The Sodder Children: Five Kids, One Christmas Fire, and No Remains

Just after midnight on Christmas morning, 1945, the telephone rang in the Sodder house outside Fayetteville, West Virginia.

Jennie Sodder got up to answer it. A woman she didn't know asked for a name she didn't recognize. In the background Jennie could hear laughing and the clink of glasses—a party somewhere. Wrong number. She hung up.

On her way back to bed she noticed things that weren't right. The downstairs lights were still on. The curtains were open. The front door was unlocked. Her daughter Marion was asleep on the sofa, and Jennie assumed the other children had gone up to bed. She turned off the lights, drew the curtains, locked the door, and lay down.

She'd just started to drift off when something hit the roof—a sharp bang, then a rolling sound.

About half an hour later, she woke up to smoke.

The fire

George Sodder was an Italian immigrant who'd built his own trucking business hauling coal and freight. He and Jennie had ten children; nine were home that night. One son was away.

When the fire broke out, George, Jennie, two-year-old Sylvia, and three of the older kids—Marion, John, and George Jr.—got out. Five others were upstairs: Maurice, 14. Martha, 12. Louis, 9. Jennie, 8. Betty, 5.

George broke a window to get back in and cut his arm open doing it. The ground floor was already engulfed. The staircase was burning.

So he ran for the ladder he always kept propped against the house.

It wasn't there.

He decided to drive one of his two coal trucks up to the wall and climb from the cab to the upstairs windows. Both trucks had run fine the day before. Neither would start. He tried to throw water from the rain barrel. It was frozen solid.

Marion ran to a neighbor's house to call the fire department and couldn't get an operator. A neighbor tried from a tavern down the road—same result. That neighbor finally drove into town and found Fire Chief F. J. Morris, who started a phone-tree of volunteers.

The fire station was about two and a half miles away. The crew arrived at 8 a.m. By then the house was a pile of smoking ash.

Declared dead in five days

A search of the site on Christmas Day turned up no remains. Chief Morris suggested the fire had burned hot enough to cremate five children completely. A state police inspector blamed faulty wiring. George, overwhelmed, filled the basement with five feet of dirt to make a memorial.

On December 30, 1945, the coroner issued five death certificates. Cause: "fire or suffocation."

But the Sodders had already started noticing the details that would consume the rest of their lives.

George had recently had the house's wiring checked, and the power company had called it sound. If the fire was electrical, why had the downstairs lights stayed on while the house burned? A telephone repairman told them their line looked like it had been cut, not burned. A man was later seen taking a block-and-tackle from the property that night; he pleaded guilty to stealing it but denied anything to do with the fire. And in the yard, Sylvia found a hard rubber object that George became convinced was some kind of incendiary device—which would explain the bang and the rolling sound on the roof.

Then there were the threats. A few months before Christmas, a stranger looking for hauling work had pointed at the fuse boxes and said, "This is going to cause a fire someday." A life-insurance salesman George had turned down had exploded at him: "Your goddamn house is going up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." George had been loudly anti-Mussolini in a small Italian community.

A private investigator the family hired later found that the same salesman had sat on the coroner's jury that ruled the fire an accident.

The bones

Jennie couldn't accept that five children could burn and leave nothing. She burned animal bones in her own experiments; they always left charred bone behind. Household appliances had been found in the basement, still recognizable.

In August 1949, the Sodders brought in a Washington, D.C. pathologist, Oscar B. Hunter, to dig the site properly. The excavation turned up damaged coins, a partly burned dictionary—and four human vertebrae.

The Smithsonian examined them. All four came from one person, aged roughly 16 to 22 at death. That made them unlikely to belong to Maurice, the oldest, at 14. The bones showed no signs of fire. The report concluded they'd most likely come in with the fill dirt George had used for the memorial.

In fairness to the official version, a Fayetteville firefighter pointed out decades later that gasoline drums and motors stored nearby could have intensified the heat, and that the fire likely smoldered far longer than the "45 minutes" often quoted. A search lasting a couple of hours on Christmas Day would never meet modern standards.

The state held hearings, then told the family their search was hopeless and closed the case. The FBI had already declined to get involved when J. Edgar Hoover wrote back in 1947 that it was a local matter.

The billboard on Route 16

So George and Jennie put up a billboard along Route 16 with five photographs and a question: what was their fate—kidnapped, murdered, or still alive? They offered $5,000 for information, then $10,000.

The leads never stopped. A tourist-stop owner said she'd served the children breakfast the morning after the fire. A woman at a Charleston hotel said she'd seen four of them a week later with two men and two women who wouldn't let her talk to them. George drove to Manhattan after spotting a newspaper photo of a schoolgirl he thought was Betty. In 1967, a woman near Houston wrote that a man had told her, after too many drinks, that he was Louis—and that he and Maurice were living in Texas. George went down with his son-in-law, Grover Paxton. Police helped them find the two men she meant. Both denied being Sodders. Paxton said years later that George never fully believed the denial.

Then, in the late 1960s, an envelope arrived postmarked from Kentucky. Inside was a photograph of a man in his mid-twenties with dark curly hair—and the same nose and lifted left eyebrow as their Louis. On the back, handwritten: "Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35."

They hired a detective and sent him to Kentucky. They never heard from him again. They added the new photo to the billboard.

George died in 1969. Jennie wore black every day from the fire until her own death in 1989. That's when the billboard finally came down.

What's documented, what's claimed, what's unknown

Documented: The fire on Christmas morning 1945; the five missing children and their ages; the fire crew's 8 a.m. arrival; the December 30 death certificates; the 1949 dig and the Smithsonian's report on the vertebrae; the decades-long billboard and reward.

Claimed: That the ladder was moved, the trucks tampered with, and the phone line cut deliberately; that the rubber object was an incendiary device; that the children were seen alive afterward. These come from the family and from witnesses whose sightings were never confirmed.

Unknown: Whether the children died in the fire or were taken before it started.

Sylvia, the two-year-old carried out of the house that night, said the fire was her earliest memory. She spent her life keeping her parents' promise not to let the story die. She passed away in 2021, at 79, still believing her brothers and sisters got out.

The iRunReality Short below walks through that night in about a minute. If you know West Virginia history or have seen the billboard, tell us in the comments.