April 10, 2021 • 44 mins
In 1945 a house fire took the lives of five children - except that their bodies were never found. In this classic episode, dive into the longstanding mystery of the odd circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Sodder children.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everyone, it's me Josh, your old friend, and
for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen
our episode from two thousand sixteen, The Unsolved Mystery Disappearance
of the Sodder Children. Uh. It's a story, a very
tragic and sad one, but also incredibly enthralling about five
children who disappeared after a house fire on Christmas back
(00:21):
in It's one of my all time favorite episodes, which
is why I'm choosing it as a select and I
hope you enjoy it as well. Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and
(00:44):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles
W Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff
you should Unsolved Mysteries Edition. Yeah. Really, are you cool
with us? No? I'm leaving. Yeah. I think it's great. Man.
I love me a good unsolved mystery. Yeah, and this
is super sad, So it's not like I love it
(01:06):
and I think it's hysterical. I just I just like
unsolved mystery. What's a what's an hysterical unsolved mystery? Um?
Like I got pantsed in the second grade and I
don't know who did it. That's an hysterical unsolved mystery.
It was just in line pants around the ankles turned
around and like everyone's like, did you just go with it?
(01:30):
And you're like, check it out, check me out him
in second grade. Yep, good for you. That never happened.
I made it up. Oh really yeah, it's called improv, buddy.
It's a craft so en scene and scene and seen.
Have we are established which one it is? Yeah? A
(01:51):
few times and nope, it is Chuck. We are talking
about a family called the Solders. Um, not the Soldiers right,
not the welding technique. No, the Solders. They are a
family out of Fayetteville, West Virginia, of Italian extraction, as
(02:11):
we'll see. Yes, and um, very much so. Like you said,
this is an unsolved mystery. They they they're family, just
going along totally normally. Has turned into one of the
stranger unsolved mysteries in American history. Yeah, and certainly in
West Virginia history. Oh definitely. And I should say I
texted our friend Justin McElroy of the McElroy triplets. Well,
(02:37):
they're not triplets, they're they're they're brothers. Oh yeah, my brother,
my brother and Me podcast because they are from West Virginia.
And as you'll see here, there's a very famous billboard
that we're going to talk about about this case. And
I was like, hey, dude, do you ever do you
remember where you know seeing this thing? How far are
you from Fayettville? He said, just a couple of hours,
(02:57):
he said, but I've never heard of that. And I
was like, really, this seemed like the kind of cautionary
tale that would be whispered about all over West Virginia.
I could see that. But he said he never heard
of it. And then he looked it up and said,
oh wow. And I said, I bet your dad knows
about it, and then he said he didn't. He didn't respond.
You didn't text him back? Answer me, No, that's right.
(03:20):
I am Facebook friends with his dad. That should have
SA yeah, ask him. Yeah, go go to the source.
That's right. So well, let's go back to the beginning,
Chuck back to that's right. That's when Georgiros, who would
become George sodder I, was born in Sardinia and came
to the US and nineteen o eight as a young
(03:42):
lad of thirteen years old. Yeah, and he was a
go getter. He really was so his. He had an
older brother who traveled with him from Sardinia to New York. Um.
I guess he was like, I don't want to do this,
and right when they made it through Ellis Island, he
turned right back around and went back to Italy. Yeah,
he's I don't know, man, Go get a cup of
coffee and think it over, is what I say. After
you made that ship's voyage, just mull it over for
(04:05):
a day or two. Yeah, because what if, like you're
halfway back, you're like, actually I should have stayed. Yeah,
you might meet a pretty lady from Brooklyn. Did you
see that movie Brooklyn? No? Great? Really? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
I mean it will check it out. You sound it surprised.
I was a little surprised. Yeah. It was nominated for
(04:25):
many awards. Yeah that doesn't always mean. It usually means
it's pretty good. No, it depens. Okay, Brooklyn highly recommended
about young Italian man who falls in love with an
Irish immigrant. Oh well, this has nothing to do with
this thing. No, not at all, because this man falls
in love with an Italian immigrant. That's right, right, So, um, George,
(04:47):
like you said, he was a bit of a go getter.
He's thirteen, he's on his own, literally without any any
other family in America. Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing.
But then you think back to there there. They didn't
really under to what childhood was at that point. So
he was probably like of working age and had been
for years. But it seems really weird to us now.
(05:07):
He might have been retiring right at thirteen. He was
smoking cigars already, so he, like I said, it, was
a go getter. He started working at the on the
Pennsylvania Railroad and then moved to West Virginia to Smithers Smithers,
West Virginia, and worked as a truck driver and then said,
you know what, this is America, darn it. I didn't
(05:31):
come here to drive a truck for someone. I'm gonna
own my own trucking business. And the Statue of Liberty went,
ah yep, nice going kid. So he started at his
own trucking business. Um, and he's in West Virginia. So
in short order he starts hauling cole yeah, coal and dirt.
And it wasn't like the hugest business. I think he
did okay for himself. He did it okay for himself
(05:52):
solidly middle class. Yeah, he didn't become like wealthy or anything.
And as a matter of fact, later on UM a
local local government official would say that the Sauders were,
um one of the best middle class families in Fayetteville. Yeah,
and they had a small Italian population in Fayetteville, which
I think is why he ended up there, right in
(06:14):
his community. Yeah, and he moved there with his wife Jenny, right, Yeah,
Jenny Cipriani who he met, Um. She came over from
Italy when she was three. He met her historic called
the music Box, and they got married. And like Italian
families do, they had ten kids. Ten kids in twenty years. Yeah,
(06:36):
that's a lot of kids, pumping them out with great regularity.
And like you said, when they moved to Fayettville, the
reason they moved to Fayville. Had no idea that West
Virginia even had Italian people in it, let alone strong
Italian communities. But they moved to Fayettville and they were
part of the Italian community, and George was well known. Again,
they were respected middle class family there. He did pretty
(06:56):
good for himself, UM. And he was also well known
for his opinions on everything including politics and UM. During
the forties, the United States was at war with Italy,
and not all of the Italian Americans were UM feeling it.
On the American side, there were a lot of disagreements
over Mussolini and the government that he was creating UM
(07:20):
among Italian Americans, including in Fayetteville, West Virginia, and George
in particular, hated Mussolini and very frequently spoke out about
him and would get in arguments with some of the
locals who who felt differently about Mussolini. And Uh, I
guess there were some hard feelings here there, but he
doesn't seem to have taken them seriously very much. No,
(07:40):
And we mentioned that, Um, if it sounds like we're
setting something up for later, we indeed are. So just
tuck that little fact away, um. And then can we
fast forward in time? Yeah too, Uh Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve?
N So, Um, here's what happens. It's Christmas Eve. Um.
(08:02):
As his tradition, in some households, you can open up
a few gifts on Christmas Eve. Yeah, so this is
what happened. They opened up some presents comes time for
Betty By and five of the children, Maurice fourteen, Martha twelve,
Louis or Louie, ten, Genie or Jenny as that was
(08:24):
a little confusing because that's the mom's name. Eight years old,
and Betty said, can we please stay up late and
play with these new toys? Yeah, they're older. Sister Marian
had she worked at a five and diamond town two
miles down the road, and she had surprised her younger
brothers and sisters with some toys that they had not
been expecting. That's right, and they were very happy. So
(08:45):
they asked mom if they could stay up. Yeah, and
the older, the elder Jenny, said yeah, I guess you
can stay up, turn out the lights, locked the doors
before you go to bed. I'm going to hit the
rack with your dad. And are two year old daughters Sylvia,
twenty three year old John In sixteen year old George Jr.
Were I guess they were just ready for bed too.
(09:06):
And then if you're thinking there's one missing child, he
is away in the military. The eldest, Yeah, fighting either
Mussolini or Hitler or to Joe, one of those guys, right,
So he's away and I could not, for the life
of me find that guy's name. Then I couldn't either. Actually, So, um,
(09:27):
the mom goes to bed. Jenny goes to bed, and uh,
the dad, George and his two next oldest sons, who
had been working with him that day, they'd all gone
to bed about ten. Um. What time did the mom
go to bed? Eleven something like that. Yeah, but she
leaves those five youngest children, Um and Marian, their older
(09:48):
sister who I think was seventeen at the time, downstairs
when she goes to bed. Um. And then it about
twelve thirty on Christmas Morne, because remember that was Christmas Eve,
about twelve thirty at night, the own rings and Um,
this is not an era where and this kind of
to me goes to show these people were doing all right.
They had a phone in in West Virginia. They may
(10:12):
have been the only people in West Virginia with a
phone in nineteen I'm just saying, I don't think everybody
had a phone in West Virginia, so they certainly didn't
have one at their bedside. So Jenny, the mom has
to get up to answer the phone, and on the
other line she hears a woman asking for somebody she
didn't know or recognized, and in the background there's obviously
(10:34):
a party going on. There's laughter, there's clinking of glasses,
and uh, Jenny says, I don't know who you're talking about.
