The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader

Larry Bader disappeared in 1957 and reappeared a few days later with a new identity. Was it a brain injury or a scam? To this day, nobody knows. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
That's right. I don't want to give away what this
one contains, so let's just say it is the strange
tale of a man named Larry Vader.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yes, he went to Great Links to escape Ohio.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Right, well, you just gave it away. Not really, this guy,
Lawrence Joseph Bater. He was an Akron native, So shout
out to my people, my wife's folks, and Akron, Akron,
Akron Akron, as she says, because of that bridge. If
you've been through there, you know what I'm talking about.

(00:51):
He was born in nineteen twenty six to a Catholic,
pretty well to do Catholic family. His father was a dentist,
and Lyvia dug up some dirt from a family friend
who was like, you know, Larry and his brothers and
sisters were spoil little rich kids. Larry was pretty careless
with his money because he could just get more anytime

(01:12):
he needed it. But he was pretty funny, guys, pretty
fun dude. Had a lot of personality and he used
to do weird things, like in one of his party tricks,
would he would he would eat a whole chicken, like
including the bones.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah that's special.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, but put a pin in that. We're not just
mentioning that strange factor for no reason.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
No, So he joined the Navy in nineteen forty four.
I think he left high school to join the Navy
because the United States was in the grip of World
War Two and he served for I think a little
under two years. And when he came back, he graduated
from high school and he went to the University of Akron,
but school was just not for him, and he dropped

(01:54):
out after a semester. Apparently he was known for money
making schemes more than he was known for acing tests.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
I gotta say, if you're known for money making schemes
after a semester, you must have been doing a lot
of money making, well, highly visible money making schemes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Or you wear a suit that's got dollar dollar signs
printed all over it. It's a green suit with dollar signs.
That's another way to become known for money making schemes.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, that's bait. All my suits look like that. You
know nothing, You threw me off, all right, So he's
not lasting in college. He didn't last long in the navy.
But while he was in college, he did accomplish something

(02:45):
because he got married. He met a woman named Mary
loud Knapp with a K. They got married nineteen fifty
two and within five years had three kids, with a
fourth on the way. And he was doing pretty well
for himself. He was making the equivalent of about one
hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year these days as
a cookwear salesman, and that was about twice the median

(03:07):
income at the time. So he's doing pretty good. But
he still had some debts. He had a pretty hefty mortgage,
He had a new car, and was about two four
hundred dollars in debt. Basically, you can multiply most stuff
from this era by ten and arrive at our modern
conversion rate, so you know, roughly twenty four thousand dollars
in debt is pretty hefty.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah. He also like he didn't pay his taxes for
like five years.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
I think, yeah, not good.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
No, And it was bad enough. He was bad enough
with the bills or behind enough that the milkman apparently said, like,
I'm not bringing milk anymore until you pay your milk bill.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
So the thing is, is this guy, like you said
family friend from when he was a kid, was like
he was a rich kid, but he was actually really charming,
fun to be around, rich kid, And apparently as he
grew up into an adult, he remained essentially the same.
Like basically everyone who met him or had something to
say about him later on basically unanimously said, this guy

(04:10):
was a good guy. So if he's like cracking under
the pressure of these bills and this debt, it's not
showing outwardly to anybody who knew him. One of his
friends said that he was a red blooded American thirty
year old family man who liked hanging out and drinking
beer with friends, and his friends liked hanging around him

(04:32):
because he was just fun to be around, essentially without
being like a reckless party animal. He was just fun
to be around.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, just sort of your average fun guy exactly. And
he was also and put a pin in this, we
just were not mentioning this for no reason. He was
also very good at archery, had won some competitions, so
he was an archery He was a fun guy and
everything swimming along in his life, making a pretty good living,
little bit in debt, and then on Wednesday May fifteenth,

(05:01):
nineteen fifty seven, he had collected some bad payment checks
from vendors from his business and said, you know what,
I got to go to Cleveland to kind of clear
up these bad checks with these vendors. He tells this
to his wife, Mary Lou who is, keep in mind,
four months pregnant, and he said, so, I'm going up
to Cleveland. It's going to be the morning, and then

(05:23):
I'm gonna probably do a little fishing in the afternoon
in Lake Erie, and so I'll be home late. And
she said what any partner should say in that situation,
which is, maybe you could also come home and be
a father and husband instead of going fishing after you
do your work. And he supposedly replied with, yeah, maybe

(05:45):
I will, maybe I won't. All right, So I'm not
saying he's some really bad guy. It may have been
a cheeky response, that may have been how things went
in their marriage, but he just was a little vague,
and that will come into play.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
So one of the things he did was he paid
some bills before he left, and one of those bills
was a life insurance premium. He had recently adjusted or
changed the policy to include a nice payout for an
accidental death. And he whistled as he drove off to
Cleveland and eventually went to Rocky River, Ohio, which is

(06:21):
a little town on the Rocky River which flows into
Lake Erie, and he runted a boat at Eddie's Boat Dock,
about a half a mile inland from the lake from
a guy named Lawrence Cott cut leure, yeah, cut lower Yeah. Anyway,
he paid fifteen bucks from a big roll of bills.

