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

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.