You have the wrong number, and the woman laughs weirdly
and hangs up. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and come
out and say, I think this means nothing in his
total coincidence. So supposedly they tracked that woman down and
she said it was just a wrong number. Total coincidence,
(10:57):
that's what I think. But think about that though, Like,
had that not happened, a lot of other stuff would
have gone unnoticed. Right, it's a big deal. So before
she goes back to bed, she noticed the lights are
on downstairs. She said, you know, turn the lights off,
locked the door before you go to bed. So one
of her kids is on the couch asleep. She's like,
wait a minute, the doors unlocked, the lights are on. Um,
(11:19):
they shouldn't have done that. So let me lock the
doors and turn off the lights. And she leaves the
one that's asleep on the couch asleep. It was the
one that got her toys. Sleepy time on the couch.
That's fine, But those five younger ones who've been playing
with their toys, they were in ordered to be found,
so mom just assumed they went upstairs to bed, right,
So she goes back to bed, and then like an
(11:41):
hour later, she's awoken by like a thump on the roof. Yeah,
and she falls back asleep again. Well, it sounded like
a heavy thump and a sliding down of the roof
was just something heavy head landed on it and then
slid off, and she just went back to sleep, very
important matters. Probably figured it was a reindeer or something
(12:01):
like that. At being Christmas, you never know. Uh. The
next time she woke up, she woke up to panic
and chaos because her house was on fire. And chuck,
we'll talk about the fire right after this. All right, dude,
(12:40):
the house is on fire, that's right. So Sylvia, a
little two year old Sylvia is in their room with
her the parents, so they get her out, obviously covered
with them because she's in the crib. Uh. And then
seventeen year old Marion and year old John and sixth
year old George Jr. Are all outside and safe right
(13:02):
at this point, So everyone is out except for these
five other kids, right, And they were on the top
floor of the house. I believe in two different rooms
and the only way down is this one single staircase.
And George tried to go back into the house. He
broke through a window, cut his arm quite badly. UM
(13:22):
getting into through in through the window or opening the door. UM,
and runs inside and the entire downstairs floor is totally
engulfed in flame and smoke. He can't see anything, but
he can see that there's no way he can go
up the staircase or anyone can make it down the staircase.
So he runs back outside of the house to try
to figure out another way to get up to those
(13:44):
kids on the on the top floor. Yeah, and here's
an interesting point. UM. One of the relatives of I
think it was the guy who ended up marrying the
youngest daughter later in life. UM Sylvia said they did
a lot of research on this, and he said the
original police report said that the very first statement said
that the two sons, John and George, who got out,
(14:04):
said they actually ran into the other kids rooms and
physically shook them awake. And then later on in interviews
they said no, they just called out to them. UM,
and assume they heard. But it's still is a mystery
as to whether or not that really happened. Police will
say the first statement is usually the accurate one, um,
(14:25):
But that's just speculation. So from what I understand, the
family rationalized that later on by saying that the two
boys probably felt very guilty, and they said that they
did what they wished they had or felt that they
should have done. That makes sense, and that their revisions
later on were actually the factual ones. That they tried
to rouse their um siblings by just shouting up the stairs.
(14:49):
I can buy that. UM. So Papa tries to get in,
cuts himself really bad. Then he says, wait a minute,
I have this ladder that leans up against the house.
Always always let me go grab that ladders. Not they're
very weird. It is very weird, and it would be
found in a ditch like from the house later on,
and later on witnesses supposedly saw dude stealing it, uh
(15:12):
from the garage. But there's so many things that people
say about this case that it is hard to know
what's true and what was invented. That is true that
they saw a guy a dude, well, they report that
they saw a guy. Well that guy the guy actually
was found and was arrested and charged for stealing and
never questioned about the actual fire. The guy that stole
(15:33):
the ladder. Yeah, okay, so they he says, the dad says,
let me get my trucks, my big uh coal Holland
trucks and pull because those are tall. Let me pull
that next to the house, climb up on that. Neither
one of the trucks start, even though they've been using
him to work earlier that day. Yeah, so the thinking
by the cops and everyone else pretty much is in
(15:54):
the panic he and his son flooded the engines trying
to get him started, and that they wouldn't start. Yeah,
but it became yet another like fishy detail that made
this family suspect like something really weird happened here. Yeah,
and then later there was a totally don't understand the
whole engine removal theory. So it doesn't make any sense
(16:18):
that guy who stole the ladder was caught stealing a
block and tackle that you would use to remove engines. Yeah,
that doesn't make any sense, But it doesn't mean like
he messed with their car or used that block and
tackle to do anything to the engines. They probably just
flooded him that one. I'm I'm an agreement on. So
these this family they're watching helplessly as the house is
(16:40):
going up in flames. That was burned to the ground
in about forty five minutes, ostensibly with the children trapped inside. Yeah.
And if you think, why did in the fire the
fire trucks come the Fatte Fire Department? Uh, you know
it was was Fayetteville, West Virginia. Was Christmas? It was
Christmas night or morn I guess at this point, um, uh,
(17:04):
you know, one of the daughters went to a neighbor's house,
called the fire department. No operators on duty even, right,
And another neighbor who saw this didn't have a phone
at their house, so they went to the local tavern
and they called the operator to report the fire too,
and they couldn't get the operator either operator was probably
at home sleeping for Christmas, that's right. So eventually someone
(17:27):
drives and literally physically tracks down uh fire Chief F. J. Morris,
who does not come out smelling well in this, Well
he doesn't. He said, well, I can't drive the fire
truck as the fire chief. And the way that they
don't even have a siren, The way that they alerted
the fire department was it's called a phone tree. They
just start calling one another. Then they called the next person,
(17:48):
which made even the last sense because again the solders
were the only people in West Virginia with a phone
in their house. It's not true. Uh So eventually, seven
hours later, at eight a m. The fire truck arrives
to find a smoldering pile of ash, and a lot
of people are like, well, clearly the fire department was
paid off or told to halt. From what I gather,
(18:09):
it was sheer ineptitude. And also the sense I think
the fire marshal or fire chief defended himself later saying, yeah,
he said I couldn't drive the fire trucks side to
wait for somebody who could. And also that house went
up so fast there was no there wasn't any need
for us to get there in any kind of hurry. Well,
I mean that's probably true. He also said burned in
(18:32):
like between thirty and forty five minutes. Yeah, if you're
a fire chief, that's not what you want to say,
you know, like who cares when we get there? Also,
one of the firemen who showed up was Jenny Satter's brother,
So it's not like there was this conspiracy to among
the fire department necessarily, although that is a common belief
in people who pay attention to this case. It is
(18:54):
so what they find eight am as a house burnt
to the ground. What they don't find are any remnants
of those five children. Yeah, and here in is where
the mystery really kicks in. The family starts like paying
attention to little weird details. At first, they just assumed
that the kids have they're they're just totally gone. They
(19:17):
were totally burned up. Well, that's what the fire chief said.
He was like, there's no remains whatsoever because it burned
them to nothing. They did, like a cursory examination of
the rubble. They did find some other stuff, like they
found appliances that were recognizable, They found a couple other things,
but they never found any of the kids. Um, And
they took the fire chief's word at face value and said, Okay,
(19:40):
well our kids are in there. We can't bear to
the side of this any longer. So George went and
got a bunch of dirt and buried the site in
about five ft of fill dirt and decided to plant
a memorial garden there on the side of the house. Fire. Yeah,
this is on January two, so that he wasn't supposed
to do this. They're supposed to leave it open to
(20:01):
continue to investigate. Um. The state police inspector said it
was faulty wiring. It's now covered in dirt. Um, and
so now the family has just left alone, saying what
happened to our children? Are they? Were they in there? Right?
So that that when they buried the place and dirt,
they assumed that the children were still in there, and
(20:22):
this was there. They're grave now. They were never going
to be found um. But then, like you said, they
started thinking about weird details that emerged. Right. One of
the first ones was the idea that it was faulty wiring.
George basically knew for a fact that it wasn't faulty wiring.
He'd recently had um an electric stove installed and just
(20:43):
to make sure again there he was doing pretty well,
just to make sure that the house didn't burn down
with this new fangled electric stove. He had the wiring
in the house redone, and then he had it inspected
by the power company, who sent out an inspector and
said they did a good job. Wiring is fine. So
he basically you almost for a fact that it wasn't
faulty wiring in the house. Yeah. Not only that after
(21:06):
the fire started, when they were outside, there were still
lights on in the house, right, So remember Jenny came
down and turned out the lights. She left the Christmas
tree lights on, and while the house was burning, the
Christmas tree was still the Christmas tree lights were on,
which must have been like a really ghastly thing to see,
you know. Uh, speaking of the wiring, there was a
(21:26):
point a few months earlier, and this is definitely a
strange thing, when this guy showed up. He was a stranger,
no one knew him, and he asked about, you know,
working as a driver, and he didn't have any work
for him, but he was sort of just I guess.
