Infamous America - MYSTERIES Ep. 2 | “Sodder Children”

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

A tragedy unfolds on Christmas Eve, 1945 in a small town in West Virginia. The Sodder family – 2 parents and 9 children – go to bed after a happy celebration. But during the night, a series of unexplained events occur. The events culminate in a raging fire that burns the family’s house to the ground. It appears as though five children were lost during the blaze, but the rest of the family embarks on a 20-year campaign to discover the truth of the missing children.   Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Christmas season was an especially joyous occasion in 1945. For the first time in four years, the United States and the rest of the world were not at war. In May, Nazi Germany surrendered following the self-inflicted death of Adolf Hitler. Three months later, Japan flew the white flag, after the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation created by World War II was hard to fathom, but it was finally over, and Christmas could be celebrated in peace. For the Sauter family in Fayetteville, West Virginia, the end of World War II was a particularly

exciting time. George Sauter, the family's patriarch, was an immigrant from Italy. He was a devout, anti-fascist, and he was thrilled to be a very important. to see the Axis powers defeated. And so he and his wife, Jenny, made sure their family of 10 kids had a very merry Christmas. The only member of the family who wasn't there was 21-year-old Joe Soder,

who was still in Europe with the US Army. Like many families, the Sotters began celebrations on Christmas Eve. In all the excitement, George and Jenny allowed the children to stay up a little later than usual. But by around midnight, everyone had gone to bed. bed. At roughly 1 a.m., Jenny saw her suddenly awoke to the sound of a loud crash on the roof. As she sat up in bed, she heard a rolling noise, as if something had hit the house and then rolled

off the roof. George was still asleep next to her, and Jenny jumped out of bed to investigate. As Jenny crept through the two-story house, she found nothing amiss and heard no more strange sounds. There was only silence and darkness. She went back to bed, but she didn't sleep for very long. 30 minutes later, around 1.30 a.m., Jenny woke up again. This time, it wasn't a loud noise that met her sit up in bed. It was the smell of smoke. Jenny slid out of bed and stepped into the hallway. To her horror, she saw flames bursting from George's office. Jenny rushed back into the bedroom and shook George awake. They hurried through the house to collect their children, but the roaring fire stopped them from reaching certain places. George and Jenny were able to grab

three kids and heard them outside. They found the two oldest boys, John and George Jr., and the youngest child, three-year-old Sylvia. The oldest girl, Mary Ann, who was often called Marion, made it out on her own. As smoke billowed from the windows, George, and Jenny took stock. Four kids were outside, but that left five inside. George rushed back into the home and shouted to the missing children. He heard no response. By that time, the staircase was engulfed in flames, and it was impossible to search for the kids on the second floor or in the attic. The flames and the smoke forced George to retreat outside. As the house burned and the Sauter family raced to find help and to find a way to put out,

the fire, they were living the first terrifying moments of one of America's most enduring and hotly debated mysteries. From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. This season is a shortened season that will feature three infamous mysteries that have kept people guessing for decades. This is episode two, the Saunders Children. George Saunders hailed from the Italian island of Sardinia. In 1908, when he was 13, years old, he and his older brother traveled to America and passed through the immigration process at Ellis Island. For some unknown reason, George's brother decided to return to Italy, leaving George in America to fend for himself. For a time, George worked in Pennsylvania for a railroad company.

Then he moved down to West Virginia. He worked as a truck driver before he decided it was time to be his own boss. He started his own trucking company to transport dirt, coal and other. freight. And as George grew his business, he also grew his family. It isn't clear exactly when he met Jenny Cypriotti, who was also from Italy, only that he met her while stopping by a music shop. They fell in love, got married, and moved to Fayetteville, West Virginia. Between the 1920s and early 1940s, George and Jenny Sauter became prominent members of Fayetteville, especially within the Italian community. They had a successful business and 10 children, and by the mid-1940s, they were one of the most respectable families in town.

But the Saughters weren't without their problems. It appears that much of the growing tension stemmed from the fact that George was not afraid to share his political opinions. Despite being very secretive about his past in Italy, George freely expressed his opinions on events back home. He let everyone know that he hated Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was an Italian dictator and one of the principal founders of the political ideology known as fascism. He took power in 1922 and transformed Italy into a one-party dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist. He employed secret police to instill fear throughout the country. His brutal reign became so successful that it inspired Adolf Hitler to become more aggressive in Germany.

