The Disappearance of Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty Sodder

0:00 On Christmas Eve nineteen forty five, in the rural outskirts of Fayetteville, West Virginia, George and Jenny Sotter tucked their children into bed for the night with the anticipation of spending Christmas together the next morning. Tragically, a fire quickly engulfed the home, forcing the family to leave, but five of the children were presumably still inside. What would unfold that evening is still one of the greatest mysteries in the true crime world today, leaving us to wonder what happened to the Solder children. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Truly Twisted. As always, I'm your host, Alicia Watson, and every Thursday, I will be bringing you a story that is always victim focused and fact based. If you like the show, please rate me five stars wherever you are listening. It really is the best way to help me find new audiences and I really appreciate it. But let's get into this week's episode. We're jumping right in with another holiday related story and it's an absolute doozy,

1:33 the disappearance of disolder children. So let's get into it. Parents, George and Jenny Sotter, were born in Italy, moving to the US at young ages. George had come from Tula, Sardinia in nineteen oh eight when he was thirteen years old, along with his older brother, but his brother wasn't a fan of the US and quickly left to go back to Italy, leaving young George there alone in a new At just thirteen, George found a job at the Pennsylvania Railroads carrying water and supplies to the laborers, and he did this for a few years before moving to West Virginia, where he found a job as a driver. This would eventually evolve into his very own trucking company, and it was then that he met Jenny, a storekeeper's daughter. Jenny Capriani moved to Italy when she was just three years old with her parents. The couple met at her family's store called the Music Box, which honestly is quite beautiful, and the two would get married in nineteen twenty two move into a two story timber frame home in Fayeteville.

2:42 It was a small and quiet town in West Virginia with a population of about thirteen hundred people at the time. Their main street wasn't even a mile long. Throughout their marriage, George and Jenny would have ten children together between nineteen twenty three and nineteen forty three, Joe, John, Marion, George Junior, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, Betty and Sylvia. They were, by all accounts, a very happy Italian family and at the timeline of our story, their children ranged from twenty five to two years old. So now that we have set the scene, let's get into the events of Christmas Eve. Also, please note that the oldest Sawder child was not home that evening, Joe was serving in the army overseas at the time, but all other nine children were there. The house was full of holiday cheer until about ten thirty pm, when George and Jenny went to bed with their two year old daughter Sylvia. Five of the younger children, Betty, Jenny, Lewis, Martha and Maurice, who were six, eight, ten, twelve and fourteen at the time, had asked if they could stay up later given that it was a holiday, and they were allowed provided that they finished their chores and locked up the house, which meant closing all the curtains, making sure everything was turned off and locked up, beating all the farm animals, and making sure, you know, everything was just secure for the night. At twelve thirty am, a strange phone call woke Jenny. An unfamiliar woman asked for

4:16 a name that she didn't recognize, laughed oddly, and then hung up. In the background, glasses clinked and it sounded like maybe there was a holiday party going on, and Jenny was about to tell the woman that she had the wrong number, so she didn't think anything of it. While awake, Jenny noticed that the downstairs lights were still on and the curtains were open. The front door was also still unlocked. She assumed that the children were up in the attic playing, so she secured the house and went back to bed. Moments later, she heard a loud thud followed by a rolling noise coming from the roof, but she eventually drifted back to sleep. At one thirty am, roughly an hour later, and Jenny awoke to smoke filling her room and flames engulfing the family home. She heard screaming and coughing, and yelled for her kids to get out of the house. The family rushed out, but five of them were still missing. George desperately tried to re enter the house, but the stairs were already engulfed in flames.

5:23 When he ran to get his ladder, it was missing from its usual spot at the side of the house, so he tried to start not just one, but both of his coal trucks that were parked at the house to use them as a platform to reach the attic windows, but neither of the trucks started. Despite working perfectly the day before, even the water well was frozen solid. Everything that they were trying to do put them at a standstill. This nightmare continued as the family tried to call for help. Their phone line was dead and a local volunteer fire department was severely understood due to the current war and the fact that it was Christmas Eve. It took seven hours for them to arrive, and by eight a m.

6:07 The house was completely reduced to a pile of ash. The surviving family members were devastated by the loss of their home and the fact that five of their children were still missing and presumably died in that fire. I can't even imagine how helpless the Sawdters felt watching their home. The local corner ruled that the children had perished in the fire that was caused by quote unquote faulty wiring. And death certificates were issued on December thirtieth, nineteen forty five, for the five children, Betty, Jenny, Lewis, Martha, and Maurice. The remaining Sawders, however, were skeptical for one thing. The fire department wasn't able to find a single identifiable bone or human remain in the wreckage that could have belonged to any of the five missing children. That, in combination with their phone lines not working, their vans not working, and George's ladder being moved, it felt very suspicious. Too much had gone wrong all at once, and it felt intentional.

