My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 359 - We Wish You A Merry Criminal

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

This week, Karen and Georgia welcome back Phoebe Judge, the host of Criminal, to tell the story of the Sodder children's disappearance on Christmas Eve.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We at Wondery live, breathe and downright obsess over true crime and now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music, Exhibit C. It's truly criminal. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hardstar and that's Karen Kilgariff. And I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Yay, Phoebe Judge is back baby. Welcome back. Thank you for being here. Yes. No, thank you for having me. Have you been since we last touched base on a crossover episode? Yeah, just finding more crime stories that you never run out of stories. You don't. No, they just keep coming. Oh, we know it. I found a story this

morning that I tried to pitch to the group about a woman who had called the police because she thought that she'd ordered a barbecue sandwich and it was pink and she thought that it was undercooked. And so she called the police who arrived and the people who owned the barbecue restaurant said, well, it's smoked. So it's pink and she didn't believe it. And so the cop was kind of laughing at her and she went back that night and started posting one star reviews on Google saying they serve raw pork here. So I pitched that story. It didn't go over so well, but I'm finding stories like that lately. Wow. I love that Phoebe has to pitch stories on her own podcast. I know. You got to do whatever you want. That's very journalistic of you to just be like,

I can't be the only one making this decision. We need to put it to the, how many people are on that panel? Lawrence Spore. Oh, nine. Lawrence Spore has a very high bar. So a lot of my ideas just get immediately axed. Well, you save them for here is what you do. We don't have a high bar here. Yes. No way. Bring that barbecue shit right over here. We want it. Yeah. That bar is like touching the ground basically over here. It's like limbo. It's like a little limbo chit chat bar. We're just like, what's fun to talk about a lady like that. That would be amazing. Yeah. She's going to sink a barbecue place because she doesn't understand the concept of barbecue itself. Those people are dangerous. That is criminal.

That is the idea of calling 911 to begin with. Like I'm scared to call 911 when I know it's like, this is, and I like, have I seen a car accident or something like that? Like this is okay to do. I need to do it. And I'm still scared to do it. And to do it just that willy-nilly in your life and to live your life as a 911er for no biggie. Yeah. I mean. What a privilege. But truly. Well, you won't be hearing that story on any episode of Criminal. I'm sorry to say that has been, this is our only time we'll ever speak of it because we'll not be on the podcast apparently. I was going to say that's what this crossover is all about. That's Phoebe got this idea where she was like, I have stories that don't make the cut that Lauren Sporer says absolutely not to,

but they're still really good. Would you guys like to hear them? And we're like, oh my God, yes we would. Absolutely. And now we're here for the third time doing this crossover with you. That's right. It's our new tradition. And this story was so good actually that when I said, I think I'd like to tell this one on my favorite murder, the nine people on the panel of criminals said, can you save it for us? Yes. Yes. We got a goodie. We got one that everyone, I love that. I think so. I think so. Very generous of you to give that to us. Do you have any like holiday traditions that you're looking forward to or like that you enjoy in the holiday season that you want to tell? Let's get to know Phoebe a little, just a tiny bit before we get into the business of this

episode. I really love giving gifts more than I like receiving and I get really excited about it. But I think that I take some of the pleasure away from the person I'm giving the gift to, because I'm so controlling about how they open it. And you know, we slow down, you're opening, you open that too. Sit here and open it. I take the pleasure away from people, I think. But, and I'm also very, on Christmas morning, I like things to go very slowly. So if I see children opening too quickly, nieces and things, I slow them down and give them bad looks. And you know, I grew up in a family where you were forced to have breakfast before you opened any presents. And so you could open your stocking and then you had to go and you had to have your breakfast.

And then you could go in and we had, there were four of us, four kids. And so everyone sat around and one present at a time and everyone had to watch as people opened their present. Torture for children. And you know, my sister Chloe used to hoard her present. She would go and grab them all from under the tree and kind of stack them up by her side and make me so upset. I love Christmas Eve so much. And for me, at around 11 a.m. on Christmas morning, I start to get a little depressed because it's all over. Who cares about Christmas dinner, you know? For me, it's all about Christmas Eve. And then just up until 11 a.m. and then it might as well be, you know, March. I'm over it. Yeah. So true. There's no, yeah, that's so true.

