True crime between the years The mysterious disappearance of the Sodder children

On the night of December 25, 1945, five children disappear during a house fire in Fayetteville, America. Officials claim that they died in the fire. But there is no proof of this.

It is December 24, 1945, and a thin blanket of snow lies over the small American town of Fayetteville, Virginia. Most of the inhabitants have already gone to bed. A few houses still have a light on.

The Italian immigrant couple George and Jennie Sodder and their ten children are also at home in Fayetteville. One of their sons is stationed in Germany because of the Second World War, so there are eleven of them this Christmas. They have festively decorated their two-storey wooden house.

The Sodder family is a respected middle-class family in Fayetteville. The Italian community is large here. But father George has not only made friends there. He has an opinion on too many things and is not afraid to express it loudly. His political views in particular are controversial in Fayetteville.

George is a strong opponent of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. However, he has many supporters in the Italian community. This repeatedly leads to arguments. George also repeatedly receives threats because of this.

In the USA, Christmas is traditionally celebrated on December 25. In the morning, presents are comfortably unwrapped in pyjamas. This is also the case with the Sodders.

The woman at the other end of the phone

Because it's Christmas Eve, the children are allowed to play a little longer. However, father George and the two older sons go to bed at around 10 pm. Mother Jennie tells the playing children that before they go to bed, they have to feed the chickens and lock the front door. Then she grabs 2-year-old Sylvia and goes to bed too. A few minutes later, Jennie falls asleep.

The house is very quiet. Until the phone suddenly rings at 0:30 a.m., waking Jeannie from her sleep. She runs over to her husband's study and picks up the phone. She can hear voices and laughter in the background, like at a party. Then a woman's voice asks her if she knows a person Jeannie has never heard before. When Jeannie says no, the woman begins to laugh hysterically.

Confused and slightly annoyed at the late interruption, Jeannie hangs up the phone. On her way back to the bedroom, she notices that the front door is unlocked and the light is still on. Unusual, as she asked the children to do this. She locks the door, turns out the light and goes back to bed.

She has barely fallen asleep when she is woken again. This time by a strange rolling noise on the roof, followed by a dull thud. But Jeannie stays in bed, she is too tired.

Everything is on fire

About half an hour later, shortly before 1:30 a.m., she notices an acrid smell. It is smoke. She gets up, runs into the corridor and sees that smoke is coming from the study. In other words, from the room where she had just been on the phone with Jane Doe.

Jeannie runs back into the bedroom, wakes her husband, grabs her daughter Sylvia and wakes Marion, the eldest daughter, who is sleeping on the sofa downstairs next to the front door. Father George shouts throughout the house to wake the rest of the children.

But the stairs to the bedrooms are already on fire. Only the two older sons, John and George Junior, hear him and rush down the burning stairs. Their hair is already on fire.

The father continues to scream and call for the other children. But Maurice, Louis, Martha, Jennie and Betty can neither be seen nor heard.

All help comes too late

The father runs around the house and tries to get inside somehow to save his five remaining children. There is always a ladder leaning against the house, which he wants to climb up. But the ladder, which is always in the same place, is suddenly gone. So he runs to his haulage truck, which he uses to deliver coal during the day. He wants to drive them under the windows of the house, climb onto the roof and get into the house. But neither truck starts.

He and his two sons try to put out the fire with a couple of filled buckets, but they don't stand a chance. Meanwhile, daughter Marion runs to a neighbor. She screams hysterically that her house is on fire and her siblings are still inside. The neighbor uses his phone to contact the fire department, but no one answers the phone.

Another neighbor also notices the fire. As he doesn't have his own phone, he runs to a nearby pub to report the fire from there. But no one answers the fire department's phone there either. So he makes his way to the fire chief on foot. He explains to him that the fire department doesn't have an emergency number as they are only a voluntary fire department. If you want to report a fire, you have to call a firefighter.

All help comes too late for the Sodders. The house burns down completely within 45 minutes.

No remains of the children

The fire department only arrived at the Sodders' home at 8 a.m., more than six hours after the fire was noticed by mother Jeannie. This is despite the fact that the station is only four kilometers away from the family.

