Notes

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder residence in Fayetteville, West Virginia, United States. At the time, it was occupied by George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and nine of their ten children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the nine children escaped. The bodies of the other five children have never been found. The surviving Sodder family believed for the rest of their lives that the five missing children survived.[1]

The Sodders never rebuilt the house, instead converting the site into a memorial garden to the lost children. In the 1950s, as they came to doubt that the children had perished, the family put up a billboard at the site along State Route 16 with pictures of the five, offering a reward for information that would bring closure to the case. It remained standing until shortly after Jennie Sodder's death in 1989.[2]

In support of their belief that the children survived, the Sodders had pointed to a number of unusual circumstances before and during the fire. George disputed the Fayetteville fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical in origin, noting that he had recently had the house rewired and inspected. George and his wife suspected arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's outspoken criticism of the fascist government of his native Italy.

State and federal efforts to investigate the case further in the early 1950s yielded no new information. The family did, however, later receive what may have been a picture of one of the boys as an adult during the 1960s. The last surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, continued to publicize the case in the 21st century in the media and online.[3]
The Sodder family celebrated on Christmas Eve 1945. Marion (19), the oldest daughter, had been working at a dime store in downtown Fayetteville, and she surprised three of her younger sisters—Martha (12), Jennie (8), and Betty (5)[8]—with new toys she had bought for them as gifts. The younger children were so excited that they asked their mother if they could stay up past what would have been their usual bedtime.[8]

At 10 p.m., Jennie told them they could stay up a little later, as long as the two oldest boys who were still awake, 14-year-old Maurice and his 9-year-old brother Louis, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed themselves. George and the two oldest boys, John (22) and George Jr. (16), who had spent the day working with their father, were already asleep. After reminding the children of those remaining chores, she took Sylvia (2) upstairs with her and they went to bed together.[8]

The telephone rang at 12:30 a.m. Jennie woke and went downstairs to answer it. The caller was a woman whose voice she did not recognize, asking for a name she was not familiar with, with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses in the background. Jennie told the caller she had reached a wrong number, later recalling the woman's "weird laugh". She hung up and returned to bed. As she did, she noticed that the lights were still on and the curtains were not drawn, two things the children normally attended to when they stayed up later than their parents.[7] Marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so Jennie assumed the other children who had stayed up later had gone back up to the attic where they slept.[1] She closed the curtains, turned out the lights, and returned to bed.[7]

At 1 a.m., Jennie was again awakened by the sound of an object hitting the house's roof with a loud bang, then a rolling noise.[1] After hearing nothing further, she went back to sleep. After another half hour she woke up again, smelling smoke. When she got up again she found that the room George used for his office was on fire, around the telephone line and fuse box.[9] Jennie woke him and he in turn woke his older sons.[2]

Both parents and four of their children—Marion, Sylvia, John and George Jr—escaped the house. They frantically yelled to the children upstairs but heard no response; they could not go up there as the stairway itself was already aflame.[6] John said in his first police interview after the fire that he went up to the attic to alert his siblings sleeping there, though he later changed his story to say that he only called up there and did not actually see them.[9]

Efforts to find aid and rescue the children were unexpectedly complicated. The phone did not work, so Marion ran to a neighbor's house to call the Fayetteville fire department. A driver on the nearby road had also seen the flames and called from a nearby tavern; they too were unsuccessful either because they could not reach the operator[6] or because the phone there turned out to be broken. Either the neighbor or the passing motorist was eventually successful in reaching the fire department from another phone in the center of town.[8]

George, barefoot,[7] climbed the house's outside wall and broke open an attic window, cutting his arm in the process. He and his sons intended to use a ladder to the attic to rescue the other children, but it was not in its usual spot resting against the house and could not be found anywhere nearby. A water barrel that could have been used to extinguish the fire was frozen solid. George then tried to pull both of the trucks he used in his business up to the house and use them to climb to the attic window, but neither of them would start despite having worked perfectly during the previous day.[1]

Frustrated, the six Sodders who had escaped had no choice but to watch the house burn down and collapse over the next 45 minutes. They assumed the other five children had perished in the blaze. The fire department, low on manpower due to the war and relying on individual firefighters to call each other, did not respond until later that morning.[2] Chief F.J. Morris said the next day that the already slow response was further hampered by his inability to drive the fire truck, requiring that he wait until someone who could drive was available.[8]

The firefighters, one of whom was a brother of Jennie's,[10] could do little but look through the ashes that were left in the Sodders' basement. By 10 a.m., Morris told the Sodders that they had not found any bones, as might have been expected if the other children had been in the house as it burned.[1] According to another account, they did find a few bone fragments and internal organs, but chose not to tell the family;[2] it has also been noted by modern fire professionals that their search was cursory at best.[10] Nevertheless, Morris believed that the five children unaccounted for had died in the fire, suggesting it had been hot enough to burn their bodies completely.[As spring approached, the Sodders, as they had said they would, planted flowers in the soil bulldozed over the house. Jennie tended it carefully for the rest of her life.[9] However, further developments in early 1946 reinforced the family's belief that the children they were memorializing might, in fact, be alive somewhere.[8]Duration Missing for 77 years, 4 months and 12 days

Evidence soon emerged indicating that the fire had not started in the electrical fault and was instead set deliberately. 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.[6] 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 by then there was no way to prove it.[8]

Other witnesses claimed to have seen the missing Sodder children themselves. One woman who had been watching the fire from the road said she had seen some of them peering out of a passing car while the house was burning. Another woman at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston said she had served them breakfast the next morning, and noted the presence of a car with Florida license plates in the rest stop's parking lot as well.[1]

The Sodders hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley from the nearby town of Gauley Bridge[1] to look into the case. Tinsley informed the family that the insurance salesman who had threatened George over his anti-Mussolini sentiments had been on the coroner's jury that ruled the fire an accident. He also learned of rumors around Fayetteville that despite his report to the Sodders that no remains had been found in the ashes, Morris had found a heart which he later packed into a metal box and secretly buried.[1]

Morris had apparently confessed this to a local minister, who in turn confirmed it to George. George and Tinsley went to Morris and confronted him with this news. Morris agreed to show the two where he had buried the metal box and they dug it up. They took what they found inside the box to a local funeral director, who after examining it told them it was in reality fresh beef liver that had never been exposed to fire. Later, more rumors circulated around Fayetteville—that Morris had afterwards admitted the box with the liver had indeed not come from the fire originally; he had supposedly placed it there in the hope that the Sodders would find it and be satisfied that the missing children had indeed died in the fire