Week of Holiday Horrors Day 7: The Disappearance of the Sodder Children
December 24, 2021
George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in 1895, and immigrated to the US 1908 with one of his older brothers who had gone back home after they both had cleared customs at Ellis Island. It was said that George had rarely talked about why he had left Italy for the US at such a young age.
George had found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania, his job was to carry water and other supplies to the workers. After a few years of this, he took a more permanent position as a driver in Smithers, West Virginia. After this, George had begun his own trucking company, first hauling dirt to construction sites, and then later hauling coal that was mined in the area.
George married a woman named Jennie Cipriani, who was a storekeeper’s daughter in Smithers and had also immigrated to the US from Italy. George and Jennie began a life outside Fayetteville, which had a large population of Italian immigrants.
The two lived in a two-story timber frame house that was two miles north of town. George and Jennie ended up having 10 children together, the first in 1923, and the last, Sylvia, born in 1943. George’s business was going great and the Sodder’s became known in the area for being one of the most respected middle class families around the area.
While the family was respected, it was said that George had some strong opinions, especially one that was in opposition of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, which led to some arguments between him and other members of the immigrant community.
In 1943, the Sodder’s second oldest son Joe had left to serve in the military during WWII. In 1944, Mussolini was deposed and executed, but despite this, George’s opinions on him had left some angry feelings from others in the town. It is said that one insurance salesman in October 1945 told George that his house would go up in smoke and his children would be destroyed, after not being happy about George’s Mussolini comments.
On another occasion, a visitor who had been looking for work noticed that a pair of fuse boxes would cause a fire, and told George this. George was confused by this, as he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove had been installed, and the electric company had told them it was safe.
In the weeks before Christmas 1945, George’s older sons had noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, and whoever was in the car would watch the younger Sodder children walk home from school.
On December 24, 1945, Marion, the oldest Sodder daughter, had been working at a dime store in Fayetteville and had surprised her younger siblings, Martha (age 12), Jennie (age 8) and Betty (age 5) with some new toys she had bought them. This excited the younger children so much they asked their mother if they could stay up past their usual bedtime to play with their new toys.
At 10 pm, Jennie had told them they could stay up a little bit later, as long as the two older boys were still awake, Maurice (aged 14) and Louis (aged 9). Jennie told the two boys that they had to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed. George and his two older sons, John (aged 23) and George Jr. (aged 16) were already asleep as they had spent the day working. Jennie also told the younger girls that they needed to do a few chores before they went to bed, and then she took the youngest child, Sylvia who was 2, up to bed with her.
Around 12:30 am, the telephone rang in the Sodder household and Jennie had waken up and gone downstairs to answer it. The voice on the other end was that of a woman, but Jennie did not recognize her voice. The woman asked Jennie to speak with a name she was not familiar with, and there was the sound of laughter and clinking glasses in the background. Jennie told the strange woman she had the wrong number, and later recalled that the woman had a weird laugh. She hung up the phone and went back to bed, but as she was going she realized that the lights were still on and the curtains were not drawn, two things she told the children to do before they went up to bed.
Marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so Jennie believed that the other children had stayed up later and gone back to the attic where they slept. Jennie then closed the curtains, turned out the lights and went back to bed.
At 1 am, Jennie was woken up again by the sound of something hitting the house’s roof with a loud bang, then a rolling noise. She listened for a moment longer, but heard nothing and decided to go back to sleep. Around 1:30 am, Jennie woke up again, this time smelling smoke. When she got up, she saw that the room George used as an office was on fire, around the telephone line and fuse box. Jennie woke up George and he woke up the older sons.
Both George, Jennie and 4 of the children, Marion, Sylvia, John and George Jr, escaped the house. They were yelling to the children upstairs but heard no response, and they could not go up the stairway because it was already on fire. John said in an interview later that he went up to the attic to tell his siblings who were sleeping there, but he later changed his story and said he only called up the to the attic and did not actually see any of them.
The Sodders phone line had been cut, so they were unable to call for help, so Marion had run to a nieghbour’s house to use their phone and call the fire department. A driver on a nearby road had claimed to have seen the flames and called from a nearby tavern, but this was not successful as they could not reach the operator. Someone eventually was successful in reaching the fire department, however they took a while to get there.
George climbed the house’s outside wall and broke up the attic window, cutting his arm. He and his other sons wanted to use the ladder that was always resting on the side of the house, though when they went to grab it, it was gone. There was a barrel of water they could have used too, but it had been frozen. George then tried to use both of his trucks to drive up to the house to use it to climb up to the attic, though neither of them would start, despite them both working the day before.
The Sodder’s who had been able to escape the fire had no choice but to watch their house burn down over the next 45 minutes. They had assumed the 5 children sleeping upstairs had died in the fire. Once the firefighters got there, the next morning, they looked through the ashes that were left in the basement. By 10 am, the Sodder’s were notified that the firefighters had not found any bones, which they most likely would have if the children had been in the house during the fire.
Other accounts claim they did find a new bone fragments but had not told the family, though I have not heard this as much throughout my research. It was believed that the children had died in the fire, and that it had been so hot it was able to burn the bodies completely, leaving behind no evidence that they were ever in the house.
George was told to leave the site of the burned house alone so that the state fire marshal’s office could conduct a better investigation. But after 4 days, George and Jennie could no longer bear to look at the site of their wrecked house and potentially deceased children, so they bulldozed 5 feet of dirt over the site and had planned to make it into a memorial garden for their children.
The coroner started an inquest the next day, which held that the fire was an accident caused by faulty wiring. The man who had threatened George that his house would be burned and his children destroyed was one of the jurors.
On December 30, 1945, the 5 Sodder children’s death certificates were issued. The local newspaper stated that all the bodies had been found, but later in the same story reported that only part of one body was recovered. George and Jennie could not bear to go to the funeral, which was on January 2, 1946, though the surviving Sodder children attended.
It wasn’t long before the Sodder family began to question the ruling of their children’s deaths and the fire itself. They did not believe that the fire had started from an electrical problem, as the family’s Christmas lights had been on throughout the early stages of the fire when the power should have gone out. They did find the ladder that had been missing from their property that night, at the bottom of an embankment 75 feet away.
A telephone repairman told the Sodder’s that the house’s phone line had not been burn through, but it had been cut by someone who had been willing to climb 14 feet up the pole, and reach 2 feet away from it to do this. A man whom neighbours had been stealing a block and tackle from the Sodder’s property around the time of the fire was arrested and admitted to theft and cutting the phone line, though he denied any involvement in the fire.
There is no record identifying this suspect exists, and why he would have wanted to cut the Sodder’s phone line while stealing the block and tackle. Jennie said in 1968 if he had cut the power line, her, George, and the 4 other children would not have been able to make it out of the house.
Jennie had a hard time believing that her children had completely parished in the fire with no trace, as many of the household’s appliances had been found and were still recognizable in the ash. There was a newspaper report of a family of 7 that had been killed in a house fire around the same time, and all of the victims remains had been found. Jennie would experiment by burning small piles of animal bones to see if they would be completely consumed, but none of them ever were.
An employee at a local crematorium told Jennie that human bones remain even after they are burned at 2,000 °F for two hours, which was far longer and hotter than the house fire was that night.
As far as the trucks not starting that night, George believed someone had tampered with them, maybe even the same man who stole the block and tackle and cut their phone line. One of George’s son in laws stated in 2013 that he thought it was possible that the men had flooded the engines in haste of trying to get the trucks to start.
Another thing to consider was the mysterious phone call Jennie received just hours before the fire. However, investigators apparently located the strange woman who had called and she confirmed that it had been a wrong number.
Soon there was evidence that the fire had not been started due to an electrical fault, but was purposely set. A driver of a bus who had passed through Fayetteville late on Christmas Eve said he witnessed some people throwing balls of fire at the Sodder house. A few months after the snow had melted, Sylvia, the youngest Sodder child found a small, hard, dark green, rubber ball like object in the brush nearby. George said it looked like a pineapple bomb hand grenade or something similar, which might have explained the loud noise on the roof that woke Jennie that night.
It didn’t take long for many to believe that the 5 Sodder children were not dead, but very much alive and had been kidnapped that night. Witnesses had claimed that they had seen the missing Sodder children themselves. One woman who claimed she watched the fire from the road said she saw the children peering out of a passing car while the house was still burning. Another woman said she had served the missing children breakfast the morning after the fire, at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston. She noted that there was a car with Florida license plates in the parking lot.
