January 24, 2025 • 30 mins
On December 24th, 1945, a fire destroyed the home of Jennie and George Sodder and their ten children in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Five children were believed to have died. But when firefighters searched the rubble, there was no trace of them—no remains, no answers. How could they have vanished so completely? Join us as we uncover the strange clues and lingering questions surrounding this unforgettable case.
Written by Emma Dibdin and produced by Richard MacLean Smith.
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash
Unexplained pod. In the early hours of Christmas Day nineteen
(00:30):
forty five, dawn breaks over the small town of Fayetteville,
West Virginia, in the United States. All across the county,
children arousing from sleep dreaming of reindeers and presents under
the tree. But as early rises sleepily draw back their curtains,
they're startled to find thick smoke hanging over the town.
(00:54):
This wasn't the festive haze of burning logs and roasting chestnuts.
Acrid and deadly. On Beckwith Road, in a quiet rural
district on the outskirts of town, people stepped out of
their houses to see thick, black plumes of smoke spiraling
upwards from number twenty sixty two. The house belonged to
(01:18):
George and Jenny Sodder. The couple had ten children, nine
of whom were home when the fire broke out. Like
most other kids, they had all gone to bed filled
with nothing but joy and excitement for the day to come. Instead,
they emerged into a nightmare. When fire services made it
(01:40):
to the property, they found George and Jenny huddled on
the lawn with four of their children. Five others had
yet to make it out. They could only watch in
desperation as the volunteer crew did their best to stem
the flames, hoping beyond hope for any sign of their
missing children, but none appeared. Hours later, with the blaze
(02:06):
having long since burned itself out, fire Chief F. J.
Morris took on the grim task of searching for the
bodies of the missing children. Black smoke hung thick in
the air, still billowing from the rubble as he stepped
from room to room, but the more he searched, the
more confused he became. The children's bodies weren't there. After
(02:32):
searching for more than an hour, Morris was exhausted and
light headed from the smoke. Forced to admit defeat, he
headed back outside into the chilly morning, Gulping in the
fresh air. Across the front yard, the remainings of family
members looked close to catatonic. Morris took a moment to
(02:53):
rehydrate and compose himself, then walked over to the sodders
told them that he'd searched the house from top to bottom,
but for some inexplicable reason, he'd found no trace of
Morris fourteen, Martha twelve, Louis nine, Jenny eight, and Betty five.
(03:20):
It was almost too much to wrap their heads around.
It wasn't the awful news they'd been bracing themselves for,
but in ways they had yet to understand, it was
perhaps even worse. Their five children, it seemed, hadn't burned
to death in their beds, they'd completely vanished. You're listening
(03:41):
to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Giorgio Sodou was
born on the Italian island of Sardinia, but in nineteen
oh eight, when he was just US thirteen, he and
(04:01):
his brother boarded a ship bound for America with the
intention of immigrating. It isn't known why exactly, but shortly
after their arrival at New York's Ellis Island, a tearful
Georgio was given the crushing news by his brother that
he would be continuing his journey on his own. Georgio's
(04:23):
brother gave Georgio one final hug, then got straight back
on their ship and sailed back to Italy. Georgio's only
option was to assimilate as quickly as possible. By his
mid twenties, the industrious Georgio Sodu had changed his name
to George Soder in reaction to the anti Italian sentiment
(04:45):
that was rife at the time, and was running his
own trucking company in West Virginia. A short time later,
he met Jenny Cipriani, who had also emigrated to America
from Italy as a child. The connection was instant, and
within a year they were married. Together they moved to Fayetteville,
(05:07):
a town with a strong Italian American community where they
felt truly at home. It was the ideal place to
start their family. Over the next two decades, the Sodders
had a total of ten children. Their eldest, John, was
born in nineteen twenty two, and their youngest, Sylvia, in
(05:28):
nineteen forty three. Jenny focused on raising the kids, and
George concentrated on expanding his trucking business. By the mid
nineteen forties, the Soders seemed to have firmly established their
reputation in the community as a respected middle class family,
(05:49):
but not everybody saw eye to eye with them. Although
George had left Italy behind. He was deeply invested in
his home country and had stronger peaions about the Fascist
government and Benito Mussolini. Even after Mussolini was overthrown in
forty three, this remained a controversial issue among the Italian
(06:12):
immigrant community. George wasn't afraid to share his views in public,
and his opposition to Mussolini led to some heated arguments
with his neighbors. Still, for the most part, the Soders
lived a quiet and uneventful life in Fayetteville. That was
(06:33):
until the autumn of nineteen forty five, when a series
of strange incidents occurred. One morning, a stranger knocked on
the Soders front door and asked to speak to George
about a possible job. When George invited the man in sight,
(06:58):
he began wandering around the house, then suddenly made a
beeline for the fuse box, pointing at the wiring with
an oddly knowing look. The man said, this is going
to cause a fire some day. The man lingered for
a little longer, making small talk, than eventually left. George
(07:19):
was confused. He'd only just had the houses wiring checked
by the power company, and according to them, everything was fine.