(06:41):
It's also kind of important. And he said, hey, Lawrence,
I want you to put some running lights on this
boat because I'm probably going to be out after dark.
And Lawrence said, okay, I'll do that, but it's going
to cost you an extra fiver I'm presuming here at
this time. And Larry Bader paid it.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, he paid it, and he was like, all right, whatever, buddy.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
He did notice, and this is stuff that you know.
They interviewed Lawrence afterward for reasons that we still don't
know because we're keeping this a secret. Well we know, yeah, sure,
but he did notice that he had a suitcase with him.
He thought that was a little bit weird. He said,
you know, you got a storm coming, you might not

(07:24):
want to be out there after doc.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Let us people in Cleveland. Sure it is, and King
novel about Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
So people don't go in there. That's why the Browns play.
So he warned you about the storm. Uh. He goes
out on Lake Erie. The coastguard sees him and says, hey, there,
you know there's a big storm coming in after sunset,
and I've noticed you have some running lights, so you
clearly plan on being out after dark. And he was like,
it's fine, and so they said, all right, go about

(07:58):
your way. Three hours later, that storm does come in
and Larry Baier has disappeared. They find the boat the
next day about five miles away. The life jackets were
all on board. There was a some scratches like it
had hit some rocks. There was a bent propeller, and
some accounts say that it was either a gas line

(08:19):
had been disconnected or the gas cans were empty, but
either way, and I guess it's the kind where the
gas line runs directly into like a gas can. That
sitting on the boat must have been one of those
kind of boats. But basically they were like, but nothing
shows the kind of distress where a human would be
completely missing, Like it wasn't capsized or sunk or anything
like that.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
No, and the life jacket was in the boat.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
You said, right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
So that's a really that's so that's a big point
because the coastguard was like, that was one heck of
a storm on Lake Erie. There's no way that anybody
could have survived this. Even a strong swimmer like Larry
Baiter was known to be without a life jacket.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, one of the oars was missing, but you know,
just do with that what you want, right.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
But the boat was generally in pretty good shape. The
thing is is like, this is not an uncommon thing,
Like people drown in Lake Erie pretty frequently. It's a
great lake. It's a very big lake. And just as
a little side anecdote, when I was a kid, we
used to vacation on Kataba Island on Lake Erie, and
every week we would go there for a week every summer,

(09:24):
and every time we went, I would have to wait
on the beach the first half of the week because
somebody had drowned, and I was convinced that if I
went in the water, they would their dead body would
bump up against me, and I just couldn't even bear
the thought of that. So finally I would watch the
news every night, and finally when they announced they found
the missing person. Wow, then I would start to go
into the lake.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
And you thought, I won't run into that body. Now
I might become one, but it's worth the.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Risk, right, yeah, because no one had any business swimming
in Lake Erie back when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
What do you what's Kataba Island? Like? What do you
do there?

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Oh? You play mini golf and putt putt?

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
We stayed at this place. It was just like a
block of like I guess, little condos or apartments or
something like that. And everybody had beach towels like drying
over like the railing and it was like on the beach,
like the sand came up into your little front stoop
and it was just great. It was one of it.
I remember my oldest sister went on a date with

(10:23):
the dude she met there, and they went and saw
a top secret at the drive in.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Oh, the vacation date. That's always great, man, that's nice.
I love young Josh stories, all right, So they looked
for Larry Bayder for a couple of months. The coast
guard was like, no one's going to survive that storm
if they don't have a life jacket, but they looked anyway,
and they were also were like, well he was a
strong swimmer though, so it's a little weird that, like

(10:48):
the boat wasn't that damage and he's just nowhere to
be found. Some people thought, you know, he had this
big wad of cash. I don't think, we said, but
he cashed a four hundred dollars check, so if you
do the math, you know, that's probably like four thousand
bucks a lot of dough. So he may have been
you know, robbed and murdered or something. And also the
suitcase was gone, so that could also explain that. But

