Buried Bones - a historical true crime podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul HolesOn today’s episode, Paul and Kate take us to 1945 West Virginia where a family of 12 is awoken on Christmas Eve by a fire in their home. An investigation of the scene reveals much more than simply what could have started the blaze.
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I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
This is buried Bones.
Hey, Kate, how are you today?
I'm well, Paul, how about you?
I am?
I am doing good. In fact, I'm looking forward to the Christmas break. I'm going to be in Hawaii for part of that.
Hawaii? Really, how do I get that gig? Can I come to Do you want to do a show? And I'm sure I can find a Hawaii story we can do.
Oh yeah, no, Go visit my parents who live out there, and quick trip out, quick trip back. It's been a couple of years since I've been out there, so it'll be fun.
Do you go over Christmas Eve Christmas Day? Or are you kind of going around it?
Go around for sure, try to avoid, you know, the real crush of the of the travel. But it's still going to be tough, you know, anytime during that period is a tough travel.
Yeah, I'm going to really try to muster up some sympathy for you. Wi You're lying on a beach somewhere seeing your parents on the holidays while I'm in Texas freezing with the definition of freezing in Texas being probably about fifty degrees.
Well, I'll be thinking about you at least. How's that?
Well, thank you. I appreciate that this is our kind of holiday Christmas ye episode, and I have a Christmas story for you. But as you know, we are a true crime show, so this is definitely not about Santa Claus. This is definitely a story about the Christmas holidays and some of the good and bad that comes with I think investigating around the holidays. Did you work on Christmas? Ever?
You know, I don't recall being called out on Christmas Day, though I'm not entirely sure about that. I definitely was called out New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, you know, over the course of my career when I was actively on call.
This is a busy time.
Yeah, families get together, family strife rears its ugly head, somebody ends up dead.
Well, I mean, I see it. There's economics involved. I mean, there's financial strain, there's right stressful families, all that kind of stuff happening, and then you have to think that you have investigators, you know, like in journalism. We had definitely had people on call, and I worked several Christmases, many Christmas Is actually, but we had less people than we we normally would have, and I imagine that has to be the same for police at least that was the case in what we're about to deal with.
Of course, within the department there's mandatory staffing aspects. However, many people were granted time off as long as you know, the fundamental services were covered. I know what we would do, because this is what I was on call for CSI work while I was with the lab is. We would try to rotate the holidays across the staff so the same person wasn't on call the next year for Christmas and or New Year's you know, we are always trying to at least spread that pain out, but we did not increase our staffing during that time, even though it's a busy time historically.
Well, this I think has in some ways the disadvantage of this happening on Christmas. Let's do a couple of things before we jump in. Number One, this is a case suggested by a listener. Love that. Number two, my friend who's a fantastic author, Abbot Taylor, who has been on my show a couple of times now. She's also known as Karen Abbott. She's a wonderful author. She wrote about this in her blog, which is how I found it. I was reading something that she had written, and I thought, oh my gosh, this would be a great Buried Bones episode because it is a Christmas mystery, big mystery mixed in with some conspiracy, which I like a good conspiracy sometimes, and we certainly have that here. So I would buckle up and get ready because you know, we are going to be heading into I think, a time period that's really going to be interesting and also a family. There's a lot of stuff happening where we have to figure out what happened.
All right, Well, ho ho ho, I'm ready for you.
Here we go. Let's set the scene. In my family, Christmas Eve is the big thing, big big deal. That's where we have dinner at my mom's house. Traditional. Everybody gets stressed up relatively, We have a nice dinner that night, and then Christmas Day is a lot more laid back. I think we've probably talked about this before. You know. The kids are up at five inexplicably and open presence, and then we're kind of done. We talked up later that day and sometimes we'll have a good dinner afterwards. But Christmas Eve is a really big deal in our family. And is that that big of a deal for you too or no.
We sort of have a tradition and it comes from my wife's side where she has to watch Christmas Story.
Doll she try out kid.
Yeah, so that's that's kind of the big event. And then the kids get to pick a present from out of the tree that they want to open on Christmas Eve. You know, that's kind of it, which I we never did that in my when I was growing up for Christmas, and so for.
Me, I'm like, no, no, no, they need to wait until the morning.
It's like, oh, come on, let them have you know, the kids are older now, they actually sleep in on Christmas Morning, which is nice.
It sounds really nice. Yeah, so so fantastic.
But I wouldn't say that we make a real big deal out of Christmas Eve.
