A Christmas Eve Mystery: Where Are the Sodder Children?

A family named Sodder once lived in Fayetteville, West Virginia.  It was a large household:  The parents, Jenny and George, and nine of their ten children.  (Their eldest son was away serving in the military.)  Their life was, as far as is known, a perfectly ordinary one until Christmas Eve 1945, when their routine middle-class existence suddenly morphed into something out of the most chilling psychological horror story.

On that night, as the family prepared to go to bed, five of the younger Sodders--Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty--asked to be allowed to remain downstairs to play with their presents.  Their parents indulgently agreed, and went upstairs to retire for the night.  It was the last time they would see these children again.

The Sodders did not notice anything amiss until around midnight, when Jenny Sodder was awakened by a phone call.  She noticed that lights were still on in the house, the shades were up, and the doors unlocked.  The house was quiet, and she assumed everyone was now asleep.  When she picked up the receiver, an unfamiliar female voice asked to speak to a name Jenny did not recognize.  In the background of the other end of the line, she could hear wild laughter and glasses clinking.  Before she could respond, the caller hung up.  Shrugging it off as a prank, she went back to sleep.  Some time later, she thought she heard a noise on their roof.  Not long after that--around 1:30 a.m.--she smelled smoke.  The house was on fire.

Jenny began screaming for everyone to get out of the house.  Once they were outside, Jenny and George saw that five of their children were still missing--the same five that had stayed downstairs past their bedtime.  Mr. Sodder went for a ladder he always kept by the house, so he could climb up to the bedrooms, but it was gone.  It was later found in an embankment some distance away.  He tried to drive off for help, but his trucks--which had worked perfectly the previous day--now refused to start.

By the time the fire department arrived--in this small town, with primitive communications and equipment, it took them seven hours--the house was a mass of smoldering ashes.  In less than an hour, it had completely burned to the ground.  Officials assumed bad wiring was to blame for the conflagration, but that seemed questionable, considering that lights in the home were still on after the fire started.  Besides, just a few months before, the local power company had inspected their wiring.  We simply do not know for sure why the home was destroyed.

Whatever the cause of the blaze may have been, the most important question was, where were the five Sodder children?  Some newspapers reported that some fragmentary bones and flesh were found in the ruins, but other accounts say that not a single trace of human remains were ever found on the site.

Despite the eerie events preceding the fire--not to mention the fact that telephone line had been cut just before or after the flames erupted--the authorities shrugged the incident off as a tragic accident and ignored the Sodders' pleas for an investigation.

The many peculiar circumstances surrounding the fire, coupled with the lack of remains, increasingly convinced the Sodders that their missing children had not died in the fire, but were kidnapped.  Searches of the site in the years after the fire eventually turned up a few stray pieces of bone, but a pathologist working with the Sodders noted that it was highly unusual not to find more of the children's bodies.  The fire simply did not burn long enough to completely incinerate bodies.  Another oddity is that these bones were not fire damaged, leading pathologists from the Smithsonian to theorize that the  fragments were in the dirt George Sodder used to bury the site of the fire.  And was it anything more than coincidence that the children who were allowed to stay up late were the only family members to disappear?  No one could say.  

"Calgary Albertan," October 6, 1953, via Newspapers.com

George Sodder--who was, like his wife, Italian-born--had been very vocal about his dislike of Mussolini.  This had made him very unpopular in their Italian-American community, leading the family to harbor the fear that the tragedy had been some horrendous payback for his political views.  This may well have been merely paranoia, but unless they found some definitive answers, it was a paranoia they could never shake.

The Sodders lived through years of painful uncertainty about the fate of their children.  The events of that Christmas Eve seemed just too strange to be an ordinary accident, but, on the other hand, the idea of some maniacs singling them out and torching their house in order to spirit off their children was too weird to even contemplate.  George and Jenny did everything in their power to publicize the mystery--they even rented a billboard with photos of the missing children that stood for forty years--but no one came forward with any information.  The private detectives they hired to chase every possible lead, every "sighting" of the missing children, came up with nothing.  The remaining family members were left in a nightmarish limbo.

Life went on, with no concrete developments in the case until 1968, when the Sodders were anonymously mailed a photograph of a man who looked to be in his mid-twenties.  On the back of the photo someone had written, "Louis Sodder," "I love brother Frankie," "ilil Boys," and the cryptic "A90132 or 35."

The Sodders were convinced the young man in the photo was their son Louis, who was nine when he disappeared.  No one can say for sure if they were correct, or if the mailing was merely a sick prank by some unknown creep.

That unsettlingly enigmatic photo is the last word to date on the Sodder mystery.  George Sodder died in 1969 and his wife twenty years later.  Sylvia, the last living Sodder child, (that we know of, at any rate,) was only two when disaster struck.  She passed away in 2021, still haunted by what had befallen her family.  She believed her siblings did not die in the fire, but she had no more luck than her parents in finding evidence of that theory.  The story of what really happened that Christmas Eve remains as baffling as ever.