The Curious Case of the Sodder Children

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
December 24th, 1945.
Fayetteville, West Virginia.
The Sutter Family.
George and Ginny and nine of their tenchildren were celebrating Christmas Eve.
Some of the youngest children askedto stay up late and it being Christmas.
Their mother approved around 1:30 a.m..
Ginny would wake from the smell of smoke.

(00:22):
She got out of bed and found a firespreading quickly through the house.
George and Jenny and onlyfour of their children made it out alive.
Five of the Sutter childrenhad been stuck upstairs and drastic
efforts were taken to save them,but all failed after the fire.
The Sutter family was stricken with grief,but it wasn't long
before the starters began to noticethat certain details didn't add up.

(00:47):
From missing remains cut.
Telephone wirescontradicting reports from authorities
and rumors of the childrenbeing seen alive after the fire.
The Sutter family believedthe kids were not in the house
during the fireand could still be alive today.
This is
a study of strange.

(01:27):
All right.
You ready?
Yep. Welcome to the show.
I'm Michael May.
With me tonight is Mr.
Matt Glass, who met. Hi.
You are the first personto be on two episodes.
Yes, I did it. Yeah. Yeah.
Just for myself. Yeah.

(01:48):
You told a story on.
Ah, scary stories, terrifyingtales, part one. And.
And now you're on an episode.
So you're the first to do two.
And you composed the theme musicfor the show.
So you're.
Part of in every episode, if you're true.
It is true.
You are part of every episode. Well,thank you for being on.
I've been wantingto find an episode for you,

(02:10):
and this one wasn't particularly like,Oh, I've got to have Matt on this one,
but just scheduling wise,it just kind of worked out.
So I hope you I hope you enjoy it.
It's no idea what's coming. It's great.
Nice. Nice.
So real quick, I just want to saya couple of things to listeners out there.
First, I still have COVID.
If you listen to last episode
and my throat is not doing great,I'm feeling fine besides that, but just my

(02:33):
my a warning in case I lose my voiceor start to sound really funny tonight.
And also,I've just been tired and delirious.
So this is either going to bethe best episode ever or the worst.
We're going to find out.
I don't have COVIDand I'm tired and delirious.
So nice.
Now, this is going to be fun.
Well, thank you, everybody, for listening.
If you enjoy the show,make sure to subscribe.
Great.

(02:54):
And leave little comment, a little review.
You can even just say, hey,you don't even have to say good or bad.
But leaving a review is very,very important for podcast.
So please do that also on Patreon.
I'm going to have a new episodeof News of Strangeness next week,
and then I'm going to try something newfor Patreon members in December.
A thing called strange but true.

(03:17):
It's yeah, it's a good title.
I don'tI don't even know what's going to be it,
but it's going to be something fun.
So you just came up with the titleand that's it? No.
I'm actually joking.
I actually do have an idea for it,but it's going to be some fun stuff
for Patron listeners, so check that out.
You can find informationfor that on our website.
A Steve Strange Scam.
All right.
So Matt, who's with us today,I've already mentioned

(03:39):
he composed the theme music, but you arealso a film maker, a composer, an artist.
You do a lot of cool stuff.
I do, yeah. Yeah. Do you?
I mean, I usually ask peoplethis the end of the episode,
but now I feel like I should ask now,where can people find your work?
You want to.You want to give yourself a plug?
Yeah.
So my, my productioncompany website would be a dot media.

(04:02):
That's the whole URL.
You can find stuff about movies.
We've done what we're working on nextor just strange little things
on our Instagram account, which is alsoI think it's dot media or just
my stuff is either at glass brain iconwhich is, you know,
has all my music and weird old photos andstuff or matte glass dot net.

(04:23):
You have a dot net.
Oh yeah.
I couldn't get the dot com for Matt Glassso I just I got the done that.
Oh well, well look at that.
I haven't heard of dot net in a long time.
I think I got the only one left.
Do you rememberthe net was Sandra Bullock?
You remember that? Course,yeah. Yeah, it was.
Mozart's Ghost was the name of the programshe used to have the secret code.
You pressed a little pisymbol in the corner?

(04:44):
Yeah.
Yeah, because that waswhen all those movies that had to do with
the Internetused things like pi or equals Square.
I remember
would flash on the screen, went in hackersand they were hacking because of course,
that is how you hack it's Martians.
Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, see, I am delirious tonight.
So tonight, Matt,we're going to be covering a tale

(05:06):
that I've been reading about for probably,like, 15 years.
There's a lot of blogs about this.
There's some books and articlesand sayings, and it's this mystery
from 1945 about the Solder children,the Solder family.
And they had ten kids, five of them.
There was a house fireand five of them were not found.
They were presumed dead.
And then years later, people started tosuspect that those kids were still alive.

(05:30):
And where were theyand why did the fire get started?
And a lot of people out there
that follow these kind of weird storiesprobably have read about this
and it's so much so it'skind of so popular that I didn't know
if I wanted to cover it.
But then when I started to research it,I started to find
clarifications or details on thingsthat were never given before.

(05:51):
And like the main common story,and that's my favorite
thing is to find like the common storyand then compare that
to actually like some researchand things that you can, you can confirm.
And it,it made the mystery more of a mystery
when I found more information.
So, yeah, it's it's a good one.
There's it's sad,but it is definitely a story

(06:12):
ripe with mystery that still needs peopleto look into to figure it out because
I don't want to
want to give away the ending, butsome people suspect that there could be
foul play involved or it would be niceto find answers to that.
Yeah, I'll just jump in to the story here.
So this takes place in 1945

(06:33):
and the family it's George and Jenny arethe parents George cider and Jenny cider.
And like I said, they they had ten kids.
They were Italian immigrants,and they lived in West Virginia
in a town called Fayetteville, Georgia,and emigrated from Italy.
But so did so did Jenny.
They both were immigrants,but they didn't meet each other
until they were in the States.
George emigrated to Italy,I think, when he was 13,

(06:56):
if I remember that correctly,and he came over from Sardinia
with his brother, his older brother,and as soon as they got through
Ellis Island, his brother turned around.
It was like going back home. See you. And.Yeah.
Yep. Nat, I'm out of here.
Look at that.
Statue of Liberty saw it.
All right. Go back home.
No one.
No, there actually is a bit of a mystery,like a people that follow this story.

(07:17):
There's never really a clarificationof why the brother left to return home.
And I'm not sure there's really muchto read into that, but it's definitely
one of the many strange thingsthat happened in this story.
And George Sartor famously didn'ttalk much about why he left Sardinia,
although if he's 13, I don't knowif he had much of a choice in the matter.
I'm sure it was a family thing.
So in in the United States, in the WestVirginia area, I did not know this,

(07:42):
but apparently in the early 1900s,there was a
it was there was a big groupof Italian immigrants in West Virginia.
And looking into it a little bit, it'sbecause a lot of the miners, they were
considered union busters to hire Italiansbecause they weren't part of unions.
And they would come inand they would work cheap or work hard.
So West Virginia had what was the number

(08:02):
I found in my notes 1910 in 1910,
there were 1700 Italian immigrantsin West Virginia, which is a lot.
So that's a lot in West Virginia,in my opinion.
Yeah, probably even now in West Virginia,I realized, oh.
They are still yeah, there's there'sdefinitely like a culture there that built
up. Actually, this is interesting.

(08:22):
West Virginian miners, Italian minerspopularized
pepperoni because they would bake itinto bread to take it as their lunch.
They would, like pack it awayand take it for lunch down in the mines.
And a big pepperoni fan.
So, no, I know who to thank.
This episode brought to you by Pepper.
So when George and Jenny met,it was after George had.

(08:45):
He had been working as a trucker.
And he decided,you know, living the American dream.
As he got older and saved enough money.
He started his own business.
And there's some kind of misinformationout there about what kind of business
he had.A lot of people think he hauled coal.
That is true.
He later did that.
But he was mainly he would he had trucksthat would go to the train, stop

(09:06):
load on things onto his trucks,and then take the the materials
from the train into town.
So it wasn't necessarily coal right away.
So, yeah, he started his owntrucking company after a while.
This is how he met his wife.
It was like on the road, stopped at a shopsomewhere that her family owned.
And like I said,she was also an Italian immigrant.
They had ten kids Sylvia, Marion,John, George,

(09:28):
Joe Louis, Jenny, Betty, Martha morris.
I think that's everybody.
I feel like some. Of thosekids have the same name.
They hear Jenny twice and they
just.
Well, Jenny's also the mom's name,so that's radio.
You could call. You're listening, Matt.
Good job.
Better than most my guests.

(09:48):
I'm not supposed to memorize those names.
Right, because. No, don't worry.
I mean, I can always refer to them.
I always forget their names, too,so I will have to refer to notes.
So in 1945, I don't knowif you've heard of this, Matt,
but this thing called WorldWar Two was going on.
I mean, that ring.
About I see I'm not I didn'tread the first one, so maybe I'd be lost.
What? I mean. I mean, you can.