(11:11):
either way, they said, we just got to put this
one to rest. And so in nineteen sixty he was
declared dead and his wife got that forty thousand dollars
insurance policy and Social Security started rolling in. That's right,
and I believe that's where we should take a break
and see what happened to Larry Bader.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Okay, Chuck, where we last left off, Larry Baters missing,
he's disappeared, but enough years have gone by, I think
roughly three that he's officially declared dead. His insurance policy
has come in, his wife has said, this is what
you get for telling me. Maybe I will, maybe I
won't when I tell you not to go fishing. Yeah,
and if we rewind just a little bit to the

(12:20):
day that Larry Batter went out on the lake and
add usually people say about three days zoom on over
from Lake Erie over to Omaha, Nebraska. When we sit
down at a little bar called the Round Table Bar
in Omaha, what we will see on May eighteenth, nineteen
fifty seven, as a guy walk in and his name

(12:44):
is John Johnson. Take it, Chuck.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
I was so busy trying to work up a Saturn
joke about that eight hundred miles, but I couldn't do
it in time.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Well wait, if you can, I'll give you an hour.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Eight hundred miles between Omaha and Acri and roughly one
third the size of the distance between. And then I
couldn't remember what it was on Saturday.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
The Cassini Division.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
That Cassini Division.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
So that's not a joke. That's making fun of my
hard work.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
I know. So here's what happens. Three days after Larry
Bader disappears, eight hundred miles away, a dude shows up
in Omaha at the Round Table Bar. He said his
name was John Johnson. He said, I got this driver's
license here, it's got my name on it. I was
a fourteen year veteran of the Navy. It's a Navy license,

(13:34):
as you'll see. I got out because of a bad back.
And I go by the name Fritz. And there was
a bartender there named Betty who said he was a
really well dressed guy. He clearly had money. He was
really sort of fascinating and charming. He asked me out
like thus second he met me, which is I assume
what you do if you three days after you have

(13:55):
left your wife and soon to be four kids. Oh well,
probably ask out the first woman you see. Well we have.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
I haven't said it yet, but okay. John Johnson bore
a really striking resemblance to Larry Bader.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Also, yeah, I mean, didn't people see that coming.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
I don't know. I mean now they do.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Okay, So this guy, John Johnson aka Fritz, gets a
job not there, but at Ross's Steakhouse. And basically it
was like, hey, I came from an orphanage in Boston.
There were twenty two boys in this orphanage. They named
us all john Johnson and gave us all nicknames so
they could tell us apart instead of just naming us

(14:32):
different things. It's very strange, but they called me Fritz
because I reminded them of a character from a comic,
The Kats and Jammer Comic, Cats and Jammer Kids Comic.
Different times during that period, he also would say that
his navy buddies thought his haircut made him look like
a German soldier, so he went by Fritz. But either way,

(14:54):
this is some new dude in town, and he was like,
all of a sudden, the talk of Omaha.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah. Betty Johnson's impression was not isolated. Apparently, people who
met Fritz Johnson felt essentially the same way that she did.
Like he was a cool dude that you wanted to
be around. Debonair, you could say. But he also was
a bit of a character. And by a bit, let
me just say that he bought a hearse and rearranged

(15:21):
the back so that it was like a little lounge
area for him when he picked up women on dates.
And I saw one place but it was a legitimate source,
like a contemporary newspaper article that said that it he
had somehow gotten it licensed with the city as a
hunting vehicle. Can you imagine anything more nineteen fifty seven

(15:45):
than that nineteen fifty seven bachelor?

Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah, I mean he was an avid hunter.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
That is not what he was going for.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
You think it? Is it? I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yes, you don't put a lounge area in the back
of your heart for dead deer.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
No, no, no, I know. But do you think he
had it licensed as a hunting vehicle because like he
was hunting ladies and he just want to be able
to tell people that yes I do. Okay, I don't agree.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Okay, that's fine, but either way with UPI buddy.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
He's an eccentric dude. He wears a leather beret. His
apartment apparently was just a bunch of like beanbags and
throw pillows. He had champagne parties, he had Sime's fighting fish.
He was an archer. He said, you know, I hurt
my back, and so archery really helped strengthen the back,

(16:39):
and so I took up archery. And then five weeks
later he's won a state championship in Nebraska and then
one's thirteen I believe twelve more thirteen total archery titles
in the state, and at parties would do the eat
the whole Chicken, including the bone.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Trick and the last three listeners.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
That's right, so's he's working at the bar, but he
butties up with a guy that works at a radio
station kbo IN, and he lets him come in there
to kind of just monkey around because he was interested
in broadcasting. And he's monkeying around enough to where he
figures it out and deers himself like he seems to
be doing to everybody gets a job as a DJ

