Any thoughts on the disappearance of the Sodder children?

[ChrissySnow]

For those not familiar with this case, there was a fire at a family home with 9 children present, and 5 of the children vanished.
There remains were never found, and there is no trace of them.

[Arnold_OldSchool]

Originally Posted by ChrissySnow

For those not familiar with this case, there was a fire at a family home with 9 children present, and 5 of the children vanished.
There remains were never found, and there is no trace of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCgCeRN8ZN0


Link is not UM, and is not copy righted material. A brief video covering the incident. Chilling story.

[TracyLynnS]

Any movies or books done about this case?

I remember hearing about it over the years and read a halfway decent synopsis somewhere. Can't remember if it was the internet or a magazine article or what.

The case is very strange, with the late phone call on christmas eve and then the house burning down. I have no idea what the motive could have been but it was suggested that someone wanted to abduct the kids that were missing.

It's probably more likely that someone tried to kill the whole family and not just some of the children. Another possibility is that it was an accident. It was christmas time and there are lots of house fires that time of year because of candles and defective light decorations. I need to find out more info about the ladder being moved and some other stuff tho.

Unless there's some kind of baskin-like family feud that we don't know about, it seems weird that some of the kids would be chosen for abduction while others were left behind.

Some of the missing kids are too old to be targeted by the kind of kidnapper who wants a child of their own, so steals one. The age ranges and genders make it look like this was not a sexual predator, they usually have an age/gender preference.

The logical conclusion is that the missing kids died in the fire, then the site was bulldozed, covering up any evidence and remains. I didn't realize that the site was destroyed by the father only a week after the fire. I thought it was several weeks or even months afterward, not just a few days. Did authorities thoroughly search for remains before he did that? Remember how badly investigators messed up the Lauria Bible/Ashley Freeman fire scene.

IIRC, bones were found at the Sodder site... small hand bones or something, but then it was later determined they were not human. I'm really not positive on those details.

And, would that many people be burned in a house fire, all the way to the point of not finding enough remains to prove their deaths? When a dead person is cremated, the fire has to be really hot, but they also pulverize the remaining bones to make the cremains. Murderers who've cremated their victims have actually tried to totally destroy the body as evidence and many have failed because fragments survived their attempts. (gah, I know way too much gross stuff....)

According to that link above, the fire department didn't arrive at the Sodder house for hours, when it was way too late to do anything. I can believe that because of the year and location, etc. But without purposely destroying the bodies, you'd think there'd be something at the site that would prove the kids died in the fire.

[TracyLynnS]

This is the charley page for the one child whose photo, supposedly him as an adult, was sent to the family. Links to the other children's charley pages are there too but the story is the same:

http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/s/sodder_louis.html


This link takes you to several discussion threads on the websleuths site:

http://www.websleuths.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=149

[TracyLynnS]

Lots of details in this article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5067563 Following is the full text:

December 23, 2005
Other than music that plays from a loudspeaker mounted on a storefront in the center of town, the streets of Fayetteville, W.V., are quiet as Christmas Eve approaches. Inside, they talk of presents and parties, and inevitably, what really happened to the Sodder family on Christmas morning 60 years ago.

Everyone has an opinion about the fire. These are the facts: When George and Jennie Sodder went to sleep on Christmas Eve in 1945, nine of their 10 children were with them. One son was away in the military.

George Bragg, a local writer and author of West Virginia Unsolved Murders, tells the story of that night's events: "Jennie woke up. She heard a noise. Somebody had thrown something on the roof. She got up and checked that out, and went back to bed. She woke up about a half-hour later, and she smelled smoke. She got up and realized one of the rooms where their office was [located] was on fire. She screamed for her husband and woke him up, and they both hollered upstairs where two of the boys were."