Eventually, Hitler and Mussolini formed an alliance. Mussolini supported Hitler's expansionist dreams, which led to World War II. George Soder hated everything Mussolini stood for, and he made sure everyone knew it. George's hate for fascism and support for American ideals inspired his second oldest child, Joe Soder, to join the military in 1942 at age 17. While Joe fought for the Allies, George religiously read about the war's developments, especially in Italy. By 1943, the King of Italy had grown tired of Mussolini and placed him under arrest.

Although the Nazis broke Mussolini out and briefly reinstalled him in power, it didn't last long. In April, 1945, Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans and publicly executed. George Sauter couldn't be happier. But not everyone in Fayetteville shared his joy. Just as the King of Italy had finally grown tired of Mussolini, some people in the Italian community of Fayetteville had grown tired of George's comments.

They expressed their displeasure in strange and threatening ways. In October 1945, a life insurance salesman knocked on the front door of the Sauter home. George knew the man and listened to his pitch and then declined to buy a policy. Apparently, the salesman became enraged, and it doesn't sound like it was entirely about George's unwillingness to buy a policy. The salesman has been quoted as saying,

Your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini. George shrugged off the threat and chalked it up to a crazed fanatic who was probably annoyed that he didn't close. a deal. By that time, Mussolini had been dead for six months, but the dictator was still a hot topic in the Italian community in Fayetteville. Then, not long after the incident with the insurance salesman, a stranger appeared at the solder home with an interesting observation.

The unidentified stranger claimed that fuse boxes at the home were not properly wired, and they were likely to cause a fire. George thought the man's claims were absurd. By coincidence, the power company had recently inspected the boxes and said the wiring was fine. The two incidents were odd, but George and Jenny didn't give them much thought. And as 1945 moved toward Christmas, the incidents were likely forgotten in the rising excitement of the holiday season. But they would be relevant again immediately after the Christmas tragedy. The Sauter family received an early Christmas present when Joe Sauter was discharged for, him the army on Christmas Day, 1945. He wasn't home to celebrate the holiday with his family,

but he was on his way. On Christmas Eve, George, Jenny, and the other nine kids were all at the family home that night, though by that time it wasn't fair to call at least two of them kids anymore. The eldest was John at 23 years old. Marianne, who was often called Marion, was either 17 or 19 and probably 19. Next in line was 16-year-old George Jr. And then there were six more children younger than George. That night, Marion brought her younger siblings special gifts from the dime store she worked out in town. The surprise caused great excitement, so much so that they all begged their mother to let them stay up just a little later than normal. Even though it was already 10 p.m., Jenny agreed, but she gave them a few chores before going to bed. They had to feed the cows, close the

chicken coop, shut the curtains, locked the front door, and turn off the lights. The kids agreed, of course, and George and Jenny went upstairs to retire for the evening. The next two hours seemed to have progressed normally, but at midnight, everything changed. Jenny saw her awoke to the harsh ringing of the telephone. Midnight was a strange hour to receive calls. Jenny bolted out of bed, ran downstairs, and answered the phone. It was a woman whom Jenny didn't recognize. The woman asked for someone by name. There's no surviving record of the name, but Jenny didn't know the person and said as much. Suddenly, the woman emitted a weird burst of laughter. Then it sounded as if glass broke on the floor. Jenny was convinced she was the victim of a prank call. She told the woman she had the wrong

number and hung up the phone. Before Jenny returned to bed, she noticed something that annoyed her. The lights were still on, the curtains were still open, and the front door was unlocked. Three of the five chores she had given her children had been ignored. With a sigh, she went into the living room, spotting Marianne asleep on the couch and did what the kids had failed to do. Then she went back to her room and fell asleep, but she didn't sleep for long. 30 minutes later, Jenny awoke to the sound of a crash on the roof of the house. Then she heard the sound of something rolling down the roof. She sat up in bed and listened for a couple minutes to see if she could understand the noises.

When she didn't hear anything else, she decided it must have been nothing, and she went back to sleep. Half an hour later, at about 1.30 a.m. on Christmas Day, she woke her to her. up again. This time, a noxious smell had pulled her out of sleep, and she realized it was smoke. She slid out of bed, stepped into the hallway, and saw flames tearing through George's office. Jenny ran back into the bedroom and shook George awake. Together, they raced through the house trying to collect their children. They grabbed three-year-old Sylvia and found the two oldest boys, John and George, in their bedroom. The five of them ran outside. where they found Marion who had escaped on her own.

