The enigmatic disappearance of five children: many wanted to prove that they died in the fire

No traces of his remains were found after the fire. Although officials found the fire to be from electric cables, the enigmatic events that led to the fire and signs of sabotage at the Sodder House suggest that the fire was not accidental, writes historicmysteries.com.

“You can’t tell me that five children in a small, old house could have been burned so that none of them were left. No, I will never believe it. Someone kidnapped them. It’s been a long time, but maybe I’ll be lucky and see them someday,” Jennie Sodder, the mother of the missing children, believed until her death.

Sodder children’s names and ages

Parents George and Jennie Sodder, John, 23, George Jr., 16, Marion, 17, and Sylvia, 3, survived the fire. Joseph, 21-year-old Sodder’s son, had gone to war. But after the fire, Maurice, 14, Martha, 12, Louise, 9, Jennie, 8, and Betty, 5, went missing.

George Sodder and his anti-fascist views

The small town of Fayetteville, a West Virginia coal miner, was home to a large community of Americans of Italian descent. The majority of the population knew Sodder as a respectable and honest family. George Sodder, whose real name was Giorgio Soddu, emigrated from Sardinia in 1908 and, at the age of 50, founded a trucking business.

On December 2, 1945, World War II had just ended. Just eight months ago, communist supporters had shot dead fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose death severely divided Italians. Mussolini’s supporters were furious. George spoke often on political issues and was famous for his anti-fascist views. He had made fierce enemies among Italian immigrants who adored the Italian leader.

Unexpected visits to Sodder’s house

Several strange events had taken place a few months before the fire. First, an unknown man was looking for a job at the Sodderiai house. When George told him he didn’t need workers, a stranger looked at the electrical fuse box outside and stated that one day it could cause a fire. That observation was strange, since George had recently called an electrical company to verify the wiring, and she found that everything was in order.

Another strange visit to Sodderi’s house took place just a few weeks before the fire. A local agent tried to inject life insurance into the family. When George rejected his offer, the agent threatened: “Their damn house will be smoked and their children will be destroyed. You paid for the nasty speeches about Mussolini. “

Also, just before Christmas, Sodderi’s older children noticed a suspicious car parked on the side of Highway 21 for several days in a row. The man sitting in the car looked closely at the Sodder children returning from school.

Christmas

It was very cold on Christmas Eve. Around 10 p.m. 30 minutes. parents with 3-year-old Sylvia prepared to sleep. The oldest daughter, Marion, had brought toys for the younger children from the store where she worked. The mother allowed the children to stay a little longer to play with the new toys. However, he reminded the children Maurice and Louis that they would close the chicken coop and feed the cows before bed.

Around midnight, Jennie woke up to a phone call. When she replied, a woman asked to invite the man by an unknown name. Later, Jennie will recall that the woman was “laughing oddly,” and other people’s laughter and cups were heard in the background. Jennie replied to the woman that she had dialed the wrong number and had not turned around due to the call.

At that time, the house was completely silent. Marion slept on the sofa, but Jennie noticed that the door to the house was not closed and the curtains were not closed. Children generally take care of security at home, but for some reason they did not that night. Jennie closed the door and closed the curtains. She was convinced that the remaining children slept in the attic. She went back to bed herself.

Sodder House Fire

About half an hour passed. Jennie woke up again: this time from “some kind of hit on the ceiling, like a rubber ball. She turned around and hit the ground in silence.” However, even then she didn’t make sense of this sound and fell asleep again. Half an hour later, he woke up to the smell of smoke. George, Jennie, Sylvia, Marion, John and George ran away. Unfortunately, the stairs to the attic were already covered in flames. When Sodder started yelling at the children in the attic, no one answered from there.

“I ran to the bottom of the stairs and screamed, screamed. The two children (John and George Jr.) fell. Her hair burned with fire. “

Suspicious circumstances at the scene

Probably the most suspicious part of this story has to do with George Sodder’s attempts to save his children when the house caught fire. Mr. Soddder recalled the staircase that was constantly tilted to the side of the house. These ladders were regularly used to clean rain gutters or repair the roof. George wanted to climb this ladder to the attic with the children, but according to reports that night, the ladder was not in the usual place. For reasons unknown to the family, they lay in a ditch on the side of the road away from home.

Marion tried to call the fire department, but her phone stopped working. He ran to the neighbors to call from their homes, but even then he was unable to contact the fire department. Finally, the firefighters were called by a man who called them out of town.

George had found another way to get into the attic: drive his trucks home and try to reach the top window from them. However, none of the trucks started.

While the Sodder family tried unsuccessfully to resort to various means, their home collapsed in just 45 minutes.

Findings after the fire.

Firefighters appeared at the fire station only at 7 p.m. By then, only ruins and hot ashes of the house remained. The remains of the children were searched until 11 p.m. morning but nothing could be detected. State police initially thought the fire was caused by messy electrical wiring, but later abandoned this version. Fayetteville Fire Chief F.J. Morris conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence to refute the conclusion of the “electrical failure”. No remains were found either.

Charles Payne also went to the scene of the fire the following day to collect the victims, but found no remains. Many years later, in the Post Herald newspaper, chap. Payne’s wife Velma said: “It was a real puzzle.”

A few days after the fire, the coroner began another investigation to determine the cause of the fire. It turned out that among the members of the commission of inquiry was the man who threatened George that his children would be destroyed and the house burned down. Not surprisingly, this commission also concluded that the fire was caused by electrical wiring.

Sodder disagreed with such conclusions. They claimed that as the house burned, the light shone inside for some time. Jennie later also said that they would not have found a way to get out of the house if the lights had not been turned on. Also, George had replaced the old wires to install an electric stove.

Witnesses to suspicious events.

Sodder’s doubts about the official findings were reinforced by several other facts. The foreman of the telephone informed them that someone had cut the telephone cables. That may have been the reason Marion was unable to call the fire department, not because the phone cords were burned.

Neighbors saw a man stealing a hoist from Sodder’s yard in a raging flame. Later, the police arrested him and he confessed that he had drowned and cut the cables. The detainee assured me that he was cutting electrical cables, but they turned out to be telephone lines. No one knows when this arrest ended and why the police did not continue the investigation.

Another witness, a bus driver who worked a night shift, said he saw “fireballs” falling on the roof. Then circumstances showed that Sodder’s house was burned down. Witnesses who saw Sodder’s children soon appeared.

Who and how did they see the children of Sodder?

A girl claimed to have seen children in a car driving away from a burning house.

A man who worked in a motel about 50 miles from Fayetteville saw the children the day after the fire.

The children were seen at the Charleston Hotel, where they arrived with two Italian women and two men. The woman who saw them said: “The children were accompanied by two women and two men. They were all of Italian descent. I tried to speak to the children in a friendly way, but the men reacted very hostilely and did not allow me to speak to them. One of the men glared at me; he turned and began to say something in Italian. “

A missionary, who saw photos of the missing children in the newspaper, reported seeing them at a house in Cortez, Florida. A private detective who reviewed this version found that the children did visit those homes, but then left. The children in Cortez were seen by five different witnesses.

Jennie Sodder tries to discover the truth

Dissatisfied with the results of the study, Jennie Sodder began to retrieve the answers on her own. He experimented with animal bones in his oven to see if they would make ashes, but he never managed to achieve that result.

After reading about a fire in another house that killed seven family members, Jennie closely followed the news of the disaster: Among the scabs, investigators found the remains of the seven people.

He also contacted an employee of the crematorium. He assured that even cremating the remains for two hours 2,000. degrees, charred bones remain. At the scene of the September 11 attacks, the remains of human remains even withstood the flames of burning jet fuel. It is not possible to leave a child without any electrical appliance on fire for 45 minutes without even burning some appliances.

Private detective C.C. Tinsley

George and Jennie hired a private detective C.C. Tinsley to investigate the enigmatic disappearance of children. He had heard rumors that fire chief F. J. Morris had told some residents that he had found a heart at the scene of the fire and buried it in a dynamite box. The detective persuaded F. J. Morris to show him where he buried his heart. Together, they went to that place and unearthed a box with a heart.

DC Tinsley brought the organ to one of the funeral directors, who discovered it was a piece of beef liver. George also sent the alleged heart to Washington for investigation and received a response that it was a bull liver. However, they were not burned, meaning Morris brought them to the scene of the fire a little later. Rumors were circulating in the city that F. J. Morris had confessed to several residents who stabbed this organ under his skin to appease Sodder and encourage them to stop his search. Officials apparently wanted the family to think the children had died in the flames.

Other evidence in the disappearance of Sodder children

Three months after the fire, Sylvia, playing among the ruins of the house, found an empty green object made of hard rubber. It had a screw cap. Sylvia began to wonder if it wasn’t what hit the ceiling. George showed the strange find to the military. They told him it was called “pineapple,” better known as a napalm bomb.

In 1949, George and Jennie hired a pathologist, Dr. Oscar B. Hunter from Washington. A few days after the fire, George Sodder filled the basement with a layer of soil: he wanted to build a monument for the children.

When O. B. Hunter excavated the site of the fire, several vertebrae in the human spine surfaced. He sent them to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis. The researchers found that the age of these bones did not match the age of the Sodder children. Also, these bones showed no signs of burns. “These bones were probably on the land George brought to his monument,” the researchers concluded.

Louis Sodder found?

In 1968, Sodder received a letter in the mail that contained a photo of a young adult like Louis Sodder. A Kentucky postage stamp was placed on the letter, but no return address was written. Inside the letter was also a short message: “Louis Sodder. I love my brother Frankie. Ilil boys. A91032 or 35 “. It seems that a letter with such an encoded message was just a cruel joke.

However, it was another strange moment in this story. In the two decades since the fire, George and Jennie Sodder have received a series of photos or testimonies from people with possible information about their missing children. However, none of these reports turned out to be true and only brought even more confusion.

In 1952, George and Jennie built a large billboard on Route 16 highway with photos of their missing children and some 10,000 fiancees. dollars into consideration. This bulletin board on the said highway was maintained for 37 years, until Jennie’s death in 1989.

For years, looking for their children, the spouses spent more than $ 15,000 on private detectives and traveled across the country. dollars (today that would correspond to more than $ 200,000).

Take revenge on George Sodder?

Despite official findings that five Sodder children died in a fire caused by electric cables, the evidence suggests that the entire tragedy could have been a criminal and malicious conspiracy. It was well known that several members of the Fayetteville Italian community were angry with George Sodder. Uninvited guests in his house were a prophetic sign of what would happen on Christmas Day.

It is possible that a late phone call to Sodder’s house meant that Jennie and George did not sleep and escaped the fire. It’s probably not a coincidence and the fact that it was the kids who played with the new toys until late. The most logical conclusion would be that people who hated George Sodder wanted to inflict pain on him and teach him for the rest of his life. In other words, the circumstances in the scream scream that this fire was nothing more than a crime. To this day, there is a theory that this was the work of the Italian mafia.

Today, the only surviving member of this family is Sylvia Sodder Praxton. Her parents yearned for the tragedy of her family and the memory of their children to survive, so Sylvia holds memorial meetings every year in her hometown. Sylviai will be 77 this year.

George Sodder died in 1969 at the age of 73. Jennie Soder left this world at the age of 85 in 1989. She planted flowers where her children disappeared until her death. Sodder promised to seek his children to death, and they did.