Neighbors reached Chief F. J. Morris at the Fayetteville Fire Department a little after 1 a.m. By then, it was already Christmas. Firefighters were told that children were trapped inside, but no fire truck was sent until 8 a.m. — seven hours later. Chief Morris is long dead. But another retired fire chief, Steve Cruikshank, tried to explain the delay. He says the fire department didn't even have a siren back then. When somebody called to report an incident, an operator would take the call and rouse a firefighter, who would then have to reach fellow firefighters one by one.

The Sodder parents and four of their children escaped. But five of the Sodder children, ages 5, 8, 9, 12 and 14, were never seen again.

Strange Events Surrounding That Night

What happened next unfolded in such a way as to almost guarantee that the story of the Sodder fire would be forever surrounded by misinformation, wishful thinking and rumor.

All that remained of the Sodder house was a basement full of ashes. A brief, informal search took place, but instead of the skeletons they expected to find, firefighters encountered just a few bones and pieces of internal organs. The family was never told that anything was found. Because it was Christmas, a more thorough search was postponed.

The fire marshal told the Sodder family to leave the site as it was. He said authorities would come back and finish inspecting things later.

But the father, George Sodder, ignored the fire marshal. Less than a week later, he bulldozed four or five feet of dirt onto what was left of his home. The family planted flowers, a shrine to their lost children.

Two years later, George Sodder saw a newspaper photo of school children in New York and became convinced that one of the children was his missing daughter Betty. He jumped in his pickup and drove to Manhattan. Despite his insistence, he was not allowed to see the child.

But Sodder became convinced that his children were still alive — if not in New York, then somewhere else. He and his wife hired a string of private detectives to search for the children.

Around the same time, Fayetteville Fire Chief Morris added a bizarre twist to the story. According to Unsolved Murders author Bragg, Morris told the Sodders that he had recovered a body part from the site of the fire and buried it in a box there.

If the box of remains could be recovered, that would be proof that the children had died that night. The family could finally move on. George Sodder and a private investigator asked Morris to show them where he'd buried the box.

"They got together and dug the box up," Bragg says. "They took it straight to a funeral home and asked the person in charge there to open the box and examine the interior. When he did open that box, he found what looked like a fresh beef liver."

Rumors Swirl

That's when newspapers got hold of the story. Strangers began reporting that they'd seen the Sodder kids around the country. None of the leads went anywhere.

Today, there are no longer any traces of the 1945 fire at the former site of the Sodder house. Cars speed past a new white house at the end of a gravel driveway. A few Christmas decorations hang here and there around the house, but nothing stands out.

But for decades, a huge reminder of the tragedy stood at the site: a billboard. The Sodders purchased the billboard in 1952. It featured black-and-white photographs of each missing child and an account of the fire. It also offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of any or all of their children. For years, people would pull over and walk up to the billboard, Bragg says. "When you walked up to that sign, you were looking right into the faces of the children," he says.

The billboard fed new rumors: The children had been sold to an orphanage. They were taken to Italy. Some even suggested the mafia had somehow been involved.

And through it all, the Sodder family clung to hope. After all, no one had seen the children at the windows, crying for help. But that's not unusual, says West Virginia State Fire Marshall Sterling Lewis. He says that when young children feel heat and smell smoke, they are likely to hide. "We find them under beds. We find them in closets. We find them crawled up in the bathtubs," Lewis says.

Hope Springs Eternal

For the rest of his life, George Sodder traveled the country, tracking down rumors of his missing kids. He died in 1969, his wife, Jennie, 20 years later. After her death, the billboard came down.

The youngest child who survived the fire, Sylvia Sodder Praxton, didn't want her voice recorded for NPR's story. What she did want: to fulfill her parent's wish to keep the story alive.

So every Christmas, the people of Fayetteville go over what happened that night, repeating the same reasons for believing their version of the story. Without physical evidence, they can't say for sure, but fire professionals are convinced the blaze that took place in 1945 probably cost the Sodder children their lives.

For some, the children died 60 years ago. For the family and many of their neighbors who grew up looking into the faces of the Sodder children, and who firmly believe the children are still out there, this could be the Christmas they finally come home.

