This Is the Most Mysterious Disappearance in History

this video is brought to you by manscapes.com the global brand for men's grooming and hygiene products hey 42 here don't you just love christmas it's my favorite time of the year the tinsel the carols the eggnog the delicious reindeer stew but for one family in west virginia christmas eve was anything but merry instead of a heartwarming time around the fire they were met with a blaze of very different proportions a catastrophe that tore their lives apart and ignited an enduring mystery that remains unsolved to this day it was the 24th of december 1945 and the soda family of fayetteville west virginia was home enjoying the evening before christmas george soder was a successful businessman who along with his wife jenny presided over a respected middle-class family of 10 children yes 10 children nine of those children were at home this fateful night with only 21 year old joseph being absent while serving in the army as christmas eve drew to a close three of the kids 12 year old martha 80 year old jenny and five-year-old betty were playing with the gifts given to them by their sister marion who at 17 was the eldest daughter after a long day's work together george and his two older boys 23 year old john and 16 year old george jr had already gone to bed at 10 p.m the young girls begged to stay up later than usual to play with their new toys which their mum jenny agreed to provided that two boys 14 year old maurice and nine-year-old louis did the final farm duties before turning in then jenny said good night to the kids and took sylvia her youngest to bed it was by any one standard an idyllic family scene [Music] at around 12 30 that night the phone rang jenny went downstairs to answer the call and was greeted by the sound of laughter and glasses clinking in the background a woman's voice that jenny didn't recognize asked for a name she'd never heard of jenny said she had the wrong number and the woman gave what jenny later called a weird laugh before hanging up the phone on her way back up to bed jenny noticed that the lights in the house were still on the door was unlocked and the curtains were still open and that was strange if the children ever stayed up late they always took care of these details before going up to the attic where they all slept but 17 year old marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch and jenny assumed the other kids had gone off to bed forgetting these minor chores and the excitement of christmas so she turned off the lights locked the door closed the curtains and went back up to bed as you'll all know by now i'm a huge fan of manscaped they offer the best tools and solutions for the big free odor zones your body butt and balls and their new lawnmower 4.0 waterproof electric trimmer is no exception what's more you can now get the ultimate manscaped experience when you purchase their new performance package 4.0 bundle firstly you can start your grooming in the shower with the new lawnmower 4.0 it's a waterproof cordless trimmer and it makes it so easy to tackle your groin grooming with confidence without any messes it also comes with a cool new wireless charging system and a new travel lock feature it's the future of the trimming game trust me and after your shower you can treat yourself by applying the manscaped crop preserver ball deodorant it's a quick absorbing clear drying moisturizer lotion for all day protection and for a little midday refresher you can always pack your crop reviver ball toner spray this spray is a real revitalizer with its cooling aloe vera and anti-inflammatory properties trust me your balls will thank you but manscaped is so much more than a ball trimmer company in fact their new performance package 4.0 bundle now includes their new weed whacker nose and ear hair trimmer this thing is an absolute game changer for tackling those pesky nose hairs without any pain for a limited time you can get not one but two free gifts the shed travel bag and the manscaped anti-chafing boxer briefs all you need to do is head to manscape.com forward slash 42 today to get 20 off free international shipping plus these two free gifts your balls and your body will thank you just half an hour later jenny was woken again this time by something hitting the roof she later described it as sounding like a heavy rubber ball which then rolled off the roof and hit the ground with a foot she listened for another noise but when the night remained still she drifted back off to sleep another half hour later jenny woke up again this time to the smell of smoke after scrambling out of bed she discovered that the room george used for an office was on fire panicked she woke george who then woke the two eldest sons john and george jr jenny woke marion and told her to get baby sylvia out of the house everyone yelled for the children upstairs in the attic but there was no answer initially after the fire john said he'd gone into the children's room and shaken them awake but later he changed this story to say he'd only called up to them a pretty critical piece of evidence as we'll see later george jenny and the other four children escaped the house but the remaining five children were nowhere to be seen by now the entire downstairs was in flames as was the staircase that led up to where the five children slept george and his sons tried to re-enter the house through an asic window which george smashed slicing his arm open in the process the plan was to climb in through the window using the ladder that was always kept at the side of the house except that ladder was nowhere to be seen george had the idea to drive his trucks up to the house and used them to climb up into the attic window but despite working perfectly the day before neither truck would start in desperation george tried to use water from an outside barrel to extinguish to flames but being the middle of west virginia in winter the water was frozen solid george jenny and their four children could do nothing more than stand by and watch watches their house burnt to the ground within 45 minutes it was over the house had collapsed taking with it the sodders believed their youngest five children thanks to the second world war which had ended only months before the fayetteville fire department was understaffed and relied on a telephone chain with each firefighter taking turns to call others to spread the word to make masses worse the fire chief cj morris didn't know how to drive the fire truck and needed to wait for someone more qualified to arrive the result of this comedy of catastrophes was that firefighters only arrived at the scene between seven and nine am on christmas day at least six hours after the fire had started by then there was nothing to be done what had once been the sodder home was now little more than a pile of smoldering ash and ruins ash and ruins but weirdly enough no bones at least none that the firefighters could find not that that necessarily meant the children had survived how could they have their house had burnt down and they were nowhere to be seen by 10 am chief morris told the devastated parents that their five children had died in the