I went to West Virginia last week to research a piece I’m doing for NPR about a fire in Fayetteville, WV on December 25, 1945. Five children were believed to have died in the fire, but there was enough weirdness that night and for years afterwards that the family never accepted it. They believed the children were either kidnapped or murdered that night.

This is the billboard the family put up starting in 1952.

The children who died or went missing that night.

Maurice Sodder, 14 years old on December 25, 1945.

Martha Lee Sodder, 12 years old on December 25, 1945.

Louis Sodder, 9 years old on December 25, 1945 (his birthday was in 5 days).

Jennie Sodder, 8 years old on December 25, 1945.

Betty Sodder, 5 years old on December 25, 1945.

The site today. The billboard sat at the top of the rise, by the pine trees. The house that burned was on the left side of the driveway you see today.

This is Fayetteville today.

The Fayetteville Courthouse.

This is from my collection from the Photo Unit at 1 Police Plaza. It’s an old photograph, obviously. It’s sad to see the WTC, but this remains one of my favorite shots. I would LOVE to know who the very daring Santa was!

A few months ago I posted about how the police train cadaver dogs. Recap: to train a dog to find dead bodies they construct something called a scent tube. It’s made from PVC and sealed at both ends after inserting a piece of gauze that’s been doused with one of the following perfumes: Pseudo Corpse I or II (II is a corpse further along), Pseudo Drowned Victim, or Cadaverine. They get the stuff from the Sigma Chemical Company in St. Louis.

I found a site for training dogs and saw that Sigma also makes “Distressed Body Scent,” and for training dogs to find narcotics, they make marijhana, cocaine, LSD and heroin scents. I always figured they used the real thing to train the dogs. Sigma was careful to note that they don’t use the real thing in any of their products.

There are over twenty detectives in the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, and unfortunately I couldn’t write about them all. The book is pretty packed with people as it is. But this always bugged me, I met a lot of great detectives. In the Bronx Squad for instance, there’s a detective named Mark Tebbens. I just read about one of his cases here [the article has since been removed].

It’s an incredible story, and worth reading. They tracked down the murderer of a holocaust survivor.

I went back to my book to find my description of the Bronx Squad office. At the time there were five squads within the Cold Case Squad — Queens, Brooklyn, Special Projects, Manhattan and the Bronx squad (the Special Projects unit has since been disbanded). I’m beginning to describe them here:

Every squad has its own personality. The Bronx squad is far away and ghost-like. Even within its own precinct it’s tucked away, and you have to walk through the warrant squad to get there. While all the Cold Case Squad offices are battered and worn, the Special Projects squad office has at least some fancy touches because of its proximity to 1PP. The office of Lt. Pollini, the commanding officer of Special Projects, is almost grand. The Manhattan and Brooklyn squads, which are both housed in the Brooklyn office, are less fancy, but they have a certain formality and tension because this is Cold Case Squad headquarters and the headquarters for the Fugitive Enforcement Division under which it operates. Spano and Ferrari, the commanding officers, are here. Detectives outside Brooklyn complain that the guys in Brooklyn get everything they want because they’re in Spano’s face every day. The Brooklyn detectives complain because they’re in Spano’s face every day.