Unsolved Christmas Mystery Of The Sodder Children
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- čas přidán 26. 07. 2024
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On Christmas Eve, 1945, the small town of Fayetteville, West Virginia was stunned by a fire at the house of George Sodder, the owner of a local trucking company. Five of the Sodder children never came out. But no remains were ever found, and as various sightings of the children started coming in, along with clues that pointed fingers at local political groups, they began to suspect that the children may have been kidnapped. What exactly happened to the Sodder children is a mystery that has never been fully explained.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS
www.bostonreview.net/articles...
primolevicenter.org/events/fa...
segredosdomundo.r7.com/wp-con...
www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
thecrimewire.com/true-crime/T...
allthatsinteresting.com/sodde...
play.history.com/shows/histor...
/ the_sodder_children_ne...
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
1:05 - The Backstory
4:07 - Questions and Controversy
9:40 - Reopening the Investigation
12:36 - Sightings
14:08 - Theories
17:50 - Sponsor - Nebula
stacyhorn.com/2005/12/28/long... - Věda a technologie
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Thanks!
Love your channel but the bleeps made it sound like you were saying fuck or fucking. Not the best vib when you’re actually talking about dead children, just saying. Still a good video
Please consider just muting the audio next time if you really fear demonetization (which i personally highly doubt was warranted for some of those words like "died" which I've seen used on plenty on videos with monetization).
I love the choice of text in the bleeps at the bottom. I wish this platform could treat it's users like adults. I mean if they can have a YT kids why not a YT rated M or whatever.
@@salimufari No creator would want that because it would severely reduce the amount of advertisers available for adsense. CZcams is the one with the leverage and they need to just tell the advertisers to screw off if they're scared of a few swear words (or apparently even non-swears).
Got Nebula... never use it cuz the feed curating algorithm is subpar. I would use it, in situations like this *IF* say you could post a link directly to that vid. Then maybe over time I could sufficiently train the algorithm... hopfully.
Worked in the funeral industry for very long time and most of that work was as a crematory operator or crematory management. I can say with almost 100% certainty that the children were not killed in that fire and simply reduced to ash. Ive cremated people over 500lbs and newborns, their is always something left. Plus in a open air fire without controlled and directed heat they would not simply reduce to ash. There would still be "pieces" of their bodies.
wow thats a solid opinion by an expert. Definitely makes me lean the other way.
Yep your gonna get a visit by the feds
@@asylum.patient 😂
Why hasn't a single one realized their true identity and come forward? I mean, mom died 34 years ago. They haven't had to worry about retribution for at least that long!
@@asylum.patient If @Duffman638 lives anywhere but the US, what are the Feds going to do?
Its wild how many old unsolved crimes start off with lazy police / investigators not wanting to do their actual jobs.
I think it’s going to get worse because it’s not just police that don’t want to do their job!
I noticed the work ethic of younger people is pretty much just shit!
Or maybe they were poorly paid and over worked in a country that still has no social systems to make troubled people or just people with trouble and just deals with problems by shooting it or putting it in jail or both.
@@Dr_Larken0:51
@@Dr_Larken - I notice the psychological conditioning of the older generation was incredibly harsh.
Thats just normal police.
12:30 Honestly not a mystery at all. Until fairly recent legislation, farm communities would often bury their dead on the property instead of interring them in cemeteries. Over time, some families would go extinct, or the properties would be sold and the gravesites forgotten. Sometimes when you're grabbing some random dirt out in the middle of nowhere, you'll get somebody's remains in there.
Exactly or maybe some native American remains, you never know.
In my teens, I found a small tombstone while doing some landscaping for my grandparents on their farm. I still have it; I figured it would be bad luck to just dispose of it. I did not explore further for any remains,
My late father lived in very rural central Kentucky. There was a strip of woods on the side of his property, near the neighbor's. I love to walk the woods, & the first time I bushwacked thru there I found two headstones nearly buried in dirt, moss, & the weeds. They were so old nothing could be read on them. Dad had no clue they were there, no one will ever know who lies there, but we cleaned up the brush & stuff around them a bit. It seemed rather sad that no one knew they were there or would ever know who they were.
This happens everywhere. I live in Washington State and once owned an old home built in1911. There was a huge apple tree in the back yard and the original owners were buried under it. I never ate the apples!
@@spnyp33What's the Tombstone made of?? And yes I'll feel stupid if you say "stone"! LOL
In 24 years as a professional firefighter in a major metropolitan area, I never saw or even heard of a fire fatality where human remains could not be easily located and identified.
No way that the heat produced by a house fire will be sufficient to completely incinerate 5 bodies.
Crematoriums work because the fire is inside a sealed unit. Temperatures can rise well beyond the flash point of structural and furnishing materials. Even in a cremation, bone fragments and some teeth will often remain intact.
In a house fire, as soon as a window is broken or a portion of a roof collapses, fresh air is constantly introduced to the fire. Temperatures no longer have the chance to get to the level necessary to do so much damage to a body.
The moisture in a body will also protect bone and tissue for quite a while. The only way for these children’s bodies to have simply vanished is if they simply weren’t in the house when the fire happened.
There is plenty of photographic evidence out there to show what is left of a human body after an intense and prolonged house fire. It isn’t nice to look at but it is usually intact.
For me, the biggest “mystery” is the phone call. Rural areas in 1945 wouldn’t receive a “misdial”. Then it was definitely connected by an operator. Which means someone had to request a connection through an operator. There is always the possibility of an incorrect or cross connection… but someone would have definitely been waiting on the line to talk to whoever picked up.
Most likely a Party Line... it would have rung a lot of phones. My grandparents still had a party line in the 60's...
That’s a possibility too. Further researching shows some reports say the phone line was cut. But was due to an unrelated crime. I just can’t get over the phone line thing. I’m sure it’s related to the fire being electrical.
