Sodder Family Hope

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family of Fayetteville, W.V., lost five children in a fire. Strange events that night and afterward fueled speculation, which continues to this day, that the children may have been kidnapped or murdered. This has been a question that has been asked for many years.

December 24, 1945 Snow was falling air was chilly children playing. Sounds like a regular holiday day. Exciting children impatient for presence that lay under the tree. Wonderment of when Santa would appear sounds normal but for one family this day became a nightmare that would haunt them and their own kids for the rest of their life.

That night was the night that a nightmare would unfold. Mr. Sodder told two of the boys to go out and lock-up the animals. The oldest daughter was reading a book. Later that night the phone rang and it was said that the call was from a lady that was asking for a person that Mrs.Sodder had never heard of. Half hr. Later the house was engulfed in flames. Mr.Sodder believing that his kids were upstairs asleep he tried to get to them but the fire was too hot. And for some reason vehicles that were used the day before would not start. It seemed that all was lost a family had lost five of it's member's. But once none of the evidence started, Why was it done, Who was involved? Why this family a family that had nothing and made something of their lives threw hard work evidence was not making scene nothing made since. The biggest question was why.

A brief, and a 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."

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.

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.