The Mysterious Case of the Sodder Family

hey guys it's bella and welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having an incredible day today in today's video we're going to be covering another mystery monday case but before we do i just want to thank today's sponsor case defy you guys no testify are my tried and true their compostable cases are my absolute favorites because they're 100 compostable both the case and the packaging they come in are totally free of virgin plastic but they're still super protective of your phone like the amount of times i would have smashed my phone without this case is ridiculous i love that they're totally customizable as well you can get all sorts of different colors you can get them engraved and they look amazing in a selfie honestly i literally have so many of these compostable cases because i'm obsessed with them i even have carry on to them he uses the black one and he swears by it now and any of their case defied cases you can actually return to their retail stores and they will repurpose or recycle them for you they are also planning to be a carbon neutral company by 2025 which i think is amazing they also plant one tree for every case to fight conscious case sold and if you guys are interested in any of the cotton possible cases i promise they're amazing you can get 20 off by going to casetify.combella i will leave all of that information in the description down below so make sure you check it out and let's go ahead and get into today's case so today we're going to be talking about the mysterious case of the soda family george and jenny soto were both italian immigrants and together had 10 children george was born giorgio sodu in tula sardina in 1895 and had immigrated to the us in 1908 when he was 13 years old with his older brother they first arrived in ellis island but almost immediately after arriving george's older brother went back to italy and george at just 13 years old was left in a new country on his own he found a job at the pennsylvania railroads carrying water and supplies to the laborers which he did for a few years until he moved into smithers in west virginia and upon moving he first worked as a driver and then eventually launched his own trucking company that would hold dirt for construction freight and coal he met jenny capriani at a local store called the music box which her parents who had moved to the us from italy when jenny was just three years old owned and they hit it off right away and eventually married and settled in fayetteville in west virginia in a two-story timber frame house just over three kilometers out of town and had 10 children together between 1923 and 1943. in 1945 fayetteville in west virginia was a small quiet town with a population of about 1300 people and the main street didn't even run longer than 100 meters so it was pretty small which meant a lot of talk and a lot of rumors and i mean i think there was honestly more rumors than actual evidence in this case despite the town being so small it was an active italian community and amongst this community the sodders were considered one of the most well-respected middle-class families around and although the family and george were very well respected in the community george did have some very heated arguments on occasion with some members of the italian community because he had some very strong opinions that he was not shy about expressing anything from business to current events and politics and had some very strong negative opinions on benito mussolini who was the leader of the national fastest party in italy in 1944 mussolini was deposed and executed but george's opinions for the guy still left some differing feelings for him in fact he had a man try to sell him life insurance for the family which george declined and when he did so the salesman became super pissed off and said your goddamn house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed you are going to pay for the dirty remarks you have been saying about mussolini but of course george didn't take the threats too seriously because like i said he did get into the occasional heated argument about his opinions especially on mussolini on another strange occasion a man came to the house the sodder family house looking for work and he kind of just wandered around the house wandered towards the back of the house and while he was around the back of the house he spotted two fuse boxes he pointed them out to george and he said they're going to cause a fire one day which george thought was really strange because literally just a few months ago the house had been all the electrics had been checked and given a clean bill of health when they had a new stove put in so yeah he didn't really think too much of it and also i mean a lot of weird sort of things were kind of happening to them which you know individually weren't too strange but when you put them together along with the actual tragedy that happened on christmas eve of 1945 it looks a little bit more suspicious but in the weeks leading up to christmas in 1945 one of george's older children noticed a person or a couple of people sitting in a car along the main highway us highway 21 and these people apparently would sit there like every day when the kids would get off the bus and would intently watch them get off the bus and go into their house now despite all of these strange but seemingly unrelated and at the time without context and concerning occurrences the soda family were enjoying a lovely christmas eve together nine out of the ten of the sodded children were home to celebrate christmas as a family orbit their eldest son joe who was stationed away in the army marion who was 17 and the eldest of george and jenny's daughters had just surprised her three younger sisters with toys that she brought home for them from her dime store job and everyone was just in really good spirits and the children were all excited about christmas and couldn't sleep in anticipation i mean i'm 23 and i still get so incredibly excited for christmas it's my favorite day of the year but when i was a kid like there was just something so magical