Chicago Daily News, Sept 6

MYSTERY VEILS 'GAS RAIDS' ON MATTOON HOMES
Women Say Odor Made Them Ill and Caused Partial Paralysis.

MATTOON, Ill., Sept. 6 [Special to The Daily News] -- Mattoon police today called on University of Illinois chemists and the State Crime Laboratory for help in solving the mystery of the "poison gas" which has stricken ten residents.
Eight victims have been reported in the last few days, the others a year ago, Police Chief C. Eugene Cole said today.
Cole and Lieut. Edward H. Davidson confessed they were baffled by the mystery. They had no evidence on which to proceed until Mrs. Carl Cordes, 45, last night reported that she sniffed at a damp cloth on her back porch.

Felt "Electric" Charge.

"I felt as though I had had a charge of electricity go through me," she told her husband. A few minutes later her nose, throat and lips began to burn and she was taken to a hospital. Her mouth was described by police as "terribly swollen," but she will recover, doctors said.
The cloth had lost its sickly sweet odor by the time police had arrived, but it still carried a reddish tinge on which Cole based his hope that chemists might be able to identify it.
Mayor E.E. Richardson, a doctor, was unable to identify the potion, which in most cases has been sprayed by the prowler into the bedrooms of sleeping women and children.

Check War Gas Theory.

An Army officer's suggestion that it might be picric acid or chloropicrin, a war gas, led to a check of drugstores, but there had not been a sale of either to any one in five years.
Cole meanwhile began to shift day policemen to night beats in the hope of picking up the prowler. The material is not an anesthetic, it was said. Victims did not go to sleep in any of the attacks so far reported.
The attacks followed the same pattern. Apparently some gas or vapor was sprayed through screened open windows into bedrooms while the victims slept and they awoke severely nauseated, lips and throats burning, skin tingling. The distress lasted as long as 12 hours.

Couple First Victims.

In only one case was a husband at home when the attack occurred. Urban J. Raef and his wife woke up last Thursday night to find themselves the first victims of the bizarre prowler. They suspected that they had been gassed, but thought it so silly, Chief Cole said, that they made no report.
The next night, the first victims were Mrs. Bert Kearney, whose husband was at work, and her child. Mrs. Edgar Reedy, and the three Reedy children, asleep in another room, were not molested. The same night the home of Mrs. George Rider, wife of a night postoffice clerk, was invaded and Mrs. Rider and her two children, 7 and 4, were affected. -- Wednesday, September 6, page 8