What Happened to the Sodder Children?

Night. You're driving along a lonely stretch of West Virginia Highway.
The only light comes from the headlights of your car, which shine on the dark forest lining the road. The scenery is a blur.
Until suddenly, up ahead, you see it. A strange billboard looming low to the ground at the side of the road.
From it, the faces of five unsmiling children staring back at you. Their photos are haunting enough.
But then you read the words plastered above.

What was their fate?

Kidnapped or murdered?

Or are they still alive? Christmas Eve, 1945. Just outside Fayetteville, West Virginia.
Freezing temperatures make the trees creak and the river run still. But inside the Sauter family's house, it's warm.
George and Jenny Sauter are there with nine of their ten children. The only member of the family that's not present is Joe, the Sauter's second-to-oldest son, who's away serving in the army.
The youngest children, who have just received some new toys from the local dime store,

play happily in the living room. As it gets late, the parents retire to their bedroom on the first floor, taking their three-year-old daughter Sylvia with them.
Everyone else has beds on the second floor. The older kids, John, Marion, and George Jr., share one room.
The younger kids, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty, sleep in another upstairs room. At this point, the Sauter children begin to trickle off to bed.
But not all. Some of the younger ones are too excited about Christmas to go to sleep just yet.
And Marion, the eldest daughter, stays up on the couch to watch them play a little while longer. Though other children still have chores to do, Maurice and Louis must go outside to feed the animals before they turn in.
It's not an enviable chore. Maurice and Louis layer on hats and coats and journey out into the freezing darkness to feed them.
It's a stark contrast from the warmth, joy, and laughter of the living room to the quiet, eerie stillness of the outdoors.

Two hours later, a silence has fallen over their home.

And then, at 12.30am, the phone rings. Ginny, the mother, awakens with a startle.
She looks around her bedroom, orienting herself. George and little Sylvia are sleeping soundly next to her.
She gets out of her warm bed, clutching her nightgown against the cold. Bewildered as to who could be calling at this hour, she exits her room and crosses to the table where the phone is.
The lights, she notices, are still on. They should be turned off now that all the children are in bed, all save for Marion, who's fallen asleep on the living room couch.
Jenny reaches the phone, grabs the receiver off the hook, and offers a blunt hello. But the voice on the other end doesn't introduce themselves.
Instead, what Ginny hears is laughter. And it's not pleasant laughter either.
It feels cruel, almost as though this caller is mocking her. And then suddenly, it stops.
The voice on the line finally speaks, and asks for a name, someone that doesn't live there. And so, Ginny informs them that they have the wrong number, and hangs up.
Unsettled, Ginny surveys the room around her. A number of unusual things pop out to her now.
It's not just that the lights are all on. The curtains are wide open, too.
And when Ginny walks to the front door, she finds it unlocked. She sighs.
Her children know perfectly well how to lock up for the night. She considers waking Marion to chastise her,

but thinks better of it. It's Christmas after all.
The kids were probably just excited and forgetful. Jenny locks the door herself and closes the curtains.
Then she hurries back to the warmth of her bed and slowly drifts off to sleep. A strange noise comes from above.

Jenny's eyes blink open. She sits up groggily, trying to get her bearings, and still dark out.
Now she hears a new noise overhead, a rolling sound, like something landed on the roof with a thud and rolled off. And then, silence.
Ginny tells herself that it was just an animal. She tries to fall back asleep, but then an acrid scent hits her nostrils.
Her eyes fly open. She's wide awake now.
It's because she knows that smell. and's smoke.
In an instant, Ginny's up and out of bed, hoisting little Sylvia into her arms and screaming for George to wake up. She sees smoke pouring into the bedroom from beneath the door.
George, Ginny, and Sylvia burst out of their bedroom, and they're met with an apocalyptic scene. Their house is becoming engulfed in flames.
They race to the telephone to call the fire department, only to discover, to their horror, that the phone line, which worked perfectly just a little while ago, is dead. Amidst the chaos, what springs to the front of Ginny's mind is a number.

Nine.

Nine of her children are in the house right now.

Only two of Ginny's children are accounted for at the moment.