(10:10):
Maybe they'll recap itat the beginning of the book, do a little.
Previously on.
So, yes, World War Two is going on.
Mussolini in Italy, bad dude.
And a lot of the Italian immigrantsin West Virginia area
supported him,even though they were American now.
And this caused
some issues in town with George

(10:33):
because George was an outspokenMussolini critic.
So he he did nothave the best of friends in town
that were sort of hardcoreMussolini fans at the time of the fire.
The fire that we're goingto talk about tonight.
I think Mussolini was already dead,but there were still feelings of like
ill will towards George because he didn'tlike Mussolini and talked a lot about it.

(10:55):
There's two popular storieson all the blogs and Reddit posts
and stuff about this talethat happened before the fire that people
put emphasis on, and rightly so, honestly.
The first one is that this man,we don't know who, or at least
I couldn't find out who.
Someone out there
probably knows was coming aroundthe property, George's house, looking for.

(11:18):
Work.
And I think he was in my personal theoryas he was trying to invent reasons
to get hired as a handymanbecause he saw the Fuze box
and was like,Oh, that's going to start a fire.
Are you going to hire meto replace all that?
All the wiring is going intothe whole house is going to catch on fire.
And George was like,no, this is this is all new wiring.

(11:39):
We just had a stove put in
and the power company had to come outand rewire and everything's up to code.
And he was apparentlyit's still put him off.
He's probably not a figure of speech, butI have COVID, so I'm just going to blame.
Him like it. Know. Yeah.
So Georgeactually called the power company
and they were like, no, everything's.

(11:59):
You're totally safe. You're totally fine.
And yeah, so it's just an it's
an interesting, interesting precursorto what may happen.
Let me back up a little bit.
The the house that they lived inand George built it, it was a two storey
it also had a basement timber frame house,and it was not particularly large.
The master bedroom was downstairsas well as like a living area,

(12:22):
an office in an upstairs.
And a lot of the stories you read, theycall it the attic, but it's just upstairs.
There were two roomsand those were the kids bedrooms.
The boys had one room.The girls had the other.
The other popular story that happenedas a precursor to the fire is a story
of an insurance salesman that comes byand got into an argument with George.

(12:45):
This story is one of the reasonswhy I wanted to see
if I could research morebecause the story seems to be like it's
local rumorand I did find more information about it.
I am going to save the details forthis story until the end of the episode,
but we're going to do a scenethis is our first scene.
Did you get that?You got that email, right?

(13:05):
Yeah. Let me see here.
You and I are going to do a dramatization.
This is
not what happened.
This is the common storyof what people say happened.
And a lot of the linesin this actually are true.
But there are some details.
Again, I'm going to save itfor the end of the episode
or towards the end of the episode.
Do you want to read a George Solderor the insurance salesman?

(13:27):
That I got to be insurance, dude.
I think that's a good casting for you.
All right.
So again, dramatization of somethingthat people say happened
before the fire.
So it is the solder house during a.
I'm just going to call it a lovely day.I don't know.
And the doorbell rings. Yeah.

(13:48):
And George Solder opens the front door
to his house to an ambiguous insurancesalesman, smiling back at him.
Hello.
Mr. Solder, I presume?
Yes. And you are? George notices.
The salesman has a nametagpinned on his left lapel.
The name tag reads name with a blank spacebelow it.
I sell insurance, Mr. Sardo.

(14:10):
All kinds, you name it.
And I provide best deals.
And all the West Virginia need coveragefor good trucks, bon cattle, chickens.
We're fine, thank you.
What about your house, Mr. Sada?
Or your children?You have ten of them right now.
How do you know?
We're running a special right nowon life insurance.
Do you have a pleasant day, sir?
George begins to close the door. Wait.

(14:31):
What about home insurance?
Anything could happen. Timber frame, houselike this.
George is about to close the door andthe salesman's foot suddenly blocks it.
I'm trying to help.
I'm not interested. Get off my property.
Listen to me, Mr. Sarda, please leave.
Your damn house is going up in smokeand your children will be destroyed.
Go get back.

(14:51):
Because of your remarks about Mussolini.
George manages to kick the footout of the door and slams it shut.
The salesman walks away from the house,laughing.
There we go.
There we. Isthat is that thing about the name?
An actual thing that is, you.
Know, so the the reason I did that,it was just a little quirky,

(15:14):
dorky thing I wrote in.
So I'll tell the storieswhen you when you read blogs that,
you know, the story pops up in blog postand articles and things going back again.
I've been reading about thisfor like 15 years,
and I think the first time I read aboutit was in some magazine.
And the story always is,is that an insurance salesman
came by the house and got into an argumentand he said those things too.

(15:34):
Very specifically,the house is going up in smoke.
Your children be destroyed.
I'll be out of all of your remarksabout Mussolini.
All of that is true.
But I love how it was always an insurancesalesman and I was just like that.
Something about this story doesn't ringtrue to me just because there's no
there's no details around it.
It's not like Joe,the insurance salesman from down the block
that always tried to get him.

(15:55):
There is there's missing stuff
to that story that always intrigued methat I was either like, this is all fake.
It's just like a local rumorthat's like spread over time
or there's something more to it.
And again, I did find more to this story,so I will get to get to the facts.
But a little cliffhanger, get awaya little later in the episode, everybody.
Yeah.
All right.
So that was I think there was roughly60 days before the infamous fire event.

(16:21):
And the night of the fire,it was actually Christmas Eve, 1945.
And the Sutter family,
they they were the type of familythat opened presents on Christmas Eve.
My family always knew Christmas morning.
Other people do Christmas Eve,or maybe a little combo of both.
So they had opened uppresents earlier in the day.
They had had a big dinner,they had a fun day.

(16:42):
And two of the two oldest boyswho were living at home
because they had another older boy,I think Joe, who was fighting in World
War Two and John had fought in WorldWar Two but was now living back home.
They were both they were the two oldest.They were in their twenties.
So the two oldest were asleep
by ten, 1030, because they had workedhard with their their father all day.

(17:05):
And the younger children kept asking
Jenny, the mom,if they could stay up late Christmas Eve.
They're playing with toys.
Also, I found out in a book, oh,I was going to say this up top
and little, little, little side noteWhat is it?
Transcript Something a little notationfor the end of the page.
This is great radio.

(17:26):
I'm going to cut most of that out.
Never.
I wanted to tell people my main sourcefor information.
Tonight I read two books and one
that I came came acrosskind of late in my research.
I'm so glad I did.
And he has a great websitewith a lot of information.
A guy named Bob Bragg wrote a bookwhose the title
the book is not in front of me,but I have links in the show notes to it.

(17:47):
He did a ton of research and dug up
a ton of very specific informationfor this case.
And he actually mentioned the kidsbecause I never read this in anything.
I read about it.
The kids wanted to stay up late
because they were listening to the radiobecause they were radio would do like
Santa has been seen
flying over the Cascade Mountain,you know, like those kind of things.
So they wanted to stay upand listen to the radio for those

(18:08):
kind of like Santa like storiesand it being Christmas, the mom was like,
Yes, you can stay up,but when you go to bed,
make sure to turn off the lights, closethe curtains, lock the door, you know,
all that kind of like tour type stuffthat parents make kids do it in the night.
It is so weird. Yeah. Why?
So they got all their presents already.
What do they care where Santas goand he's not going to come visit them.

(18:29):
He already gave them all their stuff.
Don't ruinthe magic of Christmas met people have.
Have to understandit goes to everybody else's house.
But why didn't he go to their house?
Maybe there's a combo of like they openedsome the night before and they like,
I guess I saying this is actually a good.
That is a good question.That is very good question.
So anyway, yeah, the kids stayed up

(18:50):
except for the two oldest boysand the parents went to bed
and around 1230, Jenny was woken up
by the phone ringingand she went downstairs to the phone.
It was in the office and the ground floor.
Excuse me.She didn't have to go downstairs.
Master bedroom is downstairs,but she went into the office room
to answer the phone.
And an unfamiliar woman,someone she didn't know, asked for some.

(19:12):
A name that she never remembered.
But it was obviously like a wrong number.
But what was odd about it is it soundedlike there was a party going on.
People are laughing in the background.
And the woman, when she was told
that, like you had the wrong number,she laughed in a very odd way.
They just kind of made Jenny feel weird.
She hung up the phone,
and this is when Jenny noticedthat the lights were still on downstairs,

(19:35):
and she saw that her her daughter,Marianne, was asleep on the couch
and all the other kids were there.
So they had forgotten to do their choresand close the curtains, turn off lights,
all that kind of stuff.
So Jenny goes back upstairsafter she notices this,
she tries to sleepand she assumes around one 130.
Somewhere in there, she hearsthe sound of what she calls a rock

(19:59):
hitting the roofand then kind of rolling off the roof.
It's like so.
And again,she was like, okay, that's weird.
But there was a storm.
There was a stormthat had a lot of crazy winds that night.
So I think she kind of just assumed it'sthe storm went back to sleep.
And a little while later, we'rea little unsure of exactly how long later.

