Hi crime junkies, it's Brit, and back in 2019, we covered the Sotter children. Five kids who vanished on Christmas morning, 1945, during a house fire. It's one of those cold cases that crime junkies and Reddit have debated for years, but it's not just an infamous story. For Miranda Weeks, it's family history that she's just always known about. She's the great, great granddaughter of one of the older Sotter kids, and this mystery has haunted her family for as long as she can remember. In 2024, she got sick of waiting for answers. So she spent the last two years talking to family members, chasing down records and case files, and digging through the archives. Then she got in touch with us, because her search unearthed dozens of pages of case records that have never been published before. And now more than ever, she believes someone out there might have answers. So we're bringing this case out of the archives with brand new information. This is the updated story of Marie's Martha, Lewis, Jenny, and Betty Sotter. So, let's go back to Christmas Eve, 1945, in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Jenny and George Sotter were both born in Italy, but ended up in the same small corner of West Virginia. And they've built a nice life. George runs his own trucking company, Jenny keeps the books, and they have 10 kids together. One is away in the army, but the other nine kids, ranging from 23 to three, are still at home. So this is a busy, crowded house. Downstairs, there's Jenny and George's bedroom, a living room, kitchen, dining room, and a little office, and the kids bedrooms, one for the boys, one for the girls, are upstairs on the second floor, not in the attic as it was originally reported. On Christmas Eve, the house is still buzzing around 10.30 p.m., because younger kids are excited to play with their new Christmas gifts. They want to stay up past their bed time to play a little longer. And Jenny says yes, as long as they finish up some chores too, like locking the doors, turning off the lights, closing the blinds, the kids obviously agree. So, Jenny heads to bed with George and their three-year-old Sylvia in their first floor bedroom by 11 p.m. The eldest daughter, Marion, falls asleep on the living room couch. And around 1115, a couple of the older boys head upstairs to bed. But at around 12.30 in the morning, the phone rings. Jenny gets out of bed, goes to the office, and picks up. And a woman on the other end asks for somebody Jenny's never heard of. Jenny tells her she's got the wrong number, and hangs up. She checks the house before heading back to bed, all's quiet. But it seems like the kids didn't finish up their chores, like the lights are still on, the doors still unlocked, so Jenny locks up, closes up the house, and goes back to bed. And a little later, as she's falling back asleep, Jenny hears a thud up on the roof. Then this rolling sound, like maybe a tree branch hit the roof and rolled down. She's not worried enough to wake George up, so she goes back to sleep. Then around 1 a.m., she's woken up again, and this time she smells smoke. She jumps out of bed again, looks out her bedroom door, and sees that the office, right across from the stairs, leading up to the kids' bedrooms, is on fire. And she can't even call for help, the fire is already too hot to get to the phone in the office, so she yells for George and the kids to get up, and wakes Mary, and who runs and grabs a little Sylvia. John and Ted, the oldest two boys, wake up and come flying down the stairs. The fire is moving so fast that their hair and eyebrows actually get burned on the way down. It must have been mayhem, because once the six of them get outside, they look around and realize they're alone out there. The other five kids, Maurice, Martha, Lewis, Jenny, and Betty, never made it out. They're the younger ones who stayed up late to play with their toys. And Jenny's mom instincts kick in, because she immediately runs back toward the burning building. She tries getting in the front door, the way they came out, but she can't get through. The fire is too hot and is moving too fast. Mary and runs to a neighbor's house to call for help, but when she gets on the phone, she can't get a hold of an operator. Remember, it's 1945, she needs an operator to connect the call. Meanwhile, George tries getting in through a second floor window. First, he goes for the ladder that's always leaning on the side of the house, but it's mysteriously gone. He breaks a window to get to the staircase landing instead, and he slices his arm open badly doing it. But the stairs are already engulfed in flames, no way in there. He and his son, John, go for the family's trucks, hoping to back one up and climb up onto the roof that way. The panic, they flood the engines and nothing starts. Basically, everything that can go wrong does. Now, around this time, a man he's called Mr. Smith in the records, is driving home from work, sees the fire and pulls over. The family tells him to go get the fire department, so he races off again. But first, he pulls into a bar down the road, looking for a phone, but the phone's out or something. So he gets back in his car, drives into town, finds a phone, and finally gets a hold of the fire chief. According to records, when the chief answers the phone, his response is odd. He basically says, "Yeah, we already know. We got a couple calls." Mr. Smith is like, "Okay, so are you coming?" There are kids trapped in there, and the chief says he doesn't know, like, no sense of urgency in this crisis at all. So Mr. Smith races back to the property to help, and at this point, the house is basically gone. There's nothing else for him to do. So he leaves at about 8 a.m., right around the time the fire department finally arrives. At this point, it's been