Her youngest, Sylvia, is wailing in her arms.

And nearby, her eldest daughter, Marion, has awakened on the first floor couch.

Ginny locks her gaze on the staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms. It's impassable.
The heat coming from the upper floor is too intense. The smoke is too thick.
And so, that makes it seven. Seven of Ginny's kids are trapped upstairs.
Gin screams up the staircase, her eyes stinging from the smoke.

She keeps them open, though, praying to see her children.

Finally, a figure emerges from the smoke and hurtles down the stairs.

Another follows close behind.

It's two of the oldest boys, John and George Jr., and their hair is singed from the flames. The boys are hysterical.
They tell their parents that they tried to get into their younger sibling's bedroom, but they couldn't. Now the noise, the heat, everything else disappears from Jenny's world.
She casts a final glance upstairs as her husband pulls her away toward the exit. The number in Jenny's head is now five.
Five of her kids are up those stairs, and none of them are coming down. A moment later, Jenny, George, and the four kids who are accounted for are standing outside.
It's freezing cold, and they're all still in their nightgowns. But George doesn't hesitate.
He races off to fetch the ladder they keep against the side of the house. The others follow, their bare feet slapping against the icy ground.
But around the corner of the home, another shock awaits them. Their ladder is gone.
Following this, they go to their garage to get their truck, so they can drive it up to the window and climb up. Now the Sodders have two trucks, but when George tries the ignition on both of them, neither engine will start.
George can't believe it. Both trucks worked perfectly fine just yesterday.
He bolts out of the garage, desperately searching for something, anything that might help. There's an old rain barrel near the home, and so George tries to throw some water into the flames, but it's no use.
The water inside the barrel is frozen solid. Because of this, George is reduced to shouting the children's names over and over at the house, but in return, all he hears is the roar of the inferno.
While the house continues to burn, the oldest daughter, Marion, dashes away, down the dark, freezing road. The Sauter's phone doesn't work, but their neighbors just might.
She's still barefoot, and there isn't another house for quite a while. At last, she arrives, and tears of relief flow down her cheeks as the neighbor lets her in and points her to their phone.

Shaking from head to toe, Marion manages to place the call, but the operator doesn't respond. Marion is beside herself.
This can't be happening. The neighbor grabs his coat and rushes for the door, informing her that he'll drive into town and alert the fire chief in person.
Fayetteville's fire chief, F.J. Morris, is fast asleep when the Sauter's neighbor arrives.
Once Morris gets filled in, he begins the process of alerting Fayetteville's other volunteer firefighters. Their department operates by using a phone tree, which means one calls the other, calls the other, calls the other.
It's time-consuming,

and it takes a while for all the volunteers to be notified,

assemble at the firehouse, and then drive out to the Sauter's home.

But even so, the emergency response to the fire feels less than urgent.

The Sauter's home is only two and a half miles from the firehouse,

and yet the firefighters don't arrive on the scene until seven hours later. By this point, the sun is up and the house is gone.
For hours, George and his family have helplessly watched the entire structure be reduced to ashes before their eyes, with their five children apparently trapped inside. There is no urgency from George or his family once the fire trucks finally pull up to the scene.
There's no shouting or waving of arms. The time for that has long passed.
For the past seven hours, George has experienced more emotions than in the rest of his life combined. Complete terror, complete helplessness, rage at the firefighters' lackluster response, and finally, the horrific bitterness of losing five children before his very eyes.
Now, on Christmas morning 1945, he's simply numb. The firefighters douse the smoldering wreckage with water.
They search for the bodies of the missing children, but they can't find even a single bone. Fire Chief Morris says the fire must have incinerated them completely, and so he declares the children dead at the scene.
The next day, December 26th, a coroner's jury declares the fire accidental, and by December 30th, death certificates are issued for the five kids. A state police inspector eventually arrives.
Given that the house burned for so long and so completely, it's not easy to determine a cause, but in the end, he attributes the fire to faulty wiring. To George, it all happened so fast, too fast.
The fire department took so long to come put the fire out, but then afterwards, officials practically sprinted to declare the

fire an accident and the children dead. It makes George uneasy.
But what can he do? The Saunders try to move on. In the new year, George brings in dirt from off-site and covers the ruins.
They plant a garden in remembrance of the children they lost.

If the story ended here, it would be a mercy.

The Sodders could mourn in peace.

However, our story is just beginning.

Shocking details are about to emerge.

Details that suggest that this fire was no accident, and that the supposedly deceased Sauter children may actually be alive. It's spring.
On a day like today, the sound of children's laughter should be echoing across the Sodders' property. Yet instead, it's silent.
The surviving Sodders have been without a home for months, and the time has come to rebuild. But their new house won't be where the previous one stood, as the site of the fire is to remain a memorial garden forever.
George is overseeing the

construction of the family's new home nearby when he sees one of the workers approaching him.

It's a telephone repairman and he's discovered something odd. He leads George over to a nearby

telephone pole and explains that when he ascended the pole on his ladder, he expected to find the

remnants of the telephone wire that used to lead to the solder's old house. Instead though,

He should have been a good one. and explains that when he ascended the pole on his ladder, he expected to find the remnants of the telephone wire that used to lead to the solder's old house.

Instead, though, he found no burned wire dangling there at all.

Rather, it was completely severed, cut cleanly, intentionally.

Immediately, George realizes what that means.

The phone lines didn't melt in the fire. Someone cut them, and they would have needed a ladder to do it.
A ladder. George thinks back to the night of the fire, and suddenly he takes off across the yard, searching wildly under bushes and rubble.
It's not until reaching the back of the property where the yard falls off into a ditch that he finds what he's looking for. It's his ladder.
The one that he kept propped up on the side of the house. The one that he could not find to save his children on the night of the fire.
And it's here where he realizes it wasn't misplaced. Someone moved it.
George feels dizzy, nauseous even. The blood is pounding in

his temples. A whole new series of details are flooding his mind.
The wrong number in the middle

of the night. The thump on the roof.
His trucks that wouldn't start when he needed them most.

And this is when it hits him. This fire may not have been an accident at all.
George forces himself to breathe and tries to clear his head. He reminds himself that the investigators already determined the cause.
It was faulty wiring. And yet, George can't bring himself to believe it.
He was in the house when it happened. The investigators weren't.
Now, a final memory comes back to George. When he emerged from his dark bedroom into the living room, it was bright.
And not just because of the flames, either. He's certain that the lights were still on.
And if the lights in the house were on, it means the fire couldn't have been started by an electrical short. Otherwise, the house's power would have failed, and it would have been completely out.
He rushes to tell Ginny, and she remembers it all the same way he does. In her recollection, the lights were definitely on when they came out of the bedroom.
In her mind, she returns to the moment after she hung up the phone. She closed the curtains, she locked the door, but no, she didn't turn the lights off before going back to bed.
She left them on for her daughter. So if the house had electricity at the time, the lights should have been on, and they were.
All at once, a realization rushes over them. Her eyes meet his, and the word on their lips, arson.
At this point, there's no stopping it. George and Ginny's minds are running wild, considering every possibility.
They've lost so much, and the idea that someone could have wished this upon them, that someone could have actually done this to their family, is staggering. Everything Jenny thought she knew has been thrown into question.
She asks herself, if it's possible that someone in their community had started this fire on purpose, then what else is possible? What else could the investigators and officials have been wrong about? Can she believe anything she's been told about the fire? About the fate of her five little children? Doubt begins to gnaw at her. She can't stop thinking about that night, picking apart every tiny detail in her mind.
Ginny can't bring herself to accept that her five young children actually perished in those flames. Perhaps it's the wishful thinking of a mother who has suffered an unthinkable loss, but perhaps not.
Because what really keeps Ginny awake at night are the facts of this case, or rather, the lack thereof. Why were there no screams or cries for help during the fire? Why are there no skeletal remains in the wreckage? They say burning flesh can be smelled from miles away.
And if that's true, why in the world didn't they smell it? She begins to fixate on these details and on the bones.

She hears about something that happened in a neighboring community, another fire.

In it, seven people died, but in that case, seven skeletons were recovered.

