November 18, 2025 • 43 mins
What happened on Christmas Eve 1945? Where are the Sodder children? Did they die in the fire or were they taken? Go down the rabbit hole with Brandon and lets see if we can find out!
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Email: downtherh@protonmail.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
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we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome to another episode of Down the
Rabbit Hole. It's the midweek edition and today you've got
me Brandon, So we're gonna go into again. I like history,
so we're gonna go with a history once again today.
Before we start, I want to thank everybody for listening.
I want to thank Fringe Radio Network for putting us
(01:44):
out there as well. And if you haven't gone over
there yet, definitely go over there and check them out.
Fringe Radio Network. They're a great place to find other stuff.
If you like what we do, you're gonna like what
they do. So we're going to talk here about a
Christmas strategy. We're getting close to Christmas kind of. I mean,
(02:05):
it's Talloween just happened. We stawp Thanksgiving, but whatever. Thanksgiving
is just a day to eat food, at least in
my life. I mean, I don't do a lot in Thanksgiving.
Me and the wife and the kid. Might have something,
might invite a friend over. That's about it. So yeah,
so not a big thing. So I'm actually gonna start
(02:26):
talking Christmas already. And this is a Christmas tragedy that
happened many, many years ago. A lot of the stuff
I got on this scribed was one place. There's a
couple other places missing people in America. It's another one
definitely wanted to look up. This is an interesting one
that I kept coming across. I've heard about it over
(02:46):
and over again for years. It never really went down
this rabbit hole to see what it really was. So
one of the big things on this If you've ever
been to Fayetteville, West Virginia, it's not there anymore, but
it used to be. For nearly four decades, anyone driving
down Route sixteen near Fayetteville, West Virginia could see a
(03:06):
billboard bearing the grainy images of five children all dark
haired salmiyd Their names and ages were listed Maurice fourteen,
Martha twelve, Louise nine. I heard it as Louise and
Louis both ways, so could be either one. So I'm
gonna say Louise because it sounds better to me, So
(03:26):
Louise nine, Jenny aid, and Betty five sencil beneath along
with speculation about what happened to them. Faateeville was and
is a small town with a main street that doesn't
run longer than one hundred yards, and rumors always played
a large role in the case, sometimes more than the
evidence actually did, which we'll get into as we go
through on this one. It's a very interesting, very interesting case,
(03:50):
but it's also a very old case. So there's saw
eyes and innocent faces that becomes synonymous. Synonymous with one
of the most mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance
of the Solder children on Christmas Eve nineteen forty five.
It continues to confound and captivate as an unanswered question
surrounding their fate refused to fade into the annals of history.
(04:15):
So the Solder family, led by George and Jenny Sotdter
compromised ten children living in Fayetteville, small town nestled in
the Appalachian Mountains. Their lives were abruptly shattered in the
early hours of December twenty fifth when a fire engulfed
their homes or their home. So that we're going to
(04:36):
get into a little bit more on the fire and
what happened. But what I also want to talk about
in this is not just the fire, but kind of
what led up to it, and then kind of what
(04:57):
happened to them? Where do they go? So why has
the sign been there for forty years? All of that
fun stuff. So first thing we got to do is
really look at George, the dad, George Shotter. He's obviously
the dad. So he was born with the name Giorgio
(05:20):
Soto in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in eighteen ninety five. He
immigrated to the United States when he was thirteen with
an older brother. And this is one of the weirdest parts,
but it's never fully explained or never really said anything
of why him and his brother came to America when
he was thirteen. His brother pretty much came over with
(05:44):
him on the boat. They got off the boat, went
through all this island George continued on the brother got
back on the boat, went back to Italy. There's never
really an explanation of why or any of that. So, yeah,
which is so weird to me. So he went from
(06:05):
Georgio to George, and he never really talked about why
he left the homeland, why he did anything anything like that.
There are questions on whether or not he was running
from something. There's a lot of questions on why he
came here.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
But that.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Could or could not really have anything to do with
what ends up happening later. So eventually he found work
on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies workers.
After a few years, he took more permanent work as
a driver in Smithers, West Virginia. He then started his
own trucking company, initially hauling filed dirt to construction sites
(06:46):
and later hauling coal mine in the region. Jenny Capricini,
a storekeeper's daughter and Smithers who had also emigrated from
Italy and her childhood, married George in nineteen twenty two.
Now there is questions on when he started the trucking company,
on how he got the money, and that will come
up later, which is one of those things that I
(07:09):
didn't find in a lot of articles, but I found
in a couple and one of the ones that kind
of makes a little bit sense on some of the stuff.
So this Otters settled outside nearby Fetteville, which had a
large population of Italian immigrants, and a two story timber
framed house two miles north of town. Nineteen twenty three,
(07:31):
they had their first of their ten children. George's business
prospered and then became one of the most respected middle
class families around. In the words of one of the
local officials. However, George did have strong opinions about how
on many subjects. One of those was Benito Mussolini, which
we don't know who Benito Mussolini is. He was, of
(07:53):
course the dictator that ran Italy during World War Two,
so definitely someone that we probably should talk about someday,
but I don't think we've talked about yet. So sure
he's come up in stories, but never had a full
talk about Mussolini. So the last of the Sorder children, Sylvia,
(08:16):
was born in nineteen forty two. By then, their second
oldest son, Joe, had left home to serve in the
military during World War Two. The following year, Mussolini was
deposed and executed. Herabad George's criticism of the late di
dictator had left some hard feelings. Some of the people,
even though they'd come to America and had left Italy
still you know, stood for Italy and still had a
(08:37):
thing for Mussolini and whatever. So Harabad george criticism late
dictator had left some hard feelings. Like I said in
October nineteen forty five, at visiting life insurance salesman, and
see this is this is one of the ones that
comes up a lot. There's a lot of things about
this insurance salesman, and the argument that happened not a
(09:00):
whole lot of I mean, it had just about every
story this one comes up. But there's a lot of
questions about this. So after being rebuffed, warrened George at
his house would go up and smoke, and your children
are going to be destroyed. So cheering this all to
the dirty marks you've been making about Mussolini. Another visitor
to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took theccasion to go
(09:22):
round to the back and warned George that a pair
of fuse boxes would cause a fire someday. George was
puzzled by the observations that she just had the house
rewired when an electric stove was installed and a local
electric company had said afterwards it was safe. And the
weeks before Christmas that year, George's oldest sons had also
noticed a strange car parked along the hot Main highway
(09:42):
through town. It's occupants watching the younger side of children
as they returned from school. Now, that last statement is
something that comes up in a lot of them, but
was mentioned later. It didn't seem to be something that
popped up in their regional investigation of this. Now, this salesman,
this is one that got interesting because there's a couple
of article that mentioned this. A lot of them really
(10:02):
look over it. According to a lot of stuff that
I could find, the argument necessarily wasn't with this salesman,
per se. The argument was more with a gentleman named Ganoleslus.
I'm sure I'm completely saying that wrong. And it's one
(10:22):
of those ones. I could only find it in videos
and some of the some audio stuff, and I found
in a couple other places that talked about it that
it wasn't the salesman that made this comment. It was
this other guy caulists, ganula lists whatever he had when
George started his business, it sounds like, and bought his house.
(10:44):
This guy had helped with the loan to be able
to get it, so he had partial rights to the
house because he had put you know up put up
the loan or done somehow. He was involved, so the house,
he had some right to the house, some buy into
(11:05):
the house. That if the house was destroyed, he would
also lose money. So where the argument came in was
from this gentleman because of the fact that if the
house burned down, he would lose money too, and it
was him who got upset because George did not get insurance,
and if George didn't get insurance, this guy would lose out.
(11:27):
So he the other guy, he got insurance on the
house to protect his investment and his money. So later
when the house spoiler alert that the house burns down,
he did get paid, but George didn't because George didn't
(11:48):
have insurance in the house at least that's one of
the articles. A couple articles that I found mentioned that.
But what's weird, and that's the hard part on a
lot of this stuff, especially you know, you're looking back
in nineteen forty five. Not all of them mentioned that,
So it seems like one of those weird facts that
you have to dig deep for to find when you
(12:09):
go down the rabbit hole. So that's another weird, weird thing.
And once again, as we go into this, there's going
to be a lot of weird things that we talk
about and weird oddities, weird stuff that comes along with
this story. Another one of the articles that talks about this,
(12:32):
the issue with the salesman is supposedly what the guy
said was your goddamn house is going up in smoke,
he warned, and your children are going to be destroyed.
You're going to be paid for the dirty marks you've
been making about Mussolini. So again, it's one of those
things that keeps popping up in that part of the story.
(12:54):
But as I mentioned, I read in multiple places where
they talked about the other gentlemen who owned part of
the house. All right, so let's talk about what happened
with the fire, and we might go into some of
this other stuff later. Like I said, there's a lot
of weird instances the gentlemen that you know sitting outside
the house, the salesman. There's a few weird things that happen.
(13:21):
So basically Christmas Eve. They were a family that opened
up presents Christmas Eve, which I've seen some families do
that as tradition. They open up like it appears anyway,
from what I could find, is what it was is
they opened up presents from like the family and from
each other Christmas Eve, and then in the morning they
(13:42):
would be the presence from Santa Claus. So that's how
a lot of people did it. That's how it was
done so that way you could differentiate the two so
that it sounds like that's what they did. So they
open up about their presence Christmas Eve. The younger children
wanted to play with their presents. And also from one
of the other articles that I read and some stuff
(14:02):
that I listened to, a lot of people speculate that
at the time kind of like they do Norad does
now where they track Santa Claus. They used to have
a radio show that would go through and say, oh,
Santa's here now, so the kids would listen to that
and then you know, kind of find that out. So
they wanted to stay up late, the younger kids, so
they did. They stayed up listening to the radio and
(14:25):
playing with their new toys. So just after midnight on
Christmas morning, the shrill ring of the telephone broke the quiet.
Jenny rush to answer it, and unfamiliar female voice asked
for an unfamiliar name, Rocus. Laughter and glasses clinking could
be heard in the background. Jenny told the call she
had the wrong house and hung up, which seemed odd,
(14:47):
very odd thing. So police later did question the woman
that called, and they said she simply dialed the wrong number.
Tiptoeing back to bed, Jenny note said all the downstairs
lights were on and all the curtains still open. The
front door was unlocked. She saw Marian asleep on the
sofa in the living room and assume that the other
kids were upstairs in bed. She turned out the lights, closed,
the curtains locked, the door, returned to her room. She
(15:08):
just begun to doze when she heard a sharp, loud
bang on the roof and then a rolling noise. About
half an hour later, she roused once again, this time
by heavy smoke crawling into her room. And that's one
of those things that it's kind of questionable on the
timeframe there the timeline because of you know, sleep and
everything else. It could have been a lot less than that,
(15:30):
which we'll come back to because the loud, rolling noise
could have been something else that will point to later
as we're going through this. So this is just kind
of a quick timeline of what happened that night as
the witnesses upset it. So this heavy smoke rolling in
we mentioned earlier, this was a timber framed house. So
(15:52):
and that's where everything kind of goes crazy. Timber framed house.
Everyone runs, they get out of the house, attempt to
get out of the house, and that's that's where everything
starts to go bad. Everyone runs, they get out, at
(16:12):
least most of them. And here's kind of the undisputed
facts again. So nine attention shot, a chilled and the
oldest front was away in the army. Went to bed
on Christmas Eve. After that, mother Jenny was woking three times.
First at twelve thirty, I woke by that phone call,
went back to bed, and then startled by a loud
(16:35):
bang and a rolling noise on the rope. She then
nosed off again and finally awoke an hour later. And
see this is a different article. This one says an hour,
the other one said half an hour. There's kind of
a That timeframe is a little jumbled, so we're not
sure exactly what time because you know that whole sleep
thing she heard the bang, and what time she woke
(16:56):
up the second time. We do know when she woke
up the second time. There is probably about one thirty,
I think is what it ends up being. So four
of the George Jenny and four of the side of children,
toddler Sylvia, teenagers Marian and George Junior, as well as
twenty three year old John escaped. Marion ran to a
neighbor's house to call the Fbill Fire Department, but did
(17:18):
not get a response, prompting another neighbor to go looking
for Fire Chief F. J. Morris. And the hours spent
waiting for help, George and Jenny tried every imaginable way
to rescue their children, but their efforts were thwarted. George's
ladder was missing and neither of his trucks would start.
Help did not arrive until eight am. Eight am. Eight am.
(17:44):
Remember twelve thirty she woke up. They're basically assuming like
an hour later, it's about one thirty ish the fire happened.
They went to go get help. One thirty is ish,
eight am is when the fire department finally showed up.
And here's the fun part. The fire department was only
two miles away from the Solder home. Boom, that's kind
(18:10):
of odd there. The police inspector said that the cause
of the fire was faulty wiring. George and Jenny wanted
to know how that was possible given there had been
no previous issues with the electricity. They also want to
know why there were no remains among the ashes. And
this is the other part that got interesting. When they
searched the ashes, there was no remains, nothing, no bones,
(18:33):
no nothing, which doesn't make sense because when you do
the math and figure everything out, you look into cremation.
Cremation takes about two hours when the fire is at
two thousand degrees fahrenheit. Two hours at two thousand degrees fahrenheit.
(18:58):
The Solder Home only took five minutes to burn. It
was gone in forty five minutes. That doesn't make sense
that would have got up to enough to make the
bones and everything disappear. Considering there was pieces of furnitures
that was survived like they were charred and burnt, but
(19:18):
they serve pieces of them survived. So very weird, so
a nineteen forty nine follow up, Surchon covered a tiny
portion of human vertebrae, which was determined by the Smithsonian
Institution to sustain no fire damage and most likely was
mixed in with the dirt that George used to fill
in the basement while constructing a memorial. So he did
(19:39):
fill in the basement to make a memorial. So that's
some of the craziness is there. But it gets it
gets gets even crazier. So so of course, you know,
like I said, she didn't understand how they could all
pour perish, so she conducted a private experiment. She would
(20:02):
burn animal bones, chicken bones, beef joints, pork chop bones
to see if the fire consumed them. Each time she
was left with a heap of charred bones. She knew
that remnants of various household appliances had been found in
the burned out of basement, still identifiable, and like I
mentioned earlier, an employee at a crematorium informed her that
bones remained after bodies are burned for two hours at
(20:25):
two thousand degrees and again, the house burned to the
ground in forty five minutes. Some of the other details
that are a little bit odd telephone am pair maid
told their swads that their lines appeared to have been cut,
not burned. Their family realized that if the fire had
been electrical, the result of faulty wiring is official port
(20:45):
stated that the power would have been dead and the
lights in the rooms downstairs would have been off instead
the shiny they shine brightly during the blaze. But that's
also that one's question on whether lights were on, because
in the original interview Jenny said they were off, and Joe,
the oldest son said they were on, and then later
(21:08):
everybody said they were on. So there's questions on that
one on whether or not the lights were on or not.
So again, so a witness did come forward claiming he
saw a man at the scene of the fire taking
a block and tackle used for moving car engines, so
basically like a hoist, and yeah, could be he could
(21:29):
be the reason George Trucks had refused to start. The
man in question later played guilty and stealing the block
and tackle, but denied any involvement in the fire. Most
people think that he actually just it was a crime
of convenience. The house is burning down. He knew George
had that he broke it and grabbed it. Yeah. So
one day, while the family was visiting the site, the
(21:50):
youngest child, Sylvia, I found a hard rubber object in
the yard. Jenny called hearing the horror thud on the
roof the rolling sound, and George concluded it was a
napalm or pineapple bomb of this type used in warfare.
So basically a fire a fire starting bomb. Yeah, so
(22:15):
a grenade that starts fires basically, yeah, pineapple bomb. Then
came the reports of sightings. Now this is where it
starts to get crazy too, of people seeing the children.
A woman claimed to have seen the missing children peering
out of a passing car while the fire was in progress.
