4: The Sodder Children Disappearance
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It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaylin Moore.

If you're new here, this is a podcast of heart-pounding tales, and today we're doing an episode of heart-pounding history, or should I say, heart-pounding holidays, because even though it's the happiest time of the year, the spooks don't stop. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please give us a rating wherever you listen. It really helps. What story does your family tell every year around the holidays?

Around New Year's, I always think back to the story about my grandmother in 1930, who, at 12 years old, was sledding down a hill on New Year's Eve when her appendix burst. She got to the top of the hill only to feel a horrible pain in her side and sled all the way down to the bottom in tears. Her parents rushed her to the hospital where the doctor showed up in a top hat and coattails, still drunk from the party he had been ripped from.

My grandma Jean lived to her mid-80s, so the surgery couldn't have been all that bad. For the families of Fayetteville, West Virginia, each year their stories all sound the same. They relive the story of a tragic night in their town on Christmas Eve, and though it happened almost 80 years ago, its mysterious circumstances and unsolved ending play on a loop in their heads each year.

Today, we're diving into the mystery of the Sodder children, whose disappearance on Christmas Eve 1945 still lingers in Reddit threads, YouTube deep dives, and the town where it all happened. Let's dive in. On Christmas Eve 1945, the Sodder family was home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, a small town that to this day has a main road that's only a few hundred yards long.

The Sodders consisted of George and Jenny Sodder, as well as their 10 children, nine of which were home that night, ranging in age from 2 to 23 years old. They also had another grown son who was away in the army. That night, the children had all gone to bed by the time the home phone rang at 1230 a.m. Jenny Sodder, the mother, went downstairs to answer it, only to hear a woman laughing on the other end.

It sounded like there was a party going on behind her, and the stranger on the line was asking for someone who didn't live at the Sauter residence. Jenny figured the operator must have connected the call to the wrong line and hung up the phone. While she was downstairs, she noticed that all the lights were still on, and the curtains were all open. She also saw that her daughter Marion lay sleeping on the couch. Jenny, slightly annoyed that her children didn't prepare the downstairs for night time,

turned off the lights, closed the curtains, and went upstairs, desperate for sleep. But Jenny was only asleep for about 30 minutes when she heard a loud bang on her roof, as if some sort of projectile had hit it. It wasn't enough to rattle Jenny though and she fell back asleep. The next thing she woke up to was the smell of smoke less than an hour later. What preceded was absolute chaos.

A fire had seemed to have started in the downstairs office, and Jenny and George sprung into immediate action. They grabbed Sylvia, the toddler that slept in their room, and got Marion off the couch as they were running out of the house. They called upstairs to their other children, but when they got outside into the chilly December air, George noticed that only John and George Jr., two older boys that shared a room upstairs, had also made it out of the house. Their hair was singed from the fire.

But where were the other five children? Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty shared two rooms on opposite ends of the hallway on the top floor, separated by a staircase that was now completely engulfed in flame. George thought that must be where they were. And like any father would, he started to try and reach them. But going through the house wasn't an option. So he ran to where the ladder he kept propped against the house was, only to find that it was... missing. Huh.

George was in full adrenaline mode and quickly devised a plan to bring his truck over to the side of the house and climb up on it to get to the top floor window. Although he had used the truck just the day before, when he went to go start it, it wouldn't start. Not only that, but his other truck wouldn't start either. It feels like too perfect. Too planned. Like one or two coincidences, that sucks, that happens. But this many? Like everything that could go wrong did go wrong?

I don't... Yeah. Something fishy is going on. Something else is at play here, and it's very, very clear. So Marion sprints to a neighbor's house and calls the fire department, but the operator doesn't answer. Another neighbor who actually saw what was happening called the fire department as well, to the same end. So that neighbor actually drove into town and tracked down the fire chief, F.J. Morris.

Since there was no alarm system in town, Morris started off the phone tree system that they used to alert all of the firefighters when there was a fire. That's the most small town thing that I've ever heard. There's no siren. There's no siren in town and the neighbor goes into town and literally rips the fire chief out of his home and is like, you gotta go deal with this. And then he does a phone tree where they call each person. Like a phone tree is like the first person calls

Two people, those people, it's like a reverse pyramid scheme, but for calling people and letting them know there's an emergency. Though the Sauter family lived only two and a half miles from the fire station, help didn't come until 8 a.m. the following morning. By that point, the house was a pile of ash.

The roof had completely collapsed into the house, tearing the whole structure down into the basement. That didn't stop a search party from combing through the remains of the house to try and find the bodies of the children, though. And the results of the search are... odd, to say the least. George Sautter was told that no traces of his five children were found in the rubble. Nothing. Fire Chief Morris claimed that a fire that burned that hot for that long probably would have entirely cremated the children,

But George claimed that he never smelled burning flesh in the fire, a smell that is unmistakable and incredibly pungent when a person is burned. Multiply that by his five children and there should have been some stench. Later on, George and Jenny would consult experts to double check this fact. George claimed that the fire burned for only 45 minutes before the roof caved in,

How could five children be completely cremated in that time, when it typically takes an adult two plus hours to be cremated? And even then, there's usually some remains left. I mean, I will say...

That when you look up the cremation times online, they are for fully grown adults. And these were children. So in theory, they are going to burn faster than adults. Yeah, but they'd still leave something behind. Like even...

Yeah, there's always like something left behind because, you know, whenever they do the like review after a fire, they have to be able to tell like what, like how many casualties there were, you know, there's things that they can do to tell. Absolutely.

And I feel like if this fire cremated all five children, then every fire would basically cremate the people that were inside. And that's just like simply not the case because they find remains after fires happen. So this was like so fishy. Also, the fact that they did not smell anything...

I've lit my hair on fire a couple of times on accident. It's a very distinct smell. It's very clear. And that's just my hair being singed. Like I have five people to be cremated in a house. And you would think with, again, five people cremated.

Being burned, just multiply that, you would smell something. The cause of the fire was also written off as faulty wiring, which struck Jenny as odd. If the wires to the house had failed, why were all of the lights on downstairs an hour before the fire broke out?

Wouldn't they have been experiencing electrical issues before the wires spontaneously burst into flames? It was Christmas Day, so a more thorough search could not be completed. The search that happened that day was mostly volunteers, with George's brother and the local priest helping search the rubble for approximately two hours. But the police needed to get real investigators in there to comb through more meticulously and for longer. And that wasn't going to happen today.

Morris told George not to touch the rubble until the authorities could come back and do a proper search. George couldn't take it, though. He couldn't sit there every day and look at the remnants of a house that entombed his middle children. So he took matters into his own hands and bulldozed five feet of dirt into the basement of the house to build a commemorative garden in memory of his five lost children. Oh, he did that, like, immediately? Yeah. Dude. Dude.

I know he contaminated the entire. I can't. I understand. I understand grief. But dude, I know you couldn't wait. I know. It's basically like just like the nail and the proverbial coffin of like actually being able to to figure anything out because the entire crime scene at that point was contaminated.

I'm not sure what changed in George. I imagine the seed of doubt that had been planted in his head at the search had finally sprouted. Because in 1946, he saw a photo in Look magazine of a group of young girls practicing ballet at the Walt Whitman School in New York City. And he wrote the school this letter. Attention, Ms. Louise Kruger, Director. Dear Ms. Kruger,

The enclosed picture of several of your students appearing in the May 14th, 1946 edition of Look magazine is self-explanatory. For your information, the little girl to which the arrow points quite definitely resembles one of our children who disappeared during the latter part of 1945, and I shall appreciate it greatly if you will, at your earliest convenience, favor me with the following information. One, her name. Two, the date of her enrollment.

Okay, a few things. One, no one has ever been able to locate the photo George is referencing. While the edition of Look magazine was found, the photo he's talking about was not, but we know from context he's referring to his daughter Betty. And two...

disappeared. He said one of our children that disappeared. Whoa. Now George was claiming that his children weren't lost in the fire, but that something else may be at play. Okay, so if something else happened to the kids, that must mean there would be suspects in their disappearance. So let's look at some of the facts surrounding the night of the fire.

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Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. So first and foremost, George Sauter was an Italian immigrant and a strong dissenter of Mussolini, the dictator of Italy. It wasn't unusual for someone in America to be in staunch opposition of a fascist, especially coming out of World War II. However, since George was an Italian living in a community of other Italians, it may have been a different story. It wasn't totally unreasonable to think George had made some enemies around town with his outspokenness.

Listen, I have a minor in marketing. I have taken several sales classes. They make it very clear that you should, like, not threaten the people that you try and sell stuff to.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Can you imagine like going to the gym and like, you know, at the end of your trial when they try to get you to sign up if they're like, if you don't sign up for this gym, I'm going to murder your family. That's so specific. Your house is going up in smoke and your children will be destroyed. Not killed. Destroyed. Destroyed. Yeah. I've solved the case. I know who did it. I know.

I'm thinking we know who did it. George also thought back a few months prior when a stranger came to his home to ask if George had any work hauling equipment. Apparently, this gentleman had wandered into the backyard, pointed at George's fuse box and said, this is going to cause a fire someday.

But George had just had the wires checked by the electric company, who said they were fine. And then there was the fact that the two older Sauter sons recalled seeing a strange man parked along US Highway 21, intently watching the younger children as they came home from school. There's also a few things I didn't mention about the night of the fire. The ladder that was mysteriously missing from the side of his house? Yeah. It was leaned up against a telephone pole where the phone line coming out of the house was cut.

There's also the report that the night of the fire, in the midst of the panic and chaos, the Sodders were robbed. Someone had broken into their shed to steal tackle and blocks as George was scrambling to save his children. Who in their right mind would do that?

Later, when the family came back to visit the site, Sylvia was playing in the backyard when she picked up a hard rubber object. George gave it a close inspection and concluded it was a napalm pineapple bomb, typically used in war. Okay, hear me out. People need to keep things to themselves. If you're going to commit a crime, don't tell someone how you're going to do it. That is not what I was going to say. Leo just went full villain.

Keep your plots to yourself. No, but I'm thinking that it's tough because the web sleuths are going to hate this. But multiple people did go to George's house and say the wires were faulty.

The electric company said they were fine. They were using the lights at night. So either everyone that said the wires were faulty was in on the conspiracy, which actually there is evidence that that might be the case, or they were right and the electric company was wrong and all of this just was a faulty wire. Okay, then where's the ladder? Why are the trucks not working? Where's the fire department? Okay, fair. No, that's why I said the websites are going to hate it because I agree. There's a lot of evidence. Also, like...

Here's the thing. If you're in a town of people who are, in this case, Italian, and you're speaking poorly about the leader of their home country, they're going to have it out for you. But if you go to the electrical company who might not have any skin in the game, they're going to be more honest with you. That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. The electric company, famously anti-fascist. I'll say it. Well, they might not be Italian. We don't know.

We don't know. Or they were not pro-fascism in Europe. And they were like, listen, we don't care about that. We just care about your wires. And they're fine. I don't know. I agree with you. Who was telling him that they were faulty? That's the thing. It was just a guy that was looking for work. But he did live in the community. The community was mostly Italian people. That was... Well, in this case, yes. That was the guy that came over and said... But when they...

decided that the when they ruled that the fire was accidental they blamed it on the wires and actually this is a part that i forgot to include in the podcast but guess who was on the friggin jury that said or the friggin um like panel that decided that the fire was accidental salesman

Yeah, Giannottolo, the little salesman, the squirrely sales guy that threatened to murder them. I'm just saying, the plot thickens. The plot is ready. We've solved the case. I don't know what more information we need. Sure, some of this points to someone being responsible for the fire, but it doesn't say much about the children disappearing into thin air.

Well, after George saw the photo of who he thought was Betty, he drove to New York to try and see the girl. He wasn't allowed to see her, but who's to say if that was because of some big plot to keep his children away from him or because the school didn't want to be responsible for a man that drove thousands of miles to see a young girl. But now, George couldn't be stopped. And he and Jenny hired several private investigators over the following years to track down his children.

And stoking George's fire was multiple reports of people claiming they had seen the children. There was the woman who claimed that she saw the children inside of a passing car the night of the fire. And then there was Ida Crutchfield, a woman who ran a small inn in Charleston, West Virginia, and in 1952, a whole seven years after the fire, she claimed that she had served the children breakfast a week after they went missing.

According to Crutchfield, they were accompanied by two men and two women, all Italian. She had tried to talk to the children, but the men seemed hostile and wouldn't allow the children to speak to her. Later, in 1947, George decided to enlist the help of the FBI. He had written a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI at the time, and received word back that though the case was outside the Bureau's jurisdiction, his agents could help if local authorities would collaborate with them.

The local police and fire department declined the offer. Why do you think they would have declined the offer? I mean, my opinions aside, looking at the facts of the case, because they probably thought that it was a close thing. They ruled it an accidental fire and that the kid's

perished in the fire and they were like we don't want to spend any more time and resources looking into this like it's done yeah so they were they were confident in their own abilities to close the case yeah

Okay, well, I'm gonna play you a little bit about what they were actually up to because I think you're gonna freaking hate it. Oh, God. A private investigator hired by the Sodders named C.J. Tinsley heard a rumor that Fire Chief Morris had in fact found remains in the rubble the day of the search, but hadn't told the Sodders as to not upset them on Christmas. He went to press Morris on the matter, and Morris confessed to him that he had found a heart in the ashes and buried it in a box on site.

Together, the two went back to the site to retrieve the box, which was immediately brought to a coroner by Tinsley. The coroner took one look at it and declared that it wasn't a human heart at all. It was a beef liver. Why would you put it in a box and bury it? What does that do? What is the point? He...

told the family, so he ended up telling the, um, CJ Tinsley, the investigator, that he actually had buried it that day of the search. That he found a heart the day of the search, put it in a box, and buried it. And that was them going to find it years later. Someone had to bury a beef liver. That's just weird. That is weird. In 1949, the Sodders decided to do another search of the site to see if there were any clues.

Remember, the first and only search for the children had been conducted by volunteers in the community over the course of less than two hours. I don't work in forensics and even I can tell you a more thorough search was needed.

And this time, while digging through the churned dirt that George had bulldozed, they find pieces of vertebrae. George was desperate for answers, but terrified of what these shards of bone might reveal. He sent them in for analysis anyways, and eagerly awaited some answers. Were they one of his children's? Either way, he just wanted to know for sure. It seemed like at this point, George was willing to hear that there was proof his children died in the fire that night.

He was just asking, as any parent would, for the definitive proof that the local authorities were not willing to give him. Unfortunately, these bones were not going to be that proof. George was told that the bones most likely belonged to a boy between the ages of 16 and 17, with the oldest possible age being 23 and the youngest possible age being 14 and a half. Maurice Sautter was the oldest child lost that night and he was just 14.

The people who did the analysis of the bones said they could have potentially already been in the dirt that George bulldozed. Yeah, those kids died in that fire. There's so much that's upsetting about this. I think the fact that... Well, you have to remember, too, there's no DNA at this point in time. They're not doing DNA searching, so they're just looking at bones and kind of guessing if they belong to the right people. But...

I don't know what's more upsetting that they after this mailed the bones back to George and said, just do whatever you want with these bones. They're yours. So he probably lost them or the fact or how he found bones. And they're like, those bones were probably there. Like, OK, so that's another person. Let's dig into that.

If they're not my kids, whose are they? Yeah. So, okay. It's a different 16-year-old. Like, yeah. Can we take two seconds out of our day to look into stuff? It reminds me of when I worked at the airport. You know how they always say, like... You find bones at your airport job.

No, I did not find bones at my airport job. I don't know what 16 year old Kayla would have done if I found human vertebrae in the airport. No, but they, you know how they always say like, if you see something, say something. If you see something, say something. Well, one day I saw something and I said something to a CSA agent because someone had left a briefcase at the food court.

And you're always supposed to report luggage that's just left in case they want to find the person, in case it's something dangerous. And I remember I reported it to TSA. I was like, hey, someone left their briefcase over on that chair. And they're like,

Oh, oh no. Oh, that sucks. That's sad. And then they just walked away and carried on with their life. And I was like, okay, cool. No one cares about anything. George and Jenny may not have known it, but this was the moment it was decided they would spend the rest of their lives looking for their children. After these few years of activity, the trail started running a little cold, as most cases do the further in time you get away from the tragedy.

Tips were flooding in from all over the country, most of them bogus. George and Jenny passed out flyers around town offering $10,000 for information that would lead to the recovery of their children. For reference, that's almost $95,000 today.

George also never stopped with the private investigators. At one point, he even claimed that the kids were with Jenny's sister in Florida. And an FBI report reads that authorities went to the Florida house and Jenny's sister had to prove to them that her children were her own. The two of them were spiraling into borderline madness. But how can you blame them? The next big development came in 1968, more than 20 years after the fire.

The children would be in their 20s and 30s at this point, full-grown adults, maybe with kids of their own. Jenny found a letter in the mail addressed to only her. It was a photo of a man in his 20s, and on the back it read, Louis Sauter. I love brother Frankie. Lil boys. A90132. Or 35. The man in the photo had the same dark hair and strong eyebrows that were signature to the Sauters.

In it, he's wearing a white shirt with a cross necklace, and there's no mistaking that this looks like what Lewis could have grown up into. Once again, they hired a private investigator to head to Kentucky and find out if it was really Lewis, but the PI was never heard from again. The longest legacy of the solder search was a billboard constructed in town in 1952 that read, What was their fate? Kidnapped or murdered?

It had five black and white photos of the Sauter children until 1967 when it was updated with the new photo of the maybe Lewis. It stayed up for the rest of George and Jenny's lives. George passed away just a year after the photo of Lewis came in and Jenny passed away 20 years later. It said that she wore black every single day after Christmas Eve, 1945. So, dear listener, what do you think could have happened?

Well, here are some of my thoughts. So Leo, based on what you heard, what kind of, what do you think happened? Well, I used to think that they were kidnapped. But I don't know. After this, do you think they might have just died in that fire? Like, I know it sucks to say, but maybe while it was happening, the smell of a burning house was so intense that you couldn't smell anything.

the burning flesh. Maybe, you know, I definitely think that someone burned their house down. That's very obvious. That's very clear. Yeah. There's very clear. Yeah. Up to some cover up. But I think that the kids, like they found a, they found part of a vertebrae in rubble in the ditch in the dirt. Yeah.

It just, it's so sad and it's so unfortunate because they'll never have that like full closure. But I think they died in that fire, unfortunately. I know. And I want listeners that think differently to message us and let us know what they think because I'm so willing to be convinced otherwise. Yes.

But I've done a lot of web sleuthing. And I found this article by this woman, Stacey Horn, who in 2005 wrote the article for NPR on this. And so she went down to Fayetteville. She interviewed a lot of people. And she has a blog post where she compiles all of her research that she couldn't fit into the NPR article. And what she found was...

There were other people the day of the search that found remains in the rubble. And they were told to not tell the family. That they had found reportedly organs. And it's not uncommon to just find organs. Because think about it during a fire. The outside of a person can burn. And then some organ tissue can just be left over. The house also collapsed on itself. The kids were on the top floor. It's also...

From her Stacy's research, kids don't often burn to death. They die first of smoke inhalation. So all the kids could have been dead.

and unable to get out of the house one of the other kids that did make it out john reportedly went into that room and tried to shake them awake that's what he told police that day but then his parents said that he only said that because he felt bad and he thought that's what he should have done so it's very unclear if if that actually happened but when the house collapsed on itself it's just a burning pile of ash on top of people it actually could just cremate bodies yeah

And it burned like that till the morning. Without getting that scent out. So it was burning for hours and hours. Yeah, exactly. And then there was the fact that they also hired... One of the investigators they hired fully quit the case in 1949 because even that investigator was like, they died in the fire. Like, there's no proof that anything else happened. And so I think we've solved this and I don't think we need to investigate this any further. So...

It does appear like the children just died and the parents... Like, grief does really wacky things to people. And I think this was just a case where they were overtaken by their grief. Understandably so, but... They were so desperate for answers that they would do anything to get the ones that they wanted. Because if it's like, well, my children were kidnapped, it's like they're still out there. It gives them a reason to get out of bed in the morning, you know?

As much as it sucks. But they also were never given definitive proof by the cops. Like, there was never any DNA test. You know, he didn't keep the vertebrae. So even when DNA testing was available, they didn't have the bones to be able to do that. So...

It was just there. He wasn't given the opportunity to fully know. And I really do think that he would have just accepted it if they had died in the fire and he knew that. But I think the cops botched it so bad. The fire department to botched it so bad that they were never going to find out what actually happened to those kids.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, and I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. If you've been enjoying what you've been hearing, please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. It really helps. Enjoy the holidays, and until next time, ooooh. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

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