventure stories. Among his favorites were Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the frontier novels of J. Fenimore Cooper. His intelligence was obvious, and after leaving school he applied for a place at the university in Freiburg, twenty miles to the north. He was accepted, and moved into a student lodging house to begin his studies.
Modern Germany is famous for its scientific achievements and superb engineering, but that’s a recent thing. From the fall of the Roman Empire until the rise of Prussian dominance in the 19th century, which became complete with the establishment of the German Empire under Otto Von Bismarck in 1871, Germany was a patchwork of small states and had a reputation in Europe for being socially and technologically backwards. A swarm of minor princes and dukes ruled the tiny countries and wasted their resources building palaces and squabbling with each other. Some cities objected to this and managed to break free, so the unhappy land was studded with an assortment of free cities; these tended to thrive. Hamburg, for example, was the heart of the Hanseatic League, a trading network of free cities that dominated commerce from Calais to the Baltic, and along the river Rhine, for over 400 years. Nuremberg was an art center that played a huge part in the Renaissance in northern Europe. Freiburg chose a different route to influence; it became a center of advanced education.
[1] He was. In 1865, after being refused a promotion, he followed his uncle’s example and cut his own throat with a razor.
[i] Nickerson, Thomas; Account of the Ship Essex Sinking, 1819-1821
http://www.galapagos.to/TEXTS/NICKERSON.HTM
[ii] Faiella, Graham; Moby Dick and the Whaling Industry of the 19th Century, p. 27
[iii] Pratchett, Terry; Cohen, Ian; Stewart, Jack; The Science of Discworld III – Darwin’s Watch pp. 120-121
[iv] Darwin, Charles; The Voyage of the Beagle, p. 357
[v] Treherne, John; The Galapagos Affair
[vi] Treherne, John; The Galapagos Affair
