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Listeners, this holiday season marks 75 years since the unfolding of a real life Christmas tragedy, the Krypto case of the Sadr family. If you enjoy this special three part series. Be sure to follow the Spotify original from podcast Unexplained Mysteries. There, you'll find some of history's greatest conundrums twice a week. Follow unexplained mysteries free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It was late on Christmas Eve 1945, that evening had been filled with merriment and cheer.

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Now everyone was in bed, George and Jenny Sodor and nine of their 10 children, one of their older sons, was away fighting in the army. But for the rest of them, everything was fine. The house was quiet.

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And then Jenny awoke with a start. She smelled smoke. Slowly, she got out of bed. She didn't wake her husband right away, perhaps because she hadn't yet found the source of the smell. Maybe one of the kids was making toast in the kitchen.

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But when Jenny discovered flames in another room, she realized that their lives were all in terrible danger.

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She woke George and the pair located what children they could in a mad dash. They shouted upstairs for the kids on the second floor to come down. But as the flames grew, the parents fled the house, trusting the younger ones were right behind them. Once they emerged onto the lawn, George looked back to see the tongues of fire licking the structure of their home. He also saw their beautiful decorations and electric Christmas lights gleaming through the windows, relics of joyous memories slowly becoming engulfed in flames.

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And that's when he realized there were only four children outside with him. The other five were still inside. But maybe, just maybe, he had time to get them out. Welcome to Unexplained Mysteries, a Spotify original from Park asked, I'm your host, Molly, and I'm your host Richard.

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In life, there's so much we don't know, but in this show we don't take we don't know for an answer.

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Every Tuesday and Thursday, we investigate the greatest mysteries of history and life on Earth. You can find episodes of unexplained mysteries and all other Spotify originals from Parkhurst for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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This is our first episode in a special three part series about the mysterious fate of the Sadr children.

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On Christmas Eve 1945, a house fire killed five sons and daughters of George and Jenny Sadr, or did it for more than half a century.

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Family members and sleuths have investigated the odd occurrences around the fire and put forth the theory that maybe the missing Sadr children are still out there somewhere.

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This week, we'll explore the background of the Sadr family and learn about a number of strange events leading up to the Christmas Eve fire. Then we'll dive into a series of unsettling occurrences from during and immediately after the blaze.

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Next time, we'll detail George and Jenny's investigations into the blaze and its aftermath.

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As they dug deeper into the bizarre circumstances, they began to suspect foul play and held on to the hope that against all odds, their children might still be alive. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. Long before his house burned down and he lost five of his children, George Sardars saw the United States as a land of opportunity or at least of escape.

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He was born as Giorgio's Sardou on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1895. He spent the first 13 years of his life there, growing up in a small town on a hill.

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Not much is known about his youth, mainly because he refused to speak about it.

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It was obvious to those who knew him later that something happened in Italy that made young Georgiou want to leave. In 1998, he seized the chance to escape his home country and boarded a steamship with his older brother headed to Ellis Island.

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Because we don't know his brother's name, we'll call him Rafael Giorgio was 13 years old when he and Rafael saw the Statue of Liberty and New York City skyline for the first time. But whatever excitement the new land may have inspired in Giorgio, his brother didn't seem to share it for reasons unknown.

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Rafael returned to Italy immediately after delivering his younger brother to the immigrant inspection station. Perhaps he was only tasked with delivering Giorgio safely to America. Maybe he was just along for the ride.

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It could have been any number of reasons. He could have been turned away from Ellis Island for criminality or disease.

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Regardless, when 13 year old Giorgio emerged from Ellis Island, he had a new Anglicized name, Jorge Sodor. He was alone in a brand new country, for better and for worse. His new life in America began that day in 1998, and he quickly got to work.

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George didn't stay in New York State for very long. Instead, he headed west to Pennsylvania in order to find opportunities there and find them. He did.

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It took a few years, but before long he left a railroad job in Pennsylvania for West Virginia and worked his way up through the hauling industry to open his own trucking company.

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But that wasn't all he wanted out of life in the early 1920s. George met Jenny Cipriani.

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Jenny, like George, was also an Italian immigrant. But unlike him, she moved to the United States when she was just three and couldn't remember much of her life in Italy. It didn't matter, though. The two had plenty in common and hit it off right away. They fell in love and soon enough they got married, ready to start a family.

