🐝 David Peters 🐝

On Christmas Eve 1945, the Sodder family went to bed in their home in Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jennie Sodder had ten children. Nine of them were home that night. The kids had been playing with new Christmas toys, and five of them begged to stay up late. Their mother said yes. At 12:30 in the morning, the phone rang. Jennie answered. A woman asked for a name she didn't recognize. In the background, she heard laughter and glasses clinking. Jennie told her she had the wrong number and went back to bed. At 1 a.m., she heard something hit the roof. Then a rolling noise. Around an hour later, the house was on fire. George, Jennie, and four of the children made it out. The five kids who stayed up late were sleeping upstairs. The stairway was already engulfed. George ran for the ladder he always kept leaning against the house. It was gone. He ran to his two coal trucks to drive one up to the window and climb on top. Neither would start. Both had worked fine the day before. A family member tried to call the fire department from a neighbor's phone. Couldn't get through. The fire department, short on men during the war, didn't show up until the next morning. By then the house was ash. The fire marshal said faulty wiring. But the Christmas lights had been on during the fire. Here's the thing. No remains were ever found. Not a single bone from five children. A house fire like that wouldn't destroy bodies completely. Crematoriums run for hours at far higher temperatures and still leave bones. The Sodders became convinced their kids didn't die in that fire. George was an Italian immigrant who openly criticized Mussolini. Months before the fire, an insurance salesman told him his house would go up in smoke and his children would be destroyed for the "dirty remarks" he'd made. A phone repairman later found the family's phone line had been cut, not burned. A man admitted stealing the ladder that night. He was never tied to anything else. Witnesses claimed they saw the children in a passing car while the house burned. Others said they saw them at a hotel days later. For decades, the Sodders kept a billboard along Route 16 with all five faces and a reward. Then, in 1967, Jennie received an envelope in the mail with no return address. Inside was a photo of a man in his twenties who looked just like their son Louis. On the back, someone had written a cryptic message with his name. The family hired a detective to track it down. He was never heard from again. George and Jennie died never knowing what happened. Their youngest daughter, Sylvia, kept pushing for answers until she died in 2021. Five children. Five beds. No bodies. What happened to the Sodder children?