(17:25):
reading the news.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, I want to just backtrack a little bit and
specifically say there was nobody in any interview or any
article that I read about this who seemed to think
that Fritz Johnson was a creep or like a jerk,
or like a sicko or anything like that. I know,
he kind of painted him a little questionably, but there

(17:47):
doesn't seem to be anybody who had any kind of
weird vibes from him at all. He was just a
fun guy to be around and just living up the
bachelor life. Apparently he was saying like I spent you know,
my youth and an orphanage having to listen to the
people who ran the place tell me what to do.
I spent fourteen years in the Navy listening to them

(18:08):
tell me what to do. And now I'm finally free.
I'm living it up. So that's essentially I think the best,
the best way to paint his character is that he
was living it up his newfound freedom.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, for sure he and we can talk about some
more of his plamboyants, just because it's simply really funny
and interesting. When he wrote a personal check to someone,
he would sign it Fritz only, and then he wouldn't
put it in a date. I don't know why I
love this so much. He wouldn't put a date. He
would just put a season. So he would write a

(18:40):
check to someone on the date of, you know, autumn,
and then he would just sign it Fritz.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Isn't that weird that they would catch I.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
Think it's well, it's a nineteen fifties. I guess stuff
like that would happen. It was also the nineteen fifties,
so you could collect your tip money as a bartender
in a milk bottle and then just go hand that
milk bottle to the uncounted to the person working at
the bank and fill out the deposit slip one court
of money. And I'm sure they thought, oh, he's such

(19:09):
a character, but like, now I got to count on
the stuff. Yeah, thank good, lot, dude.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, every time he made that deposit, he think to himself,
are you going to withhold the milk deliveries?

Speaker 1 (19:18):
H yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
So one of the other things that he was known
for is being a little unkind to friends who were
engaged or married or about to get married. He was like,
marriage is just another way to trap a fella. Yeah,
whoever gets married is a sap. Probably said something.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
Along those lines, that old thing.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
And then a few years after he appeared in Omaha
in nineteen sixty one, he got married. Yeah, he got
married to a model named Nancy Zimmer who was twenty
one at the time, and she had a daughter from
her first marriage. She said later that they were just
too young, and not only did Fritz Johnson adopt her daughter,

(20:00):
they also had their own son. So he had a
family all of a sudden, within just a couple of years.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Yeah. So he's working part time at the radio station,
eventually works full time there and then transfers over to
TV when he got a job at k E TV,
the local affiliate there, eventually getting promoted up to sports
director and also on the side, he was advising, like consulting,

(20:26):
I guess for archery companies because he was just so
good at it.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
And he's like, well, maybe consider making the arrows straight.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
And it's MARCHERI at the camp. We took a big
family trip with a bunch of families, and I got
the archery set out and it was quite fun and
I'm a pretty good shot.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Oh yeah, any bulls eyes.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, I was hitting some bulls eyes on the rag.
And I've never even done much archery. It just seems intuitive,
you know, just kind of hold it steady and aim
at the thing and then let it go.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
You're like, I'm just as surprised as any of you.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
I really was.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
How far away though, are we talking like five feet?

Speaker 1 (20:58):
I mean, I don't know what standard archery is. I
was shooting I bet from about probably from about thirty
five feet would be my guest.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Oh that is good man.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
I don't know what standard is. But everyone's like, oh, yeah,
I can come up here on the time and do this.
I was like, I actually never do this. I'm just
good at it.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, you just have to say that out loud with
every shot.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
I know, like, don't compliment me because you think I've
worked at.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
This, right, this is all blind luck.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Speaking of blind luck, one of the other things that
kind of made Fritz Johnson a noted character around town
is that he ended up donning an eyepatch. And he
was one of those eyepatch wears who really needed one
because they found a tumor behind his eye, I think
his left eye, and to remove the tumor, they had

(21:48):
to permanently remove his left eye. So he wore an
eye patch rather jauntily from what I can tell, and
that just made his legend even more so, Like one
of the local lod TV announcers now wears an eye
patch with his little pencil thin mustache and everybody just
loves the sky so much.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Let me ask you something, Uh, are you saying that
there are people who wear eye patches just for attention
that don't need them?

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, I mean I've never met one, but yes, I'm
sure those people out there there that's I mean, they're
they're the same people who wear glasses. That's how they start.
It's the gateway. Drug is like wearing glasses that you
don't actually work.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
You know that I did that? I know? Are you well?