George and Jennie hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley from the town of Gauley Bridge. Tinsley had found out that the man who had threatened George over his Mussolini comments was on the coroner’s jury and also learned that supposedly, investigators had found a heart in the ashes but had it secretly buried without the Sodder’s knowledge.
This was confronted, and soon George and Tinsley went to uncover what was buried, but a local funeral director examined it and told them it was fresh beef liver that had never been exposed to fire.
One day George saw a magazine photo of a group of ballet dancers in New York, one which resembled his daughter, Betty. He drove all the way to the ballet school, where he asked to see the girl but was refused.
In August 1949, George persuaded Oscar Hunter, a Washington pathologist to supervise a new search through the dirt at the site of the fire. A thorough search was conducted and there were several small bone fragments found, determined to be human vertebrae. The fragments were sent to a lab, and confirmed to be lumbar vertebrae, all from the same person. However, this lumbar vertebrae was estimated to be from an individual who was 16-17 years at the time of their death, and as old as 22 years, thus it would be quite unlikely to be any of the 5 missing Sodder children, as the oldest missing child, Maurice, was only 14 at the time. It was also said that these fragments had no sign of exposure to flame.
The case was closed at the state level shortly after this, but the Sodder family did not give up. They printed flyers of the missing children, and offered a $5000 reward which soon turned to $10,000 for any information that would settle the case for even one of the children. In 1952, a billboard was put up with the information of the missing children.
Ida Crutchfield, a woman who ran a hotel in Charleston, claimed to have seen the missing children about a week after. She said the children had come into the hotel with 2 men and 2 women who appeared to all be Italian. She tried to speak to the children but one of the men looked at her in a hostile manner, and he turned around and began talking in Italian fast. She said after this, no one spoke to her. She said they left the hotel the next morning but investigators did not really believe her story was credible, as it she had come forward with it for years.
George Sodder would always follow up leads in person, and would travel to areas where tips would come in. A woman from St. Louis said that Martha Sodder was being held in a convent there. A bar patron from Texas claimed that they overheard two people making incriminating statements about a fire that happened on Christmas Eve in West Virgina years before.
George went to Houston to investigate a tip in 1967. A woman there had written to the Sodder’s, saying that Louis Sodder had revealed his identity to her one night after they had too much to drink. The woman also said she believed Louis and Maurice were living in Texas somewhere. However, George and his son in law were not able to speak with this woman, and police helped find these two men the woman was talking about and they denied being the missing Sodder boys.
Perhaps the most credible piece of evidence in this case was a letter received that Louis Sodder was still alive. Jennie found a letter addressed to her in the mail, postmarked in Central City, Kentucky with no return address. Inside the letter was a picture of a man around the age of 30 who resembled Louis, who would be in his 30′s if he was still alive.
On the back of this letter was written, “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil boys. A90132 or 35.”
The Sodder’s hired another PI to look into this but they never reported back to the them and were unable to locate this PI after. The picture of this young man resembling Louis gave them hope and they added it to the billboard, leaving out the information about Central City.
Tragically, George Sodder died in 1969, never knowing what happened to his missing children. Jennie and the other children, except for John who never spoke of the fire, continued to look for answers to what happened that night. For the rest of Jennie’s life she wore black in mourning and tended to memorial garden. She died in 1989, and the rest of the family took down the billboard.
The surviving Sodder children with their own children now continued to talk about the case and investigate leads. They had theorized along with others that perhaps the Sicillian Mafia was trying to extort money from George, and the children were taken by someone who knew about the planned arson and told them they would be safe if they left the house. It was possible that they were taken back to Italy, and wanting to protect their parents and other siblings, they avoided contacting them all these years.
Sylvia Sodder, who was the youngest surviving Sodder child, died in this year, 2021. She said the house fire was her earliest memory and that she was one of the last children to leave the house. She said later on her and George would often stay up late and talk about what might have happened to her siblings. Sylvia herself believed that her siblings were alive and survived that night. Sylvia’s own daughter said in 2006 that she had promised her grandparents she would never let the story die.
The case of the Sodder children is now 76 years old, and it has never been uncovered whether they died in the fire or survived that night, perhaps getting kidnapped and feared to come forward to protect their family that made it out of the house that night. It is unlikely that this mystery will ever be solved as all of the Sodder children would likely be deceased.
What do you think happened on that fateful night?