@@185MDEfound your comment & reply to be one of the coolest parts for some reason about this case. very insightful read thanks
@@grene1955 Party lines have a different style of ring for each house on the party line. Anyone who had a party line would know their ring in a heartbeat and not mistaken it for someone else. Was a good thought though.
@@twenty99 thank you!
“..threatened to burn down his house and *BLEEP* his children.” Yikes, the censorship has made this story unintentionally darker
it did.
Yeah, the beeps just made this sound even more wrong. The more popular thing to do on YT is use alternate words like “unalive”. It still sounds a bit silly but better than the beeps.
yeah I kept filling in the beeps with a worse scenario every time, especially since I truly believe they were kidnapped.
One thought occurred to me regarding no remains being found in the ashes of the house: I recall that Caitlin Doughty on the CZcams channel , Ask a Mortician, said in one video that to cremate a body, you need a temperature well over 2000 degrees fahrenheit. Even at that temperature, bones remain (they're broken into small pieces afterwards, according to my understanding.) It seems unlikely to me that no bones, not even parts of skulls, would have been left behind. A human heart, however, would be destroyed at a much lower temperature.
I couldn't figure out why anyone would have believed that because it's it's just a piece of meat - literally
I watch Caitlin too. I'm pretty sure she said they use a mallet/hammer to reduce pieces so there's consistency of size throughout.
(i could be remembering that from something else though 😆)
@@animerlon They use a machine called a cremulator to crush bone fragments into a powder like consistently. My sister works in a crematorium. Large bones such as femurs often need to be crushed.
It's possible the authorities in 1945, whether because of corruption or incompetence, or both, failed to identify the remaining bone fragments. 🤔
@@chrisv9186 Except that there would have to be whole bones remaining. That 2000 F temperature? You need to maintain that constantly for 2ish hours in order for cremation to occur, and still leave whole bones behind. House fires can _peak_ at that temperature, yes - but they cannot maintain it, not in open air in the middle of winter. So were there any remains, they would be very visible.
There's another interesting fact I've heard regarding this case, apparently the object that caused the loud thud reported by Jennie Sodder was recovered in the rubble following the fire and George Sodder apparently identified it as rubber pineapple grenade
That wouldn't have caused such a fire, and it would have been a loud bang. It was not a grenade that hit the house. Grenades don't have fireballs like on movies.
To be fair, “your wiring is fine” at the time was still a pretty severe fire risk.
I worked for a company that did maintenance for this ancient building and we had to replace all the wiring in the basement. It was all from the 60’s and even then the standards were not good. It was shocking how it had been there for so long without starting a fire.
@thezombiequeen1908 yes, shody wiring is truly SHOCKING!
Also appliances and electric cords were not always safe
Except it's pretty clear that it was a molotov, here in Europe, when riots break out, they fly about pretty easily. So we're familiar with them. Everything the mother says and describes, is bang on with how fast a molotov would light up a house of that type.
As a licensed electrician I approve of this message. I find fire hazards in my own home that was built in 2020 on time to time. Inspectors don't even look at 10% of the work. You are mostly relying on the contractor and their employees to do the right thing. Assuming they know how.
I may have missed it. But I had always heard that not only was the ladder not in its usual location, but that they later found it in the middle of a nearby field, with no explanation. As though it had been intentionally hidden.
Yeah, they found it in a nearby embankment.
@@xealixcrowing7659 maybe someone was wondering around drunk that night and stole it. One of my neighbors did that, swiped all my lawn chairs and then I found him and the chairs in a bunch of bushes the next day.
I heard this as well
@@kellyroth3512 Heard? or read?
Or used to enter the house... and then hidden...
A detail Joe didn't report that i saw in another video was that a hard runner object was found in the yard, and it was suggested that it could've been the object that was heard clunking on the roof the night before.
When it was shown to George he identified it as part of an incendiary grenade used in WWII.
Its very possible that in the age of 23&Me and Ancestry that this unsolved mystery could have a new chapter or two. If the children were kidnapped, and presumably grew up as that picture of the older Louis suggests, those kids would likely have had kids of their own.
All you need is a few people to sign up for the same service and suddenly some dots can start to be connected.
This. They are solving so many old cases now with DNA .
Agreed. They could even still be alive. Depending on genetics and lifestyles they would be in their 80s. I feel like genetic genealogy is going to be the key to finally giving the remaining family closure.
As of a couple of years ago, this has not occurred for this family.
If they were allowed to live long enough to have families.
Most of those services will give you fake/unverified results, so, not likely to be helpful 👍
It's too bad we can't discuss real life issues without beeping out parts of real life.
Advertisers don't want to be associated with real life. You don't want to advertise your ready meal just after a gruesome cremation.
It's simple business.
If CZcams placed every ad by hand they could use tact, mix and match. But this is automated and thus they are careful.
I feel like “passed” would flow naturally and disrupt less than the beep
It is INSANE! A youtuber can say Fuck and Shit but god forbid you mention suicide or real life Nazis!!!
Not Joe trying to make a point to set up his Nebula ad. 😆
Yeah - I can't afford Nebula so to me it just feels like class warfare instigated by somebody I like.
CZcams needs to start a rating system. The demonetization over a few words is just stupid.
Right? Someone trying to be "candid about their sewer slide" is... Somehow worse.
I pay subscription fees for YT Premium, so every video I watch should get a cut of that, regardless of whether it carries ads (which I don't see). I doubt CZcams has a system of revenue sharing that nuanced though.
I’ve heard this story told by 4 or so different people by now, and honestly it’s still fascinating to learn about each time.
Scary Interesting is one of them. This Joe dude stole the entire script from Scary Interesting. What a punk.
@@AmysAttitudeor, you know, they could’ve both gotten the same information from similar sources
We had a similar loss of a young adult in my hometown. Very sketchy. His skull was found years later about a kilometer from his abandoned truck with a gunshot wound. Ruled a possible suicide but may have been assisted or an out right homicide as no gun was found but it was about 12 years later.
Really, who was it?
Well, generally when someone shoots themselves the gun is found next to the body. So, either someone stumbled across a gun and a body, and decided to take the gun and not tell anyone about the body, or it was a homicide.
Just his skull?
@@raerohan4241 Not impossible given the amount of time, decom and animals what not. Skull is the least like bone to be pick away given the shape and size.
My wife’s family is from WV. I don’t know why, but every crime story she’s told me about the area involves arson. There was one case where a murderer confessed to killing somebody, but refused to confess to burning down the victim’s house. I’ve never understood the connection. Maybe it all goes back to those billboards.
I visited West Virginia a few times. When someone sees something all the phones start going off. They call the police the law there. I saw the police as gestapo. The bullies. Now everything is turning upside down when it happens to them they'll be pleading for mercy. Man made law is superceded by universal law God's ten commandments. The reason they say every knee will bow. When man realizes they're not in control only God is in control and our job is to obey the ten commandments as commanded. Pretty sad it's going to take removing everything from then until they finally see it. Quite different feel in West Virginia than in other states. Hatfield and McCoy? They'll be brought to their knees. Their coal industry that they need earth but earth would continue without them because of greed they could lose everything. Banks are closing down rapidly. Trains are being targeted. Almost like God's in control and they're not. I hope they see this comment.
"Burnin' people out" was/can still be a big thing here in Appalachia.
@@FlyingWraith So was sacrificing children to Moloch but everyone knows how that story ends.
West Virginia is I believe the third poorest state after Mississippi and Louisiana. Even though it's surrounded by fairly wealthy states like Ohio and Maryland and North Carolina. It's a bit of a different world.
@@ammitthedevourerofsouls Don't panic. Nursey's on her way with your medication and a nice warm drink.
If you ever do a follow up on their decedents let us know if they did some kind of genetic match up, to see if they could find each other like that.
I never could have imagined how DNA would wind up being the true crime hero we've always been waiting for. It's sofa king neato! 😃
I often wonder how many people are shaking in their boots knowing just how close they are to getting caught now that DNA evidence is a thing.
Yeah, those five kids could have had kids. If those kids ever got curious about their family histories they'd probably end up with unsatisfying answers that could have prompted a DNA test. Maybe one would try for a family match. No doubt there are close living relatives who could provide DNA. So tempting to think that this could provide a huge boost to the search for answers.
You mean DECENDENT'S right? Cause a decedent is a dead person. Check your spelling.
@@jacob1207 Oh it would! there's an answer there for good or bad. With a family that big thats a gene pool. I would love to think GED Match or one of those, is working on it now. It an awful tragedy and with so much weird evidence. I tend to go with Occum's Razor.... but there's definitely reasonable doubt. If I was those parents I know I would have held out hope. Even I want to believe they lived and grew up etc. Can I really evaluate how much emotions effect my reasoning? Idk can anyone?
@@jacob1207 Slightly different point but i read an interesting article discussing the ethics of these companies sharing information with police and how even if you haven't taken a test the growing database of customers means your crime-scene DNA probably would find a match and then you probably could be identified using genealogy.
Here in the UK I think I'm right saying it would be unlawful for a company to share with cops/health insurers etc, at the very least it's stated company policy. I think that's probably a good thing for civil liberty given the various, nefarious uses such info could be put towards but I can see the benefits of sharing too.
This case is wierd. I understand why the parents (and the family) wondered what happened. I still have problems with the 7 hours for the fire department. I lived (several years) in an area with a volunteer fire department. One to two men always showed up quickly and before the equipment. They would help with rescue (if needed) or other things. 7 hours seems way too long -- even for a holiday. The volunteers could have walked to the burning house in less then half the time.
Yup. There is no way it took seven hours for volunteer firefighters to show up. No way. Even in 1945. They were held back or they decided to not show up for a while.
As someone who grew up in an Italian American family none of this is actually surprising to me. My grandmother's best friend in grade school, Fatima Ugilini (😅), was kidnapped at the age of 12 by her father's business partner and forced into marriage; then they came home again where they all found a new normal because by social standards she was "ruined" and staying in the marriage was the only way she could have some semblance at a normal life. And of course, stay out of hell.🙄 She went on to "adopt" the children of her husband's mistress, on top of her own four kids, totaling 7.
My great grandfather was born in Sicily but raised in the Italian Alps by another unrelated family, while all his other brothers were adopted (in the most casual sense of the word) by local families who shipped them off to the US to make money. They paid for my g. grandfather (the youngest) to come over as well but he didn't join the gang as they had (the Purple Gang). He'd felt like a burden to the rural farming family that took him in, who had many kids of their own, and decided to find his own way. He became a butcher and made homemade wine in the garage. He gave my mother a juice glass of this wine "for health" every day before school. Starting in first grade.
My real grandfather, whom I've never met, was also a gangster and there were tunnels connecting the houses under the road to other gangster families in the neighborhood. My grandmother divorced him after one too many trips hiding from gunfire in those tunnels with my mother. She married a 4F German American at the war's end, who is the only grandfather I've ever known and he was awesome (his best friend was named Harry Keister; wish I was joking). Grandma however was an absolute psychopath and terrifying. She worked as a bookkeeper for the family doctor for decades and skimmed so much money I'm shocked I was the only person to ever discover her (school budget project). The doctor lived across the street from us (grandparents' house) and his wife was my grandmother's best friend. They were English with ties to the Caribbean; had they been Italian I don't think this would have happened. Or maybe it would. Like I said, psychopath.
In turn, my grandmother raised my brothers when the 60s/70s happened to my mom, and sometimes me as well, depending on my mother's current state of mental health. While I was kindergarten another Italian family, childless, disapproved of my mother and tried to get the courts to take me away from her and allow them legal adoption. The courts told my mother as long as she was married they didn't have a leg to stand on so my mother married someone quickly, an Italian who needed a greencard. I think I only saw him twice. He died in a car crash a week after the marriage was dissolved. No, my mother had nothing to do with it. Because it was the seventies a husband had been the only way she was permitted to have a credit card.
In the eighties we (at my grandparents) took in the neighbor kid for a few years. Carl had been prank calling some mobster who got fed up and bombed Carl's family's living room. No one was hurt but being that his father was the fire chief Carl had to live with us for awhile.😆
We also had another branch of the family; my uncle (-?-grandmothers were sisters) was a successful criminal attorney, they were church-going Catholics, and my aunt never, ever in her entire life spoke a bad word about anyone. His boys followed in his footsteps and his daughter (my cousin?) became a school teacher and married well. When my brother faced prison in the eighties my uncle got him out and then decided to break off all ties with our side of the family.
The point to all this is, many Italian families are and have always been both fluid and complicated. Not unlike Oobleck. Knowing this, I fully believe those children survived, the neighbors were psychotically spiteful and the authorities were beyond crooked. It was almost as polarizing of a time as things are now. The siblings were probably scattered all over the country and the community most likely legitimately believed they were doing right by those kids.
Anyway, from my personal experience this is Occam's Razor. Of course I may be the only Italian descendant who's ever heard of Occam's Razor. Simplicity is not an Italian virture.
I want to read a book about your family. (Also, poor Fatima. She deserved so much better.)
@@SewardWriter I know, Fatima's story is so sad. Unfortunately although it wasn't considered "normal" at the time, it wasn't uncommon either. Imagine how betrayed and small she must have felt when her dad kept doing business with the man.
I won't be writing anything (rather not relive certain parts) but you could use it for inspiration if you like, being that you have Writer in your name.🙂 If it helps, all this went down in Detroit. I'd tell you to leave me a dedication but clearly my name is not Violet.😅
@@CleoHarperReturns Yeah, that poor girl. I hate that she was punished for his actions.
Give me time, I might come up with something. :) If nothing else, some of this could work in something I've been batting around.
The youngest of those kids would still be alive today. Why have they never ever come forward with their suspicions? It's not possible to me that A) they all died young from random accidents or cancer or B) not a single one had a single inkling that they might be one of these pretty highly publicized kids. Maybe they were arson-murdered and not kidnapped.
@@User31129That could very well be.
Or perhaps they traded up. We don't know anything about their parents except they were anti-Mussolini.
Or there's also the fact that things were just not talked about in those days. For instance, women would take things like r*pe or unwanted children to their graves. Back then there were more reasons to stay quiet than there were to come forward. I'm sure that if they were alive, they knew exactly what had happened.
They could have felt indebted to some very bad people, who they now "owed" for their upkeep.
Also, being in another state was like being in another country when it came to things like news. Long distance calls were expensive as hell and usually reserved for tragic news and phones were rarely used by children. There's a decent chance they hadn't heard anything. They could have been told their parents died in the fire and either never found out, or found out so late in life they just wanted to "let sleeping dogs lie, what's done is done." As they used to say ad nauseam.
Or, they could have been killed and a fire lit to cover the crimes. How could a child sleeping on the couch not realize the house was engulfed in flames? Her smoke-filled lungs would have woken her long before the flames ever reached her. Perhaps she was dead already. Perhaps she was a mound of pillows and never there at all.
My mother was born in '48 and there is no way if anything like this had happened to her she'd have told anyone, especially not now. It took me 50 years of pulling teeth to get her to tell me the reason she was terrified to ever have the curtains open (peeping Tom incident when she was a teen; she got seriously shamed for years after).
There are just so many variables; we'll never really know. Which is why it holds our attention.
This case is SO weird. I do think they were taken, and it 100% has to do with the threats the family received. It's just so horribly sad that the parents passed away before they could figure out what happened. Sadly I don't think we ever will.
idk… kidnapping 5 children at the same time doesn’t seem very practical. i think it’s more likely they died in the fire. do think it could’ve been arson though
@@grasstastesbad My thing is that bones don't just disintegrate like that. Even in cremations bones are always left behind, and that happens at VERY high temperatures.
@@petalpotionsartBones are not always left behind
@@petalpotionsart& that was a lot of bones that disintegrated. If it’s true that some of the furniture recognizable, it stands to reason that there’d be some bone fragments found.
Has no one thought of the family being suspects themselves? It's not like it never happened... even from the most unsuspecting parent/parents.
The insurance guy would have tampered with wiring, known about the neighbors ladder, and disconnected whatever made both trucks not start.
I used to nanny/babysit for a friend with 2 children, a boy, Wylde (6) and a girl, Lyric (9).... we lost them to a house fire between Thanksgiving and Christmas this past year, I mean 2022 sucked, but losing those kiddos was absolutely devastating for anyone that knew and loved them. I can only imagine the parents not knowing whether they were lost in the fire or were kidnapped. Idk what's worse honestly.😢
Sorry to hear that, hope you're doing okay now 😔
@@cherrydragon3120 we hung a big collage of them in our living room, that some friends had made for us with a bunch of pictures of us all together. It helps seeing them smiling every day, but definitely still miss their craziness
@@cherrydragon3120 thank you
sorry for your loss
As someone who has worked in childcare for coming up on 10 years now, that horrifies me. I am so so sorry for you and your friends loss. I took a break from working with kids to try working as a home care aid for an elderly man. His neighbor's ex husband showed up and stabbed her in front of their 7 year old son and I had to sit with him and take care of him while they tried to save the moms life and the police arrested the POS that did it. I took that as a sign I should go back to working with kids, especially because I had such a hard time when clients would pass away.
Great video :) such a sad but fascinating case. Here are a couple of additional interesting facts if you’re interested. In regards to the picture of Louis that was addressed to the mom, Jennie, she did had a brother named Frank Cipriani, who could be “brother Frankie”. The Sodder family had initially suspected him because he lived in Florida. There were witnesses who saw the children get into cars with Florida licence plates. Even the Sodders believed this theory that Jennie’s brother took them because it would’ve been someone they knew. Thank you again for a great video.
That photo looks just like Louis. You can see it clearly in the nose and eyebrows.
@@Pushing_Pixels I completely agree. So many similarities.
That story hit close to home, I'm from that part of W.V. I actually graduated high school in Smithers. I had never heard of this story, but I was born in 1977. Thanks Joe, for doing this story, you enlightened me on some of my local history that I never knew about.
As someone who has renovated homes built in the '40s and older, sketchy wiring is more the norm then the exception. So a fire started by defective wiring is entirely possible.
Especially if an inspector sees something that is only MAYBE SLIGHTLY bad but the inspector is like "eh, no one's gonna pull a lot of power through this point, it'll be fine" and left it at that.
100%
Except it wasn't, the bang and roll was a molotov. Common thing for someone in Europe...
@@aserta also, I think it's way too sus that the local authorities didin't cooperate.
sure.... and some inspectors were crappy too especially back then. And a big house mice or rats. But furniture found but no bones?? there should have been some remains. I am curious whether their bedrooms were directly over the coal pile in the basement. That would explain some of it, but you would think at l;east one or two of the children would have made it to another room, jumped out a window; something.
I wouldn't be surprised if CZcams demonetized you because you said mentioning violence will "kill" the video 🤦🏻
It's weird.. even crime channels can't talk about crimes with their names, like r*pe, SA, CP, CA, DV.. but kids animation shows on kids youtube can talk about their dad/uncle/brother/dog/robot getting them pregnant..
When you ask who BEEPed the kids, it's worse.
The bleeping out is ridiculous.
I've heard worse language on videos that have been on this platform for years.
"Unalived" is the coloqeol term here on CZcams. Or "Dyed". Really truly sad that free speech has been shit on in such a way.
I heard this story before and as I remember one of the boys was supposedly seen in Italy with mob related people.
As a retired Firefighter/ Fire Inspector whenever there was a fire and the origin couldn’t be determined the old timers would say it was electrical, always. It became a joke that the fire crews would laugh at.
Well, given the wiring in the US back in the day, they were probably more often right than wrong.
@@lonestarr1490 No they were usually wrong. Make a quick determination so they could leave. I saw plenty of scary wiring in my Inspector days.
Stacy Horn, a non-fiction author, did a piece for NPR in 2005 and followed it up with a very long blog post that mentioned all the stuff she’d left out of the NPR piece. As part of her research, she interviewed fire experts and also family members. It’s worth noting some of the key pieces of info:
- Remains were actually found the next morning; the family later said they were never told
- The oldest son originally said that he went into the other kids’ room and shook them awake but the family later said he felt obligated to say that
- Fire experts say that the fire could have started in the basement and leapt straight to the top floor through the walls thanks to the chimney effect. That would mean that the upper floor had been on fire for a while before it woke Jennie up. That info leads me to speculate that in the process of jumping from the basement to the attic, it may have burst through the roof, causing the noise that Jennie heard. If that’s the case, it would mean the fire burned far longer than the hour that Jennie estimated from when she woke up.
I believe the kids died in the fire and it was just too much for the family to face so they started grabbing onto anything and everything that seemed to offer the slightest hope that they were still alive.
yeah I've always thought the kids died in the fire; maybe it was an arson maybe it wasn't we don't know; But I've never seriously put any stock into the kidnapping part.
Source?
@@thecianinatorthe first line of the sentence.....
But there aren't any remains found that matched that would have been in the fire. You can't burn people without having something remain. That many children with zero remains found isn't possible. The only remains found don't appear to be burned and the remains you pointed out if they weren't the one mentioned in the video then what kind were they?
@@sadmermaid That ain't a source, it's a list of things to google
If they did survive, wouldn't now be a good time to do DNA testing on the known descendants with those ancestry tracking services?
Or those random bones?
Agreed. Assuming they (the missing kids) had kids and grandkids then it’s highly likely they can be the key to bringing surviving family members closure.
This case lives rent free in my head. Poor kids.
I grew up seeing that billboard and always wondered what really happened. The local Italians at that time were often stone Masons and you can still see some of their work at the museum and surrounding walls at Hawk's Nest State Park, outside of Fayetteville in West Virginia, not far from that sign.
There was a similar sign in a small town near me. For 30 years the family wanted info about the SA and murder of their daughter. Two years ago the sign came down because thanks to DNA evidence the killer was caught and convicted. I drove past that sign thousands of times. I wish I'd been there the day her family pulled it down.
Slightly off topic but I think you and Lemmino do the best 'mystery documentary' videos. The amount of research that goes into these is great, but they're always presented in a conversational story-telling way rather than a 'true crime' bombardment of evidence. Makes these cases feel more real and human and less like a story someone once wrote.
To be compared to Lemmino is a giant compliment. Love that guy's channel.
Also, it’s weird that the one youngest and the oldest children survived. It’s like the easiest ones to kidnap most likely could’ve been. If I were any of the surviving Sodder children, I would be doing DNA tests to see if any these companies have any matches.
As of a couple of years ago, they have, and have received no matches.
Occam's Razor says that the children suffocated in their sleep and their bodies burned to nothing. But all of the weird little coincidences...the phone call, the salesman (oh God that salesman...), the missing ladder, _two_ trucks not starting, the "watcher", the lack of _any_ remains or identifiable burn patterns (bodies are _messy_ when they burn), the antagonism between the family and others in the community...I hate coincidences.
Occam's razor ignores how bodies burn? Got it.