(22:36):
A woman operating a tourist stop Betweenville and Charleston, West Virginia,
so I'm fifty miles northwest, that she saw the children
in the morning after the fire. I served them breakfast.
She told police there was a car with Florida license
plates at the tourist court too. A woman at Charleston
Hotails saw the children's photos in the newspaper since she
had seen four of the five a week after the fire.
(22:56):
So here's the funny thing too. Apparently Jenny had family
in Florida, and at one point George even thought that
her family had taken them and even went down there
and questioned them on why they had taken his kids,
so which from all accounts, they say they haven't. So
(23:18):
the lady that says she'd seen them in a photo
said she'd seen four of the five, and a savement
to local thorders. She said the children were accompanied by
two women and two men, all of Italian extraction. I
do not remember the exact date, however, the entire party
did register at the hotel and stayed in a large
room with several beds. They registered about midnight. I tried
(23:39):
to talk to the children and a friendly manner, but
the man appeared hostile and hughes allowing me to talk
to these children. One of the men looked at me
in a hostile manner. He turned around and began talking
rapidly in Italian. Immediately the whole party stopped talking to me.
I since that I was being frozen out, and so
I had nothing more, said nothing more. They left early
the next morning. So very interesting. So that's kind of
(24:01):
the crazy stuff that comes in with the you know,
the kids, people saw them. There was reports that they
survived supposedly, but you know so in nineteen forty seven,
George and Jenny said a letter about the case the
Federal Brewer of Investigation. They received to apply from the
(24:21):
agency's director, Jay Edgar Hoover, who wrote, although I would
like to be of service, the matter related appears to
be of local character and does not come with an
investigative jurisdiction of this bureau who was agents said they
would assist if they could get permission from the local authorities,
but the Fayval police and fire departments declined the offer.
So their stance was that it was an electrical fire
(24:43):
and all five children perish in the fire. That was
their stance, and that's what they were sticking to. Yes,
definitely sticking to it. So and here's a couple things
of the fire. I mean, you can go into detail.
The hard part with going to detail of what happened
with the fire is it's all hearsay, all crazy stuff
(25:07):
that you go into that it was they all woke up. Joe,
the oldest, tried to wake up the younger ones and
then ran out. Supposedly, later he changed the story and
said that he never actually shook them. He originally said
(25:28):
they shook them to wake them up, thought that they
were awake, and ran ran out, and then they never
followed him. Later he said that he never actually saw
them or shook them. He yelled for them and that
was it. So the big question that comes in here
and a lot of people during this investigation really wonder
is when the family went to bed and the five
(25:48):
stayed up, that was the last time anyone saw those five,
the five that went missing and disappeared and supposedly died
in the fire, or the five that stayed up up,
Nobody saw them after everybody else went to bed. When
the mom got up again and answered the phone, she
(26:11):
saw one of the kids, but not one of the
five that went missing, laying on the bed on the couch.
Another one that toddler, was in their room with them.
So a lot of people, you know, the way that
they say happened was Jenny got up, she ran when
she saw the fire, handed it, grabbed the toddler, handed
it to Muriel. I believe it is the one that
was on the couch, and she ran out with the
(26:34):
baby and went to call the fire department. From the neighbors,
the other five that went missing had not been seen
since everybody else went to bed. So when the mother
got up at twelve thirty to that phone call, she
saw Muriel, but not the five. She assumed they went
to bed and left all the lights on with the
door unlocked. So that's where a lot of these questions
(26:57):
started coming in on whether or not they were even
there when the fires started. So yeah, So next this
uters turned to a private investigator named C. C. Tinsley.
He discovered that the insurance salesman who had threatened George
was a member of the coroner's jury that deemed the
fire accidental. According to The Times West Virginia, the individual
(27:19):
had previously been employed by George, and he was a
co signer on the family's home insurance, which he'd increased
from fifteen hundred to seven fifty before the fire. Now
that's where things get weird. That's what some of them say,
is that the insurance guy was he was the co signer,
but it wasn't him. It was actually another guy, depending
on which. And this is one of those things, like
(27:40):
I said, it's being from forty five. I heard both,
I saw both, and you know this one right here
is the Smithsonian magazine that's saying that it was the
insurance salesman. Another one that I saw had said that
it was that there was another owner all right, so
that he'd got a loan who also had an insurance
(28:03):
policy on the house. So the detective also heard a
curious story about Morris, the fire chief. Although Morris claimed
that no remains had been found, it's supposedly confided to
someone they discovered a human organ in the ashes and
hit it inside a dynamite box and buried it at
the scene. So, and this is one too that comes
(28:25):
back and forth on whether or not where where the
idea of this happens. A lot of people use a
private investigator is an easy out on this one. That
he found it all other people don't. Most people backus
when they talk about the private basketor pretty much said
they paid him. The guy looked around a little bit
and then basically fucked off and they never saw him again.
So but other ones say that, hey, he found all
(28:48):
this information. Others say this information came out different ways.
So but after the Sodas dug up the box, they
took it straight to a local funeral director who poked
and proud of the organ and concluded it was beef
liver that had never seen fire, so it could not
be from one of the children. Soon the family heard
rumors that Morris had told others that the contents of
(29:09):
the box had not been found in the fire at all,
and said he'd bury the beef liver in the rubble
and the hope that finding any remains would placate the
family enough to stop the investigation. Now there's a couple
of weird rumors that come around with this. One. One
of them is that Jenny knew more than she said,
(29:30):
And this is one of those ones. And this becomes
those crazy rumors and speculation that people pop up with,
you know, no evidence, nothing at all, And this is
one of them. And we'll go through a few more
as we go. That she knew about it, that the
reason that the one lady only saw four kids at
the hotel is because only four survived. That one of
(29:50):
the kids was killed and Jenny saw it and knew
about it, and it was killed as a warning that
they were taking the other full and they killed the
one and said, hey, if you do anything or say anything,
we will kill the other ones. And that she was
in it in with the fire inspectrum when he buried
(30:14):
that because she's trying to get George to back off
and stop looking, that if he'd found remains, he would
stop looking, and then these people would to kill the
other children. That was one of the stories. But I
don't know if I believe that one. There's too much
other evidence that points to that she, you know, really
wanted to find the kid and was looking for him.
(30:34):
So but yeah, so that was it. So the oldest sibling,
John said the fire marshal was either paid off or
they didn't push it. So so this was in the
Roanoke Times in nineteen eighty four. The family wasn't sure
what had happened during the fire, but they were convinced
(30:55):
that something was off. Perhaps a blaze was an active
at Arson designed to cover their production the five mystic
children who'd been spirited away by the Italian mafia's revenge
for George's criticism of Mussolini. So that's one thought which
goes into what I was just talking about with but
Jenny knowing that she knew about this because she'd seen
them and talked to them, and then yeah, all that
(31:15):
so or maybe the children were victims of a human
trafficking scheme, as John told the Virginia newspaper, or if
thinking was that kidnappers might have been trying to take
us all, My brother Bray and I barely got out
of the house, but you can't relive it. Over the
next several year years, tips and leads continued to trickle in.
(31:37):
George saw a newspaper photo of the school children in
New York City and was convinced that one of them
was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan and searched
the child, but her parents refused to speak to him.
In August nineteen forty nine, the saughters decided to mount
a new search at the fire scene. They brought in
a Washington d c. Pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter. The
excavation was thorough, uncovering a number of small object damaged coins,
(32:01):
a partly burned dictionary, and several shards of vertebrae. Hundred
set the bones to the Smithsonian Institution, which we'd mention
these a little earlier, which issued the following report. The
human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual.
Since the transverse recessor fused the age of this individual
at death should have been sixteen or seventeen years old.
(32:22):
The limit of age should be about twenty two, since
the CenTra, which normally fused it twenty three are still
in unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal
matureration than one would expect for a fourteen year old boy,
who is the oldest of the missing Solder children. It is, however, possible,
although not probable, for a boy fourteen and a half
years old to show age sixteen or seventeen maturation. So
(32:47):
those were some of the bones that were found. Once again,
a lot of people assume that those bones because he
did fill in the basement, because most of the house burnt.
