How about a 1900-1925 two story which collapses into a 10’ high concrete box (aka basement).
I’m guessing that oven effect + size/composition of children’s bones rendered the bodies unrecognizable to 1945-1950 investigators.
At the very least, I’m guessing, the bones were baked to the point of vitrification.
How would a femur react to heat? Could the marrow swell enough to burst the bone?
I agree completely with the retired fire investigator Oddball_92,
I was a firefighter 21 years and EMT 35 years and saw numerous burnt bodies.
The photo’s of the burned bodies from the Waco fire with the Davidian cultare all of recovered bodies from a fire that burned a long time.
Vehicle fires are like ovens and bodies will usually be missing arms and lower legs but the torso is mostly intact and that is after aggressive fire suppression with water.
We do make every effort to recover all the bone in those cases just so some morbid goofball doesn’t look for collectables.
And if you ever look at cremains its very apparent that the bones have been “Processed” and that little box or URNE the cremains are put in is only a small representative sample of the total ash and processed skeleton and the last 1-2 hundred of those that have preceded Grandpa.
Interesting topic. As a Sherlock Holmes fan the story The Norwood Builder always bugged me as I figured there would have to be human remains left behind.
Didn’t he put a couple of dead rabbits with his clothes? I guess forensic science wasn’t very advanced back then.
Might sound odd but a body would be less damaged the closer to the floor of the basement it is. If you were to fill a 10’ square concrete box with wood and other combustibles and ignite it, then place a body on top of the pile then by the time the fire burned itself out it is probable most, if not all of the tissue would be consumed. Think BBQ here. Since the connective tissue is burned away, the bones would probably separate from each other and mix within the debris. Upon sifting the debris it is likely many of the bones could be recovered, especially the larger bones. Now in the same scenario if the body was on the floor with the wood and other combustibles piled on top of it and set on fire, more than likely there would be a large amount of tissue remaining as well as the bones.
As for a femur, that question would be better suited for a forensic pathologist, however I have seen femurs that were whole, as well as in pieces. Size does matter of course. Bones of a child would be much harder to find.
Fire investigative tactics in the 40’s and 50’s were basically non existent. Even as late as the 60’s the pugilistic stance of fire victims was believed to be caused by the victim “fighting off the flames”. It isn’t.
With all due respect, there is such a thing as “Too Much Information”.
:dubious:
Duly noted
Thanks. 
It’s very unlikely.
I asked this question of a prominent medical examiner recently, for a newspaper story I wrote:
“If you ask a funeral director, they’ll tell you it takes temperatures of 1,500 degrees or more for several hours to cremate a body and completely destroy it,” she said. “That’s not typical in a fire, even when accelerant has been used.”
Bones need to burn at 1400 to 1800 F for a few hours to turn to ash for cremation. The average house fire burns around 1100 F. The fire in 1945 according to reports burned for about 8-9 hours before the fire dept. responded. So yeah, it’s likely they burned to ash over that time period.
Interestingly I asked this same question, about the same family tragedy, a few years ago. Thread here.
He did.
I try to ignore that part of the story.
“Inspector, we found a rabbit skull in the fire!”
“Really? Hmm… must have been a Furry.”
I think we’ve hit both ends of this now. I contend it’s possible for a house fire, especially a house fire in 1945 to burn bones beyond recognition. We have modern fire inspectors who haven’t seen anything like that. I’d say it’s plausible but unproven by the evidence so far.
I lean towards it being possible for a house fire, in a 1945 era home, to destroy a human body sufficiently that untrained investigators would conclude after a cursory examination that the remains were “destroyed” and unrecoverable.
If you look at the link for the Waco remains a lot of them are in pretty terrible shape, and I think the Sodder’s house fire probably burned longer. Keep in mind this fire was never “put out” by anyone, it burned until it naturally extinguished. Anyone who has ever built wood fires on their own know that a tremendous amount of heat can last for a long, long time after the visible flames are gone (and it’s very easy to restart a fire in a fire pit from the night before, for example.)
I think the professionals in this thread are right that a house fire won’t completely destroy bones such that you could never find them, and I think in some scenarios it’s even likely you find a fully intact torso etc. But I don’t think the Sodder children had to be completely cremated to be “lost”.
