Stuff You Should Know - The Unsolved Mystery Disappearance of the Sodder Children

Episode Date: May 18, 2016

In 1945 a house fire took the lives of five children - except that no trace of their bodies was ever found. Dive into the longstanding mystery of the odd circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Sodder children. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

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Yeah. Live shows, that is. Yeah, we're going back to DC and Boston. That's right, this fall, October 27th, Thursday, we're gonna be at the Wilbur Theater in Boston where we've performed before. That was great. And that's why we're going back because Boston was like one of the best shows.

Off the chain, I think is what they call it. That was very much off the chain. And we're also going back to Washington DC on Saturday, October 29th, as part of the Benson Ball Comedy Festival. Yeah, and we're gonna be at the Lincoln Theater again. Yeah. That was off the chain as well. Boy, that was a great show.

So big ups to you, Boston and DC. That's why we're coming back. So, tickets go on sale tomorrow, Friday. And you can find out the information at our Squarespace live show home on the web, sysklive.com. And if I happen to not have the links up for that yet, just go to the Wilbur Theater website,

or go to the Benson Ball or Lincoln Theater websites, and get your tickets, because these are gonna be reserve seating. So if you wanna get up close and smell us, then you gotta be Johnny on the spot. You don't wanna do that. So, we look forward to seeing you guys this fall. Yep.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and 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 Know. Untold Mysteries Edition. Yeah, really?

Are you cool with this? 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, and I think it's hysterical.

Right? I just like unsolved mysteries. What's an hysterical unsolved mystery? Like, I got pantsed in the second grade, and I don't know who did it. That's an hysterical unsolved mystery. Yep. I was just in line, pants around the ankles, turned around,

and everyone was like, whew. Did you just go with it, and you were like, check it out. Check me out, I'm in second grade. Yep. Good for you, buddy. That never happened. I made it up. Oh, really?

Yeah. It's called improv, buddy. It's a craft. So, end scene? End scene, end scene. Have we ever established which one it is? Yeah, a few times. And?

Nope. It is. Chuck, we are talking about a family called the Sodders. Uh-huh. Not the Solders. Right. Not the welding technique. No, the Sodders.

They were a family out of Fayetteville, West Virginia of Italian extraction, as we'll see. Yes. And? Very much so. Like you said, this is an unsolved mystery. Their 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. Right. Well, they're not triplets. They're brothers.

Oh, yeah. Of 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 gonna talk about, about this case. Right. And I was like, hey, dude, do you ever, do you remember seeing this thing?

How far are you from Fayetteville? Right. He said, just a couple hours. 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 didn't respond. No, you didn't text him back, answer me. No. That's right. I am Facebook friends with his dad though.

I should just ask him. Yeah. Go to the source. That's right. So, well, let's go back to the beginning, Chuck. Okay. Back to 1895. That's right.

That's when Giorgio Sodo, who had become George Sotter, was born in Sardinia in 1895 and came to the U.S. in 1908 as a young lad of 13 years old. Yeah. And he was a go-getter. He really was. So he had an older brother who traveled with him from Sardinia to New York.

I guess he was like, yeah, 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. Have you made that ship's voyage? Just mull it over for 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. You see that movie, Brooklyn? No. Great. Really?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, I'll check it out. You sounded surprised. I was a little surprised. Yeah, it was nominated for many awards. Yeah, that doesn't always mean. It usually means it's pretty good.

No? It depends. Okay. Brooklyn highly recommended. Okay. About a young Italian man who falls in love with an Irish immigrant. Oh, well, this is 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 George, like you said, he was a bit of a go-getter. He's 13. He's on his own, literally without any other family

in America. Yeah. It's kind of mind-blowing, but then you think back to 1895, they didn't really understand what childhood was at that point. So he was probably like of working age and had been for years.

Yeah. But it seems really weird to us now. Sure. He might have been retiring at 13. He was smoking cigars already. So he, like I said, was a go-getter. He started working 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 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 his own trucking business. And he's in West Virginia. So in short order, he starts hauling coal. Yeah, coal and dirt. And it wasn't like the hugest business. I think he did okay for himself. He did okay for himself.

He was like solidly middle class. Yeah. He didn't become like wealthy or anything. And as a matter of fact, later on, a local government official would say that the Saunders were 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 his community. And he moved there with his wife, Jenny, right? Yeah, Ginny Sipriani, who he met. She came over from Italy when she was three. Right. He met her at a store called the Music Box.

