Christmas Eve. 1945. West Virginia. 10pm. The Sodder family was getting ready for bed.
Or rather, they were supposed to be. Marion, the oldest Sodder girl at 19, had landed her
first job just a few months back. After saving up for several weeks, she’d bought presents
for three of her little sisters Martha, Jennie and Betty. The kids had been so excited
that getting them into bed had been a lost cause. In the end, their mom, also called Jennie,
decided to just let them stay up past their bedtime. Exhausted in the way that only a
parent can be the night before Christmas, she milled around the house doing the last
spots of housework before bed. They had nine of their ten children home for Christmas. They
had to choose their battles. Her husband George, shattered from a hard day’s work,
had already taken himself off to bed. But 10pm was Jennie’s cutoff point. Finally collapsing onto her bed in the room
with 2 year old Sylvia, Jennie couldn’t help but smile at the muffled sound of their children
laughing and playing from the lounge. They’d head up to their attic bedroom soon enough, but
for now she just wanted to drift off to sleep. Little did she know that her perfect night was
just hours away from descending into a nightmare that would last the rest of her life, a tragedy
so profound that it would be immortalized in the obituary of 2 year old Sylvia asleep in the
crib. Decades later in 2021, the obituary read: “An unsurpassed wife and a mother, Sylvia had an
infectious laugh and a delightful sense of humor. She had been preceded in death by her husband,
granddaughter, three brothers, and a sister. Five other siblings were unable to be
located following a fire that occurred in December 1945 in their Fayetteville home:
Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty.” *
Jennie woke up with a start. Smoke. It was curling through the gaps around her
bedroom door, a kind of darkness that was somehow much blacker than the shadows in the room.
Parental instinct kicked in almost straight away, she rolled out of bed and was at the crib in an
instant, snatching up little Sylvia and running for the door. The clock ticked calmly away in
the corner of the room, blissfully unaware that for the Sodder family, time had forever frozen in
their minds at this exact moment. Half past one. Jennie sprinted towards the source of the smoke, peering around the room into George’s
office and seeing the telephone line and fuse boxes both engulfed in flames.
She turned and ran to fetch her husband, barging into George’s room and shaking him awake.
The shout went up all throughout the house. “Fire! Fire” Stumbling out into the freezing night air,
George and Jennie looked around to see far too few of their children. Sylvia in Jennie’s
arms, Marion who’d bought the presents, John and George Jr, their oldest sons. Where
were the little ones? Where were the kids? In unison, the parents looked up helplessly
at the attic, the room where all five of the others had slept. There was nothing for
it. George sprinted back into the house, throwing a hand across his mouth to
shield it from the smoke. He was met almost instantly with a wall of searing
flame where the staircase used to be. His stomach lurched. They were trapped up there. Running back outside, he rounded
up his two boys to help him. They were to get the ladder and scale
the side of the house. But where was it? They always left it in the
exact same spot, but it was gone. Okay, in that case, they’d fight the fire
themselves. George ran to the water butt that collected rainwater. It was frozen solid.
Cursing and desperate, he started to scale the side of the house himself, smashing a window
in the process and slicing his arm badly on the glass. The smoke and the loss of blood were
making him dizzy, but he couldn’t stop trying. Meanwhile on the ground, Marion was trying to
contact the fire department. She ran inside to use the nearest phone, but the line was dead.
No help at all. Running across to the neighbor’s house, she pounded down the door and rushed in,
snatching their phone off the receiver. Nothing. In the black winter night, the burning house
cast terrifying shadows in all directions. George was back on the ground, running
around barefoot on the ice with a new idea in his mind. He had a couple of
trucks that he used for work parked up on the street. He’d reverse one of
them back up to the front of the house, climb on the roof, and reach the attic from
there. Except neither truck would start. He’d been using them just fine only a few
hours before. They had plenty of fuel, and were in good condition.
Yet neither truck would start. A crunching crashing sound filled
the air. The night sky burned a brighter orange as sparks erupted.
