The Disappearance of the Sodder Children

The Sodder family's West Virginia home caught fire on Christmas Eve, 1945. Five of the children were never seen again, though their bodies weren't recovered from the rubble.

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how

(00:42):
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We
have a sad Christmas mystery today and it's one that
is a listener west from Lauren, Rachel, Hella, Lizzie and

(01:02):
probably other people. Something we've heard people ask for a lot.
We are going to talk about five children from the
Solder family of West Virginia whose home caught fire on
Christmas Eve. Their bodies were not recovered and they also
were never seen again, so that sounds dreadfully sad. It's
actually not as sad as what I had originally been

(01:25):
researching for today's episode, and I decided I had to
put that one off until after the New Year because
it was just too sad to talk about right now,
So you all can look forward to something even sadder
in January. Uh. In other news, I'm tasty. I'm taking
suggestions for happier Christmas E episodes for next Christmas, because

(01:45):
I feel like mine for the last couple of years
have been extraordinarily sad well, and I am kind of
relieved that I'm not the one that picked this. It's
kind of been on my list, but I usually am
the one that goes for the horrible stories, so it's
good to not always be me. It was my turn
this time. Well, in the last year, one of my
picks was the Christmas the Christmas Tree Ship, and that

(02:05):
one was also just dreadfully, dreadfully sad for the holidays.
You do know how to pick a tear jerker there,
so to shift gears and go to the more somber story.
Georgio Saudu was born in Tula, Sardinia in he immigrated
to the United States in nineteen o eight. He was
only thirteen years old at the time, and he was
in the company of his older brother. At some point,

(02:27):
he changed his name to George Sodder, and the brother
who had accompanied him returned to Sardinia. George worked as
a laborer in Pennsylvania before moving to West Virginia, and
there he eventually started his own trucking company. He met
Jenny Cipriani, who would become his wife, at a local
music store. Jenny had been born in Italy and had
come to the United States at the age of three.

(02:50):
They moved from Smithers to just outside Fayetteville, West Virginia,
where George focused his business on Haulling Cole. They lived
in a two story frame house about two mile north
of town. George and Jenny Sodder had ten children together.
On Christmas Eve, nine of these children were at home
with them, the tenth was away in the army. George

(03:11):
and two of his older sons, the twenty three year
old John and sixteen year old George Jr. Had all
gone to bed early. John and George Jr. Had gone
to bed in their attic bedroom, and George Sr. In
the parents bedroom next to the office, which was on
the Holmes ground floor. The daughters Marian aged seventeen, Martha
Lee aged twelve, Jenny age eight, Betty aged six, and

(03:36):
sons Maurice age fourteen and Louis aged ten, all asked
to stay up late. The younger ones wanted to play
with the toys Marian had bought them from her job
at a dime store, and their mother had agreed, telling
Maurice and Lewis that they had to close the chicken coop,
feed the cows, and lock up before they all went
to bed. Then she went to bed herself, taking the

(03:56):
baby Sylvia, who was two or three, depending on what
source you look at, to sleep in the crib in
her parents room. A little bit after midnight on Christmas Day,
Jenny woke up to the phone ringing in the office,
and so she ran to answer it, and she presumed
that this was a wrong number or a prank. A
voice she didn't recognize asked for a name she didn't recognize,

(04:17):
and then laughed. While she was awake, she noticed that
the downstairs lights were still on and the curtains were
all still open, and the front door was unlocked, so
she went to turn all the lights off and close
up the house for the night. Then she went back
to bed. Not long after, Jenny woke up again, this
time after hearing what sounded like something hitting the roof
and then rolling down. She got up and investigated, but

(04:41):
found nothing and went back to bed. Maybe another hour later,
she woke up again, and this time she smelled smoke.
She woke up George Sr. And they realized that the
office was on fire. They started calling for their children
and trying to get everyone out of the house. They
grabbed Sylvia from her crib. Marian had fallen asleep on

(05:01):
the sofa downstairs and made it out as well. John
and George Junior came down from their attic room, according
to an article in the Charleston Gazette Mail. In the
initial police report, John and George Junior were described as
stopping in the younger children's rooms on the way down
and shaking them all awake, but in later statements they
said that they called to the other children on the

(05:22):
way down. Once both parents and Marian, John and George
Junior got outside, they realized the younger children hadn't made
it out with them. George Senior turned back and found
that the bottom of the stairs to the upper rooms
was already in flames, so he went back outside to
try to get in through the windows. First, he broke
one of the windows that he could reach, slicing his

