The beginning of all my sub theories is always the insurance guy, Mr. J, and George plotting an insurance scam which included burning the house down and possibly even loss of life.
In this scenario, kids survive.
So Jennie, their business accountant and whether she liked it or not, in on insurance scam. But! First she arranged for her eldest daughter to stay up downstairs, and shepherd her 5 youngest into the possession of these Cipriani relatives. She even ordered the two oldest boys to be outside doing chores in the barn. How easy to take the girls, put them in a waiting car and tell them she loved them and to be good etc. I am thinking in this scenario, kids knew someone in the car.
The witnesses who saw the children with Italian speakers seem believable. Especially because they always mention the Italianness, the abrupt foreign speech, the hostile piercing eyes seen and heard utterly from ordinary country folk.
Everyone do not get mad at me but I can even see a mother thinking that maybe she should get her youngest kids out of this place and even back to Italy and out of growing up to be in the coal business, miners etc. like the Sardinians were as well, Jennie Cipriani was not Sardinian.
Anyway I can see a mom stretched to her limits and feeling her family threatened financially and maybe even their lives, agreeing to letting her side of the family have these children, take them far away and love them.
thus, she tended a garden for dead children and he was the one who searched to the end for live children.
Because in the scenario above this one, #1 he murdered the kids accidentally in an insurance scam...so he has to be seen to hysterically believe they are alive somewhere although he has seen their death certificates. In the above scenario #2, Insurance scam, but kids must SEEM dead although have been adopted by loving relatives.
Now, about those 4 vertebrae. 16 to 18 year old. That info about the boat Verona comes in handy yes it does. All of that secrecy about back home, etc. Did someone who was aboard the Verona with them, one of the 11, commit a crime later, like murder a 16 to 18 year old. All that going back and forth to Italy especially the bro who returned directly to Italy after dropping George off...
and to add a Dan Brown masonic twist as one poster suggested...that whole Fra Francesco thing, loved it, the pic of the very handsome Dr. Francesco palermo, with his accolades, notice he received his degree from the University of Verona.
There is something untold about this, we sense it, and it will always elude us.