They had the conversation outdoors, wandered around at the back
of his house and said, you know, what you're wiring
here at your fuse box is going to cause a
(21:47):
fire someday. And George thought, well, that's a really weird
thing to say, because not only did I have it
just inspected and it's fine, it's just a strange thing
for you to say, Mr stranger, get off my property
pretty much, but take the cannoli very nice, but weird
and disconcerting after the fact. Obviously, sure he didn't think
(22:07):
anything of it at the time other than that's a
weird thing to say. Yeah. Um. Another fishy thing that
happened that really kind of stuck out in retrospect was
the life insurance salesman, right, Yeah, a life insurance salesman
came through and um tried to sell George some life
insurance policies for his children, and George didn't bite and
(22:29):
the guy got I rate and his quote was kind
of weird. Actually, he said, your house is going to
go up and smoke your g D house. Yeah, your
children are going to be destroyed. And then here's here's
where it really gets weird. He says, you will be
repaid for the dirty things you've been saying about Mussolini. Yeah,
(22:52):
and George just went like, get off my property. Yeah,
just the usual. Yeah. So remember we said that he
was outspoken about Mussolina and politics. Um, clearly this got
around to this dude, and uh, it's just a weird,
disconcerting thing to say, especially after these kids look like
they may have perished in this fire. Yeah, especially if
(23:13):
he didn't like make a big deal out of it
at the time. Was this like a normal business attempt
in West Virginia among the Italian community, Like your kids
are gonna die, You'll be repaid for what you've been
saying about Mussolini. Good day to you. I don't know.
I'm sure that's not in the handbook. What's even fishier, though, Chuck,
is that same guy served on the coroner's inquest jury
(23:36):
that ruled that the fire was the result of faulty wiring. Yeah,
it all gets a little weird. Yeah. Uh. And then
one other, well, not one other, quite a few other
weird things. Um. One of the older sons said that,
you know what, right before Christmas, there was a dude
parked right across from our house, watching the school bus
and watching the younger kids get off the school bus
(23:59):
and come to the house. And it was clear that
he was sitting there watching us, and it was strange. Yeah,
he was in a van. Was he really? No? I
bet he was. He would have been if it were
like the seventies all that. Yeah, that's trip sickos and seventies.
So Chuck, let's take another break, because the mystery is
about to deepen even more. The plot thickens et cetera.
(24:47):
All right, so things are getting a little weird, and
all of a sudden, now Jenny and George, the solder
um parents, start thinking, like, wait a minute, are our
kids actually dead? Who is the last person to see
them alive? The if if John and George Jr. To
be believed they were the last ones to see him
(25:09):
alive because they went and shook them awake, but they
may not have actually done that well, and they changed
her story to say that they didn't. So then technically
Mary in, the seventeen year old older sister who brought
the toys and was downstairs with the kids while they
were playing with them, would have been the last to
see them alive. But I could never find anybody pressing
(25:30):
her for what her story was. So the assumption that
I'm going on is that she just fell asleep on
the couch, and when she fell asleep, the kids were
still downstairs. But the solders are starting to wonder, like,
wait a minute, where those kids even in the house
when the house went down, And they they're backed up
by the idea that no remains were found. Yeah, that's
the one that really is bothering them. They're like, something
(25:51):
should have been found. Yeah, and um, all of a sudden,
this this story is starting to get national attention in
the press. And the Saw later on would say, George
would say, if they were burned in the house, if
they died in that house fire, I want to be convinced.
And if they weren't, I want to know what happened
to them. Um. And this kind of kicked off like
(26:13):
a lifelong quest for for George and Jenny. Um. And
in nine to try to literally get to the bottom
of it, they hired a guy to come in and investigate,
to basically excavate the memorial site and look for the
remains of the children, and he didn't find it. Well. Yeah,
and previous to that, they did their own experiments with
(26:35):
burning things, animal bones and uh, just sort of self
experimentation to see what would remained. And there was always bones,
of course. Yeah, they could never get them to just
to to turn into ash. Uh. They went to a
crematorium even and said, you know, we're probably just not
even getting this thing hot enough. And they said, well,
actually at two thousand degrees it would take two hours
(26:58):
to completely burn a body up. Your how didn't get
nearly that hot and it only burned for thirty to
forty five minutes, so there should definitely be human remains
like all over the place. Jenny kind of really turned
into like this citizen scientist. Actually, she taught herself forensics
as far as burning of remains goes. She um looked
(27:18):
into other fires. There was another fire that happened around
the same time that killed seven people. Uh, and the
remains of all seven people were found in the in
the burned out house as well. So she's like getting
more and more convinced, and so is George that their
kids are still alive. So in nine they had a
(27:40):
a forensic investigator of some sort of coming and do
an investigation and an excavation of the site. And he
turned up some stuff. He found some coins, found a
dictionary that had belonged to the kids, and he did
actually find some vertebra and he had the vertebras sent
off to the Smithsonian Institution actually, and they investigated this
(28:01):
and issued a report about the bones. Yes they did.
They said the human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae
belonging to one individual. The transverse recess of fused, so
the age of this individual death should have been sixteen
or seventeen top limit twenty two UM. And on this basis,
the bones show greater skepter maturation than what I would
(28:22):
expect from a fourteen year old who was the oldest
missing child. So basically, it was either placed there by someone,
It was not charred, it was not a part of
the fire, one of the fire, It wasn't one of
the kids. And it was either place there by someone
or brought it happened to be in that dirt. Can
you imagine that? Like, think about that. George went and
(28:46):
got a bunch of filled dirt to come and fill
in this memorial site and ended up disturbing a grave,
like maybe an unmarked grave somewhere that didn't find I
didn't think that was remarkable. That's crazy. If you ain't
got filled dirt and you found bones, human bones, Yeah,
I wouldn't. Can you tell by the pitch of my
voice that that is crazy? I can. The other weird
(29:08):
thing that they found was a, uh, this green rubber
casing that later they found out it was a part
of some kind of bomb um an incendiary device, And
some people think that that's a weird thing to have
on your property. House had just burned. And they think
(29:28):
this could have been the sound that Jeanie heard in
the middle of the night when something hit the roof
and rolled off. Who knows, but she didn't hear a
big boom. It seemed like if it was a bomb,
that would have been pretty obvious. Yeah, but I mean,
if it was like a napalm bombment doesn't necessarily explode
it just like nites breads. Yeah, so then I'll make noise.
(29:51):
I don't know, we'll go experiment with one. UM so
that that objection speculation right. That Smith's Zonian report actually said,
it's really curious that that the bodies weren't recovered or
found in this pretty good excavation that you guys hired
this dude to do. UM and it actually set off
(30:13):
a larger investigation in West Virginia. The governor and the
UM I think the state police superintendent both said, what
you guys are doing is hopeless. The cases closed. Your
kids died in that fire. The case closed. And the
solders were like, no, we're going to go hire a
private detective. And they did hire a private detective and
(30:34):
he started sniffing around town. And UM, I heard a
weird rumor that the police that the fire chief had
said that he actually found a heart and had put
it in a box and buried it at the site,
which is a weird thing to do, it is. And
he went to the guy and was like, you gotta
show me where this thing's buried. Uh. He does. He
(30:55):
actually dig it up, and they find a sort of
I wouldn't say fresh beef liver, freshish but not burned.
And then he admits, you know what, I put this
there hoping that someone would find this and just think
it was a body part of one of their kids.
We can close the case, very ham fisted way of
closing a case. Yeah. And it's just I don't know
(31:19):
why he thought that would work. I don't want to
say he's dumb, but it was a pretty dumb thing
to do. Uh. So previous to this, all sorts of
weird claims had started to fly in reportings of sightings
all over the country. One woman was operating a tour
stop about fifty miles west and she said, no, I
(31:40):
saw them the morning after the fire, served in breakfast. Uh.
They got into a car with Florida license plates. Um,
and and trust me it was your kids. Yeah. So
that freaks him out, of course. Uh. Then there was
a hotel not too far in Charleston, and apparently late
(32:01):
at night, the UM I think four kids had checked
in accompanied by some adults, two women and two men,
all Italian. And she said, I tried to talk to
the kids and tried to be nice, and the dudes
freaked out and started talking Italian and like shuffled the
kids out of there real quick. Yeah, and they left
early the next morning, super super sketchy. Some ladies said
(32:22):
that she saw the kids looking out of a car
that was driving by as the house was on fire. UM.