What about New Year's Eve? Do you love New Year's? Is that a big Phoebe Judge party night? It's not. I don't know if I've seen the New Year in about a decade. One time I went, I went to a free, I went to a champagne tasting event. Every course gave you a glass of champagne when I was about 27 in New Orleans. And you shouldn't drink that much champagne. No, that's not a course. That's not a tasting thing. I think champagne's like to celebrate with one, you know? So I think ever since then, I have been very happy to see nine o'clock, 10 o'clock on New Year's Eve and then start the New Year. It's nice to not have that pressure that I definitely felt like in my 20s of like,

this has to be the night and it has to be amazing or something like the party itself has to be much more special than any other get together. It's so much pressure. It's like built-in disappointment. And now it's that kind of thing where it's like, last year we all watched Miley Cyrus and Pete, what's his name, host the thing. And it was like a complete debacle. It was really funny when we all went to bed. Like, I think we watched the countdown and then everyone was immediately like, goodbye. Don't talk to me anymore. It's so late. It's a little anti-climactic that countdown when you're watching it on TV at least, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, this already happened in New York anyways. Like they're already in bed.

You know what I think is good is parents who have the New Year's Eve parties for their kids at like seven o'clock. Yes. They have it down. I'd like to be invited to a child's New Year's Eve. That's my kind of party. You hear that? Murderinos invite Phoebe Judge to your children's New Year's Eve party. Any children's party at all. That's right, I'll show up. I do do magic. I'll bring my tricks. You do? Like what, up-close magic tricks? Yeah. I dabble in magic. But yeah, I started, I started thinking that this would be a good skill to have if ever, if you were ever at a party and no one was talking to you or it was awkward or, you know, that you could just say, would you like to see a trick? Oh my God. And so I would bring my cards or my coins or my scarves, all my different

and my nutshells. Your 50-foot scarf, chain. So that's my, you know, that's what I could bring to any party that I was invited to. I'll bring my cards. Boom. Perfect icebreaker. I love that. What a cool hobby. Like what a fun hobby to have. Just you're in the middle of it, like the worst small talk ever and then you just reach up and pull a quarter out of someone's ear and then boom. Yeah. It's on. Everyone's laughing. Yeah. Yeah. A dove for my breast pocket. For you and then you give the dove away. That's right. That's right. It's a beautiful symbol. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, HelloFresh has you covered. HelloFresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can

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free shipping on your first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder20 with code murder20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candace DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily, I share a quick 10-minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. I have decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse, FBI agent and criminal profiler. On Killer Psyche Daily, I'll give you insight into cases like Ryan Grantham and the newly arrested Stockton Serial Killer.

I'll also bring on expert guests to dive deeper into the details, share what it's like to work with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey, Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music exclusive podcast Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. We already said this, but if you don't know and you haven't listened to the other crossovers, Phoebe tells us a story. So this is the best, this is the ideal where we actually get to be, we get to listen to a podcast and beyond it at the same time, which is every podcast listeners dream where you get to talk back to the host as they're telling you their story. That's part of

the plan that we had for doing this crossover. So Phoebe, would you like to tell us the story that you brought us today? Sure. And I hope you both will jump in anytime you like to ask any more questions. Okay, great. Thank you. Or just pull a dove out of your ear. And this has a theme, you know, it's maybe not a theme, but this happened at this time of year in 1945 on Christmas Eve, actually, right over into Christmas Day. But I'll just start by saying that, you know, there's a family called the Sotter family. They lived in the town of Fayetteville, West Virginia. George Sotter, the father, had immigrated to the United States from Sardinia when he was young. He was 13. And when he got to America, he started working on the railroads

and then kind of got himself to West Virginia. When he got to West Virginia, George started working as a truck driver. Eventually he started his own trucking company. And he met his wife, Jeanne Sipriani, at a local store, the music box. She was also from Italy. She had immigrated to the US when she was three. George and Jeanne got married and moved to Fayetteville and had 10 children all between the years of 1923 and 1943. So there was a pretty big age span for their kids, you know, 23 year olds and two year olds. But the family was really well respected and well known in Fayetteville, West Virginia. They were middle class family. They had a nice house. And in 1945, that fall of 1945, odd things started happening to the Sotter family.

First off, a man, a stranger, came to the Sotter's house asking for work one day. And while he was there, he kind of pointed at the fuse box at the back of their house and said, that's going to cause a fire someday. And George Sotter kind of thought, what? What are you talking about? But he had the wiring checked by the power company because it was such an odd thing to say. And then, you know, around that same time, an insurance salesman came to the Sotter house and was trying to sell George and the family life insurance. And George declined this and didn't really know why this man was there. And the salesman said something like, your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke and your children are all going to

be destroyed. And then said, you're going to pay for the dirty remarks that you've been making about Mussolini. In 1945, there was a lot of people who were against Mussolini. George was outspoken about not liking Mussolini. And he often got into arguments around town with other Italian-Americans. Fayette Bellaccio had a very strong Italian-American community. So there are these two odd instances of someone coming to the house and talking about the fuse box and then someone offering life insurance and talking about a fire, but also swearing. I mean, that's to me, that stands out of like, why would that salesman be that rude and like aggressive? Yeah. And to be so specific to say, you know, your house is going

