Hi Inky Buds! I hope you enjoyed your November since November is reaching its conclusion. First, I must say that today's topic is pretty gory. It has themes of death, mentions of suicide, and murder! Not recommended for the faint of heart, you have been warned.
I'd like to start this post off with I love cold cases. To me they're like murder mysteries, but in real life. I also like to rack my mind about why and how. So, this will be a treat for you and me. To all my fellow crime fans, I won't bore you with the same old "Zodiac Killer" and "Black Dahlia" mysteries. Arguably, I think those are the classics, but they are a bit overused and have become the staple of crime blogs and stories. I will feed your brains with some pretty unknown and crazy cold cases. These are all from different countries and places and are all delightfully gory and gruesome. This will include mysterious murders, as well as disappearances. Enjoy!
Norway's Isdal Woman
This cold case is from Norway and relates to an unidentified woman found at Isdalen (The Ice Valley) In Bergen, Norway. She was found sometime in November of 1970, which is about 52 years this cold case remains unsolved, and it still haunts Norway. The woman was found badly burned. Strangely enough, all the labels of her clothes were cut off, and distinct markings of her belongings were also in the same state, as if to prevent her from being found or identified. As police started investigating her death, they uncovered a trail of coded messages, disguises, and fake identities - but never cracked the case. On the morning of November 29th, 1970, a man and his two young daughters see a body in Isdalen Valley.
The corpse is sprawled across some rocks - with its arms extended in a "boxer" position, typical of bodies that have been burnt.
A "fun" fact about the location is that Isdalen is known to some locals as "Death Valley" - it was a site where people committed suicide in medieval times, and, in the 1960s, some hikers had fallen to their deaths while trekking in the fog.
Below is the image of the mysterious Isdal woman's body.
*May be graphic to some viewers*
She was badly burned in the front of her body, her face was burned, and hair was incinerated. However, the back of her body wasn't burned. "It looked like she had thrown herself back" from a fire, he says, adding that she was so badly burnt they could not imagine what she originally looked like. Maybe she was forced into a fire? There were many questions with this case: Who was she? How long had she been there? What circumstances did she die under? Was she a spy?
At the scene, jewelry, a watch, a broken umbrella, and some bottles were found. The position of the objects was perplexing and raised even more questions. The jewelry wasn't being worn; it was placed beside her. Tormod Bønes, one of the forensic investigators says: "The placement and location of the objects surrounding the body was strange - it looked like there had been some kind of ceremony,"
According to BBC.com: "Police also find the remains of a pair of rubber boots and nylon stockings.
"She had been wearing a lot of clothes - of synthetic materials - and all the clothes had been heavily burned," says Tormod."
"Adding to the mystery is the fact that the production labels have been cut off her clothes and rubbed off the bottles at the scene."
"Police find nothing at the scene to indicate who the woman was."
An autopsy revealed she had ingested between 50-70 tablets of phenobarbital and had bruising around her neck. She had also inhaled carbon monoxide and soot from the fire indicating that she was burned alive. With no identifying documents and the presence of a large amount of sleeping pills in her system, Norwegian officials ruled her death a suicide. Below is an image of what she was believed to look like.
Nobody knows who she was, or why she was in such an odd state. As the years roll by, the chances of finding out who this mysterious woman has begun to grow slim. It has already been 52 years since her discovery, and so far, no leads have come forward about this enigmatic cold case. She was believed to be in her 30's when she died.
A few days later, a pair of suitcases were found at a train station in Bergen with fingerprints that matched the dead woman. Inside there were an assortment of wigs, makeup, clothing, eczema cream, eyeglasses with nonprescription lenses, maps, and small amounts of money from Norway, the UK, Switzerland, and Belgium. Inside the lining of the case were 100 Deutsche Marks–the equivalent of about $1000 USD today.
My theory is that she was a spy, and she was found out.
Spies obviously lived a dangerous life, and it couldn't be completely ruled out because of her odd objects, plus Norway was a hotbed for espionage during the Cold War, since it was right on the front lines between Russia and the West.