A couple of weeks later, a traveling salesman arrived at
the door attempting to sell life insurance. When George declined,
the man refused to take no for an answer. When
(07:42):
George then asked him to leave, the man grew angry
and said that George would pay for his opinions on Mussolini.
Just before George could shut the door in his face,
the salesman snarled, of final warning, your goddamn house is
going up in smoke and your children are going to
(08:02):
be destroyed. Though disturbed by the incident, George chalked it
down to the emotional turmoil of how things had unfolded
in Italy towards the end of the war. It was
a few weeks before the winter holidays of nineteen forty
five when the two oldest Otter sons, John and George Junior,
(08:24):
noticed that the same car kept parking across the street
from their house. It didn't belong to any of their neighbors.
The nearest house was several hundred feet down the road,
and they didn't recognize the man behind the wheel. Even
more unsettling, the car always seemed to be there When
(08:45):
the youngest children arrived home from school as if the
driver was keeping watch on them. Then just like that,
the car was gone. On Christmas Eve, the Sodder's house
was a twinkling haven of light on their dark rural road.
(09:06):
Festive fairy lights adorned the front porch. Inside, tinsel and
mistletoe hung from every available surface. A huge tree stood
proudly in the living room with an array of colorfully
wrapped presents laid out beneath. That night, George and his
(09:26):
two eldest sons, John and George Junior, who'd been at
work all day together, decided to get an early night,
but for the rest of the kids, the night was
only just getting started. It was a sod of family
(09:50):
tradition that the younger children be allowed to open one
present each on Christmas Eve. This year, they all chose
to open their gifts from Marian, their seventeen year old sister,
who'd bought toys from the dime store where she worked.
By ten pm, the children were all excitedly playing with
their new toys and begged their mother to let them
(10:14):
stay up a little while longer, since it was Christmas
after all. Jenny was happy to agree on the one
condition that Marian keep watch over them. Then she scooped
up her youngest, two year old, Sylvia, and went upstairs
to bed. A few hours later, Jenny was woken by
(10:35):
the sound of something ringing. As she roused from sleep,
she realized it was the phone. Squinting at the clock,
she saw, to her confusion that it had just gone
past midnight. Grabbing her nightgown, she shuffled into the hallway
and made her way to the phone downstairs. Hello, she said,
(10:57):
answering the call. For a moment. On the other end,
she heard only the muffled noise of what sounded like
a party, glasses clinking, and indistinct chatter. Then a man
asked to speak to someone whose name Jenny didn't recognize.
She replied that they must have the wrong number. Then
(11:19):
the caller let out a strange laugh and hung up.
Jenny stared at the phone in disbelief, then replaced the receiver.
Turning around, she saw Mario fast asleep on the sofa,
but no sign of the other five children. They must
have finally gone upstairs to bed, she thought. Then she
(11:43):
noticed something strange. The living room curtains were wide open,
and all the downstairs lights were still on and the
front door was unbolted. Now she was annoyed. She'd specifically
told Marian to make sure everything was off and the
house secured before going to bed. Too tired to dwell
(12:05):
on it, Jenny drew the curtains, locked the door, and
turned off all the lights. Then she walked back upstairs
to bed and fell back to sleep. Jenny had only
been sleeping for half an hour when she was startled
(12:27):
awake again, this time by a loud bang, like something
had just hit the roof of the house and rolled
off it. Still half asleep, she figured it was just
an animal, or maybe a tree branch. After a few
moments of silence, she dozed off again. It was thirty
(12:48):
minutes later when she woke again, coughing violently. The air
was thick with suffocating smoke. The smoke seemed to be
snaking into the bedroom from the hallway. Disorientated, she staggered
out of the bed and followed it to George's office,
where a blaze had broken out in the corner of
(13:09):
the room. She watched in horror as the flames began
to spread outwards at terrifying speed. Jenny screamed for George,
who emerged from the bedroom seconds later, holding their two
year old Sylvia. With Marion now awake too, the couple
handed Sylvia to her and told her to get to
(13:30):
safety while they concentrated on getting the rest of the
children out of the house. John and George Junior appeared
sprinting down the stairs. Together with their father. They began
to try and fight the fire. They ran outside to
the well to fetch water, but the water was frozen solid.
(13:51):
By the time they got back to the house, the
entire staircase and foyer was engulfed in flames. With five
children still inside the property, George smashed a window in
the side of the house, cutting himself badly. Pushed back
by the heat from inside, he yelled for his children
to get out, over and over again until his voice
(14:14):
was hoarse, but the children, whose bedrooms were on the
second floor did not appear. Now Frantic, George, John and
George Junior rushed to the other side of the house,
where they kept a step ladder. Perhaps they could reach
the upstairs window and get to the children that way,
they thought, but the ladder was missing. George sprinted to
(14:40):
his truck and jumped into the driver's seat. His plan
was to back it up to the house, then he
and the boys could climb on top of it, but
the truck wouldn't start, and neither would his spare truck
that he kept on hand for emergencies. Paralyzed by horror,
George and Ja had no choice but to simply stand
(15:02):
on the front lawn and watch helplessly as the flames
engulfed their entire home. They screamed and screamed for the
missing children, Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny and Betty. If
one of them could just make it to the window,
they begged, they'd find a way to get them down,
(15:25):
But there was still no movement from inside, and within
minutes the entire house was a raging inferno. As the
situation became increasingly helpless, Marion handed Sylvia to her mother
(15:46):
and ran as fast as she could to the nearest
house to call the local fire department. With so many
able bodied men still posted overseas for the war effort,
the emergency services were stretched dangerously thin, with only a
handful of volunteers left to sustain it. When the neighbor
failed to raise anyone on the phone, he drove to
(16:08):
the home of fire Chief Morris and hammered on his
door to wake him up. By the time Marian returned home,
the house had burned completely to the ground. When Chief
Morris and the rest of his team finally arrived at
the scene several hours later, there was little left for
them to do except surveyed the damage and recover the
(16:30):
bodies of the missing children. But after several hours of searching,
he had to tell the sodders that he couldn't find
any sign of them. With the remaining family inconsolable, Morris
tried to make sense of it all. He explained the
most likely theory that the fire had been so hot
it had simply left no trace of the bodies. There
(16:54):
were tanks of fuel stored in the basement, which could
potentially have intensified the flames enough to make this possible.
Deep down, however, this explanation didn't make sense to him,
the family had little choice but to accept it. A
few days later, the missing children were officially declared dead
(17:17):
by fire or suffocation, But as the days went by,
Jenny couldn't help but dwell on the strange events that
preceded the blades. Having found Marion asleep but all the
lights on the curtains wide open and the front door unbolted.
At the time, she naturally assumed that all the other
(17:40):
children were upstairs in bed, But now an alternative theory
took shape in her mind. What if the children had
never made it to bed at all, but had instead
been abducted, And if that was the case, then they
were possibly still out there somewhere alive. After the worst
(18:03):
night of their lives, Jenny and George now had a
shred of hope to cling to, and cling to it
they did. Losing five children is a horror beyond words,
(18:26):
and it was a relief to Jenny Soder, especially that
she had something else to focus on. Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny,
and Betty were all she could think about. The pain
of their absence, like a black hole of anguish inside her,
forever on the verge of consuming her entire being, and
(18:50):
so to try and satiate it, she looked for proof
that they were still alive. She sifted through the ashes
of her home and found remnence of household appliances that
survived the fire. This in itself made the official explanation
seem ridiculous. How could a toaster survive, she thought if
(19:12):
human bone could not, She began experimenting burning various kinds
of animal bones chicken, cow, pig, to see if she
could reduce them to ash. In every case, fragments of
bone remained, even when she let the fire burn for
hours on end. Seeing his wife's desperation, George felt it
(19:37):
important to share what he knew too. He told her
about the bizarre incidents he'd experienced in the lead up
to the fire, the stranger who warned him that the
fuse box might burn the house down, and the insurance
salesman who'd made that chilling and seemingly prophetic threat. And
(19:59):
from these settling pieces, the Sodders began to put together
a picture of what they think happened. Somebody had targeted
their family with a view to burning them alive in
their beds. But what if their real plan was actually
to kidnap the children and the fire was merely a distraction.
(20:23):
As unlikely as it might seem, the theory gained credibility
when a neighbor of the Sodders claimed to have seen
one of the children being driven away in a car
just after the house caught fire. A bus driver also
reported seeing what looked like a ball of fire being
thrown onto their roof around one a m. Then, Jenny
(20:47):
later found a rubber looking object in the back yard
of the house, which George identified as a hand grenade.
The couple tried their best to convince the state police.
