← All case filesCase No. 013 · 1944 · Status: Unresolved

September 5, 1944 · Mattoon, Illinois

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

Content note This case involves a wartime panic, reports of chemical injury and a town that never agreed on what happened. No one was ever charged, so this page keeps to what the public record supports.

In September 1944 a small Illinois town reported a mysterious gas attacker. Nobody was ever arrested. One porch left physical evidence behind. This is what Eli and Simone argued over.

From the episode · Clip 1 · 0:30Listen

ELIThat part, awful as it is, you could almost explain. Here's what's actually stopped researchers cold for 80 years. Right there on the same porch, next to that cloth, a skeleton key, a tube of lipstick, not hers.

SIMONEA house key and a lipstick tube next to a rag that just chemically burned a grown woman's mouth. Nobody has ever made those three objects add up into one coherent story.

Archival photograph: a woman crouching beside a screen door, looking at a man’s arm reaching toward the latch, from the Mattoon gas scare
Mattoon, 1944Archival photograph
September 5, 1944

The porch

Beulah Cordes picked up a cloth on her porch, smelled it, and her lips swelled and her mouth and throat began to burn.

  • The clothBalled up on the Cordes porch
  • Also foundA skeleton key and a tube of lipstick, neither belonging to the household
  • The linkNo connection between the three objects has ever been established
  • Earliest reportThe Raef household, night of Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, not public until later
From the episode · Clip 2 · 0:39Listen

SIMONEBut here's the line the whole episode kind of pivots on. Right in the middle of the peak, the town's public health commissioner, a man named Thomas Wright, goes on the record with this: There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists and has made a number of attacks, but many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria.

ELIRead that again. He's not picking a side.

SIMONEHe's naming both sides. In one sentence. In real time. In 1944.

Archival newspaper clipping: “Mattoon Gets Jitters From Gas Attacks,” beside a photograph of women reacting to the gas
  1. 01 / 04 · KEARNEY

    On Sept. 1, 1944, Aline Kearney reported a sweet odor in her bedroom and numb legs. Her husband Bert saw a man outside the window. The Journal Gazette ran it on page one.

  2. 02 / 04 · THE STUDY

    Donald Johnson’s 1945 field study called that front page the “index” event and read the episode as mass hysteria.

  3. 03 / 04 · THE OFFICIAL

    Public health commissioner Thomas Wright: “There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists… But many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria.”

  4. 04 / 04 · THE CHIEF

    On Sept. 12, Chief C. E. Cole floated an industrial source. The plant denied it, and reports fell sharply within days.

From the episode · Clip 3 · 0:36Listen

ELIReports climb in exact lockstep with the press coverage. They collapse within a day of the police chief publicly doubting it out loud. That correlation is hard to explain if you're picturing one person sneaking around Mattoon with a rag and a bottle for two straight weeks. It's very easy to explain if you're picturing a town primed by wartime anxiety, Husbands and sons gone. Real fear the war itself could reach American soil. A police department stretched about as thin as it's ever been, reading every strange smell in the dark as an attack because one front-page story told them that's what strange smells in the dark now meant.

A newspaper against a porch

Same town
Eli’s reading

Mass hysteria

Reports climbed with the press coverage and collapsed after the police chief publicly doubted them. Wartime fear was the fuel and the front page was the match.

Simone’s reading

Something happened on that porch

The media and a real physical incident can both be true. Hysteria explains the volume, but it has never explained the Cordes burns or the objects recovered.

The Farley Llewellyn theory, from a self-published 2003 book, is single-source. Wikipedia’s editors flag its sourcing as unreliable.

From the episode · Clip 4 · 0:28Listen

SIMONEPrimed people notice real things faster too, not just imagined ones. Which brings me to my actual problem with letting the newspaper carry the whole weight of this.

ELIGo ahead.

SIMONEBeulah Cordes is real. Her burns are real, documented. Not somebody's secondhand impression of a smell in the dark. And there's a cloth, a key, and a lipstick tube that were actually recovered. Not reported, recovered, sitting on a real porch.

From the episode · Clip 5 · 0:26Listen

ELII'm not going to fight you on that. Something happened at that house. I'll say that flatly. Whatever it was, That's not hysteria.

SIMONEThank you.

ELIDon't get comfortable. One corroborated, physically substantiated incident doesn't retroactively validate two weeks and dozens of secondhand, description-inconsistent reports that never produced one piece of forensic evidence, one suspect, or one charge.

Two weeks in September 1944

Aug. 31 to Sept. 18
  1. The Raef household reports a sweet smell, nausea and partial paralysis. It does not become public until later.
  2. Aline Kearney’s report runs on the front page of the Mattoon Journal Gazette.
  3. Beulah Cordes finds the cloth, a key and a lipstick tube on her porch.
  4. Reports accelerate. Illinois State Police and FBI agents get involved.
  5. A report describes a short, heavyset suspect in women’s shoes. It was never corroborated.
  6. Chief Cole floats an industrial explanation. The plant denies it.
  7. Time magazine runs “The Mad Anesthetist” nationally.
  8. No suspect was ever arrested or charged. The case is unsolved.

Two readings

No winner
Precision · Eli Marchetti

“Hysteria is the best-evidenced read on the table.”

  • “Reports climb in exact lockstep with the press coverage.”
  • “A single, well-documented incident… doesn’t require an unidentified serial gasser to explain it.”
  • “It’s a sample size of one.”
Instinct · Simone Valdez

“Hysteria explains the volume. It’s never explained the residue.”

  • “You don’t hallucinate a lipstick tube into existence.”
  • “Media amplification and a real incident aren’t competing theories.”
  • “I’m arguing the evidence, not the suspect.”

In their own words, from Episode 13.

No verdict.

From the episode · Clip 6 · 0:34Listen

ELIIt's also, on its own, a sample size of one, and it doesn't require an unidentified serial gasser to explain it. It could be an isolated, unrelated act that just happened to get swept up into two weeks of panic already in motion. The evidence for somebody was systematically gassing this town for two weeks is thin to nonexistent. The evidence for a newspaper story convinced an anxious wartime town it was under attack is about as strong as this kind of case ever gets.

  1. Was one real incident the spark for two weeks of panic?
  2. Did the front page create the attacker, or report one?
  3. Could a single unrelated act have been swept up into the panic?

Hear the whole debate

Episode 13 · Full episodeThe Mad Gasser of MattoonOpens the full episode on RSS.com.