[TracyLynnS]

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wv...Childrena.html

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wv...Childrenb.html

Should link to an image of a readable newspaper article from 1968 and a photo/article about the Sodder case.

[RobinW]

This case is so bizarre that it sounds like it was right up Unsolved Mysteries' alley, but there's one comment here from someone claiming to be a friend of the Sodder family who says that UM actually did try to get in touch with the surviving members of the family at some point in order to do the story, but that they turned them down. The Sodder family has apparently turned down numerous requests to do movies, documentaries or books on the case and probably just wants to put the incident behind them.
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/faye...U3V19KEH59KSP1

[Todd Mueller]

It took the fire department 7 HOURS to respond?!? I realize it was Christmas in the year 1945, but good god that seems excessive.

I could go either way on this. It sure sounds suspicious (and after a week they hadn't investigated fully?) but then again it could be just a fire.

If the kids were upstairs and sleeping when the fire started, they could have easily been trapped and/or overcome by smoke. Assuming they died in the fire, as the house collapsed they would fall with it and their bodies would be burned and possibly crushed by the house falling into the basement. You should be able to find skeletons but it would be tough if there was that much material on top of it.

I would love to know if they (or why didn't they) dig up the site. Even if the father bulldozed it and put five feet of dirt over the scene, you should still be able to go back and find bones if they were there. If there were none, then that says a lot.

What a weird case. I wish UM had done a story on it.

[TracyLynnS]

This is the blog page from the reporter who wrote the NPR story I linked to earlier. She quoted parts of interviews that had to be cut to fit the time constraints of the on air radio interview she did.

There's probably more on her site but just this one page shows she got a lot of answers to nagging questions such as the mysterious midnight phone call. There had been speculation that the call was from someone who may have had knowledge of a mass murder plot and they were calling in an attempt to wake the whole family up so they could get out of the house. Turns out it was just a lady who dialed the wrong number.

And the phone wires weren't cut discreetly at the house. They were cut at the top of the pole. A man caught stealing equipment out of their garage on the night of the fire confessed to cutting their phone lines, and was fined. That's it.

There has to be more to this part of the story. The Sodders received the misdialed number about midnight. One of the children ran to a neighbor's to call the fire department about 1:00am. While the family is trying to save trapped children, this guy is stealing stuff from an outbuilding. He must have cut the wires between midnight and 1:00. Did he set the fire, too? He's quite an obvious suspect, imo, especially since he was the only person caught right in the middle of committing a crime just outside the burning house. It looks like he cut the phone line so they can't call the police, set the house on fire so they don't interrupt his activities, then was free to steal their property while they fight for their lives.

Also, cutting the phone lines at the top of the pole instead of at the house could explain why the ladder was not in it's usual location. Mr. Sodder couldn't find it so he couldn't use it to climb to the upper windows to save anyone who might be trapped upstairs. The ladder was later found away from the house in a ditch or ravine. They wouldn't have been able to find it in the dark that night, imo.

There's speculation about why it took the fire department so long to arrive. Everything from racism to conspiracy to laziness is discussed.

Personally, I think the delay was caused by a combination of christmas day, freezing cold wind blowing weather, unprofessional volunteer firefighters, poor phone communication, and the fact that the firefighters knew they had no rescue equipment so could do nothing that night except watch the house burn. Instead, they decided to stay home until daylight then go spray some water on the smoldering basement. But that's jmo.

http://www.echonyc.com/~horn/stacy/?p=80

[WishfulDreamer]

This whole case is downright freaky. And what's up with the liver in a box? I believe there should have been more evidence of five bodies if the kids really did die in the fire. Kidnapping seems hard to prove, too. What do you guys think of the picture sent to the parents? Total fake?

[TracyLynnS]

Originally Posted by Todd Mueller

I would love to know if they (or why didn't they) dig up the site. Even if the father bulldozed it and put five feet of dirt over the scene, you should still be able to go back and find bones if they were there. If there were none, then that says a lot.