Speaker 2 (22:32):
The ipatch were waiting to happen.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Oh man, I hope someone writes in that knows somebody
or maybe that even did that for a time. If
you did this in middle school, you get a pass
like it seems like something John Hodgman might have done
in middle school.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, for sure, for sure. But yeah, also not as
a pirate. You can't be dressed as a pirate of no, no, no,
just be like normal street clothes.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, amazing, that's the rules. Should we take our now?

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Yeah? I think there's no other place to take our
second break on this?

Speaker 1 (23:04):
All right? We got another big reveal coming up right
it for.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
This all right?

Speaker 1 (23:31):
So I promised a big reveal. Things are going great
for old Fritzy. He's in a town, he's scoring with
the ladies in the back of a hearse, he's eating
chickens through the bone and people think it's the best
thing you've ever seen. He's on TV, for goodness sakes,
with an eye patch.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Can I say one more thing about the chicken eating thing.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, like, how do you eat bones? No?

Speaker 2 (23:52):
I mean I can get that if you cook a
chicken enough, like it can.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Be just dissolve it sort of.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, Okay, the thing is this that's not a party
trick that you do quickly. People don't have to stand
around you for possibly dozens of minutes while you do
this trick.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
So everybody watch this right.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Stop what you're doing and come over and quietly watch me,
like it takes a real showman to hold people's interest
while you're eating a whole chicken.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah. I mean the only party trick I ever did
is that thing with the hat against the wall, and
that takes like two seconds. M.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
I don't know what that is.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
You put a like a baseball cap on backwards and
then you can kind of get up against a wall
and then you act like you're blowing your cheeks out,
and what you're doing is putting the brim against the
wall such that the hat kind of levitates off your
head like you're blowing it off your head.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Oh that's I want to see that. Why have you
never done that for me?

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Hey, buddy, next time I see you. The only I
mean I haven't done it for years because I refuse
to put a baseball cap on backwards because I'm a
human adult. But I'll do it for you.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
Okay, thank you.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
Okay. The guys out there with their hat on backwards, right,
they were like, what's wrong? Is that not cool? No,
it's not.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
My only party trick was holding my breath until I fainted.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Right, Did you ever do that?

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah? We used to do that where you'd hold your
breath like you bend over and hyperventilate yourself and take
that last breath, cross your hands or your chest, and
your friend just push as hard as they could on
your chest and you just faint.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
I did it once, and this is something you should
not do. It's dangerous.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, I shouldn't have that tone of voice right now.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
But like it was super fun. Yeah, actually pass out?
Yeah yeah I did one time. And that was the
only time I had ever passed out up into that point,
and it was very, very strange.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
It was very strange. I remember feeling like I was
dropping in on a halfpipe on a skateboard. As I went,
oh cool, I was kind of like, this is all right.
We didn't do it long.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
Yeah, do not try this. It is such a bad idea.
I can't believe we were even talking about it.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, we should probably edit this out. Yeah, I'm sure
Jerry will with her responsibleness all right.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
So, like I said, he's living his best life. Then
on February second, nineteen sixty five, a guy who knew
John Bader disappeared. Man saw Fritzy at an archery demonstration
at a Sporting Good show in Chicago and was like,
that's Larry Bater, Like I would bet my life on it.

(26:20):
And his niece lives nearby, and I know this, so
I'm going to call her. She's twenty one years old,
her name is her name is Susannah. She drives over
and she's like uncle Larry basically pretty much.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah. He quote was pardon me, but aren't you my
uncle Larry Bater, who disappeared seven years ago. Yeah, and
he was like ho ho ho, no, I'm not go away.
Actually supposedly he was super polite, yeah, but was quite
insistent that they had the wrong person.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
He said, would you like to see my hearse? Right?
But the.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Resemblance was enough that then Susannah turned around and called
hers Larry's brothers, and they I think got on the
phone with this guy, and his voice enough convinced them
that they should fly out to Chicago. They flowted Chicago.
Suddenly this guy's like, man, I wish I didn't have
to work this convention. People are surrounding me and telling

(27:17):
me I'm another person, and so to kind of settle
the whole thing, he's like, how about this, Well, let's
go get my fingerprints taken. And they were like, that's
a capital idea because our brother was in the Navy too,
so his records, his fingerprints will be on record. So
they went to the local police department, they took his fingerprints,

(27:37):
They handed him over to the FBI. The FBI compared
him to the Navy fingerprints on record of Larry Batter
and the FBI looked up and said, this is a
perfect match.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
That's right. So Fritzi said, it came as a literal
physical shock. He said, I don't know anything about that
other fellow, and he said, why would I have to
give my fingerprint? I felt like I was trying to
get some scam, new double life and new identity, Like
I wouldn't have gotten fingerprinted. It seemed genuinely like he

(28:09):
didn't know and didn't realize this. He's like, I've got
all these memories, I remember the orphanage, I remember growing
up as Printz Johnson that you're saying these memories are
all fake and this is really starting to bum me out,
to be quite honest.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, like, if he knew he was hiding from his
family and he was found at this sporting goods convention,
he would have shot like a smoke bomb tipped arrow
at the floor and then it vanished as the smoke
just choked everyone out.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Oh I could literally smell that. I was so in
that scene.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
But he didn't do that, and it is a really
significant thing, Like he so not only remember if he
was Larry Bader who had assumed a new identity to
agree to fingerprints is a dumb move to begin with,
but he could have been calling a bluff or something
like that.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Who knows maybe. But he also didn't have It wasn't
like he had some awful family life like everyone. By
all accounts, he liked. He liked his wife and kids
and enjoyed being around them as much as any dad
did in the nineteen fifties. I'm not saying he was doting,
but he wasn't like, oh, God, I hate these kids,

(29:24):
and my wife's a real drag.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Right. Yeah, it didn't make sense.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah, he's a little bit in debt, but it wasn't
like his world was crumbling down around him such that
he had to escape. It was all debt that he
could get out of with a little bit of work.
So none of this was making any sense.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
No.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Plus, also one other thing, Chuck, if you're on the
run and a new with a new identity, usually the
last thing you do is become a local TV personality
and a largish city in the United States.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, let me see if the largest city.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
I said, a largish Oh.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
I was like, oh man, that's not what I know.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
The largest city in Nebraska.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, so none of this is adding up. He Yeah,
you would want to keep a low profile, so it
didn't make sense.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Well, put, I think that was much more succinct than
my whole jam Uh.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
No, I liked it. The whole Omaha thing was great.
So he hires an attorney, a guy named Harry Farnham.
This attorney gets a team of psychologists on board. They
examine Larry and test him along with the neurologists. Over
about a week and a half. The you hypnosis on him.
They're like, we can't see anything medically wrong with this guy.
It doesn't seem like a scam back home, Mary is,

(30:36):
I'm sorry, Mary lou Is. She gets this news and
she was like, Oh, I mean, I'd kind of moved
on with my life. I'm I'm engaged to somebody new
who I've been dating for a few years. Yeah, but
I can't like I'm a good catch, Like I'm not
gonna like divorce Larry, Who's seems to be back in
my life now.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah. Initially she said that she wished she'd never been
he'd never turned up again, that they had gotten used
to life without him, they'd accepted that he died, And yes,
she moved on and now all of a sudden her life.
To say it was complicated is a real understatement, Like
a handful of people's lives were ruined when that guy,

(31:17):
the acquaintance of Bader saw Fritz Johnson at that sporting
goods convention, like ruined. Not only do you have like
Mary lou Fritz slash Larry, Larry's wife, Nancy, their kids,
you also have like the nameless fiance that was engaged
to marry Lou like people's lives were completely upended by

(31:41):
the news of this, and apparently the whole time, Fritz
Johnson is like, this makes zero sense to me, But
the FBI said that my fingerprints matched this other guy,
and everybody else from Akron is telling me that I'm
this other guy. I think I'm Fritz Johnson. But he
was resigned, resigned himself to be like, maybe maybe this

(32:03):
is right, maybe they're right. He wasn't just he didn't
deny it the whole time, and he did not seem
fishy at any point. He was also more than willing
to talk to the press as this was going on,
but he was not an attention hound.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah, no, not at all. So Mary, all of a sudden,
her life is up ended with you know, every regional
news outlet is banging on her door. The insurance company
was like that forty grand which will be four hundred
thousand dollars in twenty twenty four, basically life changing money,
we're gonna need that back, although social Security payments, we're

(32:36):
gonna need that back. Even Eddie and his boat rental company,
it's like, you owe us for boat damages. Johnson Fritzi.
You know he loses that job, the TV station fires him,
he gets that marriage annulled, He moves into a YMCA
it starts working at the bar again, making one hundred
bucks a week, and he's sending money to Mary Lou

(32:58):
and Nancy, and I'm think keeping about what like seventy
or thirty bucks for himself to live on, And it's
just it's upheable everywhere you look.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah, for sure. So a few months later, it's funny
she waited a few months. Mary Lou took her for
kids and they went to meet him in Chicago, I guess,
like a neutral city, and they spent the weekend together
and she told the press later that she was like,
he's a great guy, good with the kids, but we're
strangers to him, so it was a bit of an

(33:29):
awkward weekend. Essentially, the thing is is she didn't really
have a choice now, Like she was a Catholic, like
you said, she didn't believe in divorce, and now her
husband was all of a sudden back, so she has
to figure out how to work him back into her
life and their kids' lives as minimally disruptive as possible,

(33:50):
and she's just completely just lost. By this time, Nancy
Also she was saying, you know, I'm going to stand
by my husband Fritz. At some point she even said,
I'm willing to go back to work to help pay
Mary lou child support if he's going to stay with me.
But it just did not. It didn't work out as well.