(05:43):
arm in the process, but the lower level of the
house was at this point basically engulfed. George normally kept
a ladder against the side of the house, but when
he went to get it it was not there. Later
it was found about seventy five ft away from its
normal spot, down an embank. Meant then he had the
idea to park one of his coal trucks beside the

(06:04):
house and basically use it to climb up to the
upper windows, but neither of his trucks would start from
the yard. The rest of the family didn't see any
sign of the younger children at the windows. Marian ran
to a neighbor's house to raise the alarm. They tried
to call the fire department but couldn't get an operator
to respond, so then they tried calling a local tavern

(06:24):
and got no answer there either. Finally, the neighbor drove
into town, remember they lived a couple of miles outside
of town, to try to find the fire chief. In person,
which they finally did so in case you have some
question marks in your head, that would be pretty natural.
This was actually before the existence of nine one one
or any other such emergency hotline. The Fayetteville Fire Department

(06:48):
had no fire siren to summon the firefighters. Instead, an
operator would contact one of the firemen, who would call
someone else, who would call someone else in a phone
tree situation when there was a fire. So not quite
the efficient system we have today, And based on Fayetteville's
size and the fact that the fire department is currently
a volunteer fire department, it was probably a fire department,

(07:10):
or it was probably a volunteer fire department at the
time to although I wasn't able to confirm that specifically.
And almost certainly the department itself was short staffed in
the wake of World War Two, so there were lots
of mitigating factors in the fire department's response, but ultimately
they were still unbelievably late. The neighbor trekdown Chief F. J.

(07:31):
Morris of the Fayetteville Fire Department around one in the
morning Christmas Day. The fire truck arrived at the sold
home almost seven hours later. By then, of course, the
building was destroyed, with all of its remaining structural elements
collapsing into the basement that had taken only about thirty
or forty minutes. On Christmas morning, the fire department conducted

(07:53):
a brief search, expecting to find the bodies of several
children in the rubble, and instead they reported finding only
a few bones and pieces of internal organs. But they
told the parents that they had not found anything. The
fire chief told them that the bones of their children
had probably burned to ash in the fire. Since it
was Christmas Day, they postponed a more in depth search

(08:16):
for later. The AP wire carried a very brief report
of the fire, which The New York Times ran on
the twenty six under the headline Eleven children die in
four home fires. Five parish in West Virginia, three in Pennsylvania,
two in Kansas, one in New York. It's heartbreaking in
its simplicity. To quote from it. The victims, ranging an

(08:38):
age from six to fifteen years, were trapped on the
top floor of their home, despite the frantic efforts of
their parents and other brothers and sisters to rescue them.
A state police inspector ultimately declared that Faulty wiring had
caused the blaze. The coroner convened a jury of six citizens,
which found the cause of the children's deaths to be
quote fire or suffocation. In On December twenty nine, George

(09:02):
Solder bulldozed a few feet of soil over the remains
of the house, burying what he believed to be the
bodies of his children in a mass grave. The surviving
family planted flowers. They're basically turning it into a shrine
for Maurice, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny, and Betty. Their mother.
Jenny would wear only black for the rest of her life.

(09:23):
Almost immediately though, the family developed doubts and suspicions about
what had happened in the fire, and we will talk
about them after a brief break. For a word from
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(12:55):
after the fire, the surviving members of the family gradually
started to put together a pad earn of strange events
that they remembered from the days before it. A passer
by had looked at their fuse box and said it
would burn the house down, and an insurance agent, when
George refused to buy a policy from him, had gotten
angry and said something threatening along the lines of your

(13:16):
house will burn to the ground. The children also later
recalled that they'd seen someone in a truck watching them
come home from school one day. Mrs Sodder also didn't
believe what she had been told about her children's skeletons
being burned up to ash in the fire, so she
started doing experiments where she would burn things like chicken
bones and beef joints that were left over from cooking

(13:36):
in their woodstove, and she always, as you would expect,
how bones left over afterward. The family also wondered if
the fire was caused because of faulty wiring, why had
the lights in the house worked as they fled. They
had turned them off before bed, but as they were
leaving and trying to run out of the house, they
had turned them back on it. That's one of the
things they were really insistent about when when interviewed later

(13:59):
on in their lives, was like, they would not have
been able to find their way out if the lights
hadn't worked. The wiring was on fire, why did the
lights still work? Also, when a repairman came out to
restore the telephone line that had been destroyed in the fire,
he told the sadders that it looked like it had
been cut, not burned, and the cut was only about

(14:19):
two ft from the pole. Tied to the cut phone
wire was a report that someone had witnessed a man
stealing a block and tackle from the solder's garage that night.
That man later confessed to cutting the telephone wire, saying
that he thought they were power lines. He denied knowing
anything about the fire. This whole story is a little like, oh,

(14:41):
you only meant to cut the power. There's a lot
of his story it doesn't quite make sense. While playing
one day near the side of the fire, Sylvia found
a hard rubber object that was hollow and had a
cap that screwed off a bit, and George concluded that
this was a napalm bomb and that it was what
Jenny had heard hit the and rolled down in the

(15:01):
middle of the night before the fire, so he concluded
that that was how the fire had started, and to
kind of corroborate that there was a bus driver that
also reported seeing someone lobbing quote balls of fire at
the solder's roof on the night of the fire. Then
there were reports that people had actually seen the Sodder children.