fire their bones having turned to ash in the blaze a few days later a coroner's inquest was convened and the jury determined that the cause of the fire was an electrical fault by the 30th of december death certificates for the five children were issued and on the 2nd of january a funeral was held though george and jenny sodder were too grief-stricken to attend the events of that terrible christmas were devastating and had happened terrifyingly quickly but as george and jenny sodder began rebuilding their lives they started piecing together what had happened and in the sober light of day it no longer seemed so obvious that their five children had perished in the blaze there were simply too many details on the case that didn't make sense to start with the ladder that was mysteriously missing from the side of the house on the night of the disaster the same ladder that was never moved and would potentially have allowed george to climb into the attic to save his children was found down an embankment more than 20 meters from where it was usually kept on the night of the fire marion had run to a neighbor's house to call the fire department but the phone line was down a passing motorist had seen the flames and had tried to call the fire department from a nearby tavern but he couldn't get through either in the end another neighbor had to drive into town and track down the fire chief in person it later transpired that none of the local phones were working not because of the fire but because someone had cut the local phone lines george was also convinced his trucks had been tampered with he was diligent about looking after his business equipment and it simply didn't make sense that both trucks would suddenly fail to start when they'd been working perfectly the day before around the time of the fire neighbors had seen a man sneaking away from the scene with a block and tackle the kind that's commonly used to remove motor engines it turns out he was simply stealing it but when the police caught up with him he also admitted to having severed the phone lines though he claims he thought they were power lines frustratingly it seems no one thought to ask him why he wanted to cut the power to the house even more frustratingly no official record survives identifying the mystery block and tackle thief so nobody has ever been able to track him down to find out just what the hell he was up to that night these strange occurrences on their own proved nothing but taking them all together they began to sow seeds of doubt in the soda family's minds and there was more according to fire chief morris and the coroner's inquiry the fire had been caused by an electrical failure but when the family had been trying to escape the house all the lights were working even on the christmas tree how could there have been an electrical failure if the electricity was working just fine long after the fire had started jenny soda disputed another aspect of the fire chief morris's report that the remains of the five dead children had been burnt up in the blaze in another incident around the same time a family of seven were burnt to death in a similar fire and remains of all of those dead had been found an employee at a local crematorium told jenny that human bones still remain after bodies are burnt at 1 000 degrees celsius for two hours much hotter and much longer than the soda fire had been obsessed jenny began a process of burning small piles of different animal bones trying to destroy them completely she never succeeded the more the family investigated the fire the more convinced they became that's their five children had not been taken by it the question was where were they the sodders suspicions that an electrical fault had not caused a fire seemed to be confirmed when a bus driver claims he'd seen people throwing what he described as balls of fire at the house which made it sound like a dungeons and dragons level 5 mage had been behind the incident that is until the seasons changed and melting snow revealed a small round object in the bushes near the house george recognizes it once it was a pineapple bomb a type of hand grenade used in the war could it have been responsible for the loud thump jenny heard on the roof the night of the fire and even the fire itself of course all of this weirdness leads us to the inevitable question why would anyone want to sabotage the sudden house everything we've learned so far the strange phone call the cut power lines the possibly sabotaged trucks and the presence of a hand grenade in a family garden it's all a bit odd but if these really are clues pointing to a secret scheme to whisk away five of the soda children someone was apparently prepared to go to extreme lengths to do so not only did they have to create the mother of all diversions they also appear to have thought of every last detail from hiding the ladder to sabotaging the trucks just in case george sodder happened to think of using their vehicles to reach the kids the most common place people have gone seeking possible motives for such an elaborate crime is in george sodder's somewhat shady past george soder was originally giorgio soduc an immigrant who moved to the united states from sardinia in by 1945 he built himself a successful truck hauling business in fayetteville and had become a well-known member of the local italian-american community but george was an outspoken man who publicly criticized italy's fascist dictator benito mussolini mussolini was a polarizing figure amongst italians at the time eliciting love and hatred in equal measure ilducci as he was known was executed by communist partisans in april 1945 but by christmas of that year the dramatic event still felt very fresh for many italians so george sodder's views made him unpopular amongst mussolini loyalists something that was made very clear to him [Music] just weeks before the fire a salesman arrived at the soda residence and tried to sell george life insurance when george turned him down the man claims the sodder house would go up in smoke and the children would be destroyed as punishment for the things george had said about mussolini later it emerged that the same salesman had been a juror in the coroner's inquiry that had concluded the fire had been caused by faulty wiring this was especially suspicious as a few months before the fire a man had shown up at the house looking for work when george said he didn't have any the man had pointed up to the fuse box outside the house out of nowhere and told george it was going to cause a fire one day despite the fact it was in good repair and had been checked by the local power company only weeks before the older sodder boys also recalled having seen a suspicious car parked on the side of the highway near their house for a number of days before christmas the driver had apparently been watching the younger sodder kids closely as they came home from school by now george and jenny were convinced their children were still alive a conclusion that was strengthened as eyewitness reports began to flood in one woman claimed to have seen the children in a passing car whilst the fire was in progress another woman who managed a tourist