Hi, I'm Holly and I'm Hailey. Welcome to Mountain Mysteries Tales from Appalachia. We're back, Jack. Hello.
And ready to smack? No, I don't know. I don't know. I know it's fun.
I've been workshopping something. Yeah, right. It's, you know, being a songwriter is, it's a challenge. There's not a lot of respect that comes with that.
Yeah. It's a lot for you to take on. Well, us. We're right.
I feel like you need to do this with me. Oh, got you. Okay. Yeah.
Again, your name probably won't be listed. That's fine. You're like a ghost writer is what you are. Yeah.
So when the money starts rolling in, you will not be getting, you know, the profits, it's okay. It's okay because I'm going to take you out to dinner. Wow. That'd be great.
Chick play. Perfect. Listen, I'm going to let you play in the little pit they have for children. My son loves it in there.
Yeah, that's a little pit. I will let you play. Let's just take off your shoes. Gotcha.
Yeah, that's important. It will be my pleasure. I'm glad it will be. Yeah.
So I don't know. I mean, what do you think of nuggies? Maybe a chicken sandwich? I'm a chicken sandwich with pickles.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Where am I?
Oh, cheese. No cheese. No cheese. Just plain.
Chick-fil-A sauce on it though. All the way. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That chick-fil-A sauce. So good. I could drink it.
It's so good. So that's what I'm going to do in honor and to celebrate our success in music. Yeah. I'm going to take you to the Chick-fil-A of your choosing.
Great. So it could be one year you, one year me. It could be anywhere. It could be anywhere.
Well, I mean, I would say within an hour span because you don't have anything to do. But, you know, this has been great. It's on me. Oh, good.
I have a coupon. Nice. Nice. Nice.
Yes. Okay. And I also have the app. Good.
So I'll get points off of it. So I can reimburse for other food that I go by myself. So like that. So really, it's a win win.
It sounds like it. Yeah. Yeah. I like that.
I like that for you. Okay. I have a story today. Do you?
I have a very tiny cat on my lap. You do really cute. So today, I am back at Haley's house and I get to see this cute little kitten. It just seems weird that we're talking about murder.
And here's this sweet little kitten. Although he's not that sweet. No, he's pretty spicy. His name is Edgar.
As in Alan Puff. Yeah. I love it. Yeah.
Well, it's Raven. Anyway, okay. What you got? This story breaks my heart.
Oh, no. Because it involves two children. And we all know, like, stories like that are pretty hard for me. But this is really important to share because it's ongoing.
Oh, yeah. Yes. And this story gives me solder children vibes. So you all remember that story?
We started children. I think we did it in 2023. Yeah. But basically children in West Virginia, there was a mass fire.
Yeah. Five kids just went missing. Yeah. They didn't find their bodies.
They just never heard from them again. So crazy. It's such a mystery. It's so weird.
So I want you to think along those vibes. Yeah. You haven't checked out that story. Please do.
You should. It's a great one. It's a two-parter, actually. The cat farted.
And the cat farted. It smells so bad. Well, it's right, you know, where you are. I'm sure to watch this way.
Yeah. If you got a smell of like absolute death and decay and are you trying to? Dying. I think you're also blaming your own parts.
Yeah. If I had done that, I would have clamed it. That's for such a tiny thing. It smells so bad.
It is passing this way now. Yeah. It's a lot. That is a lot.
It's kind of burning your nose hairs a little bit. Yeah. And your throat. That's nasty.
So, our story begins in Unionville, Tennessee. This is a rural area about an hour so east of Nashville. It's here at the home of Leon Bubba and his wife, Molly McLaren. We're tragedy struck.
So, on Sunday, September 23rd, 2012, a neighbor on Kingdom Road noticed a blazing fire coming from the McLaren home. They swiftly called 911 and let them know, hey, who like big fire. Big fire. Big fire.
Big fire. Please come back. Yeah. So, the firefighters come on the scene.
There was an inferno that had torn through the home and already knocked down a number of walls, like things were just starting to fall apart. Yeah. And it escalated very quickly from the time that the call was made to the time that they got there. It was maybe five minutes, but it was everything was happening fast.
So, relatives and neighbors stated that Bubba and Molly, his wife, had lived in the home with their two grandchildren, Chloe, H9, and Gage, age seven. Sadly, firefighters didn't have enough manpower nor water on their trucks to stop the blaze. So, they had to go back and forth collecting more water, which sometimes- And that was in what, 2012? 2012.
But again, we're talking about a very rural area. Yeah. I guess a farm country. Yeah.
