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As World War II finally ends, an infamous cold case begins.

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Five siblings vanish in an instant.

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They didn't find any traces of these bodies.

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No bones, not even a piece of a tooth.

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Where could these kids have gone?

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Now we uncover the top theories surrounding every parent's worst fear.

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Not only do we have an arson and a kidnapping, but a possible cover-up.

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Were they brainwashed? Or did they just not want to be found?

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Can new evidence finally reveal answers?

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What really happened to the notorious Sotter children?

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The Sotter Family

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Just four months after World War II ends, American troops head home to spend their first post-war holiday with family.

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One exception? Joseph Sotter, who won't be back in time to celebrate in his hometown of Fayetteville, West Virginia.

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So who was the Sotter family? The parents were George and Jenny.

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They had ten kids. Their oldest son was in the army, but nine of their children were home, living with them.

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The kids are celebrating Christmas Eve. They're allowed to stay up well past their bedtime.

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Unbeknownst to them, all of their lives are going to change within a matter of hours.

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At 1 a.m., Jenny wakes up suddenly. She smells smoke.

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She started a wake, runs down to her husband's study, where she sees one wall on fire.

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We have to remember that back in the 1940s, smoke detectors had not yet been invented.

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So by the time that Jenny discovers the fire, there is not much time to get out of the house, because the fire is already roaring in the study.

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First thing they do is get the four children out of the house that are on the first floor.

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And George and Jenny's bedroom was on the first floor, so this is very easy for them to do, get them out of the house right away.

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Within minutes, George, Jenny and four of their children run outside. But as far as they know, the remaining five are trapped upstairs.

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When they tried to gain entry to the second floor, the staircase was fully engulfed, and they were unable to save the children that were sleeping upstairs.

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And within 45 minutes, the house burned down.

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The heartbroken parents assume the remaining five siblings, 14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 10-year-old Lewis, 8-year-old Jenny, and 6-year-old Betty are dead.

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But could there be more to the story?

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Here's why it's such a mystery. None of the remains of the five children were ever found in the degree of the fire.

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No trace. No bones. No nothing.

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Despite this, authorities quickly jump to the simplest conclusion.

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The official word was that the children died in the fire caused by an electrical issue.

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But we have an investigation that was questionable at best.

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As part of their investigation after they arrived on the scene, they interviewed Jenny and George as to what happened.

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When Jenny first sees the fire in George's office, she reports it's burning near an electrical box on the wall.

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The fire department believes the blaze accelerated up through the walls.

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The fire appeared to have burned very quickly.

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One of the theories out there is that the construction of the house was what is called balloon construction.

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That is to say that it had vertical rafters from the basement running directly up to the second floor, creating a void space,

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which if the fire started inside the walls, it would have created the perfect chimney effect and very quickly burned up through the roof area.

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George tells authorities that after evacuating the four children downstairs, he next tried repeatedly to rescue the siblings upstairs.

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Five of the children were upstairs on the second floor and they were unable to get out.

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And the fire is out of control. There's too much smoke and he's unable to go to the second floor where the five children are sleeping.

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George screams to the kids from the bottom of the stairs, but here's nothing.

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He goes back out through the barrel of water he has outside to put out the fire.

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But he finds the barrels frozen solid.

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He runs looking for the ladder that was on the side of the building.

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The ladder that normally is there is no longer there and he doesn't know where it was or who took it.

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So then he thinks he's going to use his trucks and he had two trucks.

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He was going to pull those trucks up to the house, get on the roof to try to access the second floor.

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But unfortunately, neither truck would start that night.

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Jenny has a similar experience.

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So while George is trying to rescue the children on the second floor, Jenny tries to call the fire department using their home phone, but the line is dead.

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So then Jenny sends her daughter Marion to a neighbor's house to try to call the fire department, but Marion is unable to get through.

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Eventually, a passing motorist offers to drive into town and alert the fire chief.

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During this time in 1945, most of the fire departments in that part of the country were volunteer fire departments.

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So when a fire would come in, it was up to the fire chief to start calling everybody to come to the firehouse, pick up their equipment and then rush over to the scene.

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So as a result of that, the response time was quite lengthy.

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Seven hours after the blaze first ignites, fire trucks finally arrive.

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When the fire department finally shows up, they spend at most a couple of hours and they make a determination that the fire was still there.

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The fire was caused by an electrical issue and that the five children who were sleeping on the second floor all perished in the fire.

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Within five days, even though there were no remains, the coroner's inquest rules that these children died in the fire as a result of an accident, even going so far as to issuing death certificates.

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The fire marshal tells Jenny he believes that as a result of the fire burning so hot, it consumed the bones, the organs and everything else associated with the human body.

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But without concrete physical evidence of death, George and Jenny hold out hope that their children somehow escaped.

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Jenny doesn't end up believing the fire chief's explanation that the kids died in the fire and that they're gone.

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They didn't find any traces of these bodies, no bones, not even a piece of a tooth.

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Jenny starts to feel like there's something else going on.

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She goes and speaks to a local crematorium and they tell her that bones, at least the fragments of bones, usually survive all fires.

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When you cremate a body at a crematorium, you're exposing it to temperatures of approximately 2,000 degrees for several hours.

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And even after that type of temperature, they have to be grounded up to make them into dust when they're given to their loved ones in the urns.

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And George has his own reason to doubt the fire department's conclusion.

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George keeps falling back on two pieces of evidence that in his mind, this fire is not accidental.

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One is that during the fire, he noticed that there were so lights remaining in certain parts of the house while the building is burning.

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So in his mind is how can this be an electrical fire if you still have lights on in the building?

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But also just a few months prior, he had actually brought in an electrician to check the wiring of the house.

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The electrician gave it a passing grade and George starts wondering if there's something else going on.

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Now it is possible that the electrician might have missed something, you know, he is human after all.

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Or it's possible that between the time of the electrician showing up and Christmas Eve, something else went on in that house.

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Authorities soon discover what that something else might be.

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So if you remember, Jenny actually tried to contact the fire chief the night of the fire, but her phone wasn't working.

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So the police investigate that a few days later and what they find could alter the entire course of the investigation because they find the phone lines had been cut.

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When five siblings seemingly perish in a devastating house fire, investigators initially see nothing suspicious.

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They quickly rule that an electrical fire caused their deaths.

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But then they make a startling discovery.

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Telephone lines outside the house have been severed.

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Is it possible the fire was no accident?

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It is my opinion that this fire was intentionally set.

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Classifying a fire as an arson instead of an accidental fire has a lot of implications because an arson connotates that there is a crime that's been committed.

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And if they would have found the remains of the children, it'd be classified as a homicide.

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But it's interesting because the police just kind of brushed this off and they don't really look into that.

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But maybe they should have.

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Because as it turns out, George was far from well liked in Fayetteville.

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I think authorities are missing the background story. What was going on prior to the fire?

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George had a lot of enemies we've learned and we had conflict with other Italian immigrants in that area.

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George Sotter actually born Giorgio Sodu in Sardinia, Italy in 1895.

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Emigrated to the United States when he was only 13 years old.

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Years later, George moves to Smithers, West Virginia.

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He finds work as a truck driver and eventually gets to start his own company.

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And he meets his future wife, Jenny, who is a fellow Italian immigrant.

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The new couple moves to Fayetteville, West Virginia, a small town with a large population of Italian Americans.

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Once George and Jenny settle down, they move to a little wood-framed house about two miles outside of town.

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And they have their first son, Joe, in 1923 and really kind of start making their way as a well-respected middle-class family, at least at first.

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But George's outspoken political beliefs alienate some neighbors.

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It is very common for people that come to America from another country to want to live in the same type of community that they're used to, because it's familiar to them.

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So George has a lot in common with these other people in his community, but politically he does not favor the ruling of Benito Mussolini and makes it known to the public.

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At the time, Mussolini is incredibly popular, both with Italians at home and abroad, and especially in Fayetteville, West Virginia, which kind of leaves George as the odd man out.

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George is telling everybody, I don't like what Mussolini is doing, and he makes it known to one person in particular, Cleeto Grosz, Giannettolo.

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During that time, Cleeto Grosz, CG, is a local banker and a local businessman, and has his bankers in just about everything in the local community.

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Giannettolo has many unusual connections to George Sotter.

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CG Giannettolo is the director of the Fayette County Bank.

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He also is the employer of George Sotter, and George Sotter has a mortgage that is written by the Fayette County Bank,

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which has an insurance provision that Mr. Giannettolo will benefit if there's a fire at the home.

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Yeah, this is where I have a real problem with this case, because the person that is the benefactor of this home should it be destroyed by fire or any other type of natural disaster is the CG Giannettolo.

