Futility Closet - 132-The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

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Starting point is 00:00:33 now available in paperback everywhere books are sold. More info at kensingtonbooks.com. Welcome to the Futility Closet Podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a monument to a pest to a jet-setting mannequin. This is episode 132. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1944, a bizarre criminal assaulted the small town of Mattoon, Illinois. Victims reported smelling a strange odor in their bedrooms before being overcome with nausea and paralysis. In today's show, we'll pursue the mad gasser of Mattoon,

Starting point is 00:01:20 who vanished after 10 days, leaving residents to wonder whether he had ever existed at all. We'll also ponder the concept of identical cousins and puzzle over a midnight stabbing. On Friday, September 1st, 1944, Aline Kearney retired to her bedroom with her three-year-old daughter, Dorothy. It was 11 p.m. in Mattoon, a small city of about 15,000 in east-central Illinois. Aline's sister, Martha, was awake in a front room with her other daughter, and Martha's son slept in a back room. After some time, Aline noticed a sickening sweet odor which she attributed to a patch of gardenias next to an open window near her bed. She summoned Martha and asked her whether she could smell it. Martha couldn't and left the room again. Aline said the scent intensified and her throat and lips felt dry and

Starting point is 00:02:08 burning and she felt a paralyzing sensation in her legs. She screamed for Martha who returned and said that she too smelled the odor now. Aline told her of the paralysis and Martha alerted a next door neighbor, a Mrs. Earl Robertson, who called the police. Mr. Robertson and later the police searched the area and found no trace of an intruder. Mrs. Kearney said the feeling of paralysis ended after 30 minutes, and her daughter also felt temporarily ill, but the others in the house were unaffected. Aline's husband, Bert, had been out driving a taxi. He got home about 12.30 a.m. and claimed that he saw a figure near the bedroom window. The police again searched and found nothing. Bert said the man was tall and wore dark clothes and a tight-fitting cap.

Starting point is 00:02:46 After the Kearney attack, Aline, Martha, and the three kids spent the rest of the night with a relative in another section of the city. Mattoon's only major newspaper was the Daily Journal-Gazette, which is read by 97% of its citizens, and which I think bears a lot of the blame for all the craziness that I'm about to tell you about. On September 2, the Gazette ran the headline, Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose, with the subheads Mrs. Kearney and Daughter First Victims and Robber Fails to Get Into Home. So no bias there. Very objective reporting.

Starting point is 00:03:16 So there's a whole raft of things wrong with that, but one of them, the biggest, is that neither Mrs. Kearney nor her sister had mentioned a prowler. They had called the first time and said, I smell something odd and don't feel well. And then when her husband got home, he's the one who said there was a prowler. The Gazette put these two things together into an anesthetic prowler that it published in these headlines. Also, who came up with the headline, Mrs. Kearney and daughter first victims? Wow.

Starting point is 00:03:41 This is an anonymous story. We don't know who wrote it, but come on. victims. Wow. This is an anonymous story. We don't know who wrote it, but come on. After the Kearney attack was reported and after this news coverage, four other attacks were reported as having occurred at about the same time, not surprisingly with that kind of coverage. At the same time as the Kearney incident, Mrs. George Ryder said she was alone with her two sleeping children waiting for her husband to return from work. She was lying in bed near her children with the window closed when she heard a plop followed by an odd smell that made her feel lightheaded. Her fingers and legs went numb and her baby began coughing. A few blocks from there, another woman awoke to a sickly sweet odor and found her children vomiting

Starting point is 00:04:13 and two other households reported similar attacks. Notably, none of these people had reported them to police, told friends or relatives, fled their homes, or consulted a physician, but now that it was sort of abroad and in the news, they told the media and told police after the fact that these attacks had happened. On September 5th, Tuesday, Carl and Beulah Cordes of North 21st Street returned home at around 10 p.m. and noticed a piece of white cloth a bit larger than a man's handkerchief on their porch near the screen door. Beulah Cordes picked it up, smelled it, and said she became violently ill.

Starting point is 00:04:45 She described the sensation as similar to an electric shock. Her face swelled, she felt a burning sensation in her mouth and throat, and she began to vomit. Like other victims, she also felt weak and experienced partial paralysis in her legs. She later suggested that the cloth had been left on the porch to knock out the family dog, which usually slept there, so that the prowler could enter the house. The authorities could find no chemicals on the cloth, and they could explain her reaction, and one expert said it must have evaporated. At about this time, Mattoon's mayor, E.E. Richardson, who was himself

Starting point is 00:05:13 a physician, expressed doubt that the gas was chloroform. He said that oil of mustard could account for the numbing sensation reported, and the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service in Chicago offered an opinion as well. They suggested that chloropicrin was a widely available poison gas that has a sweet odor and was used commercially to exterminate vermin. So everyone is taking this seriously now and understanding these reports as facts. Several years later, a University of Illinois undergraduate named Donald Johnson went back and talked to a lot of people in town and put out a paper that's now considered a classic in the annals of mass hysteria. He pointed out that if there really were a mad gasser, the gas he was spraying would have had contradictory properties. He wrote, it would have to be a very potent, stable anesthetic with rapid action and at the same time so unstable that it would not affect others in the same room it would have to be strong enough to produce vomiting and paralysis and yet leave no observable after effects and he couldn't think of any gas that would do this leaving entirely aside

Starting point is 00:06:13 the question of why anyone would do this why someone would spray gas into people's bedrooms and then run away i mean no one has ever assaulted or robbed it just why would why on earth would anyone even dream up a crime like this, let alone do it? On September 5th and 6th, reports of the gasser spread to most Illinois newspapers, and the major Chicago newspapers sent reporters to Mattoon and gave the story considerable space. The Mattoon police commissioner, the mayor, and army experts described the gasser as real, and Richard Piper, superintendent of the Illinois Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, said the existence of the anest anesthetic or whatever it is, is genuine, which I can't understand. I've been wondering for three weeks

Starting point is 00:06:49 why he would say that. Based on what evidence, yeah. On September 6th, Thomas Wright, the Mattoon Commissioner of Public Health and Safety, sent an urgent message to the Illinois Department of Public Safety seeking help in solving the anesthetic Prowler case. That night, despite widespread patrolling by police and volunteers, four more attacks were reported. That's the other thing is that this guy is, this criminal is apparently superhuman because he can evade all attempts at detection and still keep spraying people. The first gassing report occurred at about 9 p.m. when Mrs. Glenda Henfershot reported a prowler lurking near her residence. Her 11-year-old daughter Glenda became ill two hours later. At 10 p.m., Mrs. Ardell Spangler was overcome by sickly sweet fumes in her bedroom.

Starting point is 00:07:28 She felt ill and reported a parched throat and lips like most other victims. That's another thing is that this gas doesn't affect your eyes, apparently, which is strange. Oh, that is unusual, yeah. Also, no dog's bark, someone pointed out. Two more reports came after midnight. A woman entered her apartment, smelled an odor like cheap perfume entering through an open window, and felt her legs go weak as if paralyzed. And a 60-year-old man told police that he awoke feeling very ill,

Starting point is 00:07:49 apparently from the effects of something sprayed through a bedroom screen window. So it's very consistent, at least. He reported nausea and vomiting that persisted for two hours. And his next-door neighbor said he spotted a tall, thin man running from his yard. Mattoon's police force, unfortunately, was only two officers and eight patrolmen, and by September 6th, the nightly barrage of gassing reports was overwhelming them.

Starting point is 00:08:09 On September 7th, state investigator Richard Piper said, this is the strangest case I've ever encountered in many years of police work. The Gazette didn't stop. They ran another story on the fifth day, another on the sixth, and on the seventh,

Starting point is 00:08:21 it ran the headline, Mad Anesthetist Strikes Again with this opening paragraph. Mattoon's mad anesthetist apparently took a respite from his maniacal forays Thursday night, and while many terror-stricken people were somewhat relieved, they were inclined to hold their breath and wonder when and where he might strike next. So there's no skepticism whatsoever. Several attacks reported that night, understandably, after that. attacks reported that night, understandably, after that. Ridiculously irresponsible, I thought,

