When a house fire rips through a home in rural Tennessee, investigators were shocked to find the remains of the children in the house are nowhere to be found.
When the fire began on September 23, 2012, four people were reported to be trapped inside - an elderly couple and their two grandchildren. Investigators spent days after the fact sifting through ash and debris to find the remains of the people who were trapped inside.
Unsolved Mysteries Episode 2: Lost in the Ashes
Cheryl Daniel bolted out of bed upon being told that her parents' farm house was on fire with her children inside. "I can remember walking around the fire, looking for a way in," she recalls.
The elderly couple was taking care of Daniel's children, Chloie and Gage, as Daniel battled with drug addiction.
Related
An hour south of Nashville, the smoke drifted over the hills of the rural setting as the fires blazed.
"The house was just completely engulfed," Daniel's sister recalls.
A single-level ranch-style house, investigators sifted through debris in an effort to find the remains of the four people inside the house. They quickly found the elderly couple side-by-side in the basement of the home.
Smaller bones found at the scene were found to be from the elderly couple's pets. Unfortunately, they were never able to uncover the remains of the children who they guessed must have been inside.
"They both had really really good hearts," the children's mother remembers of her kids.
While many suspected that their bodies had turned to ash, one forensic specialist indicates that the probability of that is not likely. "It's almost impossible to destroy a human body in a house fire," one investigator notes.
Investigators then attempted to determine the cause of the fire without ruling out arson as a possibility. The elderly couple's safe was missing from the house after fires ravaged the home, leaving Daniel to believe that someone stole the safe and then set the home on fire, kidnapping her children in the process.
For more on this story, listen to the latest episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" on the RADIO.COM app. The episode implores those with any information about the incident to visit unsolved.com.
LISTEN NOW on the RADIO.COM App
Follow RADIO.COM
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram