For nearly four decades, anyone driving down Route 16 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, could see a billboard bearing the grainy images of five children, all dark-haired and solemn-eyed. The Sodder siblings’ names and ages—14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 9-year-old Louis, 8-year-old Jennie and 5-year-old Betty—were stenciled beneath the photos, along with speculation about what happened to them: “What was their fate: kidnapped, murdered or are they still alive?”

Fayetteville was and is a small town, and rumors always played a larger role in the case than evidence; no one even agreed on whether the children were dead or alive. What everyone knew for certain was this: On the night of Christmas Eve in 1945, George and Jennie Sodder and nine of their ten children celebrated the holiday at home. (One son wasn’t in the house at the time.) Around 1 a.m., a fire broke out. George, Jennie and four of the siblings escaped, but the other five were never seen again.

George had tried to save them, breaking a window to re-enter the two-story house and slicing a swath of skin from his arm. He could see nothing through the smoke and fire, which had swept through all of the downstairs rooms: living and dining room, kitchen, office, and his and Jennie’s bedroom. He took frantic stock of what he knew: Two-year-old Sylvia, whose crib was in her parents’ room, was safe outside, as were 17-year-old Marion, 23-year-old John and 16-year-old George Jr., who had fled the upstairs bedroom they shared, singeing their hair on the way out. George figured that Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty were still on the second floor, cowering in two bedrooms on either end of the hallway, separated by a staircase that was now engulfed in flames.

The original billboard posted by the Sodder family
The original billboard posted by the Sodder family The Beckley Post Herald via Newspapers.com

The children’s father raced back outside, hoping to reach them through the upstairs windows, but the ladder he always kept propped against the house was strangely missing. An idea struck: He would drive one of his two coal trucks up to the house and climb atop it to reach the windows. But even though they’d functioned perfectly the day before, neither would start now. George racked his mind for another option. He tried to scoop water from a rain barrel but found it frozen solid. Five of his children were stuck somewhere inside those great, whipping ropes of smoke. He didn’t notice that his arm was slick with blood, that his voice hurt from screaming their names.

Marion sprinted to a neighbor’s home to call the Fayetteville Fire Department but couldn’t get any operator response. A neighbor who saw the blaze made a call from a nearby tavern, but again no operator responded. Exasperated, the neighbor drove into town and tracked down Fire Chief F.J. Morris, who initiated Fayetteville’s version of a fire alarm: a “phone tree” system whereby one firefighter phoned another, who phoned another. The fire department was only two and a half miles away, but the crew didn’t arrive until 8 a.m., by which point the Sodders’ home had been reduced to a smoking pile of ash. “Back then, there was very little training,” Steve Cruikshank, a longtime Fayetteville firefighter, told the Times West Virginian in 2016. “Everyone was volunteer, and they didn’t have much equipment.”

George and Jennie assumed that five of their children were dead, but a brief search of the grounds on Christmas Day turned up no human remains. Morris suggested the blaze had been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies.

A state police inspector attributed the fire to faulty wiring. George covered the basement with five feet of dirt, intending to preserve the site as a memorial. The coroner’s office issued five death certificates just before the new year, listing the causes as “fire or suffocation.”

But the Sodder family had begun to wonder if the children were still alive.

“During the fire, I kept watching the windows, but I never saw [even] one of the children,” Marion told the Raleigh Register in 1976. “I never smelled burning flesh—they say you can smell burning flesh miles away, but I never did.”

The Mysterious Disappearance Of The Sodder Children
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The strange circumstances surrounding the Sodder fire

George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, in 1895 and immigrated to the United States in 1908, when he was 13. An older brother who had accompanied him to Ellis Island immediately returned to Italy, leaving George on his own. The teenager found work on the Pennsylvania railroads, carrying water and supplies to laborers, and after a few years, he moved to Smithers, West Virginia. Smart and ambitious, he first worked as a driver and then launched his own trucking company, hauling dirt for construction and later freight and coal. One day, he walked into a local store called the Music Box and met the owners’ daughter, Jennie Cipriani, who had come over from Italy as a toddler.