Starting point is 00:08:50 was the Chicago Herald American, one of the Chicago newspapers that sent a reporter into town to cover this. Normally, that paper only reached 5% of Mattoon's residents, but probably more of them were picking it up just to sort of corroborate the stories they were reading in the Gazette. Here's one example of why I call them irresponsible. On September 8th, on hearing that the gasser had been spotted nearby, about 70 people converged on DeWitt Avenue in town, and then someone in the crowd detected a strange smell, and others were convinced they had been gassed. Here is how the Herald American reported that.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Groggy as Londoners under protracted aerial blitzing, this town's bewildered citizens reeled today under repeated attacks of a mad anesthetist who has sprayed deadly nerve gas into 13 homes and has knocked out 27 known victims. 70 others dashing to the area in response to the alarm fell under the influence of the gas last night. All skepticism has vanished, and Mattoon grimly concedes it must fight haphazardly against a demented phantom adversary who has been seen only fleetingly and so far has evaded traps laid by city and state police and posses of townsmen. So even if you live in Mattoon and don't quite

Starting point is 00:09:50 trust the Gazette, if you get a paper from Chicago, you're going to read that. Wow. So it hardly even counts as hysteria. That's just, you know, that's the fact you're being given. When the police chief said that many of the reports had probably been triggered by nerves, the Gazette actually pushed back on this in a lengthy editorial criticizing anyone who considered the reports to be imaginary. They wrote, it was easy to say, oh, it's just imagination and shrug the whole thing off with a disdainful error. But Mrs. Carol Cordes, who suffered burns, couldn't laugh about it. Neither could Mrs. Bert Kearney, who suffered complications which could have cost her very life. None of that's true. By September 9th, several more gassings had been reported and the Gazette

Starting point is 00:10:24 gave them sensational headlines. Mad Gasser adds six victims, five women and boy, latest overcome. Sisters Frances and Maxine Smith said they'd been frightened by noises outside their bedroom windows, and on the following night they claimed that they'd been attacked three times. Here is how the Gazette reported that. The first infiltration of gas caught them in their beds. Gasping and choking, they awoke and soon felt partial paralysis grip their legs and arms. Later, while awake, the other attacks came and they saw a thin, blue, smoke-like vapor spreading throughout the room.

Starting point is 00:10:53 Just before the gas, with its flower-like odor, came pouring into the room, they heard a strange buzzing sound outside the house and expressed the belief that the sound probably was made by the madman's spraying apparatus in operation. In separate incidents that weekend, two women were hospitalized for gassings, but were later diagnosed with nervous tension. The hysteria peaked on the weekend of September 9th and 10th, as police were now crisscrossing the city to answer dozens of calls. Hundreds of citizens gathered near City Hall to hear any news.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Men and boys roamed the streets in vigilante groups carrying clubs, rifles, and shotguns, and one woman whose husband was away in the army loaded a gun and accidentally shot a hole in her kitchen wall. The police commissioner ordered thrill-seekers to stop following patrol cars. People would pile into cars and follow patrol cars that had been called off to respond to gassing attacks just in hopes of seeing something. The commissioner referred to those people as chasers and told them to knock it off. seeing something. The commissioner referred to those people as chasers and told them to knock it off. He expressed fears that armed citizens could hurt someone, saying, I wouldn't walk through anybody's backyard at night now for $10,000. By Monday the 11th, 10 police officers were mobilized from Springfield to Mattoon. Each car carried a local volunteer to assist with directions, and each officer carried a shotgun. Three police officers were also sent from Urbana,

Starting point is 00:12:02 and two FBI agents arrived to identify the gas. The records of recently released mental patients were examined. Servicemen in New Guinea and India were writing home to be sure their wives and mothers were safe. That night, a woman was hospitalized for extreme mental anguish. But at about this time, there was a pronounced shift to skepticism among the press, the police, and politicians, describing many of the attacks as mass hysteria. The Gazette, appallingly, made a sudden about-face and ran the headline, Many Prowler Reports, Few Real. At 11.30 a.m., Mrs. Eaton Paradise told police she'd been gassed.

Starting point is 00:12:37 They found a spilled bottle of nail polish remover in her house. Commissioner Thomas Wright said, There is more than one madman in Mattoon. There's 15,000 of them. What we've got here is mass hysteria. The last attack came on September 12th, 10 days after the frenzy had started. Police Chief Cole announced it was all a mistake from beginning to end. He blamed it on large amounts of carbon tetrachloride emitted by the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company, which produced Army shell casings. And he said shifting winds had carried it across the city. I'm not sure that's true.