(20:20):
But a little while later,she's woken up again by smoke
and she got up and the house was on fire.
So she woke up.
Her husband, she's screaming,she runs downstairs, she has her baby.
Because I think it's Sylviawho's the youngest was only two.
So she slept with the baby.She carried the baby downstairs.
She handed it to Marianne,who was asleep on the couch
and told her to get the getthe baby out of the house and

(20:43):
the I think what is missing froma lot of the things I've read about this
until I researched it more, is how fast
and crazy dramatic this fire was like.
She smells the smoke, but the fireis already enveloping the entire house.
There's a story that, like her,her oldest son's got up,

(21:04):
and when they came downstairs,they were already burnt.
I like they were already, like,seared in their hair was on fire
and stuff like this happenedso and it's a timber frame house to
so it just it went up super fast.
It was also very windy outside,which also helps the fire spread.
And John says in statements,

(21:25):
I think the next daywhen he gives statements, he says that
he woke his younger brothers upwho were in the same bedroom with him,
shook them, told him to get up,and then he ran out of the room
to try to go help put out the fire.
The family makes it outside
and they noticethat the younger kids are aren't outside.
So in sort of the panic and the adrenalineand the, you know,

(21:47):
the chaos of this event,George tries to go back inside too hot.
He tries to break in through a windowto get to the stairs, to get upstairs,
to get the kids, like cuts his armreally terribly breaking up in the window.
But it's too hot.
So he decides to get his trucks.
He is two of his hauling truckssort of in the barn.
They're on the property.
And he couldn't get his truck started.

(22:10):
And because he was goingto pull them up to the window
and climb on top of the truckto get and get in the bedroom.
So it's too late.
They can't get the trucks.
Oh, the one thing and I'm also forgettingto say that always comes up as a ladder.
There's a ladder that George specificallysaid it's always in the same place.
In the ladder was gone,didn't know where it was.
It's very odd,suffice to say, very quickly, they realize

(22:34):
there's nothing they can do to savefive of their children that are inside.
And it's the five youngestexcept for the baby.
It's Morris. He's 14.
So, yes, their question.
No, that's the weirdest part right now.
Yeah. It's all the youngest kidsbecause it's all the youngest.
And they were the ones they werethe ones that asked to stay up late,
which I agree that that's somethingthat occurs to me a lot in this story.

(22:57):
So it's the five kidsthat asked to stay up late.
Yeah, because there's not a room for youngkids in a room for old kids or for boys.
Seven for girls.
So there's a sense that they'd be upthere.
Exactly.
So. Morris 14.
Martha 12.
Lewis or Lewis nine.
Jenny, eight and Betty five.

(23:17):
Yet there was nothing they could do.
The house went up in smoke.
So Marion,
the daughter that was asleep on the couchthat saved the baby, took the baby out.
She had run to a neighbor's houseto call the fire department
the operator,because at this time in this area,
you basically call the operatorlike operator,
give me the fire department,that kind of thing.
Also, most houses back then,this has come up

(23:37):
in like three of the storiesI've now done on the on the podcast
and I haven't had a chanceto talk about it.
They're on party lines.
Do you know what party lines are?
Yeah, I think my mom had a party linewhen she was younger, which is crazy.
Yeah.
So you you basically share the same phone
line with other people that maybeyour neighbors on the street or wherever.
So literally where the line is,that is your phone line.
So you could pick up the phoneand find, you know,

(23:59):
your neighbor Bob, next door is on line.
Not on line, but on the phone.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
So anyway, thethe operator didn't answer the phone,
Mary, and runs to another neighbor's houseand that neighbor
also couldn'tget a hold of the fire department.
There's a couple different stories herethat happen.

(24:20):
Some say that that neighborthen ran to the fire department.
Other stories
say if someone finally got throughto the fire department on the phone,
both may be true because I think enoughpeople knew that this was going
on, that like everybody'strying to get the fire department, the
the fire chief was a guy named Jay Morris,
and he was the only one that I can tellwas actually at the fire department

(24:43):
that night because it was primarilya volunteer fire department.
A lot of people are fighting in the war,so a lot of small town
fire departmentsdon't really have people on staff.
Now, the fire department is two
and a half miles away from the house,but they didn't get there.
And again, this is like 130 in the morningwhen the fire starts.
They didn't get there until 8 a.m..

(25:06):
And there is a lot of issues with this.
There's a lot of excuses by the chiefgave a lot of different excuses
why it took so long.
One is
he was already told that, like he said,people said the house was already gone.
So there was no reason to rush.
It's like the house burned so quick.
The house apparently burnt downin about 30 minutes. So it did it.

(25:27):
It happened very fast.
But still, it's not an excuseto not go to the other one.
Fine.
That is best practice. It's just tired.
It's just fire.
The other thing is the way this volunteer
fire department workedis one person's there.
If there's a call that comesin, that fire person calls another fireman

(25:49):
and that fireman calls another firemanand that fireman calls another fireman
they don't like.
It's not one guy callingeverybody like works at a line.
And so when there's issueswith the operator, when there's issues
with weather and Christmas Eve, I justdon't think he had enough people to go.
He also claimedhe didn't know how to drive the truck
or couldn't drive the truck,

(26:09):
so he had to wait until someone showed upthat could drive the truck.
There's just a
there's a lot of weird things
with the fire departmentand some people read into that and claim
it's like foul playand they wanted the house to burn.
And we'll get into some of those thingsa little bit later on.
So the yeah, the house burnt downin about 30 to 45 minutes
and because there was a basement,most of the ash

(26:31):
and debris kind of fell into the basement
and nothing of the house survived.
So when the fire department did show up,they show up around 8 a.m..
They do search through the rubble.
There are people, I think 7 to 9 peoplesomewhere in there actually start
sifting through the rubble in the ashuntil 10 a.m..

(26:55):
So only about an hour, hour and a half,somewhere in there that they're actually
searching for remains.
And they never found remains
for any of the five kids.
I will point out very quickly,we're going to get into some of the weird
things about this.
They only search for about an hourto an hour and a half.
They said they searched itwith a fine tooth comb.

(27:16):
There is an article that will be in myshow notes, a link to it.
That's from like 2003with a woman who investigated this case
and she interviewed like a fire marshalor some someone that knows this world.
And they're like,if there was a fire today and we were,
we would have to go through to investigatethe fire like all the ash and debris.
We would do it in like three days.

(27:37):
We wouldn't do it in an hour,an hour and a half year.
So there's not a lot of timethey did spend.
However, even in the shortamount of time, they did not find remains.
So after the fire, the investigation,
as you can tell, with kind of a short,short excavation, I'll call it,

(27:58):
it was a very quick investigation.
The fire marshal, the chief guy Morris,
basically was like,there's there's nothing here.
They'vethey burned the house, burned down.
Kids are in it.
It's really sad.
But like, that's the only explanation.
So I think they're deadand everybody kind of went along with that
because yeah, that was a terrible fire

(28:20):
and you had to get out of thereinstantaneously.
And it's these these things happen.
It's very savvy.
These things happen.
A county like could just
I don't think I could trust a fire chiefwho can't drive his own truck.
That's true. That is true.
I don't know why
you have a fire chief that never learnedhow to drive the truck in the first place.
The county commission.
I think it's a countycommissioner. There may be

(28:42):
a wrong title there.
I wrote down in my notes,
but this guy showed up the day,the day of the fire,
and he basically convenedit's freezing outside again.
There was like a windstorm,an ice storm, and it's cold.
It's Christmas.
Now, at this point, people don't wantto be there and there are people there.
So he convened kind of like, Hey, guys,we're going to do a little inquest

(29:06):
right here and just nip this in the bud,get rid of all the bureaucracy
and kind of do this quick.
He convened a jury of people that werethere to be like, All right, so no,
nobody's but like they're down therelike kids died, right?
Fire, accident, blah, blah, blah.
And everybody's like, yeah.
And so they, they, they,they just kind of quickly
were like, yeah, fire accident, dead kids.

(29:28):
And that's what everybody assumed it was.
Fayetteville did issue death certificates.
There was just to be
a formal or correct.
They actually did reconveneand do days or months or weeks later.
They actually did do another inquest,but they still said kids died in the fire
and that's how they left it.

(29:49):
The family bought into that.
At first, they
the parents were so devastated by thisand I cannot imagine
so I completely believe thiswholeheartedly.
They were too upsetto even go to the funerals
like some of the kids, the kidsthat were survived to go to the funerals.

(30:09):
But like the parents just couldn't do it.
George Sartor ended up
bringing in dirtto like fill in and cover up the ash
because he wanted to make it basicallylike almost like a grave site,
like he wanted to make ita memorial situation
and covered it with dirtand wanted to remember the kids.