It seems doubtful that we'll ever find out who the Isdal woman was, and why she died, but who knows? With advancements in technology and forensic science, it could happen. This is one of my favorite cases, as weird as it sounds to have a favorite cold case, but it is very interesting.
Oahu, Hawaii: Tragedy in Paradise
Moving on from possible spy to a girl who died under mysterious circumstances in Oahu. This was the murder of a young adult woman named Lisa Au. She died at the age of 19 about 40 years ago and was found dead on January 31st, 1982. On the fateful day of January 20th, she got off of work at 9pm to meet her boyfriend at his sister’s apartment in Maikiki, which was about a half hour away. Police reports state that she headed home shortly after dinner amid a particularly heavy rainstorm. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. The Honolulu Police Department told The Daily Beast they first received reports that the teenager was missing that next morning, when Au did not return home or answer her family. Her parents contacted her boyfriend, who went out to search for her. Instead, he found her 1976 Toyota parked on the side of a Maunawili highway and flooded with at least 2 inches of water, subsequently an effect of the storm.
Her disappearance prompted a 10-day search, which only ended with the gruesome discovery of her naked body getting found in a ravine off of Tantalus Drive, which was about 3 miles from the apartment in which she was last seen. Her body looked as if she was dumped.
This missing person's case became a homicide case. She was badly decomposed, so it was hard to identify her, and the cause of death wasn't determined.
In the car, it was wet from the storm, the seats were wet, and her purse was dry as it sat on the driver's side seat. How did the purse remain dry while the seat was drenched?
According to thdailybeast.com: "One theory was that Au’s boyfriend had something to do with her death. In an interview with police, Hawaii News Now reported, Holmes even admitted he knew he was a suspect in the case—and failed two lie detector tests. When asked why he kept failing the tests, Holmes told police that he felt guilty for Au’s death because he let her drive alone that night, even though the weather was severe."
Unfortunately, no suspects were found. The family will never find out what happened to their eldest daughter and got no closure. The closest thing to a lead was a suspect in California who was an ex-cop. They believed that he is the Golden State killer. Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was taken into custody on Tuesday night in the Sacramento suburb of Cirtus Heights in 2018.
Authorities believe he killed a dozen people and raped dozens of women in California decades ago. He worked quietly for years in a supermarket warehouse before retiring.
With that arrest, perhaps there’s hope that some of Hawaii’s decades-old cold case murders will also get solved.
He plead guilty in 2020 and has a sentence of life, without possibility of parole. Before the murder of a girl named Diane Suzuki, exactly 3 years before, Lisa Au was murdered. Also in the 1980s, five other women were murdered on Oahu. Police believe it was the work of a serial killer.
All of the victims were between 17 and 36 years old. A suspect was arrested, but was never charged, and has since passed away.
It's hard to say if the Golden State killer killed Lisa Au, but it is positive that he took the lives of many other women and couples. It was said that Au was “always a happy girl with big dreams” who went out of her way to help people. Many people who knew her had nothing bad to say about her, it was said that she was always a pleasant person to be around with a bright future.
It is truly sad that she died so young, and her parents get no closure as to how and why she died.
Russia: The Dyatlov Pass Incident
This next cold case is pretty famous. Taking place in Russia, this particular incident has been racking peoples' brains since 1959, mine included. Now I am not spending time in my house with the bulletin boards and red yarn, but I do find myself occasionally thinking about this occurrence, which occurred many decades before I was even born. You're probably thinking: "What makes this case so mysterious?" Well let me tell you why friends!
Between the dates of February 1st and 2nd, in the year of 1959 a team of Soviet trekkers died in the northern Ural Mountains under mysterious circumstances. The group was experienced and was made up of 9 people, their leader was Igor Dyatlov. It was originally 10 members, but one of them had to withdraw the month before due to illness. The group was from Sverdlovsk City Committee of Physical Culture and Sport.