And this gnaws at her.

She can't understand why there were no skeletons in the ashes of her home. She decides to conduct an experiment.
I mean, I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

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I'm not sure what I'm doing.

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I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing.
I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing.
I'm not sure what I'm doing. gnaws at her.
She can't understand why there were no skeletons in the ashes of her home.

She decides to conduct an experiment. She has plenty of animal bones in the trash from cooking chicken and pork chops for the family, and so she decides to take these bones and put them in her oven, making it as hot as she can.
Interestingly, no matter how hot she gets the oven, she can't get the bones to turn to ash. Now it's not the most scientific experiments.

Her Interestingly, no matter how hot she gets the oven, she can't get the bones to turn to ash. Now, it's not the most scientific experiment.
Her oven is not as hot as the house fire would have been. But to her, it's enough.
Jenny and her state won't be convinced otherwise. In her heart, she knows that her children's bones could not have possibly been turned to ash.
And with this, an employee at a local crematorium concurs, informing Jenny that human bones remain after being subjected to temperatures comparable to that of a house fire. It's not definitive proof, but it's more than enough for a mourning mother to cling to.
No bones were recovered, which means that there's a chance,

even if a small one, that the Sauter children weren't in the fire at all. And if they weren't in the fire, it's possible that they're still alive.
But this is hardly a comforting thought, because if they are still alive, where are they?

Ginny knows that there's no... But this is hardly a comforting thought, because if they are still alive, where are they?

Ginny knows that there's no chance that they wandered off before the fire, or fled during it, and somehow got lost.

They were young, but not so young that they couldn't find help.

Maurice, the oldest, was 14.

And if they had escaped the fire, but succumbed to the elements, their bodies surely would have been found by now. So the Sauter children didn't wander off, and it seems like they didn't die in the fire either.
This leaves one other possibility, but it's unthinkable. It's insane.
Ginny and George both know it, and yet they can't bring themselves to believe any other explanation than this. That fire was nothing but a distraction, a cover for the real crime that took place that night.
Kidnapping. Now, instead of grieving, the Sodders begin to think back on every strange moment from the months prior.
Every confrontation or mysterious occurrence. The kinds of events a person writes off as nothing to worry about, resurfacing and filled with sinister possibility.
Which is to say that, to the Sodders, every acquaintance, every neighbor, is now a suspect. George thinks back, trying to recall any recent interactions that felt a bit strange at the time.
And one in particular comes to mind right away. Months prior, a strange man showed up at the Sodders' home, inquiring if George, who owned a hauling company, was hiring.
George said that he wasn't, and yet the traveler still hung around the house a bit, like he wasn't taking no for an answer. It was an uncomfortable situation.
George followed him around the yard, trying to ride the line between being polite and getting the traveler to move on. The young man started to point out things about the yard, as if trying to impress him with his handyman knowledge.
And circling to the home's rear, George recalls that the man pointed to the fuse boxes on their wall and said, this is going to cause a fire someday. In that moment, George concluded that this man had no idea what he was talking about.

After all, he had just had the boxes looked at and approved by the power company.

Eventually, the man left, and George put the incident out of his mind.

But now, George can't help but wonder, had the traveler really moved on down the road?

