While 77 years have passed since five children from the Sodder family vanished after a fire swept through their Fayetteville area home on an early Christmas morning, interest in their disappearance remains strong.
On Dec. 29, the British tabloid The Sun carried an article about the tragedy under the headline “Who were the Sodder children and what happened to them?”
That piece followed a Dec. 17 Newsweek.com article on enduring Christmas season mysteries, which began with a synopsis of the Sodder case.
In April, the History Channel aired an episode of its “History’s Greatest Mysteries” series devoted entirely to the disappearance of the Sodder children.
What is it about the case of the missing Sodder children that continues to draw interest decades later?
“I think it’s the mystery surrounding the fact that no remains of the children were ever found, making their kidnapping a possibility,” said Bob Lane Bragg of South Charleston, author of the new book “No Direct Evidence: The Story of the Missing Sodder Children.”
Initial investigations into the blaze were hasty and flawed, prompting follow-up inquiries that unearthed more new questions than new evidence.
The fact that the fire took place on Christmas Day, ordinarily a time of joy, underscored the tragedy of the event.
“Then there’s the billboard — actually, three billboards — the parents built at their home over the years, suggesting that their children may have been kidnapped, murdered or were possibly still alive,” Bragg said. “It was like they were asking you to help them find the answer.”
The first of the Sodders’ three billboards was erected in 1953. It greeted drivers on W.Va. 16 with enlarged school photos of each missing child and the offer of a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of any or all of the five missing children — Betty, Jennie, Louis, Martha and Maurice — ages 5 to 14.
While the first billboard posed the question “What was their fate? Kidnapped, Murdered or are they still alive?” the second sign, installed in the 1960s, indicated the family had reached a conclusion: “These children were kidnapped. . . and the house set afire to cover the crime,” it proclaims.
The last billboard, built of enamel-coated cinderblocks in the late 1970s, was taken down in 1989, following the death of family matriarch Jennie Sodder. By then, the reward had increased to $10,000, but the family was no closer to solving the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the five young siblings.
Bragg became familiar with the billboards in the 1960s and ‘70s, while growing up in the eastern Kanawha County community of Handley, where Sunday drives to Hawks Nest, the Mystery Hole and other New River Gorge attractions were a key leisure time activity for his family.
Many such drives included a stop along W.Va. 16 at the Sodder place “to get a closer look at that big sign with those little children’s pictures, and the words, in large black letters, saying things that to a young boy were kind of scary,” Bragg wrote in the introduction to his book.
“I don’t remember seeing any of the Sodder family when we stood at the sign,” he wrote. “Maybe they were in the house looking out at us. Maybe they were thinking perhaps these people will know something. Maybe they will be the ones.”
After reading a 2013 Gazette-Mail article about the Sodder children, which included comments by Sylvia Sodder Paxton, the last surviving sibling of the five lost in the 1945 incident, Bragg, an environmental engineer with an interest in true crime stories, began digging into the case.
He started with a thorough re-reading of a 1950 report on the fire by the State Fire Marshal’s Office he had been given years earlier but had only thumbed through. According to Bragg, the report turned out to be “one of the few surviving official reports related to the case” and was cited frequently in his book.
Bragg came across correspondence from the early days of the investigation that referred to a “voluminous” cache of files on the Sodder case held by the State Fire Marshal’s Office. But Bragg said he learned that was no longer the case when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014 and was told the agency had “no files remaining related to the case.”
Instead, he relied on a trove of documents and letters he received from “various interested parties” connected to the investigation and decades of newspaper accounts of the case.
Paxton, who died in 2021 at age 79, was the youngest of the nine children of George and Jennie Cipriani Sodder, both natives of Italy, who met at Smithers, where Jennie’s father operated a store. Paxton was one of nine Sodder children who were in the family’s two-story home, about two miles north of Fayetteville, when the fire broke out about 1:30 a.m. on an icy Christmas morning. A tenth sibling, Joe, was stationed at an Army base in North Carolina and unable to make it home for Christmas.