The last man in the group (lower right) Yuri Yudin, was the one who had to withdraw early. He lived to the age of 75, he died on April 27th, 2013. He was the sole survivor of the group. The rest of the members died under odd circumstances. On February 20th, the family members of each of the group members started to get worried and demanded a rescue operation to find them. Yudin was told that the expedition wasn't expected to last later than the 12th of February. When the 12th passed and no messages had been received, there was no immediate reaction, as delays of a few days were common with such expeditions. The institute sent the first rescue groups. The group was made up of volunteer students and teachers. Later, the army and police got involved with planes and helicopters.
On February 26th, they found the group's tents, but they were badly damaged, torn, and in a state of disarray. The campsite baffled the search party. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind."
Investigators noticed that the tent was cut open from the inside, and 9 sets of footprints were found. They were left by people that were barefoot, only wearing socks, and even wearing a single shoe. The prints were followed to a nearby wood. After 500 meters (1,600 ft) these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large Siberian pine, the searchers found the visible remains of a small fire. That was where the first two bodies were found. The bodies belonged to Krivonischenko and Doroshenko. They were shoeless and dressed only in their underwear. This is where the questions start. Why are these hikers dead? Most of all, why are they missing their shoes and outer clothing? In the cold, snowy northern mountains in Russia, why were these two stripped in their underwear? Below are the post-mortem photos of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko.
*May be graphic to some viewers*
This is only the tip of the iceberg. (That was a badly executed, but unintentional joke.) According to the Wikipedia page dedicated for this incident: "The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, perhaps the camp. Between the pine and the camp, the searchers found three more corpses: Dyatlov, Kolmogorova, and Slobodin, who died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent. They were found at distances of 300, 480, and 630 meters (980, 1,570, and 2,070 ft) from the tree."
Below are images of Dyatlov, Kolmogorova and Slobodin.
*May be graphic to some viewers*
(Dyatlov)
(Kolmogorova)
(Slobodin)
I know you can't really see their features other than their clothes, because of the snow, but I will put the photos of them in the morgue after the bodies thawed out. Finding the remains of the other 4 members took more than 2 months. They were finally found on May 4th under four meters (13 ft) of snow in a ravine 75 meters (246 ft) further into the woods from the pine tree. Three of the four were better dressed than the others, and there were signs that some clothing of those who had died first had been removed for use by the others. Dubinina was wearing Krivonishenko's burned, torn trousers, and her left foot and shin were wrapped in a torn jacket.
Below are the images of when the last 4 were found and as always:
*May be graphic to some viewers*
(Dubinina)
(Kolevatov, Zolotaryov and Thibeaux-Brignolle, they were found on a stream with running water.)
A legal inquest started immediately after the first five bodies were found. A medical examination found no injuries that might have led to their deaths, and it was concluded that they had all died of hypothermia. Slobodin had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.
They all had frostbitten fingers, some had broken ribs, two even had their eyes missing and somebody had their tongue missing as well. Three of the hikers had fatal injuries: Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage, and Dubinina and Zolotaryov had major chest fractures. According to Boris Vozrozhdenny, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, comparable to that of a car crash. Notably, the bodies had no external wounds associated with the bone fractures, as if they had been subjected to a high level of pressure.
All four bodies found at the bottom of the creek in a running stream of water had soft tissue damage to their head and face. For example, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue and a fragment of skull bone, while Zolotaryov had his eyeballs missing, and Aleksander Kolevatov his eyebrows. V. A. Vozrozhdenny, the forensic expert performing the post-mortem, judged that these injuries happened post-mortem due to the location of the bodies in a stream.
The theorizing started here, why were some of the hiker's injuries so severe? Why were some of their eyes missing? The findings raised many questions on the cause of death. The most common assumption was an avalanche. However, the problem with this theory is that there was no sign of an avalanche ever occurring, plus the slope wasn't enough for snow to roll down. The cause of death of an avalanche would be suffocation or hypothermia.
Another odd part about the entire investigation is that some of the clothes had traces of radiation on them.