They described the threats, the apparent prank call, and the
mounting evidence that this was arson. They begged them to
(21:09):
look into the possibility that whoever was responsible for it
might still have their children. Though the police seemed sympathetic enough,
they simply wouldn't get on board with what they saw
as the couple's outlandish theory. At a coroner's inquest, the
fire was eventually ruled to be an accident caused by
(21:32):
faulty wiring. Exhausted and defeated, the Sodders felt they had
little choice but to give up and try to move
on for the sake of their remaining children. The remains
at the house were bulldozed away completely and the ashes
covered over with fresh dirt. Despite their best efforts to
(22:01):
move on, not a day went by that Jenny and
George Sodder didn't think about their missing children. They were
haunted by possibilities, unable to stop imagining what they might
be going through if they were still alive. Finally, they
decided to hire a private investigator, who soon turned up
(22:23):
some interesting clues. They learned that the insurance salesman who
threatened George later served on the jury during the coroner's inquest,
where the fire was ruled accidental. Then came a much
more bizarre discovery. The investigator uncovered that while fire Chief
(22:44):
Morris was scarring the ashes for signs of human remains,
he had in fact found a human heart. For reasons unknown,
Morris decided to bury it in a box in the
backyard without ever revealing it to the family. The investigator
successfully lobbied for the heart to be dug up and analyzed,
(23:06):
only for it to turn out to have actually been
a cow's liver that had somehow survived the inferno. After
this strange red herring, the PI hired a pathologist to
excavate the site at the sodders Old home just to
make sure there were no more surprises hidden in the ashes. Incredibly,
(23:27):
there were several shards of human vertebrae that looked to
be from a teenager, probably around sixteen or seventeen years old.
The Sodders were devastated. For the first time, it seemed
they had concrete evidence that their rather children did in
(23:48):
fact perish in the fire. A later analysis of the
bone showed that it had never been exposed to fire
or significant heat. Most likely, it did actually come from
the supply of dirt which the Sodders had used to
cover up the ashes after bulldozing the property. Despite the
(24:10):
disappointment of these dead ends, the private investigator did turn
up plenty of tips from people across multiple states who
all claimed to have seen the missing children in various locations.
One woman who worked at a hotel in Charleston, a
city fifty miles north of Fayetteville, said that she'd seen
(24:31):
four of the five missing children at her hotel the
week after the fire. They were apparently accompanied by four
Italian adults who seemed tense. She said. When she tried
to talk to the children, the adults snapped at her
and ushered them away. The whole thing had left her
(24:51):
with a bad feeling, she said, but no further information
was found to substantiate the claim. In the end, the
Soders were left with a huge pile of possible clues
that could have been something, but equally nothing. Overwhelmed, they
(25:15):
wrote a letter to the FBI asking for help, and
were thrilled to receive a reply from the bureau's director,
j Edgar Hoover. Having been dismissed by law enforcement for
so long, this validation was much needed. However, Hoover told
them that although he'd like to help, the FBI didn't
(25:37):
have jurisdiction over state matters. The Bureau would be more
than happy to assist with the case if the local
authorities gave their permission, but for some reason, the Fayetteville
police declined. In nineteen fifty, they officially declared the case closed.
(25:57):
By now, it was clear to the Soders that the
authorities in Fayetteville wanted to put the whole thing behind them.
But was this merely down to complacency and a reluctance
to spend any more resources on a five year old case,
or something more sinister. Either way, Jenny and George refused
(26:18):
to give up. Shortly after the case was closed, the
Sodders paid to have a huge billboard erected along Route sixteen,
where it would be seen by anybody driving in or
out of Fayetteville. It showed a picture of their five
missing children above a caption which read, on Christmas Eve
(26:40):
nineteen forty five, our home was set on fire and
five of our children kidnapped. It went on to list
the inconsistencies in the official story, including the fact that
no bones were ever found. It ended, what was the
motive of the law officers involved? What did they have
(27:02):
to gain by making us suffer all these years of injustice?
Why did they lie and force us to accept those lights.
The billboard remained up for close to four decades, and
as a result, supposed sightings of the children rolled in
for years. There was even a man in Texas who
(27:24):
claimed to be Louis Sodder, who bore a striking resemblance
to the child they remembered. George spent years traveling the
country to follow up on these tips, but all came
to nothing. George died in nineteen sixty nine. For the
next twenty years, Jenny wore black every day as a
(27:46):
sign of her mourning for her husband and the children
they'd lost. Then, in nineteen eighty nine, at the age
of eighty six, Jenny also died. With her passing. The
families billboard was finally taken down, but the questions it
posed in bold black letters remain forever unanswered. This episode
(28:15):
was written by Emma Dibden and produced by me Richard
McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening to the show.
Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so.