7:15 Jenny later consulted a crematorium worker and conducted her own experiments with animal bones. She found that even the most intense heat left charred yet identifiable remains. Cremation of human remains doesn't fully destroy bones in the time or temperature of a typical house fire. Even prolonged and intense house fires usually leave traces of skeletal remains. The Smithsonian reported that bones remain even after two hours in a crematorium at two thousand degrees fahrenheit, whereas the solder house burnt at a far less time and lower intensity. If that was the case, where were the children? Four days after the fire, what remained of the home was bulldozed and a memorial garden was planted in the home's place. A funeral was held for the children on January Tewod, but Jenny and George were two griefs stricken to attend. Now.

8:14 I know that hindsight is always twenty twenty, but looking at some of the events that led up to the date, all of this felt very strange. George and Jenny did not believe that their kids were dead. They believed that they had been taken from the home during the fire for starters. The months leading up to Christmas nineteen forty five were marked by several unsettling incidents. A life insurance salesman was enraged by George's refusal to buy a policy and reportedly threatened him, shouting, your goddamn house is going to go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. He claimed that George would pay for his remarks about Mussolini. Later, a stranger looking for work wandered to the back of the house and pointed to two fuse boxes. He warned them that they were a fire hazard, and George found this really strange, considering that the home's electrics had recently been inspected and cleared. Additionally, one of the oldest sold children noticed two people parked in a car along Highway twenty one, intently watching the younger children get off the school bus. Not to mention everything that went wrong during the fire, the phone line was cut, it wasn't burnt. Following an inspection of the home and the surrounding electrical units, a telephone repairman reported that the line did not burn in the fire. It was cleanly cut beforehand, as if somebody had climbed up

9:45 a pole or used a ladder and deliberately severed it. Number two, the ladder had been moved. This ladder usually sat perched against the solderhouse and was crucial for accessing the upper floor. It was found far from its original position after the fire, as though somebody had removed it before the fire started. George's usually reliable work trucks mysteriously failed to start that night. They had run perfectly fine earlier that day, So what are the odds that not one but two would stop working right when you need them to. Number four, when the snow had finally melted, young baby, Sylvia, who was just two at the time, found a hard rubber sphere in the bush. George believed that it resembled a napalm, pineapple bomb, or incendiary device of some sort, but there was no way to test it. However, this could have been what Jenny had heard rolling on the roof, and later witnesses would speculate that they saw balls of fire being thrown at the Sawder House before their home went up in flames. Five that strange phone call, Some accounts have suggested that the wrong number phone call to the Solder house might somehow be connected to the fire, or was meant as some sort of distraction for somebody to go in and take the kids. However, investigators later contacted this woman who made the call, and she confirmed

11:17 that it had been the wrong number on her part and that she didn't know anything about the family. A frequently discussed theory is that the kids were taken because of retaliation because George Sotterer had been quite outspoken about Mussolini and Italian fascism. About Mussolini and it being a prominent Italian community, some locals later claimed that maybe these threats made toward the family in the weeks before the fire were deliberate as a reason because this was a prominent Italian community, maybe George had pissed the wrong person off. Some locals later claimed that threats were made toward the family in the weeks before the fire, and witnesses would claim to see the missing Solder children themselves. One woman who had seen the fire from the road said that she had seen a couple of children peering out of a passing car while the house was burning. She said that they resembled the Solder children. Another woman at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston said that she had served them breakfast the next morning. She noted that there was a Florida license plate car in the rest stop parking lot as well. The Sawters hired a private investigator named C. C. Tinsley from a nearby town to look into the case. He informed the family that the insurance salesman who had threatened George over his anti Mussolini sentiments had been on the corner's jury that ruled the fire

12:48 in accident. He also learned of rumors around Fayetteville that, despite his report to the Swters that no remains had been found in the ashes, chief Morris, the fire chief, had found a heart, which he later packed into a small metal box and secretly buried. It was later found that this was actually a beef liver and it had not at all been affected by a fire, but he was hoping that this would help the family. Except their children had died in August of nineteen forty nine, the saughters decided to go on a whole new search of the scene. They brought in a Washington d c. Pathologist and the excavation was much more thorough than it had been the first time around. Then covered a small amount of objects, damaged coins, a partly burned dictionary, several shards of vertebrae, and a hunter sent the bones to the Smithsonian Institution. Basically, the takeaway was that the bones were human, that they belonged to one person, presumably between sixteen and seventeen years old, and this could have been a fourteen year old boy i e. The oldest missing solder child Morris, but it was not probable for a boy fourteen and a half years old to show that level of maturation.