All right, well, this is a Christmas story. I would say only in the idea that I think we are undermanned here with investigators, which is never good news for you and I. When the people you know in our stories don't have enough either forensic experience or forensic tools or just like manpower, things tend to go wrong here. And I feel like this is kind of where we're heading a little bit with this story, which is still a mystery and I can't wait to tell you about it. Okay, So this is Christmas of nineteen forty five. World War Two has just ended. Things are not settled obviously in the United States, and we're focusing in on a family that immigrated from Italy. And so the patriarch of this family is a guy named George Sadu, and he was born in Italy in eighteen ninety five. He came to the United States at the age of thirteen. So we're actually going to West Virginia for this story. So the main character, as I said right now, is his name is George, and he finds employment on the Pennsylvania railroads. He's like toting supplies to laborers. That's a job. And he eventually lands in West Virginia. He gets a job in trucking. He falls in love with a woman named Jenny Cipriani. George and Jenny eventually marry and they settle in a small Appalachian town called Fayettesville, West Virginia, where they connect with other Italian Americans in the community. So here's where things get complicated. You know, I told you this is a little got some conspiracy elements to it. So George Sado is very well respected. The problem is, you know, when they moved to West Virginia, within those few years before nineteen forty five, before what happened happens, he becomes very outspoken about Mussolini before Mussolini is killed, okay, and it causes a lot of tension. He has gotten into arguments with other people of Italian heritage in Fayetteville over these political different pferences. We have not done a ton of stories on political conspiracies. This is very much something we need to think about. We have talked about the black Glove Oh yeah, you know, society. We've talked about that a couple of times, and we've talked about the Cuban mob in New York in that one case of the restaurant here who was killed. But we really haven't gotten too much into it otherwise, and this is going to be, I think, a pretty big part of the story. So George is very outspoken, he's very political. He hates Mussolini. There are people in this small town who love Mussolini or you know, have reverence to him, and so already there's sort of tension there to begin with. So I just want to set the scene by saying, George seems like a great guy. They end up with ten kids. Cool, wow, great guy, ten kids, seems like a happy home life. But he is making some pretty big enemies over a very controversial figure for sure. So that said, they welcome their first child, John, in nineteen twenty three. They have ten kids, as I said, by nineteen forty three, and George goes on to establish his own trucking company and they have like a comfy, middle class lifestyle, which is great coming from a guy who was an immigrant at the age of thirteen, who you know, was delivering goods to or delivering supplies to railroad workers to then starting his own trucking company. So things are going really well in late nineteen forty five. So this is after World War Two, after Mussolini has died, but George is still i'm sure, spouting off about you know, Italy and fascism and everything that's happening. A few bizarre things start to happen that George and his wife talked to investigators about. The first thing occurs in the fall a guy shows up looking for work. Okay, so during this visit, the man points to two fuse boxes outside of George's house and reportedly tells him this is going to cause a fire someday. And George thinks this is a weird observation because someone from the power company had checked the wiring and said, your boxes look great, no problem, you don't need to upgrade or do anything. This might not be anything, but it upsets him and kind of creeps him out that some stranger he doesn't even know is making a comment about there being a fire. So somebody who was outspoken politically in such a tense atmosphere, I think is probably picking up on all sorts of things that could be innocuous when you think, and.
I'm wondering, is George perceiving this statement by the man as being sort of a threat. Yes, So this man shows up says I need a job, and oh, by the way, those two fuse boxes could cause a fire.
Yeah, he's saying, what are you talking about? These are in great condition. And it sounds like the guy was like, well, I'm just telling you, you know, this is what I see. I think it made him nervous. But I'm betting if you're spouting out about Mussolini in an Italian American community that is probably pretty pro Mussolini. A lot of stuff makes you nervous.
And it may also be the body language that this man used, and he made that statement which set George off you and I was like, okay, this guy is he's threatening me.
There's another man that shows up not long after. So based on reporting, we don't have a ton of information on this Paul. But based on reporting, it sounds like the family knows this guy, but he's not often identified, you know, by name and source material. He's described as a local insurance salesman and he is hoping to sell the family life insurance policies. The context here is a bit unclear, but it seems like there's an argument that breaks out between the salesman and George, perhaps because of the execution of Mussolini earlier that year. I mean, this is just something that George harped on. So before the salesman leaves, they're in this fight. He starts to leave and he says, according to George, your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussoline.
The second man is aware of George's stances on Mussolini over time. So obviously, now, okay, this wasn't just this guy showing up and then there's a spontaneous argument over Mussolini. This guy already has a bias against George because of Georgia's stances against Mussolini.
I think that's right. So later in an afternoon, shortly before Christmas, So what happens happens on Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. Later, on an afternoon before Christmas, George's kids notice there's a man sitting inside a parked car, on the highway near their home. I think they must mean like pulled over on the shoulder or something. They think this man is watching them as they walk from school to home. But we don't know a lot about it. It's just that the kids are saying, this guy was watching us, and we don't know what the intentions were. They didn't know who it was, They couldn't describe the car. And these are all little kids. He has a ton of little kids.
Right, so you know, and this is where it now. If you're sitting in a car and you see a few kids walking, you know, sometimes you'll glance over and notice the kids, or you know, you got your predators. Right, they're sitting in the car, they see the kids, and now they're tunnel visioned on the kids, and now that creep factor comes out. These kids are at least sensing some sort of creep factor. Now in the context of this story, it sounds like they're thinking it's more in line with the like the two previous men, who are you know, one indirectly is indicating that George's house is going to burn down. The second man explicitly states his house is going to burn down because of the Mussolini political aspects. So these kids are in tune that, oh, something is going on, you know, with dad and the family, and they're going, this guy isn't right.
Who's sitting in the.
Car, And this must have just set George and Jenny around the holidays on edge. I mean, as if they're not on edge already from World War Two and Mussolini and the execution. This is not good. It's Christmas Eve. It's a little after midnight, so technically Christmas Day. Everyone is asleep. And here's the list. I haven't told you about the ages of the kids. So you've got George Senior, and you've got Jenny. You've got John, their son who is twenty three. They have a twenty one year old son named Joe, but he's in the military. So they've got John's twenty three, Marion seventeen. These are all people in the house. George who is sixteen, Maurice who is fourteen or fifteen, Martha's twelve, Lewis's nine, and Jenny Junior is eight, Betty is five or six, and Sylvia's two. And then of course I said, you know there's a son who's out the military. They're all at home. Okay, so you're with me so far packed house? Yes, twelve thirty am. Christmas Day just became Christmas Day. The phone rings, and this is where the trouble starts. Jenny and George have a bedroom on the ground floor. She gets out of bed, she heads into another room to answer it. The caller is a woman. Jenny does not recognize the voice, so the woman asks for an unfamiliar name, somebody who doesn't live there. Jenny can hear laughter and glasses clinking in the background. Sounds like she's at a party. Jenny, I mean basically just says I think this is a wrong number and hangs up the phone. Then as she walks back to her bed, she notices that some of the lights are still on around the house, and the home's curtains are open, and the front door is unlocked. All of this is happening, so, you know, they went to bed and everything seemed to have been secured, and then Jenny wakes up at twelve thirty and there's all sorts of you know, there's lights and all sorts of things happening, and she can see that her daughter, Marian is asleep on the couch. So she figures the other kids are upstairs in their bedrooms. She closes the house and turns off the lights, and then she climbs into bed, and then things start to happen. So are we thinking, if something bad happens here, that this phone call is a way to confirm that somebody's home. Do you think if it's connected, well, it.
Could be the culture in our country with the landline phones. I go back, you know, all the way to the you know, the early seventies is probably my earliest memories related to the phones in the house.
But this is, you know, nineteen forty five.
You know, this is well before there were there was voicemail or voice recorders, you know, so if the phone rang in your house, you answered it. And in fact, burglars would take advantage of that. They would call houses during the day to figure out when, you know, people were home or not, and then they could start planning which houses they were going to burglarize based on that type of information. So this female calling at twelve thirty am Christmas, you know, that's rude first, you know, but I would not eliminate the possibility this was somebody trying to check are they actually home or was it just a random phone call. You know, maybe something like that happens. She's drinking dials a number. But right now with kind of the lead up with these strange men, sounds like something bad's about to happen inside this house. That yeah, I think that that is a distinct possibility that she is checking making sure people are at the house before whatever bad thing is going to happen.
Okay, Well, Jenny tries to blow this off. As I said, She closes up the house, she turns out the lights. Marian's on the sofa asleep. She gets back into bed. She starts to doze off, and she hears a bang on the roof and then the sound of something rolling. She doesn't do anything about it. She goes back to sleep, and when she wakes up about twenty minutes later, the bedroom is filled with smoke and the house is on fire.
Sounds like a Molotov cocktail.
I mean, I've seen plenty of war movies, So how does this work? Somebody? Is this like a grenade where somebody's pulling a pen and throwing it or what.
There could be a wide variety of different types of incendiary devices that could have been used. When I use the term Molotov cocktail. You know, there's different ways that these can be constructed, but you just think of having a bottle filled with a flammable liquid and you've got a wick like some torn T shirt stuffed in.
There, rag or something.
Okay, you light that, you throw it.
The idea is is that you know, when the glass bottle breaks with this flammable fluid and you have the wick, it catches fire. All that flammable fluid catches fire, and of course the structure that it's on or thrown in catches fire as well.
I'm not saying for sure.
That this is the device that was used, but that you know, when you hear this bang, it sounds like, you know, you have a heavy object that hits the roof and then when it starts rolling, well, yeah, that sounds like something that would be akin to a Molotov cocktail. But there could be, you know, a military raid device that is being used to who knows mm.
And so this is happening. Within a half an hour of this mysterious woman calling and asking for a stranger's name, the room is filling up with smoke. I will tell you that this of course is a fire of course, this is scary for the entire family. In some ways, I think the fire is the least interesting part of this story. So just hang in there, because this is not all about the fire. I'm telling you. The bedroom is filled with smoke. She and her husband wake up. George grabs the toddler, who is Sylvia, who's sleeping with them, and they rush out of the room. As they move through the smoky house, this is a big place, George and Jenny yell to Marian, who's on the couch. They also called all the kids upstairs. I mean, so now we're talking about I think like seven kids who were upstairs, two are downstairs, and ones away with the military. They call the kids upstairs. But this blaze is going really quickly and the stairwell going up becomes impassable. Only two children can make it out down the stairs, so it's George Junior and John. Let me go back up to their ages. George Junior is sixteen and John is twenty three, and Marian is seventeen. And then they grabbed Sylvia. So we are talking about five of the ten kids. Because Joe's at the military. Five of the ten kids are safe. George Junior gets out, Jenny, John, Mary and George Senior and Sylvia, and there are five kids that are still inside. And these are the relatively middle younger ones, right, So there's a fifteen year old, a twelve year old, a nine year old, an eight year old, and a five or six year old who are still trapped. Then we've got George who's trying to get to them. So he busts out a window, cuts himself pretty badly in the process. He tries to climb back into the house, but there's too much smoke and the flames are just going really quickly. It's immediately clear he's not able to do this. He runs. Now here's the conspiracy part. Boy. He runs to the back of the property. He has a huge ladder that is propped up against his house, but he just keeps it there. But it's not there and it'll later be found seventy five feet away from where he always has it. So the ladder's gone. He runs to his two work trucks. Remember he's a trucker, hoping he can drive one toward the house and park it so that he could get up to the kids on the second floor window. Neither of these trucks will turn over, which is not normal. So you have a sad, concerned look on your face here with all of this.
Well, obviously as a parent, one of the biggest fears was a fire happening in the middle of the night, you know, with where the kids are relative to where my bedroom was at and having you know, seen the ramifications of what happens in fires to people, you know, this is a horrific in terms of the situation with the ladder and the two trucks, you know, most certainly sounds like whoever set the house on fire wanted to limit the rescue aspect. That's showing intent. That's showing Okay, we want somebody to die, somebody to get burned up. It's interesting how quickly the flames are spreading. And I don't have a good sense you know, from ginny hearing the bang and the rolling to you know, waking up and the house is filled with smoke. I don't have any sense in terms of the time frame, but we have that observation of the front door being unlocked, lights being on, flames are spreading very quickly, you know, did somebody come in and pour an accelerant throughout the house or in select locations in order to be able to causes fire to spread much faster than maybe normal. You know, I don't know, yeh, but that's I mean, this is sounding. It's sounding very sinister up front, for sure.
Okay, well let me keep going here. So later on a witness will say that they have seen a man on site during the fire, like a neighbor or something during this fire, you know, and it could have been four in the morning, We don't know. It could have been a neighbor who came out and looked. He had what's called a block and tackle. Do you know what that is? A block and tackle? No, I had to look it up. It's a mechanism consisting of ropes and one or more more pulley blocks that you use for lifting or pulling heavy objects. And my friend Abbott Taylor says that it could be used to remove car engines. But we don't know if this guy tampered with Georgia's cars or who he is. And you know, I haven't seen anything about whether the engines had been removed from these two work trucks of his, just that there was a guy there who you know, nobody really knew it could have been a neighbor they didn't know. I guess there's just suspiciousness kind of throughout this entire story.
Yeah, I know we're dealing with vehicles from nineteen forty five, but I would have a hard time that in the middle of the night that two engine blocks were removed out of these trucks. Yeah, that's that's way over the top to disable the trucks. There's so many different ways, you know, So that we're further into the investigation, I would imagine that there is some some mechanical expert looking at these trucks to determine why they did not turn over, you know, were they intentionally sabotaged.
We eventually are going to learn, and I might as well tell you this now, because we are now convinced, I think you and I that this certainly was somebody who is sabotaging them. The family's telephone wires were cut. They found evidence of that. Marion, who is the fourteen or fifteen year old, rushes to a neighbor's house to use their phone because their phone is not working. She tries to get the operator, but there's no one on the line. Because it's Christmas Day, you know, and it's one thirty at this point, so it sounds like this phone call happened at twelve thirty. Marian heard the thud I would bet twelve forty five. She said she was just dozing. It probably took her ten or fifteen minutes to kind of around answer the phone, look around, shut everything down, and then the fire I mean it was quick, you know, and smoking and blazing by one o'clock. You know, Marian is having absolutely no luck finding somebody an operator, but luckily George flags down a neighbor who is driving by during this blaze. He's able to get a hold of the fire chief, who's a guy named F. J. Morris. Morris is not particularly helpful. This will go also into our conspiracy, which drive me crazy. The conspiracies are going to drive me crazy. He's not helpful. He says he can't drive the fire truck himself, even though he's the fire chief. He has to wait for other crew members to arrive. And Morris gets this in motion by starting the department's phone tree system, So you know where they're getting a hold of all the firefighters, but they won't get there until eight am. This madness started at one am. And so this is disturbing already to George, and his mind has already been churning about people out to get him to begin with. And this is not helpful that the fire chief is not responding to a fire when his little children are all trapped up on the upper floor.
Yeah, you know, I know it's Christmas. But generally, you know, for emergency response, this is you know, part of your critical staffing. You always maintain a level of critical staff in order to be able to respond to emergencies. And for this fire chief, for this fire department to take seven hours to respond to a structure fire with occupants, I would want to know, well, what is their normal response, what is their normal staffing level?
What is their staffing level?
That night when you said that, the fire chief said, I can't drive the truck myself.
Well, that might be very accurate.
I don't know what kind of truck this is, you know, does it require multiple people to drive or to get set up?
Who knows?
But a seven hour delay for this type of fire, something's wrong. And it's either just sheer negligence in terms of ensuring that you had people to respond, or there's a purposeful act in terms of delaying the response. That does sound crazy to me.
It does to me too. I mean, you have to say, we've got to throw in there that this is right after World War Two, and you know, I think their supply of local men have been depleted to a certain extent and Christmas. But at the same time, seven hours just seems not feasible to me.
Yep, it's absurd as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know if this makes sense, So you tell me if this makes sense. The Times West Virginia says that the house was completely burned down to the ground in under forty five minutes. Does that seem if we're thinking Molotov cocktail? Does that tally with you?
Not with a single point of ignition, you know from the outside. This is where I think this further supports that possibly an accelerant had been distributed inside the house.
That would be my guess.
Now I am not an expert, you know, this is where I would be looking at, you know, my Arson investigators and saying, hey, you know, and of course they would be able to take a look at the remnants of the house and maybe see that there's multiple points of origin to the fire, which is one of the things, one of the diagnostic features of well, yes, this is a you know, this was a purposeful fire. This is an arson, even though you're talking nineteen forty five, there could be visual indicators that an accelerant had been applied the way that the fire possibly spread. And this is where your arson investigators. They're highly trained and they can see. It's so interesting is that, of course, you know, the inside of a house after it's been burned, it is such a surreal environment. Everything looks different. But these guys can see. They know what let's say, an old style TV looks like after it's been melted down down, you know, into the carpet, you know, they say, that's a TV. This is this, this is this, And I'm going in going okay, okay, you know, show me where the body is, you know, that's that's my focus. But forty five minutes for what sounds like a fairly large house. You know, obviously this must be entirely a wood structure. I am leaning towards. This seems like it is a very hot fire and it's spread very quickly, and this was possibly aided by an accelerant.
Let me know, if you think this is going to make a difference. I'm pretty sure it does. Police, after talking to George, find out that he kept a fifty five gallon drum of gasoline in the basement. When'd you think that makes a difference.
