Unsolved cases

The mysterious dissapearance of the Sodder children

From now on, we have Shane here

The year was 1945 on the night before Christmas in Fayetteville, WV. George and Jenny Sodder along with nine of their children were asleep when a fire started in the house at around 1:00am. George, Jenny and four of their children escaped, Sylvia, Mary and john and George Jr, the children that remained in the house were Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty and the five of them shared two bedrooms between them both rooms upstairs.
George broke back into the house to save the rest of the children but the staircase was on fire, when he went outside to retrieve his ladder it was missing from its normal spot in both of his which he wanted to use to park outside and climbed on top of were strangely not starting.

Marion, one of the children who escaped the fire, ran to the neighbor's house to call the fire department but the operator didn't respond and when a different neighbor attempted to call she also got no response from the operator, that same neighbor actually drove to town and found the fire chief F.J Morris in person but even though the fire department was only located 2.5 miles away from the home, the firefighters bizarrely didn't reach the slaughterhouse until 8:00am. Seven hours after the fire began and by the time they arrived, the house was literally ash.

Authority scavenge the ashes of the fire looking for the remains of the five missing Sodder children but nothing was found and they were presumed dead due to the fire, the fire chief FJ Moore is suggested that the fire may have been so hot that it completely cremated the children's bodies including their bones. While that theory sounds reasonable, it is not entirely accurate because when flesh has burned away, bones are still typically left behind like and fragmented form, additionally there was no smell of burning flesh reported during or after the fire. The cause of the fire was deemed to be bad wiring in the house and in the week after the Fayetteville coroner's office issued death certificates for the five Sodder children, the basement of the house is still remained and George would later use a bulldozer to cover it up with five feet of dirt to create a memorial to his children.

Soon after the fire, George and Jenny began to suspect their children were not dead but instead kidnapped, believing the fire was deliberately set as a diversion and not the result of faulty wiring, in fact George had actually had the wiring in his house checked earlier that fall by the power company which had deemed the wiring in safe working order.
But before we dig into the theory that the children were kidnapped, let's discuss George's personal history to provide some context who George sodder Gad emigrated from Italy and Faxetteville where sadhus lived had a small but engaged Italian immigrant community, a community that George was very vocal in especially about his disdain for Mussolini sparking it few heated debates in the community.
George also reportedly never reveal why he left Italy, leading some to speculate that he may have been involved in some shady business in Italy, many believe that either of these reasons may have led to the kidnapping of George's children.

Let's examine some curious occurrences that support a possible kidnapping. In the fall, just before the house fire, a life insurance salesman came to the house and when he saw that his sale wasn't going to be successful, he became infuriated, yelling at George:
" YOUR GODD*M HOUSE IS GOING UP IN SMOKE, AND YOUR CHILDREN ARE GOHBG TO BE DESTROYED. YOU'RE GOING TO BE PAID FOR THE DIRTY REMARKS YOU HAVE BEEN MAKING ABOUT MUSSOLINI"

In the days leading up to the fire, two of the surviving a sodder sons witnessed a man watching the younger Sodder children come home from school on highway 21. Another suspicious occurrence happened that night on the night of the fire at around 12:30am, the phone rang and Jenny got out of bed to answer. This would result in an important observation Jenny notice the lights were still on downstairs, as she started to fall back asleep, she heard a loud bang on the roof followed by sound of something rolling and an hour later she woke to the smell of smoke entering her room downstairs. The detail that is interesting in the fact that the lights were still on if the fire had been caused by faulty wiring as had been suggested than that meant there wouldn't have been power to the house meaning that the lights shouldn't have been working but Jenny saw that were on about an hour before the smoke and later the sodder would claim that they saw the lights on while the fire was occurring as well. Additionally, a witness to the fire claimed that they saw a man removing a block and tackled, typically used for removing engines from cars, perhaps explaining why both of George's trucks weren't working that night.