The Sodder Children

For nearly forty years, if you drove Route 16 outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, you passed a billboard with five children’s faces on it.

They were black-and-white school portraits, the kind every family had: two boys and three girls, neatly combed, looking straight at the camera. Above them were their names. Below them was a promise of a reward for information. And on the sign, in plain lettering, was the question their parents asked every day for the rest of their lives.

What happened to them?

The Family

George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu on the island of Sardinia, Italy. He came to the United States in 1908, when he was thirteen years old, and found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania before settling in Fayetteville, a town in the mountains of southern West Virginia with a large community of Italian immigrants. He was smart and hardworking, and he built a successful trucking business, hauling dirt for construction and later coal. He married Jennie Cipriani, who had also come from Italy as a girl. Between 1923 and 1943 they had ten children.

The Sodders were prosperous, respected, and — this matters — George was outspoken. He had strong opinions about politics, and in a town where many immigrants still admired the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, George openly despised him and said so. It made him enemies. In the months before Christmas 1945, strange things started happening around the Sodder house.

In the fall, a stranger came to the house asking about hauling work. He walked around to the back of the house, pointed at two separate fuse boxes, and said, “This is going to cause a fire someday.” George was puzzled. He had just had the house rewired, and the electric company had inspected it and declared it safe.

Not long after, a life insurance salesman came by. When George refused to buy a policy, the man became angry. He told George that his house was going to “go up in smoke” and his children would be “destroyed” — as payback, he said, for the “dirty remarks” George had made about Mussolini.

And in the weeks before Christmas, the older Sodder boys noticed a car parked along the main highway, its occupants watching the younger children as they walked home from school.

Christmas Eve

On the night of December 24, 1945, eleven members of the Sodder family were at home in their two-story timber house about two miles outside Fayetteville. (The oldest son, Joe, was away in the army.)

It was a happy evening. Their oldest daughter, Marion, had brought home new toys from the dime store where she worked, and the younger children were thrilled. When Jennie told the kids it was time for bed around ten o’clock, five of them — Maurice, fourteen; Martha, twelve; Louis, nine or ten, depending on which record you trust; Jennie, eight; and Betty, five — begged to stay up a little longer and play. Their mother agreed, reminding Maurice and Louis to put the cows away and feed the chickens before they went to sleep. Then she took the baby, Sylvia, and went to bed. George and the two oldest boys were already asleep.

At about half past midnight, the telephone rang.

Jennie went downstairs to answer it. A woman’s voice asked for a name Jennie didn’t recognize. In the background, Jennie heard glasses clinking and odd laughter. Jennie said the woman had the wrong number and hung up. As she went back to bed, she noticed that the downstairs lights were still on, the curtains hadn’t been drawn, and the front door was unlocked — all things the children usually took care of. Marion was asleep on the living room couch. Jennie assumed the others had gone up to bed. She locked the door and turned off the lights.

At around one o’clock, she was woken again by the sound of something hitting the roof with a loud bang, then a rolling noise. She heard nothing more and drifted back to sleep.

When she woke the third time, the house was full of smoke.

The Fire

The fire had started in the area of George’s office, near the front of the house, and spread with terrifying speed. George and Jennie and four of the children — Marion, Sylvia, and two of the older boys, John and George Jr. — escaped. John later said he had run upstairs to warn the younger children before he fled, though his accounts of that moment varied over the years.

The children’s bedrooms were upstairs. The stairway was already engulfed in flames.

What happened next is a chain of failures so strange that it is hard to read without feeling the hair rise on your neck.

George ran to get the ladder he always kept leaning against the house. It wasn’t there. It was later found in an embankment some seventy-five feet away. He tried to drive one of his two coal trucks up against the house so he could climb onto it and reach the upstairs windows. Neither truck would start — though both had worked fine the day before. He tried to fill a barrel with water from the rain barrel. The water was frozen solid.

Marion ran to a neighbor’s house to call the fire department. The operator never answered. Another neighbor tried from a different phone; he couldn’t get through either. Eventually someone drove into Fayetteville and found the fire chief, F. J. Morris, in person. Morris used what was called a “phone tree” to reach his firefighters, and the department didn’t arrive until about eight o’clock in the morning — seven hours later. The fire station was only two and a half miles away.

By then, the Sodder house had burned to the ground in less than forty-five minutes. There was nothing left but the basement, full of ash.

No Bones

George and Jennie believed their five children had died. Of course they did. But when they and the authorities searched the ashes, they found something that would torment them for the rest of their lives.

Nothing.

No bones. No teeth. No remains of any kind.

The fire chief told them the fire had been hot enough to cremate the bodies completely. George and Jennie didn’t believe it. They had read about house fires in the papers. They knew that when people died in house fires, their remains were found. In fact, Jennie later conducted her own experiment, burning the bones of animals — chicken, beef, pork — in a fire to see if they would turn to ash. They didn’t.

Within days, the state issued death certificates for all five children. A coroner’s inquest declared that the cause of the fire had been faulty wiring. The insurance salesman who had threatened George, it later emerged, served on that coroner’s jury.

And then the stories started coming in.

The Sightings

A woman who said she had watched the fire from the road claimed she had seen some of the children being driven away in a passing car while the house burned.

A woman who ran a tourist stop between Fayetteville and Charleston said she had served breakfast to the missing children the morning after the fire. She said a car with Florida license plates had been parked outside.

A woman at a hotel in Charleston said that about a week after the fire she saw four of the children with two men and two women, all of Italian appearance. When she tried to speak to the children, she said, one of the men looked at her with hostility and began talking quickly in Italian. The group left the hotel early the next morning.

A telephone repairman later told the Sodders that the phone line to the house appeared to have been cut, not burned. And a bus driver passing on the night of the fire told them he had seen people throwing “balls of fire” onto the roof of the house. Months later, as the snow melted, Sylvia Sodder found a small, hard, dark green rubber object in the yard near where she remembered hearing the thump on the roof. George believed it was a pineapple bomb — an incendiary device.

The Search

In 1949, George and Jennie hired a pathologist, Oscar B. Hunter, to excavate the site of the fire. It was a careful dig, and it turned up a handful of small items, including several fragments of a human vertebra. The fragments were sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination. The finding came back: the bones belonged to a single person who was roughly sixteen to twenty-two years old. They showed no signs of having been in a fire. The Smithsonian suggested they had probably been in the dirt that George had brought in to fill the basement when he turned the site into a memorial garden.

None of the missing children had been older than fourteen.

George wrote to the FBI asking for help; J. Edgar Hoover’s office replied that it could not get involved unless local authorities asked, and they never did. In 1952, George and Jennie put up the billboard along Route 16, with their children’s faces and a reward of $5,000, later raised to $10,000. They printed flyers and mailed them across the country. George traveled anywhere a tip took him. Once he saw a newspaper photograph of schoolchildren in New York City and became convinced one of the girls was Betty. He drove to New York, but the family of the child he believed was his daughter refused to let him see her.

The Photograph

In 1967 or 1968, more than two decades after the fire, Jennie Sodder went to her mailbox and found an envelope addressed to her, postmarked from Kentucky. There was no return address. Inside was a photograph of a young man in his mid-twenties.

On the back, someone had written:

Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 — or possibly A90135.

George and Jennie stared at the face. There was a resemblance — the dark hair, the shape of the nose, the eyebrows. They were certain it was their son, grown up. They hired a private investigator and sent him to Kentucky to find the young man.

They never heard from the investigator again.

The Sodders added the photograph of the grown man to their billboard and hung a large framed copy above their fireplace. They never found out who sent it or why.