The Strange Disappearance Of The Sodder Children
SmithsonianThe billboard was eventually updated with a new photo Jennie Sodder received in the mail. Both parents died without reuniting with their missing children.
It was the most wonderful time of the year, yet George and Jennie Sodder would have the worst day of their lives. Tragedy struck Fayetteville, West Virginia on the night before Christmas, 1945, when a fire consumed the Sodder house and killed five of the nine children within.
Or did it?
The fire broke out at around 1 AM. George and Jennie escaped with four children, and when George tried to go back inside for the remaining five, he encountered failure after failure: His ladder was missing, and neither of his two cars would start.
Firefighters didn’t arrive until 8 AM, at which point the Sodder home was a pile of charred rubble. They figured it was an electrical fire. Though the coroner’s office issued five death certificates attributed to “fire or suffocation,” not a single bone or piece of flesh was found.
Unconvinced that Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty perish in the blaze, their parents put up a billboard along Route 16 to enlist any help they could get.
A crematorium employee confirmed to Mrs. Sodder that bones stick around even when bodies are burned for two hours at 2,000 degrees; their fire had only lasted about 45 minutes. Things only got weirder when the Sodders remembered the strangers that appeared at their home a few months earlier, and an odd phone call on the night of the fire.
Jennie Henthorn/Smithsonian
A man had appeared in the autumn, looking for work. He pointed at the fuse boxes in the back and said, “This is going to cause a fire some day.” Another man showed up not too long after, trying to sell the Sodders life insurance, which they declined.
“Your goddamn house is going up in smoke,” he warned them, “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 Sodder did voice his opposition to the Italian dictator at local meetings, but didn’t take the man’s statement as a serious threat.
Minutes before the fire erupted, a phone call from a female stranger asked to speak with an unfamiliar person. Jennie could hear laughter and glasses clinking in the background. “You have the wrong number,” she said, and hung up.
So where were the missing Sodder children? The first reported sighting came from a woman who said she served them breakfast at a tourist stop 50 miles west. Another claimed said she’d seen four of the five kids at a Charleston hotel.
The Sodders reached out to the FBI, but J. Edgar Hoover turned them down. They then hired a private investigator, C.C. Tinsley, who found out the insurance salesman from the fall before the fire was a member of the coroner’s jury that labeled the fire an accident of faulty electrical wiring.
Wikimedia CommonsThe photo Jennie Sodder received in the mail in 1967. She believed this was her son Louis, but only an odd riddle accompanied the picture.
The family then scoured the grounds where their house was and found a few vertebrae, which they sent to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis. Pathologists determined the bones all belonged to the same person — but had not been exposed to fire.
The Sodder family’s reward for information was doubled to $10,000. This prompted a renewed flurry of calls and claims that people had seen the missing children, to no avail. Twenty years passed before Jennie received a promising clue: a letter from Kentucky with no return address, with a photo inside and a cryptic note:
“Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil [sic] Boys. A90132 or 35.”
The photo was of a man in his mid-20s who resembled their nine-year-old son Louis, all grown up. When they sent a detective to Kentucky to investigate, he disappeared. The Sodders added the photo to the billboard, but never found their missing children.
“Time is running out for us,” said George Sodder in an interview. “But we only want to know. If they did die in the fire, we want to be convinced. Otherwise, we want to know what happened to them.”
George died a year later, in 1968, and Jennie died in 1989. Their last surviving daughter, Sylvia, remains unconvinced her siblings perished in the fire, leaving this horror story unresolved to this day.