The couple married and had ten children between 1923 and 1943. They settled in Fayetteville, an Appalachian town with a small but active Italian immigrant community. The Sodders were, in the words of one county magistrate, “one of the most respected middle-class families around.” George held strong opinions about everything from business to current events and politics, but he was, for some reason, reticent on the subject of his youth. He never explained what had happened back in Italy to make him want to leave.

After the fire, the Sodders planted flowers across the space where their house had stood and started to stitch together a series of odd moments leading up to the blaze. A stranger had appeared at the home a few months earlier, asking about hauling work. He meandered to the back of the house, pointed to two separate fuse boxes and said, “This is going to cause a fire someday.” It was an odd comment, George thought, especially since he had just had the wiring checked by the local power company, which pronounced it in fine condition.

Jennie Sodder holding John, her first child
Jennie Sodder holding John, her first child Courtesy of Jennie Henthorn

Around the same time, another man tried to sell the family life insurance and became irate when George declined. “Your goddamn house is going up in smoke,” he warned, “and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about [Benito] Mussolini.” George was indeed outspoken about his dislike for the Italian dictator, occasionally engaging in heated arguments with other members of Fayetteville’s Italian community. But at the time, he didn’t take the man’s threats seriously.

Other members of the family also recalled something peculiar: Shortly before Christmas, they noticed a man in a parked car intently watching the younger children as they came home from school.

Just after midnight on Christmas morning, the shrill ring of the telephone broke the quiet. Jennie rushed to answer it. An unfamiliar female voice asked for an unfamiliar name. Raucous laughter and glasses clinking could be heard in the background. Jennie told the caller she had the wrong house and hung up. (Police later questioned the woman, who said she had simply dialed the wrong number.)

Tiptoeing back to bed, Jennie noticed that all of the downstairs lights were on and the curtains still open. The front door was unlocked. She saw Marion asleep on the sofa in the living room and assumed that the other kids were upstairs in bed. She turned out the lights, closed the curtains, locked the door and returned to her room. She had just begun to doze when she heard a sharp, loud bang on the roof, and then a rolling noise. About half an hour later, she was roused once again, this time by heavy smoke curling into her room.

Jennie couldn’t understand how five children could perish in a fire and leave no bones, no flesh, nothing. She conducted a private experiment, burning animal bones—chicken bones, beef joints, pork chop bones—to see if the fire consumed them. Each time, she was left with a heap of charred bones. She knew that remnants of various household appliances had been found in the burned-out basement, still identifiable. An employee at a crematorium informed her that bones remain after bodies are burned for two hours at 2,000 degrees. The family’s house was reportedly destroyed in 45 minutes.

The collection of strange details grew. A telephone repair man told the Sodders that their lines appeared to have been cut, not burned. The family realized that if the fire had been electrical—the result of “faulty wiring,” as the official report stated—then the power would have been dead, and the lights in the rooms downstairs would have turned off. Instead, they shined brightly during the blaze.

A flyer about the Sodder children
A flyer about the Sodder children Courtesy of Jennie Henthorn

A witness came forward, claiming he saw a man at the scene of the fire taking a block and tackle used for removing car engines; could he be the reason George’s trucks had refused to start? (The man in question later pleaded guilty to stealing the block and tackle but denied any involvement in the fire.) One day, while the family was visiting the site, the youngest child, Sylvia, found a hard rubber object in the yard. Jennie recalled hearing the hard thud on the roof, the rolling sound. George concluded it was a napalm “pineapple bomb” of the type used in warfare.

Then came the reports of sightings. A woman claimed to have seen the missing children peering out of a passing car while the fire was in progress. A woman operating a tourist stop between Fayetteville and Charleston, West Virginia, some 50 miles northwest, said she saw the children the morning after the fire. “I served them breakfast,” she told police. “There was a car with Florida license plates at the tourist court, too.” A woman at a Charleston hotel saw the children’s photos in a newspaper and said she had seen four of the five a week after the fire. In a statement to local authorities, she said:

The children were accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction. I do not remember the exact date. However, the entire party did register at the hotel and stayed in a large room with several beds. They registered about midnight. I tried to talk to the children in a friendly manner, but the men appeared hostile and refused to allow me to talk to these children. … One of the men looked at me in a hostile manner; he turned around and began talking rapidly in Italian. Immediately, the whole party stopped talking to me. I sensed that I was being frozen out, and so I said nothing more. They left early the next morning.

Investigating the Sodder fire

In 1947, George and Jennie sent a letter about the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They received a reply from the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, who wrote, “Although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau.” Hoover’s agents said they would assist if they could get permission from the local authorities, but the Fayetteville police and fire departments declined the offer.

Next, the Sodders turned to a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley. He discovered that the insurance salesman who had threatened George was a member of the coroner’s jury that deemed the fire accidental. According to the Times West Virginian, the individual had previously been employed by George, and he was a co-signer on the family’s home insurance, which he’d increased from $1,500 to $1,750 before the fire, without their consent or knowledge. The detective also heard a curious story about Morris, the fire chief. Although Morris claimed that no remains had been found, he’d supposedly confided to someone that he’d discovered a human organ in the ashes. He hid it inside a dynamite box and buried it at the scene.

After the Sodders dug up the box, they took it straight to a local funeral director, who poked and prodded the “organ” and concluded it was beef liver, untouched by the fire. Soon, the family heard rumors that Morris had told others that the contents of the box had not been found in the fire at all. Instead, he had buried the beef liver in the rubble in the hope that finding any remains would placate the family enough to stop the investigation.

A newspaper photo of George and Jennie Sodder in front of the billboard
A newspaper photo of George and Jennie Sodder in front of the billboard seeking answers about their missing children The Sunday Gazette-Mail

“The fire marshal was either paid off or they didn’t push it,” John, the oldest Sodder sibling, theorized to the Roanoke Times in 1984. The family wasn’t sure what had happened during the fire, but they were convinced that something was off. Perhaps the blaze was an act of arson designed to cover the abduction of the five missing children, who’d been spirited away by the Italian Mafia as revenge for George’s criticism of Mussolini. Or maybe the children were victims of a human trafficking scheme. As John told the Virginia newspaper, “Our thinking was [that kidnappers] might have been trying to take us all. My brother and I barely got out of the house. But you can’t relive it.”

Over the next several years, tips and leads continued to trickle in. George saw a newspaper photo of schoolchildren in New York City and was convinced that one of them was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan in search of the child, but her parents refused to speak to him.

In August 1949, the Sodders decided to mount a new search at the fire scene. They brought in a Washington, D.C. pathologist named Oscar B. Hunter. The excavation was thorough, uncovering a number of small objects: damaged coins, a partly burned dictionary and several shards of vertebrae. Hunter sent the bones to the Smithsonian Institution, which issued the following report:

The human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual. Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17 years. The top limit of age should be about 22 since the centra, which normally fuse at 23, are still unfused. On this basis, the bones show greater skeletal maturation than one would expect for a 14-year-old boy (the oldest missing Sodder child). It is, however, possible, although not probable, for a boy 14 and a half years old to show [age 16 or 17] maturation.

Newspaper coverage of the 1949 excavation at the scene of the fire
Newspaper coverage of the 1949 excavation at the scene of the fire The Raleigh Register via Newspapers.com

The vertebrae showed no evidence of being exposed to fire, the report said, adding, “It is very strange that no other bones were found in the allegedly careful excavation of the basement of the house.” Given the relatively short time the fire burned, the Smithsonian scholars said, “One would expect to find the full skeletons of the five children, rather than only four vertebrae.” The bones, the report concluded, had most likely been in the supply of dirt George used to fill in the basement to create the memorial for his children.

Speaking with the Times West Virginian in 2016, Cruikshank, the firefighter, pointed out that work materials kept in the family’s garage, like 55-gallon drums of gasoline and motors, might have intensified the heat of the flames. By covering the fire’s embers with dirt in the immediate aftermath of the blaze, George also “inadvertently created an oven that would advance the cremation process,” the newspaper reported.

Stacy Horn, an author who covered the case for NPR, shared similar reflections on the fire in a 2005 blog post, writing that the widely cited estimate of the flames burning for 45 minutes is misleading. In truth, she said, the inferno “burned all night long and into the next morning. When the fire department did finally appear, it was still hot, and they had to water the site down before conducting their search. Further, two hours is not even close to a thorough search. Today, the search [for remains] would take days and possibly weeks.”

Lingering questions about the Sodder fire

The Smithsonian’s findings prompted two hearings at the State Capitol in Charleston, after which Governor Okey L. Patteson and State Police Superintendent W.E. Burchett told the Sodders their search was “hopeless” and declared the case closed. Authorities wondered whether it was possible—likely, even—that the family’s grief was clouding their judgment, leading them to search for signs of life where none could be found. Undeterred, George and Jennie erected the billboard along Route 16 and passed out flyers offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of their children. They soon increased the amount to $10,000.

A letter arrived from a woman in St. Louis, saying the oldest girl, Martha, was in a convent there. Another tip came from Texas, where a patron in a bar said they overheard an incriminating conversation about a long-ago Christmas Eve fire in West Virginia. Someone in Florida claimed the children were staying with a distant relative of Jennie’s. George traveled the country to investigate each lead, always returning home without any answers.

In the late 1960s, more than 20 years after the fire, Jennie received an envelope postmarked in Kentucky. Inside was a photo of a man in his mid-20s. On the back of the snapshot, a cryptic handwritten note read, “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35.” Jennie and George couldn’t deny the sitter’s resemblance to their Louis, who was 9 at the time of the fire. Beyond the obvious similarities—dark curly hair, dark brown eyes—they had the same straight, strong nose, the same upward tilt of the left eyebrow. Once again, the family hired a private detective and sent him to Kentucky. They never heard from him again.

The Sodders feared that if they published the message or the name of the town on the postmark, they might put their son at risk. Instead, they amended the billboard to include the updated image of Louis. “It’s hard sometimes to get to sleep at night, just wondering about them,” George told the Associated Press in 1968. “After all, if someone wanted to get me, why did they get my family, too?” He added, “It’s like hitting a rock wall—we can’t go any further—we just don’t know what to do now.”

Alleged photo of an older Louis Sodder
Alleged photo of an older Louis Sodder Courtesy of Jennie Henthorn

George died a year later, in 1969, still hoping for a break in the case. Jennie erected a fence around her property and began adding rooms to her home, building layer after layer between herself and the outside. Since the fire, she had worn black exclusively as a sign of mourning, and she continued to do so until her own death in 1989, when the weathered billboard finally came down.

The Sodders’ surviving children and grandchildren continued the investigation and came up with theories of their own: The local Mafia branch had tried to recruit George, and he declined. They tried to extort money from him, and he refused. The children were kidnapped by someone they knew—someone who burst into the unlocked front door, told them about the fire and offered to take them someplace safe. They might not have survived the night. If they had, and if they lived for decades—if it really was Louis in that photograph—they failed to contact their parents only because they wanted to protect them.

Sylvia, the youngest survivor of the fire, died in 2021 at age 79. Until the end, she remained steadfast in her belief that her siblings had escaped the flames. Growing up, “[Sylvia] was the only child in a lot of ways,” her daughter, Jennie Henthorn, told the Independent in 2022. “You’ve got to think that my aunts and uncles that were present after the fire, who were still at home, weren’t really at home. Two had been away at the war. They were grown.”

Henthorn, for her part, deemed it unlikely that her family would ever find closure. “Anybody who knew what happened would’ve been my grandparents’ age,” she told the Independent. “I would think that … it’s been public enough that, if the children wanted to be found later on in life, then they would’ve reached out.”

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Abbott Kahler

Abbott Kahler is a contributing writer for history for Smithsonian and the author of the books Sin in the Second City, American Rose and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy.

Meilan Solly

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.