They did another "excavation" I guess you could call it in 1949, but it was unprofessional and didn't lead to anything new.

Honestly, I'm thinking that the kids died in the fire and everything was just handled poorly, with no genuine effort to find remains, then the father, thinking no one was going to ever come back and look for his kids decided to basically bury them himself.

That would be a bizarre situation to be in... Your house burned to the ground on Christmas, you're ignored by the fire department, an extremely brief search reveals nothing, and you're told to leave your charred house which likely holds the remains of your five children open to the elements until someone eventually shows up sometime to do something.... then no one shows up. For a week!

The "mystery" part didn't come about until a couple years later when the father thought he saw a photo of his missing (presumed dead) daughter in a magazine and went about trying to locate her.

To prove the kids were really dead, the fire chief decided to bury fresh beef liver on the site to dig up and pass off as the remains of a child that had been discovered years earlier on the day of the fire.

[WishfulDreamer]

What about the photograph of the male sent to the family? I wonder if it's a hoax. I also wonder if the FD or PD had some sort of rift with the father or other family members which explains the negligence/delays.

[TracyLynnS]

I am still reading the threads at websleuths and anything else I can find about this case.

I came across more information since posting #11 and I'm CORRECTING A STATEMENT I made in that post.

Apparently, the 1949 excavation was not unprofessional. If the information is true, it was conducted at Mr. Sodder's request and was led by Dr. Oscar B. Hunter Jr. who was a famous pathologist from Washington, DC.

This sounds like it was an expertly conducted search that would have turned up remains if any were at the site. Information from a 1951 Sodder family letter says that when searching for bones, the soil was not screened, however Dr. Hunter said screening wouldn't be necessary because they should be finding large bones.

IMO, they should have done both. Since the search was a few years after the fact and it eventually became obvious they weren't going to find large bones, they should have begun screening and looking for fragments. But I can see why Dr. Hunter didn't do it. The fire simply wasn't intense enough to destroy entire bodies without leaving a trace.

BTW, this is the excavation where the vertebrae were found. They were said to have been from one person, age 16 - 22, IIRC, and had not been exposed to fire. The oldest missing child was 14, so it was unlikely to be him. He is one of 5 people who were presumed lost in the fire, yet only a few (4?) vertebrae were found in the whole site, and those had never been in a fire.

IMO, they were planted, just like the ridiculous liver incident.

There have been rumors that a child or the children were observed sitting in a taxi cab, watching the house burn. Turns out that a taxi brought people from a local bar by the house, for whatever reason.... maybe on the way home but stopped to watch the fire, or someone alert the patrons of the fire and they decided to gawk?

Either way, a WS poster makes an excellent point: The bar patrons were able to make it out to the house to watch it burn. Where the heck was the fire department?

[ScaryFog]

Originally Posted by TracyLynnS

The Sodder parents and four of their children escaped. But five of the Sodder children, ages 5, 8, 9, 12 and 14, were never seen again.

Interesting story. Just found out about it from this thread so all I've done so far is watched the video and read a few things over the past 20 minutes.

In my opinion, the kids died. The poor handling of the fire and Sodder bulldozing the place damaged the chance of finding the bodies.

I can totally believe that a newborn can be kidnapped and have no knowledge of their true family. I'm not so willing to believe that a 14 year old can just be ripped out of their family, and not at some point in their life, either go to the authorities, or try to reconnect with their family.

[Orange_Sody_84]

I remember this case now. still gives me the chills. well to be fair wouldn't it have been harder for a kid to try to reconnect with their family in the late 40's and so on? if they didn't know where they were. Correct me if I'm wrong but back then didn't children actually listen and obey there parents? so maybe they were discouraged to going to the Police.

But ultimately I believe they were sadly killed and the bodies just have not been found. what a sad and twisted case.