Probably not a lot of fire hydrants around. Correct. Correct. So, they were going back and forth.
This took so much time. And of course, how can you possibly fight a blaze when you have to stop and go get more water? Yeah. I mean, it's one of those, like, you hear now, like, I hear it sometimes on like our scanners and stuff that we have, that they'll call for like mutual aid from another place and bring us another tanker.
We need more water because they're somewhere where they can't access and they just have their one tanker. Yeah. And that's like a very scary thing. Kind of that, like, it's a fine alarm, you know?
Yeah, everybody got a good idea. Yeah. Absolutely. So, the fire wasn't officially put out until four o'clock in the morning.
Now, the phone call was made at 9.30, four o'clock in the morning. So, almost seven hours before they were finally able to get it off. So, during the chaos, Cheryl, who was the children's mother, was alerted by her sister of the fire. Cheryl lived in a neighboring town and swiftly came to the home.
She reiterated to officials that her children and parents were inside. The home had been essentially reduced ash, like, there was just nothing that they could do. So, investigators started, you know, sifting through the property. Inside the home, in what would have been the basement, investigators found the charred bodies of Bubba and Molly.
Upstairs, a third body was discovered, believing to be one of the children. Yeah. So, a press conference was held announcing the tragedy. Officials announced that they had plans to go back into the home and find the fourth body.
A slight problem. The third body that they found was not one of the children. It was a family dog. Oh, wow.
So, you know, this was a hot, intense fire. Yeah, at that point, you're just, I mean, not so many. Your fucking bones. Well, and it's just like even the charred, like charred remains, it's, it's gonna look like a blab.
Correct. Pretty much. So, how do you differentiate? You might be able to tell that there was a skull maybe, but like, it's pretty much, you're looking at, like, so I know, like, a lot of times they'll go through and they have like these long like poker sticks, not, you know, like they've got the sharp end on the bottom and they'll go through and start like poking through the rubble and stuff until like they get something fleshy.
Right. Right. When then they're like, oh, that's probably a body and like that's, you know, unfortunately, but like when you've got that much rubble on top of stuff, like that's what you're, you're doing because no one's survived that. Exactly.
Like you're not looking for survivors at that point. You're looking for the remains. Exactly. So, that's why you're taking that kind of stick and like doing that, which kind of is like wild to me, especially in like the area that I live in, we have a lot of volunteer fire departments and we have a lot of young people that do that.
Like, I had high school students who were on the volunteer fire department, so that's something like they might have been doing. I mean, now granted, there's going to be a lot of older people on there that are going to put them to different tasks, but in a situation like that, I mean, it's everybody's involved in doing that. And that's really, that's really hard. That's hard for me as a mother to think that my son is a teenager could be finding dead.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of trauma to put on. Very, very young.
But they also found the hollow remains of the pet cockatoo. Oh, yeah. Wow. So, you know, a smaller bird.
Small bird. Small bird. To find that is pretty wild. But they didn't find the children's remains.
I mean, maybe, but I mean, it has to burn. We talked about this. Like if I had to burn really, really hot to get rid of bone. And, you know, we can talk about this later, but it is true that we've mentioned this before, even when they put a body into the incinerator essentially to reduce it, you know, to cremate it.
Yeah. You still have body parts and bones left. Like we still have the femur and a lot of it. So they put it in what's called a cremeulator, which breaks down the bone into act.
It like pulverizes it. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, it's not going nice little intense blender.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, with a lot of blending. So a fire like this would not completely reduced.
It just wouldn't. Right. You know, so let's, let's go back for a minute and kind of talk about how we got to this point and then we'll dive more into the fire. So Chloe was born on June 23rd, 2003 to Cheryl Daniel.
When Chloe was very young, unfortunately her biological father passed away. Cheryl struggled to manage solo parenting, but the stress only increased when she found out she was pregnant again. Wow. Chloe was two when her half brother, Christopher, Gage, was born.
So we'll call him Gage, his internal name. He went by Gage was born with a rare disorder known as Dandy Walker syndrome. Don't hurt her. I have not either.
So this is when the brain, there's an issue with the brain that affects movement in the mind. And so while the diagnosis was challenging for Cheryl, I mean, I can only imagine you're already stressed. Yeah. Your child has a rare disease.
Gage made wonderful progress. He was doing very well. Yeah. I didn't let that stop him.
Each had a nickname. They called him Buster, which would be so cute. And he loved being outside, loved spending time with his grandfather. They would go fishing together.