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They moved to nearby Fayetteville, West Virginia. Their new town was nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and was home to a small but tight knit community of other Italian immigrants.

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Over the next 20 years, they became respected members of the Fayetteville community. Their neighbors view George as a successful local businessman, and Jenny was known as a caring housewife who adored her 10 children. But a mystery lingered at the heart of the Sadr family, and it involved Georgia's past, or rather the lack of it, everyone and their Italian American community knew that George had emigrated to the states just like many of them.

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And he may have had his secrets, but he certainly wasn't shy about his political opinions.

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During the 1920s and 30s, Italy's fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini, expanded his power and allied with the Nazis in World War Two. During this time, George made it known that he despised the dictator. He sometimes got into passionate arguments with other Italians who supported Mussolini and reportedly expressed relief when he heard the dictator had been killed in the spring of 1945.

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But even still, George was reticent to talk about his past.

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However, it seemed the community opted to let these quirk's go. They were fond of the Sadr families, many children.

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The sardars had 10 kids. Understandably, they ranged quite a bit in age. By 1945, their oldest, John, was 23 years old, while the youngest, Sylvia, was to the family was large and by all accounts, happy.

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And Christmas Eve 1945 was no exception. That is, until a fire changed their lives forever. By the time the sun rose in the morning, half of their children would be gone. Coming up, the omens before the fire now back to the story. After they both emigrated from Italy in the early 1980s, George and Jenny Sodor settled down in the peaceful town of Fayetteville, West Virginia. They lived there with their 10 children for decades. George had a successful trucking business and some of his kids worked local jobs on a brisk got a morning in 1945.

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George woke up early. There were many chores that needed to get done before he had to leave for work. While his children helped their mother make breakfast, he reached the leaves on the lawn. As he did, he heard a tentative voice behind him. Ask, Are you George Sodor?

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He turned a young man, stood at the foot of the lawn, hat in hand. George answered him in the affirmative, and the fellow eased a little bit.

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The man was there to ask if George had any Halling work available. George thought about it. He'd been in the young man's position more than once, he said. Just a minute, let me put away this rake.

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George went around the back of the house and leaned the garden tool against the shed. But when he turned, he saw that the man had followed him like a lost puppy. The behavior made George uncomfortable.

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Then the young man became preoccupied with two fuse boxes mounted on the back of the house.

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He pointed at them and said, this is going to cause a fire someday.

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George thought this was odd. A worker from the local utility company had recently checked the boxes wiring and they'd pass the inspection. The man declared them safe and sound.

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Naturally, George assumed the stranger didn't know what he was talking about. George sent him on his way and that was that. He put the interaction out of his mind for now.

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But a few weeks later, there was another strange encounter at the slaughterhouse, this time with someone the family had a history with in a Times West Virginian article about the Sadr family.

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This man's name and personal details were permitted to protect his identity. But for our purposes, we'll call him Peter.

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In 1943, George Sodor and Peter worked together in some capacity, that is, until they had a disagreement.

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The exact nature of the Spatt is unclear. But given George's unapologetic anti Mussolini sentiments, it's very possible their argument involved politics. Regardless, Peter and George stopped working together that year.

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But Fayetteville was small and it's Italian. American community was smaller. Still, George and Peter were once close enough that Peter cosigned the Sardars home insurance policy.

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Apparently, this was a bad decision. Peter later raised the fifteen hundred dollar insurance premium to 1750 without the family's knowledge.

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Then, in autumn of nineteen forty five, he showed up at their front door to bleed them of more money.

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Peter now wanted to sell the sardars life insurance out of the blue. He decided the sardars should take out policies on their children's lives just to be safe.

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When George heard this, he likely stared at the man in stunned disbelief. Why on earth would his kids need insurance? They were healthy. They were children with long lives ahead of them.

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But Peter pressed the issue. Life insurance was a matter of practicality and prudence, not emotion. What if something happened to the children and they didn't have a policy, but George would have none of it.

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Soon, the conversation devolved into another argument. Finally, Peter threw his hands up in frustration. He scowled at George. According to several reports about the incident, he said, your house is going to go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed.

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This was the second time someone had predicted that his house would burn down, but Peter wasn't finished. He added, You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini.