about christmas and i totally get it because i could never ever sleep the night before but i also understand george and jenny in this situation because while i love christmas and i get very excited a girl needs her beauty sleep and i'm a little bit of a nana now so by 10 30 george and jenny were kind of dozing off which like honestly same but five of the younger children betty who was six jenny who was eight louis who was ten martha who was 12 and maurice who was 14 at the time wanted to stay up later and ask their parents if they could do so jenny in the spirit of christmas told them that they could stay up a little while longer if they did their chores of feeding the cow and checking the chicken coop outside as well as turning off the lights closing the curtains and locking the front door before they head to bed george and jenny and their other four children john who was 23 marion who was 17 george jr who was 16 and sylvia who was two all went upstairs and went to bed although it wasn't too long before the other children got tired did their chores and went to vet as well at 12 30 a.m on christmas morning jenny was woken up by the telephone ringing and she and george and her two-year-old daughter sylvia's bedroom where they were all sleeping was on the first floor of the house so she just got up went into the hall answered the phone and she was met on the other line by an unfamiliar female voice and she heard in the background of the call drinks clinking people laughing and the woman on the phone asked for an unfamiliar name so just before telling her she thought she had the wrong number and she hung up the woman gave what jenny described as a really strange but quick laugh and jenny hung up and then she went to bed on her way back to bed she noticed that the lights in the lounge room and kitchen were still on the curtains were still open and the front door was unlocked on the couch she saw marion her eldest daughter and assumed that the five other younger children had gone back up to the attic where the bedrooms were she turned off the lights closed the curtains locked the door headed back to bed and just as she was starting to doze off again she heard a loud bang on the roof of the house and then a rolling noise and she didn't think too much of it started dozing off again and then once again just as she was dozing off she woke up to a very strange smell in the house this was at around 1 30 am and she sat up because this smell was like smoke and as soon as she sat up she noticed there was smoke rolling in through the door and she immediately woke george she grabbed her youngest daughter sylvia and they started running out of the house while yelling for the other children to do the same a head count showed that only george jenny two-year-old sylvia and the three eldest children george jr john and marion were outside the house the five youngest children who had stayed up a little bit later were nowhere to be found now george was doing everything that he could to try and get his children out of the house he broke a downstairs window to try and get inside and get his children out but while doing so sliced his arm open and he also realized that there would just be no point trying to get in because the stairs heading up to the attic where the children's bedrooms were were already encased in flames he then ran around to the side of the house to grab the ladder that he always left in this one spot so that he could climb up to the window of the children's bedroom and get them out that way but his ladder for some mysterious reason was nowhere to be found he then decided to pull one of his large coal trucks up around the side of the house get on top of the coal truck and get them out that way however when he went to go and start the coal truck neither of his two coal trucks were working despite the fact that they were starting working perfectly literally the day before then as a last desperate effort to try and save his children he went to a nearby well and tried to scoop water out of it to put onto the house to help put out the flames but this unfortunately was frozen solid at this point there was nothing else he could think to do so he joined the rest of his family and started yelling and screaming for his other children to jump out of the window or something but they never ever heard a single scream or a single response from any of the five children now on the way out of the house when they first discovered the fire george tried to pick up the phone and call the fire department but for some reason the phones weren't working despite the fact that jenny literally got a phone call from that unknown woman just an hour before the fires and so their eldest daughter marion ran to one of their neighbors house to call the fire department from their phone but no operators were working at the time a neighbor who saw the fires drove into town and tracked down fire chief fj morris who was the only one working that night on the volunteer fire department and was also unable to drive the fire trucks fire chief fj morris started fayetteville's version of a fire alarm which is known as a phone tree where he would call one fire fighter that firefighter would call another firefighter and so on and so forth now despite the fact that the fire department was only three odd kilometers away from the sort of family house they were severely understaffed due to one the time of the year and two a lot of their volunteer firefighters were overseas serving in the war because of this no one from the fire department showed up until 8 00 a.m so nearly seven hours after the fire started despite knowing that children were trapped inside jenny george john george jr marion and sylvia were unable to do anything but stand outside and watch their house burn to the ground knowing that their children or siblings were stuck inside the house and this fire was insane like the house was collapsed and nothing but ashes within less than an hour after the fire started there was nothing but you know little bits of burning sediment at the bottom after literally just one hour that's how crazy this fire was local police followed