In the early 1930s, the remote Galápagos island of Floreana became the stage for a strange and tragic sequence of events that would leave several people dead and one mystery unsolved for nearly a century. The island, located in the southeastern Pacific west of Ecuador, had long been known to passing whalers for its fresh water, its penguins and lava gulls, and the wooden barrel at Post Office Bay where sailors left letters for ships heading back to Europe or the United States. But for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no one had tried to live there permanently. The land was difficult, the resources scarce, and the island remained essentially uninhabited.
That changed in 1929, when Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dora Strau, arrived from Germany. Ritter had been a physician, and Strau had once been his patient, coming to him years earlier after developing multiple sclerosis. He had unconventional medical views and apparently told her she could overcome the disease through sheer willpower.
Their relationship developed into something more, and both left their spouses to seek an uninhabited paradise off the coast of South America. Ritter was a peculiar figure, so committed to his experiment in primitive living that he had all his teeth removed before departure, wanting to see if his gums would toughen in the wild. Strau soon lost many of her own teeth as well, some having to be pulled with garden tools in the absence of any dental care. The island was not the paradise they had imagined.
They cleared land, built a home, raised livestock, and grew fruit and vegetables, but the work was exhausting, and they came to understand why Floreana had remained empty for so long. Their relationship deteriorated. Ritter was domineering and fifteen years older than Strau, whose condition worsened until she needed a cane to walk. There was no longer any affection between them, only bitterness, and they sometimes refused to speak to each other for days.
To the few visitors who passed by, however, they appeared to be living in some kind of alternative community, walking around the island largely undressed to cope with the heavy rains and warm heat. Stories about the strange German couple began to spread, and pieces of Ritter’s letters, leaked to journalists, were printed in American and European newspapers. The attention drew newcomers. In 1932, Heinz and Margaret Wittmer traveled to Floreana with their thirteen-year-old son, Harry.
Margaret was pregnant, but they believed the by now famous Dr. Ritter would be able to deliver the baby. He did, and she gave birth to a son they named Rolf, but the relationship between the original inhabitants and the new arrivals was cold. Ritter and Strau viewed the Wittmers with suspicion and resentment.
Life was hard for everyone. Fresh water was limited, and its use caused tension between the groups. The Wittmers, while building their first house, lived in a cave on the island. They kept a night watch with a rifle by their garden gates to stop wild hogs from stealing their vegetables.
It was a difficult existence, but at least it was manageable. Then, a few months later, a third group landed, and everything changed. The central figure was Eloise Wagner de Bousquet, an Austrian woman with pretensions to nobility who called herself the baroness. She arrived with two German lovers, Alfred Lorenz and Robert Philippson, and an Ecuadorian servant named Manuel Valdivieso, hired on the mainland before departure.
The baroness had not come to live a simple rural life. She had grand ambitions to build a magnificent hotel on Floreana and attract further settlers. She established herself in a makeshift homestead she christened Hacienda Paradise and soon took to greeting passing ships from the shore in her swimwear, waving a pistol around her head. Tensions quickly emerged between the baroness and the other German couples.
The Wittmers began to suspect that she was intercepting their letters back to civilization, which were usually handed to the crews of passing ships. Several of their letters ended up printed in international newspapers, often sensationalized to make the baroness appear to be some kind of head of the small community, with some even referring to her as the Empress of Floreana. Resources made things worse. Fresh water was scarce at certain times of the year, and the original inhabitants and the Wittmers had long relied on goods and bartered items from the crews of the few ships that anchored at the island.
Once the baroness’s party arrived, she began to interfere with that primitive trade. Problems also developed within Hacienda Paradise itself. The baroness clearly favored Philippson over Lorenz, and Lorenz was often mistreated by her. When the tension became unbearable, he would take refuge with the Wittmer family, complaining about his treatment.
They gave him a place to stay for a while, though Margaret Wittmer privately considered him weak for allowing himself to be treated that way. Then, on March 27, 1934, something strange happened. The baroness and Philippson quite suddenly vanished. Margaret Wittmer believed they had boarded a passing ship heading to Tahiti, but no such ship was ever recorded passing through the Galápagos at that time, and the pair never arrived anywhere.
Their possessions were all left behind at Hacienda Paradise, and if they had left on a ship, they took nothing with them. Dora Strau gave a different account, claiming she heard a loud shriek shortly before the pair disappeared and that no ship passed the island at that time. As soon as the baroness vanished, her Ecuadorian servant boarded the next boat and returned to civilization. Shortly afterward, Alfred Lorenz convinced a fishing vessel to take him to San Cristóbal, the Galápagos island with the archipelago’s oldest permanent settlement and the place where Charles Darwin first went ashore in 1835.
From there, he planned to take another ship to the South American mainland. Months later, the fishermen and Lorenz were found dead on the beach of Marchena, another island off the coast of Ecuador. That island had no fresh water supply, and given what had happened, people wondered whether they had simply died of thirst or whether something more sinister had occurred. Another death followed back on Floreana.
In November 1934, Friedrich Ritter died of apparent food poisoning. A severe drought had left the inhabitants with meager supplies, and Ritter and Strau had apparently boiled a dead chicken. It was later suggested as suspicious that Strau was perfectly fine after eating it while Ritter became so ill that he died. In memoirs composed afterward, Margaret Wittmer and Dora Strau provided wildly different versions of Ritter’s death.
Wittmer claimed that Ritter had been unable to speak but had looked at Strau with hatred and scribbled notes suggesting she might have poisoned him. After the doctor’s death, Strau left Floreana and returned to Germany. Her multiple sclerosis created further health complications in the years that followed, and she died in 1943, not before writing her own memoir of the events on the island. The Wittmers stayed.
They built a hotel that began to attract tourists from the 1950s onward. Heinz died in 1960, but Margaret lived on Floreana until her death in the year 2000. Their son Rolf, born on the island shortly after their arrival in the early 1930s, lived there for most of his life, running a yachting company. Over the years, further stories emerged, many of them almost certainly unreliable.
One suggested the baroness had seduced the governor of the Galápagos. Another claimed she had shot and killed a visitor during a hunting trip. A third said she threatened to shoot a honeymooning couple who immediately returned to their boats and headed back out to sea. There is no answer to what happened on Floreana in the early 1930s.
It seems most likely that someone killed the baroness and Philippson, but who did it is open to conjecture. Nearly everyone else on the island had a motive, whether the spurned lover or the original inhabitants whose lives had been upended by her arrival. No evidence was left, and there were no witnesses. As for the other deaths, there is possibly greater clarity.
Lorenz’s death shortly after leaving Floreana appeared suspicious, but it was ruled at the time as death by dehydration and seems to have simply been a strange coincidence occurring so soon after the disappearance of the baroness and Philippson. And there is no clarity as to what happened to Friedrich Ritter, whether he truly died of food poisoning or whether Dora Strau killed the man who had dragged her to a remote Pacific island and neglected her as her health declined. What can be said with certainty is that the environment of jealousies, rivalries, and tension on Floreana took a more sinister turn and led to events that remain unsolved to this day.