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So that was why Peter was so heated. He was bitter about George's politics. George didn't care, but he'd had his fill of being polite. So he ordered the man off his property and shut the door. Hopefully that would be the end of it. But it wasn't a couple months later, the Sadr family had another, albeit more distant encounter with someone. In late December, only a few days before Christmas, the younger Sadr children walked home from school for one of the last times that year, they were on their typical path along U.S. Route 21.

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The trees were bare and the sky was gray, as they normally did. A few of the older Sadr boys watched for their younger siblings from the house to make sure they got home safe.

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It was easy enough to see the road from the Sadr home. Most days, nothing much happened on the quiet rural street.

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But this day was different as the younger kids made their way along the road, the older Sadr brothers saw a man in a car parked on the gravel shoulder, staring at the Sadr children.

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As they walked, the boys didn't know what to do. They thought about telling their parents, but decided against it. The younger children were almost to the house, and if the man tried something, well, the boys would put a stop to it.

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Fortunately, nothing did happen that day. The children made it home and got inside in one piece. By the time the older boys closed the door, they forgot about the strange car entirely. They had Christmas to be excited about. Now, it was only a few days away in the Sadr household was buzzing with activity and anticipation.

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Christmas Eve was a whirlwind of small gifts, twinkling lights and holiday songs on the turntable, the children could barely contain their excitement about the next day's festivities, and that was in part because their older sister, Marian, had brought all of them toys from her job at a local dime store.

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The majority of the kids wanted to stay up late playing with the gifts.

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George was tired after a long day of work and wanted to get to bed soon. But his kids wanted to stay up past their bedtime on Christmas Eve. Given the special occasion, he told them that they could.

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But George and the two older sons, who are also feeling tired, went to bed.

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The house finally went quiet sometime around midnight, but it didn't stay peaceful for long. Around twelve thirty in the morning, the phone rang.

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Jenny Sodor stumbled out of bed. If someone was calling it this time of night, it must be important.

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She practically ran to the phone, grabbing for the receiver and lifting it to her ear. She heard a stranger on the other end, an unfamiliar woman asking for someone who Jenny didn't know. In the background, Jenny could hear people laughing and the tinkling of glasses. It sounded like a lively party.

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On the other end of the line, Jenny realized that this call wasn't for her or for anyone else in her family, or maybe it was a prank.

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She told the woman that she had the wrong number and then Jenny hung up.

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She started to go back to bed, but in her hazy, half asleep state, she noticed that all the lights downstairs were still on. But Jenny hadn't been in there, which meant that someone else must have turned them on.

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Jenny creep through the house. Most of the children were upstairs sleeping.

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She figured that it couldn't have been one of them.

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So who'd done it before she could come up with an answer, she noticed the curtains were hanging open and as she went down to close them, she noticed that the front door was unlocked.

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Jenny listened. Maybe there was an intruder in the house, but she didn't hear anything. Then she noticed Marian had fallen asleep on the couch. She shook off the eerie feeling, locked the door and headed upstairs to sleep.

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Only a few moments after nodding off a thumping noise woke her from her slumber. It sounded like something hitting the roof and then rolling. She had no idea what it could be.

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Jenny listened closely to see if it would happen again, but it didn't. And so she slowly drifted back into sleep.

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An hour or so went by before Jenny was woken up again. This time it wasn't a sound that roused her, but instead the smell of smoke. She noticed it creeping into her and George's bedroom.

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Jenny went to find out where it was coming from.

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She moved through the rooms looking for flames, but the only thing she encountered was smoke billows of it until she rounded the doorway into George's office and froze fire, climbed the walls and the flames were growing quickly.

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That's when she realized that everything she held dear, her home and her children was in serious danger.

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Coming up, George tries to rescue his children from the fire and everything that can go wrong does.

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Now back to the story.

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On Christmas Eve 1945, George woke to the sound of his wife screaming his name. Their house was on fire and their children were trying to get out.

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George climbed out of bed, shaking off his confusion as Jenny ran through their home looking for their kids. After the festivities, hours before several of the youngest ones had fallen asleep, scattered about the house. Finding them wasn't as simple as checking their beds.

