The number of unsolved murders are tragically high, and although you may have heard of some creepy stories like Elisa Lam (thanks American Horror Story), there are plenty of investigations on the Internet that you absolutely should not Google at one in the morning.These are a few of them, and I have to warn you: these can be quite triggering, especially the case of the Original Night Stalker. Please read with caution.
Sodder children disappearance
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It was Christmas Eve of 1945 in Fayetteville, West Virginia. The Sodders were all at home that night, save for the eldest son, who was away in the Army. After celebrating the holiday together, they returned to bed looking forward to seeing the light of Christmas the next morning.
The fire began at 1 a.m. - George, Jennie, and four of their children escaped. Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty Sodder did not. A window was broken in George’s desperate attempt to save them, but the fire and the smoke obscured his view completely. Everything was aflame: the kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms.
He didn’t find them, and neither did the people who searched the ashes for their remains. One chief suggested that the fire had cremated the bodies of the five children, and five death certificates were issued.
But the Sodders were not convinced that they were dead.
Odd details began to come together afterwards. The telephone lines appeared to have been cut, not burned. The fire had been stated as electrical, but the rooms downstairs had been lit. Sylvia Sodder found a hard rubber object in their yard, and Jenny Sodder remembered the thud, rolling sound on the roof that night. George believed it was a napalm “pineapple bomb.”
Worse, people came forward and reported sightings of the missing children. One woman reported seeing the five looking out the windows of a passing car during the fire. Another woman claimed to have served the children breakfast the morning after 50 miles west of Fayetteville. A woman at a Charleston hotel said she had seen four of the five children a week after the fire with “two women and two men, all of Italian extraction,” according to her statement.
Investigator after investigator was hired, but the five children (or their remains) were never found.
Original Night Stalker
He has many names: the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist, the Diamond Knot Killer, and the Golden State Killer. But his name, given to him at birth, is still yet to be discovered.
His modus operandi (anyone familiar with Criminal Minds?) was the same in each attack. Sometime after dark, he broke through a window into a single story home, inhabited by a woman. He then entered her bedroom wearing a ski mask, where he would threaten her, tie her up, and sexually assault her.
Some women reported a prowler in the area the night before they were attacked. others received phone calls. One in particular consisted of heavy breathing, becoming more frequent with time, with the phrase “Gonna kill you” whispered multiple times in one minute and seventeen seconds.
In February of 1977, a teenage boy spotted him, masked and fleeing the scene, and began to follow him, only to be shot in the stomach.
Being spotted did nothing to deter him. The attacks continued in March of 1977, and he escalated from attacking young women and teenage girls to attacking couples. He brutalized the men and made them watch as he raped the man’s female partner, mocking and humiliating them as he did.
The attacks escalated, and authorities began to believe that there was another rapist, dubbed the East Area Rapist, separate from the Night Stalker. In 2001, the two were connected with the help of DNA sample. They also found a handwritten note at the scene of one of the crimes, and map of a neighborhood in Goleta, CA.
The Original Stalker, the East Area Rapist, whatever he was called, changed his M.O. as soon as they were mentioned in any news media. He also taunted police in their failure to capture him, and perhaps he was right to, for even today, he has yet to be found.
Hinterkaifeck murder
It began days and weeks before the actual murder. Andreas Gurber, a farmer living 60 miles north of Munich, Germany, neighbors the strange occurrences that had been piling up. Footprints came from the forest to the back door of the farm, but there were none leading back. Creaking noises came from the attic. An unfamiliar newspaper appeared. The house keys went missing. A lock on the tool shed had been damaged in an attempt to pick the lock.
On March 31, 1922, the six people living in the Hinterkaifeck ranch were slaughtered with a pick-axe: Andreas (63), wife Cazilia (72), daughter Viktoria (35), grandchildren Cazilia (7) and Josef (2), and their housemaid Maria Baumgartner (44).
The police dedicated that Andrea, Cazilia, Viktoria, and young Cazilia were lured to the livestock barn and murdered on by one. Afterwards, the killer entered the house and murdered little Josef sleeping in his parents’ room, and then killed Maria in her room.
Autopsies showed that young Cazilia survived the first attack, and tore out her hair before passing.
But even creepier, the killer stuck around. Neighbors saw smoke rising from the chimney after their deaths, and even saw that their dog had been let out. Food from the kitchen had been eaten. The cattle had been fed. The killer had stayed for a weekend after murdering the residents of Hinterkaifeck.
