r/UnsolvedMysteries

In 1969 a killer sent a cipher to three San Francisco newspapers simultaneously. Publish this or I'll go on a killing rampage this weekend.

The newspapers published it.

The FBI couldn't crack it. Naval Intelligence couldn't crack it. A schoolteacher and his wife solved it in eight days at their kitchen table. The decoded message boasted about killing. Talked about collecting slaves in the afterlife. Misspelled paradise as "paradice" the same misspelling appeared in every letter he ever sent.

He sent three more ciphers after that.

One took fifty one years to crack. When researchers finally decoded it in 2020 it contained no name, no location, nothing that helped identify him. Solving it told investigators what he was thinking. Not who he was.

One cipher is thirty two characters possibly directions to something that's been sitting in the Bay Area since 1970. Nobody has gone to find it because nobody has finished reading the map.

And then there's Z13. Thirteen symbols. Preceded by three handwritten words: MY NAME IS —

The FBI has had it since April 1970. Fifty six years.

Do you think his name is actually in there or was Z13 always just another taunt?

TL;DR

On Christmas Eve, the Sodder family home burned down. Five children were believed to have died in the fire. But no bodies were ever recovered. The fire itself behaved in ways that fire experts could not explain. Several witnesses also reported seeing the children after the fire. Nearly 80 years later, no theory has been able to fully explain what really happened.

Who were the Sodders?

The Sodder family lived in Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jennie Sodder raised ten children together.

On the night the house caught fire, five of the children were still inside:

• Maurice (14)
• Martha (12)
• Louis (9)
• Jennie (8)
• Betty (6)

The other five children managed to get out safely.

The Night Everything Fell Apart

Earlier that evening, Jennie Sodder got a phone call from a woman who just laughed in a strange way and then hung up without saying a word.

Around one in the morning, the house was completely swallowed by flames. The family did everything they could to save the children still inside. But nothing went right. The ladder was nowhere to be found. The water pump would not work. Both of their trucks refused to start. And by the time neighbors realized what was happening, it was already too late.

Within just a few hours, the fire had reduced the home to nothing.

No Bodies Ever Found

After the fire died down, fire officials concluded that the children had probably died inside. But here is the problem. No remains were ever found. No bones. No teeth. Nothing that would match five human bodies.

What makes it even more troubling is this. In some parts of the house, the fire simply did not burn hot enough to completely destroy human remains. And the basement, where the children were supposedly last seen, barely had any damage at all.

Reported Sightings

After the fire, several reports came in that raised more questions than answers. Someone said they saw children in a car passing by on the highway that night. A witness at a bus station claimed five confused looking children were there. Another woman reported seeing the children with some men who appeared to be leaving the state with them.

But none of these leads ever checked out. None of them were ever confirmed, and they just added to the mystery instead of solving it.

Theories

* The House Fire and Total Loss Theory

This is the official explanation. The fire was caused by an electrical problem, the house collapsed, and the children died right away. But there are two big problems with that. No remains were ever recovered, and the fire did not behave the way it should have.

* The Mafia Retaliation Theory

George Sodder was very vocal in his opposition to Mussolini and Italian fascism. Some people believe that his political views put his family in danger, and that the children were taken as an act of revenge.

* Arson and Cover Up Theory

Some investigators think the fire was set on purpose. They point to the missing ladder, the trucks that would not start, and other signs that suggest someone planned this ahead of time.

* The Abduction Theory

This is the most popular explanation. According to this idea, the children made it out of the fire alive, but were taken during the confusion that followed. They may have been placed with another family or trafficked out of the area.

* The Billboard

For years, George and Jennie Sodder kept a billboard standing along Route 16. It asked a simple question that never got answered: "What happened to our children?" They never accepted the official story.

Thoughts?

Do you believe this was just a tragic fire that people misread? Or was it a carefully planned abduction that happened in the middle of the chaos? Or could there be something even stranger going on?

And the biggest question of all. If the children did survive, where did they go?

---

Share your thoughts below, especially if you have a theory that actually explains every strange detail in this case.

A woman has been charged with the murder of her newborn son more than 41 years ago in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Dianne Curry Peck, 59 has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge Tuesday and was released on $10,000 bail. She is going to have a huge uphill battle in court as it was proven to be her baby who was alive and well right after birth only to be left in the freezing winter which lead to his death.

In November 1953 a group of government men met at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. One of them, Frank Olson, was an Army bacteriologist. That evening the CIA's Sidney Gottlieb spiked their after-dinner drinks with LSD without telling them. Olson didn't take it well. Nine days later he went out the window of the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. Ruled a suicide.

