Bernard von Bredow: Mammoth, Violins, and Murder Mystery

Bernard von Bredow, known for discovering a mammoth, faced a violent death over his valuable violins in Paraguay.

### The Mysterious Murders of Bernard von Bredow and His Daughter Loreena
* 🎻  Bernard von Bredow, a mammoth expert turned violin aficionado, was found **brutally murdered** alongside his daughter in Paraguay.
* 💰  The case was initially linked to the theft of **four rare Stradivarius violins, valued at over $45 million**.
* 🔍  The investigation uncovered a **complex web of relationships and motives**, including **financial disputes and personal vendettas**.
* 🕵️‍♂️  The original suspects, Volker and Stefan, were close friends of Bernard, but evidence pointed towards a **more elaborate conspiracy**.
* 👨‍⚖️  The focus shifted to Jimmy, Bernard's lawyer, who was found with **incriminating evidence** and a **suspicious alibi**.
* 🤝  Jimmy's possible accomplice, Yves, had a longstanding feud with Bernard over a cello, adding another layer of **complexity to the case**.
* 🔒  The police discovered a potential motive related to Bernard's inheritance, as **Jimmy stood to gain from his death**.
* 💔  Despite the arrests, the true motivations behind the murders remain unclear, leaving Bernard's family and friends with **more questions than answers**.

I thought this guy had a very interesting life story. He had found and dug out a mammoth when he was an adolescent. Then he became an expert on expensive violins. The auction house is accepting bids for the instrument and expects to sell it for more than $45 million. For collectors, I mean, this is kind of the holy grail of instruments in terms of what you can purchase in your lifetime. He had money, he had valuable instruments. But he also had this trail of financial instability, and was clearly susceptible to some pretty out-there conspiracy theories. It's hard to make up a coherent image of Bernard. But as many interesting characters, also a difficult character to deal with. The place was so remote. Nobody would've heard them scream. The nature of the killings, the execution seemed to involve veteran killers. Police said that four of the world's most expensive musical instruments went missing. Then a lot of stories began to unravel.

In death, Bernard left a string of murder suspects, but very few answers. In the morning hours of this day, I called him. I don't remember the exact hour. I think it was eight or nine in the morning, and his cell phone directed to his voice box. And I knew him. In the morning, obviously, he preferred not to be disturbed, so I didn't care. Normal day. But I think at midday, I was there, calling him, no response. This was rare. There was a moment where I just entered the property. And when I was walking upstairs here, I saw that the door was opened, and I saw that there was an amount of glass outside the door in this part of the stairs. Then I entered here. I saw this chaotic scene, and my eyes turned right to the bathroom, and I saw Loreena in his blood bath, naked, dead. Stefan called me. He was completely devastated on the phone.

and he told me that they were murdered. And I couldn't believe it. And little... I try not to think too deeply about that because otherwise I will be crazy. Promised I'd show you how to make sauerkraut the German way. We have a little guy here, a slimy little fella. And if you turn around against the light, you can look right through. He's got a special name but I always forget what his name. Albert.
Albert, yeah. Albert is our fermenter. Hi, Albert, bye-bye. He was a outstanding
character, a good man, and he was an excellent father. An excellent father. I saw this with Loreena. Grinding this into pieces, so now we're gonna start
with the hard work, okay? She was funny, she was open-minded, she was always laughing. Difficult to remember because it hurts a little bit. In 2017, Bernard and his
daughter moved to Paraguay.

He was very much a doting father. He called her Lolo. They built this very sort of idyllic life of outdoor activities. They would post videos on
YouTube of them building things. They really loved to cook together, and they were in this
small community, Aregua. And by all accounts, it was a great life that they had built for themselves. You know, as a reporter, you're just trying to wrap
your head around it and say, Okay, what can I say with any confidence
here actually happened? And with this particular
case, very little. Volker, he arranged the few funeral. About three, four days after it happened. He sent me a photo of
when he was in the coffin, because it's so unreal. This is something that happens
in a movie or somewhere, but not to you. It's impossible. We did everything together. Everything. We built these huts in the woods and it was really soulmates.

