The Disappearance of the Sodder Children

On December 24, 1945, George and Jennie Sodder and 9 of their 10 children, their eldest son in the army, went to sleep. At around 1am, a fire broke out and George and Jennie, along with four of their children escaped, but the other five were never seen again.

Jennie Sodder woke up at around 1am to a bang on the roof followed by the sound of rolling. Per The Lineup, she drifted back to sleep but awoke 30 minutes later to the smell of smoke. She quickly discovered the fire started from a fuse box in George’s office, and she, George, and four of their children escaped the house, while the other five were believed to have still been sleeping upstairs in the attic.

The fire occurred at a terrible time as the town of Fayetteville was shut down, many local men were still in the military, and the fire department was short staffed.

Unfortunately, things only got worse. George, in an attempt to save his children who were stuck upstairs, planned to reach for them through the upstairs window using a ladder that was usually propped against the side of the house, but it went strangely missing. Smithsonian Magazine claims that George also came up with the idea to drive one his coal trucks up to the house and climb on top of it to reach the windows, but the engine wouldn’t start despite the fact that it had been working fine in the previous days. Desperately, George made another attempt to save his children himself; he tried to scoop water from a rain barrel, but it was frozen solid. After that didn’t work, he tried to climb the walls and broke open an attic window, cutting his arm in the process, and sadly, he still couldn’t reach the upstairs bedroom.

Marion, one of the older Sodder children, sprinted to a neighbor’s home to call the fire department but couldn’t get a response. Another neighbor made a call from a nearby tavern, but again, received no response. The neighbor drove into town to track down the fire chief who then initiated the town’s version of a fire alarm: a “phone tree” system, where one firefighter phoned another who phoned another.

The fire department didn’t arrive until 2am, though they had only been two and half miles away, and at that point, the Sodder’s home had been burned to ash.

George and Jennie believed that five of their children were dead, but after a brief search of the house ensued on Christmas morning, it appeared no remains of the missing five Sodder Children–Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty–were found, and the Sodder’s were told their children must’ve burned away completely. 

The following weeks after the fire, the Sodder’s began to believe that their children hadn’t died in the fire, rather they had been kidnapped by potential mafia members due to George’s anti-Mussolini claims.

An employee at the Charleston hotel claimed to have seen four of the five children a week after the fire, claiming that they were accompanied by “two women and two men, all of Italian extraction.”

The Sodder’s hired a private investigator who heard a rumor that the fire chief, F.J. Morris had discovered a heart in the ashes and buried it in a dynamite box.  After digging up the box and taking it to get examined, it was discovered that the “heart” beef liver, untouched by the fire. The Sodder’s heard rumors that the fire chief had told others that the contents of the box had not been found by the fire at all, rather he buried the beef liver in hopes that finding any remains would encourage the family to stop the investigation.

Over the years, leads appeared and were sent to the Sodder family, but to this day, it is still unclear what happened to the remaining five children that were never seen again.