Season 08 Episode 16: Nothing Beside Remains

the tree. But as early rises sleepily draw back their curtains, they're startled to find thick smoke hanging over the town. This wasn't the festive haze of burning logs and roasting chestnuts. Acrid and deadly. On Beckwith Road, in a quiet rural district on the outskirts of town, people stepped out of their houses to see thick, black plumes of smoke spiraling upwards from number twenty sixty two. The house belonged to George and Jenny Sodder. The couple had ten children, nine

of whom were home when the fire broke out. Like most other kids, they had all gone to bed filled with nothing but joy and excitement for the day to come. Instead, they emerged into a nightmare. When fire services made it to the property, they found George and Jenny huddled on the lawn with four of their children. Five others had yet to make it out. They could only watch in desperation as the volunteer crew did their best to stem the flames, hoping beyond hope for any sign of their

missing children, but none appeared. Hours later, with the blaze having long since burned itself out, fire Chief F. J. Morris took on the grim task of searching for the bodies of the missing children. Black smoke hung thick in the air, still billowing from the rubble as he stepped from room to room, but the more he searched, the more confused he became. The children's bodies weren't there. After searching for more than an hour, Morris was exhausted and

light headed from the smoke. Forced to admit defeat, he headed back outside into the chilly morning, Gulping in the fresh air. Across the front yard, the remainings of family members looked close to catatonic. Morris took a moment to rehydrate and compose himself, then walked over to the sodders told them that he'd searched the house from top to bottom, but for some inexplicable reason, he'd found no trace of Morris fourteen, Martha twelve, Louis nine, Jenny eight, and Betty five.

It was almost too much to wrap their heads around. It wasn't the awful news they'd been bracing themselves for, but in ways they had yet to understand, it was perhaps even worse. Their five children, it seemed, hadn't burned to death in their beds, they'd completely vanished. You're listening

to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Giorgio Sodou was born on the Italian island of Sardinia, but in nineteen oh eight, when he was just US thirteen, he and his brother boarded a ship bound for America with the intention of immigrating. It isn't known why exactly, but shortly after their arrival at New York's Ellis Island, a tearful Georgio was given the crushing news by his brother that

he would be continuing his journey on his own. Georgio's brother gave Georgio one final hug, then got straight back on their ship and sailed back to Italy. Georgio's only option was to assimilate as quickly as possible. By his mid twenties, the industrious Georgio Sodu had changed his name to George Soder in reaction to the anti Italian sentiment that was rife at the time, and was running his

own trucking company in West Virginia. A short time later, he met Jenny Cipriani, who had also emigrated to America from Italy as a child. The connection was instant, and within a year they were married. Together they moved to Fayetteville, a town with a strong Italian American community where they felt truly at home. It was the ideal place to start their family. Over the next two decades, the Sodders

had a total of ten children. Their eldest, John, was born in nineteen twenty two, and their youngest, Sylvia, in nineteen forty three. Jenny focused on raising the kids, and George concentrated on expanding his trucking business. By the mid nineteen forties, the Soders seemed to have firmly established their reputation in the community as a respected middle class family, but not everybody saw eye to eye with them. Although

George had left Italy behind. He was deeply invested in his home country and had stronger peaions about the Fascist government and Benito Mussolini. Even after Mussolini was overthrown in forty three, this remained a controversial issue among the Italian immigrant community. George wasn't afraid to share his views in public, and his opposition to Mussolini led to some heated arguments with his neighbors. Still, for the most part, the Soders

lived a quiet and uneventful life in Fayetteville. That was until the autumn of nineteen forty five, when a series of strange incidents occurred. One morning, a stranger knocked on the Soders front door and asked to speak to George about a possible job. When George invited the man in sight, he began wandering around the house, then suddenly made a beeline for the fuse box, pointing at the wiring with an oddly knowing look. The man said, this is going

to cause a fire some day. The man lingered for a little longer, making small talk, than eventually left. George was confused. He'd only just had the houses wiring checked by the power company, and according to them, everything was fine. A couple of weeks later, a traveling salesman arrived at the door attempting to sell life insurance. When George declined,

the man refused to take no for an answer. When George then asked him to leave, the man grew angry and said that George would pay for his opinions on Mussolini. Just before George could shut the door in his face, the salesman snarled, of final warning, your goddamn house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. Though disturbed by the incident, George chalked it down to the emotional turmoil of how things had unfolded

in Italy towards the end of the war. It was a few weeks before the winter holidays of nineteen forty five when the two oldest Otter sons, John and George Junior, noticed that the same car kept parking across the street from their house. It didn't belong to any of their neighbors. The nearest house was several hundred feet down the road,

and they didn't recognize the man behind the wheel. Even more unsettling, the car always seemed to be there When the youngest children arrived home from school as if the driver was keeping watch on them. Then just like that, the car was gone. On Christmas Eve, the Sodder's house was a twinkling haven of light on their dark rural road. Festive fairy lights adorned the front porch. Inside, tinsel and

mistletoe hung from every available surface. A huge tree stood proudly in the living room with an array of colorfully wrapped presents laid out beneath. That night, George and his two eldest sons, John and George Junior, who'd been at work all day together, decided to get an early night, but for the rest of the kids, the night was only just getting started. It was a sod of family tradition that the younger children be allowed to open one

present each on Christmas Eve. This year, they all chose to open their gifts from Marian, their seventeen year old sister, who'd bought toys from the dime store where she worked. By ten pm, the children were all excitedly playing with their new toys and begged their mother to let them stay up a little while longer, since it was Christmas after all. Jenny was happy to agree on the one

condition that Marian keep watch over them. Then she scooped up her youngest, two year old, Sylvia, and went upstairs to bed. A few hours later, Jenny was woken by the sound of something ringing. As she roused from sleep, she realized it was the phone. Squinting at the clock, she saw, to her confusion that it had just gone past midnight. Grabbing her nightgown, she shuffled into the hallway and made her way to the phone downstairs. Hello, she said,

answering the call. For a moment. On the other end, she heard only the muffled noise of what sounded like a party, glasses clinking, and indistinct chatter. Then a man asked to speak to someone whose name Jenny didn't recognize. She replied that they must have the wrong number. Then the caller let out a strange laugh and hung up. Jenny stared at the phone in disbelief, then replaced the receiver. Turning around, she saw Mario fast asleep on the sofa,

but no sign of the other five children. They must have finally gone upstairs to bed, she thought. Then she noticed something strange. The living room curtains were wide open, and all the downstairs lights were still on and the front door was unbolted. Now she was annoyed. She'd specifically told Marian to make sure everything was off and the house secured before going to bed. Too tired to dwell on it, Jenny drew the curtains, locked the door, and

turned off all the lights. Then she walked back upstairs to bed and fell back to sleep. Jenny had only been sleeping for half an hour when she was startled awake again, this time by a loud bang, like something had just hit the roof of the house and rolled off it. Still half asleep, she figured it was just an animal, or maybe a tree branch. After a few moments of silence, she dozed off again. It was thirty minutes later when she woke again, coughing violently. The air

was thick with suffocating smoke. The smoke seemed to be snaking into the bedroom from the hallway. Disorientated, she staggered out of the bed and followed it to George's office, where a blaze had broken out in the corner of the room. She watched in horror as the flames began to spread outwards at terrifying speed. Jenny screamed for George, who emerged from the bedroom seconds later, holding their two

year old Sylvia. With Marion now awake too, the couple handed Sylvia to her and told her to get to safety while they concentrated on getting the rest of the children out of the house. John and George Junior appeared sprinting down the stairs. Together with their father. They began to try and fight the fire. They ran outside to the well to fetch water, but the water was frozen solid. By the time they got back to the house, the

entire staircase and foyer was engulfed in flames. With five children still inside the property, George smashed a window in the side of the house, cutting himself badly. Pushed back by the heat from inside, he yelled for his children to get out, over and over again until his voice was hoarse, but the children, whose bedrooms were on the second floor did not appear. Now Frantic, George, John and George Junior rushed to the other side of the house,