It was a basement, the main floor, and and then
basically say the attic, But it was basically just a
second floor where the kids bedrooms were so basic. When
the house burnt, it all just fell straight into the
(33:09):
basement and became a pile of the basement and then
they bury it, brought in dirt and buried that. So
the vertebrates showed no evidence of being exposed to fire.
The report said to get adding it is very strange
to know other bones were found in the alleged the
careful excavation of the basement of the house give the
relatively short time the fire burned. The Smithsonian scholars said
one would expect to find the full skeletons of the
(33:31):
five children rather than only four vertebra The Bones report
concluded have most likely been the supply of dirt George
used to fill in the basement to create the memorial.
So that's kind of the thought process on that one. Yeah. So.
Speaking with The Times West Virginia in twenty sixteen, Cruckshank,
the firefighter, point out that work materials kept in the
(33:52):
family's garage, like fifty five gallon drums of gasoline and motives,
might have intensified the heat of the flames by covering
the fire's embers with dirt. In the meadiate aftermath of
the blaze, George also intevertently created an oven that would
advance the information process. The newspaper reported, there's arguments about
the gas where Cruckshank says, there was the family and
(34:12):
the children. The older son said, yes, he did work
on motors in the basement, but he never kept gas
down there, So yeah. Stacy Horne, author recovered the case
for NPR shared similar reflections on the fire in a
two thousand and five blog posts, writing that the wildly
cided estimate of the flames burning for forty five minutes
(34:32):
is misleading. In truth, she said, the inferno burned all
night long and into the next morning. When the fire
department did finally appear, it was still hot and they
had to water the site down before conducting their search. Furthermore,
two hours not even close to a thorough search. Today,
the search for remains would take days, in possibly weeks.
And that's the thing that once the house burned and
they basically sprayed fire on water on it. Once the
(34:55):
fire department got there seven hours later, cool it down,
and then they only investigated basically. The estimates are an
hour to two hours. That was the entire investigation. An
hour to two hours. Nowadays, even with all of today's technology,
would be weeks. And they're based it in an hour to
(35:17):
two hours and said, nope, nothing here. We sipped it
through it with a fine toothcomb and found nothing. So
as this a guy from Spaseball says, we ain't found
shit but in two hours that you need more time
than that to look through those those remains plus, like
they said, once you put the dirt on there, it
(35:39):
kind of made oven effect. Could have could have but
not likely, but could have gotten rid of the bones.
So the Smithsonian's findings prompted two hearings at the state
capitol and Charleston, after which Governor OK L. Pattison and
State Police Superintendent W. Burchett told the Sados their shirt
(35:59):
was hopefully and declared the case closed. Doorities wondered whether
it was possible, likely even that the family's grief was
clouding their judgment, leading them to search for signs of
life where none could be found. Undeterred, George and Jenny
erected the billboard a long Route sixteen and passed out
flyers offering a five thousand dollars reward for information leaving
(36:19):
the recovery of their children. They soon increased that amount
to ten thousand dollars. A letter arrived from a woman
in Saint Louis saying the oldest girl, Martha, was in
a convent there. Another tip came from Texas, where a
patron and bar said they overheard an incrimination incriminating conversation
about a long ago Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia.
(36:41):
So when Florida claimed the children were staying with the
distant relative of Jenny's, George traveled the country to investigate
each lead, always returning home without any answers. In the
late nineteen sixties, more than twenty years after the fire,
Jenny received an envelope postmarked in Kentucky. Inside it was
the photo of a man in his mid twenty on
the back of a snapshot, A cryptic handwritten note read
(37:03):
Lewis sotder I love brother Frankie ill ol boys A
nine zero, one, three two or three five. So yeah,
Jenny and George couldn't deny the sitter's resemblance to their Lewis,
who was nine at the time of the fire. Beyond
the obvious similarities, dark curly hair, dark brown eyes, they
had the same straight, strong nose, the same upward tilt
(37:26):
of the left eyebrow. Once again, the family hired a
private detective and sent him to Kentucky, and this one
they definitely never heard from again. So he basically went
to Kentucky and never came back, So which has lots
of questions on that. So why didn't he come back?
What happened with him? There's not a whole lot of
reports on what happened with that private investigator. Why he
(37:48):
just went off to Kentucky and never came back, or
did he just take their money and just leave, or
did something happen. Did he show up there and they
someone offered him more money to back off, or was
he killed or was he what? Nay, who knows? So
this sawd was feared that if they published the message
(38:09):
or the name of the town on the postmark, they
might put their son at risk, and staid they ment
at the billboard to include the updated image of Lewis.
It's hard sometimes to get to sleep at night just
wondering about them, George told the Associated Press in nineteen
sixty eight. After all of someone wanted to get me,
why'd they get my family too, he added, it's like
hitting a rock wall. We can't go any further. We
just don't know what to do now. George died a
(38:32):
year after that in nineteen sixty nine. Still hoping for
a break in the case, Jenny erected a fence around
her property and began adding rooms to her home, building
layer after layer between herself and the outside. Since the fire,
she had won Black exclusively as a sign of morning,
and she continued to do so until her own death
in nineteen eighty nine, when the weather billboard finally came down.
(38:54):
So it was up till nineteen eighty nine when they
finally took it down. After Jenny died, the saughters, surviving
children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with
theories of their own. So we mentioned earlier there'd be
some crazy theories. Here's some of them. The local mafia
branch had tried to recruit George and he declined. They
tried to extort money from him, and he refused. The
(39:16):
children were kidnapped by someone they knew, someone who burst
into the unlocked front door, told them about the fire
and off to take them someplace safe. They might not
have survived the night if they had, and if they
lived for decades if it really was Lewis in the photograph.
They failed to contact their parents only because they wanted
to protect them. Sylvia, the youngest survivor of the fire,
(39:36):
died in twenty twenty one, aged seventy nine. Until then,
Schuman seat fast and to believe that her siblings had
escaped the Lames. Growing up, Sylvia was the only child
in a lot of ways. Her daughter Jenny hen Thorne,
told The Independent in twenty twenty two, You've got to
think that my aunts and uncles that were present after
the fire. Who was still at home weren't really at home.
(39:56):
Two had been away at wore they were grown. Henthorp,
for her part, unlikely that her family would ever find closure.
Anybody who knew what happened would have been my grandparents' age,
and told The Independent, I would think that it's been
public enough that if the children wanted to be found
later on in life, they would have reached out. So
that's the story. It's interesting definitely. Like I said, this
(40:23):
is one that has fascinated me for a bit because
I mean it's nineteen forty five. There's so many much intrigue.
There's questions on what his tie to the mafia could
have been. A lot of people thought maybe it was
a kidnapping for ransom, which was very common in the forties.
We've talked about it before with you know, other cases
(40:44):
in the forties which children were taking ransomed. It's happened.
It's also as typically most people say that, you know,
the mafia usually doesn't go after children, but they have
but they typically do not they have in the past.
So I mean, it could have been the mafia getting
(41:04):
back at George for not joining them, or for being
against Mussolini or whatever. Could have just been neighbors that
were mad at him for whatever reason, people that weren't
happy about his his Mussolini issues, all sorts of stuff.
Could have just been at the fire. They died in
the fire and somehow the remains just were missed, they
(41:26):
weren't found that they're still there, Who knows they might
still be there. Definitely an interesting story, Definitely one that
you should go back and read, look into, get deeper
into that one. Are they still out there? I mean
at this point, if they're still out there, they're old.
(41:48):
So the youngest died at seventy nine a few years back,
so they would be in their eighties or nineties at
this point. So more than likely if they survived, they
died later life life. But yeah, so Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny,
(42:09):
and Betty, those were the five. So Maurice was fourteen,
Martha was twelve, Louise was nine, I believe Jenny was eight,
and Betty was four. So sad, very sad, very interesting case,
(42:38):
but definitely want to go look At look At, Look
Deeper into that one. It's quite interesting one. Yeah, so
thank you all for listening and the Sunday you will
get me in big d again on another great episode.
So if you have any ideas thoughts something I missed
in this one, let me know. Thank you, see you later.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
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Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
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Have the app?
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It's the best way to listen to the Fringe Radio Network.
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we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome to another episode of Down the
Rabbit Hole. It's the midweek edition and today you've got
me Brandon, So we're gonna go into again. I like history,
so we're gonna go with a history once again today.
Before we start, I want to thank everybody for listening.
I want to thank Fringe Radio Network for putting us
(01:44):
out there as well. And if you haven't gone over
there yet, definitely go over there and check them out.
Fringe Radio Network. They're a great place to find other stuff.
If you like what we do, you're gonna like what
they do. So we're going to talk here about a
Christmas strategy. We're getting close to Christmas kind of. I mean,
(02:05):
it's Talloween just happened. We stawp Thanksgiving, but whatever. Thanksgiving
is just a day to eat food, at least in
my life. I mean, I don't do a lot in Thanksgiving.
Me and the wife and the kid. Might have something,
might invite a friend over. That's about it. So yeah,
so not a big thing. So I'm actually gonna start
(02:26):
talking Christmas already. And this is a Christmas tragedy that
happened many, many years ago. A lot of the stuff
I got on this scribed was one place. There's a
couple other places missing people in America. It's another one
definitely wanted to look up. This is an interesting one
that I kept coming across. I've heard about it over
(02:46):
and over again for years. It never really went down
this rabbit hole to see what it really was. So
one of the big things on this If you've ever
been to Fayetteville, West Virginia, it's not there anymore, but
it used to be. For nearly four decades, anyone driving
down Route sixteen near Fayetteville, West Virginia could see a
(03:06):
billboard bearing the grainy images of five children all dark
haired salmiyd Their names and ages were listed Maurice fourteen,
Martha twelve, Louise nine. I heard it as Louise and
Louis both ways, so could be either one. So I'm
gonna say Louise because it sounds better to me, So
(03:26):
Louise nine, Jenny aid, and Betty five sencil beneath along
with speculation about what happened to them. Faateeville was and
is a small town with a main street that doesn't
run longer than one hundred yards, and rumors always played
a large role in the case, sometimes more than the
evidence actually did, which we'll get into as we go
through on this one. It's a very interesting, very interesting case,
(03:50):
but it's also a very old case. So there's saw
eyes and innocent faces that becomes synonymous. Synonymous with one
of the most mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance
of the Solder children on Christmas Eve nineteen forty five.
It continues to confound and captivate as an unanswered question
surrounding their fate refused to fade into the annals of history.
(04:15):
So the Solder family, led by George and Jenny Sotdter
compromised ten children living in Fayetteville, small town nestled in
the Appalachian Mountains. Their lives were abruptly shattered in the
early hours of December twenty fifth when a fire engulfed
their homes or their home. So that we're going to
(04:36):
get into a little bit more on the fire and
what happened. But what I also want to talk about
in this is not just the fire, but kind of
what led up to it, and then kind of what
(04:57):
happened to them? Where do they go? So why has
the sign been there for forty years? All of that
fun stuff. So first thing we got to do is
really look at George, the dad, George Shotter. He's obviously
the dad. So he was born with the name Giorgio
(05:20):
Soto in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in eighteen ninety five. He
immigrated to the United States when he was thirteen with
an older brother. And this is one of the weirdest parts,
but it's never fully explained or never really said anything
of why him and his brother came to America when
he was thirteen. His brother pretty much came over with
(05:44):
him on the boat. They got off the boat, went
through all this island George continued on the brother got
back on the boat, went back to Italy. There's never
really an explanation of why or any of that. So, yeah,
which is so weird to me. So he went from
(06:05):
Georgio to George, and he never really talked about why
he left the homeland, why he did anything anything like that.
There are questions on whether or not he was running
from something. There's a lot of questions on why he
came here.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
But that.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Could or could not really have anything to do with
what ends up happening later. So eventually he found work
on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies workers.
After a few years, he took more permanent work as
a driver in Smithers, West Virginia. He then started his
own trucking company, initially hauling filed dirt to construction sites
(06:46):
and later hauling coal mine in the region. Jenny Capricini,
a storekeeper's daughter and Smithers who had also emigrated from
Italy and her childhood, married George in nineteen twenty two.
Now there is questions on when he started the trucking company,
on how he got the money, and that will come
up later, which is one of those things that I
(07:09):
didn't find in a lot of articles, but I found
in a couple and one of the ones that kind
of makes a little bit sense on some of the stuff.
So this Otters settled outside nearby Fetteville, which had a
large population of Italian immigrants, and a two story timber
framed house two miles north of town. Nineteen twenty three,
(07:31):
they had their first of their ten children. George's business
prospered and then became one of the most respected middle
class families around. In the words of one of the
local officials. However, George did have strong opinions about how
on many subjects. One of those was Benito Mussolini, which
we don't know who Benito Mussolini is. He was, of
(07:53):
course the dictator that ran Italy during World War Two,
so definitely someone that we probably should talk about someday,
but I don't think we've talked about yet. So sure
he's come up in stories, but never had a full
talk about Mussolini. So the last of the Sorder children, Sylvia,
(08:16):
was born in nineteen forty two. By then, their second
oldest son, Joe, had left home to serve in the
military during World War Two. The following year, Mussolini was
deposed and executed. Herabad George's criticism of the late di
dictator had left some hard feelings. Some of the people,
even though they'd come to America and had left Italy
still you know, stood for Italy and still had a
(08:37):
thing for Mussolini and whatever. So Harabad george criticism late
dictator had left some hard feelings. Like I said in
October nineteen forty five, at visiting life insurance salesman, and
see this is this is one of the ones that
comes up a lot. There's a lot of things about
this insurance salesman, and the argument that happened not a
(09:00):
whole lot of I mean, it had just about every
story this one comes up. But there's a lot of
questions about this. So after being rebuffed, warrened George at
his house would go up and smoke, and your children
are going to be destroyed. So cheering this all to
the dirty marks you've been making about Mussolini. Another visitor
to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took theccasion to go
(09:22):
round to the back and warned George that a pair
of fuse boxes would cause a fire someday. George was
puzzled by the observations that she just had the house
rewired when an electric stove was installed and a local
electric company had said afterwards it was safe. And the
weeks before Christmas that year, George's oldest sons had also
noticed a strange car parked along the hot Main highway
(09:42):
through town. It's occupants watching the younger side of children
as they returned from school. Now, that last statement is
something that comes up in a lot of them, but
was mentioned later. It didn't seem to be something that
popped up in their regional investigation of this. Now, this salesman,
this is one that got interesting because there's a couple
of article that mentioned this. A lot of them really
(10:02):
look over it. According to a lot of stuff that
I could find, the argument necessarily wasn't with this salesman,
per se. The argument was more with a gentleman named Ganoleslus.
I'm sure I'm completely saying that wrong. And it's one
(10:22):
of those ones. I could only find it in videos
and some of the some audio stuff, and I found
in a couple other places that talked about it that
it wasn't the salesman that made this comment. It was
this other guy caulists, ganula lists whatever he had when
George started his business, it sounds like, and bought his house.
(10:44):
This guy had helped with the loan to be able
to get it, so he had partial rights to the
house because he had put you know up put up
the loan or done somehow. He was involved, so the house,
he had some right to the house, some buy into
(11:05):
the house. That if the house was destroyed, he would
also lose money. So where the argument came in was
from this gentleman because of the fact that if the
house burned down, he would lose money too, and it
was him who got upset because George did not get insurance,
and if George didn't get insurance, this guy would lose out.
(11:27):
So he the other guy, he got insurance on the
house to protect his investment and his money. So later
when the house spoiler alert that the house burns down,
he did get paid, but George didn't because George didn't
(11:48):
have insurance in the house at least that's one of
the articles. A couple articles that I found mentioned that.
But what's weird, and that's the hard part on a
lot of this stuff, especially you know, you're looking back
in nineteen forty five. Not all of them mentioned that,
So it seems like one of those weird facts that
you have to dig deep for to find when you
(12:09):
go down the rabbit hole. So that's another weird, weird thing.
