Maurice Antonio Sodder was 14 when he disappeared from the family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, during a house fire on Christmas Eve of 1945. Five Sodder children—Maurice and four younger siblings—were missing after the blaze; their parents and four other children escaped. The fire destroyed the house in under 45 minutes. The family’s ladder was reported missing from its usual place and later found down an embankment, and the home’s telephone line had been cut. A coroner’s jury concluded the children died in the fire, and initial reports mentioned bone fragments, but authorities never produced definitive remains matching the missing children.

George and Jennie Sodder came to believe the children had been abducted and spent decades searching for answers. In 1949 bone fragments were recovered that at first were thought to match a 14 to 15-year-old but were later described as from an older person and showing no fire damage. In 1968 the family received an anonymous photograph of a man resembling one of the missing boys with a puzzling message on the back. Maurice’s parents died without learning what happened; the youngest sibling, an infant in 1945, still seeks answers.

If anyone remembers unusual activity in Fayetteville around December 1945 or has information about the photograph or the cut telephone line, please share what is known.