Beyond the Veil Magazine

The Sodder Children Mystery

Issue #5: May 1979

On Christmas Eve 1945, fire consumed the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jennie Sodder escaped with four of their nine children. The remaining five (Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty) were trapped upstairs.

Or so everyone believed.

When the ashes cooled, no remains were found. No bones. No teeth. Nothing. The fire that should have claimed five young lives had apparently vaporised them entirely. It was, investigators claimed, an impossibly hot blaze.

But the Sodders never believed their children had died. For the next forty years, until their own deaths, George and Jennie Sodder searched for their missing children, convinced they had been kidnapped and the fire set to cover the crime.

The Night of the Fire

George Sodder was a successful contractor of Italian immigrant stock. He had spoken publicly against Mussolini, which had earned him threatening letters and a visit from a man who warned that his house would “go up in smoke” and his children would be “destroyed.”

The fire started around 1 a.m. on Christmas morning. Jennie was woken by a telephone call from a woman with a strange voice asking for a name she did not recognise. Looking out the window, she saw a strange object on the lawn and heard what sounded like something rolling on the roof.

When she smelled smoke, she and George woke the four children sleeping on the ground floor. George tried to reach the five upstairs but was driven back by flames. He ran outside to fetch a ladder, but it was missing from its usual place. His two trucks, normally reliable, would not start. The fire department, just two and a half miles away, did not arrive until 8 a.m.

By then, the house had burned to its foundations.

The Missing Evidence

The fire chief examined the ruins and declared the five children dead, though he found no remains. He ordered the site bulldozed and covered with five feet of dirt just five days later, before any proper investigation could be conducted.

This haste troubled the Sodders. They hired a private investigator, who discovered disturbing inconsistencies:

The fire had burned for only forty-five minutes before collapsing the structure. A crematorium requires temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit maintained for two hours to reduce a body to ash. The Sodder fire, fed only by a wooden frame house, could not have achieved such temperatures.

The telephone and electrical lines to the house had been cut, not burned through.

A local woman reported that she had seen the five children in a car with Florida plates early Christmas morning, accompanied by several strange adults. She was never formally interviewed by police.

Thirty Years of Searching

The Sodders refused to accept their children’s deaths. They maintained a billboard on Route 16 near their home, featuring photographs of the five children and offering a substantial reward for information. George excavated the site of the fire himself in 1949, finding nothing.

In 1967, the Sodders received an envelope postmarked from Kentucky. Inside was a photograph of a young man with a striking resemblance to their son Louis, who would have been twenty-nine by then. On the back was written: “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil boys. A90132 or 35.”

The cryptic message was never decoded. The young man in the photograph was never identified. Enquiries in Kentucky led nowhere.

Sightings continued through the 1960s and 1970s. A woman claimed to have seen Martha Sodder working as a waitress in a Texas hotel. A traveller reported meeting a man in Louisiana who broke down in tears when shown photographs of the Sodder children and refused to explain why.

None of these leads produced the missing children.

Theories

The most persistent theory holds that the Sodder children were kidnapped as part of a vendetta against George Sodder, possibly connected to his anti-Mussolini statements or to Sicilian organised crime. The fire was set to disguise the abduction, and local officials were bribed to prevent investigation.

Others suggest the children were taken by a child trafficking ring. In 1945, adoption records were poorly maintained, and children could be sold with relative ease.

A darker theory proposes that the fire was indeed accidental, and the children’s bodies were removed by local authorities to protect someone, perhaps the person responsible for the defective wiring that may have started the blaze, or perhaps for reasons that remain unknown.

The Legacy

George Sodder died in 1968, still searching for answers. Jennie continues the search alone, maintaining the billboard and following every lead. She has never accepted that her children are dead.

If the Sodder children survived that Christmas Eve, they would today be in their forties. Maurice would be forty-eight, Martha forty-six, Louis forty-three, Jennie forty-two, and Betty thirty-nine. If they are alive, they may not know they are missing, or they may have spent decades hiding their true identities.

The Fayetteville fire department’s records from 1945 have been lost. The fire chief who ordered the site bulldozed died in 1951. The private investigator’s files were destroyed in an office fire in 1961. One by one, the pieces of evidence have vanished, as completely as the five children on that Christmas Eve thirty-four years ago.

Any reader with information regarding the Sodder children or similar cases of fire-related disappearances is urged to contact our research department in strictest confidence.