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In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them, except one. A woman known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events.
Hear the story on Where's Dear? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Jessica Knoll, host of the new series Back in Crime.
If you're a follower of true crime, you're probably familiar with some of the most shocking stories from our history. Horrific tragedies like the Columbine Massacre. And notorious criminals like cult leader Charles Manson.
In a scene described by one investigator as reminiscent of a weird religious rite, five persons, including actress Sharon Tate, were found dead at the home of Miss Tate and her husband, screen director Roman Poliansky. But what if we were to turn back the hands of time and relive these events as they unfolded? Follow along each week as we take a fresh look at crimes from the past. Back in Crime is available now.
Voices for Justice is a podcast that uses adult language and discusses sensitive and potentially triggering topics including violence, abuse, and murder. This podcast may not be appropriate for younger audiences. All parties are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Some names have been changed or omitted per their request or for safety purposes. Listener discretion is advised. My name is Sarah Turney and this is Voices for Justice.
Today, I'm discussing the mysterious disappearance of the Sauter children. At around 1am on December 25th, 1945, Jenny Sauter woke up to smoke pouring into her bedroom. She woke up her husband George and they started evacuating the house of their nine children. By the time the fire took over the Sauter residence, only Jenny, George, and four of their children made it out safely. George and two of his sons frantically tried to get back into the house to save the remaining children, but they couldn't.
When George went to fill up a bucket with water to start extinguishing the flames, the water was frozen. When he went to grab their ladder to get the children from the top story, the ladder was missing. And when he went to drive his truck to the second story window, neither would start, despite having worked just the day before. And when they tried to call the fire department for help, no one responded for hours. The only thing the family could do was watch as their house burned to the ground.
Hours later, a group of people began searching for the children's remains, but nothing was found. Not a single bone was found in the ashes.
The fire was quickly ruled an accident, and investigators told the family that the children's bodies had burned up completely in the fire, leaving nothing of them behind. But between the mishaps while trying to put out the fire, threats made against the family before the fire, and the strange behavior of authorities throughout the investigation, Jenny and George Sautter refused to believe that their children were killed in the home.
They were convinced that their children did not die in that fire, and they spent the rest of their lives trying to prove it. This is the mysterious disappearance of the Sauter children. To fully understand this case, we need to go way back to the patriarch of the Sauter family, George Sauter. George was born Giorgio Sadu on November 24th, 1894 in Tula, Sardinia, Italy. We don't know much about his childhood.
But according to immigration records, he came to the U.S. on the S.S. Verona in 1911 at the age of 16. While passing through Ellis Island, Giorgio's name was officially changed to George Sauter. The Smithsonian Magazine reported that George eventually moved to Smithers, West Virginia. That's where he met his future wife, Jenny Cipriani, an Italian woman whose family immigrated to the States when she was a toddler.
George and Jenny got married in 1922. They would go on to have 10 children between 1923 and 1942. The Sauter family later settled in Fayetteville, West Virginia, a coal mining hub and home to an active Italian community. George mined coal by day and drove a taxi cab by night. Later, he purchased a failing fright hauling business and ran it with his two older sons.
By the winter of 1945, Jenny and George had a full house. While their second oldest child, 21-year-old Joseph, was away serving in the army, the other nine children still lived at home. Let's talk about the layout of the house, because it's going to be important. The house was two stories. George, Jenny, and the youngest child, Sylvia, slept on the first floor.
The rest of the children, John, George Jr., Marion, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, named after her mother, and Betty, slept in the two bedrooms on the top floor. The home also had a basement, which, according to the Times West Virginian, served as a sort of makeshift garage for George. He stored 55-gallon drums of gasoline and motors there.
December 24th, 1945 was a very long day for John and George Jr. They spent all day working with their dad and were pretty tired, so they went to bed early. George and Jenny started getting ready for bed around 10.30, taking three-year-old Sylvia with them.