(15:23):
A woman at a tourist stop between Fayetteville and Charleston,
West Virginia, told police that she had served them breakfast
after the fire. A woman working at a hotel in
Charleston gave a statement to police that she had seen
four of the five children there a week after Christmas.
She said they've been accompanied by four adults, to women,
and two men whose demeanor was frosty and hostile. George

(15:48):
and his wife Jenny wrote to the FBI in n
asking for help finding their missing children. J Edgar Hoover
wrote the couple of reply, effectively saying that this was
not with the FBI's jurisdiction. However, he did offer to
assist local fire and police if desired, but the local
officials declined that offer. The Solders continued to write to

(16:11):
the FBI for help every couple of years. Also in
nine seven, George Solder saw a picture of school children
in New York in a newspaper, and he became completely
convinced that one of the children in that picture was
his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan demanding to see her,
but was refused. However, George and Jenny Sawder became completely

(16:34):
convinced that their children were in fact alive, even if
that one that looked like Betty in the picture was
not really their child. They hired a long series of
private investigators, starting with CC Tinsley, who unearthed a couple
of odd connections. One was that that threatening insurance agent
had also been part of the coroner's jury. Another tidbit

(16:55):
that Tinsley discovered was that fire Chief Morris, who had
told the Sawders obviously that he had found no remains
of their children in the ruins of the house, had
confided to a minister that he had in reality found
a heart, put it in a dynamite box and buried it.
They dug up this box and took it to a
funeral home, and the funeral director said that it looked

(17:19):
to him like a fresh beef liver, not something that
had been in a fire. This, of course started rumors
that the fire chief had gotten a beef liver and
buried it in a box very recently, with the hopes
of getting the solders to stop their investigation, the conclusion
being that he wanted it to end because he had
something to hind. It was really at this point, with

(17:41):
the weird box and the series of detectives and this
ongoing search that newspapers around the country started to pick
up this story. That meant that then tips started to
come in from all over, but none of them panned out.
George Sodder dedicated a lot of the rest of his
life to traveling all around the United States to search
for his missing children. Following up on all these scattered leads,

(18:03):
the family started another investigation of the site itself in
August of nineteen forty nine, this time with the help
of Oscar B. Hunter, a pathologist from Washington, d c.
He found, among other things, a few pieces of vertebrae,
which he sent to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis. According
to their report, the vertebrae were all from the same person,

(18:25):
and based on their development, they probably belonged to a
sixteen or seventeen year old boy. The oldest Sawder son
unaccounted for after the fire, was younger than that. In
the words of the Smithsonian report, it is, however, possible,
although not probable, for a boy fourteen and a half
years old to show sixteen to seventeen maturation. The report

(18:48):
also said that one would have expected to find complete
skeletons of all the children given the conditions of the fire.
The Smithsonian's involvement wound up leading to hearings in the
West Virginia capital of Child Austin. The governor and the
superintendent of the state police told the Sadders that this
case was hopeless, and they declared it closed. In nineteen

(19:08):
fifty two. The Sawders put up a billboard displayed pictures
of their five missing children, and it was low to
the ground so that if you walked over to read it,
the pictures were at eye level. It read, quote, what
was their fate kidnapped, murdered or are they still alive?
And it offered a five thousand dollar reward and gave
additional information about the fire and the children. Eventually that

(19:31):
reward was increased to ten thousand dollars and they passed
out flyers with all of this same information as well.
George continued to travel to personally investigate tips that the
family got. He looked into the idea that Martha was
in a convent in St. Louis, that someone had overheard
a conversation about the fire before it happened, that a

(19:52):
distant relative of his wife, Jenny's, had the children, That
a woman had overheard a drunk man in a Mexican
border town telling someone else the story of his true identity.
It went on and on and on. In response to
that last one, George did track down the woman who
wrote the letter, although she was not willing to talk
to him. He found the men she had described, though,

(20:14):
and they told him they wished they could help, but
that he had the wrong people. He apparently doubted for
the rest of his life that that that that they
were being honest, and when wished he had stayed and
pressed them further with his questions. Jenny received an envelope
with a Central City, Kentucky postmark in night and and

(20:34):
it was a picture with a cryptic note that included
the name Louis Sodder and some strange number and letter
numbers and letters. Also written on it was I love
brother Frankie, But none of those Soider children were named
Frankie or frank To all the surviving family, the man
shown in this picture did look like a grown version
of Louis, who had been nine years old at the

(20:55):
time of the fire. The private investigator that they sent
to Kentucky to investigate never got back in touch with them.
After receiving this cryptic letter, they revised their billboard, adding
in the picture that purported to be of the grown
up Louis with new text that said, after thirty years,
it is not too late to investigate. On Christmas Eve,

(21:18):
our home was set a fire and five of our children,
ages five through fourteen, kidnapped. The officials blamed defective wiring,
although lights were still burning after the fire started. The
official reports stated that the children died in the fire. However,
no bones were found in the residue and there was
no smell of burning flesh. During or after the fire?
What was the motive of law officers involved? What did

(21:40):
they have to gain by making us suffer all these
years of injustice? Why did they lie and force us
to accept those lies? In nineteen sixty nine, George Solder died. Afterward,
Jenny Sawder put up a sturdy fence around her home
and then started adding to it. In an ex Smithsonian
Magazine describes as quote, building layer after layer between her

(22:01):
and the outside. The billboard remained until Jenny died about
twenty years after her husband. And now we're gonna talk
about some theories for what happened, but before we do that,
we will have another brief word from sponsor. We've said
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in stuff that stamps dot com enter stuff. So to
get back to the story, there are so many unanswered

(23:27):
questions about this fire. The big one why were there
no bodies found, especially considering that there were plenty of
other structural pieces and damaged household items after the fire
was over. Why did it take seven hours for the
fire department to get there even with that whole phone
tree situation. It was actually one article that suggested that

(23:47):
the fire chief was not capable of driving the fire
truck for some reason and had to wait for somebody
who could. But why would that take seven hours? And
where did the vertebrae come from? One theory is that
they were in the fielder that George used to bury
the remains of the home, But if so, who's were they.
The bone fragments analyzed by the Smithsonian have since disappeared,

(24:08):
so they can't be further analyzed for DNA. Why was
the latter that was normally propped by the house not there,
especially since George insisted that was where it always was,
that's where he kept it. Why would the coal trucks
not start? George's answer to that one became that somebody
had tampered with them on purpose, although descendants of the

(24:28):
surviving children have theorized that he might have flooded their
engines in his case, in his haste to try to
get them moving. And if the children had been trapped
in their rooms at the top of the house, why
couldn't the survivors outside see them at the windows? An
obvious answer is that they had already succumbed to smoke,
an elation, and another theory, according to fire Marshal sterling

(24:50):
Lewis interviewed by NPR, when children reached the age of
twelve or thirteen. They generally try to escape a fire,
but younger children usually try to hide. He told very
sad stories about finding the bodies of children curled up
in strange places because they rather than trying to get out,
they tried to hide from the fire. So then the

(25:11):
question becomes, if they were not in the house when
it burned down, if they were still alive, why did
they never contact their parents even once they were grown.
One theory is that for some reason, doing so would
have put their parents lives at risk. Well, and we
don't know if one of them did, since there was
that weird cryptic letter, but it's super cryptic. There are

(25:32):
so many theories for what happened to the Solder children.
The first and most obvious is that they really did
die in the fire, although that does not account for
why no one found their remains, and all the other
theories are basically entirely speculative. Some of them kind of
feel like they're pulled out of thin air. One such
notion is that the mafia had tried to recruit the

(25:52):
solders and the solders had refused, which led to the
kidnapping of their children his retaliation Local law enforcement. On
the other hand have said that there was no known
mafia activity in that part of West Virginia at the time.
Another theory is that this was all some sort of conspiracy,
and that someone known to the family played a part
kidnapping the children by claiming they were going to take

(26:14):
them somewhere safe. Sylvia, who was just a toddler at
the time of the fire and whose youngest memories are
of that night, told NPR in two thousand and five
that she wanted people to uphold her parents dream of
keeping the story alive. She was still living as and
as at that point, she, her husband, and their daughter
all steadfastly believed that her siblings did not die in

(26:37):
that fire. Remains a mystery. It does. I don't know
what I think about this, Yeah, me either. I mean,
there's always the Occam's razor thing, and you're like, well,
the most likely, but there's so much weirdness around it
that right when I started researching it and knew very
little about the fact about it. Besides the house burned down,