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Most banks don't do that. Most banks have the bank be the benefactor, not an officer within the bank.

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In today's times, it would be not only a conflict of interest, but it would be illegal for Mr. Giannettolo to hold a financial interest in the property of George Sotter.

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Just two months before the fire and without Sotter's knowledge, Giannettolo increases the insurance payout amount to $1,750, almost $27,000 today.

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Giannettolo's greed didn't stop there, so about 60 days before the fire, he ends up sending one of his good friends, Russell Long, an insurance broker to George's house,

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and at George's house, Russell Long attempts to sell him life insurance for his kids.

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When George refuses the extra insurance, Giannettolo allegedly makes a chilling threat.

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Giannettolo gets very angry and threatens him. He says his house is going to go up in smoke and his children are going to be destroyed.

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And he also says that George will pay for the dirty things that he had been saying about Mussolini.

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Let's put the pieces of the puzzle together. Giannettolo shows up at the house, threatens George, the very individual who was set to collect money if and when the house was destroyed.

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The house does in fact burn down. And this starts putting everything together that this was in fact an arson and not an accidental fire as claimed by the local authorities.

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But what about the cut phone lines?

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If Giannettolo would have also cut the phone line that was found cut the day after the fire, he would be the prime suspect. But in fact, he isn't.

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There is another suspect that comes to surface. Several days after the fire, an individual is arrested in possession of a block and tackle.

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A block and tackle is used to lift a heavy object. This block and tackle, as it turns out, belongs to George.

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The thief, while he's being interviewed, admits that yes, he did steal the block and tackle, but he insists that he did not start the fire.

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He was just present when the fire was burning and used that as a distraction to steal the block and tackle.

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Do we believe the thief's story? Sure, he could have just been there to steal the block and tackle, but why would somebody go all the way out to George's property to steal that one small thing?

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He could have been there to start the fire and used the block and tackle theft as a red herring to lead the investigation astray.

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And it's very plausible that this thief was actually sent by somebody like Genitolo himself.

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It appears that the authorities believe what the thief told them, and also they don't bring in Genitolo to question him further about his possible involvement in this fire.

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But in my profession, as an investigator for 33 years, I have found that there is no coincidences.

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Whether the cause is arson or electrical, another question remains.

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Did the five children die in the fire? To answer that, George starts his own investigation.

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And in 1949, makes a shocking find.

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A few years after the fire, George had an excavation done of the site.

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And they did recover what they believed might be human bones.

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And they sent those bones to the Smithsonian.

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And an expert there said it was in fact human vertebrae, potentially from a young man between the ages of 16 and 24 years old.

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If the bones were indeed from one of the children, the only possible match could be Maurice, 14 years old at the time of the fire.

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Despite the fact that the report says that these were vertebrae from a male between the ages of 16 and 24, there's still enough uncertainty that a 14 year old could have been within that range.

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However, what is interesting is that the report also notes that there didn't appear to be any evidence of charring on the bones.

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That would be very unexpected for someone who was cremated in a fire.

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So we have to ask whose bones are these? Were they already there before the fire started?

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Or were they part of the dirt that was used to bulldoze over the site? Unfortunately, we'll never know.

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Even though the solders were disappointed with the excavation's results, it reinforces their hope that their children still could be alive.

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It's clear that the fire happened and burned down the house, and it's clear that the investigation that was done after the fire was incomplete at best.

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And it's also clear that the remains of the children were never found.

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So in George's and Jenny's mind, their children are not dead.

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George and Jenny, because they're not getting answers, seek the public's help, and they ask for anybody knowing what happened to their children to contact them.

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When their home burned down early on Christmas morning 1945, did five soldered children die in the blaze?

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That's what buyer investigators believe, but the soldered parents are not convinced.

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Over time, understanding that no remains were found and that the fire was most likely caused by arson, Jenny and George wanted to get some answers.

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If law enforcement are not going to step it, the blade who else is going to do it? Nobody else has more on the line than you do.

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What parents would do, they get desperate to try and find their children.

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So seven years after the fire, they erect a billboard in their area.

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George and Jenny offer a reward for any information about their children.

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The offer is at 5,000 in the beginning and eventually increases to 10,000.

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Which is a lot of money back then.

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Eventually, that investment pays off.

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A woman comes forward named Ida Crutchfield and she has information about the children.

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Crutchfield runs a motel in Charleston, West Virginia, about 60 miles away from George and Jenny's home.