Chloe was very outgoing. She's smart and she loved helping in the kitchen. She also loved playing outside. So Cheryl was struggling.
She could not take care of both of her children. And I assume things didn't work out with Gage's dad. Cheryl started having some issues with substances and eventually child protective services stepped in. They removed the children from the home and placed them with Cheryl's mom and stepdad, Bubba and Molly.
At the time, the kids were two and four years old. So pretty young. Cheryl worked to plan with DSS over the years and was really trying to get her life back on track. But she knew her parents would take good care of the kids.
And Molly and Bubba were described by others as very sweet. They would do anything for others, very hospitable kind of people. Like just like good country folk. You know, just salt of the earth people.
Yes, exactly. They lived in a house that was pretty far off the road. It had been in the family for generations. In fact, they were surrounded by family.
So kind of like a compound. You know, maybe there's an older house that you live in, but maybe you put a trailer down the road. That's where he lives. That kind of thing.
So Cheryl had regular supervised visitation with her children. And it appeared that the children were doing well. They had good grades in school. They had close friends that they would play with.
They would always go to the nearby family's house. So they just were normal kids. They hung out a lot on the land. They helped to care of the animals, take care of the animals.
And they like to ride around on the family's Gator, ATV. So that fateful Sunday in September, neighbors reported seeing the kids outside riding around on their Gator, which totally sounded like something my son would do. So by 630, the children were called inside for dinner. And it's assumed they went through their regular nighttime routine.
It was a Sunday. So my guess would be that they're prepping for the weekend. They're like, okay, all right, we can go over, calm down, get into bed, all the things. So most of the time the kids went to bed around eight o'clock.
And it seems like maybe the grandparents went to bed not long after that. So yeah, I mean, you're older and you're taking care of young kids. You're tired. Yeah, I'm exhausted.
And I'm in my 40s. Yeah. So all right. So that's a little history of kind of how we got here.
It's assumed that everyone in the house was asleep when the fire started. Investigators initially believed that Bubba and Molly's floor collapsed where they were sleeping and their body fell into the basement. This theory, however, quickly gets next because family members stated Bubba and Molly had separate bedrooms, which were clear across the house from each other. So if they were sleeping in their beds, there's no way they would be together side by side.
Another interesting pivot is that investigators found rubble on top of their bodies, suggesting that they had been in the basement when the fire started and the floor's collapsing collapsed onto them, but they were already lying down in the basement. Also, the basement door was open. Family reported that this was odd, because Bubba had over 30 propane tanks in the basement along with, and we'll get there, have to look on daily space, along with tools. And he always kept the basement door closed because he didn't want the kids going downstairs getting hurt messing with things.
He was ritualistic about it. He made sure that door was closed. So it being open was very odd. And what it did was, it created a suction.
So if the fire had started in the basement, it pulled it upward into the rest of the house. So it's believed, like I said, that it started in the basement, but they don't know how. So as I mentioned, Bubba had over 30 propane tanks in the basement. Don't get those in your house.
Yeah, no, that's, that scares me. Yeah, he had worked with propane, like that was his thing prior to retiring. And so he had multiple tanks down there and somewhere as old as 30 years old. Yeah.
Yeah. So instantly you go to, ah, this must be it. This must be, you know, how the fire started, right? Wrong.
When investigators examined the tanks, there were two that were damaged, but they hadn't exploded. So if they had been the cause of the fire, there would have been a massive explosion. So upon examination, most of the tanks were empty. Like most, yeah, so it couldn't have been the right tanks.
So another theory was that Molly was on oxygen and she was also a smoker. So according to the family, she would remove the cannula from her nose and would smoke like right beside her oxygen tank, which we all know is like, oh, no. Yeah, I used to have hostos stations that would do that. And I'm like, what's just figured out?
You're just gonna blow up explode. And Bubba and Molly did keep space heaters all over the house. But again, those were upstairs and it appeared the police came from downstairs. So it was also mentioned that Bubba and Molly were hoarders.
I mean, yeah, I'm gonna throw that out. If you have 30 propane tanks and some of them are empty in your basement, you're really likely. So I mean, I think of my own parents, my gosh, if their house went up, we'll say, you know, because my mother's gonna hear this podcast in two years, right, because that she's that behind, but she's gonna hear it and she's gonna say, we're not orders. Sort of.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry.
I had to plug the computer in at this time. So these things may have contributed to spreading the fire, but it doesn't seem like they were the direct causes of fire. So the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation known as the TBI got involved in the case and brought in some of the best debris experts. Yes, including those who were on site sifting through the rubble at the World Trade Center after.
