On this episode of "Expedition Files"...
In 1974, the body of a brutally murdered, unidentified woman is
found in the sandy dunes of Cape Cod.
[woman screams]
[Josh] Was she the victim of a mob hit?
Or something even more sinister?
Now, nearly 50 years later, the Lady of the Dunes' identity
is finally revealed.
Then, for centuries, Christians have believed Judas
was the ultimate betrayer.
But a recent archaeological discovery is challenging that
narrative and raising the question, what if the story
of Judas isn't what we've always been told?
And in 1828, a teenage boy stuns Germany by claiming
he's a long-lost prince from a famous royal dynasty.
Will new evidence confirm that he's of royal blood
or a master of deception?
In the corridors of time
are mysteries that defy explanation.
Now, I'm traveling through history itself
on a search for the truth.
New evidence.
Shocking answers.
I'm Josh Gates.
And these...
are my "Expedition Files."
Scientists have calculated that you make a first impression of
someone in just a tenth of a second.
That's all the time it takes to form an opinion, good or bad.
And to put that in context, you've already been watching me
for over 150 times that.
And the good news is, you've decided that
I'm awesome, right?
Tonight, we're taking this concept to the opposite extreme,
examining three strange and shocking stories
from history where, far from getting to know our main
characters in under a second, it will take decades,
centuries, even millennia to solve the mysteries
of who these people really are.
And we begin on a beautiful summer morning
in Cape Cod in 1974.
It's here that we find a young girl exploring the scenic
Race Point Dunes near Provincetown,
but she's about to walk straight into a nightmare.
[woman screams]
It's the decomposing body of an auburn-haired woman,
face down, half buried in the sand.
And horrifically, she's missing both her hands.
Authorities will soon arrive, but despite an exhaustive
investigation, they will be unable to identify her.
In fact, her name will remain a mystery for almost 50 years,
buried in the sands of time.
That is, until groundbreaking DNA analysis finally answers
the question -- who is the Lady of the Dunes?
[phone rings]
Hello?
[Josh] Minutes after the body is found...
Where?
...Provincetown Police Chief James Meads is alerted.
At the dunes? Any witnesses?
[Josh] He's led the police force for just four years.
This is by far the biggest and most shocking case
to ever cross Meads' desk.
When Meads arrives at the crime scene,
he immediately examines the body and finds it's brutalized.
The woman's hands have been completely severed
and are missing, presumably
to prevent identification through fingerprints.
Her head has almost been decapitated.
The left side of her skull has been crushed by a massive blow.
Who did this to you?
[Josh] Under her head, almost like a pillow, Meads finds a neatly
folded bandana and a pair of Wrangler jeans.
The woman appears to have been dead for at least ten days.
And in the summer heat, her body is in a sorry state.
With no identification and very little to go on,
their best hope of discovering what happened to this Jane Doe
is through an autopsy.
The medical examiner suggests
she's between 25 and 40 years old,
5'6", 145 pounds, with an athletic build.
She's had a lot of dental work.
[Josh] And something else.
She has several missing teeth, and those that are left
are unusual. She has seven gold crowns.
With no matches on the missing person databases,
Meads comes to believe that the victim's extensive dental work
could be the best chance of getting an ID.
Meads and his team contact thousands of dentists,
desperate to make a connection.
But despite their efforts, the cops come up empty.
And meanwhile, no one has come forward to claim the body.
It's as if the Lady of the Dunes is a ghost.
October 1974, three months on from the body being found,
she's buried here in an unnamed grave in Provincetown's
St. Peter's Cemetery.
The funeral is paid for by the town itself.
The community has become invested in the tragic story,
and they're looking for answers.
And no one wants those answers more than James Meads himself.
He pledges to solve this case, whatever it takes.
Six years later, in 1980, he has the woman's body exhumed
in hopes of finding a clue he missed the first time.
Samples are taken, and the body is reexamined
with the latest technology.
Unfortunately, nothing decisive is found.
But unwilling to give up on the case,
Meads retains the skull when the remains are reburied.
He stores it at the state medical examiner's office,
hopeful it may one day help identify the body.
Over the next several years, police use the skull to create
forensic facial composites of the Lady of the Dunes,
releasing them to the public.
[phone rings]
[Josh] One woman claims the victim looks like her missing sister.
Another says her father was the killer.
A psychic suggests her hands were buried
under a nearby building.
Meads and the other officers follow these and hundreds
of other leads, but none pan out.
-[Meads] Thank you all so much. -[clapping]
[Josh] Then, in 1992, after more than 30 years on the job,
18 of those working the Dunes case,
Chief Meads retires from the force, seemingly no closer
to solving the case than when he started.
With the advancement of DNA analysis,
the body is exhumed again in the year 2000.
However, it's early days for this technology,
and no match is found.
The case fades from public attention until remarkable
new leads bring it back into the spotlight.
The first lead comes in 2012, when an informant comes forward
saying that he saw a woman matching the composite
of the Lady of the Dunes hanging out with the notorious mobster
Whitey Bulger in July of 1974, the same month she died.
Bulger was known for removing his victim's teeth
to prevent identification.
But disturbing MO aside, investigators are unable
to link the mobster to their Jane Doe.
Then in 2013, the body is exhumed for a third time
to collect additional samples for newer forensic techniques.
But once again, no identification is made.
In 2015, perhaps the most bizarre lead
in the case emerges.
It's a theory that one can only describe as jaws dropping.
Joe Hill, son of author Stephen King,
is watching the 1975 movie "Jaws."
And in one of the beach scenes, he spots a woman
in the background with long auburn hair,
wearing a blue bandana and jeans that look just like
those found alongside the Lady of the Dunes.
Hill, familiar with the Lady of the Dunes story,
reports his lead to a friend at the FBI, noting that the film
had been shot in Martha's Vineyard the same year of
the murder, just 100 miles south of Provincetown.
He also posts his theory to social media.
Hill's post goes viral, but a Universal Studios
archivist is unable to find the name of the extra,
and the FBI doesn't turn up any new leads.
All hope of ID-ing the victim seems lost.
That is, until the FBI makes a stunning announcement
in 2022.
Thanks to the latest forensic analysis,
and after nearly 50 years,
the Lady of the Dunes has a name.
[Josh] For almost half a century, Massachusetts' most mysterious
murder victim, the so-called Lady of the Dunes,
has remained unidentified.
But in 2022, advanced genetic testing conducted by the FBI
finally unlocks the truth.
Journalist Megan Carpentier has been tracking the story.
[Megan] Investigators were able to get DNA from a couple of sources
in order to build out this genetic profile.
One was from the body of the Lady of the Dunes,
who had been interred.
The other part was from her jawbone, which was part of
the investigator's materials.
And then they were able to use forensic genealogy to find
family members who had uploaded their own genetic profiles
to public databases looking for family members.
And that's how they were finally able to identify her.
She was no longer the Lady of the Dunes.
Her name was Ruth Marie Terry.
[Josh] Who was Ruth Terry?
Well, she was born in 1936 to a working-class family
in Tennessee.
She moved to Michigan and worked in an automotive plant,
where she married, divorced, and had a son whom
she gave up for adoption.
She then headed to California,
where she met her second husband,
an antiques dealer named Guy Muldavin.
And that's when her life took a serious turn for the worse.
[as Ruth sobs]
[as Guy] Move over. What's wrong with you?
[Megan] When Ruth brought Guy home to her family,
he was significantly older. He didn't seem like he fit in.
She was acting different. He was acting controlling.
The family had a lot of concerns.
These concerns were more than justified.
By the time he met Ruth, Muldavin already had
an extremely checkered past.
[Megan] Over the course of his life, he had five wives.
Ruth was his fourth.
His first wife, he was married to for ten years.
They had a child together, and then they got divorced.
He had his second wife, he was married to for a year.
And then, according to Guy, she abandoned him.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[police] Ugh.
[Megan] And eventually, police began to question what happened to her,
and they discovered remains in the septic tank of their home.
Police believed the remains belonged to Guy's missing
wife and stepdaughter, but Muldavin had apparently
fled the scene.
The FBI launched a nationwide manhunt,
and Muldavin was ultimately apprehended.
But unbelievably, the cops couldn't directly tie him to
the crime, and he walked free.
That led him to his third wife, who had him convicted of theft,
after which he served a year in prison.
In 1974, Muldavin met wife number four, Ruth Marie Terry.
He was married to her for just five months
before he claimed she vanished.
After Terry's disappearance, Guy returned, driving her car,
and seems to have told her family they'd had a fight
on their honeymoon, and she just left him,
and he had no idea what happened to her after that.
-Where is she? -I don't know, man.
She walked out on me.
[Megan] The family believed that Terry had made it back to California.
They flew out there, they hired a private investigator,
they did everything they could in 1974 to try to find her,
but they were unsuccessful.
Even after hiring a PI, they were told she'd joined
a cult, and there was no trace of her.
Over the years, Ruth's relatives contributed DNA swabs
in hopes of one day finding out what happened to her.
And eventually, it worked.
In 2022, her DNA was definitively matched to
the Lady of the Dunes.
The story of what happened to Ruth Terry
has its tragic ending. So who killed her?
Well, Guy Muldavin is the extremely likely suspect,
but unfortunately, justice cannot be served.
Guy married his fifth wife about two years after Terry
disappeared, and they stayed married until his death in 2002.
In 2023, the district attorney's office
announced that they were closing the case in the death
of Ruth Marie Terry.
The police and prosecutors had determined
that her killer was Guy,
and given his background, given the disappearance of
his second wife and the stepdaughter,
the sum total of the evidence prosecutors felt like pointed
to Guy and no one else.
It feels pretty rotten that he was able to just live out
his life like nothing happened.
[Josh] While Muldavin sadly escaped justice, he ultimately couldn't
escape being identified as a cold-blooded killer.
And thanks to the determination of investigators,
advancements in DNA science,
and the persistence of her family,
the Lady of the Dunes is anonymous no more.
She is Ruth Marie Terry.
One lingering question remains --
could Ruth have been the background extra some
believe appears in the film "Jaws"?
The timeline fits, and her body was discovered just 100 miles
from where the movie was filmed.
But despite the intriguing connection,
no definitive proof has ever surfaced that Ruth was on set.
Still, the theory reignited global interest in the case,
and in the end, that attention helped bring Ruth her name back.
The mystery that haunted the dunes for generations
and the woman at the very heart of it
may finally rest in peace.
It's AD 33.
I'm in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem.
It's normally a place of peace and reflection,
but all that is about to be shattered.
A man is being arrested on charges of blasphemy.
Actually, you might have heard of him.
His name is Jesus.
And in the next 24 hours, he will be tried and crucified,
marking the defining moment in the Christian faith.
And the person said to be responsible for betraying him
is this man, Judas Iscariot.
But two millennia after Jesus' death,
an artifact will emerge that some say rewrites
the story of Judas and proves he wasn't a traitor after all.
OK, folks, hope you've got your Sunday best,
because it's Bible recap time.
The story of Judas Iscariot as we know it today
comes from the four canonical gospels of the New Testament,
the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
In around A.D. 33,
Jesus has been preaching for several years throughout
the region of Judea, achieving his famed miracles
like curing blindness and walking on water,
not to mention gathering passionate followers.
But that adulation has also left Jesus with powerful enemies,
none more so than the Judean ruling authorities
and their backers, the Roman Empire,
who brand Jesus as a heretic.
Meanwhile, Jesus has been continuing to spread the good
word alongside his 12 most devoted followers
known as the Apostles. And one of them is Judas.
The night before his arrest, Jesus hosts history's most
famous dinner party, the Last Supper.
During the meal, he announces that one of
the apostles will betray him.
What you were about to do,
do it quick.
[Josh] And later that night, just as his prophecy foretold,
Judas follows Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane.
In the darkness, where the soldiers cannot
easily distinguish him from his followers,
Judas agrees to identify Jesus with a signal,
a single kiss.
[distant crowd shouting]
[Josh] With that, the soldiers move in and arrest Jesus.
[distant crowd shouting]
[Josh] But hold on. Why would Judas give up Jesus,
the leader he supposedly worshiped?
Well, the Gospels indicate that he's motivated by greed.
According to Matthew, Judas asks the authorities
what they'll give him if he turns Jesus in.