Where the house once stood, the fire department found only a mountain of ash. And the Sodders had to watch as the whole house and their five children burned down.

The fire department ensures that the fire does not spread any further. They then set off in search of the five children. But they find nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the children's remains. The fire chief explains briefly and concisely that the children were probably burnt along with their bones. And when the police arrive, an officer explains that the fire broke out because of faulty wiring.

A few days later, the Sodders receive five death certificates. The cause of death: fire or suffocation. This closes the case for the authorities.

Experiments in the garden

The family is in a trance. Father George fills the cellar with rubble to create a flat surface. Where the house once stood, a green area with flowers is to be planted in the spring. As a reminder of their children. They want to build their new house a few meters next door.

But the family is increasingly asking themselves: can it really be that nothing remains of five bodies? Not even the slightest trace? They cannot and will not accept this. Mother Jeannie then begins to carry out experiments. She burns chicken bones and joints and tendons from cattle and pork chops in the garden. However, the bones remain after each experiment.

Jeannie asks the crematorium how hot the fire has to be before even the bones disappear completely. An employee tells her that a corpse has to burn for over two hours at 1000 degrees so that even the bones turn to ash. But the Sodders' house only burned for 45 minutes in total. And: How can it be that electrical appliances were damaged in the fire, but not completely burnt?

The strange visitors

Father George also doubts the cause of the fire. Only a few months earlier, he had the power and telephone lines checked. At the time, he was told that everything was in order. And something else is strange: if a faulty power line was to blame for the fire, the lines would coke for a while. Toxic smoke would be produced and there would be a power cut. But there was no such thing.

Jeannie and George become more and more concerned and remember more and more specific things that happened before the fire. For example: Why was the ladder gone and why didn't the two trucks start?

Then Father George remembers a strange situation. Two months ago, a stranger knocked on the front door. The stranger asked if George had any work for him at the haulage company. Without asking, he pushed past George at the door and into the house. The stranger walked down the hallway, pointed to the security boxes and said, "That will cause a fire one day," George remembers. The stranger disappeared again. George was surprised, but thought nothing more of it.

A few days later, there was another knock at the front door. This time, an insurance consultant wanted to sell George life insurance for the whole family. When he refuses, the insurance advisor completely freaks out. He screams: "Your goddamn house will go up in smoke. Your children will be destroyed. You'll have to answer for all the dirty remarks you made about Mussolini."

A hand grenade filled with napalm

The two oldest Sodder boys also remember something strange. They saw a man who had parked his car on the street in front of the Sodders' house and the younger siblings were watching.

A witness also contacted the family. They said that they had seen a man with a heavy pulley at the scene of the fire. And such a heavy pulley could be used to lift out the engine of a truck. Did this unknown man immobilize the two trucks? Or is it all just a strange coincidence?

But one thing is no coincidence: the Sodders' telephone lines were not destroyed by the fire on the night of the fire, they were cut. But by whom?

When the mother returns to the scene of the accident, she discovers an object made of hard plastic. She picks it up. She quickly realizes that she has never seen anything like it. When she shows the object to George, he is convinced that it is a hand grenade filled with napalm. This discovery would at least explain the cause of the fire and why it started on the second floor, then spread to the first floor and burned the house down so quickly.

A bus driver who contacted the Sodders just a few days after the fire told them how he had seen fireballs flying towards the house.

But the question still remains: who set the fire and where are the children?

Are the children still alive?

Also shortly after the fire, an acquaintance visits the family. She says that she saw the five children during the fire. They are said to have driven past her in a car. However, the acquaintance had never seen this car, nor who was driving it.

The Sodders are emotionally entranced. Could it really be what the acquaintance was saying? The police also receive a similar tip. A woman who runs a restaurant around 80 kilometers west of Fayetteville is certain that she saw the five children on 25 December. She told the officers that she had served them breakfast. There was a car with a Florida license plate in the parking lot. But the officers ignore this tip. The case was already closed.