Starting point is 00:13:02 That's his explanation. On Wednesday the 13th, the gasser was being called the phantom anesthetist and the Mattoon will-o'-the-wisp. The Chicago Herald-American now turned critical, publishing a series of interviews with a Chicago psychiatrist about the phantom prowler, the non-existent madman,

Starting point is 00:13:17 a wave of hysteria, and the gasser myth, equating it with the Salem witch hysteria. An editorial in the Decatur Herald on the 19th said, our neighbors in Mattoon sniffed their town into newspaper headlines from coast to coast. So that seems like a classic and has become a classic case of mass hysteria. In this case, I think decidedly fanned by the media. Here's the odd thing, though.

Starting point is 00:13:37 The same thing had happened in Virginia about 10 years earlier. A similar series of attacks had happened in western Virginia, three states away. Between December 1933 and February 1934, a mad gasser there was reported to be spraying residents in their homes at night. I'll give you one example. This is the first attack. It occurred in Haymaker Town at the farmhouse of Cal Huffman on the evening of December 22, 1933. At about 10 p.m., Mrs. Huffman detected a gassy odor and became nauseated. She went to bed and her husband stayed up. About 30 minutes later, a smell of gas again appeared and Cal Huffman called the police. They arrived about midnight, searched and found nothing, and departed about 1 a.m.,

Starting point is 00:14:14 whereupon the gasser struck again. All seven or eight family members experienced choking fumes that made them temporarily ill. Alice, the Huffman's 20-year-old daughter, fainted. After the third attack, Cal and a neighbor who was staying with the family, Ashby Henderson, thought they may have seen a man running away from the house. That all sounds extremely similar to what happened 10 years later in Illinois. It's the same pattern. The victim smelled a sickly sweet odor and became temporarily ill or weak with constricted throats and swollen faces,

Starting point is 00:14:39 but they recovered quickly. No one was actually assaulted or robbed, and the local press reported the attacks as fact. The Roanoke Times ran the headline, Gas Attacks on Homes Continue. Attacks in two counties in Virginia stopped when police concluded that the attacker was a figment, just as it happened in Illinois. In all, police in Roanoke County fielded 19 calls and suggested that the gas man was a product of overwrought imaginations. So as I say, strangely, these Virginia attacks took place 10 years earlier than the ones in Illinois, but they came to light later. The Virginia attacks were covered only in the local press and only barely in the national, so it seems pretty clear from the evidence that when the attacks, quote-unquote, took place in

Starting point is 00:15:19 Illinois afterward, no one thought they had actually heard of these earlier Virginia attacks. So it seems like that's just an odd coincidence. But an odd coincidence, it certainly is. There are two unrelated cases separated by only 10 years and 500 miles. And they're both so idiosyncratic, so strange, the idea of a mad gasser. It seems strange if they'd happened so close together in time and space, but there doesn't seem to be any link between them. Unless there really is a Mad Gasser, I guess. For the Illinois attacks, the ones that took place later in the 1940s, the first ones I talked about here,

Starting point is 00:15:53 it at least makes sense that chemical attacks were in people's minds because this was World War II that was going on. Right, right. And in fact, someone tracked down on August 30th, just before the attacks had started, Mattoon's neighboring Charleston Daily Courier had carried a United Press story claiming that Germany could be preparing to use poison gas or developing a mystery weapon to win the war.

Starting point is 00:16:09 So those people were thinking about this. It was in their minds, yeah. But that certainly wasn't the case in the 1930s. Right. It's just hard to explain why someone in a farmhouse in Western Virginia would be thinking at all about a chemical attack. Apparently, it seems to be just a coincidence.

Starting point is 00:16:26 Johnson, the University of Illinois undergraduate who wrote all this up later in his paper about mass hysteria, said that prowlers and odd smells might be real, but these things don't cause paralysis and palpitations, and hysteria does. He wrote, the hypothesis of a marauder cannot be supported by any verifiable evidence. The hypothesis of hysteria, on the other hand, accounts for all the facts. So it seems that most likely cases that these are just two coincidentally close cases of mass hysteria that were fanned by the media. But I guess we should say for complete mistake, that it's not impossible that there was a mad gasser whose attacks were exaggerated by the hysteria, that there was, it's even possible that it was one person. I mean, in one person's lifetime, they could easily have, for no reason, been spraying gas into people's bedrooms in Virginia and then moved 10 years later to Illinois and did the same thing there.

