1n 1945, a Christmas Eve fire destroyed their home in Fayetteville, West Virginia where George and Jennie Sodder lived with 9 of their 10 children.
Their oldest son, Joe, was overseas fighting in WWII.
George and Jennie Sodder were able to escape the burning house with 4 of their children.
The remaining 5 Sodder children were never accounted for.
George Sodder and Jennie Sodder were Italian immigrants who came to the US separately as children.
George started his own trucking company in West Virginia.
George had strong political opinions he expressed, which some people did not like.
He was strongly opposed to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
George was able to break back into the house but was unable to make it back up the stairs on their 2nd story.
Their bodies or remains were never found.
The house burned down quickly, not allowing enough time to cremate their bodies completely.
So why were their remains never found?
The Sodder family believe that the remaining 5 children escaped the fire due to a series of events before and after the fire.
At 12:30am on Christmas Jennie Sodder woke up to the phone ringing.
On the phone 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.”
She then checked on her children.
She had allowed her kids to stay up later, playing with new toys. She noticed that lights were on and the curtains were closed.
She found one child asleep on the couch, then returned her to bed, assuming the other children were in the attic and had forgotten to close down the house.
At 1:00am, 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.
At 1:30am, Jennie Sodder woke up again to the smell of smoke. She got up and found a fire in George’s office.
This was also where the fuse box and telephone wires were.
Jennie woke George up and they escaped the house with four children.
The family yelled at the house, but did not hear from the other children and could not go upstairs to get them because the staircase was aflame.
The family tried to call for help, but their phone did not work so one of the children ran to a neighbor’s to call.
The family tried to locate their ladder to get to 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.
The fire department was small and volunteer only. They did not arrive until morning when the family assumed the other five children had already died.
When the fire department finally arrived, they 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.
The family’s Christmas lights stayed on through the beginning part of the blaze.
Would this have occurred if it was truly an electrical fire?
They found the family ladder had been moved from the side of the house and hidden on an embankment hear the home.
The telephone company discovered that someone had crawled up a telephone pole and cut the phone line leading to the Sodder’s house.
While sorting through the rubble, they found kitchen appliances intact.
How could this be if the fire was truly hot enough to burn human bones to ash?
Jennie Sodder contacted a crematorium who told her a two hour fire at 2,000 °F, both hotter and longer than the Sodder’s house fire, would still leave human bones intact.
Why were neither of George Sodder's previously working trucks able to move that night?
A local bus driver, passing through Fayetteville late Christmas, provided an alternate account.
The driver said he had seen some people throwing “balls of fire” at the house.
A few months later, 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 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 and human vertebrae bones were found.
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.
A woman who ran a Charleston hotel, claimed to have seen the children a week afterwards.
She said that 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,
“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”.
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
Two months before the fire in October 1945 a traveling life insurance salesman tried to sell George Sodder a policy.
When Sodder declined, the salesman told him his house would go “up in smoke … and your children are going to be destroyed.”
The salesman told George the cause of this tragedy would be “the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini.”
Someone in town had told George that he could fix his fuse boxes, warning him that they needed to be fixed or they would catch fire. George opted not to hire him as he had recently had the house rewired and cleared by the electric company.
The month of the fire, some of the Sodder children noticed two people in a car that would watch them on their way home from school.
The family, 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.
The Death of the Sodder kids.
The Sodder kids forced into slavery?