But in the first week of January, another woman from South Carolina reports to the police who claims to have seen the children. She says that she is a receptionist at a hotel in Charleston. She had seen the picture of the five children in the newspaper. She says that around the turn of the year, four of the five children had checked into the hotel where she works. They were accompanied by two women and two men who came from Italy.

She says that the group stayed in a large room with several beds and that she was forbidden to speak to the children. The next day, they left the hotel very early in the morning. But where was the fifth child and was it really possible to recognize the children so clearly in the photo in the newspaper?

Police refuse to reopen the case

The Sodders then go back to the police and demand that the case be reopened. But they stick to their guns: the children are dead and the case is closed.

In 1947, mother Jeannie finally writes a letter to the FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover. She asks him to let the FBI take over the investigation. However, the FBI refused, but offered to help. But only if the case is reopened by the local authorities. But the police and fire department refuse to help.

Father George is fed up. How can it be that the police are not investigating this case? So he hires a private detective. He soon finds out some exciting things. For example, that the insurance consultant works for the forensics department in Fayetteville. In other words, the very authority that came to the conclusion that the cause was a cable fire and that the fire had not been started.

The private investigator also finds out that the fire chief is said to have found human remains. No bones, but a heart. He is said to have packed it in a wooden box and buried it next to the house.

The fire chief even agrees to show them where he buried the box. It is quickly unearthed. There is indeed something dark red in the box, and it also looks like an organ. However, the coroner's examination shows that it is a cow's liver that had no contact with the fire.

The Sodders demand an explanation. But the fire chief insists on his original story. At some point, Father George hears a rumor that the fire chief had told other people that he had not found the organ in the rubble of the house, but had brought the beef liver himself and buried it. His motive: he had hoped that the family would then finally be at peace.

One last attempt

There was still no evidence that the children died in the fire. And the Sodders are firmly convinced that their five children are still alive. When father George sees a picture of schoolchildren in New York in a newspaper, he is convinced that one of the girls is his daughter Betty. He gets in his car, drives to New York and finds the girl's parents. But they don't want him to talk to her or see her. So George drives back home.

In August 1949, George and Jeannie have the fire accident professionally investigated. This had never been done before. The team goes through layer after layer of rubble. And sure enough: they find human bones. Lumbar vertebrae. But there is a big but. The bones must belong to a person who must have been at least 16 years old. That rules out the Sodder children. Again, nothing.

Six years later, the Sodders make one last attempt to find their children. Where the house once stood, they put up two large plaques with pictures of the missing children. The story is told next to them. Flyers are also distributed. But again, no one provides a decisive clue. The Sodders are no longer able to.

"Louis Sodder, I love brother Franky. Ilil Boys. a90132"

In 1968, over 20 years later, mother Jeannie finds an envelope in her letterbox. It was addressed to her personally. It was posted in Central City, Kentucky. There is no return address. She opens the letter and finds a photo in the envelope. It shows a man who must be in his mid to late twenties. On the back it says: "Louis Sodder, I love Brother Franky. Ilil Boys. a90132." But the last digit could also be a five.

Mother Jeannie's jaw drops. The man looks like her son Louis, who disappeared back then. Both have the same upward curve on their left eyebrow. The numbers also look familiar. They are the zip codes for Palermo, in Sicily.

The Sodders then hire another private detective. He travels to Kentucky and never contacts the family again. A year later, father George dies at the age of 74.

The attempted explanations

There are attempts to explain what happened on the night of the fire. It is said that the two trucks did not start because Father George was too excited to let the diesel trucks preheat before they started. That's how it was back then. The missing ladder is said to have been stolen by a man, according to a witness. It was later found in an embankment and the thief was sentenced to a fine. However, he was never questioned about the fire. He is also said to have cut the telephone lines at the time. Here too, the police do not investigate.

Then there is another possibility: in this one, the children are said to have been abducted near the chicken coop. There has been speculation in Fayetteville for some time as to whether the Italian mafia abducted the children. Some claim that they wanted a ransom, others that father George was to be intimidated. But a ransom demand was never made.

The search for the missing children continues to this day. After the death of mother Jeannie in 1989, daughter Sylvie takes over. But to this day, there are still no leads on the five missing Sodder children.