(30:30):
And and also I think that was his way ofgrieving is just to like quickly
kind of put something on top of like,I don't want to see the ash every day.
I want to just put something on top of it.
Now, that's the way it stood for a while
over the next two years, Georgeand Jenny started to doubt that their kids
died in the firebecause of some very strange things.

(30:52):
They, I guessover time they just started to notice
even Mattjust put his finger up like he's thinking.
And there are two predominant strange.
I'm going to list out other ones,
but there are two predominantstrange things that stood out to them.
The first one is that
Jenny learned about Boneslike this, intrigued her

(31:15):
that there were no bonesor anything that were found in the ash.
So she started doing her own testing,like she would burn animal
bones in the yard and stuff.
So she started talking to peopleand it turns out that to disintegrate bare
bones, you have to burn them at roughly
900 degrees Celsius or more for 2 hours.

(31:37):
I should have written downwhat that is in Fahrenheit,
because it's hard for my brainas an American to figure out.
It's a lot, but it's a lot.
It's very hot and it needs to burn
for at least 2 hours at that temperaturefor like the bone to really crumble down.
And the fire was too fast for that.
It was too fast.
And it may not have even gotten
that hot fromsome of the things that I've read now.

(31:57):
The ash was still smoldering when the firedepartment showed up at eight.
Like they still had to water down
because it was still hot,but it still wouldn't have been that hot.
Yeah.
So there is some doubtthat remains would have just gone poof.
The other thing is that other stuffwas found that would have also burnt
in those kind of temperatureslike books and pieces of furniture

(32:17):
and things like that did surviveand were in the ashes.
So you would expect stuff like thatto be along with remains of bodies.
Now, some say to this day
there are somethat said that George kept gas or oil
in the basement because he would work onengines down there.
He denies that he was he was like,I never kept that stuff in the basement.

(32:40):
According to his son John, they did workon engines and stuff in the basement.
But that doesn't mean theythey stored gas.
Like that's not a good place to keep gas,not even for the danger of it.
But like the fumes and stuff,they had a barn with the truck.
So I would imagine that's where gas was.
That's I think the gas. Outbefore you take that out or. Whatever.
And I think, you know,if they're working on engines
in the basement,it's probably because of weather and stuff

(33:01):
like you're not taking everything downthere.
It's just more comfortable at nightif you're working on engine stuff.
Yeah, I imagine you want it to be as lightas you can to get it in the basement
so you're not going to have a full tankfull of gas.
Yeah. Exactly.
So then the second kind ofpredominant strange thing
besides the remains not being foundis that John, their son

(33:21):
who woke up his testimonythat like first day,
is that he kind of shookhis siblings awake,
but he later changed that and said
he just called to them and he couldn'tsee them through the smoke.
And that's an important distinctionto make.
And I'm actuallygoing to read a quote of his

(33:43):
that he gave in one of his interviewsor testimonies or something.
So this is John Solder, who is the
the oldest kid on in the housethat that evening,
motherand father went to bed about 10:30 p.m..
We went to sleep upstairsabout 1115 or 11:30 p.m..
We had everything ready for Christmas.

(34:03):
There was a set of Christmas lightsin the window of Mother's bedroom.
George Junior woke me up and I came downexpecting to help put out the fire.
When I got tothe door, flames were already there
and I couldn't get back.
Fire had swept from the placewhere the desk was to the front door.
George had startedtrying to wake the others,
but I guess they eitherdidn't wake or didn't move fast enough.

(34:26):
I think somebody set the fire
so he's not saying
anything there about like missing kids,
but he also isn't saying that he saw them.
And he also says very specifically,I think somebody, set the fire,
the the two connected
but separate mysteries of this whole caseare, was the fire set on purpose

(34:50):
and were the five missing children dead
or were they taken out of the housebefore the fire?
And, yeah, there's a lot of details
this some have kind of skipped over,but I will kind of I'll try to circle back
to most of them hereas we go into more of the details.
But that's kind of the.
Oh, sorry. I think about the

(35:11):
the chores not being donethat you mentioned like
yeah, there's that possibility.
They were gone before
after she before she had woken upthat first time or whatever.
Yeah.
You're picking up on good details, Matt.
I'm good details.
That's why there's this one.
Yeah, this one's tough.
This one's tough.
So let me let me also mention two other.

(35:33):
This might literally be in the listI'm about to read in my notes,
but just in case I forgetand it's not run down.
The trucks wouldn't start the two trucksthat he wanted to climb on top of.
They wouldn't start.
Also, after the fire, it is found
that the phoneline was cut from the house.
They also the the investigationthat happened way too quickly.

(35:54):
They just assumed it was ait was because of the Fuze box.
They thought it started in the officeon the other side of the wall
where this fuzes are withthat one guy was like,
Oh, it's going to start a fire one day.
That's what assumed happened.
But there are some strange thingsoutside of even the kid stuff.
There'ssome strange things around the fire itself
and the wires, there'sthere's just a lot of strange things.

(36:16):
The family, even the descendants stillto this day claim that they're there.
Their siblings are nowadays.
They're, you know, great unclesor whatever you would call them.
They never died in that fire.
The family is full.
Harding full heartedly believesthat those kids survived,
were kidnaped, were taken,something like that,
and they even put up a

(36:38):
a billboard on the propertythat was there for decades
and decades and decadesthat had pictures of all the kids.
And the billboard had had wordsand information about eye contact
and was with with detailsor if you know who did it.
And it also claimed a cover upby local authorities.
And that was on the property
up until, I want to say like 1990,maybe even later than that.

(36:58):
So it was up there a long time.
So anyway,my list of strange things, I divert it. So
the kids thatdidn't down were the same five that asked
to stay up late, which you've alreadyyou've already commented on.
Magistrate
Chief Moore.
Again, these are a little out of order.
I just sort of wrote down strange thingsas I was thinking about Chief Morris.

(37:19):
The fire fire chief claimedhe didn't know how to drive the truck.
He claimed the housewas out of his jurisdiction at one point
and basically kept making excuses onwhy it took so long to get there.
Two sons of the solderssaw a man watching their house
and watching the kids before the fire,like weeks before the fire.

(37:41):
Sometimes you read thisas like a man in a van watching the kids.
I could not confirm a van or not,but definitely.
Have vans back then.
That's that's a good question.
That's what makes me kind of doubt that.
But anyway, it's a creepy manwatching the family
and watching the housethat apparently some of the kids saw
the man that came by looking for work.
They claim the house is going to catch onfire with wires.

(38:03):
The life insurance salesmanthat got into the arguments to
the house is going to go up in smoke.
There's the strange call at 1230.
That was the wrong number. Yeah.
So there's there's a coupleof contradicting reports here.
Jenny, the mom saidwhen she got up with the fire,
she said the lights were not on anymore,which actually means

(38:24):
maybe there was faulty wiring.
George Solder,
the dad, when he got up,he said the lights were still on,
which means it wouldn't be a firewith with faulty because of the wiring.
So that that's interesting that they bothhave sort of contradictory things,
although it is a highly dramatic,intense moment.
So you're noticing different things.

(38:49):
The phone line was cut to the house,not burned, but cut.
And that ties into something.
I'm also going to like leave a cliffhangerthat it ties in.
There's something elseI found out about this case
and I'm super excited about that.
I will share later on too.
After the fire, Silvia,the youngest daughter, ended up
finding the strange object in the yard,and George thought it was a napalm

(39:11):
hand grenade saying somethingthey call a pineapple.
So it's sort of like a hand grenade,but it's like,
you know, it creates fire right awayinstead of explodes.
During the fire, witnesses saw a maninto the garage and steal things.
While this waswhile the fire was going on,
they Also think that he may be responsiblefor the ladder being moved.
I was going to ask about the ladderif they ever found it. I guess that.

(39:33):
Yeah, they did. Theythey actually did find it.
It was sort of like nearby,but it was down a ravine
and that ties in to the cut phone linethat I'll talk about later too.
Yeah.
Also too, like I forgetwhat they're called, but it's basically
like chains and hooks that lift enginesand things that were in the garage.
Those were stolen from the garage.

(39:55):
Authoritiessay the fire started on the ground floor
because of wiring, but a witnessthat night who was driving by
saw somebody throwing what he calledballs of fire onto the house,
which, if you remember,Jenny heard that like rock sound.
And rolled off the roof.Right before the fire.
This thing sounds like a pineapplefalling off the roof.

(40:15):
Exactly.
So no one
saw or heard the childrentrying to get out of the house that night?
I actually don't thinkjust my own personal opinions about it.
Yeah, that is weird.
But also the house, as the house went upso fast, it's so smoky, it's
so hot, it's noisy like that.
Doesn't that doesn't ring out to meas being too odd.

(40:37):
But a lot of people do mention that
no bones,
no remains found the kids here'sone of the weirdest parts of this word
got out about town that the family startedto doubt that the kids died in the fire.
So good old fire chief Morris,who can't drive a truck,
heard this and he goes,What are you talking about?
We did find remains.