to go up in smoke. So these two odd things happened. And then just a little bit before Christmas, the older Sotter sons, because there were some 20-year-olds and their mother remembered that a man would park along US Highway 21, which is right where their house was. And he would watch the younger Sotter kids as they would come home from school. He would just park his car across the road, watch them get off the bus every day and then drive away. But these are odd things, but, you know, they didn't really put them all together. And then it turned into Christmas or right before Christmas. It was Christmas Eve of 1945. And the Sotter children stayed up late, opening some presents. And then some of the younger ones went to bed. All but one of the 10 Sotter children

were at home. Joseph, one of the oldest, was serving in the Army. But George and Jeannie went to bed around 1030 on Christmas Eve with their two-year-old, Sylvia. The other children stayed up and were listening to the radio. And at 1230 that night, a phone call came in and Jeannie answered it. And a strange woman asked for a name that she didn't recognize. Jeannie didn't recognize who this woman, the name was, this woman was asking for. And she could hear laughter and a party in the background. She said, you have the wrong number and hung up the phone, went back up to bed. On her way back up to bed, though, she noticed that all of the downstairs lights were on and the front door was unlocked. Mary and one of the daughters was asleep on the couch in the living

room. And Jeannie turned off the lights and closed the curtains and locked the front door and went back to bed. Just as she was falling asleep, she remembered she heard a sharp, loud bang on the roof and then kind of a rolling noise. But she didn't think much of it, went to bed. An hour later, at around one o'clock now, 45 minutes later, she woke up and she saw smoke in her bedroom. And she shouted to her husband and children to get out of the house. Smoke was already, already rising. George and Jeannie escaped outside with their toddler, Sylvia, who had been sleeping in the bedroom. And three more children who were also sharing a bedroom upstairs, Marion, John, who was 23, and George Jr., who was 16, all of these kids get out of the house with their parents.

They get out of the house, they're there on the front lawn, and the parents realize that five of their other children are still trapped in the bedrooms, in their house. And the fire had now spread to the staircase, so there was no way to get out. George, their father immediately, you know, runs, tries to get water from the well to put the fire out, but he found that the water was frozen. He couldn't get any water. He then ran to the house and broke a window to try to get to the children. He cut his arm on the broken glass and it was bleeding, but he couldn't get in because the fire was spreading so rapidly. Then George goes outside and is running around and he's looking for a ladder. And he usually kept a ladder next to the house to reach the upstairs windows.

But there was no ladder. It was missing. And then George screams at his sons, John and George Jr., who were out of the house, to get his coal trucks. You know, he owns a trucking company that were next to the house, and they were going to kind of drive the trucks up and try to stand on the trucks to get to the windows so the kids could get out, but neither of the trucks would start. At this point, Marion, the daughter who had escaped, runs to a neighbor's house to call the fire department. But in those days, it wasn't just like calling 911, you know, and guaranteed that someone was going to answer. No operator responded to her call. One of the sawder's neighbors at this point sees the fire and also calls the fire department, but they also couldn't get any response.

So that neighbor gets in his car and drives to the fire chief's house to alert him. The fire chief at that point starts something called a phone tree, where one firefighter starts to call the other firefighter. But the fire department, it was only two and a half miles away from the house, but the crew didn't arrive for hours. And by that point, the sawder's home was on the ground in a pile of ash. The reason that the fire department was so short staffed, one, because it was Christmas, so no one was expecting to be working really. And also, there were many men in town who were overseas fighting in World War II. Apparently, the whole house had burned down in about 45 minutes. Five kids, the five who hadn't walked out, right, as their parents were walking out, their names

were Maurice, a 14-year-old, Martha, a 12-year-old, Louis, a nine-year-old, Jeannie, an eight-year-old, and Betty, a six-year-old. At first, the sawder's, the parents assumed that the children had died, as you might. But once the fire was put out and you could start going through the remnants, the rubble, no remains were found in the ashes. And the fire chief said, well, maybe the fire was hot enough that it completely cremated the bodies of these five children. And Jeannie was so upset about this all, and she didn't believe that the fire could have been hot enough that no remains of her children had been left. And so she started experimenting with burning animal bones, chicken, beef, pork chops, to see what would happen. And she said that each time a pile of charred bones was

left. And she also realized going through the rubble that the household appliances that were in the basement of the house were still identifiable after the fire. So she's starting to think, why don't I see any remnants of my children? And a Fayetteville firefighter kind of makes a point that the house had two fuel tanks in the basement and drums of gasoline. And that this could have helped intensify the heat of the fire, making it even more possible that the bodies of these children would have been kind of completely incinerated. But then there was an employee at a crematorium who told Jeannie that, you know, bones can remain even after burning for two hours at 2000 degrees. And as we know, the solder fire burned for 45 minutes. Nevertheless,

the coroner issues five death certificates just before the new year, attributing all of the deaths to fire or suffocation. The idea that a mother would lose five children and then have to start investigating, like basically be like suspicious in her grief and try to be looking into it. Like that is so monumentally nightmarish. Also, this sounds familiar. I feel like I know this story, or at least I've heard it, right? Georgia, have you heard this? Yeah, definitely. It's one way. Well, I think we've always wanted to cover. Yeah, it's like losing an entire family of children. It's crazy. Yeah. In just an instant. Right. The state police inspector did come to the house and investigate, and he determined that the fire was due to faulty

wiring. The family decided to bulldoze the site of the home, and they covered the basement, kind of what was left underground, with five feet of dirt to kind of preserve the site as a memorial. But shortly after they were kind of still grieving, some odd things began happening. First off, there was a telephone repair man that told the solders that their lines looked like they had been cut, not burned. And investigators had said the fire was due to faulty wiring, but she remembers that the lights had all been on at 12.30 that night. She had cut them off, and they were working fine. And then there's a neighbor who tells the solders that she thought that she saw one of the missing children looking out of a car window while the fire was still happening.

And then there's a bus driver who reports that he had seen balls of fire being tossed onto the roof of the solder home. You remember that the mother had heard something hit the roof? Who knows if it's connected? And later, while the family was visiting the site, Jeannie had found a hard rubber object in the yard that looked like a green pineapple, and she said that army personnel later identified it as an incendiary device, or kind of like something called like a pineapple bomb. So these odd things, I mean, it's not as though the family just was able to close the chapter. People keep coming and telling them odd things that are making them start to question whether their children may still

be alive or whether something else has happened. Two years pass, and in 1947, Jeannie Sotter notices a child who's been photographed in a magazine who looks similar to their daughter Betty. And according to some police files, George actually travels to the New York school where the photo was taken to ask about the girl. But he's not allowed into the school because he didn't have any identification. But he goes all the way to New York, the police files say, to go see this girl who had been in this photo. The Sotter family finally decides they need to take some real action here. And they hire private investigators to look into the possibility that their children have disappeared and not died in their home. One of the investigators is named

Oscar Tinsley. Oscar Tinsley finds that the insurance salesman who's threatened George had actually been a member of the coroner's jury that declared the fire accidental. And the next thing he discovers is that the fire chief had told them that he discovered a heart in the ashes, that he hid inside a dynamite box and buried at the Sotter's home for some sort of closure. Sorry. Yeah, it's wild. The bones burned, but there's just a human heart. Tinsley said that he had found a heart in the ashes. Oh my God, that's so macabre. Tinsley says that the fire chief said that he had found a heart. Right. So Tinsley asks the fire chief to dig up this box. And he did, the fire chief did, and they find it. And Tinsley takes

it to the local funeral director who examines it and says the heart is actually a beef liver. And the rumor is that the fire chief did this so that it would seem like some remains had been found in the Sotter's home so that the Sotters would stop investigating. And then there's another private detective, George Swain, who starts to say that he believes that the children may have been kidnapped and put up for adoption. Right around this time, the Sotters who've never stopped kind of wondering start receiving tips of sightings through investigators and newspaper coverage because this is being covered in the newspapers of their children. You know, a woman claims to have seen the missing Sotter children peering from a passing car. A woman operating a

tourist stop some 50 miles away from the house said she saw the children the morning after the fire. She told police that she gave them breakfast and that there was a car there with Florida plates on it. A woman at a Charleston hotel saw the children's photos in a newspaper and said that she had seen four of the five of them a week after the fire and that they were accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction. She said that they had registered at the hotel, that she had tried to talk to the children, but that the men had kind of gotten angry about that, wouldn't allow her to talk to the children and then the next morning they left early. So, they keep getting all of these tips that people around the country are seeing their children

and at that point George and Jeannie write a letter to the FBI about their suspicions that their children may still be alive. They write a letter and it gets to J. Edgar Hoover who writes back, quote, although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come with the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau. But Hoover says that they will assist if they can get permission from the local authorities but the Fayetteville police and fire departments decline the offer. That's not good. That's not a good sign now. Oh, and then in 1949, the Saunders still trying to just figure, they never stop trying to find a solution. The Saunders hire a pathologist. His name is Oscar Hunter and he's going to

excavate the site of their old home. And when he starts excavating, he finds some damaged coins, kind of a dictionary that's been burned and some shards of vertebrae which he determines are human bones for lumbar vertebrae that came from one individual. And he thinks that the individual is anywhere from 16 to 17 years old. But the vertebrae showed no evidence that they'd ever been exposed to the fire. And the report also said that it was strange that no other bones were found in the house. And so the report from this pathologist concluded that the bones were most likely in the supply of dirt that George used to fill in the basement to create the memorial for his children. So that even the bones that they had found that didn't show any sign of burning

