It was December 24, 1945. The Sodder family of Fayetteville, WV, was enjoying a wonderful Christmas Eve with nine of their ten children. The oldest child, Joe, was away in the Army. The family was exchanging gifts and enjoying time together.
Father George and sons George Jr. and John had worked all day, so they went to bed. Mother Jennie allowed the others to stay up but reminded them they had chores to be done before turning in, feeding the chickens, and putting the cows in. Jennie took the youngest child, Sylvia, who was two, upstairs to go to bed.
Around 12:30, the phone rang, and Jennie went downstairs to answer it. The call was later verified as a legitimate wrong number, with no connection to the fire. As she returned to bed, she observed that the curtains had not been closed, and the lights were still on. These were things the children would usually attend to before heading to bed. The oldest daughter, Marion, was asleep on the couch, so Jennie pulled the curtains, turned off the lights, and went back to bed.
A half hour or so later, Jennie was awakened by a sound she later described as a “thud” on the roof, followed by a sound like a heavy object rolling. The noise stopped, so she went back to sleep. Just a few minutes later, she was awakened again by the smell of smoke. She found George’s office on fire, and she woke her husband, and they began to wake the children.
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George Sr., Jennie, Sylvia, Marion, John, and George Jr. could get out of the house. The focus turned to rescue the others. The stairway to the second floor was fully engaged and impassable. Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty were thought to have been trapped in upstairs bedrooms.
George tried to break a window to get to the other children and suffered cuts that required medical treatment. A ladder stored next to the home was missing from its usual location. Barrels of water that could have been used to extinguish flames were frozen solid. George decided to position one of his work trucks to gain access to the second floor. Both vehicles that had operated fine the previous day would not start.
The Sodder phone was not working, so the eldest daughter ran to a neighbor’s home to call the fire department. She was unable to connect with an operator. Another neighbor called with the same result. That neighbor, Thomas Smith, drove into town and located the Fire Chief, who set about finding his firefighters. They were not on the scene until 8 AM.
The blaze had consumed the house in around forty-five minutes. Searchers found no remains. A state investigator attributed the fire to faulty wiring, even though George had recently had the hose rewired, and it had passed the necessary inspection. Just days later, George covered the basement with dirt to preserve the site as a memorial to his lost family. Without any remains, the coroner’s office issued five death certificates, citing fire and suffocation as the cause. The local newspaper falsely reported that all of the bodies had been found. A coroner’s inquiry found that all five perished.
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Once they began to piece together some of the odd incidents of the previous weeks, the circumstances of the night of the fire, and the lack of remains, the family began to see red flags. Authorities started to take steps to assure the Sodders that the children did perish in the fire, although their arguments fell on deaf ears with George Sr. and Jennie Sodder.
The Oddest of Circumstances and Evidence Ignored
The local Fire Chief, F.J. Morris, claimed that he had found a human heart at the site and buried it in a box in the ashes. When a private investigator hired by George, C.C. Tinsley, heard the claim, he and Morris went to the site and dug up the box. The contents were taken to a local funeral director for examination. The Director determined it to be beef liver, which had never been in a fire. The chief later confessed that he had planted the liver in an effort to terminate the investigation.
Despite the investigator’s finding of an electrical problem being the source of the fire, the home’s lights continued to burn well after the fire was detected.
A bus driver driving past the house on Christmas Eve reported seeing people throwing flaming objects onto the house that night. That would be consistent with what Jennie heard and with a round, bomb-type device later recovered at the scene.
Almost immediately after the fire, reports of sightings of the children came forward. A witness reported they had stopped for breakfast with adults in a car with Florida license plates. Another saw them in a car the night of the fire. Another saw them in a hotel just days after the fire.
Four years later, George contracted a pathologist, Oscar Hunter, from Washington D.C., to examine the site. His excavation uncovered some minor artifacts and a few human bones. The bones were sent to a lab for examination.
They were determined to be human, likely vertebrae, and from a male, approximately age eighteen. This was older than the eldest victim, who was fourteen. Nonetheless, several local officials and papers considered this “case closed” as human remains had been verified. They ignored the lab’s additional findings that the bones likely came from the fill dirt George added and that they had never been exposed to fire. The lab also noted that, from a forty-five-minute fire, intact, complete skeletons should remain.
George sent a letter to the FBI, asking for their assistance. He received a response from J. Edgar Hoover, advising that it was a local matter. Still, the FBI would be willing to assist if asked by local law enforcement, who declined to include the Bureau in the investigation.
The phone line onto the home was found to have been cut by a man who stole a block and tackle the night of the fire. This required him to climb a fourteen-foot-high pole. Although police reportedly interviewed the man, no investigators could ever find any police record of his interview or identity.
A local insurance salesman had tried to sell a policy to the Sodders months before the fire. When they declined, he became angry and threatened, “Your G—D— house is going to go up in flames, and your children are going to be destroyed.” This same man was a member of the coroner’s jury that concluded that the five children died in the fire.
George Sodder was a first-generation immigrant from Sardinia, Italy. He had built a successful trucking business. During WWII, he was a very vocal opponent of Mussolini. One theory is that the children’s disappearance was retaliation for his statements and positions.
The family retained multiple private eyes over the years. One was in response to a postcard received in 1967 that purportedly came from their son Louis. The letter was postmarked in Central City, KY. George retained a private investigator to travel there to investigate. After he was paid, the investigator disappeared and was never seen again. Over the years, George made numerous trips based on tips that one of the children had been sighted. None were successful. In 1952, the Sodders erected a billboard, seeking assistance in finding their children. It remained there for years and became somewhat of a famous landmark.
The Experts Weigh In
Sheryl McCollum is a top CSI expert and frequent guest on network crime segments like Nancy Grace. Below you will find a link to her new podcast series, Zone 7, which is a deep dive into multiple cold cases. Sheryl is the Director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute and has won an Emmy winner for her work. We asked her to take a look at the most compelling forensic facts in the Sodder case, the absence of skeletal remains.
Sheryl says of that issue, “I have never heard of a house fire where the deceased burn victims could not be found because they were burned completely up. The bodies are always located because a house fire won’t burn hot enough or long enough to completely burn a body up. A cadaver is cremated or turned into ashes at around 760 to 982 degrees Celsius (1400 – 1800 degrees Fahrenheit) in about 1 – 3 hours, and they can still have bone left that they must process in another machine.”
She continues, “Arson is most often used to cover up another crime. Arsonists leave others clues for the Investigators. Some evidence can even be preserved in the fire.”
Bill Rockwood is a retired Fire Chief with forty-one years of experience. Having worked hundreds of fires in vehicles, residences, and commercial properties, he has never seen a fire where the skeleton did not survive. “He said, “Bones will distort or elongate but will not disintegrate. They will discolor and show evidence of having been in a fire.”
All of the Sodders who survived the fire are now deceased. Sylvia died in 2021 at age 79. Investigators would take a fresh look at the case should new evidence come forward.
