I have been a fan of true crime for over 20 years. Through that time, the cases that have driven me the most research-obsessed have been disappearances, and missing persons. And among those cases, the disappearance of the Sodder children has always been at the forefront of my mind.
But before the case became infamous, the Sodder family lived a very simple, happy life.
The family patriarch, George Sodder, was born in Sardinia, Italy, in 1895. At the age of 13, he immigrated to the United States. He was accompanied by an older brother, who returned to Italy as soon as young George had cleared customs through Ellis Island.
George proved himself to be a very hard worker, and made his way to Pennsylvania to work on the railroads. He worked hard, carrying supplies and water to the railroad workers. Eventually, he worked his way up, and gained permanent employment in Smithers, West Virginia as a driver.
From there, George started his own trucking company, which hauled fill dirt to construction sites. A few years later, George gained a new contract, carrying coal from the mines throughout the region.
In Smithers, George met Jennie Cipriani, a young woman who worked for her storekeeper father. The Cipriani family had also immigrated from Italy. Though George scarcely spoke of his homeland, he and Jennie got on famously, and soon the two were happily married.
George and Jennie moved to Fayetteville, West Virginia, into a two-story, timber frame house. The house was located just a couple miles north of the town, and became a loud, and bustling family home.
George and Jennie had their first child in 1923, and by 1945, 9 more children were born to the Sodder family.
While George’s business grew from one coal truck to two, making a very comfortable living for his family, he rubbed a few of the community members the wrong way. George had very strong opinions, and wasn’t afraid to share them. He was especially vocal in his opposition of Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. While the Italian community generally came together to celebrate their homeland, some of George’s opposition ruffled a few feathers.
George grew even more steadfast in his opposition of Mussolini when his oldest son, Joe, served in the military and was stationed overseas during WWII.
In October of 1945, strange things started happening around the Sodder family.
An insurance salesman visited the Sodder home, and expressed that the home would “go up in smoke” and that the children “are going to be destroyed” in retaliation for George’s remarks against Mussolini.
In another instance, another man came to the Sodder house looking for work. George had none to offer him, but the man told him that a pair of fuse boxes attached to the house “could cause a fire someday”. George didn’t take the man’s comment seriously, as he’d just had the house re-wired, and he had been assured that his house was safe.
As October changed to November, another strange occurrence prickled at George and Jennie.
Their older sons had noticed a car that they didn’t recognize. The car routinely parked along the main highway through town, and seemed to watch and follow the Sodder children on their way home from school. As the occupants of the car never approached any of the children, the concern wasn’t escalated.
On Christmas Eve of 1945, George and Jennie were celebrating. They had news that their son was to return from war. It was going to be a merry Christmas, indeed.
19-year-old Marion returned home from work with small presents for three of her younger siblings – 12-year-old Martha, 8-year-old Jennie, and 5-year-old Betty. The kids were excited, and asked for permission to stay up later than usual and play with their new presents. Jennie gave them permission.
At around 10:00 PM, 14-year-old Maurice and 9-year-old Louis went outside to bring the cows in, and feed the chickens. They came in to bed, and left Marion with Martha, Jennie, and Betty downstairs.
The two older Sodder boys, 22-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr. had already gone to bed, as they’d spent the day working with their father. Jennie, reassured that her children were all settled and accounted for, took her youngest, 2-year-old Sylvia, upstairs with her, and went to bed herself.
At around 12:30 AM Christmas morning, Jennie, a known light sleeper, was woken up by the phone ringing. When she went downstairs to answer it, she was greeted by the voice of a woman she didn’t recognize looking for a name Jennie didn’t know. Jennie also made note of the sounds of glasses clinking and general merriment int he background.
When Jennie told the woman that she had the wrong number, the woman giggled, and Jennie hung up. Jennie then noticed that the lights were still on in the living, and that the curtains hadn’t been drawn shut. Jennie tended to those things, noting that Marion had fallen asleep on the couch. As Martha, Jennie, and Betty weren’t with her, she assumed that they’d gone up to the attic to their own bedroom. Jennie then went back to bed herself.
A half hour later, at around 1:00 AM, Jennie was woken up by another strange sound. She had heard what sounded like an object hitting the roof of the house with a loud bang, and then rolling down the side. Jennie stayed silent, trying to hear anything else, but soon fell back asleep when no more noise occurred.
Another short half hour later, Jennie woke up once again – this time, to the smell of smoke.
Jennie shot out of bed, and noticed that George’s office was on fire. She woke him up, grabbed Sylvia, and then tried to wake the other children in order to escape their house which was aflame.
George, Jennie, Marion, Sylvia, John, and George Jr. managed to get out of the house in time. They yelled and screamed for the other five children. However, the house’s staircase had caught fire, effectively trapping the children in the upstairs bedrooms.