where they kept a step ladder. Perhaps they could reach the upstairs window and get to the children that way, they thought, but the ladder was missing. George sprinted to his truck and jumped into the driver's seat. His plan was to back it up to the house, then he and the boys could climb on top of it, but the truck wouldn't start, and neither would his spare truck

that he kept on hand for emergencies. Paralyzed by horror, George and Ja had no choice but to simply stand on the front lawn and watch helplessly as the flames engulfed their entire home. They screamed and screamed for the missing children, Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny and Betty. If one of them could just make it to the window, they begged, they'd find a way to get them down, But there was still no movement from inside, and within

minutes the entire house was a raging inferno. As the situation became increasingly helpless, Marion handed Sylvia to her mother and ran as fast as she could to the nearest house to call the local fire department. With so many able bodied men still posted overseas for the war effort, the emergency services were stretched dangerously thin, with only a

handful of volunteers left to sustain it. When the neighbor failed to raise anyone on the phone, he drove to the home of fire Chief Morris and hammered on his door to wake him up. By the time Marian returned home, the house had burned completely to the ground. When Chief Morris and the rest of his team finally arrived at the scene several hours later, there was little left for them to do except surveyed the damage and recover the

bodies of the missing children. But after several hours of searching, he had to tell the sodders that he couldn't find any sign of them. With the remaining family inconsolable, Morris tried to make sense of it all. He explained the most likely theory that the fire had been so hot it had simply left no trace of the bodies. There were tanks of fuel stored in the basement, which could potentially have intensified the flames enough to make this possible.

Deep down, however, this explanation didn't make sense to him, the family had little choice but to accept it. A few days later, the missing children were officially declared dead by fire or suffocation, But as the days went by, Jenny couldn't help but dwell on the strange events that preceded the blades. Having found Marion asleep but all the lights on the curtains wide open and the front door unbolted.

At the time, she naturally assumed that all the other children were upstairs in bed, But now an alternative theory took shape in her mind. What if the children had never made it to bed at all, but had instead been abducted, And if that was the case, then they were possibly still out there somewhere alive. After the worst night of their lives, Jenny and George now had a shred of hope to cling to, and cling to it

they did. Losing five children is a horror beyond words, and it was a relief to Jenny Soder, especially that she had something else to focus on. Morris, Martha, Lee, Louis, Jenny, and Betty were all she could think about. The pain of their absence, like a black hole of anguish inside her, forever on the verge of consuming her entire being, and so to try and satiate it, she looked for proof

that they were still alive. She sifted through the ashes of her home and found remnence of household appliances that survived the fire. This in itself made the official explanation seem ridiculous. How could a toaster survive, she thought if human bone could not, She began experimenting burning various kinds of animal bones chicken, cow, pig, to see if she could reduce them to ash. In every case, fragments of bone remained, even when she let the fire burn for

hours on end. Seeing his wife's desperation, George felt it important to share what he knew too. He told her about the bizarre incidents he'd experienced in the lead up to the fire, the stranger who warned him that the fuse box might burn the house down, and the insurance salesman who'd made that chilling and seemingly prophetic threat. And from these settling pieces, the Sodders began to put together

a picture of what they think happened. Somebody had targeted their family with a view to burning them alive in their beds. But what if their real plan was actually to kidnap the children and the fire was merely a distraction. As unlikely as it might seem, the theory gained credibility when a neighbor of the Sodders claimed to have seen one of the children being driven away in a car

just after the house caught fire. A bus driver also reported seeing what looked like a ball of fire being thrown onto their roof around one a m. Then, Jenny later found a rubber looking object in the back yard of the house, which George identified as a hand grenade. The couple tried their best to convince the state police. They described the threats, the apparent prank call, and the

mounting evidence that this was arson. They begged them to look into the possibility that whoever was responsible for it might still have their children. Though the police seemed sympathetic enough, they simply wouldn't get on board with what they saw as the couple's outlandish theory. At a coroner's inquest, the fire was eventually ruled to be an accident caused by faulty wiring. Exhausted and defeated, the Sodders felt they had little choice but to give up and try to move