@@rog2224no, but it tells us to look for simple solutions. The children were upstairs. They likely suffocated, crashed with the house into the basement when the fire weakened everything enough. Coal stored there plus all the wood from the house. It likely got very hot and everything would be black soot. Like a crematorium you would get only dust left over. It would have been a pit.
Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.
Sounds like you blindly assume coincidences are always just that. What's your bank account number? don't worry, it'll only be a coincidence if your money is taken.
@@JohnnyWednesdayyou think you’re disagreeing with the original comment but you both are saying the same thing
re: Documented spike in house fires around the holidays--my Pops was the Port Fire Marshall of the SFFD for many years. He and his longti.e partner were the first on the scene after Moscone/Milk, and Moscone was a friend. Oh, the stories I could tell.
Anyway, back before he became an inspector, they used to work 72hrs on, 48hrs off. This is why the fire/rescue boys are so so SO tight knit. They would cook together and live together--every time we move, our first meal in a new house is Pop's Firehouse Casserole (it's my daughter's favorite--anything to get the littles to eat, amirite?)
So, my point. One Xmas a firehouse....I don't remember which station they were. I want to say it was in Pac Heights or over in that general part of the city. Anyway, these guys LOVE their food, so they are in the midst of cooking themselves a major massive feast and they get an alarm. They all stop what they're doing, throw on their gear, and are out of the station in under a minute (at least that was the goal). This was a huge fire, and SF is largely made up of row houses--so they had to move fast.
So fast they didn't take their turkey out of the oven or turn it off, and my Pops ladder went over to put it out.
No. No one has ever stopper giving them hell. To this very day.
Ahh, I love fire and rescue stories.
Whatever the cause or whatever truly happened, my heart breaks for the parents never being able to get closure. I can’t imagine…
Kidnapping seems the most likely. You'd have to figure if there's a fire the kids wouldn't just be hanging out in their room; they would have been running around screaming for help; the fact that didn't happen tells me they weren't there. The ladder thing for me is almost definitive; there is no reason for it to have been moved otherwise.
If the rooms were filled with smoke they could have died in their sleep. Two or tree breaths and you die. There is a reason we have firealarms today.
@@KasperochSiri No, not all five. Plus, 5 sets of teeth, and no teeth evidence. No, they were definitely kidnapped. That picture looks just like the boy.
The ladder was found in a nearby field, apparently. Whoever moved it didn't want them to find it in a hurry.
This is one that has stuck with me for a number of years.
This story has always been a fascinating one to me, always felt so dark. There feels like there are just too many little inconsistencies for it to just be a fire. (To appease the algorithm, “Pass” is a very useful synonym for die.)
I agree he could have used "pass" or "end" as other channels do. I almost feel like he did it on purpose to use it to market Nebula.
Oops. Just demonetized your comment lol😂😂😂😂😂
Could just say "expired", but that's besides the point. This is as much a protest (read the bleep) as it is a video. YT's CEO needs to be pulled by the ear for this bullshit.
Unalived, life deleted etc
I just have to say this channel is amazing. I've truly learned so much from watching. Keep up the awesome content.
I've seen this story a few times but your detailed timeline and narration is by far the best..
Nice work! 👍🏾
Thank you for covering this case. I have always been interested in it. Have watched a lot of videos on it.
Couple of questions, was the child sleeping on the couch (presumably downstairs) one of the five to go missing and second how do you abduct five children aged between 5 and 14 without causing a sound loud enough to wake the parents or any of the other children?
Not sure on the first question but there was allegedly a Mafia presence in the town and there are drugs that can make people quite agreeable and easy to move (you can probably guess the most common use).
Edit: my phone keyboard has a tendency to turn ) into lol. ) is created by holding down l for a second then sliding up.
I wonder, if the remaining children and their descendants register for a genetic family history program like 23&me, there would be a chance of finding more info.
Thanks for the great content! I love when you do mysteries and history topics! Keep it coming! 😊🔍📜
Love your channel!
This is random but, I wanted to say thank you Joe. I have been watching you for years now and you have truly enriched my wealth of knowledge and inspired me to learn more about subjects (cough *quantum theory) that are difficult for me to understand. You’re the best sir!
Wow, a lot of unexpected twists in that tragic case.
CZcams demonization is a bit extreme especially when it’s over a few words accurately describing a true historical case.
He's doing it to promote nebulla or whatever it's called.
@@nahtesalinas1917100%
I'd rather not make money than allow a private company to start dictating public morals across the world - while making me look like a greedy person at the same time.
How is your comment 4 days old but the video upload is 19 hours ago?
Great Video!
It’s hits a little to close to home so thank you for the first section of This video letting us know. That was very good of you. I always love and enjoy your videos and you do such a good job on them. I will see you on the next one. I’m sure this one is amazing though. Thank you for what you said in the beginning.
This is the most honest and straightforward I've ever heard this story be told. Lots of people I've seen cover it gloss over the fact that the fire had 7 hours to burn or smolder, since it took that long for the fire department to arrive. These days it's harder for people to imagine the degree of damage a fire left for that long can do. It's also easier to see the slow response as a conspiracy rather than a possible reality for the time and place. Further, I just can't imagine they put much effort into recovering bone fragments (or that all those searching were even very effective at identifying them). They probably didn't feel much of a need to do that, anyway. But this case does show how much closure is needed and assumptions just won't do.
I feel like a lot of the big question marks involved here (the wiring thing, the car not starting, the 8 hours for the fire brigade to show up...) can be pretty satisfactorily explained by "it was christmas eve in a rural town in 1945." Combine that with people in town plus the authorities not really feeling all that charitable towards them, and I'd have been surprised if they _did_ do a proper investigation and find anything. Which of course looks like some kind of wild conspiracy after the fact.
