First, a lot of this stuff comes from George Sodder who refused to believe his children died. So everything is filtered through a certain level of bias.
For example the life-insurance agent saying that George's home would burn and his children destroyed when when George wouldn't purchase a policy from him.
That sounds like what a salesman would say to make a sale, "what happens if there is a fire?" Most insurance company commercials even today are variants of this ("things are great since I had insurance/things are awful since I didn't".)
Death certificates issued for the children only five days after the fire.
Why is this suspicious? They thought the kids were dead.
The same person on the review board that determined the fire caused by faulty wiring, despite the lights in the house and Christmas tree lights remaining on during the fire for a long time.
I'm not sure how you'd tell that the lights on the Christmas tree were on when there is a blazing fire going on in the house. I see this pop up a lot but it sounds like a bit of an urban legend to me. It's also possible depending on how the wiring was hooked up that faulty wiring in one part of the house could have caused a fire but the rest of the house was not affected - Christmas trees are a great example of this, look at all the fires that used to get started with the old-style lights, but the power was on in the rest of the house.
The Fire Marshall advising George not to bulldoze the site.
Which seems like a good idea just in general if they hadn't searched the rubble yet.
All of this points to arson and cover-up. This was no accident or faulty wiring.
Disagree. Accidental fires happen every day.
Even the ladder not in its proper place to rescue the children upstairs.
Or maybe the ladder was used by Mr. Sodder in his work, he forgot to put it back in place, and he felt guilty.
This spells way too many avenues that somebody for whatever reason, hated George Sodder and wanted him and his family dead.
My fear is that somebody in George's family had strong connections back in Italy with the Italian Mafia.
OK, I hear the Mafia thing all the time, but here's the thing: most Italians and Italian-Americans hate the Mafia. They are the ones most historically victimized. An honest, law-abiding Italian-American growing up in a neighborhood dominated by the ****s is going to hate their guts, just like any honest, law-abiding citizen is going to hate the thieves and murderers who they have to live with.
So an Italian-American hating the Mafia? The Mafia doesn't care. If they took out a contract against everyone who hated them, Staten Island would be piled high with corpses.
This power over the years, could have been found out by a local and prominent West Virginia politician, who may have spread horrible rumors about George, because they hated his opinionated and out-spoken political views against people such as Italian dictator Mussolini.
This was December 1945. Mussolini hadn't been Prime Minister of Italy for over two years, and when he was kicked out, the Italians celebrated. He was finally murdered in April of 1945. Nobody was going to hunt down an outspoken Italian-American who hated Mussolini in late 1945.
Anger and prejudice against George spread throughout the community, by perhaps a very small, but powerful group of people who had bad connections with revenge-seeking people. The family may have faced strong stereotypes, jump-started by these group of people, and they got the innocent locals to believe the terrible rumors.
So kill George. If that's who they hate, why didn't they kill George? It's not like it would have been particularly difficult if the community was against him, we still don't know who exactly killed Ken McElroy.
Start a fire Christmas Eve Night. In addition to items being moved (the ladder) or not starting, (both office trucks.) I believe that the children were taken by several people at gun or knife point. The Sodder's daughter Sylvia, found a grande like object in the yard.
Sylvia was two. I don't know many two year olds who know what a hand grenade looks like. I would guess it's more likely she saw something and George's overactive imagination and belief in a conspiracy theory made the pine cone she saw turn into a hand grenade. Also hand grenades don't start fires.
Witness reports of the children being seen in a passing car, as the fire was in progress!
Or maybe they were other kids.
The reports of four of the children being seen by an inn-keeper a few days after the fire, but when this person tried to talk to them, they were given a look of hate by the man in the group and refused to speak.
The story is that someone thought they saw a family who was speaking Italian, and got the stink-eye when they tried speaking to the kids. The kids were old enough to speak English, they certainly would have learned it in school so they could have cried out for help in English. I doubt the average West Virginian at the time would even know what Italian sounds like (as opposed to Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, or even some dialects of French). And if they were speaking Italian, then it probably wasn't the kids since Sardinian is a different language than Italian, and George would have spoken Sardinian at home.
And finally, while I do not know this for sure, I think if a Websleuther was out with their family and some stranger tried to talk to their kids, they'd get a mouthful and for good reason.