Well, obviously that's a huge fuel source for the fire, but you'd have to get access into the basement. If you're the arsonist, either you're going into the basement or you are able from the outside to start a fire down there, and that would indicate you have knowledge that that fuel source is down there for the fire. Let's say the fire starts upstairs, and yes, I mean eventually it could make its way down, but generally fires move faster up than down. Maybe this open door that Jenny saw, you know, was an arsenist or a member of a team of arsenists that went down into the basement to take advantage of this massive fuel source. And I would imagine you're just not keeping that gasoline in that fifty five gallon drum. You are possibly puncturing the side of it or laying it down on its side with the little tab open, so this gas is now spreading across the floor, and that's when you're throwing your ignition source at that fuel, and then that would explain how rapidly this fire spread and possibly help speed up the time frame it took to completely burn this house down.
Well, let me ask a very cryptic question. Which section of a house is better to start a fire in with an accelerant to ensure that it burns as fast as possible. The lowest point or the highest point?
Oh well, the lowest point the basement. And you know, typically basements because they're built underground. You know, they have a retaining wall aspect. Structurally, they're made out of concrete or cinder block, something that's relatively non flammable. But once you get to the first floor, the second floor, whatever, that's going to be your wood structure that's above ground. And so you think about this fire that's fueled by this fifty five gallons of gas. You know, once you know that fire heats up the ceiling to the basement, that's going to be probably wood. Now you start getting the fire moving very quickly up, you know, and if you have stairwells where you have oxygen sources, you know, the fire likes to.
Go to where it can breathe.
So yes, I would say that if the point of origin to this fire was in the basement and the arsonists utilize the existing gasoline down there. Then this is showing pre planning, This is showing intent. This is wanting this fire in essence to kill as many people in this house as possible.
Okay, well, let me tell you who is left in this house that has been burned down to the ground. So Maurice, Martha, Lewis, Jinny Junior, and Betty. These kids are let's see, Maurice is fourteen or fifteen, Martha's twelve, Lewis is nine, Genny is eight. I don't know if I said Betty she's five. These are the kids who were still trapped this house, they said, burned to the ground. Their parents, of course, are completely devastated and trying to figure out what happened, and they couldn't get to their kids. They're sort of tortured over this. And then we get to trying to figure out in the aftermath of this fire, who caused it. This was murder, except there is no evidence of any of these kids left. There's no teeth, not one tiny bit of anything from any of the kids. And this is very alarming to the locals.
Well, I've seen.
In fact, I just consulted on a case in which, again a very hot fire as well as the body had been probably within a structure as it burned for quite some time, and in essence, there was hardly anything left body completely cremated. In essence, it was like this congealed mass that was there that was tiny. So on one hand, I'm wondering if these kids had burned up so much that now what I would expect to be relatively naive and ignorant fire investigators would never have recognized their bodies. On the other hand, were the kids even in the house right when the fire happened? Had they been taken out, kidnapped or something else going on? So I think those are the two competing theories I have right now. I'll leave it at that. I'm sure you are going to be giving me a curve ball here pretty soon.
Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff happening, and there's evidence on both sides of that. So don't conclude they were burned up just yet, because we have some experts who came in and they said that there was days and days of searching. There was at least one firefire who had extensive experience responding to house fires and doing searches like this, who had been great at finding the most minute pieces. The quote was, they searched through the ashes for the five children's remains. They did not find as much as one single tooth. The police said, well, he's got that fifty five gallon drum, and of course the fire chief immediately says, it burns so hot it was an incinerator. Essentially, the fire chief is on board with all the children died. George and Jenny are not saying anything just yet. But tell me if you think that this is weird, because this is the beginning of my own conspiracy in my head about this story. A few days later. So this happens on December twenty fifth. Four days later, on December twenty ninth, George and Jenny bulldoze the property to create a memorial for the kids. Four days later, would you not think we need to investigate? Like, why would you if this is a I don't get it. I don't understand why they would be allowed to do that. It's weird to me. Four days Yeah.
Typically with arson investigations, you know, those can take some time, and the burned up structure is usually left in place for a period of time because the arson investigators need sometimes need to kind of continuously come back as they find out more information. This does seem quick to decompletely destroy this crime scene, especially being done by George and Jenny. But right now I have no I guess I have no opinion on this at this point in time, It's just okay. This does seem odd. It starts to open up the door. Though in my head that George's paranoia and his reporting of these men is that staging. Is he trying to set something up? And is there any benefit to him or Jenny to have five of their kids either disappear or die interesting.
I will make a note with no judgment towards George or you know, saying that this is what I think happened. I will say that the kids that were in the fire are the youngest, with the exception of the toddler that they grabbed. When I read that he had bulldozed down the site, what I thought was he so freaked out and paranoid that he faked their debts sent them off. He was that scared and he thought maybe he and Jenny could take care of the toddler. And then the other ones were old enough. But we have a lot more. I mean, I have several more pages of stuff to get through. There's a lot more happening with this. You know, this fire happens on Christmas Day. Four days later they bulldozed down the rest of the house. Then the next day after that, the corner issues at death certificates based on the corner's inquest, which was that it was an accident, the result of faulty wiring.
From those fuseboxes.
Yeah, which is weird because the utility company had come out and said everything is fine. Now this is where I go back to being confused, because at first I was thinking George is doing weird stuff. But George and Jenny are sounding alarms about this from now until the end of time. They're saying, we think that something nefarious was happening. We don't think this was an accident. This is not bad wiring, and most of the people in the town don't think it was bad wiring. They said that Ginny had seen these lights on. You know, they're explaining the power company had come out. It just doesn't make any sense that it was an electrical wire malfunction. They also said, you know, of course, this is when we found out that their telephone wires had been cut and that the latter had been moved. So eventually it's determined that the telephone wires were cut by a man named Lonnie Johnson, who happened to be robbing the property of tools because he was a trucker. You know, George had all of these tools the night the fire began. He pled guilty to theft, and of course the timing is really suspicious, but Lonnie is adamant he didn't have anything to do with the fire at all. And you know, we don't know if this is the guy who had the block and tackle I told you about. But you know, essentially the police are not a him. He's never arrested. He's arrested for theft. He confessed to that that there's nothing else and he's not somebody who's been making a threat, and you know, he's just a thief essentially.