Below are the post-mortem images after the members thawed.
*May be graphic to some viewers*
(Doroshenko)
(Krivnoischenko)
(Dyatlov)
(Kolmogorova)
(Dubinina, notice how her eye sockets are empty. She was the one with her tongue missing.)
(Zolotaryov)
This occurrence in Russia has intrigued many people and caused conspiracy theorists to run wild. Some theories range from USSR intervention, natives living in the mountains, even aliens or yetis.
This is a very gripping case, that has not been given a definitive solution and cause.
Kagawa Prefecture, Japan: Is it possible for a child to disappear into thin air?
This cold case isn't as gruesome as the latter, but it is as odd as the Dyatlov pass incident. In 2005, a 5-year-old girl named Yuki Onishi disappeared. Her disappearance took place during Greenery Festival, in which people participated to dig up bamboo shoots in the prefecture's Goshikidai Forest. She came with her mother and 8-year-old sister. The event started at 1pm, and about a half hour later, the young girl found her first shoot. She told her mother that she was going to find another one, and then walked away to continue her search. About 60 people showed up that day, they pick the shoots, boil them, and eat them.
20 minutes later, her mother looked where all the other diggers were, only to find her daughter missing. Her family searched for a while, only to find nothing. Yuki's family called the police at about 3pm. When the police still couldn’t find a single trace of the girl, firefighters were brought in to assist the search at 5pm.
For the next 6 hours, the search went on and authorities found no trace of her, not even a shoe or the hat she was wearing. Below is an image used to show what she was wearing the day of her disappearance.
Over 3,000 people assisted the case, but none of them found anything or any clues. The forest where she disappeared in turned up nothing. Later on, police dogs were brought to find her scent and oddly, the dog stopped in the middle of the forest. Four other dogs were used to try and locate the girl, but they all stopped in the exact same spot the first dog ended up in.
That is all there is to this story. This little girl disappeared suddenly and disappeared without a trace. Internet sleuths suggest that maybe an eagle swooped down and carried her away. This was disproved however since eagles can only carry about 4-5 pounds at the most, the little girl was 34 pounds making her too heavy for the eagle.
The more believable theory is that she got lured away by a hiker in the woods. Some accounts say that they did see a man with a backpack big enough to hold a child of Yuki's size walking around the area. The man remains unidentified, but could he have something to do with her disappearance? At the time of her disappearance, Yuki Onishi weighed 34 pounds (15.5 kg) and stood at 3 feet, 5 inches (106 cm.)
Today she would be 22 years old. There is even a website set up for her that offers printable flyers and contact information. There are even pictures made to help her be found by showing what she would look like older.
I hope that one day this young girl will be found, but it remains unsolved for now.
Fayetteville, West Virginia: The Vanishing of the Sodder Children
Our fifth case is another disappearance, but not for one person. This was the disappearance of 5 children. How do you lose 5 children? This case opens up many possibilities and theories on what happened to these children and their whereabouts today. What is truly tough about this case is that in took place on Christmas eve in 1945. It's not so much as the date itself, but the year. It is going to be very difficult to find leads and clues on a 72-year-old case. Let me paint the picture for you.
It's 1945 the night before Christmas, the children are eager with anticipation on what is to come the following morning, only to have all that interrupted by a fire. A fire started in the Sodder house, which was inhabited by George Sodder, his wife Jennie and their 9 out of 10 children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the 9 children made it out. Now, what made this case so special is that the remains of the last 5 Sodder children weren't found. Since that was the case, the Sodder family always assumed that the 5 children could be alive.
This developed theories such as possible kidnapping, or even the mafia being involved.
From left to right on the poster are the children Maurice, Martha Lee, Louis, Jennie Irene, and Betty Dolly Sodder.
In support of their belief that the children survived, the Sodders had pointed to a number of unusual circumstances before and during the fire. George disputed the Fayetteville fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical in origin, noting that he had recently had the house rewired and inspected. George and his wife suspected arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's outspoken criticism of the fascist government of his native Italy.