I remember we were sitting
at the table at home, and my brother came in, and he said, I found a mammoth. And firstly, we laughed, and then he showed us a rib bone, and we knew that it is a mammoth. In 1975, at the age of 16, Bernard discovered Oscar the Mammoth. It was really sort of the defining moment of his adolescence in a lot of ways, and really sort of set
the tone for his life. In the '90s, he opened
this museum in Siegsdorf called the Mammutheum. It really spoke to Bernard's
character and his ingenuity, the way that he handled the
discovery of this mammoth. People were intrigued by his knowledge, and it's all self-study. He was able to really build this platform for himself and do it pretty much all on his own. Yeah, he traveled a
lot all over the world. Quite exciting, actually. Yeah, he lived the life of several people.

That's a nice one. But it's not all gone. When I called the police, I was obviously hopeful that all will be handled in the manner. I'm not a policeman, but that someone expects. But this illusion was destroyed very fast because the first policeman that arrived here were walking all around, touching things, looking at things. Everybody entered here, but there was no evidence process before this crime scene was contaminated completely. I only knew that Bernard von Bredow was a well-known. They called him like mammoth scientist. An interesting person. The first idea of what this whole thing was about was when I met Volker Grannas. Our first stop was at the graveyard. What struck me is that they buried the bodies, but they hadn't done a proper forensic investigation. They buried the bodies, they closed the murder site, and they stopped investigating. Afterwards, we went to Bernard's house where the murders had happened.

and that's when I saw the crime scene. This is the footage that
I took when we went in. It's the crime scene. You can see the blood on
the floor, the mess it is. You see an old cello here. Lots of artwork on the walls, paintings. Right from the beginning looked to me with my experience in Latin America like an organized crime because of the nature of what
they had done to Bernard. He was found naked, tortured, they had burned his testicles, and he was killed with a
shot in the back of her neck. They killed his daughter. She was a teenager. They shot her in the stomach. She ended up in the bathtub, and I was asking myself, Who did this? The Paraguay media really made a big deal of these Stradivarius violins that were supposedly
found in Bernard's house. The Paraguayan investigators
quickly announced that this was the motive
for this horrific killing.

and that's really what caught my eye as a reporter in California. How does a Stradivarius
violin end up in Paraguay, and why is someone gonna
be murdered over it? He bought old instruments,
and he dismantled them and things like that. And first, I thought he's crazy. I really thought, What is he doing now? And the next time I came,
he had built a violin. He took me to the Pelina Philharmonica. They played one of his violins, and I thought, Well, yeah. His main income was with violins, buying, selling violins. He told me, I'm not sure if
this is the truth or not, but repairing violins for someone like Vladimir Putin or Abramovic. He had good contacts to
China, selling instruments. I don't want to judge him, but I think he was not the
best guy at managing money, but wealthy, yes. A lot of these instruments come

with centuries of lore attached to them. There's only a finite amount of these super rare instruments, and that's sent the prices soaring. 82,000? 84,000? People were willing to go to great lengths to get ahold of these rare instruments. Closed. For violins, there is no black market. You cannot sell a violin of high values simply like that. But if you have the documentation, the history of the violin complete, this, yes, has a value, and there are the theory of the violin was born. Okay, we are good to start. Once you start looking into the background of a lot of these people who moved to Paraguay involved in this story, at least, you start to see some unsavory elements. Bernard moved to Paraguay because he was not satisfied at all with the direction that Germany was heading. Germany wasn't being Germany anymore. There is a history of German immigration in Paraguay.

For example, the Mennonites,
a religious minority. Then after the Second World War, a couple of Nazis moved there. And recently, Paraguay
saw an influx of Germans who were not satisfied with the way that Germany was developing in terms of, let's say, immigration, in terms of liberal social issues. Then recently, in terms
of the whole corona and vaccine issue. He sort of fell into these conspiracies around George Soros and Bill Gates, and he started to view
Paraguay as a place to escape. He really started
evangelizing for Paraguay to his friends back home. There was really a sense of building blocks in this community where one person recommends to
the other person to come out, and there was this sense that they were building this paradise for themselves together. Now, my brother said, Oh,
you should get a green card. He was building a new
house with two apartments, and he said one apartment
is for me when I come.

I said, Okay. His lawyer, Jimmy Paez. He said, Oh, I can do that for you. So when pressure was building up to solve this case, they changed the prosecutor. Sandra Ledesma became the main prosecutor. Right away, she was very proactive. She had the bodies dug out again. They did a forensic investigation. They found a piece of a bullet in one of the bodies. And then they did a raid. They searched Volker Grannas' house. He didn't cooperate right away. He didn't open one room that he had. They found a pretty suspicious site. Volker was in possession of a bunch of Bernard's violins, and Stefan at the same time was caught trying to hide this armory of weapons that Volker had on his property. And what seemed sort of weird was that Volker and Stefan arranged a funeral just a few days after this killing. And that just struck people as a bit odd.

Your friends get killed, and instead of waiting for the authorities to do the proper investigative work, you just go right ahead
and bury the bodies. The authorities concluded that one, this couldn't have been a single killer. There had to be at least two
people to subdue Bernard. Bernard was a big man. They believed that the
person that killed Bernard must have been known to
Bernard prior to the killing. Otherwise, why would they
have killed Loreena as well? The idea is that Loreena
could have IDed the killers. And there was also this
strange element of the glass in the front door was apparently broken from the inside of the house, which looked like it was
someone trying to make it seem that they had broken into the house, when in fact they might
have just been let in. Sandra Ledesma was very
convinced of her theory. Her theory was, Volker and
Stefan and Yves had conspired

to murder Bernard, to take possession of his instruments, to find the documents, and to sell them. Her main argument was that why would Volker not open that room for the police if he had nothing to hide? They locked up Stefan and Volker. I was completely shocked. Couldn't understand because they are the last people who would harm my brother. Never ever. Volker has helped me and he took the violins on my order, on my request. The police is quite corrupt, so when you they take something, you don't know whether you will get it back anymore. Sandra Ledesma completely dismissed Volker's alibi. He had been to one of his farms. He had passed the toll station, and there must have been footage of him passing the toll station. So I thought she was inverting the roles. She had to prove his guilt. The police weren't speaking to me. They weren't releasing any of the violins.

that they had in their possession. You know, they claim they
had Stradivarius violins, but they wouldn't release any evidence that there was any truth to that claim. You hear often that
don't trust the police. You know that they're corrupt. My impression was just of secrecy on the part of the police
and also incompetence. If you ask me how much money I had to pay, I cannot tell you an exact amount, but I can tell you that I lost everything. At one point, Bernard and Yves'
relationship really fractures. Yves says that he loaned this
cello to Bernard to sell, and Yves claims that
Bernard stole it from him. Bernard said that he had given
Yves his violins to sell. Then at one point, when
Bernard is away on business, Yves tells Bernard that his
house burns down in Paraguay, and this has all of Bernard's
violins in the house.

and they were lost in the fire. This starts this legal battle
between Bernard and Yves. It really sort of made the
two enemies of each other. Sort of the more you learn in this story, the murkier it gets. And I very much felt that as a reporter. I felt that I never
really knew who to trust. There was a lot of
conflicting information. You're hearing a lot
of different accounts, a lot of accusations. But there was this growing sense that Yves really might
have something to do with this murder. About two weeks after it
happened, I was in Paraguay. My family. They didn't want me to go. They said it's far too dangerous. Somebody of the family had to go. You can't leave that like that. I contacted Jimmy because
that's one of the persons I knew from my visits before. The strange thing was
Jimmy, when I called him. He said, now his family has advised him.

not to be in contact with me. I thought I found that strange. And then I wrote to him back, told him, Okay, but I would
like to talk about my brother and what was he doing. Maybe the paperwork will show something, what could be the reason
why he was murdered. Finally, he agreed to meet. He showed me the files. I saw some handwritten paper in which it was said that Jimmy would be the inheritor of the property. I thought, That's strange. The handwriting was quite chaotic, which my first impression was
that's written under stress. I knew that Loreena was the one who should inherit everything. That would have explained
why Loreena had to die too. I was internally scared, but absolutely no show. Very friendly, as normal as possible. I didn't have a good feeling about this. My reaction in hearing
this from Anita was, Wow, this is like the
dumbest murderer ever.

I thought, Well, case closed. There's your killer in Jimmy. The police do a raid on
Jimmy's mother's house, and they find a bunch of
cash and a bunch of violins. And they find a rental
car in Jimmy's possession that had a GPS in it that
apparently placed him near Bernard's house at
the time of the killings. Jimmy was looking for money, I think, every second of his life. He was the lawyer of the
devil here in Paraguay. He described himself like this, so I thought he has a need to show himself like a violent and dangerous person, but I didn't believe this. Today I have to admit that I was wrong. The police start to
wonder if Jimmy and Yves were both in on this together. Yves to get revenge,
Jimmy to get a payday. They find increased phone conversations between Jimmy and Yves around
the time of the murder, and then they also say that at one point,

they exchange a blueprint
of Bernard's house. This really seems to be
quite incriminating details. How do I halt memory? The little things. Something he told me, something I experienced with Loreena. The lovely small things, yes. Whoever that did, I forgive them, and not for their sake,
but for my own sake. It harms me, not them. It happened, and I can't change it. My brother wouldn't be pleased with me if I would sit in a corner crying. He wants me to live.

The Strange Murder of a Rare Violin Collector | Bloomberg Investigates

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Bloomberg Originals

The Mysterious Life and Tragic Death of Bernard

Bernard led a fascinating life, from discovering a mammoth as a young boy to becoming an expert on expensive violins.

His mysterious death, with the disappearance of valuable instruments and a string of murder suspects, left many unanswered questions.

Despite his complex and difficult nature, he was remembered as an excellent father and an outstanding character.

The Life and Tragic Death of Bernard von Bredow

Bernard von Bredow and his daughter had built an idyllic life together in Aregua, filled with outdoor activities and a love for cooking.

Bernard's discovery of the mammoth at 16 defined his life, leading to the opening of the Mammutheum.

However, after his tragic murder, the crime scene was poorly handled, with a lack of proper forensic investigation, leaving many questions unanswered.

The Mysterious Murder of Bernard and the Stolen Violins

Bernard and his daughter were brutally murdered in Paraguay, with the motive initially believed to be the possession of Stradivarius violins.

Bernard was a wealthy violin dealer with connections to high-profile clients, but also had a controversial reputation in managing money.

The case highlighted the soaring prices and demand for rare violins, leading to a closer look at the unsavory elements of the people involved in the story, as well as the history of German immigration in Paraguay.

A community of Germans, including former Nazis and recent immigrants, has been building a paradise in Paraguay.

The community came under scrutiny when a prosecutor found evidence of a double murder, leading to the discovery of a suspicious arsenal of weapons and a hasty funeral arrangement.

The authorities concluded that the killings were likely committed by someone known to the victims, supporting the prosecutor's conspiracy theory involving members of the German community.

Accusations, Betrayal, and Murder: The Dark Secrets of the Violin Trade

A woman accuses Volker of murder to take possession of the instruments and sell them, while the police show incompetence and corruption in handling the case.

The legal battle and conflicting accounts between Bernard and Yves lead to growing suspicions of their involvement in the murder.

Despite the murky and conflicting information, there is a sense that Yves may have a connection to the crime.

A woman uncovers incriminating evidence against her brother, Jimmy, as the likely murderer of their relatives.

The police find cash, violins, and damning GPS evidence, suggesting Jimmy's guilt.

There is also suspicion of Jimmy's accomplice, Yves, leading to a complex web of betrayal and greed.