the firemen to the house at 8 am that morning and the sodder family went to a neighbor's house next door while the police and firemen tried to investigate and recover what was left of the five children's bodies the local coroner was consulted and it was determined that the children undoubtedly perished in the fire and that the fire was caused due to faulty wiring despite the fact that the electricals in the house had been given a clean bill of health just months earlier now what was a little bit sketchy about this and maybe made it seem like the police didn't really care and just wanted to wrap this whole thing up is that members of the sodder family recall seeing the christmas lights on the outside of the house as well as a few lights on the inside of the house still on while they were outside watching the house burn and george and jenny were immediately suspicious of the ruling because an electrical fault to cause this kind of fire should have cut the power out immediately no bones no remains no traces of the five children were found and fire chief fj morris tried to suggest that maybe this was because the fire was hot enough to completely disintegrate any remains of the children including their bones four days after the fire george soda covered the area where the fire happened the basement of the house that was still there where the five feet of dirt and some flowers intended to memorialize the space death certificates for the five children were issued just after the new year despite there being no remains found and the death certificates ruled the causes of death as suffocation or fire over the next couple of months the sodders thought about all of the sketchy things that had been happening in the lead up to the fire like the salesman who threatened them and their children the random guy looking for work who mentioned the faulty fuse boxes the guy in the car who had been watching the children get out of the bus and go home every day as well as the strange incidents that occurred the night of the fire as well like the random phone call they got at 12 30 in the morning the sound on the roof the broken phone wires they couldn't call the police the missing ladder and also the faulty trucks that wouldn't start despite the fact that they were working literally the day before and also the fact that the lights inside and outside of the house were still working while the fire was burning all of it made the sodders question whether their children were actually still even in the house while it was burning now the soda family home was said to have been leveled within 30 to 45 minutes which is super fast i mean maybe because it was windy that night the whole process was sped up but the question is how in under an hour could a fire burn so intensely to completely disintegrate any human remains jenny went and spoke to a worker at a local crematorium who told her that even after two to three hours at 110 to 2000 degrees celsius or 750 to 1100 degrees fahrenheit bones still remained an average house fire is between 1 000 to 200 degrees celsius or 530 to 110 degrees fahrenheit and normally it's at the lower end of that so the fact that the soda family house burnt down within 30 to 45 minutes it literally doesn't make sense that bones any remains of the children would completely disintegrate into ash there were also still household appliances found in the basement of the house that yes were burned quite badly but was still identifiable but somehow you mean to tell me you could identify these but there were absolutely no human remains found and nobody smelt the distinct smell of burning flesh like it literally made no sense for there to be no human remains or bones at all and jenny started conducting her own experiments on chicken cow and pig bones and no matter what she did she was always left with charred but identifiable remains on top of this the sodas also suspected that the fire was not caused by faulty wiring not just because of the previously mentioned evidence like the lights still being on and their electricals having been given a clean bill of health just months before but also because of a witness that came forward not long after the fires a local bus driver came forward saying that he was driving past the house and saw what looked like fireballs being thrown at the roof of the sodder family home which i mean also lines up with the fact that jenny like heard this loud thud on the roof and a rolling sound like it's possible that what she was hearing was actually a fireball being thrown at her house especially because like just as she started dozing off to bed after that is when she noticed the flames in the house two-year-old sylvia also found an object lying in the remains of the house as she was playing in the yard after the fire which jenny described as a green rubber pineapple she turned it over to investigators who were able to conclude the object was an incendiary device which is basically an object used to start a fire another sketchy thing that pointed to the fact that this was arson was that a telephone repairman was checking out a hanging phone line which was connected to the solder house which he said had definitely been deliberately cut and in order for somebody to cut this they would have to climb a 4.3 meter pole reach over another 60 centimeters and cut this pole cut this wire so like a lot of effort to do so george also suspected that his two trucks had been tampered with as they were working just the day before the missing ladder was also found thrown in an embankment just 20 meters from the sodder family home now it turns out the ladder was stolen but this may have been unrelated the guys who stole the ladder were lonnie johnson and david adkins who owned a local beer store kind of near the sutter family house these guys were arrested because they had been stealing like a bunch of other stuff in the area as well at the same time and in lonnie's statement he said that they did cut the phone line as well mistaking it for power lines instead david atkins was never prosecuted for his crimes because he joined the army to avoid it lonnie however pled guilty