The further investigation of the issue in the 1950's yielded no information, however in the 1960's, the Sodder family received a picture of one of their boys as an adult.
George Sodder was born with the name Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in 1895. He immigrated to the U.S. 13 years later with his older brother. For the rest of his life, George wouldn't talk much about why he decided to leave Italy.
According to the Wikipedia page dedicated to this case, "Sodder eventually found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies to workers."
"After a few years he took more permanent work as a driver in Smithers, West Virginia. He then started his own trucking company, initially hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauling coal mined in the region. Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper's daughter in Smithers who had also emigrated from Italy in her childhood, became George's wife."
George also had strong opinions about people and political matters and wasn't afraid to express them, like his opinion on Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. This got him into arguments with other members of the immigrant community.
His impression and opinion left hard feelings among those he quarreled with.
In October 1945, a visiting life insurance salesman, after being rebuffed, warned George that his house "[would go] up in smoke ... and your children are going to be destroyed", attributing this all to "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." Another visitor to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George was puzzled by the observation, since he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed, and the local electric company had said afterwards it was safe. In the weeks before Christmas that year, George's older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.
So now they were being threatened. I believe that's enough to tell you that the mafia wanted to "take care" of the Sodder family because of George's views on Mussolini.
According to the Wikipedia page on this subject:
"The Sodder family celebrated on Christmas Eve 1945. Marion (19), the oldest daughter, had been working at a dime store in downtown Fayetteville, and she surprised three of her younger sisters—Martha (12), Jennie (8), and Betty (5)—with new toys she had bought for them as gifts. The younger children were so excited that they asked their mother if they could stay up past what would have been their usual bedtime. At 10 p.m., Jennie told them they could stay up a little later, as long as the two oldest boys who were still awake, 14-year-old Maurice and his 9-year-old brother Louis, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed themselves. George and the two oldest boys, John (22) and George Jr. (16), who had spent the day working with their father, were already asleep. After reminding the children of those remaining chores, she took Sylvia (2) upstairs with her and they went to bed together."
At about 12 am, Jennie heard the telephone ring and got up to answer it. The caller was a woman whose voice she did not recognize, asking for a name she was not familiar with, with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses in the background. Jennie told the caller she had reached a wrong number, later recalling the woman's "weird laugh".
She went back to bed after she hung up. As she did, she noticed that the lights were still on and the curtains were not drawn, two things the children normally attended to when they stayed up later than their parents. Marion was sleeping on the couch, so Jennie assumed that the children went back up to the attic where they slept. She closed the curtains, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
At 1 a.m., Jennie was again awakened by the sound of an object hitting the house's roof with a loud bang, then a rolling noise. After hearing nothing further, she went back to sleep. After another half hour she woke up again, smelling smoke. When she got up again, she found that the room George used for his office was on fire, around the telephone line and fuse box. Jennie woke him and he in turn woke his older sons.
Both parents and four of their children—Marion, Sylvia, John and George Jr—escaped the house. They frantically yelled to the children upstairs but heard no response; they could not go up there as the stairway itself was already aflame. John said in his first police interview after the fire that he went up to the attic to alert his siblings sleeping there, though he later changed his story to say that he only called up there and did not actually see them.
Since the phones didn't work, Jennie Sodder ran to the neighbors to seek help. She called the fire department from the neighbor's house. Even a driver passing by called the fire department from a nearby tavern. They too were unsuccessful either because they could not reach the operator or because the phone there turned out to be broken. Either the neighbor or the passing motorist was eventually successful in reaching the fire department from another phone in the center of town.
George Sodder climbed the house's outside walls and broke open a window in the attic, cutting his arm in the process. He and his sons decided to go look for their ladder to resue the remaining Sodder children. But unfortunately, the ladder was no where to be found, it wasn't in its usual place. A water barrel that could have been used to extinguish the fire was frozen solid. George then tried to pull both of the trucks he used in his business up to the house and use them to climb to the attic window, but neither of them would start despite having worked perfectly during the previous day.
