Can a house fire completely cremate a human body?

Factual Questions
1

So I was reading about the interesting case of the missing Sodder children that apparently has been a local (and occasionally covered in regional and national press) mystery since 1945. The basic story is, there’s a family in Fayetteville, WV with ten children, nine of whom are living under the same roof.

Christmas Eve / early Christmas Morning 1945, the house catches fire. The parents and four of the children escape, leaving five still in the house. The father tries several rescue attempts but can’t get back into the second story of the home where he believes the five children are trapped.

The house burns for 45 minutes to an hour before collapsing and the flames are mostly out by then. Some 6-7 hours later the fire department arrives and sifts through the house. No human remains are found, but it is assumed the five children died in the inferno. The parents accept this at first, but later believe instead that the five children survived the fire.

This spawns a mystery that persists to this day. But it’s all predicated on what the parents were told when they spoke with forensic experts (of the day) in New York and the local funeral home–that a 45 minute house fire would be insufficient in heat or duration to completely destroy the bodies (including bones) and that the expectation would be that five either heavily burned corpses or at the most five charred skeletons would have been found in the rubble.

Is that premise, in fact, correct? That a typical house fire, lasting 45 minutes to an hour, could not completely cremate the bodies? By “completely cremate” lets say that basically all soft tissue is gone, and all the bone has been rendered into the “chunks” that you get out of a crematorium prior to the crematory pulverizing them into more “sand/ash” consistency powder.

If the fire could actually get the bodies down to that “initial” cremated state, where yes, all soft tissue is gone, but there are still large bone fragments that would need to be pulverized (in a proper cremation) then I think that makes sense as to what happened in this case. The bones were in a fragment form, the backwater fire department had no idea what it was doing and wouldn’t have recognized bone fragments in all the rubble. The family also bulldozed dirt and filled up the basement of the house and essentially buried the entire fire scene a week after the fact (they were told not to by the fire department, but they were also told the five children were dead and they wanted to erect memorials to the children on the site.) If the children’s skeletons were in fragmentary state, and the scant fire department investigation the morning after missed them, I imagine the bulldozer completely buried the rest and that is why they were never found. But that being the solution to the mystery revolves around whether or not a house fire could burn up a skeleton so much in 45 minutes that all that would remain would be fragments–because I think obvious things like long bones, skulls etc would be noticed in the rubble even by an inept backwoods fire department in 1945.

2

The only misunderstanding is believing that cremation requires extremely high heat. Crematories use 2000-2400 degrees to get the job done quickly, but much lower temperatures will burn a body to ash and all but destroy the bones. I could easily see a house fire, at 1000-1200 degrees for 45-60 minutes, completely destroying a child’s body so that only fragments unrecognizable to an inexperienced eye remained. It would require that the fire stay “focused” on the bodies for long enough to do the job; partially burned bodies are retrieved every day from similar fires because the fire moved on and was then doused.

Where did the family think the five children disappeared to? It seems almost wildly unlikely that they would disappear instantly and permanently after an accident without leaving some kind of tracks or being discovered.

3

On reading the article at the link, my conclusion is that the fire was probably accidental (houses at Xmas time have always been firetraps, especially in that era) and the children were killed and cremated in it. All of the rest is probably nonsense with a bit of conspiracy woo and deep denial on the part of the parents.

4

And that is by far the most reasonable explanation. I had done some research before asking here and it mentioned a modern crematorium basically takes (roughly) an hour per 100 lb of body weight to do its work, so that was why I wasn’t sure if enough burn time had occurred to do that in the house fire.

However something on that, is that this was a true backwoods part of the world in a much less sophisticated time. The Fire Department had no siren, they had no 24/7 phone line. When the family tried to call from a neighbor’s house they got no answer. Someone actually drove into town and found the Fire Chief in person, and then he had to basically go through a phone tag system to rally a team together, which is why they didn’t arrive until 7-8 the next morning.

So there were no experts at the fire scene for basically 8 hours, which means the house fire could have gone on for longer than 45 minutes. Maybe the eye witnesses are correct that 45 minutes is about how long before the entire structure 100% collapsed, or something…but it could still have burned for hours after that I would think.

It’s sad, because the family seems to have initially believed the children died…and then they started hearing “weird” stories about kids who looked like theirs showing up. It may have stopped though if the experts of the day had told the family that yes, in fact a house fire could have cremated the children. Being told that wasn’t possible would indeed make it hard to believe the children had died in the fire since no remains were recovered.

The local fire chief planting fake remains to try and give the family “something to find” to get them off the case probably did not help matters much, either.

Most of the rest of it is just run of the mill coincidence that would happen any given week and not be notable. I’m sure lots of trucks had trouble starting in the cold (it was winter) back then, for example. And it’s not like no one ever misplaced their ladder. The letter they received years later was most likely the result of the case making the detective/mystery magazines in the 50s/60s and someone read about it and decided to “prank” the family.

The one thing I’m not sure about is the strange phone call the mother received around midnight, where they asked for someone she had never heard of and she could hear a party in the background. I would have thought in 1945 West Virginia, phone calls still ran on switchboard, so when you picked up the operator would have announced who was calling–which should have made that missed call scenario impossible.

5

Even after the cremation process, the bones are run through a hammermill to reduce them to small fragments.

6

All of which is for efficiency and not the only way a body can be reduced to a few pounds of ash and sand.

I have no trouble with the scenario that the house burned in 45 minutes, leaving a giant barbecue pit in the basement that apparently burned for another several hours and thus thoroughly cremated the children. That, plus shifting of the rubble as the fire settled and rough digging through what was left crumbled the well-roasted bones. Inexpert examination failed to see the fragments for what they were. Odd, but well within the realm of possibility and far, far more likely than this mysterious abduction by an evil insurance salesman - who was apparently a local and thus did… what?.. with his abductees?

Just like Betty and Barney Hill, all of the “mysterious” stuff was remembered and discovered after the fact. That’s pretty telling. So they got a weird wrong number during a drunken Xmas party. Oooh. Spooky. :slight_smile:

7

Plus you’re left with the idea that someone managed to convince 5 children (ages 5-14) to leave the house by ladder - I assume - during the middle of winter, quietly enough to not wake anyone up. Then instead of making a break for it, said kidnapper(s) instead waste time and risk drawing attention to themselves in this teeny-weeny town by fucking around with things like sabotaging vehicles on the property, stealing the long ladder they’d used to kidnap the kids, and going through the trouble and effort to set a fire in the house (which would wake up the family faster than just them leaving), for whatever reason.

8

This is like nearly all the “mysteries” that fill books and web sites: one clear-eyed look at the story reveals the truth. In this case, it all boils down to reconciling that “30-45 minutes is not long enough to destroy a body” with the fact, clearly stated but glossed over, that the house burned uninterrupted for some eight to nine hours. The end of active flames and collapse of the structure was NOT the end of burning, and those interested in home cremation could hardly do better than by building a deep, well-fueled charcoal pit.

End of mystery.

9

Since this thread seems finished, allow me to recount a case in which a person seems to have been reduced to atoms virtually instantaneously. It was a grain dust explosion one evening and all that was ever found of the night watchman was a belt buckle. It happened in Philadelphia in around 1955, give or take a year. An American Express (I think it was) warehouse at around 32nd and Market that was essentially empty but had been full of flour. I was in a building at 36th and Spruce at least a half mile away. Suddenly the building (the University of Pennsylvania hospital) shook. A glance out the window showed what could have been described as a mushroom cloud. At the height of the cold war. There were elevated tracks right in front of the building. I shudder what might have happened had a train been passing by. The nearly new building across the street belonging the Evening Bulletin newspaper was blackened. But the only casualty was the watchman.

10

This is the key thing for me. You don’t need visible flame to have intense heat and continued burning. Bury a fire in sand/dirt and it can continue to smolder for multiple days.

I would expect to find some bone fragments after that kind of fire, but it would take a pretty thorough search of the site. I don’t know how much effort the fire department put into looking for bones, but it was Christmas day, there were obviously no trapped survivors, and there was no reason to suspect criminal activity.

11

So basically the entire house burned up and collapsed into the basement. The fire department sifted through the basement rubble for a few hours, declared the five missing children dead/burned up in the fire (death certificates were issued) and then left. They told the family they would be back in like a week to do a more thorough processing of the rubble.

Instead, the family (who were in the trucking/coal mining business and had heavy equipment laying around) used a bulldozer to push enough dirt into the basement to 100% fill it in and then they planed the ground and erected a makeshift (later permanent) memorial on the site. At that point they had bought the fire department’s ruling on the matter and just wanted to get the incident behind them. They rebuilt their house on that same piece of property but obviously in a different spot than where the previous house was.

I suspect if the local fire department knew what to look for they would have found bone fragments a week later when they came back to more completely work through the rubble, but the bulldozing sort of closed that possibility.

There were at least two separate incidents where someone dug back into the site…but it was not comprehensive. I believe the first incident was spurred by the fire chief…when he realized the family was not buying that the kids were dead because of a lack of body, he informed the family that the day of the fire he had found a human heart in the rubble and buried it in a cigar box. He said he didn’t share that knowledge with the family because he thought it was too gruesome and would upset them.

So the family demands to know where exactly at the site he buried it…and he obliges and they dig it up. However when they dig it up, they find a relatively fresh raw beef liver in the box. The fire chief had fabricated the whole story in the hopes that the family would dig up the beef liver, confuse it for a human heart, and get closure from the whole thing. But they took it to someone (maybe local coroner) who immediately identified it was not a human heart and appeared to be a relatively fresh piece of beef liver.

Later on the family did a somewhat more thorough (but not complete, as I understand it) investigation of the site and they did find a single male vertebra. However, it is suspected it was also planted there. When they sent it off for testing it was found to have not been burned whatsoever and to have come from a male who was most likely older than the oldest boy that was killed in the fire. Apparently it “could have” possibly been from the spine of the oldest boy killed, but it was more developed than a teenagers spine of that age would typically be (and the fact it showed no signs of burning also makes it seem planted, and since people had already planted things at the site it was hard to trust anything at that point.)

12

The teeth would survive.

I was at a conference several years ago and attended a lecture by Dr. Henry Lee, Medical Examiner and forensic scientist, who recounted a case where a woman contacted him because she had suspicions abut her mother’s cremains.

“How many teeth do you have? " Dr. Lee asked the audience. When no one responded, he said " Great…a room full of PhDs, and nobody knows how many teeth they have? … You have thirty-two. Dental enamel is the hardest object in the human body and will survive the high temperatures of a crematorium… I counted the teeth and told the woman, ’ you have one-and-a-half people in that bag! '”