The Sodder Children

Summary

On Christmas Eve 1945 a house in West Virginia burned to the ground in about forty-five minutes. George and Jennie Sodder and four of their children got out. Five did not.

No remains of those five children were ever recovered from the ashes.

Their parents spent the rest of their lives insisting the children had not died in that fire. They put up a billboard on the highway and left it there for forty years.

The registry does not know whether they were right. It records what is in the file, and what is in the file is deeply strange.

What is documented

The family. George and Jennie Sodder, Italian immigrants, and their ten children. One son was away in the army. Nine were at home.

The fire. It began in the early hours of 25 December 1945. George, Jennie and four children escaped. Five did not: Maurice, fourteen; Martha, twelve; Louis, nine; Jennie, eight; and Betty, five.

The house was gone in roughly forty-five minutes.

No remains. This is the fact the entire case turns on.

Nothing was recovered. The parents searched the ashes themselves. The official investigation found nothing. Five children, and not a bone, not a tooth, not a fragment.

The threat. Some months earlier, a man had come to the house selling life insurance. George Sodder, who was outspokenly hostile to Mussolini, argued with him. On leaving, the man said that the house would go up in smoke and the children would be destroyed, and that George would be paid for the remarks he had been making.

This was reported to the authorities.

The night itself. The telephone line to the house was found to have been cut, not burned. The ladder George kept against the house, which he would have used to reach the upper windows, was found some distance away, in an embankment. Both of his coal trucks failed to start, though both had worked the previous day.

The reported sightings. A woman said she had seen the children in a passing car during the fire. A woman at a stopping place on the road toward Charleston said she had served the children breakfast the following morning. A bus driver reported seeing something like balls of fire thrown at the house.

None of these was ever corroborated.

The finding. The fire was ruled accidental, attributed to faulty wiring. Death certificates were issued for the five children, giving fire and suffocation as the cause.

The excavation. The site was filled in with earth within days, which meant the ashes could no longer be searched.

In 1949 the Sodders hired a pathologist, Oscar Hunter, to excavate. He recovered several small bone fragments. They were sent to the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian's report. The fragments were human vertebrae. They came from a person aged between about sixteen and twenty-two, which is older than Maurice, the eldest missing child.

They showed no evidence of exposure to fire.

The report noted that a fire of the duration described would not be expected to consume the skeletons entirely, and that it was surprising that no further remains had been found. It suggested that the bones had probably arrived in the fill dirt used to cover the site.

1968. Jennie Sodder received a photograph in the post. It showed a man in his twenties. There was no return address, and it was postmarked in Kentucky. On the back was written a name, a reference to a brother, and a string of characters.

The Sodders believed it was Louis. Investigators could not establish anything.

The billboard. The family erected a billboard on Route 16 with photographs of the five children and an offer of a reward. It stood until Jennie Sodder died in 1989.

Leading explanations

They died in the fire, and the remains were destroyed or missed. The official position.

The difficulty with it is the one the Smithsonian raised. Complete cremation of a human body requires sustained temperatures in the range of a crematorium, for a period of hours. A domestic house fire, of forty-five minutes, in a wooden building, does not normally do it. It normally leaves a good deal.

Against that: the site was filled with earth within days, so a proper search of the ashes was never possible. Small bones can be missed, and the search was conducted by grieving parents and by an investigation that had already reached its conclusion. And the collapse of a burning building can bury remains under debris and, later, under fill.

The registry cannot resolve this and does not pretend to. It notes only that the central evidentiary question, were there remains in that basement, was made permanently unanswerable within a week, by the act of filling it in.

They were taken. The Sodders' position for the rest of their lives.

It has to account for the cut telephone line, the moved ladder, the two trucks that would not start, and the threat made months earlier by a man who described exactly what happened. It does not have to account for the absence of remains, because on this reading there were never any remains to find.

What it has never had is a single piece of corroborated evidence. No child was ever found. No perpetrator was ever identified. The reported sightings could not be confirmed. The 1968 photograph could not be traced.

Local organised crime, and a reprisal. Advanced at the time and since, connecting the insurance man's threat and George Sodder's politics. It has never progressed beyond a hypothesis.

Current status

Unsolved, and now permanently so.

Everyone who could have answered it is dead. The site was covered within days of the fire, which destroyed the only evidence that could ever have settled the central question. Every subsequent investigation has been an investigation of an absence.

The registry keeps this record without a theory, which is unusual for this archive and is the honest position here. Five children went into a house on Christmas Eve in 1945 and were never seen again, and eighty years later there is nothing to add.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.