♪ (haunting intro) ♪
- (narrator) In 2006, Rey Rivera was found dead
amid extremely bizarre circumstances.
Police at the time suspected he died from suicide.
But with the lack of hard evidence and a number of strange details
leading up to his death, the case remains unsolved.
- You know, there's a lot of unsolved mysteries,
so let's see if we can solve this one. (chuckles)
- (narrator) Rivera and his wife Allison
had recently moved to Baltimore, so he could take a job
writing financial newsletters for his good friend
Porter Stansberry's investment strategies company.
- Seems like a good man.
- (narrator) In the evening after Allison had left
for a business trip, Rivera vanished. - Oh, no.
- (narrator) Friends staying at their home informed Allison
that he had left the house in a hurry after receiving
a phone call and had not returned. - This stuff always scares me.
- (narrator) After over a week with no sign of life,
phone communication, or bank activity, Allison and her parents spotted
Rey's car in a downtown parking lot on May 26th.
- Okay. - (narrator) But after searches
of the area, Rivera was still unaccounted for until a strange hole
was spotted in the roof of a second floor meeting room
of the Belvedere Hotel. - Oh my god.
- (narrator) ...hotel's main tower. Rivera's decomposed body
was found inside the locked room with the punctured ceiling.
- That is so creepy. - (narrator) Suggesting that he either
fell or was pushed from the roof of the main building.
- Ooh, that's suspicious! - This just escalated really quick.
- He went through the ceiling! Oh my god.
- (narrator) The first theory and the one that Baltimore officials
leaned towards is that Rivera died by suicide.
He left behind a cryptic note that was found taped to the back
of Rivera's computer from the day he went missing.
- Oh, wow. Okay. - (narrator) The note was largely
nonsensical and was so puzzling to police that it was sent off
to the FBI, who ruled it to not be a suicide note.
It began with Free Mason-related wording,
"brothers and sisters," and also contained a long list
of family members and celebrities who Rivera wanted to make
five years younger. Rivera would have had to take
a running leap off the main building to land where he did.
Rivera's shoes were placed near the hole's opening
along with his unbroken cellphone. - Hmm.
- (narrator) His glasses were found intact and unscratched.
- That's interesting. - There's a whole
[censored] movie here! (laughs) - (narrator) All the hotel's
camera rooftop footage of the day in question was unwatchable
due to a technical error. - You're lying!
You are-- no way. - I think that someone
disabled the cameras, so it wouldn't be shown.
That is too much to be coincidence.
- (narrator) Even more suspicious is the sudden and complete shutdown
from Rivera's supposed best friend Porter Stansberry,
who barred company employees from talking to the police or media
and refused to cooperate with the investigation himself.
- Oh. That's really sad. Usually, when it comes to suicides,
there are a lot of planned murders that relate to suicide.
- That's why his friend obviously wasn't gonna cooperate.
He killed his friend! Come on, guys! It's easy.
- (FBE) Rey Rivera went missing in May of 2006 and was found
inside a conference room under a hole in the roof
about 45 feet from the ledge of the building, meaning he would
have had to reach a speed of about 10 miles an hour
to jump that far. His phone and his glasses
were found near the hole, relatively unharmed.
And he was wearing flip-flops. Ultimately, the police ruled
his death as a probable suicide, although the medical examiner
said his death was inconclusive. - Wow. Okay.
I think him having a psychotic episode actually makes more sense.
- It could not have been a suicide. The other stuff that he had
was unharmed. Seriously? That looked more like a homicide,
and then it was framed to look like a suicide.
- He had to have died in that room. He couldn't have fell
'cause his glasses wouldn't have been okay.
Then the guy, his friend-- his "friend," he leaves,
and he pays off the same person who deleted the footage,
locks the door, so they think that he jumped off the roof,
but really, they went in perfectly fine.
This hotel is shady! - (FBE) I think you solved it.
- I think I've solved it too. They're gonna call me--
if i go missing, you know what hotel did this to me.
- (narrator) Is there something out there?
That's a question people have been asking now for 70 years.
- Oh, UFO. - (narrator) Flying disc has
been found and is now in the possession of the army.
- (FBE) It was said to have happened near a US military base
in Roswell, New Mexico. - Why do we picture aliens like that?
- (narrator) ...bodies had been found in the spacecraft.
- (narrator 2) The military claimed it was just a weather balloon.
- A weather balloon. Are you kidding me?
- (narrator 2) When the story leaked, sensational news reports made Roswell
a symbol of government conspiracies. - Interesting.
- (narrator 2) ...the existence of visitors from other planets.
- This throws me back to Area 51. - (narrator 2) Then, 50 years
after the incident, the Air Force released a report
admitting that the wreckage was part
of a secret system of atomic espionage.
But for real believers, this is just another cover-up.
