These Five Children Went Missing On Christmas Eve In 1945 After Their House Went Up In Flames
At the age of 13, George Sodder immigrated from Tula, Sardinia, to the United States in 1908 and paved his own way in America.
As a teen, he worked on the Pennsylvania railroads before moving to Smithers, West Virginia. There, he was employed as a truck driver before ultimately starting his own trucking company.
George went on to meet his wife, Jennie Cipriani, after walking into a local shop. The pair settled down in Fayetteville and started a large family together. From 1923 to 1943, they welcomed 10 children into the world.
Fayetteville was a small town, but it had an active Italian immigrant community. The Sodders were a respected middle-class family, and George, in particular, was known for his strong opinions on politics, current events, and business.
He disliked Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, and had gotten into some tense arguments with other members of the local Italian community.
This fact, coupled with other strange circumstances, is why the Sodder house fire and disappearance of five Sodder children remains so puzzling.
The blaze began just shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve in 1945. The smell of smoke had woken Jennie up, and she soon realized her family’s two-story home was on fire.
It took the fire department seven hours to arrive, and by that time, the residence had burned to the ground. Of the nine Sodder children who had been inside at the time, five were missing.
To this day, it remains unclear what exactly happened to the kids. They were never seen again, and authorities claimed the fire had been accidental.
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However, the five children’s remains were never found, and the Sodders theorized their home had been set on fire as a distraction while their five kids, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie Irene, and Betty, were kidnapped.
The Night Of The Blaze
On Christmas Eve, nine of the 10 Sodder kids were home. Joe Sodder, who was 21-years-old, had only been discharged from the Army the day before and wasn’t at his family’s house.
George and his two older sons, John Sodder and George Jr. Sodder, had gone to bed early. Meanwhile, the younger kids were given permission to stay up late as they played with toys gifted to them for Christmas.
Jennie took her youngest, Sylvia, up to bed with her at about 10:30 p.m. A couple of hours later, she smelled smoke at 1:00 a.m. and jumped out of bed. There were flames inside her husband’s office, preventing her from getting to the phone.
Jennie instructed her 17-year-old daughter, Mary Ann “Marion” Sodder, to take Sylvia outside. At the same time, she and George tried to rescue their other kids.
George Jr. and John reportedly yelled in an attempt to wake up their siblings before rushing downstairs. Then, flames overtook the staircase to the attic, where the other Sodder kids slept. Due to the blaze, George wasn’t able to get upstairs.
Instead, he headed outside and pondered other ways to reach his children, all of which were prevented by peculiar circumstances. He first headed for a ladder that typically stood next to the house, yet it wasn’t there.
Next, George and his sons attempted to move his two trucks closer to the house. That way, he could stand on top of them to reach the second floor. Strangely, the vehicles, which had been functioning fine the day before, both would not start.
George moved on to his rain barrel after getting the idea to scoop water from it. Nonetheless, even that was frozen solid.
Marion tried running to a neighbor’s home in order to contact the Fayetteville Fire Department. However, no operator responded. Another neighbor who spotted the fire from a nearby tavern also attempted to call authorities, but again, they received no operator response.
The neighbor ended up driving into town to alert Fire Chief F.J. Morris of the blaze, and a “phone tree” system was initiated. Essentially, one firefighter called another, and so on and so forth.
It took 45 minutes for the Sodder’s five-bedroom home to burn down. Firefighters didn’t arrive at the scene until 8:00 a.m., at which point the residence had already been reduced to ash.
Strange Details Surrounding The Fire
On Christmas Day, George and Jennie first thought their five children had perished. Following a search of their property, though, no human remains were recovered.
Fire Chief Morris said the fire had been hot enough to cremate their bodies, and a state police inspector suggested the fire had been caused by faulty wiring. Still, other details seemed to contradict this idea.
In 1976, Marion recalled how she never saw any sign of her siblings trying to escape the flames.
“During the fire, I kept watching the windows, but I never saw [even] one of the children. I never smelled burning flesh. They say you can smell burning flesh miles away, but I never did,” she said.
Plus, George remembered how, months before the fire, a strange man showed up at his home to ask about hauling work. The man also walked to the back of the house, pointed out two different fuse boxes, and stated, “This is going to cause a fire someday.”
Back then, George found that comment weird, especially since a local power company had just checked the wiring and declared it was in good condition.
Also, around the same time, a different man approached George, trying to sell him family life insurance. George turned down the offer, and the man reportedly became furious, saying, “Your house is going up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about [Benito] Mussolini.”
Then, just before Christmas, other Sodder family members spotted a man parked outside in a car, watching as the younger kids arrived home from school.
Other bizarre circumstances revealed themselves after the fire, too. According to a telephone repairman, the Sodders’ phone lines had been cut, not burned.
Also, the official report stated that the fire had been caused by an electrical issue, specifically “faulty wiring.” If true, this meant that the power at the Sodder house would’ve been dead. On the contrary, the lights in the downstairs of the home remained on as it burned. This was despite Jennie turning them off shortly before the fire, closing the downstairs curtains, and locking the front door.
Finally, about half an hour before she woke up to the smell of smoke, Jennie reportedly heard a bang on the roof, followed by a rolling noise. To her, it sounded “something like a rubber ball,” rolling and hitting the ground “with a thump.”
The Missing Sodder Children Declared Dead
Even in the wake of these bizarre details, the five Sodder children were issued death certificates on December 30. “Fire or suffocation” was listed as their cause of death, even though their remains were never located.
George brought in a bulldozer on December 29 to fill the Sodder home’s basement with dirt. The idea was for the space to serve as a memorial for his supposedly deceased children.
He and Jennie hadn’t yet doubted authorities’ conclusions about the house fire, and the decision to create a memorial may have inadvertently covered up or destroyed evidence.
Beef Liver Buried In A Box
The Sodders eventually hired a private investigator, and according to the private investigator, Fire Chief Morris supposedly found a heart at the site of the fire and buried it in a box.
The box was subsequently dug up and brought to a funeral director, who determined the box actually held a beef liver, not a human heart. Moreover, the beef liver had never been touched by fire.
Fire Chief Morris allegedly said that he’d planted the beef liver at the Sodder property in order to convince the Sodder family that their kids were dead.
Later, in 1949, George Sodder excavated the entire site, which led to the discovery of human vertebrae. Still, it had no evidence of charring, and there was no way to tell if the bones had been there following the blaze.
The vertebrae were sent for analysis at the Smithsonian Institution, where it was found to have belonged to a male between the ages of 16 and 22. The report didn’t fully exclude the Sodder’s 14-year-old son Maurice but rather stated it was “possible, although not probable,” that a boy his age would have that level of skeletal maturation.
The Search For The Sodder Children
George and Jennie wound up hiring multiple private investigators, as officials were not willing to investigate their kids’ disappearances. George also personally traveled around the country to follow up on potential leads.
Various alleged sightings seemed to support the theory that the five Sodder children had been kidnapped, potentially by the Mafia. In 1952, for instance, a motel manager from Charleston claimed four children, along with two men and two women of “Italian extraction,” had stayed at the motel for two to three days after the fire.
Other witnesses claimed to have spotted the children following the fire as well. And in 1967, Jennie Sodder received an envelope postmarked from Central City, Kentucky, that contained an image of a man. The man looked very similar to her son, Louis, and on the back, the name “Louis Sodder” was handwritten on the photograph.
After his name, there was also a cryptic message reading, “I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35.” Georgie and Jennie had no clue what the message meant and sent a private detective to Kentucky to investigate. Nothing ever came of this lead.
Jennie reportedly firmly believed that her children had been taken, and once she received that letter, she had a second billboard erected about their case. This billboard included the photo of Louis, and in a 1976 interview, she said, “Nothing is going to get me to give up hope that my children are still alive.”
“It’s hard sometimes to get to sleep at night, just wondering about them. After all, if someone wanted to get me, why did they get my family, too? It’s like hitting a rock wall. We can’t go any further. We just don’t know what to do now,” George had stated in 1968.
He passed away in 1969; Jennie died two decades later in 1989. To this day, what exactly happened to the Sodder children remains unknown, but surviving children and grandchildren have come up with their own theories.
Some believe George had refused to join a local Mafia branch when they tried to recruit him. Others think the Mafia had attempted to extort money from him or the Sodder children were kidnapped by someone they knew.
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