It is estimated that 800,000 children go missing per year. That’s more than 2,000 children per day. On Christmas Eve 1945, five children went missing. The youngest child being five and the oldest being fourteen. Many people argue that the five children didn’t go missing, but that they died in a house fire that same night. But there are many reasons that no one can say for certain if they did or did not die. The five Sodder childrens case was one of the most mysterious cases ever. Italian immigrants George and Jennie Sodder were the parents of the five children.
George came to America with his brother when he was 13. However, his brother went back to Italy soon after, leaving George on his own. George found his way to New York, where he met Jennie who had came to the U. S from Italy when she was three. They fell in love and moved to Fayetteville, West Virginia. In all they had ten children. Their names were as follows: John (23), Marian (17), George Jr. (16), Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (10), Jenny (8), Betty (5), and Silvia (2). Their oldest son was away in the military and his name is not known.
On December 24, 1945, the Sodder children had just opened their presents from their older sister, Marian. At bedtime, Jennie agreed to let Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty stay up and play with their toys as long as they locked the door and turned out the lights. Later that night, Jennie wakes up to a phone ringing. She gets up and answers the phone. The woman who had called asked for someone Jennie didn’t know, laughed, and then hung up. She then looked and saw the doors unlocked and the lights on. She locked the door and turned out the lights, assuming her children had gone to bed.
She went back to sleep only to be woken up again by a sound of something hitting the roof and rolling off. She dozed back to sleep. Only thirty minutes later, he woke up to the smell of smoke. Jennie grabbed Silvia, the youngest Sodder child, woke up George, and yelled for the other children to wake up. John and George Jr. ran down from in the attic where their room was, yelling at the younger children to wake up and to leave the house. Once outside, Marion ran to a neighbor’s house to call the fire department. However, none of the phones worked.
Eventually a neighbor up the street was able to call. George and Jennie noticed that five of their children weren’t outside. Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty would never be seen by their parents again. The fire was too hot and too large to climb hrough the door or any downstairs window. George went to retrieve his ladder, so he should be able to reach the second story window. The ladder wasn’t at its normal spot in the garage and would later be found next to an embankment by the house. George then tried to use his coal trucks.
However neither would start, though they had worked fine the day before. The fire only lasted for forty-five minutes, but the fire department would, for some reason, not arrive for another six hours. The court ruled that Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty had died in the fire and that the fire was caused by bad wiring. No bones were ever found and the lights were on during the fire. George put dirt over the ashes of his house and built a memorial for his children. This memorial was not to mark that they had died, but to show the public the five missing Sodder children.
He hoped that one day they would be returned to their family. George and Jennie did not ever believed that the children had died in the fire. The fact that there were no bones found bothered Jennie. Many scientists concluded that the fire had not burned long enough to completely destroy the bones. A neighbor claimed to have seen someone cut the phone wires nd run away with the ladder. A man who worked for the telephone company also concluded the wires had been cut, not burned. A bus driver claimed to have seen a person throwing “fire balls” onto the roof.
The police found burned rubber in the shape of a ball on the ground next to the house. A woman who lived down their street claimed to have seen the Sodder children in the backseat of a car driving away during the time of the fire. Many more reports of sightings started popping up. One woman said she served them breakfast at a diner the next morning and watched them get into a car with a Florida license plate. A woman claimed to have seen them with two Italian men and two Italian women at a hotel. She said that when she tried to talk to the children the men became very angry.
They were gone by the next morning. John and George Jr. claimed to have seen a car parked on the highway, watching the younger kids as they came home from school. George remembered one man telling him that the houses two fuse boxes were going to catch on fire someday. Another man trying to sell George life insurance saying that the Sodders house would burn to the ground and the children would die because of the dirty remarks George had ade about Mussolini, who was the Italian prime minister. This same man was on the court that ruled the children had died in the fire.
The fire marshall tried to put things to rest. He claimed that he had found a heart in the fire, even though he had stated earlier that nothing was found, and had buried the heart in a box. They dug the box up but inside was nothing but a fresh beef liver. A few years later, George found a picture of a little girl in a New York newspaper. George believed this girl was his five year old daughter, Betty, who was the youngest to dissapear during the fire. He traveled to New York, but he was not allowed to speak to the child. George brought in a paleontologist who did find four vertebrae.
However, the bones had no fire damage. After sending them away for testing, they found the bones would at least belong to a sixteen or seventeen year old boy, not fitting the oldest Sodder to disappear, fourteen year old Maurice. One morning ten years later, Jennie received a picture from Kentucky of a nineteen year old boy that resembled Louis Sodder, who was nine at the time of his disappearance. On the back of the photo someone had wrote, “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Lill Boys. A90132”. George sent a private investigator to Kentucky to look for Louis.
This particular private investigator has not been seen since. No one can say for certain what happened to the children. Many people believe that the children simply died and the parents were just holding on to hope. But there are some who do believe that those five Sodder children survived the fire that night. It has been many years since the death of George and Jennie Sodder, but Silvia, who was two during the fire, and George and Jennies grandchildren are still searching for what happened to the children that people say went up in flames.