- Wow. (laughs) We're in danger. - A lot of people are like,
"Do you believe in aliens? Do you not?"
This has been a feud for years. - I'm 100% confident that there
are other life forms out there, but we just don't know about it.
But people act like they know about it,
and then that's when I kind of disengage myself.
- (FBE) So, in July of 1947, Rancher William Brazel found a bunch
of debris of a supposed flying disc and reported it to authorities.
Ultimately, the military said it was a crashed weather balloon.
But a lot of people were not convinced.
In the 90s, the military came forward and said it was actually
a nuclear test surveillance balloon. But a lot of people
still aren't convinced, and the incident has gone down
in history as the kind of start of the UFO and alien obsession
in pop culture. - Whatever the government says is BS.
(laughs) Especially about aliens, there's no way.
- That was like right after World War II, right?
What if that was something from like another country
that was gonna hurt the US in some way?
You never-- they wouldn't tell the public that.
- I believe in aliens, so I think it could've definitely
been something crashed and they don't want to scare the masses.
And if we find out there's another life form
that is more advanced than us, now we're not the the biggest
on the food chain, of course the masses are gonna freak out.
So, they're definitely covering something up.
- (narrator) Jennie Sodder allowed five of her children to stay up late.
They were playing with some toys in the living room.
At 12:30 in the morning, Jennie is startled awake
by the telephone ringing. (phone ringing)
- I'm gonna get nightmares.
(phone ringing) - (narrator) When she answers it,
a woman asks to speak with someone who isn't there
and who Jennie doesn't even know. Jennie woke again, this time
at roughly 1 AM. - Okay.
- (narrator) She heard a sound like something hitting the roof
and then was rolling down off of it. About 30 minutes later,
she awoke a third time, this time smelling smoke.
- Oh, come on! - (narrator) She woke up her husband,
George Sr., and the other children on the main floor.
George tried to get to the attic, which is where the five children
were sleeping, but the staircase was engulfed in flames.
- Oh, shoot. - It was lucky that George,
his wife Jennie, and their other four children were able
to escape at all. - That's a lot of kids.
- (narrator) Once the fire was out,
the search for the children's remains started.
None were found. - That's so sad.
- (narrator) They started to believe that the five children
weren't even in the house during the fire.
- Okay. - (narrator) They believed
that the children were probably kidnapped.
- Oh, I've seen this! I have information on this one.
I'm ready to talk about this one. - (narrator) George Sr. remembered
an altercation he had back in October with an insurance salesman.
The salesman warned George that his house would go up in smoke.
George believed it had something to do with his vocal hate
of the late dictator Mussolini. - That damn insurance agent.
- (narrator) If it was just an electrical fire,
why were the Christmas lights still on as the house was burning?
The power should have been out. - Exactly.
- (narrator) When George Sr. was trying to frantically
save his children, he decided to drive one of his trucks
to the side of the house to climb up the attic.
But it wouldn't start. In fact, neither vehicle would start.
- Very sus. Extremely sus. - (narrator) They also discovered
that their phone line had been cut, not melted by the fire...
- Interesting. - (narrator) ...which is what
they assumed. And the biggest reason why they believed that their children
weren't even in the fire is when Jennie spoke with an employee
of a crematorium. They informed her that even if you burn a body
for two hours at 1,100 degrees Celsius or 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
there still would be bones left. - You'd find remains.
- (narrator) Yet the search turned up no remains at all.
- Bro, this is scary! I don't like this one! (laughs)
- (narrator) The best evidence they received showed up in 1967.
- The boy! - (narrator) It was a letter
with no return address. Inside was a picture of a young man.
On the back was Louis Sodder. "I love brother Frankie,
A90123 or 35."
- (exhales shakily)
That was the scariest one. - They did not die in that fire.
There was no smell of flesh. There were no bones.
They didn't cut their own phone wire. Who cut it then?!
- (FBE) In 1945, the home of the Sodders
was destroyed in a fire and five of their children disappeared.
In the 60s, they received a picture of what may have been
one of the boys all grown up, but this mystery remains unsolved.
- That's crazy. I think it's a difficult one,
because there's so much happening. I'm not surprised that it's still
an unsolved mystery. - The woman that called the phone
was looking for somebody else and that they continued
to go to the house, and then once they found out
that it was actually the wrong house or the wrong person,
they're like, "It's too late. Let's just get the kids."
- What could have possibly happened? Someone is not being honest here.
- Thanks for watching this mysterious episode of Teens React.
- Don't forget to subscribe for more episodes like this one.
- Which unsolved mystery should we react to next?
Let us know in the comments. - Bye, everyone!
- Hey, guys. It's Sierra, React producer.
You know what's not a tough mystery to solve?
How to subscribe to our channel. You should do it. Okay, bye!