seven hours since the fire broke out. And according to George and Jenny, the entire house was in ashes within 30 or 45 minutes. The family is waiting it out in the cabs of their trucks, sitting in the cold, watching the house turn to ash, and praying the five kids are somehow okay. By this point, there's nothing left to put out. Just a bed of hot embers, and a hole in the ground that was once their basement. The firefighters run a hose from the creek to cool the wreckage down enough to search. And besides the fact that they're not prompt, this is a small, rural fire department. They probably don't have a ton of manpower either. So a handful of locals pitch in to help search. Family friends, employees, a couple of neighbors. By around 10 a.m., the fire chief tells the family that they can't find anything. No bodies, no bones. He suggests they scoop some ashes into a box and bury it. So at least they've got somewhere to grieve the kids. And the family, they kind of follow this advice. Four days after the fire, Jenny's brother fills in the basement with a bulldozer, and the sauters turn the site into a memorial garden. The closest thing they've got to a grave. Now you could look at this as suspicious. Many people do, but honestly, to me, it seems like they were kind of in a days at this point. They've already been told there's nothing at the scene. Friends advise them to make it a burial ground. And right after the fire, the county prosecutor is out there telling newspapers that the site will become a burial place for the kids like it's already decided. The fire marshal, on the other hand, is not happy. He says he specifically ordered George not to touch the site. That he wanted it left alone until the investigation was finished, and that George just ignored him and filled it in anyway. But that version only works if the fire marshal actually gave George that instruction before the basement was filled. And that's where the records get murky. Early reports don't point to anyone telling sauters to preserve the scene. Those reports actually can't even agree on when the fire marshal showed up that day. And Miranda found a record that shows the fire marshal's investigation didn't even start until December 27, two days later. To claim that George ignored orders comes up way later after officials were already being questioned about the lack of her mains and the limited search. Without the site preserve, the bulk of the investigation relies on a coroner's jury in quest. A non-criminal trial where the coroner and a jury hear testimony and look at evidence to try to figure out how the victims died. And within days, there's a ruling. This was an accidental fire, probably a wiring problem in the office. Best certificates get issued five days later with no remains to back them up. Now, George and Jenny don't buy this version of events. And they have good reason not to, because there are all sorts of things that come up in the inquest and in the weeks that follow that tell a very different story. Starting with the fact that there were zero human remains recovered when they searched the wreckage. Not a bone, not a tooth. George and Jenny were right there watching the fire as it happened. It burned down the entire building, and again, a matter of 30 to 45 minutes. How could it have completely incinerated human bones in that time? And is that even possible given the other items that survived? I mean, record state that they found coins, the kitchen stove.
And also, things that are way more flammable than a human body, like part of a dictionary and pieces of Jenny's coat. But somehow, five kids leave behind no remains. It just doesn't make sense. The sodders also don't believe this just happened by accident, by like, faulty wiring. Right after the fire, John told a newspaper that he thinks someone set the fire on purpose. And another report says Jenny shares that suspicion as well. Which seems plausible when the inquest reveals that someone else was out on the property the same night of the fire. And, that person admits to cutting the phone line right before the sodders tried to make their desperate call for help. During the coroner's inquest, a witness comes forward and says he saw someone out on the property that night. It looked like a man was stealing a ladder and cutting the phone line. Which was later discovered to be severed about 14 feet up and 2 feet out from the pole. When they track this guy down, it turns out his name is already in the files. He and a friend ran a bar down the road from the sodders. The same bar that Mr. Smith stopped at to try and call for help, but he couldn't use the phone or it wasn't working. It's not totally clear in the records. He says he saw the fire, went over to help, and cut what he thought was the power line to help stop the blaze. And now Miranda is looking at the records of this almost a century later. And she's like, yeah, right. This guy sees a blazing fire and his first reaction is to find a ladder, climb 14 feet in the dark to cut a random wire because he thought that would help. Oh, and that ladder he was using, the sodder family believed it's the same ladder George was looking for and couldn't find during the fire. It actually eventually turns back up like 70 or 80 feet away from where the house would have been over like an embankment, like someone used it, walked it off the property and pitched it over a hill, almost like someone was trying to hide it. And this guy's name just keeps popping up. Around the same time that they find the ladder, the sodders notice that George's chain hoists are gone. Now, chain hoists are like heavy equipment used to lift car engines and George's were bolted to the ceiling of the basement, which George used as a repair shop. So stealing them isn't exactly like a grabbing go thing. Somebody had to plan that one out. Now, George hears rumors that the guy who cut the phone line and the friend he ran that bar with had something to do with it. Now, I don't know exactly who George goes to with this information. Miranda thinks that it was probably local police, but Warren's end up being issued for their rest of both these guys who co-run the bar. One of the guys joins the army almost immediately after and is gone for two years, never charged. The other one, the guy who was at the solder property the night of the fire, pleads guilty and gets fined $25 for the theft. Neither guy ever gets charged with anything related to the actual fire. No motive officials say. They didn't know the sodders, which it's just so frustrating, because Miranda is digging through the records. That guy's name pops up yet again, but this connection seems like it went completely unnoticed at the time. It's related to that mystery caller, the woman who called the wrong number that was the sodders line right before the fire started. A report from 1950 says law enforcement identifies that woman confirms her wrong number story and case closed. But according to Miranda's research, a woman matching that description was also at the bar that night. The same bar that was tied to the stolen chain hoists and the phone that mysteriously wasn't working. Nobody in any official document connects those two things. There's other little bizarre details, odd visits from strangers, weird comments from neighbors, a reported sighting of Betty's solder, one of the children, that never comes to anything. They all seemingly get no attention from investigators, but at the core of it, at least for the sodders, is still this mystery of the missing bones. And Jenny's solder becomes kind of obsessed with it. In 1946, without even telling George, she starts running her own experiments at home. She uses animal bones, different accelerants, keeps a coal stove going all day just to see what happens. And no matter what she does, she cannot get the bones to turn to ash, not once. And Jenny becomes convinced that there's no way to explain the lack of remains of the scene. And she starts to hope that her children are still out there somewhere. And in 1947, the solder's here a rumor that's been spreading around town. The fire chief's been telling people that he found a human heart in the ashes the day of the fire, and he buried it on the property. Jenny calls him directly, and his answer, "Oh, I thought I told you, but maybe I didn't." Which, I'm sorry, what? You either told a grieving family you found part of one of their missing kids, or you didn't. It's not like a "maybe" kind of detail. And he says, "Oh, he marked the spot with a stake." Except the solders are still living on that property, and there's no stake anywhere. So they hire a PI, and eventually get the fire chief to actually come out, point them to the spot. And they dig down about six feet, and they find an old box. And inside is this waterlogged mass of tissue. And then, I love this part, I could not believe it. The fire chief asks for a receipt before he'll hand it over. A receipt for potential evidence that he buried on their property on his own without telling anyone for a year and a half. So they give him his receipt and drive the remains to a funeral home in a town about 40 minutes away. And I don't blame them. They wouldn't trust anyone in that town either, and they hand it to the owner without telling him what it's supposed to be. He opens the box, and he says, "Oh, that's not a heart. That's a beef liver." The funeral home owner says, "Not only is this a beef liver, but this is a beef liver that has never been exposed to fire. It wasn't burned or charred or anything, definitely not burned to ash. And also, it seemed fresh, like not what you would expect if it had been buried on the solder property for a year and a half." So now the question is, why is the fire chief going around saying he found a heart? And why did he bury this beef liver in the first place? Even the Fire Marshall report says that the fire chief either couldn't or wouldn't explain why he handled it the way he did. And then, weirdly, the beef liver disappears too. The PI asks the funeral home to hold onto it so he can send it to a contact at a hospital. Only problem, the funeral home doesn't have cold storage. So the owner preserves it with inbalming fluid and tells his brother to bury it out back. For ten days later, the PI calls to say, "Hey, I'm coming to get it." Except the brother never actually buried it. He just left it sitting on the back porch. And by the time the PI shows up, it's gone. Best guess? The garbage bin took it? Thinking it was trash? Which, I mean, at this point, yeah, the random beef liver from a box buried seemingly not too long ago is pretty much trash. But that means that the only physical thing that could have proven whether the fire chief was lying just vanishes off a back porch. But even if they had it, it wouldn't explain why the fire chief lied. Which is something I personally have been spiraling about. Oh, and, and that Montgomery funeral home the family drove to because they didn't trust anyone in Fayetteville. According to them, they found out that it was connected to the same funeral home network back in Fayetteville the whole time. Now, the sauters pushed for a real excavation of the property. And in 1949, almost four years after the fire, they finally get it. A private detective brings in an actual pathologist from the Smithsonian, a guy who'd spent years in the army excavating war graves. And he brings fourteen diggers with him, who spend twelve hours at the Burnside. And they do finally find bones. Some of them are animal bones, but four of them are human lumbar vertebrae, all from the same