Four kids were outside, but that meant five were still inside. George ran back in the house and began to search for them. Unfortunately, the kids weren't downstairs. The staircase that led to the second floor was now consumed by flames and impossible to use. George sprinted out of the house and ran around the side of the structure. He kept a long ladder there, and he thought he could use it to climb through an upstairs window. window. But as he arrived at the spot where the ladder should have been, he discovered it was missing. With no time to dwell on it, George thought of another idea. He'd back up one of his trucks

and use it as a ladder instead. But for some reason, George couldn't get any of his trucks to start. As George desperately tried to think of other options, his daughter Marion sprang into action. She ran to a neighbor's house and tried to call the fire department, but she couldn't reach an operator to connect. the call. Luckily, she wasn't the only one trying to contact the Fayetteville Fire Department. Another neighbor had seen the fire and driven to a nearby bar that had a phone. Some sources say the bar's phone was out of order. Others say the neighbor couldn't reach an operator to connect the call. Whatever the case, the neighbor didn't give up and drove through town and found fire chief F.J. Morris. When Morris heard about the situation, he initiated what's known as a phone

tree. Since the fire department was mostly a volunteer force, firefighters called each other to raise the alarm. But rallying the firefighters was a slow process, and in the meantime, the sodders watched in horror as their house burned uncontrollably. George, Jenny, and the others had exhausted their options. The flames and smoke were too much, and they couldn't get inside. All they could do was watch, wait, and hope help would arrive soon. Fire Chief F.J. Morris and the Fayetteville Fire Department didn't arrive at the Sauter home until well after dawn on Christmas Day. By that time, it was far too late.

The house had completely burned to the ground. The fire station was only two and a half miles from the Sauter House, but wrangling the firefighters had been a problem. And while George and Jenny Sauter had waited for help to arrive, they had become convinced that their five missing children were dead. As firefighters began picking through the debris, the feeling of dread intensified. There was no sign of Maurice, Martha, Lewis, Jenny Irene, or Betty anywhere. They were declared dead, but firefighters never found their remains.

George and Jenny were confused, and they pressed Chief Morris for answers. Chief Morris suggested that the indebted, intensity of the fire had cremated the bodies of the five kids. There was simply nothing left to find. George and Jenny were skeptical, and it was the first of many bewildering explanations they received from investigators. Over the next few days, investigators and firemen examined the ruins of the house. On December 30th, five days after the fire, a Fayetteville coroner's jury issued death certificates for the five children. The certificates declared the cause of death was fire or suffocation.

Meanwhile, investigators announced that the fire started due to faulty wiring. Sometime during the two months before the fire, a stranger had appeared on the solder's doorstep and told them that their fuse boxes weren't wired properly and could cause a fire. George hadn't believed the stranger because the power company had recently inspected the fuse boxes and said the wiring was fine. In their grief and confusion, George and Jenny made an interesting decision. George had access to a bulldozer, and he buried most of the house with dirt. He and Jenny intended to turn their old home into a memorial for their departed children.

But as the grieving process continued, and the weeks ticked by from 1945 to 1946, George and Jenny's grief transformed into suspicion. They couldn't shake the so-called official report. The faulty wiring, the lack of remains. It didn't add up. With each passing day, the sodders found more strange details that made them question everything. They started with the faulty wiring.

George knew his house was up to code, and the more he thought about it, the more he remembered a detail from that night. During the fire, the indoor Christmas lights were still on. If the wiring had malfunctioned and sparked the fire, wouldn't it have caused all the power to go out? Then there was the issue of the dead telephone. During the fire, Marion had tried to use the phone to call for help, but it wasn't working. Initially it was believed the fire had burned through the cord.

But a phone repairman inspected the scene and discovered the phone line looked like it had been deliberately cut. A witness eventually came forward and claimed to have seen a man near the solder house stealing a block and tackle, a device used for car engine repair. Investigators were able to identify the thief as a local man named Lonnie James. Lonnie confessed to taking the block and tackle and cutting the phone line, but he added a twist. He said he thought he was cutting the power line. But if he explained why he was trying to cut the power line, The reason has been lost to history.

In terms of the fire, Lonnie James firmly professed his innocence, and the authorities cleared him of all responsibility. But for George Sauter, the new revelations made him wonder about another strange detail. During the fire, all of his trucks had failed to start. There don't seem to be any surviving records that point to sabotage, but it seemed too coincidental. For authorities, the explanation was simple. In Georgia's panic to start the trucks, he flooded the engines.

Next, there were the crashing and rolling sounds that Jenny Sauter heard at 1 a.m., 30 minutes before she smelled smoke. A bus driver claimed to have driven by the Sauter home after midnight and saw, quote, balls of fire flying onto the roof. Not long after the fire, the youngest child, Sylvia, discovered an object in the ruins of the house. George inspected it and thought it was an explosive device that was sometimes called a pineapple bomb during the war. Today, it would be more commonly referred to as a hand grenade. If his suspicion was right, and if the bus driver's statement was accurate, it sounded like someone threw a grenade onto the roof of the house.

That theory opened the door to a host of questions that were never answered. But none of the previous confusing elements were as bad as the last. the last one. Witnesses started to come forward to say they had seen the missing solder children outside the house. One woman claimed to have seen the children in a car while the fire was blazing. Another woman said she served the children breakfast at a tourist stop outside Fayetteville. She also said they weren't alone. They were with two Italian men and two Italian women. In Charleston, West Virginia, roughly 50 miles from Fayetteville, a motel clerk claimed to see four of the five kids with Italian adults, about a week after the fire.

Between the sightings and the lack of human remains, George and Jenny became convinced the kids were not dead. The parents started to believe their kids had been kidnapped, and the fire was a distraction. But for the authorities, the case was closed. It was an accidental fire that resulted in a tragic loss of life. So, George and Jenny Sauter decided to take matters into their own hands. Kidnapping became a federal crime in 1932, with the infamous abduction and murder of the Lindberg baby. As such, the FBI investigated kidnapping cases. In 1946, George Sauter went straight to the top. He wrote a letter to director J. Edgar Hoover and pleaded with Hoover to send federal agents. Hoover actually responded, and while he sympathized

with the Saughters, he said the situation wasn't in his jurisdiction. If local authorities requested the FBI's help, he would send agents right away. But local authorities considered the case closed, and they were not about to ask the FBI to come to town. George refused to take no for an answer. Sometime in 1947, more than a year after the fire, he hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley. Tinsley quickly made some startling discoveries. The life insurance salesman who had berated George about George's anti-Musolini beliefs three months before the fire may have been trying to operate a scam that went horribly wrong. The whole thing is complicated and the circumstantial evidence for the theory is thin. But it was yet another small piece of the

puzzle that felt suspicious to the solder family. Tinsley's next discovery was the strangest by far. At one point he heard a rumor about fire chief F.J. Morris. The source of the rumor is still up for debate, but the rumor centered on Morris's claim that there were no human remains in the house. Tinsley learned that Morris may have been lying. Allegedly, Morris told someone that he did find something human, a heart. He supposedly placed the heart in a box and buried it on the sodder. property. After hearing the story, George, Jenny, and Tinsley confronted Morris. Morris didn't deny it and agreed to show him where it was. They dug into a patch of dirt, and sure enough,

they found a box. Inside was some kind of organ. The sauders immediately rushed to the funeral director to confirm if it was a human heart. Unfortunately, the director told them it wasn't human and it wasn't a heart. It was beef liver, and there were no signs that it had been affected by fire. It's unclear if Chief Morris explained his bizarre deception

to the sodders, but he supposedly told someone from town that he had hoped it would be enough to convince the sodders that the children were dead. It still doesn't explain why he put the liver in a box, buried it, and then didn't tell the solder family.

In the end, it was just another strange incident in the strange case of the missing Sauter children. After the discovery of Chief Morris's weird actions, Tinsley's investigation cooled. But George Soder kept going. Over the next year or so, George followed up on every tip,

no matter how random it appeared. George swore he saw the image of one of his daughters in a newspaper article about school children in New York City. He hopped in his truck and drove more than 500 miles to New York, and it proved to be a dead end. In late summer, 1949, George convinced a pathologist from Washington, D.C. to do an independent excavation of his old home.

After thoroughly surveying the land, the pathologist made a surprising discovery. He found bone fragments that looked like parts of a human vertebrae. The pathologist sent the fragments to the Smithsonian Institute for further examination. After carefully inspecting the pieces, the Institute confirmed that they were, in fact, fragments of vertebrae. Unfortunately, the rest of the report raised more questions that it answered. According to the examiners, the bones were from a person who would have been somewhere between 16 and 22 years old.