and was charged a 25 fee for his crimes and he never admitted to throwing an incendiary device on the home and he was never really looked into any further in relation to the sort of family fire now after all of this and the fact that jenny and george had never heard their children cry out for help during the fire they not only suspected arson but they also suspected that their children were actually still alive and had never been in the house during the fire at all and then the witnesses started coming forward with potential signings of the children one woman had come forward saying that she had seen the fire and on that same night of the fire she had seen the children in a passing car with one of them sticking their head out of the window another witness who was working as a waitress at a rest stop 80 kilometers from the sutter family home claimed to have served the sort of children the morning after the fire now she claims to have served them breakfast and also claims that the vehicle they arrived in had a florida number plate another woman working in a hotel in charleston which is an hour away from the sodder family home said she saw the children's photos in the paper and recognized them immediately as she claims to have served them just a week after the fire she said the children were accompanied by two women and two men of italian descent and she didn't remember the exact date they came in but that the entire party of nine registered at the hotel at about midnight and stayed in a large room with several rooms like i think interconnecting rooms maybe or several beds she said that she was trying to talk to the children in a friendly manner but the men that they were with didn't like that and didn't allow her to talk to them and one of the men in particular gave her like a really hostile dirty look turned around to the other adults and started talking to them really rapidly in italian so she didn't know what they were saying but after that they like all turned around and just completely stopped speaking to her so she stopped trying to interact with the children and then the very next morning they all checked out after these witnesses came forward in particular that last witness george soder was convinced that his children had been kidnapped by the italian mafia and the fire was just used as a cover-up for the kidnapping several of george's children and grandchildren in the following years also believed this theory they believed that a local member of the mafia tried to recruit george and george declined so then in retaliation they came into their house on christmas eve kidnapped their five children set fire to the house as they drove away like throwing the incendiary devices and that their siblings or children were still alive and that they never contacted them out of fear of endangering the rest of their family in 1947 two years after the fire george sodder saw a school photo on all girls school photo from new york and he was convinced that one of the girls in this photo was his youngest daughter betty who would have been seven years old at the time the photo was taken so he drove all the way to manhattan to this girl's school to try and find her and he tried to get in contact with her but the parents and the school refused which i mean is understandable because if you saw some crazy or you know what you thought was a crazy guy accusing you of like kidnapping his daughter or whatever and it was actually your kid it's a little weird so i get it during this same year george and jenny were still looking for answers and decided to send their suspicions about this being a kidnapping to the fbi they got a letter back personally from j edgar hoover the director of the fbi saying that it was out of their jurisdiction but they would happily look into the case if local authorities allowed it and the sodder family was obviously thrilled that the fbi believed them and wanted to look into the case and could bring so many resources into the case that this small 1300 people town didn't have so they reached out to the fayetteville police and a fire department however they did not allow the fbi to investigate and this just kind of made jenny and george believe that this might have been some sort of cover-up i mean honestly it is pretty sketchy like for what reason would you not want the resources of the fbi to look into this case even if you like don't think there's anything suspicious about it like it's really no skin off your back to allow the fbi to just come and investigate you know what i mean so the soda family decided to hire a private investigator named cece tinsley now tinsley actually discovered that the salesmen who came to the house threatened the sodder family threatened their children was actually on the jury who decided that the fire was actually due to a faulty wiring which is so sketchy if you ask me and he also discovered something that was even more alarming so apparently the state fire marshal who was there the day that the house burned down and the police and fire department were investigating reported that all people on the scene reported having seen human remains so the question is why would fire chief fj morris tell the family that there were no remains and on top of that why was the excavation and investigation of the fire so short it was carried out by volunteers and only lasted two hours when an excavation of a normal house takes between days to a few weeks to complete thoroughly now to make things even more sketchy a priest came forward to tinsley and confessed to him that fj morris the fire department chief had come to him to confess that he actually had found a human heart and that he put it in a metal box and buried it at the scene law enforcement managed to dig up this box on the scene and when they opened it they discovered there was no human heart inside there was a beef liver and this liver had never been touched by fire had never it wasn't even slightly charred morris actually ended up confessing to tinsley after some questioning that he actually set this whole hoax up in the hopes that the family would see this hard think it was actually a heart