Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts

Friday, September 11, 2020

What Happened to the Children?

Fayetteville, West Virginia was a small, quiet town on Christmas Eve, 1945. On that night however, it would be the site of a tragic mystery, a mystery that still has not been solved. The night before Christmas, George and Jennie Sodder and nine of their 10 children went to sleep in their 2-story home (one son was away in the Army) looking forward to the next day when there would be gifts given and plenty of good food eaten. Around 1 a.m. though, a fire broke out. George, Jennie and four of their children escaped, but the other five were never seen again. 

The 5 missing children (historical photo)
The 5 missing children

George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia in 1895, and immigrated to the United States in 1908. He found work on the Pennsylvania railroads, carrying water and supplies to the laborers, and after a few years moved to Smithers, West Virginia. Smart and ambitious, he worked as a truck driver until he had saved enough to launch his own successful trucking company. One day he walked into a local store and met Jennie Cipriani, who had come over from Italy when she was 3.

Jennie Sodder
They fell in love and soon married. Between 1923 and 1943, they had 10 children and settled in Fayetteville, an Appalachian town with a small but active Italian immigrant community. The Sodders became one of the most respected middle-class families in the area. 

George held strong opinions about business, current events, and politics, and did not hesitate to make his opinions known. In April 1945, communist partisans had killed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, which left the Italians in Fayetteville highly divided. Supporters of Mussolini were outraged. George held strong antifascist views about Mussolini and had engendered bitter distrust amongst those of his fellow Italian immigrants who had loved the Italian leader. In the weeks before the fire, a few strange encounters took place. An unknown man approached George while at his home looking for hauling work. After telling the man that he didn't need any workers, the man looked over at the fuse box on the outside wall of the house and said, "That's going to cause a fire someday." Although very odd, George dismissed the comment since he had just had the whole house upgraded and rewired before adding new appliances and the power supply company had checked the work and everything had passed inspection.

A week before the fire, a salesman had tried to sell life insurance to George and Jennie. When they refused, the salesman got very upset and as he walked away, turned back and shouted, "Your goddamn house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed! You, Mr. Sodder, are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini."

A few days before the fire, John (at 23, the oldest son at home) saw a suspicious car parked along Highway 21 for several days in a row. An unknown man inside the car seemed to be watching the younger Sodder children closely as they returned home from school.

The afternoon before the fire, the oldest daughter, Marion, had brought home some toys from the dime-store where she worked and gave them to the younger kids as small Christmas Eve gifts. At 10:30, George and Jennie went to their bedroom, carrying 3-year-old Sylvia with them. Jennie allowed the other children to stay up to play with their new toys for a while but reminded them that before they went to bed, they had to shut the chicken coop, feed the cows, close all the window shades, lock the doors and turn out the lights. 

Around 12:30 Christmas morning, the jangling ring of the telephone broke the quiet night. Jennie got out of bed and walked into the hallway to answer it. An unfamiliar female voice asked for an unfamiliar name. There was loud laughter and glasses clinking in the background. Jennie said, “You have the wrong number,” and heard the woman laughing before she hung up. As she was going back to bed, she noted that all of the downstairs lights were still on, the curtains were open, and the front door was unlocked. She saw Marion asleep on the sofa in the living room and assumed that the other kids were upstairs in bed. She turned out the lights, closed the curtains, locked the door, and returned to her room. A few minutes later, she had just begun to fall back asleep when she heard a loud bang on the roof and then a rolling noise. She wondered about it for a few seconds, but not hearing anything else, she fell back asleep. About an hour later though, she was roused once again, this time by heavy smoke billowing into her room.

George grabbed baby Sylvia in his arms and shouted for everyone to get up and get out of the house. With Jennie, they ran to the living room and pulled Marion outside. John and George also managed to escape from the burning house with singed hair, but there were still five children unaccounted for. George ran back into the house and called upstairs, but there was no answer. He started to run up the stairs, but by then, the fire had engulfed the stairway and upper landing. While her husband was frantically trying to get to the children, Jennie ran back inside to the phone to call the fire department. It wouldn't work though and the heat forced her back out. She then sent Marion to a neighbor's house to call the fire department.

Running back outside, George tried to save them by breaking a window to re-enter the house, slicing a large chunk of flesh from his arm. He could see nothing through the smoke and fire, which by now had swept through all of the downstairs rooms: living and dining room, kitchen, office, and his and Jennie’s bedroom. He figured Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty still had to be upstairs, cowering in two bedrooms on either end of the hallway, separated by a staircase that was now engulfed in flames.

He raced around to the other side of the house, hoping to reach them through the upstairs windows, but the ladder he always kept propped against the house was missing (it was later found lying in a drainage ditch 50 yards from the house). He then tried to drive one of his two coal trucks up to the house and climb atop it to reach the windows. But even though they’d functioned perfectly the day before, neither would start now. He tried to scoop water from a rain barrel but it was frozen solid. Five of his children were stuck somewhere inside the flaming fire and he couldn't do a thing about it.

When Marion arrived at the neighbor's home, she tried to call the Fayetteville Fire Department but couldn’t get any operator response. A neighbor who saw the blaze made a call from a nearby tavern, but again no operator responded. Frustrated, the neighbor drove into town and tracked down Fire Chief F.J. Morris, who initiated Fayetteville’s version of a fire alarm: a “phone tree” system where one firefighter phoned another, who phoned another. The fire department was only two and a half miles away but the crew didn’t arrive until 8 a.m., by which point the Sodders’ home had been reduced to nothing more than a smoking pile of ash.

Memorial to the 5 children
at the site of the fire
George and Jeannie assumed that five of their children were dead, but a brief search of the grounds on Christmas Day turned up no trace of remains. Chief Morris suggested the blaze had been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies. A state police inspector combed the rubble and attributed the fire to faulty wiring. Five days later, George covered the basement with five feet of dirt, intending to preserve the site as a memorial to the dead children. The coroner’s office issued five death certificates just before the new year, attributing the causes to “fire or suffocation.”

But soon, the Sodders began to wonder if their children were still alive.

The Sodders planted flowers across the space where their house had stood and began to stitch together those odd happenings leading up to the fire. Jennie couldn’t understand how five children could perish in a fire and leave no bones or any trace of anything. She conducted experiments, burning animal bones, chicken bones, beef joints, pork chop bones, to see if the fire consumed them. Each time she was left with a heap of charred bones. Remnants of various household items had been found in the burned-out basement, still identifiable. It is totally implausible that a fire that left identifiable household items would leave no trace of five children. An employee at a crematorium informed her that bones remain after bodies are burned for two hours at 2,000 degrees. Their house was destroyed in 45 minutes.

They wondered about the telephone not working when Jennie tried to call the fire department. They hired a telephone repairman to investigate and he told the Sodders their lines appeared to have been cut, not burned. They realized that if the fire had been electrical—the result of “faulty wiring,” as the official reported stated—then the power would have been dead, so how to explain the lighted downstairs rooms? A day after the fire, a man came forward claiming he saw some man at the fire scene taking a block and tackle used for removing car engines; could he be the reason George’s trucks refused to start? One day, while the family was visiting the site, Sylvia found a hard rubber object in the yard. Jennie recalled hearing the hard thud on the roof, the rolling sound. George concluded it was a napalm bomb of the type used in warfare.

Flyer posted offering a 
reward for information


Several days later, after the sad story of the five dead children on Christmas Day appeared in the papers, the reports of sightings began. A woman claimed to have seen the missing children peering from a passing car while the fire was burning. A woman operating a tourist stop 50 miles west of Fayetteville said she saw the children the morning after the fire. “I served them breakfast,” she told police. “There was a car with Florida license plates at the tourist court, too.” A woman at a Charleston hotel who saw the children's photo's in the paper said she had seen four of the five a week after the fire. “The children were accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction,” she said in a statement. “I do not remember the exact date. However, the entire party did register at the hotel and stayed in a large room with several beds. They registered about midnight. I tried to talk to the children in a friendly manner, but the men appeared hostile and refused to allow me to talk to these children…. One of the men looked at me in a hostile manner; he turned around and began talking rapidly in Italian. Immediately, the whole party stopped talking to me. I sensed that I was being frozen out and so I said nothing more. They left early the next morning.”

In 1947, George and Jennie sent a letter about the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received a reply from J. Edgar Hoover: “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.” Hoover’s agents said they would assist if they could get permission from the local authorities, but the Fayetteville police and fire departments refused the offer, saying they did not need the help.

The Sodders then turned to a private investigator, C.C. Tinsley, who discovered that the insurance salesman who had threatened George was a member of the coroner’s jury that deemed the fire accidental. Other than that news, Mr. Tinsley was unable to find any other details.

Over the next few years, the tips and leads continued to come in. George saw a newspaper photo of schoolchildren in New York City and was convinced that one of them was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan in search of the child, but her parents refused to speak to him or let him see their daughter. They threatened to call the police if he didn't leave them alone. In August 1949, the Sodders brought in a Washington, D.C. pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter and had him thoroughly exam the site of their burned house. The excavation was thorough, uncovering several small objects: damaged coins, a partly burned dictionary and several shards of vertebrae. Hunter sent the bones to the Smithsonian Institution, which issued the following report:

"The human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual. Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17 years. The top limit of age should be about 22 since the centra, which normally fuse at 23, are still unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal maturation than one could expect for a 14-year-old boy (the oldest missing Sodder child)."

The report also said the vertebrae showed no evidence of exposure to fire and “it is very strange that no other bones were found in the allegedly careful evacuation of the basement of the house.” Noting that the house reportedly burned for only about half an hour or so, it said that “one would expect to find the full skeletons of the five children, rather than only four vertebrae.” The bones, the report concluded, must have been in the supply of dirt George used to fill in the basement to create the memorial for his children. Several months later, the bones were identified as belonging to a 22-year-old man whose grave several miles away had been opened by graverobbers looking for an expensive watch and ring the young man was rumored to have been buried with.

George & Jennie in front of the 
billboard they erected
After the governor and the State Police Superintendent declared the case closed,  George and Jennie erected a billboard along Route 16 and passed out flyers offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of their children. When nothing came of it, they increased the amount to $10,000. A letter arrived from a woman in St. Louis saying the oldest girl, Martha, was in a convent there. Another tip came from Texas, where a patron in a bar overheard an incriminating conversation about a long-ago Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia. Someone in Florida claimed the children were staying with a distant relative of Jennie’s. George traveled the country to investigate each and every lead, always returning home without any answers.

In 1968, 23 years after the fire, Jennie found an envelope in the mailbox addressed only to her. It was postmarked in Kentucky but had no return address. Inside was a photo of a man in his mid-20s. On the back was a strange handwritten note which read: “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35.” She and George were astonished at the resemblance to their Louis, who was 9 at the time of the fire. Beyond the obvious similarities—dark curly hair, dark brown eyes—they both had the same straight, strong nose and the same upward tilt of the left eyebrow. They immediately hired a private detective and sent him to Kentucky. They never heard from him again.

Just before he died in 1968, George told a reporter, “Time is running out for us, but we only want to know. If they did die in the fire, we want to be convinced. Otherwise, we want to know what happened to them.” He died still hoping for a break in the case. Jennie erected a high privacy fence around her property and began adding rooms to her home, building layer after layer between her and the outside. Since the night of the fire, she only wore black clothing in a sign of mourning. She continued to do so until her own death in 1989. The billboard finally came down several years later. 

Her surviving children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with theories of their own: perhaps the local mafia had tried to recruit George and he declined. They tried to extort money from him and he refused. The children were kidnapped by someone they knew—someone who burst into the unlocked front door, told them about the fire and offered to take them someplace safe. They might not have survived the night. If they had and if they lived for decades, if it really was Louis in that photograph, they failed to contact their parents only because they wanted to protect them.

George and Jennie swore they would look for their missing children until they both died. And so they did. Several years after the fire, the FBI finally began a federal investigation but closed the case after 2 years with no additional information being found. As of this writing, the daughter of Marion still hopes the case can be solved. A large group of internet sleuths continues to investigate, but even they say this might be one that will never be solved and nobody will ever know for sure just what really happened to the children.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Letter From The Beyond

Godfrey Barnsley" by Source (WP:NFCC#4)
Godfrey Barnsley was born in Derbyshire, England on August 26, 1805. His father owned a cotton mill and as Godfrey grew up, he was taught all aspects of the cotton business. In early 1824, while still only 18 years of age, Godfrey immigrated to America seeking his fortune. 