This statement:
[QUOTE=Oddball_92]
Might sound odd but a body would be less damaged the closer to the floor of the basement it is. If you were to fill a 10’ square concrete box with wood and other combustibles and ignite it, then place a body on top of the pile then by the time the fire burned itself out it is probable most, if not all of the tissue would be consumed. Think BBQ here. Since the connective tissue is burned away, the bones would probably separate from each other and mix within the debris. Upon sifting the debris it is likely many of the bones could be recovered, especially the larger bones. Now in the same scenario if the body was on the floor with the wood and other combustibles piled on top of it and set on fire, more than likely there would be a large amount of tissue remaining as well as the bones.
[/quote]
The Sodder children were closest to the first scenario–being laid near the top of a huge pile of wood dropped into a concrete lined basement, because they were trapped (and likely died of smoke inhalation) on the second floor of the home. The flames from the conflagration were simply too powerful for their father to physically get back in to rescue them despite repeated attempts. When the house collapsed, being on the top floor they’d be “near the top” of the burn pile that then burned for 7-8 hours in the “firepit” that was the basement. As more wood burned, pieces would collapse as the weight of burnt up wood gave out below, and the whole pile would be continually shifting and collapsing until the fire eventually went out. If you look at some of the worst charred corpse from the Waco pictures, I can easily see remains like that being “damaged” so much by the shifting/collapsing of the burn pile that it wouldn’t be easy to find them.
Could a modern fire investigator? I have almost no doubt a modern fire investigation would’ve found bones and teeth from all of the dead children. This wasn’t a modern fire investigation–remember the fire crew took eight hours to respond to a residential house fire. They only poked around the scene for a little while and then told the family “well, don’t mess with this too much because we’ll come back later and look at it closer” and then left for like a week. The upset parents decided they wanted to give their children a proper burial so bulldozed a huge amount of dirt over the site/grade it, and turned it into a memorial to the children. So to me it’s not a question of whether this fire was hot enough to turn a body into modern funeral home quality cremated remains, but whether it was possible to render a body so demolished that a brief investigation by amateurs in 1945, who probably didn’t even dig very deeply into the rubble, to not find the remains–the answer to that I think is a pretty easy “yes.”
Remember that, in addition to the wood in those house to be full dimension - a 2x4 really WAS 2"x4" - the walls were also covered with wood slats 1/4" thick - the lath for the plaster.
Kids on 2nd floor, with the roof to cover them.
A modern house-on-slab is not even close to the wood content of a house in 1945.
I once cut a vent hole through a roof in a house built in 1918 - it was 2 layers of real 1" thick sheathing.
I think more like:
"Inspector, we’ve found the charred remains of organic material, together with these brass buttons, identified by the servant as belonging to his master NB. We have further evidence that he was visited by NN the same night as the fire broke out!
“Arrest that sonovabitch!”
(Actually, I believe Conan Doyle’s teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, not only served as a model for Sherlock Holmes but was also, actually, something of a pioneer in British forensics.)
Is that the wick effect at work, where human fat allows fire to consume the body, bones and all?
Today’s investigators would resort to removing the debris in layers, that is from the top working downward. The debris would then be sifted through screens looking for bones. Bones could and probably would be found by doing so. Teeth probably would not be found because they would slip through the screen. If there were parts of the mandible with teeth still embedded, they could be found.
In the 40’s the knowledge was no where near what is it now. More than likely they would have “assumed” all traces of the body were destroyed due to the prolonged burn.
Back in 1989 there was an explosion and fire in the Phillips 66 plant in Pasadena Texas. I was there for the investigation and body recovery. There were over 20 fatalities and we spent over 2 weeks, day and night, sifting for bones and body parts. We were able to find identifiable remains of all of the victims, albeit some were just a few bones. That particular fire burned extremely hot due to the fuel being isobutane.
How did you identify an individual from just a few bones?
The medical examiners office did that so I don’t really know. We had info as to the names of the missing and the approximate location they were believed to have been at the time of the blast (control room, office, etc).