UPDATE: The Sodder Children

Crime Junkie

This updated episode revisits the unsolved mystery of the Sodder children—five siblings who vanished during a house fire on Christmas morning in 1945

Key takeaways

• No bodies or remains were ever recovered from the fire scene, raising longstanding suspicions about the official narrative.
• The fire marshal's investigation did not begin until two days after the fire, contradicting claims that George Sauter ignored orders to preserve the site.

Main topics

• The 1945 house fire that killed five children
• Lack of physical evidence and remains

Notable quotes

"This was never just a bizarre mystery. It was five kids."

Conclusion

The Sodder children case remains unresolved, with no official reopening expected. However, Miranda Weeks

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Britt. If this show has taught us anything, it's that the truth is not always the version people tell you first. That's what makes Chameleon so good. Each week, host Josh Dean digs into real stories of people pretending to be someone they're not, from elaborate scams to cons that somehow keep going long after they should have fallen apart. It's true crime, but with a different kind of danger. Manipulation, deception, and lies that actually worked. Listen to Chameleon every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:31) Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Brit. And back in 2019, we covered the Sodder children, five kids who vanished on Christmas morning 1945 during a house fire. It's one of those cold cases that Crime Junkies and Reddit have debated for years. But it's not just an infamous story. For Miranda Weeks, it's family history that she's just always known about. She's the great-great-granddaughter of one of the older Sauter kids, and this mystery has haunted her family for as long as she can remember. In 2024, she got sick of waiting for answers. So she spent the last two years talking to family members, chasing down records and case files, and digging through the archives. Then she got in touch with us. Because her search unearthed dozens of pages of case records that have never been published before. And now, more than ever, she believes someone out there might have answers. So, we're bringing this case out of the archives with brand new information. This is the updated story of Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty Sauter. Speaker 2 (2:14) So let's go back to Christmas Eve 1945 in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Jenny and George Sautter were both born in Italy, but ended up in the same small corner of West Virginia. And they've built a nice life. George runs his own trucking company, Jenny keeps the books, and they have 10 kids together. One is away in the army, but the other nine kids, ranging from 23 to 3, are still at home. So this is a busy c**p. crowded house. Downstairs, there's Jenny and George's bedroom, a living room, kitchen, dining room, and a little office. And the kids' bedrooms, one for the boys, one for the girls, are upstairs on the second floor, not in the attic as it was originally reported. On Christmas Eve, the house is still buzzing around 10.30 p.m. because younger kids are excited to play with their new Christmas gifts. They want to stay up past their bedtime to play a little longer and Jenny says yes, as long as they finish up some chores too, like locking the doors, turning off the lights, closing the blinds. The kids obviously agree. So Jenny heads to bed with George and their three-year-old Sylvia in their first floor bedroom by 11 p.m. The eldest daughter, Marion, falls asleep on the living room couch. And around 11.15, a couple of the older boys head upstairs to bed. But at around 12.30 in the morning, the phone rings. Jenny gets out of bed, goes to the office, and picks up. And a woman on the other end asks for somebody Jenny's never heard of. Jenny tells her she's got the wrong number and hangs up. She checks the house before heading back to bed. All's quiet. But it seems like the kids didn't finish up their chores. Like, the lights are still on, the door is still unlocked. So Jenny locks up, closes up the house, and goes back to bed. And a little later, as she's falling back asleep, Jenny hears a thud up on the roof. Then this, like, rolling sound, like maybe a tree branch hit the roof and rolled down. She's not worried enough to wake George up, so she goes back to sleep. Then, around 1am, she's woken up again, and this time she smells smoke. She jumps out of bed again, looks out her bedroom door, and sees that the office, right across from the stairs leading up to the kids' bedrooms, is on fire. And She can't even call for help. The fire is already too hot to get to the phone in the office. So she yells for George and the kids to get up and wakes Marion, who runs and grabs little Sylvia. John and Ted, the oldest two boys, wake up and come flying down the stairs. The fire is moving so fast that their hair and eyebrows actually get burned on the way down. It must have been mayhem because once the six of them get outside, they look around and realize they're alone out there. The other five kids, Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty, never made it out. They're the younger ones who stayed up late to play with their toys. And Jenny's mom instincts kick in because she immediately runs back toward the burning building. She tries getting in the front door the way they came out, but she can't get through. The fire is too hot and is moving too fast. Marion runs to a neighbor's house to call for help, but when she gets on the phone, she can't get a hold of an operator. Remember, it's 1945. She needs an operator to connect the call. Meanwhile, George tries getting in through a second floor window. First, he goes for the ladder that's always leaning on the side of the house, but it's mysteriously gone. He breaks a window to get to the staircase landing instead, and he slices his arm open badly doing it, but the stairs are already engulfed in flames. No way in there. He and his son John go for the family's trucks, hoping to back one up and climb up onto the roof that way, but in their panic, they flood the engines and nothing starts. Basically, everything that can go wrong, does. Now, around this time, a man, he's called Mr. Smith in the records, is driving home from work, sees the fire, and pulls over. The family tells him to go get the fire department, so he races off again, but first, he pulls into a bar down the road, looking for a phone, but the phone's... out or something. So he gets back in his car, drives into town, finds a phone, and finally gets a hold of the fire chief. According to records, when the chief answers the phone, his response is odd. He basically says, yeah, we already know. We got a couple calls. Mr. Smith is like, okay, so are you coming? There are kids trapped in there. And the chief says, he doesn't know. Like, No sense of urgency in this crisis at all. So Mr. Smith races back to the property to help. And at this point, the house is basically gone. I mean, there's nothing else for him to do. So he leaves at about 8 a.m., right around the time the fire department finally arrives. At this point, it's been seven hours since the fire broke out. And according to George and Jenny, the entire house was in ashes within 30 or 45 minutes. The family is waiting it out in the cabs of their trucks, sitting in the cold, watching the house turn to ash, and praying the five kids are somehow okay. By this point, there's nothing left to put out. Just a bed of hot embers and a hole in the ground that was once their basement. The firefighters run a hose from the creek to cool the wreckage down enough to search. And besides the fact that they're not prompt, this is a small, rural fire department. They probably don't have a ton of manpower either. So a handful of locals pitch in to help search. Family friends, employees, a couple of neighbors. By around 10 a.m., the fire chief tells the family that they can't find anything. No bodies, no bones. He suggests they scoop some ashes into a box and bury it, so at least they've got somewhere to grieve the kids. And the family, they kind of follow this advice. Four days after the fire, Jenny's brother fills in the basement with a bulldozer and the Sodders turn the site into a memorial garden, the closest thing they've got to a grave. Now, you could look at this as suspicious. Many people do. But honestly, to me, it seems like they were kind of in a daze at this point. They've already been told there's nothing at the scene. Friends advise them to make it a