George tried to call for the Fayetteville fire department, but the phone wouldn’t connect. It was completely dead. Marion then ran to a neighbour’s house to make the call. A driver who noticed the fired also tried to make a call to the fire department from a tavern. None of these calls went through.
George, who was barefoot, tried to climb the house’s outside wall to get to his children who he believed were still inside the house. The Sodder sons tried to find a ladder to help their father – a ladder was usually left resting against the side of the house. However, the ladder was nowhere to be found.
There was a water barrel nearby that could have helped with the flames, but it had frozen solid.
Thinking quickly on his feet, George thought about pulling his coal trucks up to the house, and using them to get up to the attic and upstairs bedrooms to reach his children. However, neither truck would start. This was odd to George, as the trucks had been in perfect working order mere hours earlier.
Finally, someone managed to get ahold of F.J. Morris, the fire chief. From there, the fire department’s phone tree went into effect, and firefighters were called to action. However, they weren’t able to arrive until later that morning.
By the time they arrived, there was very little that the fire department could do. The fire had finally been put out, but the house was nothing bur rubble and ash.
By 10:00 AM, Chief Morris informed Jennie and George that they hadn’t found any bones, but they presumed that their five children – Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty – had likely perished in the fire.
Chief Morris informed the Sodders that a more thorough investigation would be required, but George was too devastated to listen.
Four days after the fire, George and Jennie had their home bulldozed, covering it in 5 feet of dirt. They intended on turning the site into a memorial for the children they had lost.
The following day, a coroner’s inquest had concluded that the children must have been victims of the fire. Among one of the members of the inquest was the man who had uttered threats against the Sodder children for George’s negative opinions of Mussolini, though George definitely had not been aware of that at the time.
On December 30th, George and Jennie were issued five death certificates for their children.
As the remaining members of the Sodder family attempted to make sense of their lives, they began to ask questions.
They wondered why the ladder hadn’t been where they’d last left it, and why the coal trucks wouldn’t start. They also wondered how the fire had started.
The fire department had speculated that it had been an electrical fire, but the Christmas lights were still on and shining bright, even through the flames. They had also wondered if the fire had affected the phone lines, but they were told otherwise. A repairman informed them that the lines had been cut, and that was why the phone in the Sodder home hadn’t worked that night.
And while that was highly suspicious, it was the fact that George and Jennie didn’t believe for a single second that their children had actually died in the house fire. No traces of their bodies had been found, while many of the appliances in the house remained intact and recognizable.
This got Jennie thinking. She started reading articles about a house fire that had killed a family of seven, noting that skeletal remains had been found at the scene. Jennie found it completely inconceivable that her children had been in the house at all when the fire started.
She began experimenting with animal bones, trying to see what it took for them to completely turn to ash. Nothing she did rendered them to ash. Jennie then reached out to a local crematorium, and discussed her thinking with an employee. She was told that bones often remained after a body had been cremated, and that it took temperatures of 2,000 degrees F and two hours or longer for bodies to burn.
There was no way that the Sodder house fire had ever reached that temperature, or above.
Jennie also believed that the woman who called had done so to ensure that the family was in the house at the time of the fire. However, the woman who made the call had been found, and she confirmed that it had simply been a wrong number.
In the spring of 1946, the Sodders planted a memorial garden at the site of their former home. Jennie tended to the garden for the rest of her life.
That same year, George and Jennie’s suspicions that the fire had not been caused by faulty electrical wiring in their home were reinforced. A bus driver came forward with a strange statement. He stated that on Christmas Eve, he had seen “some people” throwing “balls of fire” at the Sodder home.
One day, when Jennie was tending to the garden, Sylvia found a small, hard, green object in the bushes nearby while playing. The object looked like a hand grenade, or a possible “pineapple bomb” type incendiary device. To George and Jennie, this made sense with what the bus driver had seen the night their house burned to the ground.
As the months – and years – wore on, the Sodders never lost hope that they would find their children. Reports of sightings kept coming in, and George often took it upon himself to investigate them himself.
Some of the sightings reportedly occurred the night of the fire. One woman claimed to have seen the children peering out of the window of a car as it drove by, while another reportedly served the children breakfast the next morning at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston. The woman stated that the children were with adults driving a car with Florida plates.
To assist with finding answers, George and Jennie hired C.C. Tinsley, a private investigator from Gauley Bridge.
Along with discovering that the man who’d uttered threats against the Sodder children had been part of the coroner’s inquest, he also discovered that Chief Morris had, supposedly, kept a heart he had found at the scene locked and buried in a metal box.
Enraged, George and Tinsley confronted Morris about it. They were given the box, which they took to a funeral director in the area. The funeral director informed them that what Morris had kept was not, in fact a heart. What he had was a piece of raw beef liver.
George was not deterred from finding his children, though his trust in his community had crumbled.
George tried to reach out to the FBI for assistance, but he was rebuffed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to him directly, informing him that there was little the FBI could do as the investigation was not within their jurisdiction, and they had not been invited in by local law enforcement.
In August of 1949, George persuaded a pathologist from Washington D. C. named Oscar Hunter to supervise an excavation of the site of the house fire. A few trinkets were found, along with a few small bones. The bones were then sent to Marshall T. Newman at the Smithsonian Institution, who specialized in such matters.
Newman was able to confirm that the bones were lumbar vertebrae, and that they belonged to the same person. The person was estimated to be between 16 or 17 years old, but that the bones showed so signs of having been exposed to fire.
It was concluded that the vertebrae had most likely come from the dirt George had used on the site after the fire. Newman found it very strange that these were the only bones found, and could not definitively conclude that they belonged to one of the Sodder children.
The excavation of the Sodder house fire had garnered national media attention, which humiliated local law enforcement. Seemingly in a fit of pique, Governor Okey L. Patteson and state police superintendent W. E. Burchett closed the case at a state level, telling the family that finding a resolution was a hopeless endeavour.
George and Jennie were not at all deterred. Instead, they put up a large billboard with photos and descriptions of the children, and boasting a $5,000 reward. They also printed and distributed flyers far and wide.
After years of investigation, Tinsley gave up the case. He believed that he’d done all he could for the Sodder family to that point, but he assisted where he could, sympathizing for their cause.
In 1952, another sighting of the Sodder children was reported. A woman came forward and stated that she’d seen them at a Charleston hotel roughly a week after the fire. She said that they were with two men and two women who, in her words, appeared to be of “Italian extraction”.
The woman tried speaking to the children, but was iced out by the four adults. They then began speaking to each other in rapid Italian, before they ceased speaking to her at all. She said that they left early the following morning.
The woman’s story did not seem credible to investigators.
George travelled all over the United States following leads. In New York, he saw a photo of a young ballet dancer in a magazine. Sure that this was his daughter Betty, George found the ballet school, and begged for the girl to speak with him. The girl refused, and George left crushed.
George travelled from Missouri, to Texas, to Florida in search of his children. He never gave up hope that his children were alive and well somewhere, waiting to be brought home.
In 1967, George travelled to Houston after receiving a letter from a woman claiming that Louis and Maurice were both there. The woman stated that Louis had confessed his identity to her after a night of drinking.
When George and his son-in-law arrived there, they asked the police to help them find the woman, and the two men. When found, the men denied being the missing Sodder children, and sent George on his way.
That same year, the Sodders received another letter that gave them some hope.
The letter had been postmarked from Central City, Kentucky, though there was no return address. Inside the envelope was a photo of a man in his late 20s or early 30s. Jennie believed that the man bore a very striking resemblance to her son, Louis.
On the back of the photo was written the following:
Louis Sodder
I love brother Frankie
Ilil boys
A90132 or 35
George and Jennie updated their billboard to include the photo they believed to be their now-adult son Louis. They also enlarged the photo, and placed it on their mantle, with other family photos.
They hired another private investigator to investigate the photo’s origins. However, the man soon disappeared with his payment and they never heard from him again.
To this day, the photo of the man is believed to be the most credible lead as to the whereabout of one of the missing Sodder children.
George Sodder passed away in 1969.
Jennie never gave up hope of finding her children. She tended to the memorial garden until her death in 1989.
Following her death, the surviving Sodder family members took down the iconic billboard. However, they never stopped looking for answers.
The remaining family members have theorized that Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty were possibly kidnapped by the Sicilian Mafia. They theorize that the mafia had attempted to extort money from George, who refused. The Sodder children were then taken in retaliation.
However, the most believable theory is that the children did, indeed, die in the fire, and were trapped under the rubble.
Sylvia Sodder Paxton, the youngest Sodder child, passed away in 2021.
For nearly 80 years, the disappearance of the Sodder children has haunted the community of Fayetteville, West Virginia.
To this day, web sleuths, bloggers, journalists, and podcasters speculate the various sightings, theories, and possibilities. But the question persists – What happened to Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty Sodder on Christmas of 1945?
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Sources:
The Children Who Went Up In Smoke – Karen Abbott – Smithsonian Magazine
Lost In The Ashes: The Mystery Of The Vanished Sodder Children – John Kuroski – All That’s Interesting
35 Puzzling Facts About The Sodder Children Disappearance – Emily Madriga – Thought Catalog
The Disappearance of the Sodder Children – Sara J. Rathore – Medium
The True Story of the Disappearance of the Sodder Children – Thomm Quackenbush – Grunge
Casefile podcast – Case 192: The Sodder Children
The Sodder Children Disappearance Wikipedia page