(34:11):
So Nancy took her kids and kind of went back
into the background to leave Fritz to deal with this
whole Akron thing.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, the whole Akron thing. Yeah, I mean, and as kids,
I don't think we mentioned their ages. They were two,
four to six and unborn when he disappeared, So maybe
that six year old has a memory. The others probably
had not even any memory of former dad.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Right. So again, he's not denying this. He's saying, I
don't get this. This doesn't make sense to me. But
he's not like he stopped denying it after the fingerprint thing,
but not like a oh you caught me kind of thing.
He seemed genuinely baffled by this. There's a really good
kind of Like one of the authoritative articles on this

(34:55):
whole thing that was written by the Akron Bacrin Journal
in September nineteenth sixty five.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
Beacon, Beacon, what did I say Akron Beacrin, the Akron.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Beacon journal I say it like a local.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
And it's funny because the journalist who wrote this clearly
had just read Hell's Angels by Hunter Thompson was trying
his hand at it. So like the whole the whole
thing starts in this jet flight that he's on on Omaha,
it ends on the jet flight too, and like he's
talking about them walking through the town to the YMC.

(35:31):
It's just like he wrote himself into this this article.
And it was just kind of funny to see.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
The drugs started to gig in around barstow Right, But
what are you doing in barstow Right?

Speaker 2 (35:43):
But there was a quote in there that stood out
to me that Fritz Johnson told this guy. He said,
I've begun to think that God might solve the problem.
And it turns out who was right because later he
died from cancer.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Wow, I did not see that quote. Here's just the tip,
don't I'm not a big superstitious guy, but if you
believe stuff like that, don't say it out loud.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Right. You don't want to tempt God to kill you.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
No, because he'll do it just for.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Laughs, just to show you whose ball.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
September sixteenth, nineteen sixty six is when he died. Did
you say it was the tumor?

Speaker 2 (36:18):
No, I said cancer, he moved to his liver.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
I think, yeah, that tumor came back, passed away. First
Methodist Omaha had a memorial for him. Then he was
transported back to Akron buried in his family plot. And now,
how many of these explanations do you want to go over?
Because I almost feel like we should just skip to

(36:42):
the one that you dug up that sounds the most
plausible to me.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
I agree wholeheartedly. There was just one other thing I
want to say about his two funerals in Omaha. The
funeral was given for Fritz Johnson and Akron the funeral
was given for Larry Bader, but it was the same body.
They moved from one city to the other.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
That is super cool and a nice little footnote. But
like we said, there were some theories that don't seem
to hold water about different kinds of amnesia. But then
you did some digging, and then I went back and
did some further digging once you gave me what you
dug And it seems like a lot of people on
the Internet, and of course these are Internet people, so

(37:21):
it's not like science isn't studying this. It's just sort
of one of those things that's left to smart people
on Reddit. But what the general consensus seems to be
on the Internet is that he suffered from what is
known as a disassociative fugue, which is a very strange
syndrome in which you can have very very sudden, really

(37:45):
significant retrograde memory loss that can't be attributed to like
being hit on the head really hard or something like.
Other kinds of amnesia can be explained away in other ways,
and this one can't.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Right, yes, fugue state, I mean, it's basically like they
are describing what happened to them. But the essentially what
happens is get you have this amnesia, but it wipes
out your episodic memory, your biographical memory, and to the
point where you accidentally inadvertently move away from home. Depending

(38:19):
on how long it lasts, you're going to travel fairly
far away from home. When you get to where you're going,
you're going to set up a new life, the new identity,
make new relationships, and you're not going to have any
memory whatsoever of the life that came before this. That's
a fugue state. And apparently it is actually real. I
looked all over for like, like fake, this is made up.

(38:42):
It's not correct, Like this is a crackpot theory that
some psychologists came up with.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
No.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Dissociative fugue is a widely accepted, very very rare medical
condition that they do not know how to explain. There's
a struggle between neurology and psychology. Your psychiatry. Is it
brain based or is it like a break from some
traumatic experience? And apparently it usually is prompted by some
negative experience, but it's not something like seeing your family killed.