Or did he hang around, bitter about being turned down for work? In another instance, Ginny recalls something else. Another curious event that happened shortly before the fire.
One day, she was working in the kitchen when, through the window, she saw the kids coming home from school. But in that moment, her eyes were drawn to something else.
Behind her kids, a car she didn't recognize was parked on the street. Inside it was a man, and he appeared to be watching them.
All of them, it seemed. The children, Ginny, the house itself.
And the way he was looking at them, it felt unusual. Aggressive, even.
It made Ginny uneasy, but once her kids were inside, the car drove away and she sighed in relief. But now, she's left to wonder, was this man doing some sort of reconnaissance? But unfortunately, that's only the beginning of the suspect list.
As an Italian immigrant, George had strong beliefs about the leader of the country he left behind. He was an outspoken critic of Mussolini, which ruffled the feathers among Fayetteville's Italian-American community.
George had one business associate in particular, who we'll call Nick. He and Nick fell out over their politics, and in their final fight, Nick allegedly shouted, your goddamn house is going up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed.
You're going to pay for the dirty remarks you've been making about Mussolini. Finally, Ginny remembers the strange call she received on the phone right before the fire.
It seemed like a wrong number, but now she thinks maybe it was the conspirators calling to make sure they were home. George and Ginny share their suspicions with the police.
Though they're not convinced, they agree to investigate and put up notices around town and in the newspaper, asking for leads relating to the missing children for the fire. And soon after, a series of disturbing reports start rolling in.
Around April 1946, a spectator from the morning after the fire reveals that they saw a young man remove something from the ashes. It's unclear if this was before or after the firefighters arrived, though once they got there, there was a crowd of people for the thief to blend in two.
The police track down this lead and identify the young man as Lonnie Johnson, a local thief. And with this, an item belonging to the solders is discovered in his possession.
It's a block and tackle of sort of rope and pulley George often used to repair vehicles for work. Lonnie swears up and down that he had nothing to do with the fire, and yet when pushed, he admits that not only did he steal this tool, but he was at the house the night before the fire.
In a stunning revelation, Lonnie says that he took the ladder and that he used it to cut the phone line. Ostensibly, this was so that if he was caught stealing, the Sauters couldn't call the police before he escaped.
But he says he never did steal anything other than that block and tackle, which he only took after the house had already burnt down. It's a very odd thing to admit to while denying any further involvement.
Like the man in the car, or George's business associate Nick, Lonnie by all accounts seems like an agent in a larger conspiracy. But in order to prove something of that magnitude, the Sartres are going to need a staggering amount of new evidence.
And surprisingly, that's exactly what's about to arrive. In 1946, an eyewitness comes forward to the police.
The man is a bus driver. He claims that while driving past the Sauter's home during the night of the fire, he witnessed a person throwing, quote, balls of fire at the house.
It's unclear why he didn't

report this at the time. Perhaps he thought it was some sort of Christmas celebration or a

controlled demolition, or maybe he thought it was an act of violence and he just didn't want to get

involved. But nevertheless, it's enough to compel the family to return to the scene of the fire,

to see if there's anything they might have missed. While the family's there, toddler Sylvia gets away from her mother.
A strange ball-like object in the yard catches her eye. She travels across the lawn on her small feet, arriving at the object and picking it up.
It's shaped like a ball, but it has a weird cap on one end. Her parents finally notice her and come over, taking the device from her hand.
George has no idea what it could be, but his oldest, John, who's now home on leave from the army, identifies it immediately. It's an incendiary grenade, a weapon specifically designed to start fires.
This would explain the thump on the roof right before the fire began, as well as the rolling noise that came afterward. It also supports what the Sauders have suspected all along, that the fire started upstairs and not in a downstairs fuse box as the police investigation determined.
The Sauders are bewildered by this new evidence, but confident that it'll finally convince local law enforcement to investigate the fire as an arson case. But surprisingly, the police do no such thing.
Military weaponry found at the scene is evidently not convincing enough. But even still, other jaw-dropping evidence continues to pour in.
That same year, a pair of women reach out to the police. They claim to have seen the Sauter children alive.
One of them, who works at a roadside restaurant hours outside of Fayetteville, says she saw them the morning after the fire. She served them

breakfast and also noticed a car with Florida license plates parked outside. The other woman,

who works at a hotel in Charleston, West Virginia, says she saw four of the five children check in

around midnight a week or so after the fire with a group of unfriendly adults who spoke Italian.

When the Sodders learn of this, it sparks an array of conflicting emotions. There's joy because their kids might still be alive, but new horrors too.
What if their kids were taken by fellow Italians as revenge for George's anti-Mussolini views? If that's true, the children could be back in Italy,

thousands of miles beyond the reach of the police in West Virginia.

By this point, the Sodders are beyond frustrated with the lack of results from law enforcement.

For the past year, it's been one staggering revelation after another,

yet the local police are behaving as though the faulty wiring explanation still holds water. The Sodders recognize that they must appeal to a higher authority, and so in 1947, they write to the FBI.
They receive a response from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, but it isn't good news.
Hoover maintains that this case is a local matter, and that the FBI has no jurisdiction. But even still, the Sodders refuse to be stonewalled, and in 1947, they hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of it.
As the PI questions various people around Fayetteville, he keeps hearing one particular rumor again and again. That Fire Chief Morris himself, the man responsible for responding to the fire, discovered a human organ in the ashes.
It's a bizarre and potentially major revelation. On Christmas Day, the firefighters claimed that there was absolutely no trace of the children's bodies.
But this rumor, conflictingly, implies that they did recover human remains and hid the evidence. Even stranger, it's been said that they placed the organ in a wooden dynamite box and buried it somewhere on the property.
It's a strange, strange story, and the PI doesn't quite know what to make of it, but he hears it from so many people that he's compelled to tell the Sodders about it. Right away, the family rushes back to the scene of the fire, and thereafter, they begin digging.
It's painful to disturb the flowers they planted in honor of their lost children,

but they'll do anything to learn more about what happened.

And soon, sure enough, one of their shovels hits something.

It's wooden, hollow.

George, Ginny, and their surviving children gather around as the box is uncovered and hoisted to the surface.

It's a dynamite box, just like their PI said it would be. Collectively, they hold their breath as the lid comes off, and inside, as promised, is an undeniable lump of dried and shriveled flesh.
Resultingly, a local funeral director is brought in to examine the contents.

But there... and shriveled flesh.
Resultingly, a local funeral director is brought in to examine the contents.

But they're even more confused than the Sauders are, because it's not a human organ.

Rather, it's beef, a beef liver to be exact.

And even stranger, it's not even burnt.

At their wit's end, the Sauders decide to confront Fire Chief Morris face to face. And once pushed, Morris makes an astonishing confession.
Except it's not a confession to some sinister conspiracy. Rather, he states that he was only trying to help, but made a mistake.
Morris states that he's certain that the kids died in the fire, but watching the Sauter family desperately search for evidence to the contrary and destroying what was left of their own emotional well-being in the process was too much for him to bear. And so Morris says he did something very unorthodox.
He got a hold of some beef liver, put it in the box, and buried it at the site. He then planted the rumors himself in the hopes that the Sodders might hear of it and dig up the box.
From his strange, distorted point of view, he thought that this might be enough to get the Sodders to believe that their kids were truly dead. It's an odd scheme, one that doesn't seem likely to have ever worked.
And it gets even stranger. When the Sauders go to retrieve the liver from the coroner, they find that it's disappeared from his office.
But even as this line of inquiry fails, another rises. The PI has one more lead to pursue, and it's perhaps the most promising.
In 1947, the family's PI investigates one final lead in his search for the missing Sarder kids. He's curious about George's former business associate, Nick, who George fell out with over politics.
The one who furiously made the bizarre claim about their house going up in smoke. George tells the PI that Nick was actually his employee at one time.
They were close enough that when George needed a cosigner for an insurance policy on his home, Nick was

willing to step in. However, they stopped talking after their fights over Mussolini.
The PI secures a copy of the insurance policy, and shockingly, it's been updated since when George last saw it. As it turned out, Nick had increased the amount on George's home insurance by $250 right before the fire without telling George.
It seems odd that such a move would even be possible without George's consent, but it does mean that, as a cosigner, Nick might have benefited if the entire Sauter family died in the fire. But that isn't even the most damning detail that the private investigator uncovers.
As it turned out, Nick didn't just stand to benefit from the fire. He was actually a member of the coroner's jury that ultimately ruled the fire as an accident.
Now, this fact is incredibly bizarre. A coroner's jury is made up of random citizens, like any jury,

but their job is to look at the evidence presented in a mysterious death and determine if foul play

was involved. Nick should not have been a part of this based upon his relationship to the family

alone, and on top of that, as someone who could have benefited from their deaths, he's an obvious

suspect. And yet, he was on the very jury that could have recommended he be investigated.
Armed with this information, the Saunders go to the local prosecuting attorney and demand that Nick be investigated. It would seem like they had a decent case, but to their horror, the attorney looks at the evidence, then back to them, and politely states, I don't want to bring a case against people with whom I live and eat.
The Sauters are bewildered by this response. They're certain they're the victims of arson.
Their kids are either dead or kidnapped, and they have strong evidence suggesting who did it. On top of this, there's evidence suggesting that there was misconduct among the coroner's jury, and now the prosecutor is refusing to do his job.
Is this man in on it? Is he a part of the pro-Mussolini elements in town that wanted to see his family burn? Has Nick

paid him off? What secrets is this West Virginia community keeping from its own members?

Years pass.

It's 1953 now, nearly eight years after the fire.

And the family is out of ideas. All that's left to them is to take out a billboard on the side of the road near their house.
It features pictures of all five children, and it reads, What was their fate? Kidnapped? Murdered?

Or are they still alive?

With the $5,000 reward offered for information.

Over the next decade, George and Jenny frequently receive letters in the mail from all over the country, with people claiming to have seen one of the children.

They chase every lead, no matter how tenuous.

Once, George sees a picture in the newspaper of a little girl who lives in New York. He thinks she looks like one of his missing daughters, and so he goes all the way there and demands that her parents let him see her.
Unsurprisingly, they refuse. Yet, in his mind, he believes that they could be the beneficiaries of the kidnapping.
But at the same time, it's just as possible that they're frightened parents with no reason to let a strange man see their daughter, and ultimately, he has to respect their wishes and return home. Ginny also pursues some rather thin leads with a similar level of aggression.
She recalls the woman's testimony from the roadside motel, the one that claimed to see the children taken away in a car with a Florida license plate. As it turns out, Ginny has a brother who lives in Florida, and she gets it into her head to call him to see if he had anything to do with the alleged kidnapping.
It's unclear why she would suspect this of her own brother, but she actually has the police produce records to prove that all of her brother's kids are his own. 1966, 21 years since the fire.
By this point, the Sauters are searching for children who have, officially, been dead longer than they were alive. But the leads don't stop, so neither do they.
That year, the family received a letter from a woman who writes that she overheard two men talking to each other, evidently claiming that they were Louis and Maurice Sauter. George travels to Texas to meet with them.
However, the lead goes nowhere. A year later, in 1967, the Sauters receive another mysterious letter.
Enclosed is a photograph of a young man with the same features and complexion as the men in their family. And sure enough, on the back of the photograph, there's a note that reads, Louis Sauter.
But this letter didn't come from Texas and came from Kentucky, but without a return address, no means of contacting the sender. And so, the Sauters hire yet another PI to go to Kentucky to find out what he can.
But once the PI travels to Kentucky, the family never hears from him again. Perhaps he was just a con man who took the solder's money and ran,

or maybe it was something darker. Regardless, his disappearance is a final gut punch,

because that is where the trail runs cold for the very last time. And so, we're left to grapple with the same questions that tortured the saunters themselves.
It is, of course, possible that the children simply died in the fire. Maybe all five bodies really were incinerated.
Or maybe the firefighters just didn't search thoroughly enough to find what remained. But an accidental fire burning hot all night doesn't explain the many contradictions and lies embedded in the evidence.
It seems at least possible that their kids were kidnapped. Yet in some ways, it might be less chilling to believe that they all died in that fire.
Grief can do strange things to a person. By not accepting the deaths, Ginny and George became their own tormentors.
As horrifying as the death of a child can be, there's nothing more terrifying than the unknown. Not accepting the simplest explanation meant that

they forced themselves to imagine the worst. Forced themselves through years of false leads and disappointment, and led themselves to hurl terrible accusations at both strangers and family.
the unknown. That is what ruined their lives.

Not the fire, not the loss. Just simply, not knowing.
The Sauter children stare down from their billboard on the highway, asking every driver who passes, what was our fate? Late Nights with Nexpo is created and hosted by me, Nexpo.

Executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen.

This episode was written by Greg Castro.

Copy editing by Luke Baratz. Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain. Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacy Wood.
Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway. Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Cole Locasio.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel. Artwork by Jessica Thank you for listening to Late Nights with Nexpo.

I love you all, and good night.