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According to Ida, about a week after the fire, four children who matched the description of George and Jenny's children were at her hotel that she managed.

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And they were accompanied by two men and two women.

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She describes the men and the women as being of Italian descent.

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Ida actually tried to have a conversation with the children but she was quickly shut out by the Italian speaking adults.

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The group rents multiple rooms for the night. But the next morning, they're gone.

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So Ida Crutchfield really didn't know about the missing Sotter children at the time.

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She just saw a situation that she thought was very unusual with children with a large number of adults.

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Only later did she realize that she was a potential witness to a kidnapping.

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This is good news and bad news for the Sotter family.

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On one hand, there's actually a possibility that the children are alive and they've been taken under unknown circumstances.

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But on the other hand, can we recover them? Is there any way to possibly get them back?

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So knowing that they're alive is not enough unless you can actually recover them and bring them back to your family.

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It's a known fact that George had enemies. It's one thing to destroy his property, but it's quite another thing to actually take his children.

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Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of Crutchfield's account is its timing.

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It took her seven years to come forward after she saw the children at her motel.

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And even if it's true, seven years later, how could you follow it up, understanding that long period of time that has passed?

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But Ida isn't the only witness to eventually come forward.

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Over the years, the Sotter family are contacted with a lot of tips and different stories about what happened to their children.

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In that time period, there were no security cameras. It was eyewitnesses. It was people that thought they saw something and you had to rely on their very often blurry memories.

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Sifting through various leads, there are two accounts that catch the Sotter's attention.

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One of the tips that comes forward is a woman who says, I saw all the children in a car being driven by somebody leaving the house.

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Another woman comes forward who operates a diner between Fayetteville and Charleston.

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And she says the night after that fire, there was children in that restaurant with a stranger.

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Combining these accounts with Ida Crutchfield's story helps the Sotter family form a potential timeline.

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So in Fayetteville, we have a lady that believes that she saw the children in a car the night of the fire.

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Then we have a lady that thinks she sees the children in a diner between Charleston and Fayetteville.

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And then we have Ida Crutchfield that believes that she saw the children in Charleston.

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If these tips are true, it paints a picture of these children that were kidnapped that night and they're on the move, traveling with somebody against their will.

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After they leave the Charleston motel, there are no further sightings of the children.

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And while it seems like a dead end for the kidnapping theory, it won't be.

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The search for the missing Sotter children becomes more difficult with each passing year, but their parents never give up.

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Then in 1967, two decades after the fire, a mysterious letter arrives.

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George and Jenny are convinced it's proof one son, Louis, is alive.

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George wanted to find his children, and there's no doubt about it.

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He could follow every tip no matter what the cost.

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He would go anywhere to the ends of the earth to find resolution.

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George Sotter spends incredible time and resources scouring the country.

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Decades go by and he's tired and he's about ready to give up.

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But then in 1967, George and Jenny receive a strange letter addressed to them at their home and it contains a photograph.

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The photo was mailed from Central City, Kentucky.

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This photo was the first piece of physical evidence ever to be presented in this case.

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And I must say, it was substantial.

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It was of a man in his 30s that could be one of the children.

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It was what appeared to be a photo of Louis Sotter.

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I can't even imagine this has got to be huge for them.

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They finally see a picture of one of their children after all these years.

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When the Sotters turn this photo over, they are dumbstruck.

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On the back of the photo are three handwritten lines, starting with a name, Louis Sotter.

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But unfortunately, the rest of the writing on the photo is a mystery.

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Next to his name is written, I love brother Frankie.

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And then underneath is I.L. I.L. Boys.

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And finally there are two numbers, A90132 or 35.

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The desperate parents struggle to decipher the message.

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No one knows who Frankie is.

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No one in the family's name Frankie, none of the friends of the family are named Frankie.

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So who could Frankie be?

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Could be the name of the kidnapper?

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Or it could be the name of a person that's been kidnapped?

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Or it could be the name of a kidnapper?

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Or it could be the name of a person that is harboring the children or Louis.

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The little boy comment is disturbing.

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We don't know what that means. Does that imply something nefarious has happened with a child molester?

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Or is this someone talking about their little brothers? We don't know.

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And it appears that all the useful clues that are left are possibly those numbers at the end of that photo.

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A90132 or 35.

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It's a sequence that looks familiar.

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When the photo comes in, it's actually only four years after the U.S. postal zip code system had actually been implemented in the United States.

