'Rader Was There': The Vanishing of the Salomon Family

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 16, 2025

Sol Salomon was 35 years old, an Israeli born fire extinguisher salesman with a sideline reputation among acquaintances for dealing in illegal firearms. His wife Elaine was 39, a stay at home mother on her second marriage. Together with Elaine's 14 year old daughter Michelle, who went by the surname Houchman from her mother's earlier marriage, and the couple's own 9 year old son Mitchel, the family lived in a four bedroom ranch style house at 19232 West Lassen Street in Northridge, California, directly across from Alfred B. Nobel Charter Middle School. On the evening of October 12, 1982, all four of them disappeared, and none of them has ever been seen again.

An Ordinary Evening, Then a Phone Call That Ended Wrong

The family had spent that evening together with Elaine's parents over dinner before splitting up for the rest of the night. Sol headed out to attend a car auction with a business acquaintance named Harvey Rader, a British car dealer who owned Mr. Motors of London, a dealership in nearby Reseda. Sol had personally invested twenty thousand dollars into Rader's business earlier that year. Elaine and Michelle, meanwhile, went to a clothing party, a common social gathering format at the time built around in-home sales events.

At around 11:30 that night, back at the house, someone knocked on the Salomons' door. Elaine answered it while on the phone with a friend, and the friend later reported that Elaine said, in the moment, that Rader was there at the door. The call cut off shortly after. No one has ever established with certainty what happened in the house after that phone line went dead, but by the following day, every member of the family was gone.

A Pool Overflowing, a Bed Too Neatly Made

The first sign that something was seriously wrong came from a neighbor. Stacy Perman, a close friend of Michelle's who had originally planned a sleepover with her that same night before the plans fell through, noticed along with her mother that the Salomons' backyard pool was overflowing, running steadily with no one around to shut it off. Perman would later grow up to become a journalist and eventually published her own deeply researched account of the case in Los Angeles Magazine, driven in part by her own childhood connection to Michelle. On October 13, an LAPD officer entered the house and found it completely empty. The family's cars remained parked in the driveway, exactly where they should have been if anyone had simply left on a trip.

Inside, the scene grew more troubling the further investigators looked. Elaine's cousin, Dorene Laffer, noted that the master bedroom looked suspiciously undisturbed, the bed neatly made in a way she said was completely uncharacteristic of how Elaine actually kept the house, an absence of mess that felt staged rather than natural. Michelle's bedroom told a very different story. Investigators found a broken bed frame, missing bedding, and small bloodstains on both the mattress and the wall. A section of carpet had been cut out of the floor entirely and covered over with a bathroom rug, an unmistakable attempt to conceal something investigators believed had happened in that specific room. A baseball bat was later found near the home's bar area as well.

Scattered Along the Freeway

Five days after the family vanished, on October 17, 1982, passports, wallets, and photographs belonging to the Salomons turned up scattered along the Antelope Valley Freeway near the town of Acton, a location well outside the city, consistent with someone dumping personal effects from a moving vehicle rather than the family having simply packed up and left under their own power. No trace of Sol, Elaine, Michelle, or Mitchel themselves was found at that location or anywhere else. To date, none of their remains have ever been recovered.

An Account That Never Quite Held Up

When investigators questioned Harvey Rader, he offered an account that placed him only briefly with Sol that night, claiming he had simply dropped Sol off at a restaurant earlier in the evening and had gone separately to pick up a car that needed repairs, well before the family disappeared entirely. Investigators found his version of events inconsistent in ways that never fully resolved, and Rader's connection to the family, along with the twenty thousand dollars Sol had invested in his dealership, kept him at the center of the investigation from very early on.

The case against him gained a startling new dimension in October 1983, when Rader's own cousin, Ashley Paulle, a cab driver working in London, came forward with a detailed account implicating Rader directly. According to Paulle, Rader had shot Sol during an argument over the twenty thousand dollar investment and had then killed the rest of the family and buried all four of them somewhere in the desert. Paulle also connected Rader to an entirely separate, similarly unresolved disappearance from that same year, that of a California couple named Peter and Joan Davis, alleging Rader had killed them during a robbery. Paulle failed a polygraph examination of his own regarding these claims, and while he was initially charged as an accessory in connection with his statements, those charges were ultimately dropped, and he was released.

Three Trials, One Acquittal

Harvey Rader was formally arrested for the Salomon family's murders in August 1988, immediately after completing an unrelated prison sentence in Arizona for passport fraud. What followed was an unusually drawn out legal process built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence, since no bodies, no confirmed murder weapon, and no direct forensic link to Rader himself had ever been established. His first two trials both ended in mistrials, unable to produce a unanimous verdict either way. At his third trial, three defense witnesses testified that they had seen Sol alive in Carpinteria, California sometime after the family had already supposedly vanished, testimony that, whether or not investigators found it credible, appears to have introduced enough doubt to matter. In July 1992, nearly a decade after the family disappeared, Harvey Rader was acquitted of all charges connected to their deaths. He was never charged in connection with the Davis disappearance either, due to what investigators described as insufficient evidence in that case as well.

No Answer, Then or Since

The acquittal did not produce an alternative explanation for what had happened to Sol, Elaine, Michelle, and Mitchel Salomon. It simply closed off the one legal avenue investigators had pursued for a decade without ever developing enough hard evidence to sustain a conviction. Rumors that trailed Sol's own reputation, involvement in illegal gun sales, a habit of frequenting prostitutes, along with reports that Elaine had been having an affair of her own around the time of the disappearance, added complicating texture to the case without ever pointing investigators toward any concrete alternative suspect or explanation. Whatever tensions existed within the family or its outer circle before that October night, none of them produced a body, a confession, or a resolution.

A Family Erased in a Single Night

More than forty years later, the disappearance of the Salomon family remains one of Southern California's more haunting unsolved cases specifically because of how completely it erased four people from an ordinary suburban household in the space of a single evening. A phone call cut short mid-sentence. A pool left running. A bed made too perfectly in one room, a bloodstained one in another. Personal documents scattered along a freeway outside the city and never followed by anything else. Investigators, journalists, and true crime researchers have returned to the case repeatedly in the decades since, drawn by the same unanswered question that has defined it from the very first morning a police officer walked into an empty house across the street from a middle school and found no one home at all.

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