Settling in Savannah, Georgia, he became involved in the lucrative trade of brokering cotton. Buying cotton at a low price in the south which was awash in the crop and selling at a much inflated price to England, it wasn't long before Godfrey became wealthy. In early 1828, he met Julia Scarborough, the daughter of wealthy ship builder William Scarborough and on December 24 of that same year, the two were married. Godfrey and his father-in-law developed a close friendship and with William's help, Godfrey began shipping his cotton to England with his own fleet of ships. The Barnsley family became one of the richest in the whole south.

By 1842, Godfrey and Julia had 6 children. Godfrey deeply loved his wife so when Julia's health began to deteriorate that year, he sought out the best doctors in Savannah. Due to the heat and humid conditions of the city, yellow fever and malaria were constant threats and when the doctors told Godfrey his wife would be better served to live in a more hospitable climate, he began searching for a better location. He found land near Adairsville, Georgia to be suitable so he bought 3,600 acres of woods and valleys which used to be occupied by the Cherokee Indians until they were forcibly removed onto a reservation. 

Godfrey had plans drawn up for a grand estate and had his ships seeking out and bringing back marble from Italy and exquisite furniture, windows, exotic shrubbery and plants from around the world. Julia loved roses so he purchased and had planted in ornate gardens every known variety of rose bush in the world. The mansion, designed as an Italian Villa, was to have 24 rooms and such ultra-modern features as hot-and-cold running water. By April, 1845, the mansion and gardens were still under construction, but were complete enough to allow the family to move in and get away from the heat in Savannah. Shortly after moving in though, things took a nasty turn.

In May, Julia's father died. It was a terrible time for the Barnsley family as William was much loved by all. Just a few weeks later, Godfrey and Julia's infant son became ill and quickly died. It was devastating for the family who was still grieving over the death of William, but the worst was to come just a month later when Julia's health took a decided downward turn and in late summer, she passed away of tuberculosis. Godfrey buried his beloved wife next to their son in one of the estate's beautiful gardens. 

For weeks afterward, Godfrey spent hours every day sitting in the garden which held Julia's remains. He said he felt her presence there and could often be seen talking to her grave. Work on the mansion and grounds had ceased upon Julia's death, but one day he came from the garden and ordered work to resume as Julia had spoken to him saying the home should be finished for their children and future generations.

For the next two years, work continued on the home and gardens until it was at long last complete. Godfrey, still openly grieving, could be seen visiting Julia's grave daily. He doted on the children, but even with the comfort they provided, he seemed adrift since her death. He even lost interest in his business, but it continued to be profitable due to the dedication and business acumen of the managers he had hired to run it for him.

Over the years, he continued to be so depressed that his children and friends began to worry he might commit suicide in order to rejoin the love of his life. They tried to find anything that would bring a smile back to his face but nothing worked until one day, exactly 10 years to the day after Julia had been laid in the ground, a letter was delivered to him. It was postmarked from Savannah just a few days earlier. 

The later stated, "My dear mortal Barnsley, Julia is with me and all doing just fine." It was signed William Scarborough and was written in his deceased father-in-law's distinctive handwriting.

Godfrey immediately seemed to be better and once again began to take interest in his business and life. He never remarried, but his smile and zest for life returned. In 1873, he passed away of natural causes and was buried beside Julia in the garden of roses. The mysterious letter was handed down for several generations but it eventually was lost and now nobody knows what happened to that very unexplainable missive.  For Godfrey, it was a desperately needed message, a message from a different realm which arrived just in time to give life back to a good man.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Did He Live Before?

Vosges region of France
Marc Liblin, a shy, young boy of 6 years, was busy growing up in the town of his birth, a small village in the foothills of the Vosges in eastern France, when he began having odd dreams. He told his parents that in his dreams, a professor would come and teach him physics and an unknown language. He began speaking in this odd language which nobody in his village had ever heard. Over the course of several months, he began conversing in the words of the unknown language more than the French he had been taught since birth and told people it was his "native" language.

Kids can be cruel, especially to someone not exactly like them, so they made fun of little Marc, physically picking on him, calling him a dunce and weird. He began staying at home more, rarely going out to play. His friends were the books his parents brought home from the library. His schoolwork was not exceptional, but certainly within the normal so he passed each grade with his teachers totally confused as to why he insisted on speaking this foreign language far more than French. People from nearby towns began hearing about this odd boy. Most considered it a passing phase of a youngster who possessed an over-active imagination, but the phase didn't go away.

Marc completed his schooling, but couldn't acquire a job of substance as he continued speaking mostly in a language only he understood. As an adult, he earned money by doing odd jobs here and there and from the occasional handout, living a meager life on the fringes of normal society with few friends and no prospects. 

When Marc was 33, two language professors from the University of Rennes heard about this odd fellow who insisted on speaking a language of gibberish. Intrigued, they located Marc and interviewed him. Rather than the mentally unstable drunk they expected to find, Marc impressed them with his demeanor and his educated manor of speaking. They were totally unaware of the language he spoke so easy and naturally, but it was clear to them it was not gibberish at all. It had a rhythm to it with intonations and inflections which sounded like other languages they were familiar with. For the next 2 years, they fed the strange words and sounds Marc spoke into the database of a giant university computer which ran special programs used to decipher and translate speech into one of the world's known languages. After the 2 years was up, it became apparent their work had been in vain; the computer and every language expert they asked was stumped.

In a last ditch effort, the professors decided to ask the sailors who frequented the harbor bars in Rennes to see if any of them had ever heard this language during their world travels to exotic and out-of-the-way places. After several weeks with no luck, just before giving up, they had Marc speak in his language in another bar to a bunch of Tunisian sailors. The barkeeper, a retired Navy man, interrupted Marc, saying he had heard this tongue before on a very remote Polynesian island. And not only did he recognize the language, he knew a lady who speaks it. The lady, Meretuini Make, was divorced from an army officer and lived in a small cottage in the suburbs.

Rapa Iti
The professors quickly arranged a meeting. All three arrived at her door several days later and when Meretuini opened it, Marc addressed her in his language. Marc's life changed right then and there when she answered him right away in the old Rapa language of her homeland. Only 400 native islanders on Rapa Iti, one of the most remote and almost unknown islands in the world, spoke the language which Marc and Meretuini were excitedly and laughingly talking to each other in.

Not unexpectedly, Marc and Meretuini quickly struck up a friendship. They visited each other often and the friendship turned into love. Marc, a person who had rarely been away from his little village in the French countryside and had never been outside of Europe, married Meretuini and they moved to her little native island. There they settled into a quiet, loving and satisfied life, raising 4 children in a small community in the mountains. Marc became a teacher and taught physics to the native children. He was considered an excellent teacher and his students loved him. He also learned all he could about Rapa Iti; the oral history, the language, and the people. He wrote thousands and thousands of pages of documentation, preserving important stories and history and decoding the Rapa language. 

Marc, Meretuini and 1 of their 4 children
Unfortunately, not all of the natives felt toward him the same way his friends, neighbors and students felt. The mayor, a man known to distrust and not want outsiders on the island, discovered Marc did not have a college degree. He tried to have him fired as a teacher, but the community rose up in defense of Marc and so it was decided he would be reclassified as an Auxiliary Teacher rather than a full teacher. This meant Marc had to repay part of the salary he had been paid over the years. The repayment caused him and his family a lot of financial hardship and he had to take extra jobs to make ends meet. It bothered him that this prevented him from working on his Rapa Iti documentation.

With his documentation work still unfinished, Marc passed away due to cancer at the age of 50 on May 26, 1998. He never tried to financially capitalize on his story, indeed, he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone to be with his family and to document all he could of "his" island. When he passed, he left behind his wife, Meretuini, the only person who had ever understood him away from the island, their four children, a large, unfinished body of documentation work, and an unsolved, very strange tale.