(40:58):
I found like some sort oflike human thing.
And I put it in the boxand like buried it in the ground.
So it's still there. So.
So George Heard that was like, what?
All Yeah, yeah. And George was like, what?
I would never we never heard any of that.
It was very bewildering and confusing.
And the story is and I saw thisin an interview with Bob Wragg,

(41:21):
who wrote the book that I mentionedearlier, links, links and units,
apparently,the fire marshal had to come by the house
and just kind of like stucka stick in the ground.
It was likeit was about there that I found it.
There's the box and like leftand didn't really talk to the family
or just like if you were to find it,it's down there.
So they dug it up and there's sure enoughthere's a box and there was some sort of

(41:41):
tissue and they sent it offto be studied by professionals.
And it was a beef liver.
Not only was it a beef liver,it was a raw beef liver
that had never been anywherenear fire, heat or smoke. So
yeah.
Weird. I don't even understand the.
I don't even the thinking oflike I put it in a box

(42:05):
and put it in the ground.
But yeah, very strange.
I think it just found beef in the fridgeand he's like, I'm going to
save this for later and take the stuffwhen everybody's gone and just forgot.
There's kind of two thoughts that I hadwhen I first heard this.
And one is that
he's just trying to cover his assfor being like, Oh, they died in the fire.
And like, just trying to be like,Oh, yes, yeah, I found something.

(42:27):
And even like keeping it inthe box is kind of like, yeah,
just in case they needto, like, prove that we found it.
I'll keep it down there.
It's that's one.
Another way to put itis there's suspicion of like he knows
the kids aren't down there, so he'strying to put evidence to grandmother.
I feel like himactually having put something
in the ground at all,it's like way more suspicious than.

(42:50):
Yes, I don't know.
It's justthe weirdest thing I've ever heard he had.
Yes, it is very, very, very strange.
So on top of all these strange things,when George and Jenny began to question
if their five kids had died in the fire,it took a couple of years
for their suspicion to grow,and they weren't without merit

(43:11):
because there are witnesses that claimto have seen the children after the fire.
I feel likeI just set up a commercial break.
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(43:33):
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(43:55):
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(44:19):
or see our show notes for a link thank you
there'sthere's actually a lot more witnesses
that I'm even going to talk about,but there's just for the sake of time
and flow of the show, in my own COVIDtiredness,
I'm just going to list a few of these.
You can look these up.
They are in various books and thingsonline.
Again, links in the show notes. Everybody.

(44:42):
A woman saw the children in a carthat night
going away from the house during the fire
50 miles away.
Another woman saw the childrenthe morning after the fire.
She served them breakfast and she saw themget out of
or get into a car with Florida licenseplates.
Always Florida, man, always Florida.

(45:02):
Never trust it.
In Charleston, West Virginia,a woman saw the kids.
This is about a week later.
She saw the kids with two womenand two men.
She claims they were all of Italiandissenter, Italian immigrants
and she was trying to be nice
and have fun with kidsand she was trying to talk to the kids.
And one of the men saw hertrying to communicate with the children.

(45:23):
And he got really aggressive
and like pulled the kids awayand pushed her away and was like,
don't talk, blah, blah, blah.
And this was at a hotel, by the way.
And that family had leftvery early the next morning before.
Anybody had a chance to talk to them more.
George Sartor, the father,
he began doingkind of like his own amateur investigation

(45:43):
every tip that came in and there were
lots of them for many, many, many decades.
He would follow.
He would actually traveland go meet people and find a call.
And he hired two differentprivate investigators.
At times, he investigated all of them.
None of them ever led to any solid proofthat the children were alive
or any of the people

(46:04):
that were claiming to be the Sutterchildren were not her children.
An example of this is he saw a pictureof a kid in a New York newspaper
that he thought was one of his children,and he ended up
going up to New York and like tryingto find the kid and talk to the parents.
And it ended up not being them.
The solders actually asked the FBIfor help.

(46:26):
In 1947, J.
Edgar Hoover himselfreplied that it wasn't his jurisdiction.
But if the local law enforcementasked for FBI's help, he will provide it.
Local law enforcement declined the helpfrom the FBI, which is also kind of weird.
The FBI actually did get involvedwith this case
two years later, but it was more in thethe like, oh, if it was kidnaping.

(46:50):
And they went acrossstate lines and it's FBI jurisdiction.
So they looked into it, butthey never found any evidence of anything.
So it wasn't a very long investigation.
So one of the private investigatorsthat was hired, a man named Tinsley,
he found that a member of the coroner'sjury that said the children died in
the fire was the same man that threatenedGeorge Sutter at the doorway.
The man that you playedthis evening, Matt.

(47:12):
The insurance man was a coronerthe whole time.
Not a coroner. He was on the jury.
That was likehe was like part of the group
that was like,yeah, there's the kids are dead.
He was like on the jury,they kind of have to have to sign off on.
Oh, I see.
That things of thatnature that is all so crazy
that C.C.
Tinsley, the private investigator,
I think he's the one that actually heardthe rumor that the chief found this thing

(47:33):
and put it in a boxand buried in the ground.
So I think he's the one thatthat uncovered that whole story
in 1949, the family paid
to excavate the ground where the firewas to look for remains again.
This time they actually spent,I think, two days still not long enough,
according to the to the experton how long it should take.
Like it should be like a weekor more to actually investigate this.

(47:55):
But they did take one or two days,dug up the ground,
and they found bones.
They found very few,but it's pieces of vertebrae.
And so they sent that off.
And a pathologistnamed Oscar Hunter with the Smithsonian,
I think he was the onewith the Smithsonian.
They could have my notes backwards there.
But anyway, a pathologistlooked at these things and he claims

(48:17):
they were from a 16 to 17 year old person,the oldest kid that was dead was 14.
That is kind of close enough.You want to think about it.
However, the bones weren't near fire.
They were not burnt.
What people deduce from thisis that when that dirt
was brought into dump on top of the property,
it was actually broughtin from somewhere else. And

(48:40):
that's kind of contaminated the scene.
So there's bones are probably from that.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
And also a lot of people in West Virginia,I think still to this day
in certain parts of West Virginia,they bury people like in the backyard,
like that's the family grave, you know, so
so it's not that odd to find a fewand also a lot of other people
that investigate situationslike this have claimed

(49:03):
if you find pieces of vertebrae,you would find other bones, too.
The fact they didn't find them, I thinkit's from the dirt being brought in.
But it's still interesting.
Yeah, they actually sent the bonesback to George Sutter,
but no one knows where they are now,so we can't run DNA on them too.
That's I mean, that's still a worthwhilecause, I would think, but
no one knows where they are.

(49:25):
So A It's where they like.
I feel like, Oh, you can keep these bone.
They're human bones,but you can have them back.
I mean, they're, they're going to deal.
With it, but I don't know how that works.
Yeah, it is weird. It is weird.
I found these interesting.
I don't know how much this actually lendsto any sort of investigating any of it,
but I thought this was really interesting.
In November 1949,

(49:45):
there's a newspaper storyin the Charleston Gazette
that says that five peoplewere about to be arrested in connection
with the disappearance of the starterchildren.
And a similar story appeared againfour months later,
but no one was ever arrested.
So I don't know if that was just writerslistening to like a local gossip in a bar
and be like, Yeah, that's a good storyand like doing that kind of thing.

(50:07):
So there was,there are some really interesting things
the stories found over the yearsand I'll just do two of them.
They weren't they,they received a letter from someone
that actually claimedto be Morris, their son.
20 years later.
And of course, George, following them allwith tips, followed up and followed up.
And the guy ended up saying, no, I'm not,Morris, what are you talking about?

(50:27):
So we don't know what that is about.
We don't know if the guy got cold feet
or if he was playing a prankor someone was playing a prank on him.
That kind of situation, 1968.
This is the big one.
This is the oneyou read all the time about with this case
is they received the family receiveda photograph in the mail,
no return address,but it was postmarked Kentucky

(50:50):
and there was a man on itwho had the very same features as
Louis, who was the youngest.
I think it was the youngest boythat passed away that evening or allegedly
passed away that evening,who was nine at the time of the fire.
So it's a picture of him.
But as an adult like this,this guy who's probably around 30
and on the back of the picture,it says Louis Solder,

(51:13):
I love brother Frankie Ill boys.
8901, three, two or 35.
There was no we don't know whatthat means, but that's what's on the back.
It's like a great rap group name at least.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe it was someone trying to come upwith a cover for the rap album of 19.
And I.

(51:35):
Sent it. I just. Think.
The things that keep popping outto me is weird and it feels weird.
It's like, you know, I'm
sure some of these people are still alive,like they're living children.
But it seems weirdthat right afterwards the family
buried the house, basically,
and then maybe a couple of months,I think maybe you said after

(51:56):
they started to doubt it, butthen they waited two years to unburied it.
It just they waited longerthat to unburied 1949.
Oh, that's right.
It was four years later.
But they started investigatingbefore that.
But it was 1949. Yeah.
They like dug it up.
That seems like
if you were starting to question,that would be the first thing you do.
That's a good point I had.
I also think like ifif say perhaps this is,

(52:18):
you know, a random thought,but if, say, perhaps a child
or one of the children or somethingor all of them were
killed in some other way
and buried somewhere else, not in a fire.
You wait however longyou think it takes for bones to decompose
before you go and toss themback in the hole in the grounds.

