[OVERVIEW]

It was Christmas Eve in 1945 in the town of Fayetteville, West Virginia. The Sodder family was asleep when they were woke up to smoke filling their home at 1 am. Most of them got out, but there were some who seemingly vanished without a trace.

[SODDER FAMILY + FIRE]

The Sodder family consisted of the parents, George and Jennie, along with 9 children. They had another son but he was shipped off to war. In the house was John, 23. Marion, 17. George Jr., 16. Maurice, 14. Martha, 12. Louis, 9. Jennie, 8. Betty, 5. And Sylvia, 2. All of the children slept upstairs. John, Marion, Sylvia and George Jr., were able to escape. Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty were assumed to be inside the house. The children who didnt escape shared two bedrooms, the girls in one and the boys in another.

The fire started around 1 AM. When George realized that not all of his children were outside he went back inside. He couldn't get back upstairs however because the staircase was engulfed in flames. He went back outside and went to retrieve his ladder, only to find that it was missing. He had the idea of pulling his truck up to the house, climbing on top of the truck and climbing in the window, only his cars wouldn't start, even though they both worked perfectly the day before.

During this time, the oldest daughter Marion ran to a neighbors house to call the fire department. She received no answer. Another neighbor who saw the smoke also called the fire department but she too got no answer.

That neighbor decided to drive into town herself and she found the fire chief, F.J. Morris. Even though the fire department was only 2.5 miles away from the burning home they didn't get there until 8 am, 7 hours after the fire started.

Authorities searched the ashes for the remaining children but found nothing. They had been presumed dead. The fire chief said that the fire must have been so hot that it cremated all parts of the children, including their bones.

While that may seem reasonable, it's not accurate. When a person is cremated, some parts of their bones remains, even if in fragmented form. Also, you would be able to smell flesh burning in a house fire, but there were no reports of that kind of smell during or after the fire.

The coroners jury determined it to be faulty wiring (and we will come back to this in a minute cause it's important). Days after the fire the children's death certificates were issued. The cause of death was ruled smoke inhalation as no one wants to really believe these innocent children burned to death.

[GEORGE SODDER]

No, no one believes George had 5 of his children killed. But people do believe it had something to do with him.

It's important to know that George is original from Italy and immigrated to the United States when he was 13. His brother, who accompanied him immediately returned to Italy, leaving George on his own. Jennie was also from Italy but her family moved to the US when she was 3.

George and Jennie got married and moved to Fayetteville, which at the time was a popular place for Italian immigrants.

Now George never told anyone who he was so desperate to leave Italy, making people believe he might have gotten caught up in some shady things at a young age.

Although he never explained why he left, he was always vocal about his disapproval of Mussolini and the fascist government of Italy.

[STRANGE OCCURRENCES]

George and Jennie started to suspect their children were not really in the house. They believed they were kidnapped before the fire started and the fire was just a diversion.

The fall before the fire a man came up to the house trying to sell life insurance. Some people today think it was a way of trying to pin the death of the children on George and Jennie is they accepted the life insurance for the children. But George didn't want life insurance on anyone and the salesman started to become irate. He even started threatening him saying, "Your goddam house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. You're going to pay for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini."

This salesman will come back later on.

2 of the surviving boys witnessed, just days leading up to the fire, a man watching the younger Sodder children. It's unknown if it was the same man who threatened the Sodder family.

Another man, a little bit before the salesman, also came by the house. He was asking about doing some work around the house for him. He meandered to the back of the house, pointed to two separate fuse boxes, and said, "This is going to cause a fire someday." This was strange to George as he had just had the wiring checked by the local power company, which pronounced it in fine condition.

A 12:30 am, just a little bit before the fire happened, the family received a phone call, to which Jennie answered. An unfamiliar female voice asked for an unfamiliar name. There was raucous laughter and glasses clinking in the background. Jennie said, "You have the wrong number," and hung up. During the phonecall she noticed the lights downstairs were turned on. She went downstairs and saw Marion on the couch asleep. She turned out the lights and went back to bed and as she started to fall back asleep she heard a loud bang on the roof and something rolling (I will return to what it might be later on).

If the fire had been caused by faulty wiring as the cause was listed, the lights shouldn't have been working.

A telephone repair man told the Sodders that their lines appeared cut, not burnt.

A neighbor also reported a man carrying a block-and-tackle, something that is used for taking engines out of cars. While the engines weren't missing from the cars, it could also be used to tamper with the engine, which could explain why neither of his cars would work even though they were fine just hours before the fire.

When visiting the memorial that George set him for his missing children, Sylvia found a hard, rubber object that is believed to have caused the loud bang and rolling noise that Jennie heard before the fire started. George recognized it as a Napalm Pineapple Bomb.

[CREMATORIUM]

Not believing her children died in the fire, Jennie started to collect dead animals and would burn them. She noticed that the bones always remained.

She asked someone who worked at a crematorium about bodies in fires. They told her that even bodies that burned at over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (which is hotter than an average house fire) at 2 hours still had bone fragments left.

The house only burned for 45 minutes, meaning there should have been bones of the children in the ashes.

Another thing to note is that many house appliances were found in the rubble, meaning not everything had burned.

[SIGHTINGS]

There have also been multiple alleged sightings of the children.

One was even during the fire. A woman claimed to have seen the 5 children in a car, driving away from the fire.

Another woman who worked at a tourist shop claimed to have seen them the next day. She claimed she served them breakfast and they were in a car with a Florida license plate.

About a week after the fire another woman in Charleston claimed to see 4 of the 5 children at a hotel. She said they were with 2 men and 2 women. She tried to go up to the children to talk to them but the men were hostile towards her. She noted that they left early the next day.

A year after the fire George saw a newspaper article about New York school children and in one of the photos was a girl who he thought looked exactly like Betty. George even drove up to New York and tracked down the parents but they refused to speak to him.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATION]

2 years later George and Jennie enlisted the help of the FBI. However, they needed the police and fire departments permission, which was denied.

So the family hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley. He found out they the person on the coroners jury who came to the conclusion that the house caught on fire due to the wiring was the same salesman who threatened George.

Tinsley also heard a local minister saying the fire chief did find a heart at the house, hid it, put it in a box and later buried it where the house once stood. The PI made him dig the box up and inside was a beef liver and not a human heart, and it wasn't in the fire. When asked why he said he had hoped it would give the family closure.

The family hired a pathologist who took dirt samples above the basement as the basement was the only thing left. He found vertebrae bones in the dirt. He sent it off to the Smithsonian. Now this was before DNA testing, so they were not able to figure out who it belonged to. But what they did figure out was that it came from a person who was 16-17 years old. The oldest child who was missing was only 14. They also determined that the bones were never in contact with any fire. They also said that since the house burned for less than an hour that they would have expected to fine bones of all the children, not just four pieces of vertebrae from one alleged child. While the bones could be used today for DNA testing, that option is not available as the bones are currently missing.

Even though it was determined that the bones couldn't have come from any of the kids, the Governor called a hearing and declared the case closed.

[BILLBOARD]

The family put up a billboard on route 16, advertising the missing children. They asked why the police would lie and try to force them to accept the lie. This billboard stayed up for 40 years.

[TIPS]

The family got many tips. 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 lead, always returning home without any answers.

In 1968, more than 20 years after the fire, Jennie went to get the mail and found an envelope addressed only to her. It was postmarked in Kentucky but had no return address. Inside was a photo of a man. On its flip side a cryptic handwritten note read: "Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35." She and George couldn't deny 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 had the same straight, strong nose, the same upward tilt of the left eyebrow. Once again they hired a private detective and sent him to Kentucky. They never heard from him again. Some think he got killed for getting to close and some think he took the money and ran.

[FAMILY LEGACY]

George died a year after the photo was sent to them. Jennie erected a fence around her property and began adding rooms to her home, building layer after layer between her and the outside. Since the fire she had worn black exclusively, as a sign of mourning, and continued to do so until her own death in 1989. The billboard finally came down.

Her children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with theories of their own: The local mafia had tried to recruit him 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.

The last known surviving Sodder child is Sylvia Sodder. She was 2 at the time of the fire, and even though she was so young she says she still remembers hearing screaming and blood pouring from her fathers wounds as he tried to get back inside. She says she believes that her siblings didn't die in the fire and it's something her her daughter and son believe as well and intend on proving one day.

[THOUGHTS]

So what do you guys think happened to the 5 missing children? Was the fire truly hot enough to burn all of their remains, even bones? Were they kidnapped before the house was set on fire? If so, why only take 5? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!