And once again, as we go into this, there's going
to be a lot of weird things that we talk
about and weird oddities, weird stuff that comes along with
this story. Another one of the articles that talks about this,
(12:32):
the issue with the salesman is supposedly what the guy
said was your goddamn house is going up in smoke,
he warned, and your children are going to be destroyed.
You're going to be paid for the dirty marks you've
been making about Mussolini. So again, it's one of those
things that keeps popping up in that part of the story.
(12:54):
But as I mentioned, I read in multiple places where
they talked about the other gentlemen who owned part of
the house. All right, so let's talk about what happened
with the fire, and we might go into some of
this other stuff later. Like I said, there's a lot
of weird instances the gentlemen that you know sitting outside
the house, the salesman. There's a few weird things that happen.
(13:21):
So basically Christmas Eve. They were a family that opened
up presents Christmas Eve, which I've seen some families do
that as tradition. They open up like it appears anyway,
from what I could find, is what it was is
they opened up presents from like the family and from
each other Christmas Eve, and then in the morning they
(13:42):
would be the presence from Santa Claus. So that's how
a lot of people did it. That's how it was
done so that way you could differentiate the two so
that it sounds like that's what they did. So they
open up about their presence Christmas Eve. The younger children
wanted to play with their presents. And also from one
of the other articles that I read and some stuff
(14:02):
that I listened to, a lot of people speculate that
at the time kind of like they do Norad does
now where they track Santa Claus. They used to have
a radio show that would go through and say, oh,
Santa's here now, so the kids would listen to that
and then you know, kind of find that out. So
they wanted to stay up late, the younger kids, so
they did. They stayed up listening to the radio and
(14:25):
playing with their new toys. So just after midnight on
Christmas morning, the shrill ring of the telephone broke the quiet.
Jenny rush to answer it, and unfamiliar female voice asked
for an unfamiliar name, Rocus. Laughter and glasses clinking could
be heard in the background. Jenny told the call she
had the wrong house and hung up, which seemed odd,
(14:47):
very odd thing. So police later did question the woman
that called, and they said she simply dialed the wrong number.
Tiptoeing back to bed, Jenny note said all the downstairs
lights were on and all the curtains still open. The
front door was unlocked. She saw Marian asleep on the
sofa in the living room and assume that the other
kids were upstairs in bed. She turned out the lights, closed,
the curtains locked, the door, returned to her room. She
(15:08):
just begun to doze when she heard a sharp, loud
bang on the roof and then a rolling noise. About
half an hour later, she roused once again, this time
by heavy smoke crawling into her room. And that's one
of those things that it's kind of questionable on the
timeframe there the timeline because of you know, sleep and
everything else. It could have been a lot less than that,
(15:30):
which we'll come back to because the loud, rolling noise
could have been something else that will point to later
as we're going through this. So this is just kind
of a quick timeline of what happened that night as
the witnesses upset it. So this heavy smoke rolling in
we mentioned earlier, this was a timber framed house. So
(15:52):
and that's where everything kind of goes crazy. Timber framed house.
Everyone runs, they get out of the house, attempt to
get out of the house, and that's that's where everything
starts to go bad. Everyone runs, they get out, at
(16:12):
least most of them. And here's kind of the undisputed
facts again. So nine attention shot, a chilled and the
oldest front was away in the army. Went to bed
on Christmas Eve. After that, mother Jenny was woking three times.
First at twelve thirty, I woke by that phone call,
went back to bed, and then startled by a loud
(16:35):
bang and a rolling noise on the rope. She then
nosed off again and finally awoke an hour later. And
see this is a different article. This one says an hour,
the other one said half an hour. There's kind of
a That timeframe is a little jumbled, so we're not
sure exactly what time because you know that whole sleep
thing she heard the bang, and what time she woke
(16:56):
up the second time. We do know when she woke
up the second time. There is probably about one thirty,
I think is what it ends up being. So four
of the George Jenny and four of the side of children,
toddler Sylvia, teenagers Marian and George Junior, as well as
twenty three year old John escaped. Marion ran to a
neighbor's house to call the Fbill Fire Department, but did
(17:18):
not get a response, prompting another neighbor to go looking
for Fire Chief F. J. Morris. And the hours spent
waiting for help, George and Jenny tried every imaginable way
to rescue their children, but their efforts were thwarted. George's
ladder was missing and neither of his trucks would start.
Help did not arrive until eight am. Eight am. Eight am.
(17:44):
Remember twelve thirty she woke up. They're basically assuming like
an hour later, it's about one thirty ish the fire happened.
They went to go get help. One thirty is ish,
eight am is when the fire department finally showed up.
And here's the fun part. The fire department was only
two miles away from the Solder home. Boom, that's kind
(18:10):
of odd there. The police inspector said that the cause
of the fire was faulty wiring. George and Jenny wanted
to know how that was possible given there had been
no previous issues with the electricity. They also want to
know why there were no remains among the ashes. And
this is the other part that got interesting. When they
searched the ashes, there was no remains, nothing, no bones,
(18:33):
no nothing, which doesn't make sense because when you do
the math and figure everything out, you look into cremation.
Cremation takes about two hours when the fire is at
two thousand degrees fahrenheit. Two hours at two thousand degrees fahrenheit.
(18:58):
The Solder Home only took five minutes to burn. It
was gone in forty five minutes. That doesn't make sense
that would have got up to enough to make the
bones and everything disappear. Considering there was pieces of furnitures
that was survived like they were charred and burnt, but
(19:18):
they serve pieces of them survived. So very weird, so
a nineteen forty nine follow up, Surchon covered a tiny
portion of human vertebrae, which was determined by the Smithsonian
Institution to sustain no fire damage and most likely was
mixed in with the dirt that George used to fill
in the basement while constructing a memorial. So he did
(19:39):
fill in the basement to make a memorial. So that's
some of the craziness is there. But it gets it
gets gets even crazier. So so of course, you know,
like I said, she didn't understand how they could all
pour perish, so she conducted a private experiment. She would
(20:02):
burn animal bones, chicken bones, beef joints, pork chop bones
to see if the fire consumed them. Each time she
was left with a heap of charred bones. She knew
that remnants of various household appliances had been found in
the burned out of basement, still identifiable, and like I
mentioned earlier, an employee at a crematorium informed her that
bones remained after bodies are burned for two hours at
(20:25):
two thousand degrees and again, the house burned to the
ground in forty five minutes. Some of the other details
that are a little bit odd telephone am pair maid
told their swads that their lines appeared to have been cut,
not burned. Their family realized that if the fire had
been electrical, the result of faulty wiring is official port
(20:45):
stated that the power would have been dead and the
lights in the rooms downstairs would have been off instead
the shiny they shine brightly during the blaze. But that's
also that one's question on whether lights were on, because
in the original interview Jenny said they were off, and Joe,
the oldest son said they were on, and then later
(21:08):
everybody said they were on. So there's questions on that
one on whether or not the lights were on or not.
So again, so a witness did come forward claiming he
saw a man at the scene of the fire taking
a block and tackle used for moving car engines, so
basically like a hoist, and yeah, could be he could
(21:29):
be the reason George Trucks had refused to start. The
man in question later played guilty and stealing the block
and tackle, but denied any involvement in the fire. Most
people think that he actually just it was a crime
of convenience. The house is burning down. He knew George
had that he broke it and grabbed it. Yeah. So
one day, while the family was visiting the site, the
(21:50):
youngest child, Sylvia, I found a hard rubber object in
the yard. Jenny called hearing the horror thud on the
roof the rolling sound, and George concluded it was a
napalm or pineapple bomb of this type used in warfare.
So basically a fire a fire starting bomb. Yeah, so
(22:15):
a grenade that starts fires basically, yeah, pineapple bomb. Then
came the reports of sightings. Now this is where it
starts to get crazy too, of people seeing the children.
A woman claimed to have seen the missing children peering
out of a passing car while the fire was in progress.