I've seen enough videos by Caitlin Doughty of The Order of a Good Death fame, and she has gone on record numerous times stating that bodies are hard to burn, require high temps and a lot of fuel to cremate, and bones are always left behind. A house fire might be enough to char the flesh, and maybe even consume it, but not the bones. And pigs are often used as stand ins for humans, so depending on how she did her experiments, they should be pretty close to what happens to human bodies in a fire.
Great video, Scott...👍
This video is so much better and easier to watch than the other video I watched on this topic
I've heard of this mystery several times, but it's interesting to hear/ read different opinions on it. Personally, I believe that the children were most likely lost in the fire. I think (and hope) they could have passed in their sleep from smoke inhalation/ fumes. Maybe it was arson, or maybe it was a tragic accident with bizarre circumstances. I can't imagine how hard it must have been for the family to never know what happened to them.
Even in cremations some bone and teeth remain. In this case they could not find a single remain.
@@nbenefiel And there definitely should have been remains, seeing as there was furniture that was still recognisable. It's just not possible for at least the bones to not be there
You could always use "passed" instead of "died" or such...
I just wrote that above, then saw your answer. I kept thinking, why not say "passed". That seems pretty easy to me.
I remember this story now. Yeah I’m so glad you actually brought this back up I had been trying to recall this. Thank you.
Weird story. Love the new vid on Nebula. 👍👍
"they could only sit there helpless, watching their home burn with their children inside"
that sentence, combined with it being an arson attack hit harder and way too close for comfort than I expected.
I don't have human children, but pet children and I also happen to be the survivor and 112 caller of an arson attack on the apartment building I lived in(right underneath the attic where the fire started btw). I almost lost my pets/guinea pigs because I completely underestimated the fire and before one of the firefighters rescued them, this moment of being unable to get back in to get them and being told to give up on them by a police officer when I begged and plead with them to rescue my babies was a moment of absolutely helpless despair.
I understand how they must have felt waiting for the fire brigade, clinging to this fleeting shred of hope.
So relieved your guinea piggies where safed. Man that's heart breaking
Joe's room looks like a hidden object game room, like the poster has a clue, the frame has something hidden, the typewriter does something, and all the other little things do something lol
🤔💭...I was watching this video yesterday Joe! Man what an weird missing case!! I believe that the fire was just to covering all the action behind this strange case!!
Thank you Joe😮😢❤❤
Supposedly when the family went back to the scene the next day or so the youngest girl found what they believed to be a napalm pineapple bomb. Which might’ve been what Jennie heard hit the roof and roll off. Also, the faulty wiring is a bit suspicious if just 2 hours before the fire started both the phone rang and Jennie said lights were on, so the wiring was just fine then.
If the children did live, or lived long enough for at least one to have a child, maybe one day this case will be solved by genealogy. But this has always been an extremely sad and strange case.
I say this case will be *publicly* solved a lot sooner. Unsolved implies the authorities have no answers either....as I've been learning over the past few years, in most cases, *they're involved*
@@KingRandor82 I can easily see them being threatened to not intervene, but I doubt they were involved in a way that would let them know exactly what happened to the kids
I've overheard that story before, but that was the first time I had so many details. Interesting case.
Thanks for the video! I hadn't heard of the coal in the basement before, which was interesting. Shifted the scales a bit in my mind. And as for the bleeping, I get you. You gotta do what you gotta do. You deserve the ad revenue and so much more and you really shouldn't have to bleep stuff. It's like CZcams doesn't want people to learn about history.
It's really amazing that any crimes ever got solved back then. And it's probably insane how many innocent people were convicted
i drive 16 everyday, and i have heard of this story but never to this extent. thank you for covering a story especially of such a town that barely gets any recognition!
I'd never heard about this, but then a few CZcamsrs did this within days of each other.
Is there a list of suggested topics CZcams tell people to make.
Love the vids Joe
If you compare the individual features in those photos of the boy and the young mystery man, you'll notice that the noses ae different, the ears are different, and the lips are different. They both have thick, dark eyebrows, but they're not exactly doppelgangers.
Eyebrows & jawline are different. Eyebrows tend to grow bushier with age, if left to grow, but the shape remains, if never plucked.
@@sunshine3914 That reminds me of my brothers' dad. He always had bushy eyebrows, but as he got older they got bushier while the hair strands got fewer, so he had several extremely long eyebrow hairs that just sort of curled and twisted themselves into the vague shape of an eyebrow. Like memory wire.😆
Did Wendigoon always had glasses?
I can only say from personal experience. When my wife was cremated. There was lots of wood used.
These things i found out:
There were absolutely some small bones fragments remained, that were collected next day.
Place was still quite hot due to burning (next day).
It took many hours to burn completely.
The house can't burn down in 45 minutes and still leave no bone fragments. It is impossible for these types of fire.
Love ya Joe ❤ Mean it ❤
Honestly I think there was just something about the fire that we don't know about that allowed for a maintained temperature that caused the near complete cremation. What could have been left was likely missed by an incompetent police department. There may have been an accelerant in the home that was never discovered etc.
Joe mentioned the coal in the basement
I might buy that, but what about teeth ? - It's one thing to turn bones to ash, but all of the teeth too ?!?
@@techman2553 You're the smartest person here and obviously during the investigation. 5 sets of teeth, and not one found, good insite.
@@techman2553teeth do cremate so maybe they just burned up and the fragments were brushed off as nothing
@@immkk1125 - at the end of world war 2 when nearly every man of age had tons of experience of what the remains of burnt bodies looked like?
Surprised to see you covering this story again. I was hoping for more details or an update on their 5 children. Be well.
Again? I don't think I've ever covered this story.
Sorry Joe, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that you had covered this before. My mistake. 😢
It wouldn't surprise me if I had made it and totally forgot about it. That's happened before. :)
I definitely heard this story before, but I'm not sure if it was on Joe's channel or not.
Might have been Caitlin that did it before.
Thanks Joe 🥂
Love your mystery eps, it's not so easy to find videos that talk about these cases without being sensationalist.
Maybe the note referred to his new "brother" Frankie in whatever family he went to live with as a little boy. A90132/A90135 could be a Nevada license plate, although I'm sure actual PIs would have checked that out, lol. I think they're still alive. Heartbreaking either way.
At least descendants are alive.
I think the insurance fella who threatened them and then appeared on the coroners jury needs looking at more closely ...
I think you approached this traumatic subject with great respect ❤
I like listening to Joe tell stories. He has a very calm, everything is going to be alright kind of voice.
You're my favorite storyteller next to thoughty two. The fact that you also make science content puts you slightly above 👍
Here's more: Bailey Sarian. Mr Ballen. Coffeehouse Crime
@@PCLHH thanks, but i am 99% positive i know who he is and for some reason i am not super thrilled. Isn't the black hair dude with a mustache and a goatee?
Not sure how you could sneak 5 children out of a house without anyone noticing, especially with someone sleeping on the couch.
So many ways, cloriform, gun, tape over their mouths, etc.
Actually I'm surprised Joe didn't mention it but if they were kidnapped it's likely they weren't in the house. The kids had wanted to stay up late on Christmas eve and their parents had told them to do their chores (outdoor farm duties) before going to bed. She originally assumed the unlocked door was her kids forgetting to lock it behind them when they came back in and went to bed, but none of the other family members had any direct knowledge that they did ever make it back inside. It's possible that whoever came to burn down the house found the children outside later than normal and just took them rather then wait for them to go inside to bed. Periaps the kids witnessed them preparing like hiding the ladder and they felt taking them was the best option.
You only hear what the family choose to say. Maybe she was an alcaholic and an Elephant could have taken them.
Good god man, audio levelling!, the sudden volume spike at 1:00 almost gave me a heart attack.
Otherwise great channel, keep up the good work.
Such a tragic story. The fact that the parents died without knowing what ever happened to their children is unimaginably sad.
What about the heart/ liver? Why did he confess in court and said it was so the Family can have piece when nobody told them about the burried heart/liver before? They said they didn't find any remains... Sounds like a weird plan B to me. Even IF the children burnt down in the fire, maybe they did but I don't think that it was an accident. Why the false evidence when it was an accident? Gangs or the Mafia are NO joke, so for me it seems more plausible than a weird freak accident.
The left ear is different in a way that rules him out unless surgery was involved. However, In general I'm sure there are 100s of people that are a close enough adult version of the kid. So maybe just a good person, not wanting to get involved felt they should send a possible clue.
This is the one story that has me perplexed. Mistakes made, oddities galore, and just intense mystery. I wish I knew what really happened. I don’t think anyone will ever come to a solid conclusion to the disappearance of these children! Thanks for doing this video.
This mystery always haunts me, my heart breaks for the Sodder family
So... the ladder. If you knew you always had a large ladder in a particular spot (and big ladders are hard to move around) and then the one time you needed it so badly it was a case of life or death for your children it wasn't there... I think after the event you would not stop looking for it until you found out what the heck had happened to it. Like, had George misplaced it? Was it stolen? when was the last time he had remembered seeing it? And Why would the kids not have been at the window I assume George would've used the ladder to enter upstairs? Surely they'd be trying to break it and get out onto the roof? It seems like they never even saw or heard anything of the children while their house was burning, supposedly around them. Sure, smoke can incapacitate, but that any of them all at once? None of them woke up and started screaming, at least? I Also don't think that fire ever got hot enough to leave ZERO bones, it's just very weird all round. If the children were taken out of the house, before the fire, how was that accomplished without any of them screaming or kicking something over or otherwise waking up the household, including the kid sleeping on the couch, which I assume any man or men entering the premises and grabbing children would have had to walk right past? Why would they have taken only the upstairs kids and none of the downstairs?
I first heard about this on the podcast: My Favorite Murder. There is ZERO chance the kids were in the house when it burned. The proof is the lack of bones and the fact that the parents heard no screaming as they attempted to get to them through the 2nd story window in their bedroom. Even young children would attempt to jump out the window and no one even approached the window. The most likely outcome given in the podcast was that the kids were taken back to Italy, far away from the news of their kidnapping, and they simply left their US life behind them.
No screaming could happen if the kids were asleep and suffocated in the smoke without waking up.
MY FAVORITE CZcamsR AND MY FAVORITE TRUE CRIME I LOVE THIS
Thanks!
For some reason my brain replaces the beep with f word which changes the meaning quite the bit. But it's most definitely the d word.
Thanks for your hard work and entertaining videos. Also thanks for pointing out that an uncensored version is up on Nebula. I'll go watch it there because I will not comply to CZcamss attempt to censorship. I hope for you and other creators that this will not get worse and you'll need to fully comply or leave the platform.
I'm thinking it's about damn time for a new, free platform. And we can all ditch gaytube for good.
Having a completely unmoderated platform is how you end up with current-day Twitter where extremists and racists can just do what they want, but their censorship of just scary words like 'die' or killed' is insane.
Hell yeah! Another banger Joe 🙏🏻
@joescott, I love your content, do something about "Tarrare", it will make for an amazing video, it's some of your jam I feel.
This case definitely hits a point about how no individual factor is impossible and, thus, on the whole it's possible everything was completely innocent but the combined odds are incredibly small.
I've had occasion to wonder if the demonitization of so many popular videos, like these and a lot of LGBT short series, is a case of creating justification to reduce and revenue payout so more of that money stays in Alphabet's bottom line
YT has DEF been pulling crap w/ demonetization! If they keep screwing content creators and reducing the amounts of $ possible, people will stop creating and posting, esp the higher earners. When it's so easy to create another website, like Tiktok, it doesn't seem smart.
No way alphabet would try to do something like that. No way!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@metamorphicorder 🤣😅🤣😅🤣😅