Monday, June 30, 2003 11:29 AM CDT
'Mad Gasser' author points finger at 'brilliant' chemistry student
BY DAVE FOPAY, Staff Writer
MATTOON -- As far away as England, people have heard of what was thought to be one of the classic cases of mass hysteria, which happened in Mattoon nearly 60 years ago.
But Scott Maruna, who admits he's been "obsessed" with the case, says the city's gotten a bad rap. His research into the infamous "Mad Gasser" scare led him to conclude that the victims were real and the perpetrator was perhaps whisked away without ever being publicly accused.
"I hope Mattoon's name can be saved a little bit," Maruna said Sunday. "I hope the myth can be dispelled."
Maruna, a Charleston native who now teaches high school chemistry in Jacksonville and has published a book on the case, spoke to a group of about 20 people at the Coles County Historical Society's Gannaway House in Mattoon.
During about two weeks in September 1944, several Mattoon residents reported smelling a sickly sweet odor in their homes and soon being consumed by nausea, numbness of the legs and arms and other symptoms.
"For 10 days Mattoon was consumed by this," Maruna said. State police and the FBI joined local police looking for the Gasser, and a Chicago newspaper hit the story so hard it often scooped the local press, he said.
Because no one was arrested -- though that's not same as no one being suspected -- local police began to say it was hoax, Maruna said. The key event leading to the case's widespread classification as mass hysteria was when Donald Johnson researched the case, but was able to interview only police, as victims refused to talk about it.
Johnson eventually became a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, but was only a sophomore at the University of Illinois at the time. He still published an article, and it was cited enough for its conclusion to become the common thinking, Maruna said.
He said he spoke to someone at the Cambridge University in England who said he'd heard of Mattoon because of the gasser case's reputation.
"Mattoon is world-famous," he said. "Everyone across the world knows about the Mad Gasser."
Maruna said his research showed the case goes against each of the characteristics experts say most examples of mass hysteria share, including the criteria that no suspect is ever identified.
Police actually spent considerable time looking at Farley Llewellyn, the son of a prominent grocer. Though he had been a "brilliant" chemistry student at the UI, Llewellyn had always been considered odd and even blew up his home chemistry lab shortly before the gasser attacks began, Maruna said.
He guessed that Llewellyn was ridiculed because of his behavior, and noted that the first few gassing victims were all his high school classmates. The explosion might have been caused by nitromethane, and Llewellyn might have actually planned to blow up his victims' homes, he added.
"Farley harbored a lot of anger to this town," Maruna said. "We can only assume that this led him to do what he did."
Llewellyn was under police watch, so the last few attacks -- which Maruna described as "sloppier" than the first -- were probably done by his sisters, Florence and Kathryn, who were very protective and might have thought "the only way they could get Farley out of police trouble was to continue the gassing themselves."
Llewellyn was later taken to a mental institution just as police were announcing that the gassings weren't real, and he and the rest of his family are now dead, Maruna said. The Llewellyns lived at the intersection of DeWitt Avenue and 11th Street, and nearly all the attacks took place in that part of Mattoon.
Contact Dave Fopay at dfopay@jg-tc.com or 348-5733.
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Karen Hill, Pikeville KY wrote on Jun 2, 2007 6:15 PM: