00:00On Christmas night, 1945, five children vanished from a burning house and were never seen again.
00:07It was just past midnight in Fayetteville, West Virginia.
00:10The Sodder family home stood wrapped in snow, and then without warning, it was burning.
00:17George and Jenny Sodder escaped with four of their children,
00:19but Maurice, 14, Martha, 12, Louis, 9, Jenny, 8, and little Betty, only five, were nowhere to be seen.
00:30The family expected the worst.
00:33What the fire left behind was far stranger.
00:36The official report said the children had perished in the flames,
00:40but not a single bone, not one fragment of bone, was ever recovered from the ashes.
00:46And the questions kept coming.
00:49The telephone lines had been cut.
00:51Not burned.
00:53Cut.
00:54A ladder that always leaned against the house had been moved,
00:58and was found later hidden in a snowy ditch.
01:02And in the weeks before the fire, a stranger, claiming to sell insurance, had visited the home.
01:09When George refused to buy, the man grew angry,
01:13pointed at the fuse box, and warned that the house would go up in smoke.
01:17The family thought nothing of it, until it did.
01:21The fire chief said the blaze had burned hot enough to destroy everything.
01:25But a crematorium expert disagreed.
01:28Bones survive even the hottest fires, he said.
01:31The coroner signed the death certificates anyway.
01:33The family never believed them.
01:35The sodders hired private investigators and posted a giant billboard beside the highway,
01:41a photograph of their five missing children,
01:43and kept it standing there for decades, offering a reward for any clue.
01:48A woman in Charleston swore she had seen the children after the fire.
01:52Another tip spoke of children taken south to Florida.
01:56Every lead was followed, and every lead went cold.
02:00Eighty years later, the case is still open.
02:03Five children climbed the stairs on Christmas night, and never came back down.
02:09What happened to the sodder children?
02:11The answer burned with the house, or walked away from it.