So like, we're not talking about amateurs here. This is not your local volunteer department shifting through. This is a teenage boy. Is this a body?
Yeah. This feels lishy. This is weird. This is a dog.
I don't know. This is like the real deal. This is a real deal. Yeah.
So after all was said and done, the children's bodies were declared missing. Wow. Everyone else, including the family dog bird, everybody else was accounted for. So it's just so strange.
Really weird. Yeah. So we know, like we talked about, it takes a lot of heat and time for bodies to burn, but there still should have been bones, bones, bones, teeth. Yeah.
You know, something. Yeah. And that's, you know, what we talked about. But it was just, I mean, if you're finding the bird skeleton, you're going to be finding the people.
It's like that's not a small is the bird. Yeah. So if they weren't in the house, maybe, maybe they got out. So maybe they were like, Oh my gosh, it's a fire.
Maybe they called out for their grandparents. And they're like, we've got to get out and stop and roll, you know, everything that you're talking about. They're two and four. No, no, no, no.
At this point, they're nine and seven. Oh, okay. They moved in with their grandkids when they were two and four. Okay.
So they're nine and seven now. Yeah. So they're older, you know, maybe older sisters, like we'll stop to get out of here and get out of here and that kind of thing. Safety first.
And maybe they thought our grandparents were already like on the front lawn. We're going to get out there. So it's their eyes. Maybe they ran into the woods.
So police use helicopters. They brought in dogs. They searched a very wide area. Yeah.
Nothing was found. So going on that theory, you know, they also thought, well, you know, they were surrounded by family on land. So they would have gone to a relative's house. Right.
They would have known where to go. Exactly. And they didn't. So police kept coming back to the idea that maybe Chloe and Gage have been kidnapped.
That's kind of what it sounded like. It does. So three days after the fire on September 26, police put out an amber alert for Chloe and Gage. Flyers were also dispersed throughout the area.
Nine year old Chloe was listed as having long brown hair and blue eyes. At the time she was four feet eight inches tall and weighed around 75 pounds. Her brother Gage was seven years old, was short brown hair and hazel eyes. He was four feet tall and weighed about 50 pounds.
The sheriff's department thought the fire was accidental, but other arson experts felt that it was intentionally set. I mean, it kind of to me sounds like somebody put the grandparents' invasement or lured them down there and whacked them, took the kids and then set the house on fire. And that's something else that the family said. They were like, you know, Bubba would have done anything he could to go in those kids, in those kids out of the house and his wife.
Like he wouldn't have just stood by. So he would have had to have been incapacitated, you know, for this to happen. So this begs the question, who would have wanted to kidnap the children? Right.
And based on the layout of the house, it was a four bedroom, three bedroom house, you know, it's far off the main road. You wouldn't even know it existed. Right. You would have to know about it.
You would have to know like who's in what room, you know, just the dynamics like they were sleeping in separate rooms. So to get them both together. Is there any chance that the birth mother was involved? So we'll get there.
Okay. We'll get there. I was thinking the same thing. So you wouldn't know this house existed.
So it can't be a random stranger. Right. Somebody knew the kids were there. Somebody knew the layout of this house.
So they figured it had to be someone within the family or a friend that they knew. So please broaden Cheryl, the children's mother, engages dad for questioning. They were both pretty forthcoming, asked if they would take a polygraph. They both said yes, they both passed.
So very quickly they were ruled out. They even looked at other family members, but nothing. So interestingly enough, a month before the fire, Molly and Bubba had updated their will and made the kids beneficiaries. So if something happened to them, the children would.
I mean, I guess that's weird timing, but like, yeah, I mean, you should be doing that. Exactly. Regularly anyway. Yeah.
Yeah. And this safe, this will was stored in the safe in the house, but it was never found. Right. So did it melt?
Was it taken from the house? We safe was never found. Yeah. So the whole safe, full safe was gone.
So was this a monetary thing? Was this going to be a ransom kind of situation? Like, okay, we've stolen from you, but now we want more kind of thing. I don't know.
I mean, I don't see these individuals as like crazy, wealthy, you know, I think they're just normal folks unless I'm missing something here. It's just very strange. Yeah. Very, very strange.
Well, you said that Cheryl had some substance issues. Right. I wonder if like maybe like unknowingly to her, like when she was, you know, in that life around those people, like said something to them about, you know, parents have this or, you know, and people who are in active addiction, they do a lot of like things that they would never do, like take money from family and you know, that kind of thing. So you just kind of wonder it's very true.
