10. THE SODDER CHILDREN

“The Sodder children disappearance.

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in Fayetteville, West Virginia.

At the time, it was occupied by George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and nine of their ten children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the nine children escaped. The bodies of the other five children have never been found.

The fire was blamed on ‘faulty wiring’; however, one of the jurors involved in the inquest had, at one point, threatened George Sodder, saying his house would be ‘burned’ and his children ‘destroyed.’

The Sodders continue to question the official findings about the fire.

They wondered why, if it had been caused by an electrical problem, the family’s Christmas lights had remained on throughout the fire’s early stages, when the power should have gone out.

A telephone repairman told the Sodders that the house’s phone line had not been burned through in the fire, as they had initially thought, but cut by someone who had been willing and able to climb 14 feet up the pole.