5 die in bizarre auto fire

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=OcBdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DV4NAAAAIBAJ&pg=2414,4016034&dq=pikeville+car+fire&hl=en

On November 20, 1960, a little girl playing by a creek near Pikeville, Kentucky, made a grisly discovery. Five men burned beyond recognition sat in a car. The car had gone off the road and stopped with the front in the creek. There had been no impact; the car had just rolled to a stop. There was no gas in the tank. Though the outside of the car looked undamaged, the interior of the vehicle was incinerated, and police initially suspected foul play for simple reasons: The men were all upright in their seats and showed no signs of having struggled to escape the fire. In addition, metal detectors suggested possible pellets or bullets in the chest areas of the men, and there was blood on the ground near the car.

But the autopsies showed that the metal had dripped from the ceiling of the vehicle as it started to melt and that the men had high levels of carbon monoxide in their bodies, meaning they were alive and breathing when the fire started. It was determined that it was the carbon monoxide that, ultimately, killed the men. For lack of a better theory, police decided that the fire had started at the front of the vehicle and moved back, but it was never stated how this odd fire started. Nor was it explained why five men in a burning vehicle would calmly drive a car off a road, nor where the blood on the ground came from, nor why the five men, alive and breathing, would calmly sit still as they burned to death.
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