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Jenny located their 17 year old daughter, Marian, on the couch downstairs. Jenny asked her to get baby Silvia to safety and then meet everyone outside. Marion was terrified, but did as she was told. She ran through the burning house, headed into her parents bedroom and grabbed Sylvia from the crib. Then she retrace your steps while a distant but roaring heat prickled at her skin.

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But she made it, pushing out the front door with the baby in her arms. Marian and Sylvia were safe, but Jenny wasn't relieved. Seven more of her kids were unaccounted for. She had to go back inside. Jenny moved to the base of the stairwell that led up to the second floor. She kept her hands to her mouth and shouted for her child. And to come down, the fire was spreading quickly. Meanwhile, upstairs, their 23 year old son, John, heard his mother shouts.

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He opened his eyes to a room filled with black smoke. He and 16 year old George Junior ran out of their bedroom to escape as John passed his younger siblings room. He shouted for them to wake up and get out.

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He fled down the stairs, assuming that they would be close behind, but they weren't.

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George Jr. and John both reached the first floor of the House, only to realize that some of their siblings hadn't come down yet. But John and George Jr. couldn't turn back and the smoke was too bad for them to stay in, so they retreated outside.

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Jenny was horrified to see only two more of her kids emerge from the house. Where were the other five as the flames in their home grew? George Senior John and George Junior put together a plan to rescue the younger siblings still upstairs. First, the patriarch broke a window on the bottom floor in order to go back inside the house. He cut his arm but didn't notice he was too consumed in the hope that somehow he could still put the fire out.

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But as he stood in the house and faced the growing flames, he realized he couldn't fight them. They were too strong. They forced him back outside. He'd have to get upstairs another way. George and his sons tried to find their ladder and reach the second floor from the outside. Fortunately, George always kept one leaning against the exterior of the house, except when they turned the corner to find it, the ladder was missing.

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George didn't have any time to wonder why they had to get those children down. He ran to one of his heavy work trucks he used for hauling coal. He could drive the vehicle up to the house, then stand on the truck's roof to reach the second floor.

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But when George tried to start the vehicle, it wouldn't turn over.

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He ran to his second truck, but he had the same problem with that one. It just wouldn't start. It didn't make sense. Both vehicles had worked fine the day before. Still, George didn't have time to linger on the why's. He jumped out of the truck, ran to the rain barrel. They kept on their property and tried to get some water from it to fight the fire. But the barrel was frozen.

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He and his sons desperately tried to formulate a new plan, whatever that could be, but they couldn't. There was no other way in. In anguish, George and his boys watched the fire rage with members of their family still inside. As her father and brothers struggled, young Marian Sutter decided to take matters into her own hands. They needed help.

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Marian broke away from the rest of her family. She ran across the yard to the neighbor's house, her breath steaming in the cold. She slammed her fists on their front door, begging for them to answer when they did.

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Marian told them they needed to call the Fayetteville Fire Department quick. The neighbor did, as they were told. But there was one problem. They couldn't get an operator on the line.

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The connection simply wouldn't work.

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But there wasn't only one person trying to help the sardars that night. Another resident of Fayetteville drove by around this time and saw the home going up in flames. This person wasn't identified in any of the reporting we could find, but we'll call him Nick once Nick saw the fire. He immediately drove to a nearby tavern there.

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Nick picked up the telephone handset, but again, there was no operator on the other side.

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So Nick pushed out of the tavern and got back into his truck and motored into town. It wasn't far, but he knew every second counted, he pushed down the accelerator and sped up.

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Once there, he found the fire chief, a man named F.J. Morris. This time, Nick reached F.J. and told him about the emergency. But instead of getting into a fire truck right away, F.J. hung up and then immediately picked up the phone again. He had to call the rest of his fire department.

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Fayetteville was a small town by any measure, and in the wake of World War Two, its public sector institutions were especially modest. Many of the local men had left to fight overseas and hadn't returned. As a result, the town's already small fire department had been hit hard by the national call to duty. There just weren't many people available to fight the Sadr house fire.

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But that wasn't the only thing slowing emergency services that night. Apparently, despite being the chief, F.J., Morris couldn't drive the truck.

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What's more, Fayetteville didn't even have a professional fire department at the time. There wasn't a centralized location where Morris could simply wake up another firefighter, perhaps someone who could actually drive the rescue vehicle.

