There are many unsolved mysteries when it comes to families and individuals that none of us will ever find the answers to. So, here is one of those incredible unsolved mystery of a family from West Virginia in 1945.

The Book of Cold Cases

I recently read a book by Simone St. James called The Book of Cold Cases. It talked about an unsolved murder of two men and a website that the main character ran all about those cold cases, also known as unsolved murders.

We can all think of some cases relevant to the JonBenét Ramsey case. There’s also the Madeline McCann abduction, and a bit closer to home in New Zealand is the case of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, who vanished on New Year’s Eve in 1998, never to be seen again.

A case that comes to mind for me is the case of the Missing Sodder Children when tragedy struck a family of two parents and their nine children.

What Happened To The Family Of Nine Children?

It was the night before Christmas, and most families would have been sleeping in their beds preparing for Santa Claus’s arrival and the arrival of presents in the morning. For the Sodder family, this date would be the last time the family were all together. On Christmas morning in 1945, at 1:30, a fire broke out in their house.

The two parents and four of the siblings managed to escape to safety. However, when the fire trucks arrived, the house was engulfed in flames. The parents assumed that their other five children had been stuck inside the house and burned to death. 

This is where strange things started happening, and the case became a cold case, an unsolved mystery that, even to this date, almost eighty years later, nobody knows what happened to the five missing children. 

A Mystery Of Almost A Hundred Years Old

By the time the fire was put out, hours later at ten am, the firefighters did the sweep of the house and no human bones were found. The next day, the coroner also decided that the children had died in the fire. However, despite their decision, there also was no evidence of burnt human remains. 

Months later, when the family was trying to rebuild their lives, Jennie Sodder, the mother, saw another local article about a family of seven who were killed in the fire and how their bodies were recovered. 

This sparked her interest, and she started her own little investigation into how these bodies could be recovered, but not her children’s. To help prove her theory, she tested a small pile of animal bones to see how they would react in a fire and even contacted a crematorium, which told her that human remains can still be recovered after a fire burns at two thousand degrees after two hours, which was much stronger and hotter than their house fire.

How It Reached A Conclusion

In 1947, The Sodders also contacted the FBI after a few private investigators had failed to get them to investigate. This was met, though, with a decline from J. Edgar Hoover, who told them it was out of their jurisdiction and they would be unable to assist. 

Despite everything, the remaining Sodders did not give up hope in trying to find their missing family members. They printed flyers with the children’s photos and offered a reward of $5000 for any information. In 1952, the Sodders doubled the amount to $10,000 and hired a billboard. As you can imagine, the family was desperate for answers. 

In 1968, twenty-three years after the fire, the family received a postcard from Kentucky with a message that was believed to be from one of the missing children, Louis Sodder. The postcard read:

Louis Sodder
I love Brother Frankie
Ilil Boys
A90132 (or possibly A90135)

Post Card

The family hired a private investigator to head to Kentucky and track down the sender. However, the family had not heard back from the investigator after he left, and it was assumed that this postcard was a hoax.

The Ending To A Tragedy

George Sodder died the following year in 1973, and then in 1989, Jennie passed away. After her death, the remaining family members decided it was finally time to try to move on and took down the weathered billboard. The last family member, Sylvia, who was one of the children who survived, passed away in April 2021 at seventy-nine years old. 

In this case, a documentary was made about the disappearance titled The Sodder Children Disappearance, and some believe the children did die in the fire. This case remains one of America’s most famous unsolved mysteries. It can cause readers to fall down the rabbit hole with various theories about what happened on that fateful Christmas morning of 1945 in West Virginia.

Paula Philipps