turned out to be a dead end. Like they were from just, they had been buried elsewhere and dug up accidentally, right? Because they brought in so much dirt to fill the basement in the site of the fire. Wow. What a mystery on its own. Yeah. So it was the Smithsonian who had issued that report. So it's a pretty prestigious institution that had come to that conclusion. But that Smithsonian report did lead to two hearings in West Virginia about the soldered children in 1950. And at the end of those hearings, the governor and the state police superintendent told the solders basically that their search was hopeless and they declared the case closed. They said, we're not giving you any more resources. It's done. The solders did not take that as any sign

that they would stop though. And in 1953, then now this is almost 10 years after the fire, they put up a billboard in West Virginia on Route 16 offering a $5,000 reward for information about the five children. And the billboard is big and it has pictures of all of the children. And billboard reads, on Christmas Eve, 1945, our home was set a fire and five of our children kidnapped. The officials blamed defective wiring, although lights were still running after the fire started. The official report stated that the children died in the fire. However, no bones were found in the residue and there is no smell of burning flesh during or after the fire. What was the motive of the law officers involved? What did they have to gain by making us suffer

all these years of injustice? Why did they lie and force us to accept those lies? Wow. So it's a very stark billboard. And they also started passing out flyers with the same message and offering a reward of $10,000. I've seen the pictures of that billboard. That's what, right as you said that I was like, oh, that's the famous part of this story. And that idea that it's like five years later, the authorities say the FBI can't help, but that they're like, or that they close it and that that's that, but that they're not going to pass it off. They're just going to say it's closed. Like that's so suspicious and insane. Yeah. And also the headline, you know, this big headline on the billboard in 53 was,

what was their fate, kidnapped, murdered, or are they still alive with a big question mark? Wow. I mean, such a desperate attempt for these parents, you know. Yeah, it's chilling. And this, the billboards and the flyers actually got more attention and more tips were coming in. A woman in St. Louis wrote that Martha, who had been the oldest of the Sotter Girls to go missing, that she was in a convent in St. Louis. And someone in Texas claimed to have overheard a person at a bar talking about being involved in a Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia. Someone from Florida claimed that the children were staying with a distant relative of genies. And in 1950, George and a detective traveled

to Maryland to question a couple who visited Fayetteville the night of the fire. He kept traveling around just trying to find anyone who had actually real information, but he never came back with anything solid. And then in 1967, so this is now more than 20 years after the fire, a woman in Texas wrote that she'd met a drunk man claiming to be Louis Sotter. Louis Sotter, when he had gone missing, was nine. And this was now more than 20 years later. So he would have been around 30. And George goes to Texas to investigate, but the woman refused to speak with him. He also tracks down the young man who claimed to be Louis. And it wasn't his son. In 1967, Ginny also receives a letter addressed to her postmarked from Kentucky with no return

address. And the letter contains a photo of a man in his 20s. On the back, someone had written Louis Sotter, I love brother Frankie. So it's just this weird picture of a man in his 20s with no return address. And George and Ginny both noted the man had the same dark curly hair that their son had had and the same dark brown eyes and nose. And they also said he had the same upward tilt of the left eyebrow. They hire another private investigator, but they never hear anything back. George dies in 1969. And after his death, Ginny doesn't stop. She spends the rest of her life trying to find her children. She also since the day that they went missing or were killed in the fire, wore only black as a sign of her mourning. And the billboard that had been put up stayed up

until Ginny's death. That had been 37 years. Wow. Before her death, she was doing an interview and she said, I'm going to keep on trying. I want the case reopened. I want my children back. Or at least I want them to know who their real mother is. I know they're alive. Oh, wow. So it really did kind of shape her whole life. It was also reported that after George died, Ginny built a fence around their home, the home that was built after the house that burned in the fire was built kind of on the same property. And she continually was adding rooms to it, kind of keeping her from the outside world, kind of making her even closed off on this property even more. After their parents died, the slaughter children who had survived the fire

and lived with their parents didn't stop this idea that their siblings may have been alive. And over the years, some of them have theorized that the children were kidnapped because the local mafia there in Fayetteville in West Virginia had tried to recruit George, but he refused. And so this was retribution. The children that survived also thought maybe that their brothers and sisters that were kidnapped by someone they knew and they were either killed or survived, but never contacted their parents because they wanted to protect them from the kidnapper. John Sotter, one of the children who survived, told the New York Daily News that he believed that his brothers and sisters were taken to Italy,

