Profile: Mystery of missing children haunts West Virginia town

9:00-10:00 PM , This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

Now a story of one small town in West Virginia where the joy of Christmas is entwined with memories of a tragedy. Sixty years ago the community lost five children, but as Stacy Horn tells us, just how they were lost remains the subject of some debate.

(Soundbite of "Silver Bells")

Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Strings of streetlights, even stoplights blink...

STACY HORN reporting:

Fayetteville is a small town. The main street doesn't run any longer than a hundred yards. All the buildings look old; just the signs appear new. Other than music that plays from a loudspeaker mounted on the storefront, the streets are quiet. Inside, residents talk of gifts and parties and inevitably what really happened to the Sodder family on Christmas morning 60 years ago.

Unidentified Woman #1: There was a fire and five children burned.

Unidentified Man #2: It was an Italian family.

Unidentified Woman #2: I don't think it was an accident.

Unidentified Woman #3: The family never accepted it.

Unidentified Man #3: There was all types of rumors.

Unidentified Woman #4: I don't think the children were burned up in it.

Unidentified Man #4: I don't want to repeat any of these, but there were just rumors they may have not died in the fire.

Unidentified Man #5: It was kind of--it was weird.

HORN: Everyone has an opinion about the fire. Here's what we know. When George and Jenny Sodder went to sleep on Christmas Eve, nine of their 10 children were with them. One son was away in the military. The author of "West Virginia Unsolved Murders," local writer George Bragg, tells the story.

Mr. GEORGE BRAGG (Author, "West Virginia Unsolved Murders"): Jenny woke up. She heard a noise. She got up and checked that out and went back to bed. And she smelled smoke and she screamed for her husband and woke him up. And then they both hollered upstairs where there were two sons sleeping in one room and the other five children sleeping in the other room.

HORN: The fire moved fast. Retired Fayetteville Fire Chief Roy Cruikshank, who was still working in a factory at the time, remembers coming home from work that night.

Mr. ROY CRUIKSHANK (Retired Fire Chief): I was working the midnight shift and I drove home and as I drove by that place it was a windy night. There was strong winds blowing, blowing just like a furnace. They lived on the higher floor and underneath they had oil drums and trucks and bulldozers and things all there, you know.

HORN: Neighbors reached Chief F.J. Morris at the Fayetteville Fire Department a little after 1 in the morning. It's now Christmas. Children are trapped, they say, but no fire truck is sent until 8:00, seven hours later. Another retired fire chief, Steve Cruikshank, Roy's son, tries to explain the delay.

Mr. STEVE CRUIKSHANK (Retired Fire Chief): They didn't even have a fire siren. So if somebody calls and they'd have to call the operator--you know, Sarah get me--so when they call them then they've got to turn around and call everybody else, and this guy calls this guy and this guy calls this guy.

HORN: The parents and four of their children escape, but five of the Sodder children, ages five, eight, nine, 12 and 14, are never seen again. At this point, events unfold in a way that almost guaranteed that the story will be forever surrounded by misinformation, wishful thinking and rumor.

All that's left of the house is a basement full of ashes. A brief, informal search takes place but instead of the skeletons they expect to find, there are just a few bones and pieces of internal organs. The family isn't told about what they found. Because it's Christmas, a more thorough search is postponed. The fire marshal tells the Sodder family to leave the site as it is. `We'll come back and finish the job,' the official says.

But the father, George Sodder, ignores the fire marshal. Before a week is up, he gets a bulldozer and pushes four or five feet of dirt into what's left of his home, a shrine. The family plants flowers.

Mr. S. CRUIKSHANK: You can't really blame the Sodders for it. I'm sure at the time they assumed that that was a burial ground and they just covered that over.

HORN: Two years pass. George Sodder sees a newspaper photo of schoolchildren in New York. He's sure one of the children is his missing daughter Betty. He jumps in his pickup and drives to Manhattan. He insists on seeing the child, but they don't let him. He doesn't give up. Now he's convinced the kids are alive, if not in New York, somewhere.

The Sodders hire a man named Tinsley(ph), the first of many private detectives. Around the same time, Fayetteville Fire Chief Morris reappears to revive one of the most bizarre elements of the story. "Unsolved Murder" author George Bragg tells how.

Mr. BRAGG: Morris claimed that he buried a powder box which was--held a material like dynamite for use in the mines and that he had found a body part, what looked to him like it was part of a vertebrae with some organs attached, and that he put that in the powder box and buried it approximately a foot and a half deep at the site.

HORN: If the box of remains can be recovered, that would be proof that the children died that night. The family could finally move on. George Sodder and Tinsley ask the chief to show them where he buried the box.

Mr. BRAGG: They got together and came and dug the box up. 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.

HORN: Now newspapers get hold of the story. Strangers report spotting the Sodder kids around the country. None of the leads go anywhere.

(Soundbite of traffic)

HORN: Today you don't find any trace of the 1945 fire here at the scene. Cars speed past a new white house at the end of a gravel driveway. A few Christmas decorations are hung here and there around the house. Nothing stands out. But for decades there was something, a huge reminder of the tragedy. In 1952 the Sodders pinned all their hopes to a billboard. On it were black-and-white photographs of each missing child and an account of the fire. It offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of any or all of their children. Again, Fayetteville author George Bragg.

Mr. BRAGG: For years people would pull over right here and walk up to there. It had a lot of trees around it and it was really well-done and they took care of it. And it was a normal-sized billboard but it was built a lot closer to the ground. It was only--the bottom of it was probably about, oh, two feet above the ground and you could actually walk up to it. And when you walked up to that sign, you were looking right in the faces of the children.

HORN: The billboard fed new rumors. The children had been sold to an orphanage. They were taken to Italy. And in persistent whispers, the Mafia was involved. Nonsense, says George Martins(ph). He's the former head of the Crime Commission(ph) that covered West Virginia.

Mr. GEORGE MARTINS (Crime Commission): Even if the Mafia had a presence in West Virginia at that time, the modus operandi of this particular event doesn't in any way comport with what the Mafia would have done. To me, this is--it's like saying the martians came and landed in the field and took these children away.

HORN: The Sodder family clings to a memory. We didn't see the five kids at the windows crying for help. They weren't there. Not unusual, says West Virginia state fire marshal Sterling Lewis.

Mr. STERLING LEWIS (West Virginia State Fire Marshal): When you have kids, usually under the age of 12 to 13, the 12 to 13s start trying to get out. If you get in lower, then they're going to hide. You know, they feel heat. They smell smoke. They're choking. They don't think about going to the window, to the door. We've found them under beds. We've found them in closets. We've found them curled up in the bathtub.

HORN: For the rest of his life, George Sodder traveled the country tracking down rumors of his missing kids. He died in 1969, his wife Jenny 20 years later. After her death the billboard came down. The youngest child who survived the fire, Sylvia, said she didn't want her voice recorded, but what she did want is to fulfill her parents' wish to keep the story alive.

(Soundbite of song)

Unidentified Man #6: (Singing) ...but as long as you love me so, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

HORN: So every Christmas the people of Fayetteville go over what happened that night, repeating the same reasons for believing their version of the story. Without physical evidence, they can't say for sure, but fire experts are confident that the blaze that took place in 1945 probably cost the Sodder children their lives. For some, the children died 60 years ago. For the family and many of their neighbors who grew up looking into the faces of the Sodder children and who firmly believe that the children are still out there, this could be the Christmas that they finally come home.

(Soundbite of song)

Unidentified Man #6: (Singing) Oh, the fire is slowly dying and, my dear, we're still...

HORN: For NPR News, I'm Stacy Horn.

SIEGEL: Stacy Horn is author of the book "Restless Sleep" about New York City's cold cases. There are pictures of the missing Sodder children at our Web site, npr.org.

You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

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