The oldest missing child, Maurice, was 14 at the time of the fire. And even if the age range could be excused. The bones, similar to the beef liver, showed no signs of being touched by fire. Again, there were theories as to how random bone fragments ended up in the dirt that now covered the solder home, but there were no good explanations. If there was one positive outcome of the 1949 excavation, it was that the FBI finally decided to investigate the case as a kidnapping, or at the very least, find genuine proof of the deaths of the children.

The subsequent investigation turned out to be two years of dead ends and pointless leads. In 1952, the FBI, as well as the state of West Virginia, officially closed the case. In their collective minds, the Sauter children perished in the fire. But for George and Jenny Sauter, the case still wasn't closed. They still believed their children were alive and out there somewhere. They just needed to keep spreading the work. George and Jenny Sauter took their case to the American public. They put up two massive billboards, one near their old house, and one along Route 16, just outside Fayetteville.

The billboards had black and white images of the five missing children. Above their faces in big, bold letters, were the words, what was their fate, kidnapped, murdered, or are they still alive? More text described the events of Christmas 1945. Finally, the Sauters offered a $5,000 reward for information that would lead to their discovery. In addition, George and Jenny walked around town passing out flyers, hoping someone knew something. Unfortunately, the billboards and the flyers only furthered the mystery and sent George on wild goose chases. He drove to Texas to investigate a claim that's

some bar patrons were discussing a West Virginia house fire. He drove to St. Louis when a letter claimed that Martha Lee, who was 12 at the time of the fire, was living in a convent. He went down to Florida to investigate yet another rumor that the kidnapped kids had been seen in the sunshine state. Who knows how many miles George Soder traveled in the 1950s and 1960s in his pursuit of what he believed was the truth. But in all those trips, there was only one that seemed to have a little credibility. In 1967, 22 years after the fire, George and Jenny received a photograph in the mail of a handsome man who looked to be in his 30s. He had curly black hair and dark eyes. On the back of the photograph was a cryptic message

that started with these words. Louis Sauder, I love brother Frankie. There were more letters and numbers that were presumably an attempt to convey some sort of information, but the intent was impossible to understand. The envelope that contained the photo was postmarked Central City, Kentucky, but the envelope had no return address. It seemed clear that someone wanted the sodders to believe Lewis was still alive. Lewis was 10 years old at the time of the fire, and if he were the man in the photo, he would have been 32 years old in 1967. But if the photo was an attempt to help the Saughters find Lewis, it was maddeningly unhelpful. The only lead was the postmark in Kentucky.

George and Jenny hired a private investigator to find the man in the picture. The unnamed PI took their money, told them he was on the way to Kentucky, and then disappeared. It was yet another heartbreaking disappointment. on top of the fact that the parents didn't know if the photo was real or just a cruel, practical joke. George told a reporter, it's hard sometimes to get to sleep at night, just wondering about them. It's like hitting a rock wall. We can't go any further.

We just don't know what to do now. For 24 years, George Sauter chased the mystery of his five children. He passed away in 1969 at the age of seven years. without receiving clarity about the mystery of the photograph or who sent it. But the rest of the family, including grandchildren, refused to stop the investigation. They continued to pursue the kidnapping theory and honed in on the string of letters and numbers on the back of the photo that showed up in 1967. The complete number was A90122. Modern searches reveal that the number could have corresponded to the point.

postal code for a community in the city of Palermo, Sicily. Italy introduced postal codes in 1967, and 90132 could have been active for a neighborhood in Palermo, but it was discontinued in 2006. Regardless of the situation today, a theory developed that the mafia tried to shake down George Saunter, but George resisted. As revenge, the mafia burned down his house, kidnapped his kids and took at least one of them to the island of Sicily, the birthplace of the Italian mafia. But as with all the other theories, it remains just a theory. The truth likely falls back on the Occam's razor principle. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. George Sauter ran a small trucking company. Apparently, George kept containers of gasoline in the basement of his house. In 20,

2016, a Fayetteville firefighter named Steve Crookshank said the gasoline and possibly other flammable items likely caused the fire to intensify. The intense heat in a confined space could have been enough to cremate the bodies of the kids. Despite all the other strange elements in the case of the solder children, the simplest explanation remains that they died in the fire. Next time on Infamous America, we wrap up this miniseries, with the case of the biggest unsolved murder mystery in the history of the state of Alaska. After years of investigation and the most expensive court case in Alaska history, no one knows the truth of what happened to eight people on board the fishing boat, The Investor, in September 1982.

That story is next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They received the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. This episode was researched and written by Joe Guerra. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer Chris Wimmer.

Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channel. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.