Starting point is 00:17:11 You're welcome to make up your own story there to support that, but it would have to be, I think, a very strange story indeed. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's, who remind you that guys can be hard to shop for. It can seem impossible to find something that's a thoughtful gift, but is also useful and practical. That's why Harry's makes the perfect gift. If you haven't heard of them before, Harry's was started by two best friends, Jeff and Andy, who were fed up with being overcharged for razors, so they started their own razor company to give people what they deserve, a great shave at a fair price. I've mentioned Harry's before on this show. The blades are well made and really do give a great shave, and you can't beat the convenience of having them delivered right to your door. This holiday, Harry's is offering a

Starting point is 00:17:56 limited edition shaving set. You get a midnight blue chrome razor handle, which you can get engraved with initials, three of Harry's German-engineered five-blade cartridges, which provide a close, comfortable shave, a foaming shave cream that smells amazing, and a beautifully designed gift box. All of this goes for $30 on harrys.com, and they also offer handles and sets starting at just $10 if you haven't tried Harry's for yourself. Free shipping ends on December 9th, so act now. Go to harrys.com right now to get a limited edition holiday shave set while supplies last. And if you enter the code CLOSET at checkout, you'll get $5 off. That's harrys.com, code CLOSET. One of our Icelandic correspondents, Ali Riggett, wrote in recently with the subject line,

Starting point is 00:18:43 answering yes or no questions in Icelandic. There's more. Allie said, I've just listened to your most recent episode, 130, where the listener wrote to tell you about the old English ney. I find it interesting that a few years ago, they mapped the genetics of everyone in Iceland, population only 380,000, and found that 85% of the men are Norwegian descent and 62% of the women are Scottish. So the Vikings landed in Scotland about a thousand years ago, took some women on their way,

Starting point is 00:19:11 and settled in Iceland. I like to think of it more like choosing to take off with tall, blonde barbarians than being taken. So a lot of the Icelandic language, despite being Germanic in origin, has a lot of Scottishness rather than English about it. Scottish dialect being similar to Icelandic, including what we would call a bag in English is called poke in Scottish and polka to Icelandic, including what we would call a bag in English is called poke in Scottish and polka in Icelandic. To move houses is flitting in Scottish and flitcha in Icelandic. What I call a mouse is moose in both Scottish and Icelandic, and brown is brun in both of those languages. That's really interesting. You could trace the movement of peoples just by the language similarity.

Starting point is 00:20:05 Yeah, and I guess Iceland is kind of interesting since it's such an island, since it's geographically more isolated than some other countries. I guess it gives you just sort of a different setting for trying to trace where the people came from and how they got their languages to be influenced. Yeah. J.C. Lundberg also wrote in about the Old English nay. Listening to the follow-up discussion of English's former four ways of answering binary questions, yay, nay for affirmatively phrased questions and yes, no for negatively phrased ones, made me think of the one context where we still use the older yay, nay pair, legislative voting. Legislators are asked

Starting point is 00:20:45 whether they favor an affirmatively phrased question, should this bill or amendment be adopted, and say it should be yay or it should not be nay. Interesting to learn that this isn't just pointless specialized legal or procedural jargon, which I assumed, but a remnant of how ordinary people used to talk. Thanks for all your awesome work. And that actually was an interesting point. I had never thought about that before. Like, why do they still say yay and nay? I have to say, I agree with him. It just sounded like some pompous, pretentious way to speak.

Starting point is 00:21:14 Exactly. And I guess it's just a holdover. And that back then, it wasn't a pompous, pretentious way of speaking, right? And had a real purpose that I guess is still usable now. Spoiler alert for the puzzle. In episode 125, Matt Sargent wrote in about the solution to that puzzle, which involved two sets of identical twins marrying and producing offspring that would be genetic siblings rather than the usual cousins. Matt said, the solution to the October 10th lateral thinking puzzle may provide a clue to one of television's enduring questions. In the classic TV series The Patty Duke Show, Patty Duke plays two roles,

Starting point is 00:21:50 that of Patty, your average American teenager, and her refined cousin Kathy, who is British. But they're not just cousins, they're identical cousins. As the theme song says, one pair of matching bookends as different as night and day. The show never addressed how this might be possible, and people have been puzzling over the concept of identical cousins ever since. But it would be possible if their parents were both sets of twins who married. They would genetically be indistinguishable from being siblings. Of course, that alone wouldn't make them identical, but given that they're both of the same gender and about the same age, it's possible that they could look enough alike that they could pass for one another.