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So it's fresh in everybody's minds and that's actually the first thing that George and Jenny think when they see those numbers printed on the back of the photograph.

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Could be zip codes. 90132 and 90135.

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Are they actually in the United States?

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Well, they go to check it out and it turns out that neither one of those numbers applies to any zip code in America.

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But the United States isn't the only country to use five-digit postal codes.

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We have to look a bit further. George is of Italian descent and is from Italy.

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Those zip codes match Palermo, Sicily and Palermo is the capital of Sicily and also is the home base of the reputed organized crime organization across the Nostra.

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I do think that there is a distinct possibility there could be some Sicilian mafia involved in this case.

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Could this be the break the solders are looking for?

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For one, George is from Italy. For two, the views of George really weren't that endearing to the Italian government.

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And third, because of the organization of the fire and the events thereafter.

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I think that the zip codes are pretty telling sign that even if they're not where Lewis was or if Lewis was alive, it just adds to this idea that these children did not die in this fire, that they might be out there.

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Initially, George and Jenny are reluctant to share this information.

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George and Jenny don't say anything about this possible Sicilian connection because they don't want the kidnappers to possibly do something to Lewis and or the other children who may have survived.

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Eventually though, curiosity gets the best of both Jenny and George and they can't lay low forever.

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So they actually hire a private investigator to go down to Kentucky, which is where the postal code had been printed on the front of the envelope.

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That investigator is never seen or heard from again.

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It makes you question what this private investigator did. Did he take the money and run?

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Did he maybe find something out he wasn't supposed to know? And the people involved either kidnapped him or took him out.

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The investigator may have disappeared, but the family hires another private detective to investigate in Fayetteville. His name is Oscar Tinsley.

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Tinsley keeps digging and the more he digs, the more that he finds evidence that whenever happened to these kids, it was not an accident.

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When private investigator Oscar Tinsley begins looking into the disappearance of the Sotter children, he has no idea what he'll uncover.

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The official investigators, they think that Sotter family children died in a house fire, whereas George and Jenny, they believe that their kids were kidnapped.

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The investigator hired by George and Jenny, Mr. Tinsley, uncovered something that was breathtaking, that the authorities, the police, the fire department may have been in on the kidnapping.

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We have four things in this case that are suspicious and are significant.

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Number one, we have a fire that was not investigated. Two, we have threats against George and his family that people were not questioned or interrogated.

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Three, we have a letter with a picture with possible ties to the Sicilian mafia that was not followed up on.

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And four, we have a conclusion that the children died in the fire, but yet you don't have any remains.

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Any one of these things individually or collectively should have launched a major investigation, but none resulted.

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Tinsley, he thinks he's uncovered evidence that the authorities were in on it.

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And soon enough, he uncovers potential proof.

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Tinsley starts with the coroner's report that came out of the inquest.

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A coroner's inquest takes place after an incident has occurred.

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The coroner selects 12 individuals from the community to sit in a jury.

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They're presented with the facts of the crime or the incident, and then they determine if there's enough there to classify this fire as either accidental or as an arson.

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Without finding the remains of the five children, what could they have concluded?

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In the coroner's inquest, evidence that they might have been considering, in my opinion, was non-existent.

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They didn't recover any evidence. They didn't even have time to recover any evidence.

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On the official record, declaring the fire an accident is a familiar name.

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So do you remember CG Giannitolo, the man who had threatened Georgia's life and was the director of the bank?

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He was also one of the members of the coroner's jury who had ruled at the Sotter family house fire in accident.

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And his name is on all five of those children's death certificates.

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He signs, under penalty of perjury, that those children died in a fire and that they died of asphyxiation.

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How does he know that? They never found the remains.

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I think Mr. Giannitolo is trying to use his influence in the community to cover up what really happened.

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Did he make good on his promise to burn down the Sotter home?

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And two, did he use his contacts within the Sicilian mafia to have the children kidnapped?

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According to Tinsley, the cover-up might go even higher.

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During his investigation, Tinsley discovers that the fire chief spoke to the parish priest and told him that he did find some remains, but buried them at the fire scene.

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George confronts the fire chief and they go back to the house and they dig up a tin box.

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But what they find doesn't add up.

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In that tin box is what appears to be some sort of old, rotting organ of some sort.

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And the fire chief says, these are human remains.

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So they take these remains to the local funeral director and he tells them, it's not human remains, it's a beef liver.