shop about 50 miles west of fayetteville said she'd seen the children the morning after the fire and had even served them breakfast yet another woman from a hotel in the nearby town of charleston claimed to have seen four of the five children about a week after the fire accompanied by four people of italian descent when she tried to speak to the children one of the men became hostile and said something to them in italian at which point the children stopped communicating and moved on sightings like these spurred the sodders on they approached the fbi requesting assistance and even though fbi director j edgar hoover himself replied personally to say he didn't think he could help he did make his agents available at the discretion of local law enforcement the fayetteville police and fire departments however refused fbi involvement george and jenny soder also hired a private investigator to hunt down leads though none of these amounted to anything much the investigator did uncover a bizarre story involving fire chief morris morris had apparently told the local minister that despite claiming to have not found any remains after the fire he had in fact found a human heart which he buried in a box near the site when the sodders approached the fire chief he agreed to dig it up and inside they found what later turned out to be fresh beef liver eventually morris admitted he'd fabricated the whole thing to try to get the sodders to stop making inquiries further fuelling suspicions of a local cover-up over the following years tips and leads came in from all over the united states and george sodder travelled the country in desperate hope of finding some clue that proved his children were still alive without success in august 1949 almost four years after the fire george and jenny had an idea they hoped would confirm once and for all that their children had not died on that fateful night four days after the tragedy george had used a bulldozer to cover the ruins of the house in several feet of dirt now desperate for the truth he hired a pathologist from washington dc to oversee the excavation of the site and look for skeletal remains in yet another strange twist the pathologists found shards of vertebrae which were sent to the smithsonian institute for analysis scientists confirmed that the bones belonged to a boy but most likely one that was too old to have been any of the sodder children the smithsonian also confirmed the bones had never been exposed to fire suggesting the vertebrae must have already been in the earth george had moved with the bulldozer or perhaps if you're feeling cynical that someone had planted them there in the hope of convincing the sodders that they'd found their children's remains no matter how many setbacks the sodders faced in the pursuit of the truth they kept on fighting to find their children they erected a large billboard on route 16 a road that ran by the site of the fire it showed the faces of their five missing children and offered a ten thousand dollar reward for information that might lead to their discovery over the course of some 40 years design became a kind of local landmark more than 20 years after the event jenny received an envelope in the post with a photograph of a young man in his thirties the envelope was postmarked kentucky but had no other identifying features on the back of the photograph was a handwritten note that included the name louis sodder and the cryptic message that made no sense to the sodder family george and jenny were convinced the man in the image was their son louie but didn't publicize the fact for fear of getting him into trouble george sodder died the following year in 1968 and jenny retreated from the world and remained in mourning wearing black from the day after the fire until the day she died in 1989 the remaining sodder children kept the memory of the case active never giving up on the idea that their brothers and sisters might still be alive somewhere all of the children that is except for john the one who'd originally claimed he'd shaken his siblings awake but later changed his story john never spoke about that night again saying only that the event was behind them and that everyone should accept that fact and move on sylvia soder the youngest and last surviving member of the family died earlier this year without a final answer as to what really happened to her lost siblings more recent expert opinions suggests it may have been possible for the children's remains to have been burnt up completely in the fire but alternative theories still abound the most popular assume that the children were taken as punishment for george sodder's attacks on mussolini or revolve around george's background somehow george never spoke about his early life in italy or why he'd come to the united states sparking rumors that the mafia had been responsible for kidnapping his children this idea was especially popular at the time the supposed photograph of louis soda came to light part of the indecipherable message on the back of the photo was the number 90132 which used to be a zip code in palmero sicily strengthening the mafia connection as far as mysteries go this has to be one of the saddest around either five young children died in that fire or they didn't either way something truly tragic took place that night for the people left behind the soda family the events of christmas 1945 tore their lives apart staunchly believing their children had survived the fire they never found the closure that might have let them eventually move on instead they searched unrelentingly for a truth that may or may not have existed for the decades that remained of their lives in many ways the easiest version of events to believe is the one put forward at the time that the children perished in the flames much of the evidence to the contrary missing gladders strange phone calls in the night and sporadic eyewitness accounts is firmly circumstantial none of it proves anything at all and may only have served to give false hope to a family staring down the barrel of unimaginable tragedy and yet this is a story where so many little things just seem off where coincidences stack on top of inconsistencies to the point that there's just enough reason to believe the sodder children might already have been gone when the house caught fire whether they were taken to be sold to wealthy americans in an illegal adoption scheme that wasn't unheard of at the time though it did tend to happen to younger children or whether they were spirited away as punishment for george sodder's political views or some unknown event in the past it's impossible to say and sadly that sentiment sums this whole case up we'll probably never know what really happened that terrible christmas eve in 1945 perhaps we should in the words of mafia legend mickey blue eyes forget about it thanks for watching check out my new podcast random interesting facts available on youtube spotify apple podcast and anywhere else you get your podcasts link in the description below thanks

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 2,167,492

Keywords:

Id: 8kNLgSDgxS4

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021