And they got married. And like Italian families do, they had 10 kids. 10 kids in 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of kids. Yep, pumping them out with great regularity. And like you said, when they moved to Fayetteville,

the reason they moved to Fayetteville, had no idea that West Virginia even had Italian people in it. Sure. They had strong Italian communities. Yeah. But they moved to Fayetteville. They were part of the Italian community.

And George was well known. Again, they were a respected middle class family there. He did pretty good for himself. And he was also well known for his opinions on everything, including politics. And during the 40s, the United States was at war with Italy. And not all of the Italian Americans were feeling it on the American side.

There were a lot of disagreements over Mussolini and the government that he was creating 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 felt differently about Mussolini.

And I guess there were some hard feelings here there, but he doesn't seem to have taken them seriously very much. No, and we mentioned that, if it sounds like we're setting something up for later, we indeed are. So just tuck that little fact away. And then can we fast forward in time? Yeah.

To Christmas Eve? Christmas Eve, 1945. That's right. So here's what happens. It's Christmas Eve. As is 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, 14, Martha, 12, Louis, or Louis, 10. Jeannie, or Jeannie, that was 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, their older sister, Marion, had, she worked at a five-in-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 they asked mom if they could stay up. Yeah, and the older, the elder, Jeannie, said, yeah, I guess you can stay up. Turn out the lights, lock the doors before you go to bed. I'm going to hit the rack with your dad and our two-year-old daughter, Sylvia, 23-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr. were, I guess they were just ready for bed too.

Right. 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 Tojo. Right. One of those guys. Right, so he's away.

And I could not for the life of me find that guy's name, the eldest son. I couldn't either, actually. So the mom goes to bed, Jeannie goes to bed, and the dad, George, and his two next oldest sons who had been working with him that day, they'd all gone to bed about 10. What time did the mom go to bed at 11?

Something like that? Yeah. But she leaves those five youngest children and Marion, their older sister, who I think was 17 at the time, downstairs when she goes to bed. Yes. And then at about 1230 on Christmas morning,

because remember that was Christmas Eve, about 1230 at night, the phone rings. And 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 1945 in West Virginia. They may have been the only people in West Virginia with a phone in 1945.

They had phones in 1945? I'm just saying. I don't think everybody had a phone in West Virginia in 1945. Okay. So they certainly didn't have one at their bedside. So Jeannie, the mom has to get up to answer the phone. And on the other line, she hears a woman

asking for somebody she doesn't know or recognize. And in the background, there's obviously a party going on, there's laughter, there's clinking of glasses. And Jeannie 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 and it's total coincidence. So supposedly they tracked that woman down. And she said, it was just a wrong number. Yeah. Total coincidence. That's what I think. But think about that though. Yeah.

Like had that not happened, a lot of other stuff would have gone unnoticed, right? True. It's a big deal. So before she goes back to bed, she noticed the lights are on downstairs. Yeah. She said, you know, turn the lights off,

lock 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. 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 chairs and scissors and toys.

Sleepy time on the couch, that's fine. But those five younger ones who've been playing with their toys, they were in order to be found. So mom just assumed they went upstairs to bed. Right. So she goes back to bed. Yes. And then like an hour later,

she's awoken by like a thump on the roof. Yeah. Yeah. And she falls back asleep again. Well, it sounded like a heavy thump and a sliding down of the roof. Right, rolling or something. As if something heavy had landed on it and then slid off.

Right. And she just went back to sleep. Very important matter. She probably figured it was a reindeer or something 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. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, dude. 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, with them

because she's in the crib. And then 17-year-old Marion and 23-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr. are all outside and safe 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, getting in through the window or opening the door. 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 kids on the top floor. Yeah, and here's an interesting point. One of the relatives of, I think it was the guy who ended up marrying the youngest daughter later in life, 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, 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 and assumed they heard. But it still is a mystery as to whether or not that really happened.

Police will say the first statement is usually the accurate one, 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. Makes sense. And that their revisions later on

were actually the factual ones, that they tried to rouse their siblings by just shouting up the stairs. I can buy that. So Papa tries to get in, cuts himself really bad. Yeah. Then he says, wait a minute, I have this ladder that leans up against the house always. Always.

Let me go grab that. Ladder's not there. Very weird. It is very weird. Never be found in a ditch like 75 feet from the house later on. And later on, witnesses supposedly saw a dude stealing it from the garage. But there's so many things that people

say about this case that it's 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 the ladder? Yeah. OK. So he says, the dad says, let me get my trucks, my big coal hauling trucks. Yeah. 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 them to work earlier that day. Yeah. So the thinking by the cops and everyone else pretty much is in the panic. He and his son flooded the engines, trying to get them started, and they wouldn't start.