Well, I know, coincidences can happen, but Lonnie is at the house cutting the telephone lines the night that fire breaks out.
He's a trucker.
You have two trucks that have been disabled somehow, some way, right, did they find any stolen property with Lonnie to be able to verify that he did in fact steal something.
I do think they found some tools, yes on him. He was kind of known as the local like thief, you know, small town thief. And actually it kind of makes sense. I mean, you're guaranteed people were going to be in bed Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I know, it's weird and there are coincidences. They don't think there's enough there to charge him with anything, but that doesn't mean he wasn't involved certainly.
Right, I mean, though one person could be involved in the arson to think about, Okay, the ladder's been moved, two trucks disabled, possibly an intrusion into the house, as well as maybe an incentiary device being thrown on top of the house.
Seems like it's more than one person doing this.
Well, likely a woman at least as part of the conspiracy, the woman who called, And that would make sense if this is politically motivated. Let me give you some more information. Three months after the tragedy, they're no closer to figuring out what happened. George and Jenny are poking around the property and they find something which is a dark green hard rubber object, and according to the Smithsonian magazine, who has covered this story, George thinks it looks like a military style napalm pineapple bomb, and they wonder, of course, is this the device that Genny heard banging and then rolling off of the roof that night. I will tell you, Paul, I find it hard to believe that nobody found this before that. I mean, you've got somebody looking for teeth and they didn't find this thing. And we're at the end of World War two and people don't know that this looks like a pineapple bomb.
No, this is where your fire investigators are. Some investigators they would recognize that.
Yeah, so what happened?
Well, if if that was truly missed in the search, then that tells me that they easily would have missed these kids as remains.
You know, they did not search very good.
I don't buy this, but I don't know why that they just happened to come across this with all of these people trapesing across this property, and you have to know they're luki lose going over there too after sundown. I mean, just this is the freakiest thing that's really happened in this area. I'm not saying they planted it. I just think it's weird. Do you have any idea how big this would have been. It's not tiny, right, it would have been fist sized maybe.
I don't know.
If it's something that's handheld and thrown, it wouldn't have been very big.
I'm gonna look it up. Okay, here's the length. If this is the same same thing, and that it probably is, it's about four inches long, diameter is almost three inches, weight is about not even two pounds.
Yeah, I mean this sounds like your handheld grenade type of device, but its intent is to start a fire. It's an incendiary device. This is a type of evidence that fire investigators are some investigators are looking for, you know, when they are looking at a case like this, and so to miss something like that again, it just it underscores that this was not a very well searched arson.
Scene or somebody planted that for some reason. And you have to think it's close to the house. If Genny's right and you hear it rolling off the roof, it's going to be landing right there, right.
Yeah.
Well, if it's planted after the fact, then that is a form of staging, Yeah, you know, and why plant this military device to try to make it think that it was somebody that's a soldier? You know, that seems odd to me. I'm not sure what benefit there would be in this scenario to plant something like that.
Well, let's talk about people running experiments they probably shouldn't be running. Jenny is beside herself over these kids. She starts running her own experiments to test the theory that a children might have been completely incinerated. She starts burning animal bones to see what's left after the fire, and Abbott Kaylor, my friend, says that each time she was left with a heap of charred bones. She knew that the remnants of various household appliances had been found in the burned out basement that were still totally identifiable, and an employee at at crematorium that she talked to said that bones remain after the bodies are burned for two hours at two thousand degrees, and this house was destroyed in forty five minutes. So you know, there should have been stuff, is what everybody's pointed. With five kids, there should have been stuff.
I don't know, I'm unconvinced, Okay, Jenny's experiments are faulty completely, you know, I know, you know, you start talking about like a crematorium, Well, that's a static environment. You're just dealing with the heat that the body is being subjected to when you were dealing with a structural fire. And there's a lot of variables, you know, and I can't speak to how much hotter. You know, the house fire in this situation would be than a crematorium or less than a crematorium.
But you think about a house.
You got objects that are now collapsing, you have the house itself collapsing. You know, if you have these even if there's some long bones, some recognizable long bones from the children, there's mechanical forces that are possibly being applied that is going to disrupt all of that. I would think that remnants from some of the kids would have been able to persist after this fire. I do think it's possible that these children's remains were burned up to an extent where they would have been unrecognizable, possibly congealed with other substances that had melted inside the house. And people that were investigating this fire may not have the expertise to have recognized the child's remains.
All right, Well, let's keep going because now we're coming to your favorite part, the maddening world of witnesses who are spotting people and not spotting people. It's a big smile, Okay, George and Jenny are going out of their minds because the amount of witness statements coming in. So we have one person who says that they saw a tiny face among the flames in an upstairs window, which of course supports the idea that the kids died in the fire. But someone else says that they saw the kids in a car passing by while the fire was still burning. And then in the days and weeks that followed, there are more tips. Someone in Charleston, West Virginia reported that the four youngest of the missing children were with four Italians speaking. It's a week after the fire. And then a motel employee says that the missing kids were just hours after the fire, like right around you know, in between Charleston and Fayetteville. So people are seeing these kids, specifically four or five kids here. So what do you think about that? I mean, we've talked about witnesses.
