Five Children Vanished in a Christmas Fire. No Remains Were Ever Found. The Sodder Children.

For decades, drivers on a highway near Fayetteville, West Virginia, passed a billboard with five black-and-white photos of children on it.

Three boys and two girls. The oldest fourteen. The youngest five.

Their parents had put the billboard up. They were offering a reward for information. Because officially, those five children had died in a house fire on Christmas Eve, 1945.

But their parents never believed it.

There were no bodies. No bones. And in the weeks before the fire, and the hours during it, there were things that did not make sense. A missing ladder. Trucks that would not start. A phone line that had been cut.

The father died in 1969. The mother wore black for the rest of her life and died in 1989. The last surviving sibling died in 2021.

And nobody has ever been able to say what really happened to the Sodder children.

The Sodder family

George Sodder was born in 1895 on the Italian island of Sardinia. He came to the United States as a boy, around 1908. He worked on railroads in Pennsylvania, then moved to West Virginia, where he eventually started his own trucking business, hauling dirt and coal.

He married Jennie Cipriani, who had also come from Italy as a child. They married in 1922 and settled near Fayetteville.

They had ten children. In December 1945, the oldest son, Joe, was away serving in the military. The other nine were at home.

George was successful, and he was outspoken. In particular, he was known for openly criticizing Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy. Not everyone in the local Italian community agreed with him.

The warnings

In the months before the fire, strange things happened.

In October 1945, a life insurance salesman came to the house. George turned him away. The salesman got angry. According to the family, he warned George that his house would go up in smoke and his children would be destroyed, because of the "dirty remarks" George had made about Mussolini.

Another man came to the house, saying he was looking for work. He walked around the back, looked at the fuse boxes, and told George that they were going to cause a fire someday. George had recently had the house rewired, and the electric company had told him it was safe.

And in the weeks before Christmas, the older Sodder boys noticed a strange car parked near the road, watching the younger children as they came home from school.

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the house was full. George and Jennie. Nine of their children. John, twenty-two. Marion, nineteen. George Jr., sixteen. Maurice, fourteen. Martha, twelve. Louis, nine or ten. Jennie, eight. Betty, five. And Sylvia, three.

Marion had brought home presents for her younger sisters. They were so excited that their mother let the younger children stay up late. She asked Maurice and Louis to finish their chores before bed.

At around ten o'clock, Jennie took little Sylvia upstairs to bed.

At twelve-thirty in the morning, the phone rang. Jennie answered. It was a woman she did not know, asking for a name Jennie did not recognize. In the background, Jennie heard laughter and the sound of glasses clinking, like a party. She said it was a wrong number and hung up.

She noticed that the lights were still on downstairs and the curtains were still open, which was unusual. She turned out the lights and went back to bed, assuming the older children had gone up to the attic, where they slept.

At about one in the morning, she heard a loud bang on the roof, and then a rolling sound.

At about one-thirty, she woke up smelling smoke.

The fire

The fire had started in George's office room, near where the telephone line and the fuse box were.

Jennie woke George. George woke the older boys. George, Jennie, John, George Jr., Marion and little Sylvia got out of the house.

The stairs to the attic were already in flames. They shouted up to the children above. There was no answer.

Then, one thing after another went wrong.

The family's phone did not work. Marion ran to a neighbor's house to call the fire department. That call did not go through. A passing driver tried to call from a tavern. That did not work either.

George, barefoot, cut his arm breaking a window, trying to get back in.

He went for the ladder he always kept leaning against the house. It was not there.

He tried to fill a barrel with water. It was frozen solid.

He ran to his two trucks, planning to drive one up against the house and climb onto it to reach the upstairs windows. Neither truck would start. They had both worked the day before.

The fire department in Fayetteville was short-staffed because of the war. The fire chief said he could not drive the fire truck. They did not arrive until the morning.

By then, the house was gone.

No remains

When the fire chief searched the ashes the next morning, he reported that no bones had been found. He believed the fire had been so hot that the children's bodies had burned away completely.

Later fire experts called that search cursory.

The chief told George to leave the site untouched for the state fire marshal. But after four days, George could not bear it. He bulldozed about five feet of dirt over the basement and planted a memorial garden.

A coroner's inquest was held, and it ruled that the fire was an accident caused by faulty wiring.

One of the members of that coroner's jury was the same insurance salesman who had threatened George months earlier.

Death certificates were issued for the five children on December 30, 1945. George and Jennie did not attend the funeral.

They did not believe their children were dead.

The questions

As the weeks went by, the questions piled up.

Why were the Christmas lights still on during the early part of the fire, if the cause was faulty wiring?

The missing ladder was found, at the bottom of an embankment about seventy-five feet from the house.

A telephone repairman said the family's phone line had not burned. It had been cut, by someone who had climbed the pole.

Later, a man was arrested for stealing equipment from the Sodder property around the time of the fire. He admitted to the theft, and said he had cut the phone line by mistake, thinking it was a power line. He denied having anything to do with the fire. No record of who he was survives.

Jennie pointed out that appliances in the house were still recognizable in the ashes. She found out that bones survive even the high temperatures of a crematorium. How could five children burn away to nothing in a house fire?

In the spring of 1946, little Sylvia found a dark green, hard rubber object in the brush near the house. George thought it looked like some kind of incendiary device. A bus driver said he had seen people throwing what looked like balls of fire at the house that night.

And the woman who made the wrong-number call that night was later found. She confirmed it had simply been a mistake.

Sightings

There were sightings.

A woman who had stopped on the road during the fire said she saw children looking out of the window of a passing car.

A woman who worked at a rest stop said she served breakfast to children the next morning, and noticed a car with Florida license plates.

A woman who ran a hotel in Charleston said she had seen the children there about a week after the fire, with adults who spoke Italian. Investigators later doubted her account.

The family hired a private investigator. The FBI briefly took an interest, then dropped it. In 1949, a pathologist led a new search of the site and found a few small bone fragments. A Smithsonian scientist examined them and said they were vertebrae from a single person between sixteen and twenty-two years old, much older than any of the missing children, and that they showed no signs of having been in a fire. They most likely came from the dirt George had brought in to fill the site.

In 1950, the state of West Virginia closed the case, calling it hopeless.

The billboard

The Sodders did not give up. In 1952, they put up a billboard by the highway with the five children's photos and a reward.

In 1967, they received an envelope with no return address, postmarked from Central City, Kentucky. Inside was a photograph of a young man, about thirty, who looked very much like their son Louis. There was writing on the back. The family hired a private detective to go to Kentucky. He never reported back.

They added the photo to the billboard.

George Sodder died in 1969. Jennie stayed in the house, tended the memorial garden, and wore black for the rest of her life. She died in 1989. Soon after, the billboard came down.

Sylvia, who was three years old on the night of the fire, spent much of her life keeping her siblings' story alive. She died in 2021.

What we still don't know

Most researchers who have studied the case believe the children probably did die in the fire, and that a hasty, poorly done search simply failed to find their remains.

But even those researchers admit there are details that are hard to explain. The threats. The cut phone line. The missing ladder. The trucks that would not start. The lack of any remains at all.

Maurice. Martha. Louis. Jennie. Betty.

Did they die in the fire that night? Or did someone take them, and the fire was set to cover it up?

What do you think?