Frustrated, the Sodders had no choice but to leave, or be engulfed in the flames. They watched the house collapse and burn down, which took about 45 minutes. They assumed that the other 5 children died in the fire. The response to the fire was slow, due to the fact that they were short staffed because of the war. Firefighters had to physically call other members, which caused the response to happen later the next morning. They had to wait to find a firefighter who could actually drive. When they got there, there was little they could do but look through the ashes. One of the firefighters was the brother of Jennie Sodder. Morris told the Sodders that they had not found any bones, as might have been expected if the other children had been in the house as it burned. According to another account, they did find a few bone fragments and internal organs, but chose not to tell the family; it has also been noted by modern fire professionals that their search was cursory at best.
The firefighters gave the conclusion that the fire was hot enough to completely disintegrate the children's bodies and remains.
Afterwards, the family bulldozed the home and filled it with 5 ft of soil for their future garden. Many people were under the conception that the fire was caused by faulty wiring, Among the jurors was the man who had threatened George that his house would be burned down, and his children "destroyed" in retribution for his anti-Mussolini remarks.
Death certificates were issued on December 30th for the Sodder children.
The local newspaper contradicted itself, stating that all the bodies had been found, but then later in the same story reporting that only part of one body was recovered. George and Jennie were too grief-stricken to attend the funeral on January 2, 1946, although their surviving children did.
The "faulty wiring" theory began to be questioned by the family themselves, because they noticed that their Christmas lights stayed on as the fire was in its early stages, the power would have gone out. Their missing ladder was also found in an embankment 75 feet away.
A telephone repairman told the Sodders that the house's phone line had not been burned through in the fire, as they had initially thought, but cut by someone who had been willing and able to climb 14 feet (4.3 m) up the pole and reach 2 feet (61 cm) away from it to do so.
Jennie Sodder also had problems believing that all remains of their children were burned in the fire. As a result of her curiosity, Jennie burned small piles of animal bones to see if they would be completely consumed; none ever were. An employee of a local crematorium she contacted told her that human bones remain even after bodies are burned at 2,000 °F (1,090 °C) for two hours, far longer and hotter than the house fire could have been.
This gave their children's case new light. All her life Jennie Sodder believed that her children were alive somewhere and tended to the memorial garden her whole life.
Evidence soon emerged indicating that the fire had not started in the electrical fault and was instead set deliberately. The driver of a bus that passed through Fayetteville late Christmas Eve said he had seen some people throwing "balls of fire" at the house. A few months later, when the snow had melted, Sylvia found a small, hard, dark-green, rubber ball-like object in the brush nearby. George, recalling his wife's account of a loud thump on the roof before the fire, said it looked like a "pineapple bomb" hand grenade. The family believed the fire started on the roof, but there was no way to prove it.
This brings me to the 60's, when the Sodder family received a picture of one of their boys, supposedly as an adult. The family had been turning to private investigators on the whereabouts of their children.
They found a lead, Ida Crutchfield, a woman who ran a Charleston hotel, claimed to have seen the children approximately a week afterwards. "I do not remember the exact date", she said in a statement. The children had come in, around midnight, with two men and two women, all of whom appeared to her to be "of Italian extraction". When she attempted to speak with the 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". She recalled that they left the hotel early the next morning. Investigators today do not, however, consider her story credible, as she had only first seen photos of the children two years after the fire, five years before she came forward.
George followed many tips and went in person to the sources and sightings.
In 1967, George went to the Houston area to investigate another tip. A woman there had written to the family, saying that Louis had revealed his true identity to her one night after having too much to drink.
She believed that he and Maurice were both living in Texas somewhere. However, George and his son-in-law, Grover Paxton, were unable to speak with her. Police there were able to help them find the two men she had indicated, but they denied being the missing sons. Paxton said years later those doubts about that denial lingered in George's mind for the rest of his life.
They received another letter in that year, which is considered one of their most credible pieces of evidence that their children were alive.