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Instead, Morris had to call one of the town's firefighters. Then that man called a different firefighter who then picked up their phone and called another.

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It was an incredibly inefficient process for an incredibly time sensitive emergency. By the time Morris managed to get the town's emergency services on the case, nearly eight hours had passed.

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Morning light was hitting the Sadr property. And it was too late. Reportedly, it took only 30 to 45 minutes for the Sardars house to burn to ash by the time the fire department finally arrived. They found the despondence. Survivors mired in grief for children and two parents, George and Jenny, had to assume that their five missing children were dead.

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They'd never made it out of the house. It was an awful tragedy by any measure, but it didn't fully hit them that morning. There was still so much to do.

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Not long after Maurice and members of the fire department arrived, George Senior and his surviving sons searched the wreckage for their family's remains. Neighbors and firefighters joined in as well.

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They hope to find something of their loved ones that they could bury, if only to help them mourn. But according to the Sadr family, they didn't find anything.

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Most of the rubble had collapsed into the basement and they sifted through it all and came up empty. Morris told the senators that the fire had most likely cremated the bodies completely. That's why there was nothing left at the time.

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The suttas took this on faith, and after the fire department and their neighbors departed, the family started the long process of recovery.

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A few days later, George Sodor took a bulldozer and filled in the basement with dirt. Perhaps he and the rest of his family wanted to turn their former home's foundation into a memorial to their deceased loved ones.

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Maybe they envisioned a bed of flowers with a nice fence around it. This would allow them to remember the loved ones they lost, and it would hopefully help them move on. Soon after the bulldozing, the family received the death certificates for the children, along with a small piece of news, the state police inspector ruled that the fire was accidental, a result of faulty wiring. The death certificate listed the causes of death as fire or suffocation.

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George found the judgment a little strange, considering that he remembered seeing the Christmas lights on during the fire to him.

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That fact meant that the wiring couldn't possibly have been faulty, but he ultimately swallowed the ruling anyway. Acceptance seemed easier than fighting the experts.

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But in the weeks afterwards, as 1945 ended and a new year began and uncertainty took hold of George and Jenny Sodor, they reflected on the many unusual events that preceded the fire. The man who told George his house would go up in flames. The threats from Peter, the car that watched the children come home from school. They replayed the events of that Christmas Eve over and over in their minds. The phone call from a stranger, the unlocked door, the thud on the roof.

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They agonized over the cruel twist of fate, the missing ladder, the cars that wouldn't start, the fire department running late. And of course, the sardars had to grapple with the most wrenching mystery of all. No human remains had been found.

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Then, as the months passed, the sardars received bits and pieces of startling new information. For example, when a telephone repairman came by, he reported that the phone lines hadn't been burned by the fire. They'd been purposefully cut.

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Later, a local man named Lonnie Johnson admitted that he'd snipped the cables.

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He claimed it was an accident, sort of. He thought he was cutting a power line and not a phone line. Turns out Johnson was a thief planning to rob this sardars as soon as he caused a blackout.

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But that was hardly an explanation. It brought more questions than it answered. It seemed too coincidental that he just happened to break into a building on their property the same night that their house went up in flames. The timing was suspect. The phone had been working at twelve, thirty a.m., which placed the thief at the house no more than a half hour or so before the fire started.

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It was just too close to be chance.

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George and Jenny didn't believe that Johnson accidentally cut the phone instead of the power they thought he wanted to make sure they wouldn't be able to call for help.

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The question was why and who was he working for? Thanks again for tuning in to unexplained mysteries, we will be back on Thursday with part two on the Sutter family's decades long search for the truth. For more information on the Sadr house fire, amongst the many sources we used, we found the Smithsonian magazine article that children who went up in smoke by Karen Abbott extremely helpful to our research.

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You can find all episodes of unexplained mysteries and all other Spotify originals from Park asked for free on Spotify. See you next time. And remember, never take we don't know for an answer.

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Unexplained Mysteries is a Spotify original from podcast. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler, Sound Design by Dick Schroder with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Freddie Beckley. This episode of Unexplained Mysteries was written by Nicholas Zwart with writing assistants by Angela Jorgensen and Connor Sampson, fact checking by Claire Cronin and research by Brad Klein and Brian Petreus. Unexplained Mysteries stars Molly Brandenberg and Richard Rossner.