The other kids begged Jenny to let them stay up and play with the toys that Marion had brought home for them. Jenny finally gave in and went to her bedroom to sleep, but she was woken up just after midnight when the phone rang. It was a woman asking for a man whose name Jenny didn't recognize. She could hear clinking glasses in the back and noted that the woman had a weird laugh. Jenny told the caller that she had the wrong number and hung up. Jenny figures the call was probably just a prank and heads back to bed.
But then she noticed that the children who stayed up late hadn't turned off the lights, drawn the shades, or locked the door before going to bed. This was something they knew to do. Jenny looked around and saw Marion sleeping on the couch in the living room, and assumed the rest of the children were on the top floor in bed. So she turns off the lights, closes the curtains, locks the door, and goes back to bed.
Not long after, Jenny was dozing off when she heard something hit the roof. It sounded like a rubber ball. Whatever it was then rolled and hit the ground with a thump. But Jenny's kind of half asleep and assumes it's nothing. But then, about 30 minutes later, around 1am, smoke began pouring into Jenny and George's bedroom. Of course, Jenny wakes up, jumps out of bed, and starts trying to figure out what's going on.
She opens the door to the adjoining room to use the phone to call for help, but that room was already filled with fire. And what happens next is pure chaos. Despite the freezing temperatures, George ran outside barefoot to grab a bucket and fill it at the water barrel.
But when he got there, he realized it was completely frozen over. 19-year-old Marion, who had been asleep on the couch, grabbed Sylvia from her parents' bedroom and bolted outside. Jenny ran to the bottom of the stairs to yell at the seven children who she thought were sleeping on the top floor. At first, no one came down the stairs, so Jenny continued yelling.
Finally, two of the boys, 22-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr., came stumbling downstairs, their hair singed by the flames. According to the Register Herald, after hearing Jenny, John yelled to the next room where his siblings were sleeping.
He thought he heard them answer, so he ran downstairs with George Jr. Jenny and her sons all ran outside. At this point, George, Jenny, and only four of their children had made it out of the house safely. That left five still inside. 14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 9-year-old Louis, 8-year-old Jenny, and 5-year-old Betty.
George broke a window trying to get back into the house, but there was no way George could reach the staircase to get to his children. He then ran to grab the ladder, but it wasn't in its usual spot. He looked everywhere, but the ladder was nowhere to be found. Desperate to save the kids, George, John, and George Jr. tried to back up their two trucks to the house so they could stand on them and hopefully reach the window that way. But the trucks wouldn't start, even though they had been fine just the day before.
While the boys helped their father, Marion ran to a neighbor's house to call the local volunteer fire department, but they couldn't reach the operator. At some point, a neighbor passing by saw the fire and drove to a nearby tavern where they tried to call the fire department, but the phone was out of order. The neighbor then went to find the fire chief F.J. Morris in person.
But, according to the Register Herald, the chief was of no help. The department had been depleted by the war, and the fire chief wasn't able to drive the fire truck. He would have to start calling down their phone tree system to see who could help put out the blaze. Despite the fire department being less than three miles away from the Sauter home, help didn't arrive until 8 a.m., and by then, the house had burned to the ground.
George, his two sons, firefighters, and neighbors searched through the rubble and ash to look for any remains of the five children, but they didn't find anything. George also had 14 of his coal mining friends come over, but they didn't find any remains either.
The state police and coroner's office inspected the scene as well. In the end, the Sauter children were pronounced, quote, dead by suffocation of fire, which completely destroyed the home in which they were sleeping, end quote. They said the bodies had then burned up in the fire. The coroner's office noted in their report that the fire was likely caused by two things. A short circuit in the wiring in the rear of the house, quote,
and a stiff wind that was blowing at the time of the fire, saying the wind was the reason the fire swept through the top floor so quickly. The Sodders were stunned by this conclusion. A licensed electrician had recently installed new wiring for an electric stove, and they had the power company check the wiring and fuse box after installation. Plus, the Sodders' lights were still working after the fire started.
While the authorities were treating this as pretty much just an open and shut case, a tragic accidental home fire, none of it made sense to Jenny and George Sautter. So, they began their own investigation.
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The only structure that survived the fire was the basement. Within a few days of the fire, George had it filled with dirt and created a memorial for his children. The Sodders then built a small dwelling on the same property, where they lived for decades. Not long after the fire, Jenny began running her own tests to see if it was possible for bones to burn up completely in a fire like she was told.
She would do things like put chicken and pork chop bones in the wood-burning stove to see if they would disintegrate, but they never did. Jenny kept digging and got a report from a crematorium that said, Humans placed in crematorium chambers for two hours at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit will completely disappear except for the bones."
This obviously only further cemented the idea that her children did not die in that fire. The solder house burned down in only 45 minutes, and she was told her children's bones burned so hot that they completely broke down in that fire. That obviously just didn't seem possible based on what Jenny had learned. Jenny also knew that pieces of debris, including some kitchen appliances, were recovered in the aftermath of the fire.
So how did those items remain intact but not her children's skeletal remains?
Then, one day, Jenny read a newspaper article about a house nearby that burned to the ground also, killing seven people inside. When investigators looked over the scene, they found skeletons of all seven people. This only further led Jenny to believe that her children did not die in the fire. She began to think that the kids had been abducted before the fire was set. And George agreed.
Because the police refused to say the fire was anything but accidental, the Sodders felt that they were on their own. They ended up hiring multiple private detectives, who were able to uncover several suspicious occurrences that helped confirm the couple's theory. And there is a lot, so stay with me. Over the course of multiple days before the fire, a man was seen watching the children from a parked car as they came home from school. A
A telephone repairman told the Sodders that their phone lines had been cut prior to the fire. The line was 14 feet in the air and 2 feet away from the pole, so whoever cut it did so intentionally. And since we know Jenny answered that phone call around 12.30am, it seems that shortly after that was when the line was cut. And they did eventually recover the ladder. It was found about 75 feet away from the house in a ditch.
Also, during the fire, Marion watched the top floor window, but never saw any of her siblings trying to escape, and no one recalled hearing anyone screaming from the house or smelling burning flesh.
A bus driver also reported seeing balls of fire being tossed onto the roof of the Sauter home at around the same time Jenny heard a thumping noise on the roof. A witness came forward to say that during the fire, they saw a man named Lonnie Johnson stealing a block and tackle used to remove car engines from the Sauter's garage. According to the Register Herald, Lonnie later pled guilty to the theft, but claimed he had nothing to do with the fire.
All he had done was cut the electric line to the house and then steal the block and tackle. Jenny believes Lonnie cut the telephone line by mistake, thinking he cut the power line. She knows for a fact that the power line wasn't cut because the lights were still on. About three months after the fire, Sylvia was playing near the burnt house when she found a hard rubber object. It was military green and hollow with a twist-off cap.
George would show the object to army authorities, who allegedly identified it as a pineapple bomb. The couple thought that would explain the thumping sound Jenny heard, and the balls of fire seen by the bus driver. And there was another weird thing that happened about three months after the fire. Jenny told the Beckley Post-Herald that around that time, George was told by a preacher that if he dug in a certain spot of the burned house, he would find some skeletal remains.
George searched and ended up finding a liver, which was sent off for testing. But results showed that it was a piece of a beef liver that had never been burned. Now, there are a few sources that tell a different story about the liver. These sources claim that a few years after the fire, the Sodders heard a rumor that the fire chief had discovered a human heart in the ashes during the initial search, but never told anyone. Instead, he hid the heart in a dynamite box and buried it at the scene.
After hearing the rumor, the family asked the chief to show them where the box was hidden. He did eventually show them and dug it up, but the heart ended up being a beef liver that was never exposed to fire. Not long after this, the Sodders heard a rumor that the chief told people the liver hadn't been found in the ashes at all. He just buried it there, hoping that if the family found any remains at all, they would stop investigating.