Yeah. But it became yet another fishy detail that made this family suspect that something really weird happened here. Yeah. And then later, I totally don't understand the whole engine removal theory. So it doesn't make any sense.

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. No. They probably just flooded them.

That one, I'm in agreement on. So this family, they're watching helplessly as the house is going up in flames. The house burned to the ground in about 45 minutes, ostensibly with the children trapped inside. Yeah. And if you think, why didn't the fire trucks come? The Fayetteville Fire Department was 1945.

It was Fayetteville, West Virginia. It was Christmas. Yeah. It was Christmas night or morning, I guess, at this point. 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 drives and literally, physically,

tracks down Fire Chief F.J. Morris. Who does not come out smelling well in this whole story. Well, he doesn't. He said, oh, I can't drive the fire truck as the fire chief. Right. 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 call the next person. Which made them less sense. Because again, the solders were the only people in West Virginia with a phone in their house. Not true. So eventually, seven hours later at 8 AM, 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 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 truck. So I had to wait for somebody who could. Yeah.

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, it burned in between 30 and 45 minutes. Yeah, if you're a fire chief, that's not what you want to say. No. You know, like who cares when we get there.

Also, one of the firemen who showed up was Jenny Sodder's brother. Yeah. 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.

So what they find at 8 AM is a house burnt to the ground. What they don't find are any remnants of those five children. Yeah. And herein is where the mystery really kicks in. Yeah. The family starts like paying attention to little weird details. At first, they just assumed that the kids have,

they're just totally gone. They 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. And they took the fire chief's word at face value and said, OK, well, our kids are in there. We can't bury the site of this any longer. So George went and got a bunch of dirt and buried the site in about five feet of field dirt and decided to plant a memorial garden there

on the site of the house fire. Yeah. This is on January 2nd. So he wasn't supposed to do this. No. They were supposed to leave it open to continue to investigate the state police inspector said it was faulty wiring. It's now covered in dirt.

And so now the family is just left alone saying, what happened to our children? Were they in there? Right. So when they buried the place in dirt, they assumed that the children were still in there. And this is their grave now. They were never going to be found.

But then, like you said, they started thinking about weird details that emerged. 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 an electric stove installed. And just to make sure, again, 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. The wiring's fine. So he basically knew almost for a fact that it wasn't faulty wiring in the house. Yeah, not only that, after 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?

Sure. Speaking of the wiring, there was a 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 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? Your wiring here at your fuse box is going to cause a 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. You didn't think anything of it at the time, other than that's

a weird thing to say. Yeah. 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 tried to sell George some life insurance policies for his children. And George didn't bite.

Yeah. And the guy got irate. And his quote was kind of weird, actually. Yeah. He said, your house is going to go up and smoke. Your GD house. Yeah. Your children are going to be destroyed.

Yeah. And then here's where it really gets weird. He says, you will be repaid for the dirty things you've been saying about Mussolini. Yeah. And George just went, like, get off my property. Yeah. Just the usual.

Yeah. So remember we said that he was outspoken about Mussolini and his politics. Clearly, this got around to this dude. And 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 he didn't make a big deal out of it

at the time. Was this like a normal business attempt in 1945, West Virginia, among the Italian community? Like, your kids are going to 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 that ruled that the fire was the result of faulty wiring. Yeah, it all gets a little weird. Yeah. And then one other, well, not one other. Quite a few other weird things.

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 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.

Yeah. Was he really? No. Oh, I bet he was. He would have been if it were like the 70s all day. Yeah, that's true. Sickos in the 70s. So Chuck, let's take another break,

because the mystery is about to deepen even more. The plot thickens, et cetera. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so things are getting a little weird. And all of a sudden now, Jenny and George, the Sotter parents, start thinking like, wait a minute, are our kids actually dead? Who is the last person to see them alive? Yeah.

If John and George Jr. to be believed, they were the last ones to see them alive because they went and shook them awake, but they may not have actually done that. Well, and they changed their story to say that they didn't. Right, yeah. So then technically, Marion, the 17-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 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 Sotters are starting to wonder, like, wait a minute, were those kids even in the house when the house went down? And 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 should have been found. Yeah, and all of a sudden, this story is starting to get national attention in the press. And the Sotters 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.

And this kind of kicked off like a lifelong quest for George and Jenny. And in 1949, 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 burning things, burning animal bones, and just sort of self-experimentation to see what remained. And there was always bones, of course. Yeah, they could never get them to just turn into ash. They went to a crematorium even and said, we're probably just not even getting this thing hot enough. And they said, well, actually, at 2,000 degrees,

it would take two hours to completely burn a body up. Your house didn't get nearly that hot, and it only burned for 30 to 45 minutes. So there should definitely be human remains like all over the place. Jenny kind of really turned into this citizen scientist, actually, she taught herself forensics as far as burning of remains goes.

She looked into other fires. There was another fire that happened around the same time that killed seven people, and the remains of all seven people were found 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 1949, they had a forensic investigator of some sort come 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 vertebra sent off to the Smithsonian Institution, actually, and they investigated this 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 transfers recessed, so the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17, top limit 22. And on this basis, the bones show greater skeleton maturation than what I would expect from a 14-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. Yeah, it hadn't been exposed to fire. It wasn't one of the kids, and it was either placed there by someone or happened to be in that dirt. Can you imagine that?

Like, think about that. George went and 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 went and 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 thing that they found was a, this green rubber casing that later they found out, it was a part of some kind of bomb, an incendiary device.

And some people think that that's a weird thing to have on your property, the house at Just Burn. And they think this could have been the sound that Jeannie heard in the middle of the night when something hit the roof and rolled off. Right. 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 bomb, it doesn't necessarily explode, it just ignites. It spreads. Yeah. So they don't make noise? I don't know.

We'll go experiment with one. So that's. Objection, speculation. That Smithsonian report actually said, it's really curious that the bodies weren't recovered or found in this pretty good excavation that you guys hired this dude to do. And it actually set off a larger investigation

in West Virginia, the governor and the, I think the state police superintendent both said, what you guys are doing is hopeless. The case is closed. Your kids died in that fire. Case closed. And the solders were like, no, we're gonna go hire a private detective.

And they did hire a private detective. And he started sniffing around town and heard a weird rumor 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. He does, they actually dig it up and they find a sort of, I wouldn't say fresh beef liver. Fresh-ish. 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. Right. Very ham-fisted way of closing a case. It's gotta be a jerk. Yeah, and it's just, I don't know why he thought that would work. I don't wanna say he's dumb, but it was a pretty dumb thing to do.

Beef liver. 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 tourist stop about 50 miles west and she said, no, I saw them the morning after the fire. Served in breakfast.

They got into a car with Florida license plates. And trust me, it was your kids. Yeah. So that freaks them out. For sure. Of course. Then there was a hotel, not too far in Charleston. And apparently late at night,

the, 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 try 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 that she saw the kids looking out of a car that was driving by as the house was on fire. Yeah. And then there were even more tips that kind of poured in over the years, including one that said that they were actually being held

by a distant relative of Jenny's. Yeah. Someone said that Martha was in a convent out west, I believe. Yep. In 1967, they got a letter from a lady in Houston, said that 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. They actually went and in fact, George Sotter and sometimes Jenny, he would go 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 had to go back and tell his wife

like another zero in this one. Yeah, and it's really sad when you step back and look at it from the perspective of the parents. 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. No. The Sotters 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 cop said, thanks anyway, and turned the FBI down. I can't imagine how frustrating that must have been for the Sotters to see that. Oh yeah. To see J. Edgar Hoover say, well, help out,

but these guys have to invite us and get turned down for that, you know? Oh yeah, so I mean, it was kind of their life's 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 he drove to Manhattan and demanded to see his daughter. Yeah. And the parents or the school was like, you need to get out of here, dude. You've lost your mind. Yeah. This is our kid. No, you can't see our kid.

So we had to go back home after that. So in 1968, it gets super weird. Jenny comes home, gets a mail and sees a letter addressed to her, not to the family or to her and her husband, to Jenny Sotter, opens it up, postmarked in Kentucky, no return address. And there was a photo of an Italian man,

well, it looked to be Italian, in his mid-20s, so the age fits. And on the back of it, it said in handwriting, Louis Sotter, I love brother Frankie. I-L-I-L boys, the little boys. No idea. A-9-0-1-3-2 or 3-5. 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. 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 25. Yeah, because this is almost 20 years old. He might have looked like, it could be true. He might have looked different enough. Yeah. But yeah, that mystery just was never, ever solved. And so back in the 50s, like after they started getting shut down by the local cops

and the state cops and everybody, 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 McElroy's, everybody in West Virginia knew about it. And it was a billboard on the solders property

with pictures, big pictures of the five children with their name and age. And then basically a rundown of what the family thought may have happened to them. And at first they offered a $5,000 reward and then up to the $10,000. Yeah, they owned it. So it was there for, I mean, until the 80s.

Until, so George died in 1968. And then Jenny died in 1989. And after Jenny died, they took the billboard down. That's right. What other reports came in? One, a bus driver said he claimed he saw someone throwing quote, fireballs onto the house. Some of this stuff reeks.

Like I was pretty wasted at the time. Yeah, some of this stuff reeks of like that after the fact stuff that people kind of invent. Right. Like wait a minute, I saw a guy throwing fireballs. Right, but there was verified after the fact weirdness. Oh yeah, for sure. You know, that keeps 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. But I mean, you said they found the guy. Did they ask him about that? From what I understand, they didn't ask him anything.

They just find him for theft. Ladder theft? And block and tackle theft. Oh, the other weird thing is they hired another private investigator at one point to track down where that letter came from. Yeah, the Kentucky. It's a picture of Lewis.

And this guy just disappears. Yeah, he may have just been like a seedy gum chew, 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's a seedy gum chew. He just took some desperate family's money.

And hopefully he's burning in hell. Did the mafia rub him out? Because that became one of the leading theories is that George was approached by the mafia, rebuffed their advances, and that was it. They took the kids. 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 is entirely possible he was approached by the mafia. And he does sound like the kind of guy who'd tell him to go stick it. Yeah. You know? He also may have made some enemies with the Mussolini cracks.

Sure. What else was there? Well, one thing that was lost to time was that vertebrae, even though it's almost 100% 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 baby Sylvia, who is two, maybe three at the time, I think two is what I've seen most, is the last surviving son or child. And she said these are her earliest memories are of that night of the fire and seeing her father losing his mind trying to get in his house and bleeding. And she promised her parents that she would keep the story alive.

So she talked about it a lot. She goes on to the online sleuth websites that talk about the case and kind of feeds information to people 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 children are just vanished.

Yeah. And there's no way they burned up to nothing. That's just impossible. So I read this blog post like a NPR person named Stacey Horn did a piece on it years back. And she wrote this really long blog post about stuff that had been cut from the piece. And I got the impression 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 side of it. But she also said that there's enough weird stuff surrounding it that if she learned that they were still alive, she wouldn't be shocked.

Well, yeah. And the fact that they never got in touch because it's not like these kids were estranged from their parents or 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 in touch with them. Right, which would kind of align with the mafia theory. Just terrible, man. You lose half your family. Yeah. Without a trace. Yeah. 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 based this on by Karen Abbott. It was called The Children Who Went Up in Smoke. Yeah, the NPR one's good. And Stacey Horne's thing is pretty cool, too. You know, it's weird as I have a good friend named Stacey Horne. Is not the same one?

No, but when I clicked, I was like, oh, interesting. And I clicked on her thing and it said Stacey Horne, like cat. She's a cat person. My friend Stacey is a noted cat person. And it's not the same person. No, and I was like, weird. Doppelganger. Yeah.

No, no. Maybe. The name Doppelganger. Yeah, I'd have to see her face. I think I said something. Well, how about this search bar? I said search bar. It's time for listener mail, Chuck.

Handy dandy search bar? Sure. People said that they miss that. Used to say that. The handy search bar. Yeah. I don't think I said handy dandy, did I? Maybe.

Jerry said yes. That's back when she listened. So I would take that better word. Hey, guys. Huge fan of the show. Two 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.

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 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. Those signs are changed quite frequently

in her base predominantly. And then he goes on to name eight different types of pigment chemistries, which I won't read out. And other mixtures of iron oxides. He said lead chromates can still be found, however. And 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 to replacing or removing the lead chromate based paints on the street. Not trying to nitpick, it's common misconception to people outside the color industry and based on my nerding out with a 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. What does that have to do with dancing? Street nerds don't dance. I think if that may be a reference to something we said that I'm not picking up on maybe. OK. Maybe Sean can clear it up.

Yeah, we need a follow up listener mail. All right, that's from Sean Mueller. Oh, it's German. He dropped the Oomla out. Oh, OK. It's a molar. He didn't want that association. Well, thanks, Sean.

We appreciate that. Let us know about the dancing thing. I think we're not the only ones who are curious, right? Yeah, I'm not sure what that means. If you know what Sean's talking about, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com.

And you can always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week

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