Starting point is 00:22:27 I have a pair of aunts that are non-identical twins, but if you saw pictures of them as children, it's difficult to tell them apart. And for those who don't know much about this TV show, which included me before Matt's email, Patty Duke was a popular American teenage actress for whom a sitcom was created basically in order to showcase her in 1963. It ran for three seasons and featured the supposedly identical cousins that Matt mentioned. Apparently, the show's only explanation of why the cousins are so physically identical is that their fathers are identical twins, though it doesn't seem to me that that would really be

Starting point is 00:23:00 enough to create these identical cousins. As Matt suggests, if their mothers were also identical twins, that would help make it a little more plausible. But actually, it turns out there were apparently a total of three identical cousins, as one episode of the show contained a third cousin, a Southern belle named Betsy, that was also played by Patty Duke. So we'll just have to use our imaginations for how that could even begin to be possible. That's a bizarre idea for a show. I've always heard about it. I guess I've never managed to see it. No, I hadn't either.

Starting point is 00:23:29 And interestingly, when I was looking all this up, I learned that the dual role for Duke was actually technically pretty challenging for its time, as television special effects were really pretty rare in the early 1960s, particularly for a sitcom. the early 1960s, particularly for a sitcom. So it's kind of interesting that they would have committed to a show that would require such special effects when they didn't used to do that in TV in that time period. And if the goal was just to feature Patty Duke, there's a lot of easier ways to do it. Just give her a conventional show. If you give her multiple roles, then you're really featuring Patty Duke. We got in quite a lot of further email on more aerial bombings in the u.s uh who knew there were

Starting point is 00:24:07 so many of them uh we felt that we had covered the topic a few times already and we thought it might be time to move on to other topics but i did want to thank everyone who wrote in and just give a quick summary of some of the highlights uh besides learning of yet more stories of accidental bombings which really is kind of scary when you think about it, I learned that there were several instances of deliberate aerial bombings in the U.S. in the 1920s, usually involving World War I airplanes. These included bombings by law enforcement in 1921 during a race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during a massive coal miner uprising in West Virginia called the Battle of Blair Mountain, also in 1921, and by one bootlegging gang on another during a violent gang war in 1926 that was waged for control of the Prohibition-era sale of illegal alcohol in southern Illinois. So a surprising

Starting point is 00:24:58 number of aerial bombings in the continental U.S., but it does seem that so far, the Japanese fire balloons of Episode 111 were the only ones from a country at war with the U.S., but it does seem that so far, the Japanese fire balloons of episode 111 were the only ones from a country at war with the U.S. Yeah. Those are very early, too. I mean, a lot of those are just a few years after World War I. Yeah, yeah. I guess, you know, they had the planes available from the World War, which is how they had these bomber planes available. Yeah, and used them at the first opportunity. Yeah, right, right. I guess they don't still do that too much anymore, which is probably pretty good. Another topic that we've received a lot of email on comes from our latest episode. One representative email is from Jaron Richardson

Starting point is 00:25:37 from Barcelona. Whilst listening to the latest episode of your brilliant podcast, 131, I was intrigued to hear the segment on five incidents but only one indemnity, recounting the unfortunate calamity of a gentleman on a building site and his insurer's reaction. Bizarrely, I realized I'd heard some of the phrasing of this story before and soon realized it shared the plotline of a song I particularly enjoy by the name of The Sick Note, performed by Sean Cannon of the Dubliners. Prompted to look into the background of the piece, I see that the references on your show note soon led me to the right place and was also presented by a whole host of other versions of these brilliant lyrics.