All of these things helped convince Jenny and George that their children were alive. But the thing that really seemed to keep them going were the numerous sightings of the children. They received letters, photographs, and calls from people all across the country who said that they saw the children.
They spent thousands of dollars traveling to meet with these people, or sometimes sending private detectives in their place. One person told the Sodders that she saw one of the children looking out a passing car window while the fire was still going on. A motel operator halfway between Fayetteville and Charleston reported seeing the children the morning after the fire. She said she served them breakfast and noticed a car with Florida plates in the parking lot.
A Charleston hotel owner said that a week after the fire, she saw four of the missing children in the company of two men and two women, all of, quote, Italian extraction, end quote. The owner said, quote, I tried to talk to the children in a friendly manner.
but the men appeared hostile and refused to allow me to talk to these children. One of the men looked at me in a hostile manner. He turned around and began talking rapidly in Italian. Immediately, the whole party stopped talking to me. I sensed that I was being frozen out, and so I said nothing more. They left early the next morning."
The Sodders themselves have what they consider to be their own sightings. At one point, Jenny was looking through a magazine when she saw a child in a photograph that looked very similar to Betty. George even traveled to the New York school where the photo was taken to try to get some answers. According to the Times West Virginian, George asked for information about the girl in the photo, but he was denied entrance because he didn't have the proper identification. George ended up taking the employee's objection to see the girl as proof that his children were alive.
But why would anyone want to target the Sodder family? Well, one of the hired private detectives, C.C. Tinsley, thought he came up with a possible answer. Around two months before the fire, an insurance salesman asked the Sodders to take out a life insurance policy on their children, but they ended up refusing. He allegedly then told the Sodders, quote,
Now, it wasn't hard to believe that George had said some things about the dictator. The Smithsonian Magazine reported that George, quote, End quote.
He was outspoken about his distaste for Mussolini, and would even occasionally get into heated arguments with other members of the Italian community. And Tinsley found out something else, something huge. Apparently, this insurance salesman served as the chairman on the coroner's inquest, which ultimately ruled the solder fire as accidental.
As if it couldn't be any worse, it just so happened that this man was the co-signer of the Sodder's $1,500 home insurance policy. And at some point prior to the fire, the man increased the policy amount by $250 without telling the Sodders. Despite what I would consider to be a very solid lead uncovered by CeCe Tinsley, police didn't interview the life insurance salesman.
According to the Sodders, the prosecuting attorney did not want to bring a case, quote, against people with whom he had to live and eat, end quote. Which, of course, if true, is just one of the worst things I've ever heard in true crime. I mean, if there were ever a top suspect, it was the guy who threatened that the kids would die in a fire before their house mysteriously burned to the ground, which he then later had a major hand in declaring to just be an accident.
Now, while we're in the vein of odd occurrences, I think it's worth noting that according to BuzzFeed Unsolved, the Sodders also apparently hired another private investigator who pretty much just disappeared.
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George and Jenny Sodder are convinced that their children did not die in the house fire. After gathering all of this evidence, the Sodders did ask for the investigators to reopen the case. But they were always told the same thing. Bring authorities even the slightest bit of evidence that the children had been kidnapped or murdered and the case could be reopened. What the Sodders had collected so far just wasn't enough.
Jenny and George even wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who told the couple to check with their local jurisdiction. If the local authorities said that the FBI could come in, they would. But of course, local authorities declined. But this wasn't enough to make the Sodders give up.
On August 18th, 1949, a crew of 14 people, including Sodder family members, two doctors, and three members of the Charleston Fire Department were brought in to search through the filled in and burnt out remains of the Sodder house.
The team used an excavator to dig through five feet of dirt before they reached the basement floor. They then combed through the area with shovels. The crew ultimately found four bones, which appeared to be vertebrae. They were sent off for testing at the Smithsonian. The bones were confirmed to be human, belonging to one individual estimated to be 16 or 17 years old.
The Smithsonian's report stated in part, quote, the bones show greater skeletal maturation than one would expect for a 14-year-old boy, end quote, meaning Maurice, the oldest missing Sauter child. Basically, it was possible, but not probable, that the bones belonged to Maurice. It was also concluded that the vertebrae showed no signs of being exposed to fire.
In the end, the report said that basically the bones probably came from the dirt that George had used to fill in the property, not from any of the Sauter children. The report also noted that it was very strange that no other bones were found in the basement. They would expect to find, quote, the full skeletons of the five children, rather than only four vertebrae, end quote. After this, two investigative hearings were held, but they didn't go very well.
According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the governor and state police superintendent told the Sodders that their search was hopeless. Then, they declared the case closed, stating, quote, every effort, precaution, and means have been taken to bring about a solution. The investigation has gone as far as possible, end quote.
But still, Jenny and George refused to give up. They continued hiring private detectives and meeting with witnesses who claimed they saw the children. In 1953, they switched things up and started handing out flyers offering a $5,000 reward, or about $56,000 in today's money.
They also put up a billboard where their home once was. It displayed information about the reward and pictures of all five children, with the question, quote, What was their fate? Kidnapped? Murdered? Or are they still alive? End quote. There were also paragraphs about the fire, sightings of the children, and more.
At this time, George and Jenny were so desperate for answers that they told the Beckley Post-Herald that they weren't really interested in punishing anyone anymore. They would waive charges or sign any kind of release they were asked for if they could get their children back, or at least find out what happened to them. When no solid leads came in, the reward was increased to $10,000.
But time went on, and the next big lead didn't come in until 1967. That year, Jenny received an envelope addressed only to her. There was no return address, but there was a postmark from Kentucky. Inside, there was a photo of a man in his mid-twenties with a handwritten note on the back that read, quote, Lewis Sautter, I love brother Frankie, Lil' Boys, A90132 or 35, end quote.
Now, obviously it was handwritten, so it's hard to know exactly what was written. It's either 32 or 35. But the picture looked a lot like what Jenny thought Louis would look like as an adult. George traveled to Kentucky, but no one he spoke to had ever seen the man in the picture. Still clinging to hope, Jenny and George put the picture of what they thought was Louis on the billboard, and they hung an enlarged version over their fireplace.
In 1968, George and Jenny spoke with the Sunday Gazette-Mail about all the things they'd done to find their children. George said that the last 23 years had been really difficult. Quote, It's hard sometimes to get sleep at night, just wondering about them. It's like hitting a rock wall. We can't go any further. We just don't know what to do now. As long as we live, we will dig into it. To come out with an explanation on what really happened in that fire. End quote.
Sadly, George would never get an explanation. On August 16th, 1969, he passed away at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer. But even with George gone, Jenny kept up the billboard and continued fighting for answers. Around May 1976, she hired a painter to redo the billboard. The new one read, quote, End quote.
There were pictures of all five children, plus the picture of what they thought was Louis. Two months later, someone shot up the billboard with bullets. There was a large hole from a shotgun located about two feet under Maurice's photo. Smaller holes riddled other parts of the billboard, but a few bullet holes wouldn't scare Jenny into taking the billboard down.
In November 1984, Jenny, who was now 83 years old, spoke with the Greensboro News and Record to give them an update on the case. Unfortunately, she said there wasn't much to tell. Basically, nothing had changed since she put up the new billboard eight years earlier. Jenny still firmly believed that her children had been kidnapped. She would never give up hope that she would find them. Sadly, Jenny also passed away on February 15th, 1989, just shy of her 86th birthday.
It's said that Jenny wore all black every day after the fire, mourning her children. After Jenny's death, the billboard was taken down.
But her children and grandchildren continued investigating the disappearances. In their search for answers, they came up with a few theories to explain what happened to the children. The local mafia wanted to recruit George, but he said no. Or maybe the mafia tried to extort him for money and he didn't cooperate. Another theory was that the children were kidnapped by someone they knew.