on for the sake of their remaining children. The remains at the house were bulldozed away completely and the ashes covered over with fresh dirt. Despite their best efforts to move on, not a day went by that Jenny and George Sodder didn't think about their missing children. They were haunted by possibilities, unable to stop imagining what they might be going through if they were still alive. Finally, they decided to hire a private investigator, who soon turned up

some interesting clues. They learned that the insurance salesman who threatened George later served on the jury during the coroner's inquest, where the fire was ruled accidental. Then came a much more bizarre discovery. The investigator uncovered that while fire Chief Morris was scarring the ashes for signs of human remains, he had in fact found a human heart. For reasons unknown, Morris decided to bury it in a box in the

backyard without ever revealing it to the family. The investigator successfully lobbied for the heart to be dug up and analyzed, only for it to turn out to have actually been a cow's liver that had somehow survived the inferno. After this strange red herring, the PI hired a pathologist to excavate the site at the sodders Old home just to

make sure there were no more surprises hidden in the ashes. Incredibly, there were several shards of human vertebrae that looked to be from a teenager, probably around sixteen or seventeen years old. The Sodders were devastated. For the first time, it seemed they had concrete evidence that their rather children did in fact perish in the fire. A later analysis of the bone showed that it had never been exposed to fire

or significant heat. Most likely, it did actually come from the supply of dirt which the Sodders had used to cover up the ashes after bulldozing the property. Despite the disappointment of these dead ends, the private investigator did turn up plenty of tips from people across multiple states who all claimed to have seen the missing children in various locations.

One woman who worked at a hotel in Charleston, a city fifty miles north of Fayetteville, said that she'd seen four of the five missing children at her hotel the week after the fire. They were apparently accompanied by four Italian adults who seemed tense. She said. When she tried to talk to the children, the adults snapped at her and ushered them away. The whole thing had left her with a bad feeling, she said, but no further information

was found to substantiate the claim. In the end, the Soders were left with a huge pile of possible clues that could have been something, but equally nothing. Overwhelmed, they wrote a letter to the FBI asking for help, and were thrilled to receive a reply from the bureau's director, j Edgar Hoover. Having been dismissed by law enforcement for so long, this validation was much needed. However, Hoover told them that although he'd like to help, the FBI didn't

have jurisdiction over state matters. The Bureau would be more than happy to assist with the case if the local authorities gave their permission, but for some reason, the Fayetteville police declined. In nineteen fifty, they officially declared the case closed. By now, it was clear to the Soders that the authorities in Fayetteville wanted to put the whole thing behind them. But was this merely down to complacency and a reluctance to spend any more resources on a five year old case,

or something more sinister. Either way, Jenny and George refused to give up. Shortly after the case was closed, the Sodders paid to have a huge billboard erected along Route sixteen, where it would be seen by anybody driving in or out of Fayetteville. It showed a picture of their five missing children above a caption which read, on Christmas Eve nineteen forty five, our home was set on fire and

five of our children kidnapped. It went on to list the inconsistencies in the official story, including the fact that no bones were ever found. It ended, what was the motive of the law officers involved? What did they have to gain by making us suffer all these years of injustice? Why did they lie and force us to accept those lights. The billboard remained up for close to four decades, and as a result, supposed sightings of the children rolled in

for years. There was even a man in Texas who claimed to be Louis Sodder, who bore a striking resemblance to the child they remembered. George spent years traveling the country to follow up on these tips, but all came to nothing. George died in nineteen sixty nine. For the next twenty years, Jenny wore black every day as a sign of her mourning for her husband and the children they'd lost. Then, in nineteen eighty nine, at the age

of eighty six, Jenny also died. With her passing. The families billboard was finally taken down, but the questions it posed in bold black letters remain forever unanswered. This episode was written by Emma Dibden and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained as an

Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get yours, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.

Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast do