Early Christmas morning, December 25, 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.
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.
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. Their last surviving daughter, Sylvia, along with their grandchildren, continued to publicize the case in the 21st century in the media and online.
Background
George Sodder was born with the name Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, Italy, in 1895. He immigrated to the United States 13 years later, with an older brother who went back home as soon as both boys had cleared customs at Ellis Island. For the rest of his life, George, as he came to be known, would not talk much about why he had left his homeland.
Sodder eventually found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies to workers. After a few years he took more permanent work as a driver in Smithers, West Virginia. He then started his own trucking company, initially hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauling coal mined in the region. Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper's daughter in Smithers who had also emigrated from Italy in her childhood, married George in 1922.
The Sodders settled outside nearby Fayetteville, which had a large population of Italian immigrants, in a two-story timber frame house two miles (3.2 km) north of town. In 1923, they had the first of their ten children. George's business prospered, and they became "one of the most respected middle-class families around" in the words of one local official. However, George had strong opinions about many subjects and was not shy about expressing them, sometimes alienating people. In particular, his strident opposition to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had led to some strong arguments with other members of the immigrant community.
The last of the Sodder children, Sylvia, was born in 1942. By then, their second-oldest son, Joe (21), had left home to serve in the military during World War II. The following year, Mussolini was deposed, and in 1945, executed. However, George's criticism of the late dictator had left some hard feelings. In October 1945, a visiting life insurance salesman, after being rebuffed, warned George that his house "[would go] up in smoke ... and your children are going to be destroyed", attributing this all to "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." Another visitor to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George was puzzled by the observation, since he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed, and the local electric company had said afterwards it was safe. In the weeks before Christmas that year, George's older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.
Christmas Eve 1945 house fire
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)—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.
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 (3) upstairs with her, and they went to bed together.
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 the 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. 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. She closed the curtains, turned out the lights, and returned to bed.
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. 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. Jennie woke him, and he in turn woke his older sons.
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. 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.
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 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.
George, barefoot, attempted to climb the house's outside wall and broke open a 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 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.
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. 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.
The firefighters, one of whom was a brother of Jennie's, 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. According to another account, they did find a few bone fragments and internal organs, but chose not to tell the family; other fire professionals concluded that their search had been cursory at best. 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.
Aftermath
Morris told George to leave the site undisturbed so that the state fire marshal's office could conduct a more thorough investigation. However, after four days, George and his wife could not bear the sight anymore, so he bulldozed 5 feet (1.5 m) of dirt over the site with the intention of converting it to a memorial garden for the lost children. The local coroner convened an inquest the next day, which held that the fire was an accident caused by "faulty wiring". Among the jurors was the man who had threatened George that his house would be burned down and his children "destroyed" in retribution for his anti-Mussolini remarks.
Death certificates for the five children were issued on December 30. The local newspaper contradicted itself, stating that all the bodies had been found, but then later in the same story reporting that only part of one body was recovered. George and Jennie were too grief-stricken to attend the funeral on January 2, 1946, but their surviving children did.
Family questions about the official account
Not long afterward, as they began to rebuild their lives, the Sodder family started to question all the official findings about the fire. They wondered why, if it had been caused by an electrical problem, the family's Christmas lights had remained on throughout the fire's early stages, when the power should have gone out. Then, they found the ladder that had been missing from the side of the house on the night of the fire at the bottom of an embankment 75 feet (23 m) away.
A telephone repairman told the Sodders that the house's phone line had not been burned through in the fire, as they had initially thought, but cut by someone who had been willing and able to climb 14 feet (4.3 m) up the pole and reach 2 feet (61 cm) away from it to do so. A man whom neighbors had seen stealing a block and tackle from the property around the time of the fire was identified and arrested. He admitted to the theft, and claimed he had been the one who cut the phone line, thinking it was a power line, but denied having anything to do with the fire. However, no record identifying the suspect exists, and why he would have wanted to cut any utility lines to the Sodder house while stealing the block and tackle has never been explained. Jennie said in 1968 that if he had cut the power line, she and her husband, along with their other four children, would never have been able to make it out of the house.
Jennie also had trouble accepting Morris's belief that all traces of the children's bodies had been burned completely in the fire. Many of the household appliances had been found, still recognizable, in the ash, along with fragments of the tin roof. She contrasted the results of the fire with a newspaper account of a similar house fire that she read around the same time that killed a family of seven; skeletal remains of all the victims were reported to have been found in that case. Jennie burned small piles of animal bones to see if they would be completely consumed; none ever were. An employee of a local crematorium she contacted told her that human bones remain even after bodies are burned at 2,000 °F (1,090 °C) for two hours, far longer and hotter than the house fire could have been.
The Sodders' trucks' failure to start was also considered. George believed they had been tampered with, perhaps by the same man who stole the block and tackle and cut the phone line. However, one of George's sons-in-law told the Charleston Gazette-Mail in 2013 that he had come to believe that Sodder and his sons might have, in their haste to start the trucks, flooded the engines.
Some accounts have suggested the wrong-number phone call to the Sodder house might have also somehow been connected to the fire. However, investigators later located the woman who had made the call. She confirmed it had been a wrong number on her part.
Subsequent developments
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. However, further developments in early 1946 reinforced the family's belief that the children they were memorializing might, in fact, be alive somewhere.