Before, well, and I imagine this is a fairly high profile case, right mm. Hmmm, yeah, you know, it's it's so hard to put a lot of credibility on these witness statements. Can't dismiss them either, you know. That's that's probably the maddening aspect of this aspect of the investigation. Maybe these people are telling the truth. These witnesses are telling the truth, but they didn't interpret what they were seeing, right, These were just other kids out there. Parents are taking them home from Grandma's house to go and wake up in the morning at their own house, you know, for Christmas morning, or you know, they truly saw these victims. And then now why these particular kids are purposely selected to have been removed from the house. You know, what was at something done with the knowledge of George and Jenny. Was just something that was done to torment George and Jenny. I mean, who knows, you know at this point. You know, right now, you know the two competing theories either the kids burned up in the fire or the kids were abducted or given away. I don't know if you can resolve those two competing theories with the information right now.
So George hired a private investigator named C. C. Tinsley, and Tinsley finds out from a Fayetteville minister that the fire chief, remember him F. J. Morris, the guy who delayed coming to the fire, had claimed to have found a human heart among the fire debris, And obviously this is freaking out George and Jenny. They approached the fire chief and said, what what are you talking about? And the chief didn't have a good answer, but he says, you know, I'll kind of show you this box that I found. And they unbury this box because I guess he had buried it again. And it turned out that it was beef liver that he had buried himself. And his claim essentially was that he wanted to give the family some kind of closure like they had definitely died in this fire. It was. It's a bizarre circumstance and rumor, but all it means to me is that the fire chief can't be trusted for anything, including putting out a fire effectively.
No, that's true, you know, and I think you just brought something to light if you will, talk about how this house burned down in forty five minutes, but that fire smoldered, the embers smoldered much longer. I mean, it was seven hours before the fire department shows up.
Right.
This further puts in my brain the fact that it is possible that the kids remains were so decimated by this fire that they just were unrecognizable.
Well, let's go on, there's more stuff. Of course, turns out that the same insurance salesman who had threatened George, remember your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. Remember him, He's never been arrested for it. Of course, he said he didn't mean anything when I said it. This guy, Paul, was a member of the Corner Stury who determined it was an accidental death due to electrical wiring. Welcome to a small town. So listen. Now things get a little sciencey. So I definitely need your help because the story is not over in nineteen forty nine, So this happens in forty five. In nineteen forty nine, there's a DC pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter, and he conducts a brand new search of the property at George and Jenny's request. He unearths a partly burned dictionary that had been kept in the children's room. He also finds small pieces of human vertebrae. So you're telling me that a dictionary doesn't burn all the way, but these kids are burned. I don't know.
I can just say, and it's anecdotal. Fire does weird things. Yeah, you know, So as odd as that might seem, I'm not surprised by that. I've seen that type of thing where things all around something is just completely charred and burned. And then you have some you know, some object that you would think would have gone up too, and it's right there, the human vertebrae. I mean the fact that you have a pathologists identifying this as a small human vertebrae, which sounds consistent with child size.
You know.
Of course, in this day and age, we could potentially get DNA off of that vertebrae to show it's one of the kids.
Okay, well it's with the Smithsonian, I'm presuming. Let me tell you the interesting findings here. Number one. I'm going to start with the fact that the Smithsonian experts say this has not been exposed to fire. They send it to the Smithsonian. This is in nineteen forty nine. They determined that this is these are quotes. This is so sign see the human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual. Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been sixteen or seventeen years. The top age limit would have been about twenty two, since the CenTra, which normally fuse at twenty three, are still unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal maturation than one would expect for a fourteen year old boy who is the oldest one. It is, however, possible, although not probable, that for a boy fourteen and a half years old to show sixteen to seventeen maturation. And then they say it is not being exposed to fire. And the report the experts say, and this is a lot of people at the Smithsonian, they say, it is very strange that no other bones were found in the allegedly careful excavation of the basement of the house, and that if the house reportedly burned for only half an hour or so, one would expect the full skeletons of the five children rather than only four vertebrae. And they don't even think this is of a kid.
Well, there's I mean, there's there's so many variables we're talking about here, You're talking about four years of time after the fire, after the house was bulldozed, and then they find this vertebrae from I would say, like, what like a late teenage boy that has that wasn't exposed to the fire, And at this point in time we don't know whose vertebrae this is. You know, I'm just now trying to wrap my head around, Well, what can be said because of the you know, do you have a completely unrelated dead body that is at this property that was there either before or after the fire, but wasn't in essence burned up in the fire. Is this body even related to the family. I mean, there's too many unknowns to draw any type of conclusion. It's just that you have a crime scene in which five kids disappeared from them, and now you find vertebrae. So I think if you draw the assumption, well it's one of the kids, I think that's a faulty assumption.
Yeah, I agree, And it gets more confusing because two things. One, the Smithsonian report says that the experts believe that when they talked to George and Jenny and they said this was the basement area, this is kind of where you were putting up a memorial where this was found. What did you do to fill in some of the space here? And they said, well, we used backfill like dirt. The private investigator, there's one article that the researcher found. There's a private investigator that they hired said that he was essentially able to trace this vertebrae back to a body at Mount Hope, West Virginia. The idea was that they used dirt kind of close to this grave site.
From the cemetery.
Yeah, that it was transferred in when they built this memorial. I don't even know what the memorial looks like. So the Smithsonian said, that's to them, that's the only logical thing here. Eras that whatever dirt was used had body parts. Yeah, I think in this area, I mean, people were buried all over the place here, So I thought that was really interesting, not conclusive.