You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok
dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained as an
Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All
(28:39):
other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also
produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained. The book and
audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase
from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please
subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get yours,
(29:00):
and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts
or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.
Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast
dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained
Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained
(29:21):
Podcast do
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash
Unexplained pod. In the early hours of Christmas Day nineteen
(00:30):
forty five, dawn breaks over the small town of Fayetteville,
West Virginia, in the United States. All across the county,
children arousing from sleep dreaming of reindeers and presents under
the tree. But as early rises sleepily draw back their curtains,
they're startled to find thick smoke hanging over the town.
(00:54):
This wasn't the festive haze of burning logs and roasting chestnuts.
Acrid and deadly. On Beckwith Road, in a quiet rural
district on the outskirts of town, people stepped out of
their houses to see thick, black plumes of smoke spiraling
upwards from number twenty sixty two. The house belonged to
(01:18):
George and Jenny Sodder. The couple had ten children, nine
of whom were home when the fire broke out. Like
most other kids, they had all gone to bed filled
with nothing but joy and excitement for the day to come. Instead,
they emerged into a nightmare. When fire services made it
(01:40):
to the property, they found George and Jenny huddled on
the lawn with four of their children. Five others had
yet to make it out. They could only watch in
desperation as the volunteer crew did their best to stem
the flames, hoping beyond hope for any sign of their
missing children, but none appeared. Hours later, with the blaze
(02:06):
having long since burned itself out, fire Chief F. J.
Morris took on the grim task of searching for the
bodies of the missing children. Black smoke hung thick in
the air, still billowing from the rubble as he stepped
from room to room, but the more he searched, the
more confused he became. The children's bodies weren't there. After
(02:32):
searching for more than an hour, Morris was exhausted and
light headed from the smoke. Forced to admit defeat, he
headed back outside into the chilly morning, Gulping in the
fresh air. Across the front yard, the remainings of family
members looked close to catatonic. Morris took a moment to
(02:53):
rehydrate and compose himself, then walked over to the sodders
told them that he'd searched the house from top to bottom,
but for some inexplicable reason, he'd found no trace of
Morris fourteen, Martha twelve, Louis nine, Jenny eight, and Betty five.
(03:20):
It was almost too much to wrap their heads around.
It wasn't the awful news they'd been bracing themselves for,
but in ways they had yet to understand, it was
perhaps even worse. Their five children, it seemed, hadn't burned
to death in their beds, they'd completely vanished. You're listening
(03:41):
to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Giorgio Sodou was
born on the Italian island of Sardinia, but in nineteen
oh eight, when he was just US thirteen, he and
(04:01):
his brother boarded a ship bound for America with the
intention of immigrating. It isn't known why exactly, but shortly
after their arrival at New York's Ellis Island, a tearful
Georgio was given the crushing news by his brother that
he would be continuing his journey on his own. Georgio's
(04:23):
brother gave Georgio one final hug, then got straight back
on their ship and sailed back to Italy. Georgio's only
option was to assimilate as quickly as possible. By his
mid twenties, the industrious Georgio Sodu had changed his name
to George Soder in reaction to the anti Italian sentiment
(04:45):
that was rife at the time, and was running his
own trucking company in West Virginia. A short time later,
he met Jenny Cipriani, who had also emigrated to America
from Italy as a child. The connection was instant, and
within a year they were married. Together they moved to Fayetteville,
(05:07):
a town with a strong Italian American community where they
felt truly at home. It was the ideal place to
start their family. Over the next two decades, the Sodders
had a total of ten children. Their eldest, John, was
born in nineteen twenty two, and their youngest, Sylvia, in
(05:28):
nineteen forty three. Jenny focused on raising the kids, and
George concentrated on expanding his trucking business. By the mid
nineteen forties, the Soders seemed to have firmly established their
reputation in the community as a respected middle class family,
(05:49):
but not everybody saw eye to eye with them. Although
George had left Italy behind. He was deeply invested in
his home country and had stronger peaions about the Fascist
government and Benito Mussolini. Even after Mussolini was overthrown in
forty three, this remained a controversial issue among the Italian
(06:12):
immigrant community. George wasn't afraid to share his views in public,
and his opposition to Mussolini led to some heated arguments
with his neighbors. Still, for the most part, the Soders
lived a quiet and uneventful life in Fayetteville. That was
(06:33):
until the autumn of nineteen forty five, when a series
of strange incidents occurred. One morning, a stranger knocked on
the Soders front door and asked to speak to George
about a possible job. When George invited the man in sight,
(06:58):
he began wandering around the house, then suddenly made a
beeline for the fuse box, pointing at the wiring with
an oddly knowing look. The man said, this is going
to cause a fire some day. The man lingered for
a little longer, making small talk, than eventually left. George
(07:19):
was confused. He'd only just had the houses wiring checked
by the power company, and according to them, everything was fine.