And then there were even more tips that kind of
poured in over the years, UM, including one uh that
said that they were actually being held by a distant
relative of Jenny's. UM. Someone said that Martha was in
(32:45):
a convent out west I believe YEP. In nineteen sixty seven,
they got a letter from a lady in Houston said that, uh,
the oldest boy or one of the boys Lewis had
lived in that town, got drunk one night and basically
told everyone who he was. UM. They actually went and
in fact, George Sauder and sometimes Jenny he would go
(33:05):
all over the country tracking down these leads and always
sadly comes back empty handed. When he went to Texas,
he got down there, met with the guy and it
wasn't his son, obviously, but um, you know, I had
to go back and tell his wife, like another another
zero in this one. Yeah, and like it's really sad
(33:26):
when you step back and look at it from the
perspective of the parents, like they were not convinced that
their kids died in this fire. They were open to
the possibility, but they weren't convinced, and they wanted to
know for the rest of their lives. So Yeah, he
would go all over the country chasing down leads. And
the reason he would do this, Chuck, is because he
got no help whatsoever from the local authorities. They the
(33:47):
solders actually wrote to the FBI and got a reply
from j Edgar Hoover himself that said, I'd love to help,
but this is out of our jurisdiction. If your local
cops will invite us to help, we'd be happy to
help investigate. And the local cops said, thanks anyway, and
turn the FBI down. I can't imagine how frustrating that
must have been for the solders to see that to
(34:08):
see Jack or Hoover say we'll help out, But these
guys have to invite us and get turned down for that,
you know. Yeah, so that I mean it was the
kind of their life obsession, and obsession is a really
good good way to put it. There's a story of
George seeing a picture in a paper of a ballet
class in Manhattan, and he became convinced that one of
the girls in the picture was his daughter, Betty, and
(34:31):
he drove to Manhattan and demanded to see his daughter,
and the parents are the school was like, you need
to get out of here, dude, you've lost your mind.
This is our kid. No, you can't see our kid.
So he had to go back home after that. So
it gets super weird. Jenny comes home, gets a male
(34:51):
and sees a letter addressed to her, not to the
family or to her and her husband. To Jenny Sawder
opens it up, post markedin Kentucky, no return address, and
there was a photo of an Italian man. Well, I
looked at the Italian in his mid twenties, so the
age fits. And on the back of it it said,
in handwriting, Louis Solder, I love brother Frankie, I l
(35:14):
I l boys, A little boys, A nine zero, one
two or three five, no idea, the most weird, mysterious
thing you could imagine. And I looked at a picture.
They were like, this very well could be our son.
It looks a lot like him. It looks more like
him than I do. I didn't think it was him.
(35:35):
I was like, the eyebrows didn't match to me, the
nose didn't match. But you can never tell a kid
from nine to twenty five, you know, because this is
almost twenty he might have looked like you know, it
could be true, he might have looked different enough. Um.
But yeah, that mystery just was never ever solved. And
so back in the fifties, like after they started getting
(35:57):
shut down by the local cops and then the state
cops and everybody, they you know, they started to take
matters in their own hands. And one of the things
they did was erect that billboard that you asked Justin
McElroy about. It became kind of famous. Aside from the McIlroy's,
everybody in West Virginia knew about it. UM. And it
was a billboard on the Sawder's property with pictures, big
(36:19):
pictures of the five children UM with their name and
age and then basically uh rundown of what the family
thought may have happened to them. And it was at
first they offered a five thousand dollar reward and then
up to the ten thousand dollars. Yeah, and they owned it.
So it was there for I mean until the eighties
until um so, George died in night and then Jenny
(36:42):
died in nine And after Jenny died, they took the
billboard down. That's right. What other reports came in. One
bus driver said he claimed he saw someone throwing quote
fireballs onto the house. Some of this stuff reeks that
I was pretty wasted at the time. Some of the
stuff reeks of like that after the fact stuff that
people kind of invent like wait a minute, saw gout
(37:04):
throwing fireballs? Right, But there was verified after the fact weirdness.
Oh yeah, for sure. You know that keeps this this
case alive. Like one thing we didn't mention. Their telephone
line was cut. Yeah, and some people say it was
a guy that stole the ladder, climbed up cut the
phone lines so they couldn't reach anyone. Uh but I
mean you said they found the guy. Did he did
(37:26):
they ask him about that? From what I understand, they
didn't ask him anything. They just find him for for theft,
ladder theft and block and tackle theft. Oh. The other
weird thing is, um they hired another private investigator at
one point to track down where that letter came from. Yeah,
the Kentucky picture of Lewis and this guy just disappears. Yeah.
(37:46):
He may have just been like a CD gum shoe,
you know, maybe and just took their money. Quite possibly,
or maybe he was murdered because he found out the truth.
I don't know, but they said that he literally vanished
like they couldn't ever reach him again. I think it's
likely he was a seedy gum should we just took
some desperate families money and hopefully he's burning in hell?
Did the mafia rub him out? Because that became one
(38:07):
of the leading theories is that George was approached by
the mafia, rebuff their advances and um that was it.
They they took the kids. Uh well yeah, And supposedly
it's not just a total flight of fancy. Apparently the
mafia was really big in the coal business and the
trucking business in the area at that time, so it
(38:27):
is entirely possible he was approached by the mafia, and
he does sound like the kind of guy who tell
him to like go stick it. Yeah, you know. He
also may have made some enemies with the Mussolini cracks. Uh.
What else was there? Well, one thing that that was
lost to time was that vertebrae, even though it's almost
(38:49):
that it was not one of the kids. At least
if they still had that, they could DNA test it now. Yeah,
but of course they can't. Yeah. And so little little
baby Sylvia who was two maybe three at the time,
I think two is is what I've seen most Um
is the last surviving Solder child. And she said, like
these are her earliest memories are of that night of
(39:10):
the fire and seeing her father like losing his mind,
training in his house and bleeding. Um. And she promised
her parents that she would keep the story alive, so
she she talks about it a lot. Um. She goes
onto the online like online sleuth websites that talk about
the case, and like kind of feeds information to people
(39:31):
and tries to keep the story alive. It's just crazy, man.
You go to bed, you wake up with a fire,
and five of your five of your children are just vanished,
and there's no way they burned up to nothing. That's
just impossible. So I I read this blog post. Like
a MPR person named Stacy Horn did a piece on
it like years back, and she wrote this really long
(39:54):
blog post about stuff they have been cut from the
from the piece, and I got the impress and they
were trying to play up the mystery. And she said
that she personally came to believe that the children did
die in the fire, and that there was plenty of
evidence that supports that idea, but that the media tends
to play up the other But she also said that
there's enough weird stuff surrounding it that if she learned
(40:18):
that they were still alive, she wouldn't be shocked. Well yeah,
and the fact that they never got in touch, because
you you know, it's not like these kids were strange
from their parents or I mean, they were a tight
knit family by all accounts, right, And the family rationalized
that by saying that their family was in danger and
they were trying to protect their parents by never getting
into which would kind of align with the mafia theory. Yeah.
(40:41):
Just terrible, man, lose half your family without a trace. Yeah, Uh,
if you want to know more about this. There's plenty
of sites on the internet that have stuff, but we
found this really great article that we basedus on by
Karen Abbott. It was called The Children Who Went Up
and Smoke. Yeah, the NPR wents good and Stacy Hornson
is pretty old too. You know, it's weird. Does I
have a good friend named Stacy Horn is not the
(41:03):
same one? No? But when I clicked, I was like, oh, interesting,
and I clicked on her thing and it said Stacy
Horn like cat. She's a cat person. My friend Stacy
is a noted cat person and it's not the same person,
you know, And I was like, weird doppelganger? Yeah, no, no,
maybe the name doppelganger. Yeah, I'd have to see her face.
(41:24):
I think I said something, well, how about this search bar?
And since I since search bar, it's time for listener mail,
Chuck handy dandy search bar. People said that they miss that.
I used to say that the handy search bar. Yeah.
I don't think I said handy dandy did ida? I
don't know. Maybe Jerry said yes, that's back when she listened,
(41:46):
so I would take that better word. Hey, guys, huge
fan of the show too. Exclamation points. Yeah. I've been
listening to your show for about a year now, and
I turned my wife and kids onto the program, and
they're all hooked. We had a stuff you Should Know
marathon even in our car ride back to Chicago from Athens, Georgia.
We look forward to your new episodes and are burning
(42:08):
through them quickly to pick up the pace. You guys
made reference to lead paints being on roadside signs. That
is highly unlikely, says Sean. Uh. Those signs are changed
quite frequently in our base, predominantly uh. And then he
goes on to name like eight different types of pigment
chemistries which I won't read out, and other mixtures of
(42:32):
iron oxides uh. He said. Lead chromates can still be found, however,
in road markings like yellow and white lines on the street.
Any new road markings are now done with the chemistries
I mentioned previously, but there are many states across the
country that still haven't gotten around replacing removing the lead
chromate based paints on the street. Not trying to knitpick.
(42:52):
It's common misconception of people outside the color industry, and
based on my nerd ing out with the chemistry name dropping,
I bet you can't guess what industry I'm in. Here's
a hint. I don't dance. So he's saying he's a
chemistry nerd. Was ever dood dancing? Chemistry nerds don't dance.
I think that may be a reference. Is something we
(43:13):
said that I'm not picking up on. Maybe maybe Sean
can clear it up. Yeah, we need to follow up
listener mail. All right, that's from Sean Mula. Oh it
was German. He didn't he dropped the room out. Okay,
so Mueller he didn't want that association. Well, thanks Shan,
we appreciate that. Uh, let us know about the dancing thing.
(43:36):
I think we're not the only ones who are curious, right, Yeah,
I'm not sure what that means. If you know what
Shaan is talking about, you can tweet to us at
s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook,
dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know, You can send
us an email and stuff podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com, and there's always joined us at at home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff
(43:57):
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio
from our podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows h m hm
M Hey everyone, it's me Josh, your old friend, and
for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen
our episode from two thousand sixteen, The Unsolved Mystery Disappearance
of the Sodder Children. Uh. It's a story, a very
tragic and sad one, but also incredibly enthralling about five
children who disappeared after a house fire on Christmas back
(00:21):
in It's one of my all time favorite episodes, which
is why I'm choosing it as a select and I
hope you enjoy it as well. Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and
(00:44):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles
W Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff
you should Unsolved Mysteries Edition. Yeah. Really, are you cool
with us? No? I'm leaving. Yeah. I think it's great. Man.
I love me a good unsolved mystery. Yeah, and this
is super sad, So it's not like I love it
(01:06):
and I think it's hysterical. I just I just like
unsolved mystery. What's a what's an hysterical unsolved mystery? Um?
Like I got pantsed in the second grade and I
don't know who did it. That's an hysterical unsolved mystery.
It was just in line pants around the ankles turned
around and like everyone's like, did you just go with it?
(01:30):
And you're like, check it out, check me out him
in second grade. Yep, good for you. That never happened.
I made it up. Oh really yeah, it's called improv, buddy.
It's a craft so en scene and scene and seen.
Have we are established which one it is? Yeah? A
(01:51):
few times and nope, it is Chuck. We are talking
about a family called the Solders. Um, not the Soldiers right,
not the welding technique. No, the Solders. They are a
family out of Fayetteville, West Virginia, of Italian extraction, as
(02:11):
we'll see. Yes, and um, very much so. Like you said,
this is an unsolved mystery. They they they're family, just
going along totally normally. Has turned into one of the
stranger unsolved mysteries in American history. Yeah, and certainly in
West Virginia history. Oh definitely. And I should say I
texted our friend Justin McElroy of the McElroy triplets. Well,
(02:37):
they're not triplets, they're they're they're brothers. Oh yeah, my brother,
my brother and Me podcast because they are from West Virginia.
And as you'll see here, there's a very famous billboard
that we're going to talk about about this case. And
I was like, hey, dude, do you ever do you
remember where you know seeing this thing? How far are
you from Fayettville? He said, just a couple of hours,
(02:57):
he said, but I've never heard of that. And I
was like, really, this seemed like the kind of cautionary
tale that would be whispered about all over West Virginia.
I could see that. But he said he never heard
of it. And then he looked it up and said,
oh wow. And I said, I bet your dad knows
about it, and then he said he didn't. He didn't respond.
You didn't text him back? Answer me, No, that's right.
(03:20):
I am Facebook friends with his dad. That should have
SA yeah, ask him. Yeah, go go to the source.
That's right. So well, let's go back to the beginning,
Chuck back to that's right. That's when Georgiros, who would
become George sodder I, was born in Sardinia and came
to the US and nineteen o eight as a young
(03:42):
lad of thirteen years old. Yeah, and he was a
go getter. He really was so his. He had an
older brother who traveled with him from Sardinia to New York. Um.
I guess he was like, I don't want to do this,
and right when they made it through Ellis Island, he
turned right back around and went back to Italy. Yeah,
he's I don't know, man, Go get a cup of
coffee and think it over, is what I say. After
you made that ship's voyage, just mull it over for
(04:05):
a day or two. Yeah, because what if, like you're
halfway back, you're like, actually I should have stayed. Yeah,
you might meet a pretty lady from Brooklyn. Did you
see that movie Brooklyn? No? Great? Really? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
I mean it will check it out. You sound it surprised.
I was a little surprised. Yeah. It was nominated for
(04:25):
many awards. Yeah that doesn't always mean. It usually means
it's pretty good. No, it depens. Okay, Brooklyn highly recommended
about young Italian man who falls in love with an
Irish immigrant. Oh well, this has nothing to do with
this thing. No, not at all, because this man falls
in love with an Italian immigrant. That's right, right, So, um, George,
(04:47):
like you said, he was a bit of a go getter.
He's thirteen, he's on his own, literally without any any
other family in America. Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing.
But then you think back to there there. They didn't
really under to what childhood was at that point. So
he was probably like of working age and had been
for years. But it seems really weird to us now.
(05:07):
He might have been retiring right at thirteen. He was
smoking cigars already, so he, like I said, it, was
a go getter. He started working at the on the
Pennsylvania Railroad and then moved to West Virginia to Smithers Smithers,
West Virginia, and worked as a truck driver and then said,
you know what, this is America, darn it. I didn't
(05:31):
come here to drive a truck for someone. I'm gonna
own my own trucking business. And the Statue of Liberty went,
ah yep, nice going kid. So he started at his
own trucking business. Um, and he's in West Virginia. So
in short order he starts hauling cole yeah, coal and dirt.
And it wasn't like the hugest business. I think he
did okay for himself. He did it okay for himself
(05:52):
solidly middle class. Yeah, he didn't become like wealthy or anything.
And as a matter of fact, later on UM a
local local government official would say that the Sauders were,
um one of the best middle class families in Fayetteville. Yeah,
and they had a small Italian population in Fayetteville, which
I think is why he ended up there, right in
(06:14):
his community. Yeah, and he moved there with his wife Jenny, right, Yeah,
Jenny Cipriani who he met, Um. She came over from
Italy when she was three. He met her historic called
the music Box, and they got married. And like Italian
families do, they had ten kids. Ten kids in twenty years. Yeah,
(06:36):
that's a lot of kids, pumping them out with great regularity.
And like you said, when they moved to Fayettville, the
reason they moved to Fayville. Had no idea that West
Virginia even had Italian people in it, let alone strong
Italian communities. But they moved to Fayettville and they were
part of the Italian community, and George was well known. Again,
they were respected middle class family there. He did pretty
(06:56):
good for himself, UM. And he was also well known
for his opinions on everything including politics and UM. During
the forties, the United States was at war with Italy,
and not all of the Italian Americans were UM feeling it.
On the American side, there were a lot of disagreements
over Mussolini and the government that he was creating UM
(07:20):
among Italian Americans, including in Fayetteville, West Virginia, and George
in particular, hated Mussolini and very frequently spoke out about
him and would get in arguments with some of the
locals who who felt differently about Mussolini. And Uh, I
guess there were some hard feelings here there, but he
doesn't seem to have taken them seriously very much. No,
(07:40):
And we mentioned that, Um, if it sounds like we're
setting something up for later, we indeed are. So just
tuck that little fact away, um. And then can we
fast forward in time? Yeah too, Uh Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve?
N So, Um, here's what happens. It's Christmas Eve. Um.
(08:02):
As his tradition, in some households, you can open up
a few gifts on Christmas Eve. Yeah, so this is
what happened. They opened up some presents comes time for
Betty By and five of the children, Maurice fourteen, Martha twelve,
Louis or Louie, ten, Genie or Jenny as that was
(08:24):
a little confusing because that's the mom's name. Eight years old,
and Betty said, can we please stay up late and
play with these new toys? Yeah, they're older. Sister Marian
had she worked at a five and diamond town two
miles down the road, and she had surprised her younger
brothers and sisters with some toys that they had not
been expecting. That's right, and they were very happy. So
(08:45):
they asked mom if they could stay up. Yeah, and
the older, the elder Jenny, said yeah, I guess you
can stay up, turn out the lights, locked the doors
before you go to bed. I'm going to hit the
rack with your dad. And are two year old daughters Sylvia,
twenty three year old John In sixteen year old George Jr.
Were I guess they were just ready for bed too.
(09:06):
And then if you're thinking there's one missing child, he
is away in the military. The eldest, Yeah, fighting either
Mussolini or Hitler or to Joe, one of those guys, right,
So he's away and I could not, for the life
of me find that guy's name. Then I couldn't either. Actually, So, um,
(09:27):
the mom goes to bed. Jenny goes to bed, and uh,
the dad, George and his two next oldest sons, who
had been working with him that day, they'd all gone
to bed about ten. Um. What time did the mom
go to bed? Eleven something like that. Yeah, but she
leaves those five youngest children, Um and Marian, their older
(09:48):
sister who I think was seventeen at the time, downstairs
when she goes to bed. Um. And then it about
twelve thirty on Christmas Morne, because remember that was Christmas Eve,
about twelve thirty at night, the own rings and Um,
this is not an era where and this kind of
to me goes to show these people were doing all right.
They had a phone in in West Virginia. They may
(10:12):
have been the only people in West Virginia with a
phone in nineteen I'm just saying, I don't think everybody
had a phone in West Virginia, so they certainly didn't
have one at their bedside. So Jenny, the mom has
to get up to answer the phone, and on the
other line she hears a woman asking for somebody she
didn't know or recognized, and in the background there's obviously
(10:34):
a party going on. There's laughter, there's clinking of glasses,
and uh, Jenny says, I don't know who you're talking about.
