So what does this leave us? With two possibilities, the children left on their own, potentially starting the fire to make it look as though they died in the fire or for some other unknown reason, or it was just bad luck, that the same night the children run off the house catches fire, or that the children did die in the fire and by some freak of nature nothing is left to be found. My grandma told me, and she was born in 1931, that she had seen fires in her youth. If someone died in a burning building she told me there WAS the smell of burning bodies, even in situations where it was only one person who burned up and they lived in a big house. She has also stated that the fire department never would have tried to spare the families and hide the body, that they were actually MORE blunt than today when it came to identifying bodies. She also told me that she has never in all her years of living heard of a fire where something wasn't left. Bone fragments, teeth, SOMETHING. So she told me she didn't buy that not for one bit.