Half of the house had collapsed. With nothing left to do but stand and
stare. George climbed out of the truck and stumbled over to his wife in a daze. The
six Sodders just stood there and watched for 45 minutes as their house burned
down with 5 of their own inside. The fire department didn’t arrive until
8am, a full 7 and a half hours after Jennie smelled the smoke. A passing motorist
had to go all the way into the center of town to find a working telephone. The fire
department then had to daisy chain calls, contacting each other one at a time, before
finally mobilizing and arriving at the scene. By the time they did, there was little for
them to do other than poke around through the ashes of where the house had used to be,
as the Sodder parents watched on helplessly. But after 2 hours of searching,
Fire Chief Morris approached the family with a confused look on his face.
Nowhere in the ashes could he or his crew find any trace of the missing children.
They couldn’t have been in the attic. Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and
Betty were missing. And all of a sudden, the gears in Jennie Sodder’s head
began to turn as she remembered all of the mysterious things that had been
happening to the family all week. After all, waking up to the smell of smoke hadn’t been the
first thing that had woken her up that night… * For almost 40 years, if you were to drive
through Fayetteville, West Virginia, you couldn’t miss the striking billboard
on prominent display right next to Route 16. Thousands upon thousands of motorists would
have seen it over the years. On it were the faces of the five children who had gone missing
that Christmas Eve night. The photos were black and white, the children all looking
anything from forlorn, to bored, to angry. “$5,000 reward for anyone
who has new information.” The $5,000 was soon replaced with $10,000. Included were the contact details for George
and Jennie Sodder, who over the years, received all number of tip offs and scraps of
information about their children’s whereabouts. Both of them were first-generation Italian
immigrants. Fayettesville may seem like a random part of America for them both to land in,
but in the first half of the twentieth century, it was home to a thriving, if a
little small, Italian community. George Sodder had originally been Giorgo Soddu
but opted for a more Americanized name when he arrived in Ellis Island in 1908 at just 13 years
old. He picked up a bit of work on the railroad in Pennsylvania, making a name for himself as
a hard-working laborer before finding work in West Virginia. Before long he had started up
his own trucking company and had established a real name for himself in the area. That
was until you asked him about his past, and why he’d come to America
in the first place. To that, George would freeze over and wait for
you to move the conversation on quickly. He met his wife Jennie Cipriani at a music store
that her father had owned. Jennie had been in the US since she was just 3. To her, America
was the only home she’d ever really known. The pair of them married and moved
to Fayetteville. In 1923 they had their first child and didn’t stop
until their tenth 20 years later: little Sylvia. Fayetteville was a small town
- it still is really - and so this family of 12 held quite a prominent position in the
community, particularly the Italian community, which was more segregated at the time than
today thanks to the racial and political tensions swirling around WWII. George did not hold
back from sharing his views. Politics, economics, right and wrong, he was not afraid of being
outspoken and making it known what he believed in. If ever you were to pick out an example of the
American dream, the Sodder family would be it. Until that dream became a nightmare. In the days
that followed the fire, George and Jennie sat together and tried their best to piece together
what had happened and what on earth could have caused it. And the more they talked - the more
they remembered - the more their blood ran cold. Let’s start at the basics, where
had the fire started? Well, from Jennie’s memory of the night, it
had seemed to be coming from the spot in George’s office where the telephone line
entered the house, right by the fuse box. Almost immediately, George interrupted
her. That fuse box was new, they’d had it installed when they had got the new
electric oven just a few weeks ago. It was a local electrician who’d done it,
someone whom George had known for years. Jennie tried to proceed with her story, but
George interrupted her again. He wasn’t finished. Because a couple of weeks after
that, there’d been another workman at the house. Even though the guy was
working on something totally different, he’d insisted that George take him round
the back of the house and show him the new fuse book. The workman took one look
at the fuse box and blew out his cheeks. “That thing’s gonna cause a fire someday.” Who was that workman? Was he someone
George had worked with before? George shook his head. Why did he want to look
at the fuse box? George shrugged. An uneasy air settled over the couple
as they sat in silence for a moment. Then Jennie sat up straighter suddenly. Hang on,
what about the insurance man? It took George a second to remember what she was talking about,
but his eyes widened as soon as he remembered. Around a similar time, a door-to-door
salesman had come to the house, an Italian guy, trying to push some
new insurance package on them. George had been the one to speak to him and
refused. All of a sudden, things got heated. The insurance man started shouting
at him, berating and even threatening him. “What was it that he said again?” Jennie
asked, already knowing the answer. “Your house is going to go up in smoke...
and your children are going to be destroyed." Again the pair sat in silence.
Then George finished the sentence. “You are going to be paid for all of the dirty
remarks you have been making about Mussolini." The man hadn’t been wrong. The Second World War
had broken out and Mussolini’s fascist politics had been dividing the Italian population. A
staunch believer in the American dream and US values, George had been one of the most outspoken
members of their community against the dictator. This had ruffled a few feathers sure, but
these things all had to be coincidences, right? But then what about the incident that had
happened just a few days ago as the children were coming home from school? One of the older
boys had told his parents that there’d been a car parked up by the side of the road
with a man watching the kids intently. The official report of events did little
to comfort them. The fire was attributed to faulty wiring, and the missing children were
ruled dead. Death certificates were issued. A funeral was scheduled. But Jennie
and George were not buying any of it. Unable to handle all of the questions
swirling around in their heads, George and Jennie were desperate for action.
They’d been told by the police that they weren’t allowed to return to the burnt-down
wreckage yet, but they did so anyway. Amongst the ashes, they found melted kitchen
appliances, still recognizable for what they originally were. If those had survived the flames,
how was it possible that there wasn’t a trace of any of the children? Frustrated by the lack
of answers from the fire department and not trusting them after their delayed response, Jennie
started to conduct her own experiments. She would buy cuts of animals from the butchers, bones
still in, and throw them into roaring fires. Try as she might, no matter how aggressive the
flames were and how long the bones were in for, they wouldn’t burn down. She learned that
burning at 2,000 degrees, it would take a human skeleton two hours to be reduced to ash.
Her home had burned down in just 45 minutes. They called in a telephone repairman to check
the phone lines to the house. Why hadn’t they been able to make a call to the fire department
that night? The repairman took one look at the wiring and told them it was quite simple. The
phone line hadn’t burned, it had been cut. As they were poking through the ashes, a neighbor
approached. He’d seen a man on the street near George’s trucks with a block and tackle taken
from a vehicle’s engine. Could that man also have cut the phone wire? Also, where was that
ladder? It had been outside in its usual spot last they remembered. After searching the area for
a bit, George finally found it at the bottom of an embankment, 75 feet from the house. Neither he nor
any of the members of his family had put it there. And lastly to the matter of the cause of the
fire. The report had said that it was down to faulty wiring. The electrical cables
in the house, the ones in the fuse box, had sparked and set off a blaze.
That explanation would make sense, it would match with Jennie’s memory of the
incident except for one crucial detail. The Christmas lights had still been on. If the
fuse box had blown, the power to the whole house would have cut out. So why was the Christmas
tree still lit up as the house was burning down? There was much more to the story
from that night. As we said earlier, the moment Jennie woke up smelling smoke wasn’t
the first time she’d woken up that night. * Christmas Eve. 1945. West Virginia.
12:30am. One hour before the fire. Jennie Sodder wakes with a start. A shrill
ring is coming from the hallway outside her room. She rolls over blearily staring at
the clock in the corner of the room. Who on earth would be calling at this time
of night on Christmas Eve? She quickly tied her gown around her waist
and shuffled out into the hall, closing the door quickly behind her
so as not to wake little Sylvia. “Hello?” It’s noisy on the other end. The line’s not
great, and it’s difficult to make out what’s happening through all the noise. A female voice
speaks to her vaguely as shouts of laughter boom in the background. She thinks she can hear
the sound of clinking glasses. The woman asks to speak to a name Jennie doesn’t recognize. She
replies curtly that the woman must have the wrong number. The woman laughs. It’s a shrill strange
laugh that Jennie gets under Jennie’s skin, like the woman is mocking her somehow. Jennie
hung up the phone shaking her head and tutting. She was just about to return to bed when she
spotted something strange out of the corner of her eye. The light was on downstairs. The
whole bottom of the house was lit up brightly. She glanced into the kitchen and lounge. Lights
on, curtains wide open. That was odd. Usually, the kids were very diligent with closing
the curtains and turning off the lights when they went up to bed. It wasn’t like
them to leave the house lit up like that. In the lounge, was Marion crashed out asleep
on the couch. The others must have all taken themselves up to bed and left her there. Quietly
as she could so as not to disturb her daughter, Jennie closed the curtains
and switched off the lights. But just before she went back to bed,
she checked one more thing. Sure enough, the front door was unlocked. Jennie
twisted the key slowly in the lock, peering out into the dark snowy night. Nothing. She snuck back into her room with Sylvia,
took her robe off, and slid back into bed, closing her eyes and letting
sleep overtake her again. *
1:00am. 30 minutes before the fire. A banging noise wakes Jennie again. Her eyes snap
open and she listens to the sounds from the roof of the house. It sounded like something
hard and heavy falling onto the roof. She listens as whatever it is rolls along the roof
steadily from one side of the room to the other. Silence. She keeps her eyes open for a couple of minutes,
listening intently. Nothing. Must have been an animal or something. She closes her eyes and
falls back to sleep, blissfully unaware that the next time her eyes open, it will be too late for
her to save her home from burning to the ground. * What had that object been that
had rolled along the roof of the house in the night? Maybe it would still be here. And sure enough, while Sylvia was playing
around in the backyard, she found a large heavy rubber object that looked totally alien to
her. She didn’t recognize it as any part of her house. George took it in his hands, turning
it over and examining the object closely. “It’s a pineapple bomb. Napalm.” Despite the family’s best efforts, the local
police and fire departments wanted little to do with them. No one was particularly
interested in reopening the case, despite their pleas. Out of desperation,
they wrote to the President himself, begging that the FBI get involved as there seemed
to be a conspiracy against their family. J. Edgar Hoover penned a reply stating: “Although I would
like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within
the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau.” The FBI would have been able to step in to assist the local police department if they
wanted to, but the police refused. Increasingly paranoid and
mistrusting the authorities, the couple hired a private investigator
to look into the officials involved in the case. C. C. Tinsley took on the job,
and it wasn’t long before he came back to George Sodder with a familiar face. One of
the men who had been on the panel that had concluded that the fire was caused by faulty
wiring was a man they recognized right away. He was the salesman who’d visited the house
and told George it would burn down for what he’d said about Mussolini. Stranger than that was
F. J. Morris, the Fire Chief who had responded to the scene. Morris had spoken in private to others
about a discovery he’d made at the scene. A heart. Rather than tell the family about the
discovery, Morris had hidden it quickly, placing it in a dynamite box and burying it
at the scene. After some persuasion, Tinsley convinced Morris to return to the scene and dig
up the box. He did so much, to their surprise. The heart was taken from the box and given
to a local expert who deemed that it was, in fact, not a heart at all but a piece of beef
liver. What had that been doing at the scene of the crime? Well, Tinsley later heard rumors that
Morris had planted the evidence there in the hopes that the Sodders would accept it as proof of
their children’s deaths and drop the case. 4 years later, the Sodders, still without
any answers, launched a new search into the site. They excavated much of the land
that George Sodder had buried under 5 feet of dirt to act as a memorial. This
time they did find something. Vertebrae. Four shards of a human spine. The Sodders sent
the shards to the Smithsonian Institute right away for examination, but the report raised as many
questions as it answered. You can tell someone’s age fairly accurately from their vertebrae. At
23, they fuse together partially. They had not. Judging from their size and the gaps between them,
they would have belonged to a 16-17 year old. The oldest Sodder child to have disappeared in the
fire was 14-year-old Maurice. He wasn’t so big for his age that these could be his. What’s more,
there were no signs of fire damage anywhere on the shards, and they were all too well preserved
to have been the final remains of a destroyed body. More likely, they had been separated
from the rest of a corpse. In all likelihood, these bone shards were present in the dirt
that George Sodder had piled onto the site. A breakthrough came when a man was arrested.
