The central puzzle of the Sodder family tragedy is the complete absence of remains for the five children believed to have died in a 1945 Christmas Eve fire. Their West Virginia home was destroyed while their father, George Sodder, was thwarted in his rescue attempts by a missing ladder and two trucks that suddenly would not start. Despite an official ruling that the blaze had cremated the children, George and Jennie Sodder maintained for the rest of their lives that their children were abducted, citing the fact that no bones were ever recovered from the debris. Their conviction was fueled by strange occurrences, including witness sightings of the children after the fire and the anonymous mailing, twenty years later, of a photograph alleged to be their grown son Louis.
In November 1971, a man known only by the alias Dan Cooper executed one of America’s most daring unsolved crimes by extorting a $200,000 ransom for a hijacked Boeing 727. After receiving the cash and four parachutes during a refueling stop, he ordered the plane back into the air and then, somewhere over the rugged wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, lowered the aircraft’s aft stairs and leapt into the stormy night. Despite one of the most extensive manhunts in U.S. history, no definitive trace of Cooper or his parachute was ever found. The only physical evidence to surface was a small, decaying bundle of the ransom bills, discovered by a boy on a riverbank nine years later, a clue that has only served to deepen the mystery surrounding the hijacker’s identity and whether he survived the jump.
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