Yeah, it's a plausible explanation, you know for sure. Yeah, it sounds like this. You know, based on the anthropological assessment that expert is able to determine a lot that these vertebrae are in good shape. So that's where kind of to my point earlier to assume that these vertebrae were present at the time of the fire. It could have been there before, just not exposed to the fire or after. In this scenario, it's come after and it's in essence. It's just, you know, this is contamination of the scene. Four years later, you do have that happen.
The FBI is rocked, of course by the Smithsonian's report and gets drawn into it and then gets nowhere and drops it. And the surviving members of the family become convinced that the kids did survive, and somebody took him from the house, and they chase leads and they follow up on tips, and you know, these things always peter out. In sixty eight, so this is twenty three years later, the family gets a photograph of a man in the mail. On the back of the photograph, somebody has written Lewis Sawdu and then it says, I love brother Frankie little boys, and that's got some numbers or thirty five A nine zero, one, three, two or thirty five. So one of the boys who died was named Lewis. The family is convinced that this is Lewis, but they never find out how to contact the sender or the man in the photograph. They hand it over to investigators, this photo, and they wonder what the heck the stream of numbers and letters is. They never decipher it. You know, Lewis doesn't have a brother named Frank, but Jinny did have a brother named Frank. The Huffington Post, of course, years years years later, reports that at some point one of the family members accused her brother, Jenny's brother, of kidnapping the children and raising them himself in Florida. But we don't know what the motive is. There's nothing ever comes of that. So it's just, I mean, it is unreal what this family has gone through.
Yeah, but this sounds kind of goofy to me.
So you have one of the kids, now twenty three years later, is reaching out with a photo of himself saying he loved Frankie, one of the other kids that's missing, and then there's this weird series of numbers. Yeah, why would Lewis be so cryptic at this point? You know, as now as an adult, I mean, Lewis was in early teens at the time of the fire.
Yeah, and there's no brother Frank either. Lewis would have been nine, he would have been nine during this.
Okay, so he's now in his early thirties at the time this photo is sent. You know, this sounds more like, you know, you have the eyes that escape from Alcatraz. And then people are sending in photos of these guys, you know, saying, hey, here I am living my life, and its is like, no, you know, this is where you have your your goofballs and your nut jobs out there that are just trying to put themselves into this investigation. You know, get a thrill out of the fact that maybe they get something in the headlines.
I'm not buying this photo at all. If these kids were.
Abducted by family and raised, assuming that they were allowed to you know, grow up and start their own families and everything else.
You know.
I think if I were to get involved in this case today, if I had DNA from you know, the other kids or their descendants, I'd be looking to see if I could find siblings or you know, people at the cousin level who pursued genealogy, you know, because then it would say, oh, yeah, they did you know, they survived, you know, they have their offspring, who have their offspring several generations removed since nineteen forty five, it's not that that far back in time. That would be the one avenue I think I would pursue to try to answer this question.
You know, the vertebrae.
I kind of buy the Smithsonian's assessment, but I think we could do snip testing on that and figure out who's vertebrae that was. But potentially, you know, so, yeah, at least with what you're telling me, the missing five kids are still the big mystery in this case, and I think there are ways even what is that now, that's fifty five, I mean you're talking eighty years later. I mean, I think there's ways we could possibly solve this mystery.
I would love that. Ultimately, George and Jenny die not knowing what happened. They famously put up a billboard offering ten thousand dollars and there's a really sad photo that will go on social media of the two of them, and they're very old, and the billboard was up for decades. Finally the family took it down after Ginny died, but they never came up with anything. They never came up with anything conclusive, but the children and the grandchildren, the ones who survived and then their children had continued to search and try, and that's the end of this Christmas mystery. You know what happened to these children? And we really do always seem to come back. Paul, I feel like to how competent are our investigators at the time. How much do you trust them? Do we trust that they did a thorough search? If we do, then something happened other than maybe them being burned up or you know, they got destroyed and misinterpreted. I don't know. I mean, you know, I just now we can always come back to how much easier we haven't now than they did in nineteen forty five. Gosh, well, you know.
There's still incompetence and negligence that happens in investigations.
In this case. I mean, you just take a look.
At the seventh hour delay by the fire department to respond, you know, I think that that's, you know, really underscores there was a lack of competence and maybe even something more sinister going on. Finding the pineapple incendiary device. I forget exactly what it was called, but that's being found days later, you know. It just to me there was an incomplete search of this arson scene from the very beginning, and I just do not have confidence that they would have found these kids remains there, so I leaned towards you know, the kids were killed in the fire, and they are likely their remains are still at that location, but from the mechanical disruption from the house fire and everything going on, and then the bulldozing and everything else, I think it'd be very tough to find anything after.
Well, this is not the traditional Christmas story that I enjoy, but this was man an important story. I feel like, I really, I feel like I learned a lot off of this story. And we need a couple of weeks off from this because this is tough. Losing kids is tough. When we talk about that, it's really hard. But we need a couple of weeks off and we're going to hopefully have good holidays and enjoy our loved ones and be grateful for what we have.
Well that sounds good, And like I said, I will be on a beach in Waikiki and I will raise a glass of bourbon thinking about you and looking forward to when we get back together.
You're gonna drink bourbon in Hawaii? Can't What about my tie? Aren't you gonna expand your horizons a little bit? Paul, Oh, come on, no reason to okay, no, no expanded horizons here. Okay, We'll have a wonderful winter break and we will see you in a couple of.
Weeks, all right, you two.
Kate, this has been an exactly right production for.
Our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones Sources.
Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi.
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Baried Bones pod.
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now, and
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's cold Cases is also available now