(39:12):
It can be something like being twenty four hundred dollars
in nineteen fifty seven dollars in debt and stressed out
from that.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Or I mean, here's what I think. I think it
could that whole boat trip and fishing expedition was just
on the level and that's really just what he was doing.
He had all that cash and the briefcase, the suitcase
because maybe he just didn't want to keep that stuff
in the car, and he went out in a really
bad storm and had a traumatic event happen out there,

(39:43):
like maybe being tossed overboard. I think that could have
been the stressful event. So that's one thing. Another thing, too,
is when this disassociative fugue ends, you will probably remember
your real life, but you're not going to remember what
happened in the fugue state. My explanation there is that
he died of a tumor, so that might have happened

(40:04):
to him given enough time, and he just died before
that memory of the real life came back to him.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
So I guess kind of what you're saying is he
died in a fugue state, like he never emerged from
the fugue state.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Huh, Yeah, that's my theory.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Okay, I think that's a pretty good theory. Actually, I mean,
it does seem like he was not malingering, he was
not faking. This was not a con. It's a just
genuine mystery because also, like he just checks so many
boxes for a fugue state, but it's just it usually
goes on for what weeks or months, right, not years?

Speaker 1 (40:39):
I don't know, that's what I don't know.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
That's what I saw that really, yeah, but that in
that time, you're so convinced of your new identity that
you can form relationships that now all of a sudden
are jeopardized around the rocks because you don't remember these
people anymore, and you're like, what am I doing in Omaha?

Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah? Well when did he die in nineteen sixty six?
And when in.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Nineteen sixty five?

Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, so it was only like a year, right, I
mean that seems plausible for what little I know about it.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, hopefully we figure out more about fugue states, because
then we'll understand a little more about Larry Batter And
if we don't, then we're never going to know what happened,
Like it's just a mystery.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
Yeah, this could I was wondering if this could be
a movie, if there's enough there, and then I decided
it probably couldn't be a movie, but it could be
like probably like a ten part Netflix show.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
A ten hour long movie, yeah, with tons and tons
of archery montages.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Oh man, so many?

Speaker 2 (41:40):
So you got anything else about Larry Bater?

Speaker 1 (41:42):
I got nothing else? Thanks to Olivia. This is an interesting one.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah, thanks a lot. Well how'd you hear about this?
I meant to ask you.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
That I am convinced I know that this came from
a listener, but I could not find it anywhere an email,
so I don't think it did. Actually, I think I
might have just been searching for, like, you know, kind
of crazy story.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Or something, or it came to you in a fugue state.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Maybe maybe I'm not even Chuck Bryant.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Well, Chuck seems like he's having an autobiographical crisis right now,
and that of course unlocks listener mail.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
I'm going to call this rare shout out. We don't
really give shout outs on listener mail because we get
inundated with people saying like, Hi, can you say my
sister's name? But we're going to grant this one because
it is for a nana and we'd like to honor
the nanas.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Of the one.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Hey, guys, hope this message find you well reaching out
to request a shout out for Nana. My nana. She's
such a huge fan of you both. Every time I call,
she always mentioned your show, and you would think you
guys are family members. If you get into her car,
the bluetooth speaker automatically starts playing an episode. Your show
has brought her so much joy over the years and
kept her sharp. At the age of eighty one and

(42:54):
has given us something to connect over. Because Nana's high
praise has got me hooked as well.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
It's awesome.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
For the last few years, she's always dreamed of going
to one of your live shows, but it's never worked out.
Now with her age, it would be difficult for her
to travel to any future potential shows. Mi, Nana is
the most important person in my life, and I know
it would mean the world to hear a message from you. Guys.
It might be a shot in the dark, but I
thought it would try. Thanks for your time and for

(43:20):
considering the request. And that is from Nori Shl's or Shalis.
I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but Nana, we
just want to say thank you and you're great and
we appreciate you. And I'm not sure where you live.
Maybe either you or Nori can write in and we
can find out kind of how close you are and

(43:43):
get you to a show somehow. Maybe we'll go do
one at your house or something.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. A
show in Nana's living room. That'd be fun, especially if
it's an Omaha. I've always wanted to see beautiful Omaha.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
Wouldn't that be something well.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Thanks a lot, Nana, thank you very much for not
only listening to us all this time, but also for
turning Nori on to us. That's pretty great stuff. And
if you want to be like Nori and tell us
about your awesome grandparent, we want to hear about them.
You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off via email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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