Lost In The Ashes: The Mystery Of The Missing Sodder Children. The haunting story of the Sodder children, who vanished after their West Virginia house was set on fire in 1945, raises more questions than answers. On Christmas Day, 1945, the inhabitants of Fayetteville, West Virginia, awoke to tragedy. A fire destroyed George and Jennie Sodder’s home, killing five of the couple’s ten children. Or were they? Before the sun fell on that awful December 25, niggling questions about the fire arose, and they continue to this day, putting the Sodder children at the center of one of American history’s most iconic unsolved crimes.
Jennie Henthorn / SmithsonianTo this day, no one knows what happened to the Sodder children after their family home burned down in 1945.Did Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (9), Jennie (8), and Betty (5) indeed die in the fire? George and his mother, Jennie, didn’t think so, and put up a billboard along Route 16 to ask for help from anyone who might know anything about their children.
A fire has engulfed the Sodder family home. The indisputable facts are: On Christmas Eve, nine of the ten Sodder children went to bed (the oldest son was away in the army). Mother Jennie was then awoken three times. First, at 12:30 a.m., she was awakened by a phone conversation that included a man’s voice and glasses clinking in the background. She returned to bed, only to be startled by a tremendous crash and rolling noise on the roof.
She quickly slept off again and awoke an hour later to see the house enveloped in smoke. George, Jennie, and four of the Sodder children—toddler Sylvia, teenagers Marion and George Jr., and 23-year-old John—escaped. Marion raced to a neighbor’s house to phone the Fayetteville Fire Department, but did not receive a response, prompting another neighbor to hunt for Fire Chief F.J. Morris.
In the hours spent waiting for aid, George and Jennie tried every conceivable method to rescue their children, but their efforts were foiled: George’s ladder was missing, and neither of his trucks would start. Even though the fire department was only two miles away from the Sodder residence, help did not come until eight a.m.
The police inspector stated that the incident was caused by poor wiring. George and Jennie were perplexed as to how this was possible given that the electricity had never been a problem before. Where Did the Sodder Children Go? They also wanted to know why there were no remains in the ashes. Chief Morris claimed that the blaze had incinerated the victims, but a crematorium worker told Jennie that bones can remain even after bodies are burned at 2,000 degrees for two hours. The Sodder home burned down in under 45 minutes.
A 1949 follow-up search revealed a tiny fragment of human spine, which The Smithsonian Institution assessed had suffered no fire damage and was most likely mixed in with the earth that George used to fill the basement while building a memorial for his children. There were other peculiarities to the case as well. An ominous wanderer hinted to disaster in the months leading up to the fire, and a few weeks later, an insurance salesman angrily warned George that his house would go up in smoke and his children would be destroyed as retribution for his criticism of Mussolini among the area’s primarily Italian immigrant community.Public Domain.
For decades, the Sodder family persevered in their search for their lost children. The sightings began soon following the fire. According to several locals, the Sodder children were seen in a passing automobile, watching the blaze. The morning after the fire, a woman who runs a truck stop 50 miles away stated the youngsters, who were with Italian-speaking adults, stopped in for breakfast.
The Sodders attempted to call the FBI but were unsuccessful, and they spent the remainder of their lives looking for their children, scouring the country and following up on leads. Nearly 20 years after the fire, in 1968, Jennie got a picture in the mail of a young man claiming to be Louis, but her attempts to locate him proved futile. George died later in the year. Jennie erected a barrier around their house and wore black until her death in 1989. Sylvia, the youngest of the Sodder children, is now in her seventies and lives in St. Albans, West Virginia. And the mystery of the Sodder children persists.