George and Jennie Sodder told authorities they were awakened by smoke and fire and managed to escape the burning home with Sylvia, who had been sleeping in a crib in their room, and three other children — their 17-year-old daughter, Marion, also known as Mary Ann, and sons John, 23, and George Jr., 16.
Assuming the five unaccounted-for children were in their upstairs bedrooms, located on either side of a staircase, Sodder broke out a window to re-enter the home, gashing his arm. He found the stairway engulfed in flames and impassible. He ran outside to grab a ladder that he kept propped against the house, but discovered it missing. He then attempted to drive one of his two coal trucks to the side of the house so he could reach an upstairs window from atop its cab, but neither truck would start after operating normally the previous day.
Daughter Marion ran to the home of a neighbor to call the Fayetteville Volunteer Fire Department, but could not reach a telephone operator. Another neighbor drove to the home of the Fayetteville fire chief, who was unable to assemble a crew of firefighters until after dawn. The fire crew arrived at the scene of the fire, about two miles from their station, at 8 a.m.
By then, the Sodder home was a heap of smoking ash.
After hours of fruitless searching for remains of the five missing children, a coroner’s inquest was convened at the fire site about noon Christmas Day. Though no remains were found, those taking part in the inquest concluded the five children died of smoke inhalation or from direct exposure to the fire, and that the blaze was accidental in origin.
Firefighters told George and Jennie Sodder that the reason no bodies were found in the rubble was that the fire had apparently burned hot enough to effectively cremate any remains of the five children.
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Five days after the fire, George Sodder covered the basement of the home, where most of the fire debris came to rest, with five feet of dirt. He and other surviving members of the family planted flowers where their home once stood to preserve the site as a memorial.
But in the months and years that followed, the Sodders pieced together a series of remembered conversations and events they believed supported suspicions that the fire had been set and the five children did not die in the blaze. Several purported, but unconfirmed, post-fire sightings of the missing children at a Charleston hotel, a Smithers home, a New York City ballet class and sites in Florida and Texas bolstered those suspicions.
In 1947, the Sodders visited the State Fire Marshal’s Office in Charleston seeking a more thorough investigation of the fire to address their concerns. Lacking a favorable response, they hired the first in a series of private investigators to look into the case and track down the reported sightings.
In 1949, the family arranged to have the site of their former home excavated, with a Washington, D.C., pathologist on hand to process any unearthed remains.
As volunteers dug into the site with shovels and a scoop-mounted tractor, Hunter, State Fire Marshal Carlyle Raper and three Charleston firefighters looked on. During the 12-hour excavation, several animal bones were unearthed and as twilight approached, four human vertebrae were discovered, and the dig ended.
Instead of answering questions about the fate of the Sodder children, the find raised additional questions.
Hunter brought the vertebrae back to Washington, where an analysis at the Smithsonian Institution determined the bones came from one person and had once been connected. The analysis also determined the bones “showed no evidence of having been exposed to fire.”
For a site where authorities believed five children had died, Hunter said he was surprised at the “amazing scarcity” of human bones unearthed, according to a Charleston Gazette account of the excavation printed the following day. Hunter also deemed it unusual that no larger bones, like skulls or pelvic bones, were found in the ashes of a fire that apparently lacked the heat to incinerate them.
The pathologist was apparently referring to the fact that the fire, reported to have burned for 30 to 45 minutes, was not hot enough to consume the pieces of asphalt roofing and linoleum, a portion of a dictionary, un-melted glassware, chicken bones and other items that survived and turned up in the 1949 excavation, along with the vertebrae.
The Smithsonian report observed that “one would expect to find the full skeletons of the five children, rather than only four vertebrae,” and speculated that the bones may have been contained in the fill dirt Sodder brought in to create the memorial to his children.