maybe because remember there was the report that Italian speaking adults were seen with the children after the fire. Marion Sotter believed that her siblings were kidnapped. She told the New York Daily News in 1976, we watched the fire level our house. We thought at first the children had gotten trapped inside, but you know, I never smelled burning flesh and they say you can smell burning flesh miles away. George Sotter, Jr. said, we excavated and sifted through everything, but we found nothing. My brothers and sisters didn't die in that fire. So it's interesting that many of the siblings also didn't believe that it was possible that their brothers and sisters could have died in the house. It seems

like there's a lot of reason why the idea that these children perished in the fire probably makes sense, but these theories just kept coming over a period of 40 years. That much loss feels like you would need that proof because if there's any doubt at all, you would have reason to not have to fully grieve something that gigantic and horrible, and that it just seems like there's so much proof to not, you know, to believe in something else. Yeah. And even Sylvia, who had been two at the time, she was sleeping with her parents. In 2012, you know, she was reported saying that, you know, of course she didn't believe that her siblings had perished in the fire, but in her free time, she visited crime sleuthing websites

where she would just try to figure out what was going on, where her siblings could have gone, and she said that her very first memories are of that night in 1945. She was two years old, and she said that's the first thing that she can remember. She was the last sibling, and she died in April of 2021. Wow. It's a gigantic mystery, and it seems like it haunted these parents because they couldn't ever get a straight answer. Yeah. I mean, it just seems impossible for five bodies to not a single trace. As much as I don't, I want to not have a conspiracy theory in mind. It's like, where is a single trace of them in that fire? There's also the, like, that mafia theory we talk about the, because the mafia comes up all the

time in cold cases and in these stories where there's a little bit of mystery, but in this one specifically, you know, they say, and I'm getting this from like movies or whatever, but that the mafia doesn't kill, like, women and children, that they don't do business like that. So there is that piece of it where it's like the rationale, which kind of is, feels like, oh, well, then you can combine like their, you know, their background, their country of origin with part of the reason why something like this would have to happen. But it's like, but if that's not the way the mafia would do business, if he crossed the mafia somehow, killing five children isn't a standard mafia response. Like, you would just take the father out, right? That would take care

of business in that way. This is such an extreme and horrible and morbid, also just like, even if they wanted to, the whole family to die in that house fire, it just seems overkill is kind of an understatement in this situation. Definitely. Like burn the house down while the family is not there, but on Christmas Eve, you know, there's more than likely going to be some casualties if you're throwing incendiary devices at a house in the middle of the night with sleeping people inside of it. It's overkill and like, someone with an actual vendetta, rather than just the mafia. He didn't want to join the mafia. Like, that's it. Yeah, right. I mean, it is interesting that when the mother went down, the front door was unlocked and that she assumed that her children

had gone to bed. But when I'm thinking about the possibilities of what could have happened, I mean, that is one thing that sticks out, that the lights were on and that the front door was unlocked. But it seems hard to get children out of a house without any noise being made. Yeah. You would assume that these weren't just little kids. There were some older kids, too, that they would have yelled or put up a fight or their parents would have woken up. Right. Unless it was someone they knew who lured them outside somehow. I didn't even think about the fact that, yeah, that would, it could have already happened when she went down and was like, oh, someone didn't turn the lights out. Like, we forgot to

close up the house, which is probably kind of common if you have 10 kids and it's busy and you don't really know what everybody's doing all the time. But that idea that, like, that is taking place. Also, I just can't, the idea of what was the electrician, the guy that came and said this thing, like, basically predicted it and, like, sowed the seed early, is just sinister. It's, like, written. It doesn't feel real. Yeah. This is foreshadowing in a movie. I'm about to tell you this horrible thing. And there was the man who tried to sell the life insurance and he ended up being on the commission or whatever it was that declared the fire accidental. Yeah. Does that mean he really was? He really was with the insurance company? Like, that's,

we don't know. I mean, I guess he must have been. Yeah. You know, there are so many different things to think about here. The fact that these parents had to be tortured. And you can imagine their children, the remaining children, just living in that house where their parents were just all consumed with finding five of their brothers and sisters. And George, their father running out to New York or Texas whenever a new lead would come in. So sad. Yeah. You know, just hope it was right. Wow. The idea that, like, seeing a picture and then, like, that kind of, you believe it, it has to be true. You're going to spend the money to get up there. You're going to investigate yourself because no one will help you. And then it's just kind of like, sorry, you can't,

you can't come in here and you probably are wrong. Like, just everything about that is tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. How they even functioned at all is unbelievable. The simplest answer is that the children died in that fire. Yeah. And the fire was so hot that it incinerated their bones. You know, I mean, that is the thing that probably makes the most sense. Yeah. But there are all of these other things afterwards that the parents had to contend with to pick away at that theory. And that must have been the hardest thing, you know, to just the hope for a second, you know, keep getting these little glimpses of hope over, you know, 40 years and then having them taken back. And very interesting that all of the siblings, not one of the siblings, I think a large majority

of the remaining siblings, none of them said, you know, after all this time, I think my brothers and sisters probably did die in that fire, but they all kept up this hope as their parents had. Yeah. That's so tragic. Well, and also it makes, it just makes you think of when someone you know dies, like that's, you have that hope even when you know for a fact that that person is dead, you would love to see that person again, like that idea that you see a picture and it's like, it's irrational, but it's very relatable and understandable. But then the idea that other people coming and being like, I saw them too, or I then they could be alive and you have the opportunity to get that back, like get they get the grief to go away and then save them.

