The Death of the Sodder kids.

History

George Sodder imgrated from Tulia, Sardinia, Italy in 1908.After a few years, he started his own trucking company in Virginia. At first hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauling coal that was mined in the region. Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper's daughter there, who had also come to the U.S. from Italy in her childhood, became his wife
The couple settled outside nearby Faytteville,. In 1923, they had the first of their ten children. George's business prospered, had strong opinions about many subjects, and was not shy about expressing them, sometimes alienating people. In particular, his strident opposition to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini  had led to some strong arguments with other members of the immigrant community.
The last of the Sodder children, Sylvia, was born in 1943. By then, their oldest son, Joe, left for the military.The following year, Mussolini was deposed and executed.George Sodder's criticism of the late dictator had left some hard feelings.. 1945, a life insurance salesmen warned George that his house would "would go up in smoke ... and your children are going to be destroyed" after he had refused the life insurance. Another visitor, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George  had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed and the local electric company had said afterwards. In the weeks before Christmas that year, his older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.

Timeline

12:30am  Christmas 

Jennie Sodder had a  phone call with a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize asked for a name Jennie was also not familiar with. She heard other voices in the background along with clinking glasses and “weird laughter.”When Jennie got off the phone, she checked on her children. She noticed that lights were on and the curtains were closed.She found one child (Marion) asleep on the couch and returned her to bed assuming the other children were in the attic and had forgotten to close down the house.

1:00 am 

Jennie Sodder woke up again to the sound of “an object hitting the house’s roof with a loud bang, then a rolling noise.” She went back to sleep.

1:30 am

Jennie Sodder woke up again, this time to the smell of smoke. She got up and found a fire in George’s office (also where the fuse box and telephone wires were).

Jennie woke up George and they escaped the house with four children: Marion, Sylvia, John and George Jr.

The family yelled at the house, assuming they would wake the other children who slept in the attic. These were the children who had stayed up later than the rest of the family and Jennie had assumed went to bed without shutting the lights off.

They did not hear from the other children and could not go upstairs to get them because the staircase was aflame.

Next, the family tried to call for help. The Sodder phone did not work so one of the children ran to a neighbor’s and called.

The family tried to locate their latter in order to check on the children in the attic. It was usually resting against the side of the house but was now missing.

George Sodder tried to use both of his trucks to drive closer to the house so that he could crawl up to the attic. Both were previously in good working order and now would not start.

Because of these various delays and because the fire department was small and volunteer only (most of the firefighters were overseas serving in the war), they did not arrive until morning when the family assumed the other five children had already died.

When the fire department finally did arrive and began going through the ashes of the Sodder house, they did not find any bones. The fire chief still believed the children died in the fire.

After the fire

They found the family ladder had been moved from the side of the house and hidden in an embankment hear the home.

Someone from the telephone company discovered that someone had crawled up a telephone pole and cut the phone line leading to the Sodder’s house.

George Sodder was confused about why neither of his previously working trucks would move that night.

A local bus driver provided an alternate account.: “The driver of a bus that passed through Fayetteville late Christmas Eve said he had seen some people throwing “balls of fire” at the house. A few months later, when the snow had melted, Sylvia found a small, hard, dark-green, rubber ball-like object in the brush nearby. George, recalling his wife’s account of a loud thump on the roof before the fire, said it looked like a “pineapple bomb” hand grenade or some other incendiary device used in combat. The family later claimed that, contrary to the fire marshal’s conclusion, the fire had started on the roof, although there was by then no way to prove it.

People in the town claimed they saw the missing children in a vehicle the night of the fire, or have seen them since.

In 1949 the site of the house fire was excavated. Human vertebrae bones were found, but an expert said they could only come from a human aged 16-23 and had never been exposed to fire. The oldest of the missing children was 14 at the time of the fire.

The expert also noted that it was “very strange” that more bones weren’t found, as they should not have burned up in that situation.

Another sighting: “A woman who ran a Charleston hotel, claimed to have seen the children approximately a week afterwards. “I do not remember the exact date”, she said in a statement. The children had come in, around midnight, with two men and two women, all of whom appeared to her to be “of Italian extraction”. When she attempted to speak with the children, “[o]ne 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”.

In 1967 Jennie Sodder received a photo in the mail of a man resembling one of the missing children, Louis Sodder. The back of the photo read:

“Louis Sodder
I love brother Frankie Ilil boys

A90132 or 35” 
 

With the end of official efforts to resolve the case, the Sodders did not give up hope. They had flyers printed up with pictures of the children, offering a $5,000 reward (soon doubled) for information that would have settled the case for even one of them. In 1952, they put up a billboard at the site of the house (and another along U.S. route in Ansted) with the same information..It would in time become a landmark for traffic through Fayetteville on U.S.Route 19 (today State Route 16)

Who did it? And What Happened it the kids?

The family, along with some other town residence believe the Sicilian Mafia may have taken the children and started the fire in an attempt to extort money from the Sodders, though no one has reached out to them to ask for money.