That person set the house on fire, burst into the front door which was unlocked, told them about the fire, and said they'd take them somewhere safe. Despite all the theories, no one ever found enough evidence for authorities to press charges.
By 2012, all the surviving Sauter children had passed away except for Sylvia. She passed the torch to her children, who continued to investigate the disappearances. Sylvia's daughter told the Times West Virginian, quote, My mom promised my grandmother that she would never let the story die. That's what my brother and I are doing now. End quote. Sylvia did pass away in 2021, without ever finding out what happened to her siblings. Which brings me right to our call to action.
The Sauter family has worked for decades. I mean, at this point, really, it's almost a century now to keep all five children in the public eye.
I know this is an old case, and if the children were kidnapped, it's likely whoever was responsible is long gone by now. But that doesn't mean their family can't get some type of answers to resolve this over 75-year-old mystery. Someone knows something. The answers could be in someone's attic, in a storage unit, hidden in a home movie. Stranger things happen in true crime all the time.
So please continue to share, just like George and Jenny did until their last days.
As a reminder, at around 1:00 AM on Christmas Day, 1945, a fire broke out at the Sauter family home just outside of Fayetteville, West Virginia. Jenny and George Sauter and four of their children escaped the fire. It's unknown what happened to the remaining five children: 14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 9-year-old Louis, 8-year-old Jenny, and 5-year-old Betty.
All five children are of Italian descent, with dark hair and thick, dark eyebrows. If you have any information about the Sodder children, you can submit tips at tips.fbi.gov. But as always, thank you, I love you, and I'll talk to you next time.
Voices for Justice is hosted and produced by me, Sarah Turney, and is a Voices for Justice media original. This episode contains writing and research assistance by Haley Gray. If you love what we do here, please don't forget to follow, rate, and review the show in your podcast player. It's an easy and free way to help us and help more people find these cases in need of justice. And for even more content, check out my other podcast, Disappearances, only on Spotify.
Welcome to the Secret After Show. If you couldn't notice, I am slowly losing my voice, so I apologize if this episode is extra raspy. I'm not trying to. I promise I'm not putting on a spooky valley girl voice. I am losing my voice, which...
which sounds like we're approaching the end of the year. So it is what it is. With that being said, I wanted to let you guys know that there will be one last episode before the end of the year, and then I'm taking two weeks off. In that time, I'm hoping my voice recovers. I feel like it has like, just by the end of the year, it just kind of like loses steam. It's just like it's leaving my body right now, you guys. So yeah,
I apologize. I re-recorded some of these things so many times, but I really wanted to get this episode to you because this story holds a really special place in my heart. This mystery, the disappearance, it's one of the first true crime cases I ever heard about, and I've wanted to cover it for such a long time. And I know that it is really different from the cases I usually cover, but there
There's something to this story that is so inspiring to me. There's some, I'm like, I could like tear up right now. But the fact that these parents and then the siblings and now, you know, what would be, oh my gosh, what are their like their great nieces and nephews? I mean, this family story has been passed down through so many generations. And it seems like there's so many people on board that just want to help.
You'd think that maybe after all the years and generations, that maybe, you know, some of these people would turn around and say, you know, there's nothing we can do. We're going to stop looking into this. But, you know, these people are carrying on this legacy and just still fighting for their family. And there's something that is so inspiring to me behind that.
So in addition to this just being a timely case because it happened around Christmas, I also think it's this heartwarming story of this family forever sticking together. You know, no matter what happened, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty were so lucky to have their family fighting for them. And if that doesn't scream Christmas and love and family, I don't know what does.
So I really hope that you learned something from this episode and it inspired you the same way that it inspired me, despite my voice slowly escaping me. But with all that being said, I'm going to try to save the remainder of my voice for next week and say happy holidays, merry Christmas, whatever you celebrate. Thank you for tolerating me. I love you, and I'll talk to you next time.