That it's like piling onto the burden of grief with now you need to go find them and no one's going to help you. You're the only one that can do it. Everything about that is, I mean, it feels like everyone's nightmare in every direction. Like you're the crazy one, you're wrong. You're also being targeted and you've had just this gigantic part of your life removed. It's unimaginable. Maybe the only way to move forward from a tragedy like that is to tell yourself that there is hope that they were kidnapped. Like that's the better alternative than them all perishing in the fire. And so of course, the parents and the sibling wanted to hold on to that with whatever they could and try it any way that they could possibly find a little proof of

that. And so they clung to it, even though rationally, we are all kind of of the mindset that yeah, they probably perished in the fire, which is so sad. And such a on Christmas, Christmas night, Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you for telling us another story, Phoebe, as always, so good at this. It's like it's your job. Phoebe, do you think that they died in the fire? Personally? I think they died in the fire. There are all these coincidences that water was frozen, they couldn't get the trucks to start, the ladder was gone. There's all of these things to pick away at what one might think, but I don't know what happened, but it would seem to me that maybe the fire was very, very hot and something about the house, the way it was constructed,

the gallons of fuel in the basement just created in a section of the house, such a blaze, such an inferno. That's the logical part of me that thinks properly. And if that is the case, then it just changes to, well, how sad and what torture for those parents. And survivor's guilt for the parents and the other kids, where it would at least slake a little bit of that pain, so much pain to basically think there was somewhere to go, there was some way to change it. There's that saying, and I won't say it right, but it's like if it smells fishy and this isn't the right, this is too serious of a matter to use that term, but if it seems odd or if it seems like something might not be right,

it probably is. There are these little things in this story that make you say, well, wait. You know, so I understand why there could be those who think, I don't, I think something different went on that night. There is enough, there's enough little things, but yeah, I think it was probably just a terrible, a terrible tragedy. Yeah, me too. Karen, what do you think? The perfect Christmas story. Wow. I have that thing where I think the possibility it would be too tempting or whatever. Just the idea, when you said the little kid someone saw the child watching from in a car, watching it happen, is just like, you can see it in your mind's eye. And like, so the way my mind works is then it's true, because I can see it and you

could imagine it happening and there, you know, the evil people took them out and then that's happening and the kids are watching their own family think they're dying and all that just feels like you could believe that. So yeah, there's part of me that is like, there's something more that happened here, especially just because you would think there would just be a little bit of some out of five children, some bone, something in the ashes of that fire, anything, but right. But at the same time, we know coincidences happen all the time and that, you know, yeah, that anything is really possible. The saddest part of the whole story is their mother burning those animal bones. You know, that's a very sad thing, I think.

Yeah. Kind of like symbolizing how alone they were in this, like couldn't get anyone to care as much as they did about what happened feels like. Yeah, definitely. Well, Phoebe, we do have an email that we got about the last story that you told us if you want to hear it about Rikers. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a positive note that we could end on. Yeah. I think George, do you want me to read it? Yeah. Yeah. So last time you were here, you told us the story of the Northeast Airlines Flight 823, which crashed shortly after taking off from LaGuardia onto Rikers Island. And so we got an email from a listener named Steven Marks that we thought you'd want to hear. Yeah, Karen, I want to read it. Okay. I'll try to make this fast because it's long, but it's satisfying. Okay. It starts

with, I'm not going to read you the subject line, which is how most of our emails, that's how we start the minisodes, because the subject lines usually give it away. But this subject line is actually, my grandma survived the Rikers Island plane crash with six exclamation points after it. So it says to my amazing murder aunts who have gotten me through so much. I started listening to the podcast when everything shut down in March of 2020 and spent the last two years getting caught up. I often thought about what to write in, but in a bizarre moment of serendipity, I finally caught up just in time to hear your most recent episode with Phoebe Judge and suddenly found myself with the most relevant thing to send to you. Let's get into it. It was