A couple of weeks later, a traveling salesman arrived at
the door attempting to sell life insurance. When George declined,
the man refused to take no for an answer. When
(07:42):
George then asked him to leave, the man grew angry
and said that George would pay for his opinions on Mussolini.
Just before George could shut the door in his face,
the salesman snarled, of final warning, your goddamn house is
going up in smoke and your children are going to
(08:02):
be destroyed. Though disturbed by the incident, George chalked it
down to the emotional turmoil of how things had unfolded
in Italy towards the end of the war. It was
a few weeks before the winter holidays of nineteen forty
five when the two oldest Otter sons, John and George Junior,
(08:24):
noticed that the same car kept parking across the street
from their house. It didn't belong to any of their neighbors.
The nearest house was several hundred feet down the road,
and they didn't recognize the man behind the wheel. Even
more unsettling, the car always seemed to be there When
(08:45):
the youngest children arrived home from school as if the
driver was keeping watch on them. Then just like that,
the car was gone. On Christmas Eve, the Sodder's house
was a twinkling haven of light on their dark rural road.
(09:06):
Festive fairy lights adorned the front porch. Inside, tinsel and
mistletoe hung from every available surface. A huge tree stood
proudly in the living room with an array of colorfully
wrapped presents laid out beneath. That night, George and his
(09:26):
two eldest sons, John and George Junior, who'd been at
work all day together, decided to get an early night,
but for the rest of the kids, the night was
only just getting started. It was a sod of family
(09:50):
tradition that the younger children be allowed to open one
present each on Christmas Eve. This year, they all chose
to open their gifts from Marian, their seventeen year old sister,
who'd bought toys from the dime store where she worked.
By ten pm, the children were all excitedly playing with
their new toys and begged their mother to let them
(10:14):
stay up a little while longer, since it was Christmas
after all. Jenny was happy to agree on the one
condition that Marian keep watch over them. Then she scooped
up her youngest, two year old, Sylvia, and went upstairs
to bed. A few hours later, Jenny was woken by
(10:35):
the sound of something ringing. As she roused from sleep,
she realized it was the phone. Squinting at the clock,
she saw, to her confusion that it had just gone
past midnight. Grabbing her nightgown, she shuffled into the hallway
and made her way to the phone downstairs. Hello, she said,
(10:57):
answering the call. For a moment. On the other end,
she heard only the muffled noise of what sounded like
a party, glasses clinking, and indistinct chatter. Then a man
asked to speak to someone whose name Jenny didn't recognize.
She replied that they must have the wrong number. Then
(11:19):
the caller let out a strange laugh and hung up.
Jenny stared at the phone in disbelief, then replaced the receiver.
Turning around, she saw Mario fast asleep on the sofa,
but no sign of the other five children. They must
have finally gone upstairs to bed, she thought. Then she
(11:43):
noticed something strange. The living room curtains were wide open,
and all the downstairs lights were still on and the
front door was unbolted. Now she was annoyed. She'd specifically
told Marian to make sure everything was off and the
house secured before going to bed. Too tired to dwell
(12:05):
on it, Jenny drew the curtains, locked the door, and
turned off all the lights. Then she walked back upstairs
to bed and fell back to sleep. Jenny had only
been sleeping for half an hour when she was startled
(12:27):
awake again, this time by a loud bang, like something
had just hit the roof of the house and rolled
off it. Still half asleep, she figured it was just
an animal, or maybe a tree branch. After a few
moments of silence, she dozed off again. It was thirty
(12:48):
minutes later when she woke again, coughing violently. The air
was thick with suffocating smoke. The smoke seemed to be
snaking into the bedroom from the hallway. Disorientated, she staggered
out of the bed and followed it to George's office,
where a blaze had broken out in the corner of
(13:09):
the room. She watched in horror as the flames began
to spread outwards at terrifying speed. Jenny screamed for George,
who emerged from the bedroom seconds later, holding their two
year old Sylvia. With Marion now awake too, the couple
handed Sylvia to her and told her to get to
(13:30):
safety while they concentrated on getting the rest of the
children out of the house. John and George Junior appeared
sprinting down the stairs. Together with their father. They began
to try and fight the fire. They ran outside to
the well to fetch water, but the water was frozen solid.