The one who had been seen with the block and tackle on the road was identified and detained.
He confessed to stealing the block and tackle, and when pressed on whether he had
cut the phone line to their house, he freely admitted he had done that too. He
claimed that he had actually been trying to cut the power line but had got the wrong one. Why
he was trying to cut the power to their house is sadly unclear now. The man was released, and no
record of the details of his arrest can be found. The woman who called on the night of the fire was
also found. She was brought in for questioning, and her story checked out. She
had been celebrating with friends and genuinely called the wrong number.
There was nothing more to it than that. A bus driver soon came forward and seemed to
back up Jennie and George’s theory about the napalm bomb being used. He had been driving
by on that night and had seen from a distance what appeared to be a man throwing a
‘ball of fire’ at their house. Again, this lead never went anywhere.
By the time it was shared, it was far too late for investigators to verify
if that was indeed how the fire had started. This leaves us still with the question central
to all of this, what happened to the children? Maurice, 14; Martha, 12; Louis, 10; Jennie, 8;
and Betty, 6. Not a trace of any of them was found in the remains even after all of that work. Had
the children been taken? If so, how? Where? Why? Theories amongst the family and followers of the
case have run rampant for decades. The children who went missing were all downstairs in the
house when their parents went to bed. The front door was unlocked, and the lights were still
on. Perhaps, with Marion asleep on the couch, a person had entered the house and taken
them. It couldn’t have been by force, the noise would have woken Marion and Jennie.
Perhaps it was someone they knew. Or someone so immediately threatening they held their tongues.
Perhaps the children ran away from the fire once it was burning and were kidnapped before
their parents had time to get out of the house. Perhaps the arsonists wanted to send
a message, rather than kill the entire family. The children weren’t at
fault for their father’s sins, they should be spared, so were
taken away before the fire starts. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. That’s
all the Sodders ever had to go on. One witness claims to have seen the children
in the back of a car leaving the house earlier that night. Another witness reported seeing one
of the children in a car with Florida plates. Another saw a set of Italian adults with a group
of children all looking very similar at a hotel. The adults grew angry when the hotel worker tried
to talk to the children and pulled them away. Photos were sent to the family of people in
New York who looked like older versions of the children. For years, George would drive
all over the country. Any lead or scrap of new information that came through, he would go
to investigate personally. Not one of them ever went anywhere. All of the remaining children
kept up the investigation, except for John, who was at odds with his family wishing they
would just accept what had happened and move on. One by one, George, Jennie, Marion, John,
and George Jr all died until it was just Sylvia left. Even in her old age, little baby
Sylvia would engage with online message boards theorizing about what had happened. Her earliest
memory in life was the sight of her father covered in blood from gashing his arm on the glass,
blackened from smoke, running around in a panic. Sylvia passed away in 2021. In all their lives, none of the Sodders ever found out what
happened to the five missing children. Sadly, it seems to be a mystery that we never
get to the bottom of. All that we can hope is that Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and
Betty didn’t perish in that attic choked by smoke and cowering from the flames.
We can only hope that it was true that they did somehow escape the blaze and that
they went on to live full and happy lives. We can hope. Now check out “Kids School Bus Mysteriously
Disappears” Or watch this video instead.