person. No skull, no pelvis, no other bones anywhere nearby. The pathologist's first read is that they could belong to a 14 or 15 year old, which would line up with Maurice. And these bones had been forcibly separated from the rest of the skeleton. Then, a second Smithsonian doctor looks at the same bones a month later, and actually says this is more like someone 16 to 22. But both of them agree on two things. These vertebrae were never exposed to fire. And it's weird that no other bones were found at the Burnside. Now Miranda reads this and is like, "How could the fire marshals just have shrugged this off?" The report says the vertebrae have no significance to the case, might have just come in like the dirt that they used to fill the basement. So she goes looking for other fires to compare this to. Fires with kids, fires with delayed responses, fires from the same era. And she couldn't find a single. single one, where multiple bodies just disappeared. No bones, no teeth. She did find that a retired firefighter actually wrote the sauters a letter about this exact thing. He said in his career, he'd seen fires hot enough to burn the paint off of fire trucks 30 feet away, and even then, they still found a body. And you could still tell it was a body. His opinion was that no house fire burns long enough or hot enough to completely destroy a human body. At the time, a cremation company in Cincinnati told the sauters something similar that even two hours at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit leaves bones intact enough to recognize. And remember, this fire burned for 30 or 45 minutes. So we reached out to a fire investigator ourselves. His name is Dale Reisen, who's been doing this professionally for years. And what he told us lines up with everything the sauters were saying 80 years ago. He said a house back in 1945 wouldn't have burned nearly as hot or as fast as a house fire today because of what's actually inside a home now versus then, like synthetic materials, that kind of thing. So if there were people trapped inside, you would find remains. Period. He broke it down like this. To cremate a body, you need roughly 2000 degrees for two hours of direct flame. And even then, you're still left with pieces of skull and femur because those are parts that just don't burn away easily. A 30 to 45 minute house fire doesn't come close to that, even with something like gasoline involved. His exact words were, "You cannot declare that someone died in a fire and not have human remains." According to an actual working fire investigator looking at this with fresh eyes in 2026, the physical case for these kids dying in that fire does not hold up at all. So if the kids didn't die in that fire, where were they? Well, there are multiple accounts that suggest that the kids might have actually gotten out. There's a tip that the sauter kids were down in Florida with their uncle, Jenny's brother. Now, Jenny was estranged from her family. They didn't like George, and they'd had some disagreements about Jenny's father's estate after he died. But a couple in Cortez, Florida, a small town where Jenny's brother lived, told the PI the family had five or six kids at the time when records only showed two of school age actually living there in 1945. Now, that lead was solid enough that the FBI eventually looked into it in 1952. They checked school and birth records going back to 1940. They interviewed the family and concluded the children living there were the family's own. But the theory that seems most solid from Miranda's point of view suggests that the kids didn't just leave, that maybe they were taken. And it comes from a woman who ran a hotel in a town a little over an hour away from Fayetteville. She comes forward in 1952 and swears an affidavit saying that just a few days after the fire, four kids matching the sodder children checked into her hotel, three girls and a boy, with two men and two women who seemed to be Italian. She tried to talk to the kids, but the men got hostile and started talking fast in Italian and the whole group just clammed up, and they were gone the next morning. This brings up a new name, Fiorenzzo Genertulo, George's former boss. Fiorenzzo is kind of a big deal locally, and he and George were not on good terms. According to Miranda, George and Fiorenzzo had been close for at least a decade, George had worked for him, but they were also friends. When the sodders bought their land in 1935, Fiorenzzo co-signed for the building materials, on the condition that he'd be made the beneficiary of the house insurance. That's just how it was for years. But in 1943, George broke off and started his own trucking company. And Miranda says, "Fiorenzzo did not take it well." About 60 days before the fire, he sent an insurance salesman to push George into a raising coverage and adding life insurance on the whole family. George refused. And then, Fiorenzzo allegedly showed up himself to confront George about not signing the papers, and said, "Your goddamn house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed." Many big threat to make over some insurance money. But here's the thing, the insurance did get raised before the fire. Sometime before Christmas that year, the house insurance gets quietly bumped from $1,500 to $1,750. Except the sodders seemingly had nothing to do with it. George didn't know anything about it, and they never collected a dime of that payout either because that money went to Fiorenzzo, Genetulo. There's no explanation why or how he was able to pull that off, because Fiorenzzo himself never got questioned, not once. According to Miranda, the sodders wanted to bring a lawsuit against Fiorenzzo, only they couldn't get a single lawyer in Fayetteville to take their case. So Fiorenzzo isn't be investigated, and no one is willing to call him up in court. The sodders felt that all of Fiorenzzo's local influence and property played a big part in keeping things quiet, which makes a lot of sense once you look at who actually ran the investigation into this fire. The corner's inquest that ruled it accidental was made up of six men. Five of them had direct ties to Fiorenzzo, his cousin/business partner sat as Jerry Foreman. That same cousin was also the one who ended up paying for the sodder's small replacement house after the fire, which is either a genuinely kind gesture from a family friend or a pretty convenient way to keep a family close and grateful right when they might start otherwise asking harder questions. The other four men on the jury were the fire chief, who has Fiorenzzo's personal bookkeeper, a local bank bookkeeper who also worked for Fiorenzzo's company, a man who belonged to the same clubs as Fiorenzzo's family, and the county clerk. There was just one man on the jury without any obvious ties to Fiorenzzo, and he was one of George's own employees. And on top of all of that, the prosecutor, the fire chief, the insurance agent, a juror, and a local funeral homeowner were all as allegedly free masons together. So to the sodders, this wasn't a conspiracy of strangers. This was one small town's most powerful people making decisions together. It means it's no wonder the sodders worked so hard to find a funeral director out of town when that liver turned up. Now, we did try to get the other side of this, even after 80 years. We reached out to Fiorenzzo's granddaughter to ask her about her grandfather, and she pushed back on all of it. She told us that Fiorenzzo started out in Fayetteville as a watchmaker, and then owned a jewelry store and a lumberyard along with some commercial property. From what she remembers, he wasn't someone who talked politics at home, and she never heard of anyone in Fayetteville even bringing up the sodder family. As far as she knew him, he was well-liked, kind, and generous, someone the whole town loved. She could never believe her grandfather would be unkind to anyone. And she was clear that that's all she had to say on the subject. So with all this in hand, here's where Miranda lands. If this was a kidnapping, she doesn't think this was some kind of huge criminal operation or an organized crime conspiracy, which is a rumor that was going around for a while. She thinks that the kidnapper would have needed exactly what Fiorenzzo already had. Local money, local friends, and a personal grudge. Her theory is that the kids were part of the plan from the start. Fiorenzzo specifically mentioned the sodder children in his threat, and the five who disappeared were some of the youngest, the easiest ones to move. She thinks they were taken from the house before the Fior, and the Fior was set as a diversion. The kids were moved out of town, got shuffled around for a few days, spotted at that hotel. Then they were shipped off somewhere either far away, where they wouldn't be recognized, or something worse happened to them. And given everything we know about that town and the people surrounding the Fior, I think that story makes sense. I think it's worth asking the question a skeptic would ask here, right? What about George and Jenny? Were they ever actually looked at? And Miranda doesn't think they were seriously investigated, but she's also honest that she doesn't think anyone was seriously investigated in this case. Still, when you look at it, the theory that George and Jenny had anything to do with this just doesn't hold up. There's no financial motive. They're not the ones who got the insurance payout, Fiorenzzo did. And their behavior afterward doesn't look like two people trying to bury a secret and move on with their lives. They spent years and genuinely a huge amount of money trying to find their kids. They hired multiple private investigators. George traveled for Leeds himself. They put up billboards on their own property with their kids' faces on them, and honestly, it's an image of that billboard that's what haunted Ashley and me years ago when we initially covered this case. But those actions just aren't what you do when you're hiding something. That's what you do when you think the truth is still out there, and nobody else is going to look for it. Miranda doesn't have much hope that DNA will solve this one. She doubts the kids lived long enough to have kids of their own. But she's not done looking. This summer, she went back to West Virginia herself, because a lot of what's left in this case isn't digitized anywhere. It's sitting in boxes somewhere, and someone. has to go dick through them by hand. 80 years later, this is still an open wound for the solder family. Miranda knows the case is closed, and it's probably not getting reopened, at least not officially. What she wants is to just get the real story out there. Correct, in her family's own words, instead of second hand and half fright. So if your family has any connection to West Virginia, Florida, or Italy around this time, there's an old photo, a letter, a story about a strange adoption in the late 1940s that never quite added up. We want to hear from you. Send anything you've got. Documents, photos, newspaper clippings, letters, even just a story that's been passed down to either our tip line at
[email protected] or Miranda's at the number five solder kids at gmail.com. It might be nothing. It might be the piece that's missing for 80 years. Because at the end of the day, this was never just a bizarre mystery. It was five kids. Marie's, Martha, Lewis, Jenny, and Betty. And their family has never stopped looking for them. Crime junkie is an audio chuck production. I think chuck would approve.
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