It's maybe it was somebody that she had interacted with before she, you know, was getting it together. Absolutely. Someone had kind of made a plan and thought, I'm going to jump on this one time. Allow, you know, it's just, it's very strange.
It's really weird. But it also feels like it had to be really like well thought out. Yes. It took time.
Yeah. It took time to plan this out. And it would have to be somebody who the children knew. Yeah, you would think before.
Yeah. Yeah. So once the Amber Alert and flyers were put out, police started receiving tips and even had one reported sighting of a girl in a Tennessee restaurant that looked just like Chloe. The witness even snapped a photo of the girl and gave it to authorities who agreed that the child looked just like Chloe.
They showed it to Cheryl and Cheryl was like, Oh gosh, this is my daughter. This is my go finder, you know, this sure. The report had come in about a year after the blaze. So police tried funding the young girl, but we're unsuccessful.
No matter how do you find a random young child right of a restaurant, you know, other sightings came in from as far as Costa Rica. There was a sighting in Colorado in New York and California. And they followed all these tips, but nothing panned out. Right.
A few months after the fire, family members noticed that every time they would put up a flyer, someone would take it down. So weird. Every flyer they would put up, someone would come behind them and take it down. Yeah.
That's so bizarre. So bizarre. So in 2022, the TBI released age-progress photos of the children. Today, Chloe would be 22 years old and gave would be 20.
Their mother Cheryl feels her children are still alive. She continues to tell their story and plead for their safe return. Family is also helpful that genetic genealogy, excuse me, sorry, can you cut it there? I'm sorry.
Family is also hopeful that genetic genealogy could be helpful in this case. So if they are out there and take a 23andMe, they do like NancyS, D.A., maybe a match can be made. So the case remains unsolved and continues to be the longest running amber alert in Tennessee history. That's crazy.
Yes, because we're sitting right now at 13 years. Yeah. If you have any information about the abduction of Chloe Leverette and Gage Daniel, please call the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-TBI-FIND. That's 1-800-824-3463.
I am going to say, maybe they were kidnapped for these ransom reasons. Maybe someone figured out like, ooh, now I have these kids. And this didn't pan out how I thought. I mean, the 709 call are going to be kind of hard to control.
Yes. And they would probably, I'm going to run away and I don't like this. Honestly, unless they were put into traffic, or something like that. Like, what's the point?
Right. And so it makes me curious, either like, what is the intention? Like, is this someone who just wants children? Or is somebody who wanted children for a nefarious purpose?
Right. Right. Yeah. Or, you know, is it like a JC2 guard where they've been held captive all these years?
Or were they murdered? What do you think? I don't know. I mean, all of it just does not make sense.
But again, it just has those daughter children. Yeah. Absolutely. No heart in the box that we know of.
Gotcha. So that's a good thing. But yeah. So if you know anything, please reach out.
It is suspicious though that someone local is taking down these wires. That is really weird. That's the weird part to me. Like, why?
Almost begs the question, whoever did this is still around. Yeah. Unless someone's like, it triggers me seeing these wires. I'm going to take it out.
I don't know. Or somebody's like, no, I got to put up my yard sale sign. I don't know. It's just weird.
But it is strange. It's really bizarre. I could understand years after the fact like, right? Like, I'm tired.
It's time to come down. But just a few months after, we're at the whole community is like rallying. It's strange. So, all in good.
Yeah. That's my story. I'm pretty crazy. So.
Well, if you'd like to contact us about anything, feel free to do so at mountainistories.appletchen at gmail.com. Find us on our Facebook, Mountainistories.tales from Appalachia, our Instagram, at mountainistories.appletchen and Patreon for some bonus content, patreon.com.mysteries. That's right. And just like, Hayley.
I was going to say Holly. And just like Hayley. I am trying to look out. Look up the same.
I know. I've become. Look at that coming. Well, the tiny cat was just in the litter box and it made me really nervous.
You might have pooped somebody on the really bad smell. So, results. I think it was just a pee. But this is, you're like getting your taste of paranoid.
Like this is, it's a lot. She gets real. She gets real. She gets real.
And there's a lot of it. Does he keep you up at night? No. No.
No. No. Thankfully. It's coming.
All right. But you are parent. It is coming and it is hell. Great.
Can't wait. Yes. Yes. I can't wait.
All right. So, shout out is to Trenton, New Jersey. Nice. Yes.
Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week. Bye.