The family accepted it for over twenty years. Then, in the 1970s, the MKUltra papers surfaced and they learned about the dosing. In 1994 they had his body exhumed. A forensic pathologist found a blunt-force injury to the skull that, in his reading, didn't fit a fall through glass. The case was reopened as a possible homicide, then quietly went nowhere.

What gets me is the paperwork detail: MKUltra was supposed to be erased in 1973, but a filing mistake left roughly 20,000 pages in the wrong box, and that's basically all we know from. Everything else was shredded.

Is Olson the one case where the "official story" really doesn't hold, or am I reading too much into a cold autopsy from 1994? Curious what people who know the file think.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

A neighbor noticed something was wrong because the chickens hadn't been let out.

That's how the Moore family murders were discovered on the morning of June 10th, 1912. Eight people — Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two young girls who had been invited to stay the night — all bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt end of an axe. The axe had been swung hard enough to gouge the ceiling on the upswing.

Every face was covered with bedclothes afterward. Every window blocked with clothing so nobody could see in.

The killer also apparently ate something. A slab of bacon and a plate of food were found on the floor near where two of the victims slept. Nobody ever explained that.

Three suspects over ten years and none of them stuck. A state senator with motive whose alibi held. A traveling minister who was left-handed, confessed multiple times, and was acquitted twice. And a theory from 2017 linking Villisca to dozens of similar axe murders across the Midwest — same covered faces, same railway towns, same pattern. One suspect. A German immigrant named Paul Mueller. Never caught. Just gone.

The detail I can't get past is the covered faces. That's not concealment. It's something else. A compulsion maybe. A gesture toward the dead from someone who had just killed them.

The Moore house still stands. You can book an overnight stay in the rooms where it happened. People do.

What's your read local killer or Mueller's wider pattern?

In 1867, hunters in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh were tracking a wolf pack when it disappeared into a cave. They lit a fire at the entrance to smoke the animals out.

What came out with the wolves was a boy. Roughly six years old. Walking on all fours.

They named him Dina Sanichar ("Sanichar" = Saturday, the day he was found) and sent him to a mission orphanage near Agra. He ate raw meat, tore off any clothes they put on him, and reportedly sharpened his teeth on bones. He never spoke a single word in his life — only growls and howls.

He did bond with one person: another boy at the orphanage who'd also been found living among wolves. Staff recorded that the older boy taught the younger one to drink from a cup — the first human skill either of them ever picked up.

Sanichar lived over 20 years in the orphanage. He never adapted to human life, never smiled, never really connected with anyone. He died of tuberculosis in 1895, around age 34.

Here's the wild part: newspaper reports of his case spread through India right around the time Rudyard Kipling was living there — a few years before he published The Jungle Book. He never credited Sanichar directly, but the parallels are hard to miss. Except Mowgli got a happy ending. Sanichar didn't.

He wasn't even unique — India recorded several other "wolf children" cases around the same era, almost all of whom died within months of being taken from the wild.

Real photos of him exist from the 1880s-90s. Still one of the most unsettling "true story behind the fiction" cases I've come across.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Sanichar

Sanichar may have been the inspiration for the character Mowgli in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.^(Sanichar may have been the inspiration for the character Mowgli in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.)

^([1)

(Sourced from newspaper/orphanage records reported in Snopes, Wikipedia, and historical archives — happy to share links if anyone wants to dig deeper.)

Wendy Wolin was born on August 20, 1958 and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. in March 1966, she was living with her mother, older sister and stepfather in an apartment, as her parents had divorced several years earlier.

On March 8 1966, Wendy and her mother were leaving to run an errand. Wendy had asked to to wait on the street while her mother pulled the car out of the apartment building parking lot. As Wendy walked along to the meeting place on Irvington Ave, a man described as "stocky with a green corduroy coat and fedora," came by from the other direction and thrust a $1.50 hunting knife into the little girl's stomach. Wendy cried out in pain and the man continued on his way. Several witnesses came immediately to Wendy's aid and walked her to a nearby fire department.

Wendy initially told the fireman and other witnesses that the man had punched her in the stomach. However, the firemen discovered that Wendy was bleeding. Wendy was rushed to the hospital where she would die within an hour. A stab wound had lacerated her liver and there was internal bleeding.

Soon a manhunt for the killer emerged. The killer was described as a man in his mid to late forties, was about six feet tall and possibly weighed 220 pounds. He also had a muscular frame. People in prisons and mental hospitals were questioned. It wasn't until 1995 that a suspect was identified when a tip from an "unnamed Elizabeth woman who was at the scene when Wendy was stabbed." According to one detective, something jogged the woman's memory in which she remembered a specific man. This man was questioned several times but was never charged.

Wendy's murder has never been solved. Her family had trouble even mentioning her name after her murder. Her murder continues to haunt the city of Elizabeth, as Wendy lived in a good part of town and the crime was so senseless.

https://www.nj.com/union/2016/10/memorial_marks_spot_of_50-year-old_unsolved_child.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20210624112654/https://www.thedailybeast.com/who-murdered-wendy-wolin-the-50-year-old-murder-that-still-haunts-this-town

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/cold-case-wendy-sue-wolin-elizabeth-new-jersey-social-media-sketch/839680/

What happened to Kyle Vaughan?

Kyle was 24 when he disappeared from Newbridge, South Wales, on 30 December 2012. His damaged car was found on the A467 between Risca and Crosskeys. The case later became a murder investigation, but no one has been charged.

I’ve put together a sourced write-up of the case here, focusing on the known facts and the impact on his family with links. I’d be grateful for any corrections, additional sources, or respectful discussion.

https://open.substack.com/pub/shannongwyer/p/what-happened-to-kyle-vaughan?r=8nxyy8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This is a call to action. We are looking for the best investigators to help us solve this mystery. Two months ago we published The Trap, a Plainsite investigation into Steve Hanson's decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Many of you read it here. This piece is a follow-up, and it is different. The Trap was an investigation we delivered. This one is an investigation we are inviting you into please helping.

At the center of Hanson's emails to Epstein is a woman. She is never named. She is the one Hanson called the girl from Scottsdale, the rotten bitch, the total psychopath, and finally the California person. In his own words, he met her at his James Hotel in Scottsdale in 2004 or 2005, where she and her friends would hang around. He spent ten years paying for her life. He bought her a diamond ring. He bought her horses. He took her calls almost daily. Then in 2014 to 2016 he spent two years begging Epstein for help silencing her. The correspondence about her stops in July 2016. She has never been publicly identified. Two months of national press coverage, including a front-page New York Times investigation by Kim Severson, The Trap, and Adam Robb's earlier piece on Press Trip, have not produced her name. Not one woman has come forward as her. Not one person in Hanson's orbit has named her. The press has done what the press can do. It is not enough.

We need you. The basics. The full case is in the linked Plainsite piece above.

She met Hanson in 2004 or 2005 at the James Hotel in Scottsdale. He was in his fifties, married, with daughters. She would have been a young adult. He has never said her name in any document we have found.

The James Hotel and its J Bar lounge were a major destination in 2004 to 2006. The New York Times called the J Bar one of the hottest hotel-bar scenes in the country. Travel and Leisure named the James America's Sexiest Resort. She was part of that scene.

The Agency Arizona, a modeling agency founded by Margaret Merritt in 2004, operated from inside the James Hotel during Hanson's ownership. Margaret has not responded to outreach from us or from the New York Times.

The financial relationship involved real estate, a diamond ring, and horses. The horses are one of the strongest leads we have. Hanson and his wife Deana were known in the East Hampton equestrian scene at the Hampton Classic. He was running a separate set of horses with this woman in a different geography during the same years.

By 2016 she was in California. After July 2016, the documented record about her stops.

Who we need to hear from.

Anyone who modeled for, worked with, or remembers The Agency Arizona between 2004 and 2010

Anyone who worked at, photographed, or remembers the J Bar or James Hotel scene in 2004 to 2006

Anyone in the American horse world, anywhere, who remembers a woman with a wealthy older out-of-state partner who paid for her horses

Anyone who knew Steve Hanson during his Scottsdale years and remembers the women in his social circle

Her, if she is reading

Ground rules for the comments.

Please do not post names of specific women in this thread. We are not running a public identification process. Real women who have nothing to do with this story could be harmed by speculation in a comment thread. If you have a name, a tip, a lead, or a memory, send it to us privately.

Our tip line is: PLAINSITEINVESTIGATES@proton.me. Anything you share will be held in confidence by default. We will not publish your name without your explicit permission.

Discussion of the documents, the timeline, the venue, the agency, the equestrian world, and the broader case is welcome. Public identification of candidate women is not.

Full piece, with all citations, EFTAs, timeline, and research paths at link to article above.

This is one tiny piece of one of the largest document releases in modern American history. The Hanson archive alone runs across thousands of pages. The Scottsdale woman is one of many women whose lives are described in this archive in men's words, with no chance to speak for themselves. We are looking for her first. We will keep going.

Thank you for everything you have brought to this work so far. Let's find her.

Do you think the family was delusional or was he alive? His sister claimed a guy who looked like him pulled up to the next pump and asked her do you think it will snow in June. She found it odd. A former solider claimed he’s alive but dangerous. A few months later his niece saw him at a park but the mom told her kids to get away because he was dangerous. In 93 the marines found teeth belonging to him but no body. The family refused to believe that they were his teeth.

EMBALMED BODY PICTURE IN THE LINK DO NOT CLICK IF YOU DONT WANT TO SEE.

For nearly four decades a small Ohio town, had an embalmed man put in a shed, and on display for the millions to see.

In the town of Sabina, Ohio in 1929, A African American male, between the ages of 30-50 was found dead on the side of the road.

Many people say they saw him walking around the tiny town days before he was found, claiming he looked very ill, his death was determined to be natural causes.

The man had no identification on him, but a Cincinnati Ohio address. The address turned out to be a vacant lot. They called him “Eugene” (a name of a neighbor near the vacant lot)

The Littleton Funeral Home in Sabina Ohio embalmed him, and had placed him in a shack, on a little couch, hoping somebody, anybody, would know who “Eugene” was. The typical 30 days hold for identification went by with no one claiming the body.

For 35 years his body was embalmed many times, to preserve him, and put on display in hopes to find his family. Millions came out to see the body, bringing in a lot of revenue for the small town.

In the 35 years he was there he was used by a group of high school/college students as a prank prop, stealing his body and placing him on park benches, taking him to the Ohio state fair, and putting him on bench at the Ohio State University Campus. The Town folks would take him around town on Halloween, putting him on porches and giving people a scare.

However each time he was taken he was brought back to the Funeral home to be put on display.

Of the millions of people that came to see his shack and him on display, he was never identified. After the Decades of pranks and no help with identification, he was laid to rest in the graveyard in Sabina.

Tombstone reading: “Eugene” found dead 1929 buried 1964

Will he ever be identified. ?

more articles

picture/podcast

Alwin Sterk came from a religious family in the Dutch Bible Belt. He had two sisters. His sisters described him as rebellious. He refused mandatory military service and was active in pacifist circles. This caused friction with his father, and he had to leave his childhood home. He enrolled at the Social Academy in Amsterdam.

On 21 April 1972, his sister got a letter in which he invited his sister to attend a demonstration. His parents received a postcard, dated three days after this letter, which contained Alwin's handwriting. The card stated that he would disappear from the 'normal' life and asked them not to try to find him. His girlfriend received the same card. His family never heard from him again.

His sisters were initially upset that he had left them with only a very brief note. His parents were shocked. At first, his siblings were sure he would come back, and his parents thought he was just avoiding military service and a prison sentence that might result from it.

According to his sisters, the Dutch military police refused to search for him because he was a conscientious objector. The regular police also refused to investigate because he was nearly 21 years old. His parents contacted everyone who knew Alwin, although this was presumably limited to people known to his parents. None of them knew his whereabouts.

After their father's death, his sisters made a shocking discovery that shed new light on Alwin's disappearance. They found a letter from Alwin among their father's estate. In this letter, Alwin wrote that he was planning to kill himself. He felt that he could not cope with all the injustice in the world. This letter was dated 1969. His will, also dated from the same year, was found among the estate. His parents apparently never shared the content of those letters with the other children. It seems that the parents didn't connect the suicide note and the will with his disappearance.

In light of the subsequently discovered letters, it seems possible that he committed suicide. But why would he wait three years after making that decision? His later letter suggests that he intended to abandon a conventional lifestyle, and not life itself. Perhaps he joined a cult and was required to sever contact with people outside it. The fact that he didn't want his family to find him also suggests he planned to live somewhere else. Unless he didn't want them to find his corpse. Perhaps he was planning to use a method of suicide that would leave his body unrecognizable.

Additonal sources (both in Dutch):

https://www.eo.nl/podcast/verdwenen/afleveringen?\_gl=1\*1deallx\*\_gcl\_au\*NDI0OTc1NjIuMTc4MjIyNTYzOA..\*FPAU\*NDI0OTc1NjIuMTc4MjIyNTYzOA..

https://ikmisje.eo.nl/artikel/alwin-sterk-verdwijnt-plotseling-ik-vond-het-een-rotstreek-en-een-rotbriefje