One day Jennie found in the mail a letter addressed to her, postmarked in Central city, Kentucky with no return address. Inside was a picture of a young man of around 30 with features strongly resembling Louis's, who would have been in his 30s if he had survived. On the back was written:
"Louis Sodder
I love brother Frankie
Ilil boys
A90132 or 35"
The family hired another private detective to go to Central City and look into the missive, but he never reported back to the Sodders, and they were unable to locate him afterwards. This picture gave the family hope. Below is the image the family was sent. They included this image into their billboard pertaining to the missing children.
George Sodder admitted to the Charlston Gazette-mail: " The lack of information had been "like hitting a rock wall—we can't go any further." He vowed to continue the search, nonetheless.
"Time is running out for us", he admitted in another interview around that time. "But we only want to know. If they did die in the fire, we want to be convinced. Otherwise, we want to know what happened to them."
George Sodder died in 1969, the family moved on with the rest of their life and continued to ask questions and seek the answer as to what happened that night in 1945. The surviving Sodder children, joined by their own children, continued to publicize the case and investigate leads. They have theorized that the Sicilian Mafia was trying to extort money from George and the children may have been taken by someone who knew about the planned arson and said they would be safe if they left the house.
Whatever really happened to them is a mystery, that is yet to have a conclusion and it has eluded many experts.
Stockholm, Sweden: The Atlas Vampire
*This topic mentions sexual circumstances*
This is our last case, and probably the most gruesome one on this post. This case involves a possible vampire, opposed to odd disappearances. Unfortunately, since this case is one of the oldest cold cases ever, there aren't many pictures.
This tale starts in the year 1932, and with 32-year-old prostitute Lilly Lindström who lived in an apartment complex in the Atlas neighborhood, which is now known as Vasastan. She was a call-girl. She would meet at designated areas that the client asked for, which was a luxury because of the rarity of phones at the time. She would meet at designated areas that the client asked for.
The last person to see Lilly alive was her downstairs neighbor Minnie, who was also a prostitute. Days earlier, Minnie claimed that Lilly had come down twice in order to borrow condoms, then, around 9 P.M., came back down with just a coat covering her nude body.
After this event, Minnie began to worry because she hadn't seen Lilly. She went upstairs to Lilly's apartment and rang the doorbell. There was no answer. When Minnie couldn't even hear Lilly from the other side of the door, she called the police.
She had been dead for between two and three days before police broke into her apartment. Lilly had suffered repeated blunt force trauma to her head and was found naked and faced down on her bed. Her clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair, and there was a condom in her anus, suggesting sexual activity took place, this wasn't the most disturbing part of this case.
Lilly's body was drained of her blood, and where did it go? It was found in a bowl, with very little left. To top it all off, there was a metal gravy ladle resting in the bowl, still stained with blood. The killer was drinking her blood. Something also notable of this case is that the police found saliva on her neck, but there were no puncture wounds suggesting vampire bites.
Prostitutes have long been the targets of sexual predators and serial killers, but this killing was very out of the ordinary. There were no wounds on her body to see where exactly the killer extracted so much blood from his victim.
Stockholm police immediately focused their attention on the men who frequented Lilly’s bedroom in Atlas. It is said that a total of 9 men were suspected, but no charges were made, and all were ruled out.
Unfortunately, this is where her story ends. It has been exactly 90 years since the murder of this woman, almost a century, so finding the identity of her killer is doubtful. It is possible that her killer is already dead, unless it was the work of a real vampire.
Today, the pieces of evidence from the crime scene are found at the Swedish Police Museum, which include a hair sample, saliva, and old condoms.
It is very disheartening that some cases will never be solved, and it is especially sad for the family members of the victims. Sometimes miracles happen as new advancements in forensics are made, but as the years go by, it becomes doubtful that the case will be solved.
I hope you've enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed making it. I did lots of research on these cases, and I hope you've learned something as well.
Thank you for reading, and have a good day🏙️/night🌃
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