You have the wrong number, and the woman laughs weirdly
and hangs up. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and come
out and say, I think this means nothing in his
total coincidence. So supposedly they tracked that woman down and
she said it was just a wrong number. Total coincidence,
(10:57):
that's what I think. But think about that though, Like,
had that not happened, a lot of other stuff would
have gone unnoticed. Right, it's a big deal. So before
she goes back to bed, she noticed the lights are
on downstairs. She said, you know, turn the lights off,
locked the door before you go to bed. So one
of her kids is on the couch asleep. She's like,
wait a minute, the doors unlocked, the lights are on. Um,
(11:19):
they shouldn't have done that. So let me lock the
doors and turn off the lights. And she leaves the
one that's asleep on the couch asleep. It was the
one that got her toys. Sleepy time on the couch.
That's fine, But those five younger ones who've been playing
with their toys, they were in ordered to be found,
so mom just assumed they went upstairs to bed, right,
So she goes back to bed, and then like an
(11:41):
hour later, she's awoken by like a thump on the roof. Yeah,
and she falls back asleep again. Well, it sounded like
a heavy thump and a sliding down of the roof
was just something heavy head landed on it and then
slid off, and she just went back to sleep, very
important matters. Probably figured it was a reindeer or something
(12:01):
like that. At being Christmas, you never know. Uh. The
next time she woke up, she woke up to panic
and chaos because her house was on fire. And chuck,
we'll talk about the fire right after this. All right, dude,
(12:40):
the house is on fire, that's right. So Sylvia, a
little two year old Sylvia is in their room with
her the parents, so they get her out, obviously covered
with them because she's in the crib. Uh. And then
seventeen year old Marion and year old John and sixth
year old George Jr. Are all outside and safe right
(13:02):
at this point, So everyone is out except for these
five other kids, right, And they were on the top
floor of the house. I believe in two different rooms
and the only way down is this one single staircase.
And George tried to go back into the house. He
broke through a window, cut his arm quite badly. UM
(13:22):
getting into through in through the window or opening the door. UM,
and runs inside and the entire downstairs floor is totally
engulfed in flame and smoke. He can't see anything, but
he can see that there's no way he can go
up the staircase or anyone can make it down the staircase.
So he runs back outside of the house to try
to figure out another way to get up to those
(13:44):
kids on the on the top floor. Yeah, and here's
an interesting point. UM. One of the relatives of I
think it was the guy who ended up marrying the
youngest daughter later in life. UM Sylvia said they did
a lot of research on this, and he said the
original police report said that the very first statement said
that the two sons, John and George, who got out,
(14:04):
said they actually ran into the other kids rooms and
physically shook them awake. And then later on in interviews
they said no, they just called out to them. UM,
and assume they heard. But it's still is a mystery
as to whether or not that really happened. Police will
say the first statement is usually the accurate one, um,
(14:25):
But that's just speculation. So from what I understand, the
family rationalized that later on by saying that the two
boys probably felt very guilty, and they said that they
did what they wished they had or felt that they
should have done. That makes sense, and that their revisions
later on were actually the factual ones. That they tried
to rouse their um siblings by just shouting up the stairs.
(14:49):
I can buy that. UM. So Papa tries to get in,
cuts himself really bad. Then he says, wait a minute,
I have this ladder that leans up against the house.
Always always let me go grab that ladders. Not they're
very weird. It is very weird, and it would be
found in a ditch like from the house later on,
and later on witnesses supposedly saw dude stealing it, uh
(15:12):
from the garage. But there's so many things that people
say about this case that it is hard to know
what's true and what was invented. That is true that
they saw a guy a dude, well, they report that
they saw a guy. Well that guy the guy actually
was found and was arrested and charged for stealing and
never questioned about the actual fire. The guy that stole
(15:33):
the ladder. Yeah, okay, so they he says, the dad says,
let me get my trucks, my big uh coal Holland
trucks and pull because those are tall. Let me pull
that next to the house, climb up on that. Neither
one of the trucks start, even though they've been using
him to work earlier that day. Yeah, so the thinking
by the cops and everyone else pretty much is in
(15:54):
the panic he and his son flooded the engines trying
to get him started, and that they wouldn't start. Yeah,
but it became yet another like fishy detail that made
this family suspect like something really weird happened here. Yeah,
and then later there was a totally don't understand the
whole engine removal theory. So it doesn't make any sense
(16:18):
that guy who stole the ladder was caught stealing a
block and tackle that you would use to remove engines. Yeah,
that doesn't make any sense, But it doesn't mean like
he messed with their car or used that block and
tackle to do anything to the engines. They probably just
flooded him that one. I'm I'm an agreement on. So
these this family they're watching helplessly as the house is
(16:40):
going up in flames. That was burned to the ground
in about forty five minutes, ostensibly with the children trapped inside. Yeah.
And if you think, why did in the fire the
fire trucks come the Fatte Fire Department? Uh, you know
it was was Fayetteville, West Virginia. Was Christmas? It was
Christmas night or morn I guess at this point, um, uh,
(17:04):
you know, one of the daughters went to a neighbor's house,
called the fire department. No operators on duty even, right,
And another neighbor who saw this didn't have a phone
at their house, so they went to the local tavern
and they called the operator to report the fire too,
and they couldn't get the operator either operator was probably
at home sleeping for Christmas, that's right. So eventually someone
(17:27):
drives and literally physically tracks down uh fire Chief F. J. Morris,
who does not come out smelling well in this, Well
he doesn't. He said, well, I can't drive the fire
truck as the fire chief. And the way that they
don't even have a siren, The way that they alerted
the fire department was it's called a phone tree. They
just start calling one another. Then they called the next person,
(17:48):
which made even the last sense because again the solders
were the only people in West Virginia with a phone
in their house. It's not true. Uh So eventually, seven
hours later, at eight a m. The fire truck arrives
to find a smoldering pile of ash, and a lot
of people are like, well, clearly the fire department was
paid off or told to halt. From what I gather,
(18:09):
it was sheer ineptitude. And also the sense I think
the fire marshal or fire chief defended himself later saying, yeah,
he said I couldn't drive the fire trucks side to
wait for somebody who could. And also that house went
up so fast there was no there wasn't any need
for us to get there in any kind of hurry. Well,
I mean that's probably true. He also said burned in
(18:32):
like between thirty and forty five minutes. Yeah, if you're
a fire chief, that's not what you want to say,
you know, like who cares when we get there? Also,
one of the firemen who showed up was Jenny Satter's brother,
So it's not like there was this conspiracy to among
the fire department necessarily, although that is a common belief
in people who pay attention to this case. It is
(18:54):
so what they find eight am as a house burnt
to the ground. What they don't find are any remnants
of those five children. Yeah, and here in is where
the mystery really kicks in. The family starts like paying
attention to little weird details. At first, they just assumed
that the kids have they're they're just totally gone. They
(19:17):
were totally burned up. Well, that's what the fire chief said.
He was like, there's no remains whatsoever because it burned
them to nothing. They did, like a cursory examination of
the rubble. They did find some other stuff, like they
found appliances that were recognizable, They found a couple other things,
but they never found any of the kids. Um, And
they took the fire chief's word at face value and said, Okay,
(19:40):
well our kids are in there. We can't bear to
the side of this any longer. So George went and
got a bunch of dirt and buried the site in
about five ft of fill dirt and decided to plant
a memorial garden there on the side of the house. Fire. Yeah,
this is on January two, so that he wasn't supposed
to do this. They're supposed to leave it open to
(20:01):
continue to investigate. Um. The state police inspector said it
was faulty wiring. It's now covered in dirt. Um, and
so now the family has just left alone, saying what
happened to our children? Are they? Were they in there? Right?
So that that when they buried the place and dirt,
they assumed that the children were still in there, and
(20:22):
this was there. They're grave now. They were never going
to be found um. But then, like you said, they
started thinking about weird details that emerged. Right. One of
the first ones was the idea that it was faulty wiring.
George basically knew for a fact that it wasn't faulty wiring.
He'd recently had um an electric stove installed and just
(20:43):
to make sure again there he was doing pretty well,
just to make sure that the house didn't burn down
with this new fangled electric stove. He had the wiring
in the house redone, and then he had it inspected
by the power company, who sent out an inspector and
said they did a good job. Wiring is fine. So
he basically you almost for a fact that it wasn't
faulty wiring in the house. Yeah. Not only that after
(21:06):
the fire started, when they were outside, there were still
lights on in the house, right, So remember Jenny came
down and turned out the lights. She left the Christmas
tree lights on, and while the house was burning, the
Christmas tree was still the Christmas tree lights were on,
which must have been like a really ghastly thing to see,
you know. Uh, speaking of the wiring, there was a
(21:26):
point a few months earlier, and this is definitely a
strange thing, when this guy showed up. He was a stranger,
no one knew him, and he asked about, you know,
working as a driver, and he didn't have any work
for him, but he was sort of just I guess.
They had the conversation outdoors, wandered around at the back
of his house and said, you know, what you're wiring
here at your fuse box is going to cause a
(21:47):
fire someday. And George thought, well, that's a really weird
thing to say, because not only did I have it
just inspected and it's fine, it's just a strange thing
for you to say, Mr stranger, get off my property
pretty much, but take the cannoli very nice, but weird
and disconcerting after the fact. Obviously, sure he didn't think
(22:07):
anything of it at the time other than that's a
weird thing to say. Yeah. Um. Another fishy thing that
happened that really kind of stuck out in retrospect was
the life insurance salesman, right, Yeah, a life insurance salesman
came through and um tried to sell George some life
insurance policies for his children, and George didn't bite and
(22:29):
the guy got I rate and his quote was kind
of weird. Actually, he said, your house is going to
go up and smoke your g D house. Yeah, your
children are going to be destroyed. And then here's here's
where it really gets weird. He says, you will be
repaid for the dirty things you've been saying about Mussolini. Yeah,
(22:52):
and George just went like, get off my property. Yeah,
just the usual. Yeah. So remember we said that he
was outspoken about Mussolina and politics. Um, clearly this got
around to this dude, and uh, it's just a weird,
disconcerting thing to say, especially after these kids look like
they may have perished in this fire. Yeah, especially if
(23:13):
he didn't like make a big deal out of it
at the time. Was this like a normal business attempt
in West Virginia among the Italian community, Like your kids
are gonna die, You'll be repaid for what you've been
saying about Mussolini. Good day to you. I don't know.
I'm sure that's not in the handbook. What's even fishier, though, Chuck,
is that same guy served on the coroner's inquest jury
(23:36):
that ruled that the fire was the result of faulty wiring. Yeah,
it all gets a little weird. Yeah. Uh. And then
one other, well, not one other, quite a few other
weird things. Um. One of the older sons said that,
you know what, right before Christmas, there was a dude
parked right across from our house, watching the school bus
and watching the younger kids get off the school bus
(23:59):
and come to the house. And it was clear that
he was sitting there watching us, and it was strange. Yeah,
he was in a van. Was he really? No? I
bet he was. He would have been if it were
like the seventies all that. Yeah, that's trip sickos and seventies.
So Chuck, let's take another break, because the mystery is
about to deepen even more. The plot thickens et cetera.
(24:47):
All right, so things are getting a little weird, and
all of a sudden, now Jenny and George, the solder
um parents, start thinking, like, wait a minute, are our
kids actually dead? Who is the last person to see
them alive? The if if John and George Jr. To
be believed they were the last ones to see him
(25:09):
alive because they went and shook them awake, but they
may not have actually done that well, and they changed
her story to say that they didn't. So then technically
Mary in, the seventeen year old older sister who brought
the toys and was downstairs with the kids while they
were playing with them, would have been the last to
see them alive. But I could never find anybody pressing
(25:30):
her for what her story was. So the assumption that
I'm going on is that she just fell asleep on
the couch, and when she fell asleep, the kids were
still downstairs. But the solders are starting to wonder, like,
wait a minute, where those kids even in the house
when the house went down, And they they're backed up
by the idea that no remains were found. Yeah, that's
the one that really is bothering them. They're like, something
(25:51):
should have been found. Yeah, and um, all of a sudden,
this this story is starting to get national attention in
the press. And the Saw later on would say, George
would say, if they were burned in the house, if
they died in that house fire, I want to be convinced.
And if they weren't, I want to know what happened
to them. Um. And this kind of kicked off like
(26:13):
a lifelong quest for for George and Jenny. Um. And
in nine to try to literally get to the bottom
of it, they hired a guy to come in and investigate,
to basically excavate the memorial site and look for the
remains of the children, and he didn't find it. Well. Yeah,
and previous to that, they did their own experiments with
(26:35):
burning things, animal bones and uh, just sort of self
experimentation to see what would remained. And there was always bones,
of course. Yeah, they could never get them to just
to to turn into ash. Uh. They went to a
crematorium even and said, you know, we're probably just not
even getting this thing hot enough. And they said, well,
actually at two thousand degrees it would take two hours
(26:58):
to completely burn a body up. Your how didn't get
nearly that hot and it only burned for thirty to
forty five minutes, so there should definitely be human remains
like all over the place. Jenny kind of really turned
into like this citizen scientist. Actually, she taught herself forensics
as far as burning of remains goes. She um looked
(27:18):
into other fires. There was another fire that happened around
the same time that killed seven people. Uh, and the
remains of all seven people were found in the in
the burned out house as well. So she's like getting
more and more convinced, and so is George that their
kids are still alive. So in nine they had a
(27:40):
a forensic investigator of some sort of coming and do
an investigation and an excavation of the site. And he
turned up some stuff. He found some coins, found a
dictionary that had belonged to the kids, and he did
actually find some vertebra and he had the vertebras sent
off to the Smithsonian Institution actually, and they investigated this
(28:01):
and issued a report about the bones. Yes they did.
They said the human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae
belonging to one individual. The transverse recess of fused, so
the age of this individual death should have been sixteen
or seventeen top limit twenty two UM. And on this basis,
the bones show greater skepter maturation than what I would
(28:22):
expect from a fourteen year old who was the oldest
missing child. So basically, it was either placed there by someone,
It was not charred, it was not a part of
the fire, one of the fire, It wasn't one of
the kids. And it was either place there by someone
or brought it happened to be in that dirt. Can
you imagine that? Like, think about that. George went and
(28:46):
got a bunch of filled dirt to come and fill
in this memorial site and ended up disturbing a grave,
like maybe an unmarked grave somewhere that didn't find I
didn't think that was remarkable. That's crazy. If you ain't
got filled dirt and you found bones, human bones, Yeah,
I wouldn't. Can you tell by the pitch of my
voice that that is crazy? I can. The other weird
(29:08):
thing that they found was a, uh, this green rubber
casing that later they found out it was a part
of some kind of bomb um an incendiary device, And
some people think that that's a weird thing to have
on your property. House had just burned. And they think
(29:28):
this could have been the sound that Jeanie heard in
the middle of the night when something hit the roof
and rolled off. Who knows, but she didn't hear a
big boom. It seemed like if it was a bomb,
that would have been pretty obvious. Yeah, but I mean,
if it was like a napalm bombment doesn't necessarily explode
it just like nites breads. Yeah, so then I'll make noise.
(29:51):
I don't know, we'll go experiment with one. UM so
that that objection speculation right. That Smith's Zonian report actually said,
it's really curious that that the bodies weren't recovered or
found in this pretty good excavation that you guys hired
this dude to do. UM and it actually set off
(30:13):
a larger investigation in West Virginia. The governor and the
UM I think the state police superintendent both said, what
you guys are doing is hopeless. The cases closed. Your
kids died in that fire. The case closed. And the
solders were like, no, we're going to go hire a
private detective. And they did hire a private detective and
(30:34):
he started sniffing around town. And UM, I heard a
weird rumor that the police that the fire chief had
said that he actually found a heart and had put
it in a box and buried it at the site,
which is a weird thing to do, it is. And
he went to the guy and was like, you gotta
show me where this thing's buried. Uh. He does. He
(30:55):
actually dig it up, and they find a sort of
I wouldn't say fresh beef liver, freshish but not burned.
And then he admits, you know what, I put this
there hoping that someone would find this and just think
it was a body part of one of their kids.
We can close the case, very ham fisted way of
closing a case. Yeah. And it's just I don't know
(31:19):
why he thought that would work. I don't want to
say he's dumb, but it was a pretty dumb thing
to do. Uh. So previous to this, all sorts of
weird claims had started to fly in reportings of sightings
all over the country. One woman was operating a tour
stop about fifty miles west and she said, no, I
(31:40):
saw them the morning after the fire, served in breakfast. Uh.
They got into a car with Florida license plates. Um,
and and trust me it was your kids. Yeah. So
that freaks him out, of course. Uh. Then there was
a hotel not too far in Charleston, and apparently late
(32:01):
at night, the UM I think four kids had checked
in accompanied by some adults, two women and two men,
all Italian. And she said, I tried to talk to
the kids and tried to be nice, and the dudes
freaked out and started talking Italian and like shuffled the
kids out of there real quick. Yeah, and they left
early the next morning, super super sketchy. Some ladies said
(32:22):
that she saw the kids looking out of a car
that was driving by as the house was on fire. UM.
And then there were even more tips that kind of
poured in over the years, UM, including one uh that
said that they were actually being held by a distant
relative of Jenny's. UM. Someone said that Martha was in
(32:45):
a convent out west I believe YEP. In nineteen sixty seven,
they got a letter from a lady in Houston said that, uh,
the oldest boy or one of the boys Lewis had
lived in that town, got drunk one night and basically
told everyone who he was. UM. They actually went and
in fact, George Sauder and sometimes Jenny he would go
(33:05):
all over the country tracking down these leads and always
sadly comes back empty handed. When he went to Texas,
he got down there, met with the guy and it
wasn't his son, obviously, but um, you know, I had
to go back and tell his wife, like another another
zero in this one. Yeah, and like it's really sad
(33:26):
when you step back and look at it from the
perspective of the parents, like they were not convinced that
their kids died in this fire. They were open to
the possibility, but they weren't convinced, and they wanted to
know for the rest of their lives. So Yeah, he
would go all over the country chasing down leads. And
the reason he would do this, Chuck, is because he
got no help whatsoever from the local authorities. They the
(33:47):
solders actually wrote to the FBI and got a reply
from j Edgar Hoover himself that said, I'd love to help,
but this is out of our jurisdiction. If your local
cops will invite us to help, we'd be happy to
help investigate. And the local cops said, thanks anyway, and
turn the FBI down. I can't imagine how frustrating that
must have been for the solders to see that to
(34:08):
see Jack or Hoover say we'll help out, But these
guys have to invite us and get turned down for that,
you know. Yeah, so that I mean it was the
kind of their life obsession, and obsession is a really
good good way to put it. There's a story of
George seeing a picture in a paper of a ballet
class in Manhattan, and he became convinced that one of
the girls in the picture was his daughter, Betty, and
(34:31):
he drove to Manhattan and demanded to see his daughter,
and the parents are the school was like, you need
to get out of here, dude, you've lost your mind.
This is our kid. No, you can't see our kid.
So he had to go back home after that. So
it gets super weird. Jenny comes home, gets a male
(34:51):
and sees a letter addressed to her, not to the
family or to her and her husband. To Jenny Sawder
opens it up, post markedin Kentucky, no return address, and
there was a photo of an Italian man. Well, I
looked at the Italian in his mid twenties, so the
age fits. And on the back of it it said,
in handwriting, Louis Solder, I love brother Frankie, I l
(35:14):
I l boys, A little boys, A nine zero, one
two or three five, no idea, the most weird, mysterious
thing you could imagine. And I looked at a picture.
They were like, this very well could be our son.
It looks a lot like him. It looks more like
him than I do. I didn't think it was him.
(35:35):
I was like, the eyebrows didn't match to me, the
nose didn't match. But you can never tell a kid
from nine to twenty five, you know, because this is
almost twenty he might have looked like you know, it
could be true, he might have looked different enough. Um.
But yeah, that mystery just was never ever solved. And
so back in the fifties, like after they started getting
(35:57):
shut down by the local cops and then the state
cops and everybody, they you know, they started to take
matters in their own hands. And one of the things
they did was erect that billboard that you asked Justin
McElroy about. It became kind of famous. Aside from the McIlroy's,
everybody in West Virginia knew about it. UM. And it
was a billboard on the Sawder's property with pictures, big
(36:19):
pictures of the five children UM with their name and
age and then basically uh rundown of what the family
thought may have happened to them. And it was at
first they offered a five thousand dollar reward and then
up to the ten thousand dollars. Yeah, and they owned it.
So it was there for I mean until the eighties
until um so, George died in night and then Jenny
(36:42):
died in nine And after Jenny died, they took the
billboard down. That's right. What other reports came in. One
bus driver said he claimed he saw someone throwing quote
fireballs onto the house. Some of this stuff reeks that
I was pretty wasted at the time. Some of the
stuff reeks of like that after the fact stuff that
people kind of invent like wait a minute, saw gout
(37:04):
throwing fireballs? Right, But there was verified after the fact weirdness.
Oh yeah, for sure. You know that keeps this this
case alive. Like one thing we didn't mention. Their telephone
line was cut. Yeah, and some people say it was
a guy that stole the ladder, climbed up cut the
phone lines so they couldn't reach anyone. Uh but I
mean you said they found the guy. Did he did
(37:26):
they ask him about that? From what I understand, they
didn't ask him anything. They just find him for for theft,
ladder theft and block and tackle theft. Oh. The other
weird thing is, um they hired another private investigator at
one point to track down where that letter came from. Yeah,
the Kentucky picture of Lewis and this guy just disappears. Yeah.
(37:46):
He may have just been like a CD gum shoe,
you know, maybe and just took their money. Quite possibly,
or maybe he was murdered because he found out the truth.
I don't know, but they said that he literally vanished
like they couldn't ever reach him again. I think it's
likely he was a seedy gum should we just took
some desperate families money and hopefully he's burning in hell?
Did the mafia rub him out? Because that became one
(38:07):
of the leading theories is that George was approached by
the mafia, rebuff their advances and um that was it.
They they took the kids. Uh well yeah, And supposedly
it's not just a total flight of fancy. Apparently the
mafia was really big in the coal business and the
trucking business in the area at that time, so it
(38:27):
is entirely possible he was approached by the mafia, and
he does sound like the kind of guy who tell
him to like go stick it. Yeah, you know. He
also may have made some enemies with the Mussolini cracks. Uh.
What else was there? Well, one thing that that was
lost to time was that vertebrae, even though it's almost
(38:49):
that it was not one of the kids. At least
if they still had that, they could DNA test it now. Yeah,
but of course they can't. Yeah. And so little little
baby Sylvia who was two maybe three at the time,
I think two is is what I've seen most Um
is the last surviving Solder child. And she said, like
these are her earliest memories are of that night of
(39:10):
the fire and seeing her father like losing his mind,
training in his house and bleeding. Um. And she promised
her parents that she would keep the story alive, so
she she talks about it a lot. Um. She goes
onto the online like online sleuth websites that talk about
the case, and like kind of feeds information to people
(39:31):
and tries to keep the story alive. It's just crazy, man.
You go to bed, you wake up with a fire,
and five of your five of your children are just vanished,
and there's no way they burned up to nothing. That's
just impossible. So I I read this blog post. Like
a MPR person named Stacy Horn did a piece on
it like years back, and she wrote this really long
(39:54):
blog post about stuff they have been cut from the
from the piece, and I got the impress and they
were trying to play up the mystery. And she said
that she personally came to believe that the children did
die in the fire, and that there was plenty of
evidence that supports that idea, but that the media tends
to play up the other But she also said that
there's enough weird stuff surrounding it that if she learned
(40:18):
that they were still alive, she wouldn't be shocked. Well yeah,
and the fact that they never got in touch, because
you you know, it's not like these kids were strange
from their parents or I mean, they were a tight
knit family by all accounts, right, And the family rationalized
that by saying that their family was in danger and
they were trying to protect their parents by never getting
into which would kind of align with the mafia theory. Yeah.
(40:41):
Just terrible, man, lose half your family without a trace. Yeah, Uh,
if you want to know more about this. There's plenty
of sites on the internet that have stuff, but we
found this really great article that we basedus on by
Karen Abbott. It was called The Children Who Went Up
and Smoke. Yeah, the NPR wents good and Stacy Hornson
is pretty old too. You know, it's weird. Does I
have a good friend named Stacy Horn is not the
(41:03):
same one? No? But when I clicked, I was like, oh, interesting,
and I clicked on her thing and it said Stacy
Horn like cat. She's a cat person. My friend Stacy
is a noted cat person and it's not the same person,
you know, And I was like, weird doppelganger? Yeah, no, no,
maybe the name doppelganger. Yeah, I'd have to see her face.
(41:24):
I think I said something, well, how about this search bar?
And since I since search bar, it's time for listener mail,
Chuck handy dandy search bar. People said that they miss that.
I used to say that the handy search bar. Yeah.
I don't think I said handy dandy did ida? I
don't know. Maybe Jerry said yes, that's back when she listened,
(41:46):
so I would take that better word. Hey, guys, huge
fan of the show too. Exclamation points. Yeah. I've been
listening to your show for about a year now, and
I turned my wife and kids onto the program, and
they're all hooked. We had a stuff you Should Know
marathon even in our car ride back to Chicago from Athens, Georgia.
We look forward to your new episodes and are burning
(42:08):
through them quickly to pick up the pace. You guys
made reference to lead paints being on roadside signs. That
is highly unlikely, says Sean. Uh. Those signs are changed
quite frequently in our base, predominantly uh. And then he
goes on to name like eight different types of pigment
chemistries which I won't read out, and other mixtures of
(42:32):
iron oxides uh. He said. Lead chromates can still be found, however,
in road markings like yellow and white lines on the street.
Any new road markings are now done with the chemistries
I mentioned previously, but there are many states across the
country that still haven't gotten around replacing removing the lead
chromate based paints on the street. Not trying to knitpick.
(42:52):
It's common misconception of people outside the color industry, and
based on my nerd ing out with the chemistry name dropping,
I bet you can't guess what industry I'm in. Here's
a hint. I don't dance. So he's saying he's a
chemistry nerd. Was ever dood dancing? Chemistry nerds don't dance.
I think that may be a reference. Is something we
(43:13):
said that I'm not picking up on. Maybe maybe Sean
can clear it up. Yeah, we need to follow up
listener mail. All right, that's from Sean Mula. Oh it
was German. He didn't he dropped the room out. Okay,
so Mueller he didn't want that association. Well, thanks Shan,
we appreciate that. Uh, let us know about the dancing thing.
(43:36):
I think we're not the only ones who are curious, right, Yeah,
I'm not sure what that means. If you know what
Shaan is talking about, you can tweet to us at
s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook,
dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know, You can send
us an email and stuff podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com, and there's always joined us at at home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff
(43:57):
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.