Starting point is 00:26:15 It seems that Pat Cooksley modeled the story into the Bricklayers song, which has since been performed under other titles, as the bricklayers lament murphy and the bricks and eventually the sick note uh so that was interesting we found out that apparently there are a whole lot of songs based on that incident snope says that the story goes back they trace it as far back as 1895 i knew it best i think in america it's probably was made most famous by fred allen an entertainer in the early 20th century, who would have heard it on Vaudeville, I think, where it was big. But it was the first instance that Snopes found happened when Fred Allen was one year old, so he didn't write it himself. I feel kind of bad for whoever came up with this, because it's been entertaining people for more than 100 years now, and no one's quite sure who actually wrote it.

Starting point is 00:27:02 Oh, really? So nobody gets credit? Someone deserves a lot of credit for that. Yeah. So thanks to everyone who wrote in on that topic, and we'll have links to a couple of the versions of the song in the show notes. Apparently, there are several different versions, but we'll have a couple of them in the show notes. And thanks in general to everyone who writes in to us.

Starting point is 00:27:19 We're sorry that due to the volume of email that we sometimes get, we're not always able to reply to everyone individually or read all the emails on the show. But we do read and appreciate all the email that you guys send to us. So if anyone does have any questions or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And I do still appreciate it when people tell me how to pronounce their names. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. Kenneth traveled to his mother-in-law's home, stabbed her to death, and immediately turned

Starting point is 00:28:03 himself in to police. But a jury acquitted him of murder. Why? Okay, we start off with a bang. Stabbing your mother-in-law to death. All right, Kenneth. Kenneth is a human adult male. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:17 Okay, does it matter where this happened? No. Does it matter the time period? No. Does it matter that he specifically stabbed her? No. Does it matter the time period? No. Does it matter that he specifically stabbed her? No. Does it matter what he used to stab her with? No. Okay. Does it matter who his mother-in-law was? No. Does it matter who Kenneth was? No. Okay. Nothing matters whatsoever. Does it matter who Kenneth's wife was? No. Is she involved in any way? No.

Starting point is 00:28:45 Are there other people involved that I need to know about? There's one other person, but you don't even need to know about that. Okay. Okay. Did Kenneth want his mother-in-law to be dead? No. Aha. Oh, oh, was Kenneth not aware of what he was doing?

Starting point is 00:29:04 Yes. I mean, no, he wasn't. Was he asleep at the time? Yes. You're like supernaturally good at these. This is true. In the early morning hours of May 24th, 1987, 23-year-old Kenneth James Parks of Pickering, Ontario, got up from his bed, drove 14 miles to the home of his wife's parents, broke in, assaulted his father-in-law. That was the other person. Beat his mother-in-law. That was the other person.

Starting point is 00:29:25 Beat his mother-in-law with a tire iron and then stabbed her to death. Then he drove himself to the police station and told them, quote, I think I have killed some people. Charged with second degree murder, he claimed he was asleep during the whole incident, including driving there. That's just crazy. The jury deliberated nine hours and acquitted him. Wow. His EEG readings were highly irregular. He had no motive at all.

Starting point is 00:29:44 He was actually quite close to his in-laws. Oh my gosh. And his story remained extremely consistent, even though they led him through multiple interviews and tried to drive him off track. But his story just stayed straight. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the verdict in 1992. This is apparently part of a whole relatively rare

Starting point is 00:29:58 legal defense called homicidal sleepwalking. Wow. Apparently this is a thing that happens. Obviously it's very rare and there's a very high burden of proof to try to get out of a murder. Right, right, right. So we're not recommending that people actually try this. But at least Kenneth Parks did it. But that would be so frequent.

Starting point is 00:30:15 Like to wake up and realize that maybe you had done something like that. Exactly. It's not clear to me from Park's story exactly when he woke up. When he realized. If he drove straight from his in-law's house to the police station, it implies that he woke up. At some point, maybe. Perhaps just after doing it.

Starting point is 00:30:29 I don't know. Wow. That's really scary. Yeah, that must be awful. Yeah. Well, thank you. Oh, I guess I don't have anybody to thank. You made that puzzle up your shelf, didn't you?

Starting point is 00:30:36 Yes, I did. Yes, thank me. Thank you, Greg. And if anybody else would like to be thanked for sending in a puzzle to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you value Futility Closet and would like to help support it, please see the support us section of our website or our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities or a good holiday gift for someone on your list, then check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 engrossing evulgations. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes.

Starting point is 00:31:24 If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Doug Ross. Microphone adjustments provided by Sasha. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 132-The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

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