(52:39):
I don't know what that really means.Oh, that's.
That's devious.
It just seems like maybe.
Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.
Yeah. I mean, look, there's.
There'sso many interesting things about it.
This has all the right ingredientsto be one of those.
And there's a reason why people have beentalking about this for 80 years now.
You know, like there'sa lot of weird things to it.
And even the picture they get of this kid,poor kid, an adult man,

(53:03):
that is Louis Solder on the back,they follow up with that.
They hired a private investigatorto try to figure out who it was.
They never heardfrom the private investigator again.
They like sent him off to go find itand then he just never heard from them.
That to mebecause I haven't read anything.
Like they filed a missing persons report.They bugged him.

(53:23):
They tried to found the privateinvestigators
girlfriend in questionwhere he went. There's none of that.
So I think he just didn't find anything.
So he just never had anything to report.
But it's it'sanother little piece of spice
to the story that just makes itall the more interesting and mysterious.
Yeah.
They never found out who that picture was,who sent it, anything like that.

(53:44):
And again, they were getting a lot of,like, fake reports, too.
So it may have been one of those things,but it's a very interesting thing.
The billboardthey put up on their property
that had information,they had a reward on it for $5,000.
I saw pictures of it.That must have been years later.
It was up to $10,000.
It may have even gotten higher than that.
I don't know.

(54:05):
Now, remember,the main two questions about this case are
does it get to die in the fire?
And was it set intentionally?
It's like there's two. They're connected.
But there's there's two kind of questionsand what I'm going to do
now. Hmm.
What am I going to do now?

(54:26):
That's the end of the show,ladies and gentlemen.
No, there's I have a little section
written here like fact versus fiction,because this is where I like.
I was able to actually find some clarity
on some thingsthat are typically reported.
But maybe before I do that,
there is kind of like general theoriesthat you see a lot.
And maybe I'll just give those real quickbecause you may have comments

(54:48):
or thoughts on it.
Yeah, I want to hear thisbecause I have my own theories now.
If the fire was set intentionally,there's people that believe
that kids were kidnaped and there's peoplethat say the kids went to an orphanage.
Orphanage or different orphanage.
There know that's the word.
Orphanage in Italy.
Some people say the kidsgrew up in Florida.

(55:09):
Oh, I forgot to say that story.
Jenny Sartor, the
mom, she had relatives in Floridaand Georgia at one point saw pictures
of the kids of that family in Floridaand thought they were hits.
So they actually wentand had to go to this
this the relatives and be like,you have my kids.
And they're like, no,they're not your kids. They're our kids.
So that was that had to be a very awkward

(55:31):
this family situation.
Jenny Sadr'sbrother was also one of the firemen
that investigated and like cameand like like actually look for remains,
which I just found interestingI forgot to mention earlier.
So anyway.
Yes, the kidskidnaped sent to an orphanage in Italy.
No evidence to that.
They are just people, local stock and samething with like they lived in Florida.

(55:56):
Some people think they died in the fireand they think whoever the thief was that
took the chains and the hooks and stuffand potentially ladder
that that thief set the fireand just did like as a distraction
to steal things and ended up the kidsthe kids died
other theories and this one's a big onebecause it ties into my theory.
But some people saythe Mafia were involved

(56:19):
and I actually had to research thisbecause I was like,
wait, mafia, West Virginia?
So a lot of Italian immigrants,I know that's a stereotype, but it is a
it is a real thing.
There is a thing called theand maybe there's around,
I don't know, don't come after me.
But there was a groupcalled the Familia Vagabonds,
otherwise known as the Black Hand,which was a crime organization

(56:41):
in West Virginia,primarily 1900 through 1930s some time.
But they probably,you know, there's still vestiges of it.
In the mid 1940s,they typically operated with like brothels
and alcoholand drugs, extortion, that kind of stuff.
But they're around like there's a big partof that, that culture in the community.

(57:01):
And I actually do thinkthere's some validity to this,
and that feeds my own personal theory,which I'll get to a little bit later.
George was a business owner, you know,so there could have been some retaliation
against either him as a businessmanor even him talking out against Mussolini.
Remember, apparentlya lot of people were offended by that.
And you even have the threat againstthat as well.
So, yeah, a lot of people thinkthe Mafia was involved

(57:24):
and then a lot of the theories aroundthat don't necessarily specify.
They took the kids, they killed the kids,they killed the like there's there's
everybody kind of has their own thoughtsabout how the kids fit into that.
But yeah, the Mafiaor a crime organization, I should say,
is, is involved.
Yeah.
So those arethose are kind of the the little floaty

(57:45):
floaty out there theoriesyou typically read a little bit about.
So now it's my section, a fact or fiction.
We can kind of blend with our own theorieshere. Good.
My own personal
theory.
I mean, it keeps changing.
It maybe just changed again.
Well, I.
I think the kids

(58:06):
died in the fire.
But I think.
Yeah,I think the fire was intentionally set.
And the only thing that makes me doubtthat is the thing that you're you're
already thinking about, which is it'sthe five kids that stayed up late
and no one really saw them after the fire.

(58:27):
That's the one thingthat I keep changing my mind on,
and I'll probably change it againby the end of the night because it.
Doesn't even make senseif they did go to sleep.
It just the odds of itactually being the youngest kids.
Yeah. Doesn't make sense.
Like logically,unless they were all in the one place.
And some of them were in the bedroomwith the two older brothers or would
have, would have been.
So that's what has now changed my mindagain, because the theory I have,

(58:51):
if they actually weren't in the house, isthat the fire was set intentionally.
Whoever was getting ready to set itsaw the kids up because they stayed up
late and either was like,I don't hurt kids that little.
I'm going to get them out of the house
or something along those linesand then set the house on fire.
Because obviously there's athere's a chance they die in that house.

(59:13):
So they got them out.
And then either to keep them quiet,they either
then killed the kid somewhere else,which then doesn't really tie.
That's why I question it,because it doesn't really tie in with it,
or they just sent them awaysomewhere to never, never.
Maybe,maybe they did go to an orphanage in Italy
because that's far enough away thatthey can't really talk to anybody local.
The reason
I think they died, the thingthat I circle back around on again

(59:37):
is no one ever came forwardand the kids were old enough
to rememberwhere they came from, in my opinion.
So that's the that's the thing that makesme think they may have passed away.
But I wanted to go back because I went tomy little side topic there.
The reason why I thinkthey could have been killed in the fire,
that's a better way to sayit could have been killed in the fire.
Is John Sadr's initial statementthe morning of the fire,

(01:00:01):
he said he shook his brothersto get them up,
even though he kind of changed that later
because that that was the first thinghe said.
And I do think statements right aftersomething are really important.
When you look at truecrime and stuff like this.
But I just think that's an interesting,
interesting statement,which means the kids were in the house.

(01:00:23):
If that is true,
the excavations they never found remains.
But we already establishedthey didn't take enough time to do that.
And then the whole sika contaminated.
When they dug it up again in 1949, theyalready brought in all this other shit
that mixes in with it,so you can't even fully
do a proper excavation at that point.
It's probably not called an excavation,but I'm going to call it in.

(01:00:46):
Jenny said that the the lights were out,
which means it actually literallycould have been a fire started by wiring.
Also, Christmas lightsare horrendously dangerous.
Even still, theythey were much worse back then.
So there could have beenjust something natural to happen.
I actually think the houseI think the fire was set on purpose.
But I do think it's worth
noting that there is a possibilitythat it could have been something.

(01:01:10):
Yeah. Have you seen those videos?
We're like, this is how fast your houselight on fire with a Christmas tree.
That's super.
Yeah, you'll see that. Yes, it's intense.
Just. It just goes crazy.
Oh, the other thing
that kind of feeds into the kidsmay have perished in the house,
even though no one heard themor necessarily saw them
is there were comments from Johnthat it was super smoky.
There's comments from the familyabout how bad the fire was

(01:01:33):
and it was burnt, like there were burns on
some of these peoplefor the rest of their lives.
Like it, it just enveloped that house.
And George, the father, couldn'teven go upstairs to check the bedroom
before he left the house
the first time because it was too so hotand smoky and fire and everything.
That's why he tried to go outand go through the window,
which he's still going to go throughbecause it was still so hot.

(01:01:55):
So all those things to me led tothey might have
they might have perished in the fire.
And also, you think about goingthrough the remains or the debris.
Everything's kind of falling,burning and falling into the basement.
That's deep.
I know they're on like the top floor,
but even then, it can it can get pushedand crushed, buried and stuck.
So it's not going to necessarilybe to find.