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And the funeral director tells them that not only are these remains not human, they appear that they've never been burnt, that it's just rotted.

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Because of it being buried in the ground.

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Why would fire chief F.J. Morris lie about finding human remains?

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There are two ways you can look at this.

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One is the sympathetic way and that the fire chief is just trying to give the family closure.

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The other way to look at it is that the fire chief is involved in the conspiracy and he's trying to keep George and Jenny from continuing to look for their children.

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So potentially, chief Morris may have been in on the conspiracy with Jan Utolo.

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This isn't the only time the fire chief is accused of working against the solders.

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It's important to remember that back at the night of the fire, it took over seven hours for the fire department to show up to the Soder family house.

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One of the reasons Morris came up with why he and his crew took seven hours to arrive at the fire scene was that he had no one available to drive the fire truck.

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They were away at World War II.

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Now, World War II is actually kind of the convenient excuse.

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Christmas Eve, 1945, this was over seven months after the Allied victory in Europe and about three months after the Allied victory in Japan.

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So while there could have been some volunteer firefighters serving over seeds, it wouldn't have been that many and there certainly wouldn't have been a complete lack of manpower.

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Whatever was going on at the time, there were definitely people in that town that did not want the truth to come out and they would have done anything to make sure that it didn't.

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I think any parent can understand George and Jenny wanting to search for their children all of these years.

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But should we also consider another theory as unpleasant as it may be? What if the Soder children disappeared on purpose?

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In the decades after the five Soder children seemingly vanished, countless new questions arise and the case captures the public's attention.

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Sleuth's focus on one mystery in particular.

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I often ask myself, if the children survived the fire, why didn't they ever present themselves to their family?

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Were they brainwashed? Did they want to protect their families? Or did they just not want to be found?

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One of the theories is that the children didn't die in the fire, that they actually started the fire as a distraction so that they could escape and disappear forever.

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At 1967, the same year the Sotters received the mysterious alleged photo of their son, Louis, something else happens.

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A woman from Houston, Texas sent a letter to the Soder family, stating that she was in a bar with Louis Soder and Maurice Soder.

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And that Louis Soder, in a drunken stupor, confessed that he was one of the missing Soder children.

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So much for Louis Soder being in Italy, right? Either the photograph is fake or the lady in Texas is lying.

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But what if there is more that might lead you to think Louis is in Texas? Remember those postal codes. 90132-90135.

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They're actually also found in Mexico, which is in very close proximity to Texas.

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Is it possible that Louis has been living in Mexico and that he's now crossed back into the United States?

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George has no choice but to follow up with the Houston, Texas lead.

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It's either going to lead to the long list of leads that led nowhere or it's going to lead to finally finding his children.

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George and his son-in-law Grover Paxton take a road trip from West Virginia to Houston.

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So George travels to Texas and tries to find this woman and he cannot.

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He is, however, able to contact the two men described by this woman in the letter.

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I'm sure possibly on the eve of meeting his children, he's fraught with anxiety.

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He's nervous. He probably is on an emotional roller coaster of finally being able to meet his children, live in person.

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George meets with the two men and asks if they're his long lost children.

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George asks and they deny that they are his sons. No matter how much he presses them, they still hold that they indeed are not his sons.

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As a parent myself, I can imagine George actually approaching somebody that he believed could have been his children and then they deny they're his children.

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And he really has no way to know for sure. All he had was their word and that just wouldn't have good enough for him.

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I can't even imagine how that must have felt for George on that long drive back to West Virginia.

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You just met two potential sons that you've been looking for all these years and they deny that they're your children.

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But yet you think they are. They look like them.

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You had information that they were telling people that they were them.

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I just, I can't imagine how he must have felt the disappointment.

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After that meeting, George believed until the day he died that the two young men that he talked to in Houston, Texas were indeed his sons.

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On one hand, I'm sure George was very happy and relieved to believe that his children were still alive.

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But it also must have been very heartbreaking to think that they were denying that he was their father.

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George Sotter died in 1969, two years after his trip to Texas.

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When Jenny died in 1989, the weathered billboard pleading for information was finally taken down.

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The youngest Sotter child, Sylvia, died in April of 2021.

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Sylvia's children have promised to carry the torch and keep looking for their aunts and uncles.

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But time is running out.

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The missing children would be between 81 and 90 years old.

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If there's any chance they're still alive and waiting to be found.

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

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Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.