On Christmas Eve 1945, between 11PM and 1AM, a mysterious fire broke out at the Sodder home in Fayetteville, WV. 5 of the family’s 9 children were lost. Not killed… a house fire like this should have left at least bones and teeth, but there were no remains whatsoever. They were just gone.
In the months before, there were few oddly menacing prank-like phone calls and personal interactions. In the months/years after, were some incredibly shady coincidences and anonymous tips, but not enough information to form even a substantial theory.
It looks for all the world as if someone abducted the children, then set the house on fire, and for decades left misleading and fragmentary clues for no apparent purpose other than taunting the surviving family members. The FBI deemed it a local issue, and local law enforcement found nothing. There were some suspicious findings about the fire and the local fire department’s involvement, but not enough to form even a rudimentary theory of blame.
The parents never stopped investigating until their deaths, and some of the siblings continue to look.
Richard Ramirez was mentioned above. He really creeped me out back when those murders occurred because one of them was only a few blocks from our house in Mission Viejo. It was said at the time that he preferred homes close to the freeway, which we were. I remember my dad checking every window and door to make sure they were locked before going to bed. He had never done that before and it certainly creeped me out.
Little did I know that, only a few years earlier, serial killer Randy Kraft had also been killing and torturing people along the same freeway near our home.
I also lived on Long Island during the Son of Sam murders which creeped everyone out.
My father was largely estranged from his family, so this story is based on having heard it from others, rather than having personally witnessed any of it. But there is no reason to think it isn’t accurate, as it jibes with all independently verifiable facts:
My wealthy widowed grandmother was a hardy soul in excellent health, but as she aged her enormous garden became too much for her to manage on her own, so she hired a strapping young gardener. He flattered her and flirted with her, and she became very close to him, ultimately leaving him much of her wealth in her will (my dad got nothing, and my parents were bitter about that til their dying days, but I digress).
One day this healthy woman apparently just collapsed on the kitchen floor, subsequently discovered by the gardener. He called 911 from her phone (this was pre-cell phone era), but by the time medics arrived it was too late.
As her death was somewhat suspicious, there was a bit of an investigation. Phone records showed that an hour or so before 911 was dialed, a call was made from the same phone to the gardener’s girlfriend in England. I vaguely recall that the autopsy results suggested that whatever the cause of death was, my grandmother would have been alive for a while and could have been saved with faster emergency treatment.
So, did the gardener kill her? I guess this story doesn’t fall all that high on the creep-meter, but what gets me about it is that we’ll just never know for sure if the gardener literally got away with murder. Or alternatively, and this is creepier, he didn’t cause her initial collapse, but he stood there and watched while she expired, calling his girlfriend and deliberately waiting to call 911 until he was sure it was too late.
I wonder if they’re using DNA in the search. If the children were abducted & not killed immediately, it’s possible they had children of their own, whose DNA would provide a starting point for an investigation backward.
The fact is it can be disturbingly easy to get away with mass murder. A killer who has no connection to the victims or the area and who isn’t reusing a M.O., in an isolated area where there are no witnesses and the killer is states away by the time the bodies are discovered.
Owls are creepy enough even when you know what they are (the Romans thought so two thousand and more years ago). Baby barn owls look disturbingly like alien beings:
-and a misleadingly posed owl seen in poor light is thought to have started the legend of the Flatwoods monster - Wikipedia
Investigators have observed that long haul truckers can often be an entire state or two away from the crime scene or abduction location before anyone is aware anything is amiss.
The same is of course true of anyone driving a car. Quickly getting and staying elsewhere isn’t hard in our country. At least not for those with wheels and money for gas. Even if stolen wheels and stolen money.
However, most people stay reasonably close to home, which makes it more likely that if a police sketch or camera capture shows you, you’re more likely to be identified. A long haul trucker has the opportunity to commit crimes where no one who sees them has seen them more than a couple of times.
This isn’t to say that truckers are more likely to be serial killers. They just have some opportunities most people don’t.
Also, they spend a lot of time at truck stops and gas stations, where transient people also spend time at; i.e. people who have no ties to anyone else
Yes. I’ve got a very transient job and could be (b)offing people all over the country as long as I was careful to never do one near where I live. My problem is I don’t encounter many anonymous drifters who’d be victims nobody would miss. My decedents would be missed in a day or two tops even assuming I had a way to dispose of the bodies.
Truckers (or RVers) with their mobile living quarters along with them could easily carry suitable tools, industrial trash bags, etc., to facilitate body disposal.
Not really, the thing with long haul truckers, it’s a matter of frequency. A great many of them are literally driving across the entire country twice a week, every week, day after day, month after month, year after year. What I might consider a marathon epic road trip is just another day that ends in Y for them. It just takes a few low life psychopaths on the road and there’s a real problem, and they are hard to catch because it is so random. The FBI criminal profilers have zeroed in on this probability or likelihood whenever prostitutes start ending up in roadside ditches far away from home.
Yes. It’s easier for a trucker (or an airline pilot) because all the random motion is legit.
OTOH, there are plenty of drifters in this country. Joe MiddleClass with 2.3 kids, a mortgage, and an office job in the city might be hard pressed to take frequent road trips with a killing along the way. But folks who just kind of ooze along, picking up odd jobs (or committing odd petty crimes) for cash as they go are well-positioned to add the odd torture-murder to their repertoire without being readily traceable.
According to The Hill*, active serial killers peaked in number in the late 80s and have dwindled ever since. I wonder how much of that is due to more accurate tracking of trucks? It seems with electronic logs, GPS, and other methods of watching over drivers, it might be more difficult for serial killers’ to use truck driving to mask their movements.
Bolding mine. As long-time RV travelers, we had a hard and fast, no exceptions rule for our kids. When playing with other kids in the RV parks, under no circumstances may you enter someone else’s RV. We were harsh about this, and hurt some feelings. But allowing young kids into a vehicle that can disappear in minutes was an unacceptable risk to us.
*I have no idea of the publication’s politics or reliability, but their numbers seem to match others I encountered online.
It’s not just tracking trucks that reduces serial killers. I think it’s also the use of DNA to trace people. It’s very hard not to leave some evidence behind.
The New York Times says, “Rapid advances in investigative technology, video and other digital surveillance tools, as well as the ability to analyze mountains of information, quickly allow the authorities to find killers who before would have gone undetected.” (Gift link.)
The Serial Killer Israel Keyes creeps me out. It took a long time to catch him. He had buried murder kits years in advance of a murder. From the wiki on him:
An FBI report stated that Keyes burglarized twenty to thirty homes across the United States and robbed several banks between 2001 and 2012. He is believed to have been responsible for as many as eleven deaths in the United States, and potentially even more victims outside the country.[28] Keyes planned murders long ahead of time and took extraordinary action to avoid detection. Unlike most serial killers, he did not have a victim profile, saying he chose a victim randomly.[29] He usually killed far from home, and never in the same area twice. On his murder trips, he kept his mobile phone turned off and paid for items with cash. He had no connection to any of his known victims. For the Currier murders, Keyes flew to Chicago, where he rented a car to drive 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to Vermont. He then used the “murder kit” he had hidden two years earlier to perform the murders.[30]
I’ve seen some of his interviews on those crime shows. He had the creepiest laugh. He killed himself while in jail.