(22:36):
A woman operating a tourist stop Betweenville and Charleston, West Virginia,
so I'm fifty miles northwest, that she saw the children
in the morning after the fire. I served them breakfast.
She told police there was a car with Florida license
plates at the tourist court too. A woman at Charleston
Hotails saw the children's photos in the newspaper since she
had seen four of the five a week after the fire.
(22:56):
So here's the funny thing too. Apparently Jenny had family
in Florida, and at one point George even thought that
her family had taken them and even went down there
and questioned them on why they had taken his kids,
so which from all accounts, they say they haven't. So
(23:18):
the lady that says she'd seen them in a photo
said she'd seen four of the five, and a savement
to local thorders. She said the children were accompanied by
two women and two men, all of Italian extraction. I
do not remember the exact date, however, the entire party
did register at the hotel and stayed in a large
room with several beds. They registered about midnight. I tried
(23:39):
to talk to the children and a friendly manner, but
the man appeared hostile and hughes allowing me to talk
to these children. One of the men looked at me
in a hostile manner. He turned around and began talking
rapidly in Italian. Immediately the whole party stopped talking to me.
I since that I was being frozen out, and so
I had nothing more, said nothing more. They left early
the next morning. So very interesting. So that's kind of
(24:01):
the crazy stuff that comes in with the you know,
the kids, people saw them. There was reports that they
survived supposedly, but you know so in nineteen forty seven,
George and Jenny said a letter about the case the
Federal Brewer of Investigation. They received to apply from the
(24:21):
agency's director, Jay Edgar Hoover, who wrote, although I would
like to be of service, the matter related appears to
be of local character and does not come with an
investigative jurisdiction of this bureau who was agents said they
would assist if they could get permission from the local authorities,
but the Fayval police and fire departments declined the offer.
So their stance was that it was an electrical fire
(24:43):
and all five children perish in the fire. That was
their stance, and that's what they were sticking to. Yes,
definitely sticking to it. So and here's a couple things
of the fire. I mean, you can go into detail.
The hard part with going to detail of what happened
with the fire is it's all hearsay, all crazy stuff
(25:07):
that you go into that it was they all woke up. Joe,
the oldest, tried to wake up the younger ones and
then ran out. Supposedly, later he changed the story and
said that he never actually shook them. He originally said
(25:28):
they shook them to wake them up, thought that they
were awake, and ran ran out, and then they never
followed him. Later he said that he never actually saw
them or shook them. He yelled for them and that
was it. So the big question that comes in here
and a lot of people during this investigation really wonder
is when the family went to bed and the five
(25:48):
stayed up, that was the last time anyone saw those five,
the five that went missing and disappeared and supposedly died
in the fire, or the five that stayed up up,
Nobody saw them after everybody else went to bed. When
the mom got up again and answered the phone, she
(26:11):
saw one of the kids, but not one of the
five that went missing, laying on the bed on the couch.
Another one that toddler, was in their room with them.
So a lot of people, you know, the way that
they say happened was Jenny got up, she ran when
she saw the fire, handed it, grabbed the toddler, handed
it to Muriel. I believe it is the one that
was on the couch, and she ran out with the
(26:34):
baby and went to call the fire department. From the neighbors,
the other five that went missing had not been seen
since everybody else went to bed. So when the mother
got up at twelve thirty to that phone call, she
saw Muriel, but not the five. She assumed they went
to bed and left all the lights on with the
door unlocked. So that's where a lot of these questions
(26:57):
started coming in on whether or not they were even
there when the fires started. So yeah, So next this
uters turned to a private investigator named C. C. Tinsley.
He discovered that the insurance salesman who had threatened George
was a member of the coroner's jury that deemed the
fire accidental. According to The Times West Virginia, the individual
(27:19):
had previously been employed by George, and he was a
co signer on the family's home insurance, which he'd increased
from fifteen hundred to seven fifty before the fire. Now
that's where things get weird. That's what some of them say,
is that the insurance guy was he was the co signer,
but it wasn't him. It was actually another guy, depending
on which. And this is one of those things, like
(27:40):
I said, it's being from forty five. I heard both,
I saw both, and you know this one right here
is the Smithsonian magazine that's saying that it was the
insurance salesman. Another one that I saw had said that
it was that there was another owner all right, so
that he'd got a loan who also had an insurance
(28:03):
policy on the house. So the detective also heard a
curious story about Morris, the fire chief. Although Morris claimed
that no remains had been found, it's supposedly confided to
someone they discovered a human organ in the ashes and
hit it inside a dynamite box and buried it at
the scene. So, and this is one too that comes
(28:25):
back and forth on whether or not where where the
idea of this happens. A lot of people use a
private investigator is an easy out on this one. That
he found it all other people don't. Most people backus
when they talk about the private basketor pretty much said
they paid him. The guy looked around a little bit
and then basically fucked off and they never saw him again.
So but other ones say that, hey, he found all
(28:48):
this information. Others say this information came out different ways.
So but after the Sodas dug up the box, they
took it straight to a local funeral director who poked
and proud of the organ and concluded it was beef
liver that had never seen fire, so it could not
be from one of the children. Soon the family heard
rumors that Morris had told others that the contents of
(29:09):
the box had not been found in the fire at all,
and said he'd bury the beef liver in the rubble
and the hope that finding any remains would placate the
family enough to stop the investigation. Now there's a couple
of weird rumors that come around with this. One. One
of them is that Jenny knew more than she said,
(29:30):
And this is one of those ones. And this becomes
those crazy rumors and speculation that people pop up with,
you know, no evidence, nothing at all, And this is
one of them. And we'll go through a few more
as we go. That she knew about it, that the
reason that the one lady only saw four kids at
the hotel is because only four survived. That one of
(29:50):
the kids was killed and Jenny saw it and knew
about it, and it was killed as a warning that
they were taking the other full and they killed the
one and said, hey, if you do anything or say anything,
we will kill the other ones. And that she was
in it in with the fire inspectrum when he buried
(30:14):
that because she's trying to get George to back off
and stop looking, that if he'd found remains, he would
stop looking, and then these people would to kill the
other children. That was one of the stories. But I
don't know if I believe that one. There's too much
other evidence that points to that she, you know, really
wanted to find the kid and was looking for him.
(30:34):
So but yeah, so that was it. So the oldest sibling,
John said the fire marshal was either paid off or
they didn't push it. So so this was in the
Roanoke Times in nineteen eighty four. The family wasn't sure
what had happened during the fire, but they were convinced
(30:55):
that something was off. Perhaps a blaze was an active
at Arson designed to cover their production the five mystic
children who'd been spirited away by the Italian mafia's revenge
for George's criticism of Mussolini. So that's one thought which
goes into what I was just talking about with but
Jenny knowing that she knew about this because she'd seen
them and talked to them, and then yeah, all that
(31:15):
so or maybe the children were victims of a human
trafficking scheme, as John told the Virginia newspaper, or if
thinking was that kidnappers might have been trying to take
us all, My brother Bray and I barely got out
of the house, but you can't relive it. Over the
next several year years, tips and leads continued to trickle in.
(31:37):
George saw a newspaper photo of the school children in
New York City and was convinced that one of them
was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan and searched
the child, but her parents refused to speak to him.
In August nineteen forty nine, the saughters decided to mount
a new search at the fire scene. They brought in
a Washington d c. Pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter. The
excavation was thorough, uncovering a number of small object damaged coins,
(32:01):
a partly burned dictionary, and several shards of vertebrae. Hundred
set the bones to the Smithsonian Institution, which we'd mention
these a little earlier, which issued the following report. The
human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual.
Since the transverse recessor fused the age of this individual
at death should have been sixteen or seventeen years old.
(32:22):
The limit of age should be about twenty two, since
the CenTra, which normally fused it twenty three are still
in unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal
matureration than one would expect for a fourteen year old boy,
who is the oldest of the missing Solder children. It is, however, possible,
although not probable, for a boy fourteen and a half
years old to show age sixteen or seventeen maturation. So
(32:47):
those were some of the bones that were found. Once again,
a lot of people assume that those bones because he
did fill in the basement, because most of the house burnt.
It was a basement, the main floor, and and then
basically say the attic, But it was basically just a
second floor where the kids bedrooms were so basic. When
the house burnt, it all just fell straight into the
(33:09):
basement and became a pile of the basement and then
they bury it, brought in dirt and buried that. So
the vertebrates showed no evidence of being exposed to fire.
The report said to get adding it is very strange
to know other bones were found in the alleged the
careful excavation of the basement of the house give the
relatively short time the fire burned. The Smithsonian scholars said
one would expect to find the full skeletons of the
(33:31):
five children rather than only four vertebra The Bones report
concluded have most likely been the supply of dirt George
used to fill in the basement to create the memorial.
So that's kind of the thought process on that one. Yeah. So.
Speaking with The Times West Virginia in twenty sixteen, Cruckshank,
the firefighter, point out that work materials kept in the
(33:52):
family's garage, like fifty five gallon drums of gasoline and motives,
might have intensified the heat of the flames by covering
the fire's embers with dirt. In the meadiate aftermath of
the blaze, George also intevertently created an oven that would
advance the information process. The newspaper reported, there's arguments about
the gas where Cruckshank says, there was the family and
(34:12):
the children. The older son said, yes, he did work
on motors in the basement, but he never kept gas
down there, So yeah. Stacy Horne, author recovered the case
for NPR shared similar reflections on the fire in a
two thousand and five blog posts, writing that the wildly
cided estimate of the flames burning for forty five minutes
(34:32):
is misleading. In truth, she said, the inferno burned all
night long and into the next morning. When the fire
department did finally appear, it was still hot and they
had to water the site down before conducting their search. Furthermore,
two hours not even close to a thorough search. Today,
the search for remains would take days, in possibly weeks.
And that's the thing that once the house burned and
they basically sprayed fire on water on it. Once the
(34:55):
fire department got there seven hours later, cool it down,
and then they only investigated basically. The estimates are an
hour to two hours. That was the entire investigation. An
hour to two hours. Nowadays, even with all of today's technology,
would be weeks. And they're based it in an hour to
(35:17):
two hours and said, nope, nothing here. We sipped it
through it with a fine toothcomb and found nothing. So
as this a guy from Spaseball says, we ain't found
shit but in two hours that you need more time
than that to look through those those remains plus, like
they said, once you put the dirt on there, it
(35:39):
kind of made oven effect. Could have could have but
not likely, but could have gotten rid of the bones.
So the Smithsonian's findings prompted two hearings at the state
capitol and Charleston, after which Governor OK L. Pattison and
State Police Superintendent W. Burchett told the Sados their shirt
(35:59):
was hopefully and declared the case closed. Doorities wondered whether
it was possible, likely even that the family's grief was
clouding their judgment, leading them to search for signs of
life where none could be found. Undeterred, George and Jenny
erected the billboard a long Route sixteen and passed out
flyers offering a five thousand dollars reward for information leaving
(36:19):
the recovery of their children. They soon increased that amount
to ten thousand dollars. A letter arrived from a woman
in Saint Louis saying the oldest girl, Martha, was in
a convent there. Another tip came from Texas, where a
patron and bar said they overheard an incrimination incriminating conversation
about a long ago Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia.
(36:41):
So when Florida claimed the children were staying with the
distant relative of Jenny's, George traveled the country to investigate
each lead, always returning home without any answers. In the
late nineteen sixties, more than twenty years after the fire,
Jenny received an envelope postmarked in Kentucky. Inside it was
the photo of a man in his mid twenty on
the back of a snapshot, A cryptic handwritten note read
(37:03):
Lewis sotder I love brother Frankie ill ol boys A
nine zero, one, three two or three five. So yeah,
Jenny and George couldn't deny the sitter's resemblance to their Lewis,
who was nine at the time of the fire. Beyond
the obvious similarities, dark curly hair, dark brown eyes, they
had the same straight, strong nose, the same upward tilt
(37:26):
of the left eyebrow. Once again, the family hired a
private detective and sent him to Kentucky, and this one
they definitely never heard from again. So he basically went
to Kentucky and never came back, So which has lots
of questions on that. So why didn't he come back?
What happened with him? There's not a whole lot of
reports on what happened with that private investigator. Why he
(37:48):
just went off to Kentucky and never came back, or
did he just take their money and just leave, or
did something happen. Did he show up there and they
someone offered him more money to back off, or was
he killed or was he what? Nay, who knows? So
this sawd was feared that if they published the message
(38:09):
or the name of the town on the postmark, they
might put their son at risk, and staid they ment
at the billboard to include the updated image of Lewis.
It's hard sometimes to get to sleep at night just
wondering about them, George told the Associated Press in nineteen
sixty eight. After all of someone wanted to get me,
why'd they get my family too, he added, it's like
hitting a rock wall. We can't go any further. We
just don't know what to do now. George died a
(38:32):
year after that in nineteen sixty nine. Still hoping for
a break in the case, Jenny erected a fence around
her property and began adding rooms to her home, building
layer after layer between herself and the outside. Since the fire,
she had won Black exclusively as a sign of morning,
and she continued to do so until her own death
in nineteen eighty nine, when the weather billboard finally came down.
(38:54):
So it was up till nineteen eighty nine when they
finally took it down. After Jenny died, the saughters, surviving
children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with
theories of their own. So we mentioned earlier there'd be
some crazy theories. Here's some of them. The local mafia
branch had tried to recruit George and he declined. They
tried to extort money from him, and he refused. The
(39:16):
children were kidnapped by someone they knew, someone who burst
into the unlocked front door, told them about the fire
and off to take them someplace safe. They might not
have survived the night if they had, and if they
lived for decades if it really was Lewis in the photograph.
They failed to contact their parents only because they wanted
to protect them. Sylvia, the youngest survivor of the fire,
(39:36):
died in twenty twenty one, aged seventy nine. Until then,
Schuman seat fast and to believe that her siblings had
escaped the Lames. Growing up, Sylvia was the only child
in a lot of ways. Her daughter Jenny hen Thorne,
told The Independent in twenty twenty two, You've got to
think that my aunts and uncles that were present after
the fire. Who was still at home weren't really at home.
(39:56):
Two had been away at wore they were grown. Henthorp,
for her part, unlikely that her family would ever find closure.
Anybody who knew what happened would have been my grandparents' age,
and told The Independent, I would think that it's been
public enough that if the children wanted to be found
later on in life, they would have reached out. So
that's the story. It's interesting definitely. Like I said, this
(40:23):
is one that has fascinated me for a bit because
I mean it's nineteen forty five. There's so many much intrigue.
There's questions on what his tie to the mafia could
have been. A lot of people thought maybe it was
a kidnapping for ransom, which was very common in the forties.
We've talked about it before with you know, other cases
(40:44):
in the forties which children were taking ransomed. It's happened.
It's also as typically most people say that, you know,
the mafia usually doesn't go after children, but they have
but they typically do not they have in the past.
So I mean, it could have been the mafia getting
(41:04):
back at George for not joining them, or for being
against Mussolini or whatever. Could have just been neighbors that
were mad at him for whatever reason, people that weren't
happy about his his Mussolini issues, all sorts of stuff.
Could have just been at the fire. They died in
the fire and somehow the remains just were missed, they
(41:26):
weren't found that they're still there, Who knows they might
still be there. Definitely an interesting story, Definitely one that
you should go back and read, look into, get deeper
into that one. Are they still out there? I mean
at this point, if they're still out there, they're old.
(41:48):
So the youngest died at seventy nine a few years back,
so they would be in their eighties or nineties at
this point. So more than likely if they survived, they
died later life life. But yeah, so Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny,
(42:09):
and Betty, those were the five. So Maurice was fourteen,
Martha was twelve, Louise was nine, I believe Jenny was eight,
and Betty was four. So sad, very sad, very interesting case,
(42:38):
but definitely want to go look At look At, Look
Deeper into that one. It's quite interesting one. Yeah, so
thank you all for listening and the Sunday you will
get me in big d again on another great episode.
So if you have any ideas thoughts something I missed
in this one, let me know. Thank you, see you later.
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