14:12 That and the vertebrae didn't appear to have any fire damage, lending speculation that they were potentially dug up in the dirt that the family used to plant the memorial garden, which, as a separate aside, I did not like that as an explanation that there's just vertebrae in your dirt, But I rest my case. It was nineteen forty five. They continued to look for their children and follow any leads that came their way. George would often personally drive across state lines to wherever possible sighting was until he was confident that his children weren't there. In nineteen fifty two, the family printed out flyers and handed them out all over the state. They also put up a billboard with the children's faces, offering a five thousand dollars reward for any information leading to the missing Sawters. They put up two billboards in fact, one along the highway and one where the home once stood. In nineteen sixty seven, George traveled to Houston to investigate a possible tip of somebody who had stated that Lewis had revealed his identity to her after having too much to drink one night. She thought that he and Maurice were potentially living in Texas.

15:25 When she brought George to the two men that she believed to be his boys. They denied knowing anything about the Sotters or being these missing boys, but for whatever reason, this interaction weighed heavily on George until his death. The Sowter family later received a letter from Central City, Kentucky with no return address and a photo of a thirtyish year old male with a strong resemblance to Lewis. On the back, written in handwriting was Lewis Sotter, I love brother Frankie L L boys U A nine oh one, three two or three five. This would have been the right age if Lewis had survived. The family hired another private detective, another private investigator to go to Central City, Kentucky and look into it, but he never reported back to the Sowters and they weren't able to locate him again.

16:23 This in itself is strange, and whether or not it was Lewis, it gave the family some sort of hope. The Sawters spent the rest of their lives searching. Over the decades, they followed Leeds across the country, from a school in New York to a potential siding in Kentucky. George passed away in nineteen sixty nine without ever knowing the fate of his children, and Jenny Sowters spent the remaining years wearing black in mourning and tending to the memorial garden where their house once stood, until her death in nineteen eighty nine. The surviving sold children, joined by their own kids, would continue to publicize the story and follow up on investigative leads. They, along with Olderville residents, have theorized that somehow the Sicilian mafia was trying to extort money from George or was seeking retaliation from his so called anti Mussolini beliefs, and they were taken back to Italy. If the children had survived all those years and they were aware that their parents and siblings had survived the fire and were still looking for them, they may have been too afraid to contact them for fear that something bad might happen to them. Sylvia Sotter, the youngest of the siblings, passed away in twenty twenty one, and she too, followed up on any and all leads related to her siblings until she passed. To this day,

17:53 the disappearance of the five Solder children remains one of the most haunting unsolved mysteries in America in history. It has been eighty years and no one knows for certain if they survived that fire and were taken, or if maybe that search just wasn't done well enough, wasn't thorough enough, and by some miraculous science, defying circumstance, they did die in that fire, but I personally believe that they were taken. I would love to know what you all think, and you can send me your thoughts at It's Truly Twisted at gmail dot com. And now for a moment for the missing. Chandice left her home on August twentieth, twenty nineteen, with Christopher Spees, traveling to the Birch River area. She left a note for her mom that she would be back shortly. However, he returned and she did not. Chandace was living with her mother at the time. Her mom went to work that morning, and when she returned home, she found a note on the counter that stated, Mom, I took off for a little while. I'm in good hands.

19:16 I promise be back shortly. Please don't worry, no need to call if he need me. Love you. Chan Chandace did not take any of her personal belongings with her, only a small change purse and her cell phone. The drive that she did was approximately twenty minutes would have been no big deal to anybody now. Christopher Spies has been interviewed several times by police, but maintains that he doesn't know anything after two am. He says that due to being under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time, he has no idea what happened to her. There is no proof that she is either alive or deceased, and she has not been seen or heard from since.

20:00 Chandis is thirty three years old. She is five three, one hundred and ten pounds, and she has a tattoo on her right leg that says see no evil, hear no evil, Speak no evil. If you have any information regarding her whereabouts here asked, called the West Virginia State Police at three oh four seven sixty five two one zero one. And I do hope that you enjoyed this week's episode. Remember to leave five stars wherever you are listening now and I will see you next week for a very merry Christmas episode. And in the meantime, remember you are wanted, you are loved, and you deserve to be here. And I will see you next week,