and see this as proof that their children have died in the fire which like honestly this is so sus to me because why would he want parents to stop looking into their missing children and trying to get closure about their missing children why would he not want the fbi to get involved when it literally is no skin off their back like it's honestly so sus to me in 1949 almost four years after the fire george and jenny sotter hired dr oscar hunt who was a pathologist from washington and they wanted to get a second more thorough excavation of the house done during the excavation they found four small bones tucked into the corner of where the basement used to be dr hunt sent the bones to the smithsonian institute for identification and it was found that the bones were a single set of four lumbar vertebrae with fused transverse recesses meaning the body would have had to belong to somebody between 17 and 22 years old however the oldest missing soda child was maurice who was only 14 years old at the time of the fire so the smithsonian institute said it was literally impossible that it could have been him it had to be someone who was between 17 and 22 years of age it couldn't have been somebody who was only 14. the bones also had no signs of charring or burning they had never been exposed to fire they were also the only bones found during this excavation and if they were to find some bones of the children they would expect to have found five different sets of bones not just one it was concluded that the bones likely came from the dirt that george had covered the area in or less likely that somebody had planted these there after the fact either to hide a dead body that was totally unrelated to the case or to try and throw off the sodder family for the investigation maybe try to convince them once again that their children had died in the fire and to stop investigating over the next few years the sodder family was plagued with many different sightings of their children and george would drive all over the country to follow up any of these leads a witness in st louis claimed that martha was living in a comment a bartender in texas claims to have overheard two people bragging about the fire and kidnapping george saw a photo of jenny's distant relative in florida and their children and he thought the children looked like his children so he traveled all the way to florida demanding proof that they weren't his children but eventually was convinced that they were not in fact his children a woman from houston wrote to george claiming that she knew a man who when he was drunk one night confessed to her that he was louis soder one of the five sodded children that vanished and that he was nine years old at the time of the fire he also claimed that he was living with his brother maurice who also was apparently in the fire george and his son-in-law grover paxton drove to houston to investigate but when they arrived the woman who wrote the letter seemed to have vanished like they couldn't find her at all they ended up getting in contact with local police who immediately recognized the man that the woman had described in her letter as louis sodder they helped george and grover locate this man and when they spoke to him he claimed he wasn't louis sotter and that this conversation never actually happened in 1952 a billboard was put up on the side of route 60 with photos of the children and an offer of 10 000 for any information that could lead to any of the children however it never brought in any substantial leads in 1967 jenny soto received a letter from central city in kentucky inside the letter was a photo of a man who was around 30 years old and looked very similar to louis sotter like george and jenny were convinced it was him and the back of the photo read louis soder i love brother frankie illy boys or ill little boys a90132 or 35. the sod has hired a private investigator to go to the place this card was postmarked from and try and gather some more information however this so-called private investigator disappeared and their money was never seen again honestly grants my gears so much like whenever i look into one of these cases and somebody has taken advantage of a grieving family there are some cool people in this world truly some people believe that the numbers on the back of the picture were a postcode from palermo in italy but this has obviously never been proven it's also a possibility that because of the billboard of the sodder children with you know contact information that this was just some sort of prank on the family the soda family were so convinced that this photo was of their son though that they ended up adding it to the billboard and also adding it to the top of their fireplace at their home in 1969 george soda died without any closure as to what happened to his five children in 1968 the year before his death he told a reporter time is running out for us but we only want to know if they died on the fire we want to be convinced otherwise we want to know what happened to them honestly just like it breaks my heart jenny sotas spent the rest of her days dressed in all black and tending to the flowers in the memorial site for her children she passed away in 1989 and the next year the billboard on route 60 was finally taken down after 37 years the only remaining sodder child now is sylvia who was two years old at the time of the fire and is now 77 years old she doesn't believe that her siblings were killed in the fire she remembers her very first memories which were of that fire she remembers her father's arm bleeding and the screams of her family and she sometimes still interacts with online sleuths in the hope of finding answers that is all of the information that i have on this case if you guys have any theories you believe i would love to hear them in the comments down below i hope you guys have a wonderful day thanks for watching and hopefully i will see you in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 843,279

Rating: 4.9465504 out of 5

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Id: l9Vq17JmnBs

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020