(01:02:16):
However, my primary questiongoing into the whole story,
like I've already said,is the insurance salesman.
And now I'm circling back to that thatlittle cliff hanger I mentioned earlier.
It turns out the reality of the salesmansituation
is the thing that affectedmy personal beliefs about this story
and it not being an accidental firemore than anything else.

(01:02:40):
So it turns out the insurancesalesman actually does have a name.
His name was Mr. Long.
I forget his.
I should have written that his first namebecause I think it's like Lawler
Long or Lassie Long.
It's it's it's an alliteration,which I love.
But I just wrote to Mr. Long in my notes.
He came by
the house around 60 days before the fire.
He was a well-knowninsurance salesman in the area,

(01:03:02):
so the starters may have even known him.
And he suggested that to Georgeto take out life insurance on his kids.
George declined.
Then the salesman saidthat he should increase
his homeowner's insuranceand George declined.
There was no argument.There was no threat.
That is the story.

(01:03:22):
The threat, though, was real.
It just didn't happen from the insurancesalesman.
It came from a man in a familycalled the Giannoulias
and it's a it'sthere's actually a T in that name.
I've heard it in a video called JuniorLow, but it may be like Jenna to low,
something like that.
But I'm just going to call it
Ginnie Logueis that's whatever people say in a video.

(01:03:43):
So the Giannoulias family was athey were a prominent business
family in Westin this area of West Virginia.
They were also Italian immigrants.
They were in trucking. They were in it.
They were basically in everything.They owned a bunch of different companies.
I think one of their companiesstill exist in that area.
And the Giannoulias

(01:04:03):
that their trucking companyis the trucking company
that George Sutter worked forbefore he left and started his own home.
And they were close enoughto when George bought the house,
he actually either
he either got a loanor the Giannoulias signed on
to his bank loan or their associatedwith the purchase of the house.

(01:04:23):
They allowed him to buy the house.
So the insurance policy for the home
is for the Giannoulias,not for the senators. Hmm.
So Mr.
Janelle Lo finds out that George Sartordeclined to increase the insurance
for the House so that Giannouliasincreased the insurance for the House.

(01:04:44):
But right before the fire and it's thereand they get the payout
if the house some against it elseso when the house burned down,
the Giannoulias got the insurance payout.
I'm not saying this is like an insurancefraud thing.
I think that is part of it, though,because

(01:05:05):
the Giannoulias were pissed that Georgedidn't get the insurance thing,
so they were mad at him.
And apparently Mr.
Janela is the one showed up and said
the house is going up in smoke,your kids are going to get destroyed.
And something about Mussolini,apparently that's Mr.
Giannoulias that said that to him.
I think because of the mafia tieand because Mr.
Janela was literally, quote, quoteunquote, called a local Italian leader,

(01:05:30):
I think they were trying to
send a message to George Sadrfor reasons that we don't know about.
There's more to this.
One of the things that may be part of itis Jeni saw Ginnie Sartor, the wife.
Her dad passed away recentlyand she had not signed the like
closing of the estate and her siblingswere trying to get her to sign.

(01:05:51):
Georgelet letter signed. We don't know why.
And the Giannoulias family was somehowinvolved with that because they were asked
to convince Jenny Sadrto sign the closing of her dad's estate.
So there's somethere's some there's a big pizza pie here.
Shouldn't use pizza as a referenceabout Italians, but there's there's

(01:06:11):
a big pumpkin pie, pepperoni Thanksgivingnext week with pepperoni on it.
And and there'sjust all these little pieces
and they're all connected to thisgiant low family.
And I have no proof.
Don't come after me, everybody.
But there's interesting little bits herethat that just make me be like
somebody was pissed at George Sutter.

(01:06:33):
It could have beenfor all these different reasons and more.
It could have been for other reasonsthat we don't know about.
But I think because of the threats,
the person that literally said,your house is going up in smoke
because the witness of the personseeing like fire thrown on the house.
I just I'm like, this was intentional.
There is this was definitely intentional.

(01:06:54):
And I should stop there.
I should stop rambling on about itbecause I want to get your thoughts
now that you've heardsome of these things.
This is all good.
Yeah, this is my theory,even though I mean, this is just based.
I love your tone right now.
That's all great. But you listen to this.
This is what happened now.
This is what if I was, like,thinking of it as a movie?
This is what I feel like. Good work.
So not like in any way to like offendactual people.

(01:07:16):
That went through a horrible thing.
So it's the night of the fire
and the kids who are wanted to wait up forSanta are downstairs.
But the mom comes downstairsto tell them to
whatevergo to sleep because it's Christmas time.
Maybe at this point,
the this family that you have mentioned,the new lows that we said.

(01:07:39):
Yeah, yeah.
One of those guys shows up at the houseand there's a threat
of some kind about, you know,
I don't know, something about something.
Yeah. About taking the kids maybe.
And she doesn't want him to.
And there is some sort of fightthat happens.
One of the kids is killedin front of all the other kids and the mom

(01:08:01):
as a as a like you do you wantI can keep going and,
you know, kill all the kidsand it's like she says no or whatever.
He takes her out and makes her goand they cut the phone lines.
Obviously,they make her go and drag the body
and bury it in behind the houseor somewhere far away.
And then when they're as they're doingthat, burying the house, the the you know,

(01:08:22):
the house is lit on fire
and there's a fire.
All that stuff happens.
She tells her brother not to investigatebecause, you know, the family will come
back and take the rest of the kidsbecause she knows that's going to happen.
So it gets all covered upand then the dad starts to have questions
and she knows thatif any more questions are asked, this

(01:08:42):
the fact that these people are goingto come after the rest of their kids.
So she plants the dead liver in her yard
telling herbecause they just call the guy.
She tells her brother,who's also a fireman and says,
tell him that you found body parts andyou bury them in the yard for the family.
And because this police,this fire chief is so like

(01:09:04):
full of himself, he says he's onewho did it and he wants all the credit.
It's just the mom, again,trying to make it.
Her husband's stop
investigating the fire.
A couple more years go down.It keeps doing. It gets worse.
She does the thingsshe's never wanted to do,
which is to go back to where this man madeher bury the one child who was killed.
She's digging it up. She's horrified.
She just grabbed the few piecesof the skeleton that's there that she can

(01:09:26):
because she feels horrible.
She goes back to the house
and buries them in the thing and be like,This is enough.
This should be enough to make him stopbecause it's human bones.
He finds them. It's still not enough.
He sends it to the Smithsonian.She's like, Oh God, you know,
they're going to find outand all that kind of stuff.
And that's what I think I wouldassume would happen happened.
Maybe she got to see the kids.

(01:09:47):
So my question then
with that kind of theory iswhy spend decades claiming?
All the kids are alive,putting up the billboard,
following up on leads.
Will you cut that part out of the movieso that no one.
Oh, okay. In their.
Yeah hey that's a good question.

(01:10:07):
Yeah, that's. Good. Go.
Yeah. Yeah.
There could have been a part of me
has thought about thisspecifically with John
one of the sonsbecause he's the one that said
he like shook his brother's awakeand then later was like, oh, no,
I couldn't see any of the smokeI just called you on.

(01:10:27):
Part of me wonders if that John is justthe one that made me think of it.
I'm not saying him specifically.
It could have been anybody in the family.
If someone in the family actually knowsmore than they are letting on
and they kind of goalong with the story of hope.
The kids are alivebecause they're afraid of something.
Yeah.
That's when this feels like there'sthat kind of a thing to it, for sure.

(01:10:49):
Well, it's funny that we say thatbecause have to scroll down on my page.
Let's see here where return to parent.
There's a there's this.Oh yeah. Here we go.
So the the oldest daughter, I think it wasMarion who was on the couch,
she she has a quote.

(01:11:10):
I'm just going to read this.
I forget this is part of me being sick.
Everybody, as I actually didn't write downwhat this quote is from, but it's from
it's from something you can findand there will be links.
Again, it is a column, that's for sure.
Oh, it's a letter to the police.I did write it down.
So she was writing the policebecause they're trying to egg
on the authorities over the yearsto investigate and they never do.

(01:11:31):
So in one of her letters to the police,here's a quote.
We asked the prosecuting attorneyto call in some people
who were considered suspects in the case.
He said he could not question these people
because they were personalfriends of hits.
At another time.
He said today they burned your house,but tomorrow they may burn mine.
And I have children too. Well.

(01:11:52):
Boom.
There goes the dynamite.
So, yeah, there's an even again, I'll link
what I think
is probably the best resource for thisis Bob Bragg's book and his website
and I'll link that,but he has copies, letters and testimonies
and things like that that you can look up.

(01:12:12):
And he has an interviewthat I found on his website
that he actually talked
like, yes, still to this day,there are people that will not talk
about these thingsstill to this day, 80 years later.
So I definitely think something was goingon that I think has never come out.
And all the stories and all the coverageof this, that somebody wanted something.

(01:12:36):
It doesn't answerwhat happened to the children,
but I definitely think foulplay was there.
I will clarify one thing here, too,because this is actually really fun.
The cut phone line.
Yes. Which everybody's like, oh, yeah,they cut the phone lines.
They could call anybody.
The cut phone line was cut by a guynamed Lonnie Johnson, found his name here.

(01:12:57):
He was also had a friend with himnamed normally reported as David Atkins.
But in some of his work, he got himsomething else, which we're about to read.
Lonnie Johnson was a local guy
and he was hanging out, having funChristmas Eve that night of the fire,
and he was told about the fireat the Sadr's house.
They go over there.
I think he's just some stupid local guythat saw an opportunity.

(01:13:21):
He stole the chain, things like chainand the hook, the choices for the engines
threw him over an embankmentso that he could come later to get them.
I also think he took the letterbecause that's where the letter was found.
So I think he had the ladder to help getthe hooks down through the ladder over.
He cut the phone lines, in his words.

(01:13:41):
He kept the phone lines
because he thoughtthey were the power lines
and thought the house would stop burning
if he cut the power lines becausehe thought it was an electrical fire.
And there are some weird things with thisbecause he says he cut the lines
with wire cuttersand then later on in other testimony
said he cut them with a knife.
There's some weird shit with it,but I kind of believe him.
He just seems kind of like a local idiotthat saw an opportunity.

(01:14:03):
So we're going to have some fun here.
The other Google.
Oh, boy. Just did a thing on my microphonethat made a fun sound.
The thing I put in the email
that I sent you.
So this is is a
a statement from Mr.
Lonnie Johnson. Oh, nice.
You want me to do it?

(01:14:24):
Whatever you want. Yeah, I was.
I thought you were going to do it,but I do it.
All right. Okay.
Here I go.
Everybody, this is Lonnie Johnson.
I was at my apartment over the roof,the mood light
and located about one quartermile south of George Saunders home U.S.
route number one.

(01:14:45):
We were having a party that night,my wife and I, Grover Atkins,
who was staying there at my apartmentwith me at the time,
Fanny Atkins, who and I believebut I'm not sure
that alley Alan Janney was there,also a taxi cab driver
whose name I don't rememberfrom Bluefield, Virginia, West Virginia.
Sometime that night,a couple of boys came to my apartment.

(01:15:07):
They wanted to use my telephoneto call the fire department
at Fayetteville, West Virginia,but they could not contact the department.
They told us there at the timethat George Saunders
house is on fireand that was the first we'd heard of it.
We immediately started for the fireand my taxicab, my wife and I
and Grover Adkins, Fanny Adkins,Ali Janney and the cab driver.

(01:15:29):
When we arrived at the fire, all of ustried to help in any way we could.
We pushed his truck out of the wayand moved several things out of the way.
But the building was too far gonefor us to do anything about it.
While we were moving some of the stuffout of the way,
I got a set of chicken blocksin the garage building
and brought them up to the roadand threw them over an embankment.
About a month after the fire,George Sanders got a warrant for me

(01:15:50):
for stealing the chain blocks.
I entered a plea of guiltyand was placed on probation for one year.
Up until the night of the fire,I had never met George Sadr to speak to.
I had seen him, but that's
I never had any feelings toward himone way or the other.
Neither did
my wife.

(01:16:10):
Grover Atkins, Fannie Mae.
Oregonian or the taxi cab driver
who I don't remember the name of.
Yeah.
So, sir, Lonnie Johnsonwas the guy that took all that stuff.
It was not some Mafioso,it was not some mad
insurance salesman, it was not some alien.
He was a local guythat saw an opportunity.

(01:16:32):
There is one more thing.
I mean, there's so many detailsthat I am not going to be able to cover,
but one that I actually do think isimportant that I that I also forgot about
because it feeds into peoplethinking of foul play.
The Two trucks wouldn't start that nightbecause they wanted
to move them up by the houseto climb into the window.
And a lot of people,when you read this again

(01:16:54):
on blogs and articlesand read it Facebook post,
people are like, oh, so someone cutcut the fuel lines to the trucks.
And they took the ladder
and they and I'm always like, reallyyou think somebody set fire to a house?
And they thought ahead of like, oh,the children would be stuck upstairs,
so they're going to need a ladderto move the ladder.
Then they're going to then they're goingto try to climb on top of the truck.

(01:17:15):
So let's the trucks like thatthinking never made sense to me.
And sure enough, the latter being movedis actually Lonnie Johnson.
And also the trucks.
There's a quote, George Sadr,I think the day after when he's
first giving statements to the fire chiefand everything where he says
he flooded the truck
because the adrenaline's pumping,you're trying to do things super fast

(01:17:37):
or excite you.
You know,you're trying to save your children.
He flooded the truck. And then, John,I think try the next one.
I think John did the same thing.
So they actually have statements fromthe families as they flooded the truck.
So there was no cutting.
There was no some crazy ninja assassinthat came in and kept sealed.
Everything.
Yeah.
That being said, my personal theoryis I still think it was it was foul play.

(01:17:59):
I think somebody set that house on firefor reasons that we are unclear of.
Yeah,and I do think the children were inside.
But I could also not be surprisedif we found out that they actually
grew up in Italy or Florida somewhere
they should.
The children that are leftshould take those DNA 23 and me test
to see if anything pops up.
Yeah.

(01:18:20):
You know, I wonder,because there are so many relatives
that are still around,I bet you of them have done 23 and May.
I'd be curious. Yeah.
I'm not sure if we would have connection,I guess, but yeah.
Yeah. It's a big enough casethat I think we would have.
But also who's looking at that though?
Yeah, it may not have been connectedbecause we may not know yet.
That's true.
So there isif anybody knows a way to actually check

(01:18:40):
those things, email a study of strangerdanger, we'll make it happen.
If we can break this case open,that would be amazing.
If we could find somesome Sadr children around the world,
because it is it's
an 80 years long, popular mystery.
Popular always sounds weird to say it's
just a well-known mysterywith a lot of followers.

(01:19:04):
But that is it.Anything else you want to add?
Any other theories?
And I think you're isI like what you're thinking.
I like what's going on in there. Cool.
Well,that's the only reason I have guest on.
Has to tell me they like what I'm saying.
Wow. Well, look, that was.
It's because the way I feel right now,the way my brain is,

(01:19:25):
I've been looking at my notes all nightand they
I don't think I'm registering any of them.
So most of this, I'm going by memoryuntil luckily
I did highlight a few things like,oh yeah, Lonnie Johnson.
But it's it was really hardto follow my notes this evening.
It seemed normal from my person.
Okay, good.
This is I'm just always going to haveblame covered from now on.

(01:19:46):
And that way I just lower expectationsand knock it out of the park.
But no, this was my voiceheld up way better than I thought.
But looking at my notesis definitely different.
Have you had COVID?
No, I haven't had yet.
See, I haven't had it until now either.
But people talk about brain fog.
I didn't experience that.
This is like day 13 for meand I still can't kick it.

(01:20:07):
And I think the last three daysit is I, I cannot.
Well,I have trouble like completing things.
It's been weird.
It's been really weird.
I hope I'm through with it soon.
On that note, Matt Glass,thank you so much for for coming on
and listening to me ramble on and rambleon about the start of children.

(01:20:27):
Thank you for rambling.
Yeah.
So you already mentioned glass brain andhow to find you at the top of the show.
Check out also goes to the Ozarks,which you co-directed,
which is on all the streamingplatforms, correct?
Right now we got Squirrel on Toby,another film that.
You're right. Yeah, that I'm in.
I should always rememberto say that. Cool.
We did it. Well, thank you again.

(01:20:49):
Matt and I will talk to you soon.Sounds good.
See you around. Cue Mets music now.
Sounds so good.
That does it for tonight's show.
Thank you all for listening to The SmarterChildren episode.
If you're enjoying the contenton this podcast, please
subscribe, rate and review.

(01:21:09):
You can also support usby visiting our Patreon page,
which you can find through our websitea study of strange rt.com.
We have additional exclusivecontent on there that was going to be more
episodes on Patriot in the coming weeks.
Thanks to Matt Glass. Check out his work.
Follow us on Instagramat a study of Strange.
And lastly, I should mentionjust some scheduling stuff

(01:21:30):
because it's the holiday season.
It is Thanksgiving.
This week and this episode comes outhappy Thanksgiving because of the
the holidays and me being sickand my whole family being sick.
Honestly,
I may have to space out a few of the
the upcoming episodes, so I'm not surewhen our next episode will be out.
I do believe I will have one readynext week, but just be aware

(01:21:53):
that I may have to space out some of thesejust because of all the stuff going on.
But I'm going to try to keepkeep some stuff coming at you.
I do have a couple of serial killerepisodes coming up next.
So if you enjoy those kind of storieslike I do, check them out.
Make sure to follow us.
Lastly, I am collecting UFOstories, personal UFO stories for a
an episode TBD.

(01:22:16):
So email,if you've ever seen any unidentified
flying object in the sky,I want to hear about it.
Email me a study of strange at dinnerdot com.
Thank you and good night.

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