1957. My grandma, Catherine Kay, as she liked to be called, was retiring from her job as a flight attendant. She'd gotten engaged and she'd taken her last flight before retiring when a flight attendant friend of hers asked if my grandma could cover her shift. She agreed to take one final flight, which turned out to be Northeast Airlines Flight 823, which is just, that's also like a movie. Totally. Wow. Words like one more time around before I retire. We often hear stories about people who are supposed to be somewhere and narrowly avoided disaster due to odd circumstances, like someone who was supposed to be on the Titanic and change their plans last minute. Not my grandma. She had the

horrific luck of being on a doomed flight she was never supposed to be on. So after hours of delays, as Ms. Judge described, the flight took off and crashed into Rikers Island within moments of leaving the ground. The evacuation was absolute pandemonium, but my grandma and her fellow flight attendants took their jobs extremely seriously and did everything they could to help rescue people from the burning plane, prying open windows and directing passengers to safety. Unfortunately, she was eventually fully engulfed in flames as the fuselage was collapsing around her. She was rescued and taken to the hospital, but the damage to her body was unimaginable. She was burned on 99% of her body, barely conscious. She heard the doctors tell her mother

that she would never see, hear, or walk again. Her fiance broke up with her and then her friends sees it says, fuck straight man. Oh my God. Fuck straight man. And there was no chance she'd ever have a normal life. But my grandma, being a total badass, just felt pissed off that the doctors were making her mother cry. And with a total I'll show you attitude, she pushed herself to recover. She spent three years in the hospital being treated and rehabilitated, and she just kept fighting. Thanks to her perseverance and the medical treatment she received, she eventually made a full recovery able to see, hear, and walk. She had serious nerve damage, making her unable to feel temperature in her hands. And unfortunately, the harm done to her

kidneys and from all the smoke inhalation was the underlying problem that eventually led to her needing to be on dialysis later in life. The crash did leave a mental scar as well. She didn't like to talk about it very much, but my mom remembers her saying that from time to time, she'd suddenly smell the stench of burning flesh. But overall, she really did live a full and amazing life. And she had an incredible marriage with my grandpa, a Purple Heart recipient. My grandma was one of the smartest, wittiest, and most supportive people I've ever met. She was impossible to beat at games like Scrabble and Rummy Cube, and always made it clear how proud she was of me, even being supportive of me being gay, which is something you

can't always count on from that generation. She died in 2016 and I miss her so much, but I always feel so proud I had a literal hero for a grandma. I'm so glad Phoebe Judge talked to you about the crash on your podcast, and I got the chance to share my grandma's story with you. It's so much better than the story of the jazz singing Ghost Lady that I met, which I was going to write in about. Thank you both for all you do. The impact you've made is indescribable, stay sexy, and just keep fighting, Steven. Oh my, I don't think I had heard that. Isn't that amazing? Yes, that's a surprise to me too. Oh my God. That's wonderful. She lived with her whole body being burned. She made it. Unbelievable. That's amazing. Wow.

The tenacity of that incredible woman of Kay. It's a real person from that story. I can't believe that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, and a really good, I mean, that's us not someone, oh, I have another, I read about some, that's a real direct connection. I know. Wow. I love those. I think Maren found that. Our researcher found that. It's like, that's gold. That's like, yeah, I mean, the dream would have been if you were doing criminal, then you could have, if she had been alive when you did that episode, and that's the person you could interview. Thank you for letting me hear that. That's really great. Absolutely. Well, thank you for doing these crossovers with us because we really, truly love it. It's so fun to

talk to you and to, you know, listen to your, your storytelling is the best. If you haven't listened to criminal, the podcast, please do. It's one of the best true crime podcasts out there. And there's over 200 episodes to listen to now. Congratulations on that. Oh, yes. Congratulations. It's incredible. Thank you very much. I can't believe it. So great. Yeah. So thank you so much. Thank you both. I'm going to, I'm going to keep my ears out for any barbecue related crime stories. We should do it. Can we do an April Fool's Day crossover? And you can just tell us the silliest, the silliest stories. You guess which one is real. Yes, I love it. Oh my God, please. Yes. It'll be like a creative writing exercise where you can just write all the ones. Also,

the, you can get all the, you know, pink barbecue level stories that you can kind of just clean out of your filing cabinet and bring right here. We're here. That low bar is, is here and waiting for you whenever you want to come back. We love it. Well, thank you. I'll look forward to it. Awesome. Thanks, Phoebe. Thank you, Phoebe. Thank you. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Brighton. Our producer is Alejandra Keck. This episode was engineered by Stephen Ray Morris and mixed by Ryo Bowam. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Gemma Harris. Email your hometowns and fucking hurrays to myfavoritmurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at

myfavoritmurder and on Twitter at myfavemurder. Goodbye. Listen, follow, leave us a review on Amazon Music, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, did you know that you can listen to my favorite murder early and ad free on Amazon Music? Download the Amazon Music app today. You can support my favorite murder by filling out a survey at wanderi.com.