According to the 1950 state fire marshal’s report, written by C. R. Cobb, the agency’s chief arson investigator, the origin of the bones that turned up in the 1947 dig “was not established at the time (of the excavation) and has not been to this date. . . Their presence at the site is unexplained and where they came from may never be known. From reports of the examiners and by using common sense, they could not be considered of any significance in the solution of the case.”
“This is a powerful statement coming from a state official involved with the case from the beginning,” Bragg states in his book. By saying the bones discovered in the investigation have no relevance to the case, Cobb was “indirectly validating that the bones were not of the missing children,” Bragg wrote.
Even so, the 1950 fire marshal’s report did not take issue with the findings of the coroner’s inquest, conducted on the day of the fire, or a West Virginia State Police investigation completed three weeks later.
Though no human remains were found by firefighters, police and volunteers sifting through the ruins of the home, the coroner’s inquest concluded that the Sodder children either burned to death at the scene or died from smoke inhalation.
State Police investigators interviewed those who searched the fire scene and confirmed an absence of remains and accepted the cause of death determination made by the coroner’s panel. The State Police report listed the cause of the fire as “undetermined,” but likely to have been caused by either defective wiring or the “spontaneous igniting of combustibles in the basement,” used as an engine repair shop for Sodder’s trucking company.
But Bragg arrived at a different conclusion, after tugging at an abundance of loose ends trailing from the Sodder investigation, including:
- The fact that the Sodders’ telephone line had been cut, rather than burned through, on the night of the fire. A Gatewood man told State Police that after he had seen the burning home and stopped to investigate, he mistook the phone line for a power line and cut it, thinking it would help stop the fire. Since the phone line was 14 feet above the ground at the point it was cut, a ladder would have been useful in accomplishing that task. A ladder George Sodder tried to use on the night of the fire was missing when he looked for it outside his house soon after the fire broke out. It was later found down an embankment, about 75 feet from the burned home.
- The same Gatewood man was later arrested for stealing chain blocks from the Sodders’ barn, where they were used to pull engines from vehicles used by the family’s trucking company, on the night of the fire.
- According to the 1950 state fire marshal’s report, about three months before the fire, Sodder was approached by an insurance agent for the company holding his homeowner’s policy. The agent, who said he was making his pitch at the suggestion of Sodder’s former employer, who co-signed the loan used to buy his home, tried unsuccessfully to interest Sodder in buying life insurance for himself and his family and increasing the amount of coverage for his home.
Several weeks later, according to the report, the former employer — who was also the beneficiary of Sodder’s homeowner’s policy — berated Sodder for not buying the additional insurance and told him “Your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed.”
Investigators had not questioned the man about the threatening remarks he reportedly made by the time the fire marshal’s report was completed, five years after the fire.
As the title of Bragg’s book suggests, the lack of direct evidence in the Sodder matter makes it difficult to reach an ironclad conclusion about the fate of the five children.
But from the circumstantial evidence related to the case, Bragg was able to sketch a plausible scenario explaining how the disappearance of the five children could have occurred. The journey to arrive at that explanation includes stops to consider roles played in the mystery by such disparate topics as local support for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the Appalachian Mafia and its code of silence, a Tennessee baby farm and a chunk of beef liver planted at the fire scene.
Bragg recently established a website, www.nodirectevidence.com, where all documents cited in his book can be accessed, along with photos related to the Sodder case.
Last month, Bragg said he was contacted by a man who suspects his mother, who grew up in Kentucky, could have been one of the missing Sodder children. Bragg put him in touch with a Sodder grandson who is willing to exchange DNA test results.
“If there turns out to be a match, that would be amazing,” Bragg said. “The chance of producing a DNA match and solving at least a piece of the mystery is one reason I wrote the book.”
“No Direct Evidence: The Story of the Missing Sodder Children” was published by Charleston’s Quarrier Press and distributed by the West Virginia Book Company. In Charleston, it is available at Taylor Books, Drug Emporium and the Capitol Market bookstore, as well as on Amazon.com.