(13:51):
By the time they got back to the house, the
entire staircase and foyer was engulfed in flames. With five
children still inside the property, George smashed a window in
the side of the house, cutting himself badly. Pushed back
by the heat from inside, he yelled for his children
to get out, over and over again until his voice
(14:14):
was hoarse, but the children, whose bedrooms were on the
second floor did not appear. Now Frantic, George, John and
George Junior rushed to the other side of the house,
where they kept a step ladder. Perhaps they could reach
the upstairs window and get to the children that way,
they thought, but the ladder was missing. George sprinted to
(14:40):
his truck and jumped into the driver's seat. His plan
was to back it up to the house, then he
and the boys could climb on top of it, but
the truck wouldn't start, and neither would his spare truck
that he kept on hand for emergencies. Paralyzed by horror,
George and Ja had no choice but to simply stand
(15:02):
on the front lawn and watch helplessly as the flames
engulfed their entire home. They screamed and screamed for the
missing children, Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny and Betty. If
one of them could just make it to the window,
they begged, they'd find a way to get them down,
(15:25):
But there was still no movement from inside, and within
minutes the entire house was a raging inferno. As the
situation became increasingly helpless, Marion handed Sylvia to her mother
(15:46):
and ran as fast as she could to the nearest
house to call the local fire department. With so many
able bodied men still posted overseas for the war effort,
the emergency services were stretched dangerously thin, with only a
handful of volunteers left to sustain it. When the neighbor
failed to raise anyone on the phone, he drove to
(16:08):
the home of fire Chief Morris and hammered on his
door to wake him up. By the time Marian returned home,
the house had burned completely to the ground. When Chief
Morris and the rest of his team finally arrived at
the scene several hours later, there was little left for
them to do except surveyed the damage and recover the
(16:30):
bodies of the missing children. But after several hours of searching,
he had to tell the sodders that he couldn't find
any sign of them. With the remaining family inconsolable, Morris
tried to make sense of it all. He explained the
most likely theory that the fire had been so hot
it had simply left no trace of the bodies. There
(16:54):
were tanks of fuel stored in the basement, which could
potentially have intensified the flames enough to make this possible.
Deep down, however, this explanation didn't make sense to him,
the family had little choice but to accept it. A
few days later, the missing children were officially declared dead
(17:17):
by fire or suffocation, But as the days went by,
Jenny couldn't help but dwell on the strange events that
preceded the blades. Having found Marion asleep but all the
lights on the curtains wide open and the front door unbolted.
At the time, she naturally assumed that all the other
(17:40):
children were upstairs in bed, But now an alternative theory
took shape in her mind. What if the children had
never made it to bed at all, but had instead
been abducted, And if that was the case, then they
were possibly still out there somewhere alive. After the worst
(18:03):
night of their lives, Jenny and George now had a
shred of hope to cling to, and cling to it
they did. Losing five children is a horror beyond words,
(18:26):
and it was a relief to Jenny Soder, especially that
she had something else to focus on. Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny,
and Betty were all she could think about. The pain
of their absence, like a black hole of anguish inside her,
forever on the verge of consuming her entire being, and
(18:50):
so to try and satiate it, she looked for proof
that they were still alive. She sifted through the ashes
of her home and found remnence of household appliances that
survived the fire. This in itself made the official explanation
seem ridiculous. How could a toaster survive, she thought if
(19:12):
human bone could not, She began experimenting burning various kinds
of animal bones chicken, cow, pig, to see if she
could reduce them to ash. In every case, fragments of
bone remained, even when she let the fire burn for
hours on end. Seeing his wife's desperation, George felt it
(19:37):
important to share what he knew too. He told her
about the bizarre incidents he'd experienced in the lead up
to the fire, the stranger who warned him that the
fuse box might burn the house down, and the insurance
salesman who'd made that chilling and seemingly prophetic threat. And
(19:59):
from these settling pieces, the Sodders began to put together
a picture of what they think happened. Somebody had targeted
their family with a view to burning them alive in
their beds. But what if their real plan was actually
to kidnap the children and the fire was merely a distraction.
(20:23):
As unlikely as it might seem, the theory gained credibility
when a neighbor of the Sodders claimed to have seen
one of the children being driven away in a car
just after the house caught fire. A bus driver also
reported seeing what looked like a ball of fire being
thrown onto their roof around one a m. Then, Jenny
(20:47):
later found a rubber looking object in the back yard
of the house, which George identified as a hand grenade.
The couple tried their best to convince the state police.
They described the threats, the apparent prank call, and the
mounting evidence that this was arson. They begged them to
(21:09):
look into the possibility that whoever was responsible for it
might still have their children. Though the police seemed sympathetic enough,
they simply wouldn't get on board with what they saw
as the couple's outlandish theory. At a coroner's inquest, the
fire was eventually ruled to be an accident caused by
(21:32):
faulty wiring. Exhausted and defeated, the Sodders felt they had
little choice but to give up and try to move
on for the sake of their remaining children. The remains
at the house were bulldozed away completely and the ashes
covered over with fresh dirt. Despite their best efforts to
(22:01):
move on, not a day went by that Jenny and
George Sodder didn't think about their missing children. They were
haunted by possibilities, unable to stop imagining what they might
be going through if they were still alive. Finally, they
decided to hire a private investigator, who soon turned up
(22:23):
some interesting clues. They learned that the insurance salesman who
threatened George later served on the jury during the coroner's inquest,
where the fire was ruled accidental. Then came a much
more bizarre discovery. The investigator uncovered that while fire Chief
(22:44):
Morris was scarring the ashes for signs of human remains,
he had in fact found a human heart. For reasons unknown,
Morris decided to bury it in a box in the
backyard without ever revealing it to the family. The investigator
successfully lobbied for the heart to be dug up and analyzed,
(23:06):
only for it to turn out to have actually been
a cow's liver that had somehow survived the inferno. After
this strange red herring, the PI hired a pathologist to
excavate the site at the sodders Old home just to
make sure there were no more surprises hidden in the ashes. Incredibly,
(23:27):
there were several shards of human vertebrae that looked to
be from a teenager, probably around sixteen or seventeen years old.
The Sodders were devastated. For the first time, it seemed
they had concrete evidence that their rather children did in
(23:48):
fact perish in the fire. A later analysis of the
bone showed that it had never been exposed to fire
or significant heat. Most likely, it did actually come from
the supply of dirt which the Sodders had used to
cover up the ashes after bulldozing the property. Despite the
(24:10):
disappointment of these dead ends, the private investigator did turn
up plenty of tips from people across multiple states who
all claimed to have seen the missing children in various locations.
One woman who worked at a hotel in Charleston, a
city fifty miles north of Fayetteville, said that she'd seen
(24:31):
four of the five missing children at her hotel the
week after the fire. They were apparently accompanied by four
Italian adults who seemed tense. She said. When she tried
to talk to the children, the adults snapped at her
and ushered them away. The whole thing had left her
(24:51):
with a bad feeling, she said, but no further information
was found to substantiate the claim. In the end, the
Soders were left with a huge pile of possible clues
that could have been something, but equally nothing. Overwhelmed, they
(25:15):
wrote a letter to the FBI asking for help, and
were thrilled to receive a reply from the bureau's director,
j Edgar Hoover. Having been dismissed by law enforcement for
so long, this validation was much needed. However, Hoover told
them that although he'd like to help, the FBI didn't
(25:37):
have jurisdiction over state matters. The Bureau would be more
than happy to assist with the case if the local
authorities gave their permission, but for some reason, the Fayetteville
police declined. In nineteen fifty, they officially declared the case closed.
(25:57):
By now, it was clear to the Soders that the
authorities in Fayetteville wanted to put the whole thing behind them.
But was this merely down to complacency and a reluctance
to spend any more resources on a five year old case,
or something more sinister. Either way, Jenny and George refused
(26:18):
to give up. Shortly after the case was closed, the
Sodders paid to have a huge billboard erected along Route sixteen,
where it would be seen by anybody driving in or
out of Fayetteville. It showed a picture of their five
missing children above a caption which read, on Christmas Eve
(26:40):
nineteen forty five, our home was set on fire and
five of our children kidnapped. It went on to list
the inconsistencies in the official story, including the fact that
no bones were ever found. It ended, what was the
motive of the law officers involved? What did they have
(27:02):
to gain by making us suffer all these years of injustice?
Why did they lie and force us to accept those lights.
The billboard remained up for close to four decades, and
as a result, supposed sightings of the children rolled in
for years. There was even a man in Texas who
(27:24):
claimed to be Louis Sodder, who bore a striking resemblance
to the child they remembered. George spent years traveling the
country to follow up on these tips, but all came
to nothing. George died in nineteen sixty nine. For the
next twenty years, Jenny wore black every day as a
(27:46):
sign of her mourning for her husband and the children
they'd lost. Then, in nineteen eighty nine, at the age
of eighty six, Jenny also died. With her passing. The
families billboard was finally taken down, but the questions it
posed in bold black letters remain forever unanswered. This episode
(28:15):
was written by Emma Dibden and produced by me Richard
McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening to the show.
Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so.
You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok
dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained as an
Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All
(28:39):
other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also
produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained. The book and
audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase
from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please
subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get yours,
(29:00):
and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts
or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.
Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast
dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained
Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained
(29:21):
Podcast do
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com