Happy True Crime Thursday!
I hope you all had a great holiday season!
You guys know by now I love myself a good mystery and even though Christmas has passed I still want to share this one with you.
This mystery is what happened Christmas of 1945 at the Sodder household.
George Sodder was born in Italy in 1895 and came to the United States 13 years later with an older brother. George found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania carrying supplies and water to workers. After a few years he traveled to Smithers, West Virginia and worked as a driver. It took a couple more years, but he eventually started his own trucking company that started by hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauled coal that was mined in the area.
He met Jennie Cipriani who was a storekeepers daughter, she also came from Italy as a child. The two of them got married, and in 1923 they had their first child that would eventually be one out of ten children. The couple settled near Fayetteville, West Virginia, in an area that was prominently Italian immigrants. George's business was very successful and the family became one of the most respected families around. The last of the Sodder Children was born in 1943. At this time their second oldest son left home to serve in the military during World War II.
Fast forward to the early morning hours of Christmas 1945, a blaze broke out at the Sodder household. George and Jennie awoke to the smell of smoke, they hustled to gather their children and get out of the home. The flames were so large that there was nothing they could do but watch their home collapse into a smoldering heap. That's not the only tragedy that would occur that morning.
On the night of Christmas Eve the family celebrated by opening a few gifts. The parents went off to bed along with their youngest daughter Sylvia. The younger children were given the OK to stay up later than usual to enjoy some of the new toys they received, the oldest daughter stayed awake to watch them play. The 2 oldest sons went off to bed. By midnight all of the household had settled down and were in bed.
Soon after the phone in George's office starting ringing, this woke up Jennie. She picked up the phone and heard a strange laughter followed by a voice asking for a name that she didn't recognize. She just thought it to be someone with the wrong number. She started making her way back to bed when she realized that the lights throughout the home were still on and the doors were left unlocked, she didn't think twice about it since the kids were the last ones up. She shut everything down and went back to bed.
Just a short time later she would be woken up again, she heard the sounds of something landing on the roof of the house and rolling off. Nothing came of it, she just went back to sleep. One thing we know for sure is that it definitely wasn't Santa Claus. She was woken up again about a half hour later, this time it was to the smell of smoke. She got up in a panic and noticed flames coming from the office. She scrambled to grab Sylvia and alerted her husband as to what was going on. They were able to get their children Marion, Sylvia, John and George Jr. The flames prevented them from going upstairs to get the others. When they tried to dial out they realized their phones weren't working. Marion ran to a neighbors house to use their phone, but wasn't able to get a response while the rest of the family stood outside and yelled at the house to hopefully wake up the others. They didn't hear anything from their children at all. Another neighbor left to go find the Fire Chief F.J. Morris.
It took hours...yes hours for help to arrive, even though the fire department was only 2 miles away from the Sodder home. The department wasn't set up like it was today. George and Jennie did everything they could to try and rescue their children, but non successful. George had an idea to grab the ladder that he always kept on the side of the house to climb through an upstairs window. There was one problem to that idea...when he ran to get the ladder it was no where in sight. So then he had the idea to back up one of his coal trucks next to the house to boost himself into a window, but....the engine wouldn't start. This is where things became hopeless for the family. Over the next 45 minutes they watched their home burn down.
The Fire Department did a search through the rubble to find the remains of Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty, but there weren't any traces of them....no bodies, no bones...nothing. Fire Chief Morris told George and Jennie that the blaze was caused by faulty wiring and was likely hot enough to completely destroy the bodies. Although it seemed like a logical explanation, their gut feelings told them something wasn't quite right. They didn't believe the fire was an accident, and they also believed that their children might still be alive. Lets go back to shortly before the tragedy struck, a man attempting to sell fire insurance approached Mr. Sodder, when he turned him down the man became upset. He said "your goddamn house is going up in smoke, and your children will be destroyed." You see even though the Sodder family was well known, George was also disliked because he was vocal about his criticism of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This man also said "you are going to be paid for dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." Coincidence or not a private investigator later on revealed that this same man served on the coroner's jury that established the fire was an accident.
Another visitor who had approached George in the months leading up to the fire told him he was looking for a job. He took this occasion to go around to the back of the house and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes located there would "cause a fire someday." This was puzzling to George because the house just recently had been re-wired after the family had a new stove installed, the local electric company had pronounced everything safe.
Then in the weeks before Christmas some of the older Sodder boys had noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, with its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they walked home from school.
What's even more strange is apparently the fire department had indeed found some bones and a heart at the scene, but for whatever reason the fire chief never told the Sodder's family about it. It would be years before they found this out and when they did they confronted him. The chief led them to the site where the remains had been buried, but upon further testing it was determined that the heart was actually a beef liver and the bones belonged to someone older than any of the Sodder children. In 1947, the couple even asked J. Edgar Hoover himself to get the FBI involved in the investigation. They received a personal reply back "Although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau." FBI agents said they would be happy to assist if local authorities gave them the go ahead...the Fayetteville police and fire department said no.
Along with her other doubts, Jennie Sodder as we know didn't believe the claims that her children's bodies would have been burned completely in the fire. Many of their household appliances had been found, still recognizable, in the ashes, as well as fragments of the tin roof. She contrasted the results of the fire at home with a newspaper account of a similar fire that killed a family of 7, skeletal remains of all the victims were found. She started conducting experiments, burning small piles of various animals bones to see if they would be completely consumed. They never were. An employee of a local crematorium that she contacted told her pieces of human bodies typically remain even after burning at 2000 degree Fahrenheit for 2 hours, which was far longer and hotter than their house fire.
To add even more suspicion, there was someone from the telephone company that discovered someone had crawled up a telephone pole and cut the phone line leading to the Sodder’s house.
There was also the account of a local bus driver. “The driver of a bus that passed through Fayetteville late Christmas Eve said he had seen some people throwing “balls of fire” at the house. A few months later, when the snow had melted, Sylvia found a small, hard, dark-green, rubber ball-like object in the brush nearby. George, recalling his wife’s account of a loud thump on the roof before the fire, said it looked like a “pineapple bomb” hand grenade or some other incendiary device used in combat. The family later claimed that, contrary to the fire marshal’s conclusion, the fire had started on the roof, although there was by then no way to prove it.”
The Sodder family was desperate for answers, but continued to get nothing but more questions and no one willing to help. As years went on, rumors about the story extended past West Virginia. Photos poured in from strangers around the country who were convinced they had spotted the missing Sodder children, now all grown up. One in particular- allegedly of a much older Louis Sodder was so convincing to the family that it was hung over the fireplace in their new home. Another picture was received from New York City of a young girl who looked so much like Betty that George drove to see her, but was turned away by her parents.
The family also received a letter from someone saying young Martha was in a convent in St. Louis. They also had a motel operator come forward saying he saw the children right after the fire.
All these claims, yet none that were what they were looking for. The mystery has yet to be solved.
What do you guys think about this case?
See you all next week, looking forward to the New Year and the new stories to share with you all!
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