Eager to put Jesus on trial, the priests respond with
an offer of 30 pieces of silver, a hefty sum today.
Matthew tells us that Judas accepts
and that Jesus' fate is sealed.
Interestingly, however, the Gospel of Matthew indicates
that when Judas makes the deal, he doesn't know that Jesus'
punishment is going to be crucifixion.
When he finds out, Judas returns the money
and then hangs himself.
Judas takes his own life, apparently consumed by
the grief caused by betraying the man he once revered.
But is that the whole story?
Shocking new discoveries may rewrite the tale of Judas.
For centuries, the legend of Judas betraying Jesus
has been embraced by the Christian faithful as fact.
But some speculate the apostles' motives
aren't so clear-cut.
Does the Bible really tell the whole story?
To answer that question, we have to dig deeper into
the good book and what was and wasn't included.
The four canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John, are considered by modern Christians to be
the definitive accounts of Jesus' life,
despite being written decades after his death.
But intriguingly, they are not the only ancient texts
that tell his story.
In the early centuries of Christianity, dozens of other
writings about Jesus are also being published, and some of
them tell a very different story about Judas' betrayal.
Perhaps the most famous of these is the Gospel of Judas,
a text known to early Christians and condemned around 180 A.D.
by the bishop Irenaeus as false teaching.
Written anonymously, it portrays Judas not
as a traitor, but as the one disciple who truly understands
Jesus and carries out his wishes.
In this account,
Jesus speaks of leaving behind the physical world
and entrusts Judas with the role of handing him over
to authorities so he can be sacrificed and his spirit
can ascend to heaven. But is it true?
That's harder to answer because the text itself was lost for
centuries after being rejected by the early church.
Our only knowledge of it came from critics like Irenaeus,
whose account is openly hostile.
The debate over Judas' role largely remained unchanged for
nearly 2,000 years, until a discovery in the late
20th century brings the text back into the spotlight.
While details remain murky, it's reported that somewhere
near El Minya in Egypt, a local farmer uncovers
an ancient limestone box hidden in a cave.
Inside is a leather-bound collection of papyrus texts
written in Coptic,
the ancient language of Christian Egypt.
The farmer, unable to read the text, apparently sells
the papers to an antiquities dealer in Cairo.
From there, the documents change hands more times
than the cursed idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In 2001, the documents find their way
to a Swiss antiques dealer,
Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who partners with
preservation specialists to restore and translate
the mysterious text.
The restoration of the text takes years,
but when it's completed, it rocks the Christian world,
becoming known as the Codex Tchacos.
Dr. Cavan Concannon, a professor of religion at USC,
describes it as nothing short of revolutionary.
When the Codex Tchacos was unveiled,
a lot of people were very excited.
The Gospel of Judas was a text that we knew existed,
but no one had seen it,
and no one had been able to access it.
We have so little material evidence.
So little textual evidence from the ancient Christians that any
new addition of material is always exciting and always
brings with it a chance to revise and to rethink
and to expand our understanding of the first centuries
of Christianity.
The announcement that this codex was the lost Gospel of
Judas sends shockwaves through the archaeological
and theological communities.
But it's also immediately confronted
with an urgent question -- is it real?
There are a number of ways in which ancient manuscripts
can be verified.
One of the ways in which this text was dated was through
the use of carbon-14 testing.
And this is a form of scientific testing where, um,
you use the decay of isotopes to determine when an organic
piece of material, um, had its lifespan.
The dating of things precisely with carbon-14 is difficult,
so, uh, you don't always get the thing that we really want,
which is this text was written on this day in this year.
In the case of the Tchacos Codex, the carbon-14 testing
indicated a range of dates in the fourth
to the fifth centuries.
It's clear that this is not a text that was forged
in modernity, but a genuine ancient document.
So the document is certifiably ancient,
but not quite as old as the canonical Gospels
that make up the New Testament we know today.
Those date from several centuries earlier.
And that's why scholars pay attention
to the Gospel of Judas,
because despite its later date, it comes from a time when early
Christianity was still taking shape, reflecting a range of
different views about Jesus and his followers.
Ultimately, though, it isn't the age of the document
that's most fascinating.
It's what it actually says, particularly about Judas.
[Cavan] The Gospel of Judas is
different from the canonical Gospels.
It adds some extra scenes.
Scenes that are important for how
one should understand the life and death of Jesus.
In this text, we were gonna get a different Judas,
a Judas who was not a betrayer, but Jesus' closest disciple,
uh, a kind of tragic hero who did what no one else could do,
uh, and helped Jesus fulfill his destiny.
You will exceed all of them,
for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
Jesus tells Judas what he's going to do
that Jesus is pushing Judas to do this for him,
and he doesn't seem to have any agency about this.
He doesn't get to choose whether he's gonna do
this or not.
This is just kind of written in the stars
that this is gonna happen.
Judas is the passive actor
in what ultimately is a tragic drama for him.
The best of the disciples who ultimately will not be saved.
But as you can imagine, this new interpretation rankles
the church as it flies completely in the face of
the, well, gospel truth of Christianity.
The Gospel of Judas was received with a great deal of
fanfare and presented as something that was going to
upend Christian theology and challenge
the Catholic Church or challenge, you know,
Christian theology more broadly.
Christian communities reacted by calling this text a false text
as a representative of a heretical form
of ancient Christianity.
Now, though the Gospel of Judas is different
from the canonical Gospels, it's not radically different.
Jesus is still presented as a salvific figure
who comes into the world, performs miracles,
gathers disciples, um, dies on the cross eventually,
and as someone who is offering wisdom to a fallen humanity.
I think when it comes to the question of what's
the right version or the right story about Judas,
there isn't really one.
Judas is probably an invented character to help answer
a particular question, which is --
if Jesus was the Son of God,
if he was this important pre-existing divine figure,
why did he have to die?
It gives you a kind of narrative
around which to build that story,
to explain why a crucified person
is actually a agent of the divine.
So the Gospel of Judas is not
necessarily a deviation from the canonical tradition,
but just a different perspective on it.
The Catholic Church does not accept the Gospel of Judas,
regarding it as a heretical text with no theological authority.
But regardless of your faith, or lack of faith,
in what it says about Judas and Jesus' relationship,
there's no debating that its discovery and restoration
is extraordinary.
That a truly historic text could be lost for 1,500 years
only to have its message preserved and deciphered
reminds us that humanity's story is still being filled in
and that ancient chapters are still out there
just waiting to be found.
And that is something we can all believe in.
It's May 26th, 1828.
I'm in Nuremberg, Germany, and I'm not the only one
who's new in town.
This 16-year-old boy's name is Kaspar Hauser.
But other than saying his name, he can barely speak.
Heck, he can barely walk.
And his only possessions are two strange letters that raise
as many questions as answers.
Who is Kaspar? Where did he come from?
Some will say he's a destitute feral child
raised in isolation.
But other will whisper something even more shocking,
that he's a secret German prince, hidden from society
to prevent him from claiming his rightful throne.
And for the next 200 years, no one is able to solve
the riddle of Kaspar Hauser.
That is, until 21st century science reveals the truth
about the so-called wild child.
As the story goes, Kaspar is taken by a local shoemaker
to meet the authorities in Nuremberg.
[indistinct chatter]
There, they examine two letters he's carrying.
The first is strikingly brief, apparently from the boy's
mother, listing only Kaspar's name, his birth date,
and that his father was a deceased,
unnamed cavalry officer.
The second letter is stranger still,
addressed to Captain von Wessenig,
the commanding officer of a cavalry regiment
in Nuremberg.
It begins by stating that the boy wishes to join
the army, but quickly takes a darker turn.
This letter is not from his mother, but from a poor
laborer who claims the child was given to him,
raised in isolation, and never allowed outside
before being abandoned in Nuremberg
in the middle of the night.
The two accounts don't align, offering no clear explanation
of who Kaspar is or where he came from.
And most unsettling of all,
the second letter ends with a chilling instruction.
If no one is willing to take the boy in,
he should be hanged.
A new home or a hanging is a pretty extreme request,
but we're just getting started in this bizarre tale.
When questioned about the letters,
Kaspar can only repeat the words --
[speaking in German]
And any attempts at gaining more information
cause him to cry or say he doesn't know.
However, to everyone's surprise,
when asked to write his name,
he does so in clearly readable letters.
So what's the truth behind Kaspar Hauser?
All will soon be revealed.
[Josh] In 1828, a strange boy arrives in Nuremberg.
He's unable to say anything much more than his name,
Kaspar Hauser.
A letter he brought with him says he was brought up in
secret and has never been allowed outside before
being dumped here on the streets of Germany.
The letter also says that
if someone can't take him in, he should be killed.
The boy is, in short, an enigma.
According to the letter, he knows nothing of
the outside world.
But observers notice that he does seem to recognize money
and can even read limited words.
But with no knowledge of who raised him or where,
the boy will need someone to care for him.
[indistinct chatter]
[Josh] As word spreads about this mysterious young man,
a prominent citizen in Nuremberg named
Professor Daumer takes him in and begins tutoring him.
Under the professor's guidance, the boy's communication skills
develop quickly, and Kaspar starts sharing
his remarkable story.
For as long as he can remember, Kaspar sat in a small dark room
without never getting to see another soul or go outside.
He was given only bread and water,
but never saw the person who supplied it.
It always arrived during his sleep.
His only companions were wooden toys,
two wooden horses and a wooden dog.
He says he lived this way for 13 years, until a few days ago,
when a man appeared and taught him how to walk,
parrot a few sentences, and write his name.
This unknown man then took him to Nuremberg and abandoned him.
[man] Es ist Zeit zu gehen.
[Josh] The story is shocking, but could it possibly be true?
Well, Kaspar is given several medical examinations,
and they support and challenge his claims of isolation.
[doctor] Raise your right arm.
[Josh] Doctors confirm that he has poor motor skills
and may be intellectually impaired.
But he's otherwise physically healthy,
and his memory appears sharp.
[speaking in German]
[Josh] Whatever the story of his origins, Kaspar has
seemingly found a better life thanks to Professor Daumer.
[speaking in German]
[Josh] But in October of 1829,
five months after the boy first appeared in Nuremberg,
his new life takes a violent turn.
One Saturday, he's alone,
sick and resting at the home of the professor.
Hauser needs to use the outhouse,
so he heads outside.
But a hooded man is lying in wait.
He attacks Hauser with a knife...
[Hauser yells] Ahh.
[Josh]...cutting his forehead.
Hauser says the man shouts, "you still have to die
before you leave the city of Nuremberg!"
[man] ...city of Nuremberg.
[Josh] He later claims he has no idea what the attacker means.
The incident turns Kaspar Hauser
into a household name across Germany.
Why would someone want to harm this strange
but seemingly innocent young man?
People begin to speculate that Hauser is someone important.
Important enough that powerful people might want him silenced.
Some even whisper they know exactly who he is.
He's the lost Prince of Baden.
180 miles west of Nuremberg is the German state of Baden.
At this time it's ruled by the Grand Duke Leopold,
but it shouldn't be.
Leopold's uncle, Charles, was the Grand Duke,
but after Charles' young son died,
he was left without an heir,
and so the throne passed to Leopold.
But the thing is,
not everyone believes Charles' son actually died,
and some begin to speculate that he could be Kaspar Hauser.
They theorize that in 1812, Leopold's mother snuck into
Charles' house and secretly swapped out the real healthy
infant prince with a dying baby.
When the sickly child died, Leopold was then set to
eventually inherit the throne.
Supposedly, the healthy stolen baby, the true Prince of Baden,
would become, after 16 years imprisoned in secret,
Kaspar Hauser.
Once the rumor spills into the open,
it becomes the talk of Germany.
The claim that the mysterious Kaspar Hauser is really
the stolen Prince of Baden is nothing short of scandalous,
so much so that it's about to cost the wild child his life.
[Josh] It's 1833, and it's been five years since Kaspar Hauser,
the mysterious wild child who could speak little more
than his name, first appeared in Nuremberg, Germany.
He's now 21 and lives in the town of Ansbach under
the care of a new schoolmaster, Johann Georg Meyer.
One night, Hauser returns from a park and stumbles into
the house bleeding from a deep wound.
[Hauser yells in pain]
[man speaking German]
[Josh] Hauser says he was walking through a park when a stranger
handed him a purse and then stabbed him with a dagger.
Ah! [groans]
[Josh] Authorities then recover a cryptic note
from where Hauser was apparently stabbed.
The note reads, quote, "Hauser will be able to tell
"you quite precisely how I look, and from where I am.
"However, to spare you the trouble,
"I want to tell you myself where I come.
"I come from the Bavarian border, on the river.
I will even tell you the name."
The note is then signed in some kind of code M.L.O.
Three days later, Hauser dies.
The author of the strange note is never identified,
and rather than quell the royal rumors,
Kaspar's death only fans the flames.
The possibility that a long-lost prince
was mysteriously assassinated before he could claim the throne
becomes a captivating legend that endures for two centuries,
that is, until 2024, when the case is re-examined.
Doctor Charla Marshall, a forensic geneticist,
closely studied the work.
Kaspar Hauser was a very mysterious man.
He also had a mysterious death.
The more you learn about it, the stranger it becomes.
The study looked at hair samples from Kaspar Hauser
that were in private collections in museums in Germany.
And they compared those to DNA samples taken from cheek swabs
from the descendants of what would have been
Kaspar Hauser's grandmother.
If the DNA from Kaspar Hauser's hair samples was a match to DNA
taken from the House of Baden living relatives,
then it would be likely that he was related to them.
If the sequence did not match,
then the story probably wasn't true.
[Josh] It was a rare stroke of luck that any of Hauser's hair
survived at all.
Strands were likely preserved as keepsakes at the time,
given the widespread fascination with
his mysterious story.
They now provide crucial evidence.
Getting a full genetic match was key to the study.
Any ambiguity in the data would only leave the door open
to more speculation.
[Charla] The study concluded that Kaspar Hauser did not share
the same mitochondrial DNA
as descendants of the House of Baden.
The DNA samples are so different that they couldn't be
found in two people from the same family.
And so the Parson study rules out the lost prince theory.
So Kaspar Hauser is not from the Baden royal family.
While those results are concluding,
they only close the door on one part of this mystery.
If Hauser wasn't descended from royal blood,
the question remains -- where did he come from?
[Charla] Even though we can't tell who Kaspar Hauser was from his DNA,
we can use other parts of the story as evidence,
forensic evidence,
to investigate who he really was.
[Josh] What evidence exactly? The letters.
Both the strange letters carried by young Kaspar when
he first appeared in Nuremberg and the cryptic note found at
the scene of his death were transcribed by authorities.
These letters were subjected to forensic analysis,
and the results were nothing short of jaw-dropping.
The handwriting and language analysis of the letters
explained his background and where he came from.
And the letter from the crime scene where he was stabbed
indicates that they were all done by the same person,
Kaspar Hauser.
The phrasing and sentence construction of the two letters
Kaspar Hauser arrived with, and the one found
after his death show key similarities.
They also match with phrases in letters that Kaspar wrote while
being tutored by Professor Daumer.
The conclusion is that Kaspar was in fact the real author of
all of them, which also indicates that there was
no mysterious assailant who murdered him.
Many experts now theorize he likely stabbed himself.
Far from being a long-lost prince,
it turns out Kaspar Hauser was more likely a long lost soul,
who yearned for acceptance in society.
I think Kaspar Hauser did all this for attention.
It's really hard to come up with a reason why he would
put together a story about being royalty
and being isolated his whole childhood,
never talking to another human.
Just really hard to come up with a reason other than
begging for attention.
Maybe he was ashamed of his own actual true life,
and he wanted a more fantastical life -- think about it.
He was taken in by the elite. He was given a home.
He was given an education, food.
Sounds pretty good, right?
He certainly upgraded his circumstances.
Who knows? Maybe that's not even his real name.
Our story, therefore, ends with some remarkable answers,
but not the most important one.
Who was Kaspar Hauser?
There is still hope to solve the mystery.
Samples of his blood are held in a German museum.
Dr. Marshall thinks future forensic testing might allow us
to learn even more about the so-called wild child.
Until that happens, Hauser's own gravestone
sums it up best.
"Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time.
His birth was unknown, his death, mysterious."
I'm Josh Gates, and I'll see you on the next expedition.