In the 1950s, as they came to doubt that the children had perished, the family put up a billboard at the site along State Route 16 with pictures of the five, offering a reward for information that would bring closure to the case.

George disputed the Fayetteville fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical in origin, noting that he had recently had the house rewired and inspected.

He immigrated to the United States 13 years later, with an older brother who went back home as soon as both boys had cleared customs at Ellis Island.

[1] The Sodders settled outside nearby Fayetteville, which had a large population of Italian immigrants, in a two-story timber frame house two miles (3.2 km) north of town.

In October 1945,[6] a visiting life insurance salesman, after being rebuffed, warned George that his house "[would go] up in smoke ... and your children are going to be destroyed", attributing this all to "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini."

Another visitor to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday."

In the weeks before Christmas that year, George's older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.

Marion (19), the oldest daughter, had been working at a dime store in downtown Fayetteville, and she surprised three of her younger sisters—Martha (12), Jennie (8), and Betty (5)[8]—with new toys she had bought for them as gifts.

[8] At 10 p.m., Jennie told them they could stay up a little later, as long as the two oldest boys who were still awake, 14-year-old Maurice and his 9-year-old brother Louis, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed themselves.

[7] Marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so Jennie assumed the other children who had stayed up later had gone back up to the attic where they slept.

George then tried to pull both of the trucks he used in his business up to the house and use them to climb to the attic window, but neither of them would start despite having worked perfectly during the previous day.

[1] According to another account, they did find a few bone fragments and internal organs, but chose not to tell the family;[2] it has also been noted by modern fire professionals that their search was cursory at best.

However, after four days, George and his wife could not bear the sight anymore, so he bulldozed 5 feet (1.5 m) of dirt over the site with the intention of converting it to a memorial garden for the lost children.

However, no record identifying the suspect exists, and why he would have wanted to cut any utility lines to the Sodder house while stealing the block and tackle has never been explained.

An employee of a local crematorium she contacted told her that human bones remain even after bodies are burned at 2,000 °F (1,090 °C) for two hours, far longer and hotter than the house fire could have been.

However, one of George's sons-in-law told the Charleston Gazette-Mail in 2013 that he had come to believe that Sodder and his sons might have, in their haste to start the trucks, flooded the engines.

[6] A few months later, when the snow had melted, Sylvia found a small, hard, dark-green, rubber ball-like object in the brush nearby.

George, recalling his wife's account of a loud thump on the roof before the fire, said it looked like a "pineapple bomb" hand grenade or some other incendiary device used in combat.

Tinsley informed the family that the insurance salesman who had threatened George over his anti-Mussolini sentiments had been on the coroner's jury that ruled the fire an accident.

They took what they found inside the box to a local funeral director, who after examining it told them it was in reality fresh beef liver that had never been exposed to fire.

[1] On one occasion, George saw a magazine photo of a group of young ballet dancers in New York City, one of whom looked like his missing daughter Betty.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally responded to his letters: "Although I would like to be of service, the matter related appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau."

Ida Crutchfield,[10] a woman who ran a Charleston, West Virginia, hotel, claimed to have seen the children approximately a week afterwards.

When she attempted to speak with the children, "[o]ne of the men looked at me in a hostile manner; he turned around and began talking rapidly in Italian.

A bar patron in Texas claimed to have overheard two other people making incriminating statements about a fire that happened on Christmas Eve in West Virginia some years before.

They added it to the billboard (leaving Central City out of it and any other published information out of fear that Louis might come to harm) and put an enlargement of it over their fireplace.

Jennie and her surviving children—except John, who never talked about the night of the fire except to say that the family should accept what happened and move on with their lives[10]—continued to seek answers to their questions about the missing children's fate.

They, along with older Fayetteville residents, have theorized that the Sicilian Mafia was trying to extort money from George and the children may have been taken by someone who knew about the planned arson and said they would be safe if they left the house.

George Bragg, a local author who wrote about the case in his 2012 book West Virginia's Unsolved Murders, believes that John was telling the truth in his original account, when he said he tried to physically awaken his siblings before fleeing the house.

"[9] Stacy Horn, who did a segment on the case for National Public Radio around its 60th anniversary in 2005, also believes the children's death in the fire is the most plausible solution.