CRIME: At Night in Mattoon

The Mad Anesthetist of Mattoon, Ill. (pop. 17,500) is a tall, thin man who wears a black skullcap, and carries an instrument not unlike a Flit gun. He moves through the night as nimbly and secretly as a cat, squirting a sweetish gas through bedroom windows. His victims cough, awaken with burning throats, and find themselves successively afflicted with: 1) nausea, 2) a temporary paralysis, and 3) a desire to describe their experiences in minutest detail. This latter result often enables them to overcome their symptoms with startling dispatch.

None of them has seen the Mad Anesthetist at his work, nor heard his hollow laugh. But last week citizens of Mattoon were watching for him, any and every midnight.

The Mad Anesthetist began his nocturnal visitations two weeks ago, mainly concentrating his fiendish attacks on women. One said a smell like gardenias “made her legs tingle.” Another said a fat man had squirted perfume into her bedroom. Mrs. Carl Cordes discovered a damp pink cloth on her back porch. She sniffed it and immediately “felt as though a charge of electricity had gone through me.” She was taken to a hospital with burns and temporary paralysis.

It was at once obvious to Mattoon’s housewives that the anesthetist had baited Mrs. Cordes’ porch with a cloth soaked in the same substance he squirted through windows. After that the number of his victims increased. Mattoon’s ten policemen, who had been ignoring the archcriminal, now sallied forth at night, seeking they knew not what and not finding it. Chicago newsmen swept joyfully down upon Mattoon and wired leering accounts of The Gas Fiend, The Thin Man of Mattoon, The Mad Phantom and The Screwball Chemist.

The Illinois Criminal Investigation Laboratory sent an investigator named Richard T. Piper to Mattoon to get the pink cloth from Mrs. Cordes’ porch. The laboratory could find no indications of gas or other chemicals upon it. Piper sat up all night reading chemistry books and announced the next day that the anesthetist was probably using chloropicrin, a heavy, colorless liquid made by chlorinating picric acid.

Five Chicago chemists disturbed the case with cries of “Hoax!” But the next night 17 families on one block reported that they had been gassed. Victims continued to say the mysterious substance made them vomit and sometimes affected the use of arms & legs.

By week’s end Mattoon was gripped by semi-hysteria. Authorities were poring over records of patients released from Illinois insane asylums, seeking a clue to the Mad Anesthetist’s identity; five state police cars arrived to help. Private automobiles full of vigilantes armed with shotguns rolled slowly along the streets at night. Other citizens were taking pistols and shotguns to bed, and sleeping behind closed windows. Mattoon’s police commissioner, as alarmed by this display of armament as by the depredations of the Anesthetist, pleaded with the vigilantes to disband.

Said he: “I wouldn’t walk through anybody’s backyard at night now for $10,000.”