George Sodder was born Giorgio Soddu in 1895 in the small Sardinian town of Tula. He immigrated to the United States in 1908, at age 13, with an older brother who turned around and went back to Italy as soon as the boys had cleared customs at Ellis Island. George never talked much about why he had left home. He settled in West Virginia, built a successful trucking business, and married Jennie Cipriani. By 1945 they had ten children, the family was prosperous, and they lived in a substantial home north of Fayetteville. George was outspoken. He hated Benito Mussolini, said so loudly in the Italian-American community, and had picked up some enemies during the war years. By 1945 Mussolini was dead, but the resentments lingered.

In October 1945, a life insurance salesman visited the Sodder home. George turned him down. The salesman warned, the family later remembered: the house would go up in smoke, and the children would be destroyed - all because of George's remarks about Mussolini. Around the same time, another man came to the property looking for work, walked around to the back of the house unaccompanied, and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes there would cause a fire someday. George was puzzled. He had just had the entire house rewired when an electric stove was installed, and the local electric company had inspected the work afterward and pronounced it safe. In the weeks before Christmas, the older Sodder boys noticed a strange car parked along the highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they walked home from school.

At 10 PM on Christmas Eve, the younger children begged Jennie to let them stay up late to play with their gifts. She agreed, on the condition that 14-year-old Maurice and 9-year-old Louis remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed. George and the two older sons, John, 22, and George Jr, 16, who had worked all day with their father, were already asleep upstairs. Jennie carried three-year-old Sylvia to bed with her. Around midnight, the phone rang - a wrong number, a strange voice, glasses clinking in the background. About an hour later, Jennie woke to the smell of smoke. The fire was already coming up the stairs. George got Jennie, Sylvia, John, George Jr, and Marion (17) out through the windows. The five middle children - Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (9), Jennie (8), and Betty (5) - did not come out. The house collapsed before George could re-enter.

When the ashes were sifted, no human remains were found. George argued the temperatures had not been high enough to consume the children completely - bones survive much hotter house fires. The fire department disagreed. The Sodders never rebuilt the house. They bulldozed earth over the foundation and planted a memorial garden that Jennie tended for the rest of her life. In the 1950s, the family put up a billboard along State Route 16 with photographs of the five missing children, offering a reward for any information that would close the case. The billboard remained in place until shortly after Jennie's death in 1989. In the 1960s, the family received an unsolicited photograph in the mail that appeared to show one of the missing boys as an adult. The case was never officially reopened. The last of the surviving Sodder children, Sylvia, who had been three years old that Christmas Eve, continued to publicize the case until her death in 2021. Her grandchildren carry on the search.