(26:58):
there was a billboard, there's a sort of the two
fat that I need. I thought most likely that they
had died in the fire, and it was a terrible tragedy,
and like, it just seems totally logical to me that
a grieving family would latch onto the idea that they
were still living and spend the rest of their lives
looking for it. But then once we got into like, seriously,
where were the but I couldn't find any reasonable scientific

(27:21):
explanation for how bodies would not have been recovered if
they had really been there. Uh, And then the whole
rest of it became so weird that now I sort
of think maybe they weren't in the house when it
burned down. But then I had no idea. Yeah, the
part where it always turns for me where I'm like,
something fishy happened is the beef liver that's allegedly a

(27:44):
human heart. Yeah, it's like that's a really dicey behavior. Yeah,
with no explanation unless he knew more than more than
he was saying, we don't know. It's all speculative. Yeah.
Do you have a peppier listener mail to get us
off of the sad loss of people? Is it Peppier? Okay,

(28:07):
it's not not peppy, it's not super cheery. It's from
Adrian and it is about our recent episode on the
Gallipoli campaign, and Adrian says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I'm
a recent, albeit avid listener of your podcast, so firstly,
thank you for all your great work. I wanted to
write in after your recent episode on the Glippoli campaign.
I must admit that as an Australian I almost couldn't

(28:28):
bear to listen to anything more on Glippoli after what
felt like years of studying Glippoli throughout high school and
the constant invocations of it around Anzac Day. This is
not a criticism that I didn't miss this in history class.
It was only after high school that I realized that
not everyone in the world knew every detail or cared
as much about the campaign as we Australians do. Nevertheless,

(28:48):
I was keen to hear a foreign perspective and I
wanted to say I thought you guys did a great
job covering the campaign and the limited time you have.
I especially commend you for mentioning some of the criticism
surrounding Glippoli and Anzac in general. In that regard, I
found it interesting that you used the word Anzac myth
rather than the more common usage of Anzac legend. While
there may be only minor semantic differences. I think that

(29:10):
myth implies more falsity than legend. Throughout high school, I
was never taught that the values attributed to Anzac troops
for the result of selective and embellished accounts of journalists
like C. W. Being of Ellis Ashman, Barlott, or simply
concocted I e. A myth. In fact, I don't think
that you emphasize just how significant the Anzac legend born

(29:31):
in Gallipoli is in Australian culture. The word Anzac is
even protected by legislation and people must get permission to
use it. While in university we student we history students
do question elements of Anzac. Outside of university, criticizing an
Zac can be considered tantamount to blasphemy, people who have
even lost their jobs over public criticism around the centenary. Here,

(29:53):
there was also a huge backlash over brands capitalizing on
Anzac or quote brand Zach to sell products indicating the
sacred nature of our national narrative, or as historian King
English calls it, our civil religion. The reasons behind the
importance of Anzac are a complex mix of political, historical,
and social elements that I could go on about it

(30:14):
for days, or I'll stop myself and concluded by saying,
thank you for covering this part of Australian history, and
then she sent some suggestions for some other Australian history.
Thank you so much, Adrian. I wanted to read this
email today for a couple of reasons. One is that
I'm not totally sure where in my research process I
picked up the term and zach math. I'm not sure

(30:34):
if one of my sources use it or if it
just stuck in my head that way rather than legend.
But when I did look into this after Adrian's email,
I did find that legend was a lot more common
in various sites than myth was. And the other is
that we had several people to write in to talk
about how anzac and zach is basically protected as a term. Uh,

(30:55):
and they're like, when you make an zach biscuits, there's
only one rest p that you can sell as am
Zac biscuits. There's just a lot of sort of protecting
this this term and how it is used within Australia.
So thank you so much Adrian for writing to us
about this. It also cracked me up that she she
clarified that it was not a criticism that she didn't
miss this in history class because we hear that joke

(31:18):
like five hundred times a day. Delighted me that that
Adrian was sort of like specifically like, I'm not saying
that that thing that you hear three hundred times a day.
So anyway, thank you Adrian for writing to us. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast, we're at History Podcasts that how Stuff
Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot

(31:38):
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little more about something similar to what we've talked about today,
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how stuff Works dot com. Put the word unsolved in
the search bar and you will find a whole quiz

(31:59):
about the serious unsolved mysteries throughout history. If you would
like to come to our website, we were at mt
in history dot com and we have show notes for
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We have an archive of all episodes we have done ever,
so you can do all of that and a whole
lot more at how stuff works dot com or history
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

(32:24):
isn't how stuff works dot com.