Read the full Cora Stallman series here.
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 1925. Coles County, IL.
By August 5, Cora Stallman had been dead for five days, but investigators seemed no closer to finding out how that had happened. The truth continued to evade them like a silver fish in a summer pond, always a second beyond their grasp.
The farmer takes a husband.
Anna
Whatever path Cora Stallman followed into Coles County, Illinois, it was her older sister Anna who had cleared the way.
Anna must have been formidable. I’ve only found one photo of her, and you can barely see her face. At Cora’s inquest in late August 1925, she told the news photographers not to take her picture — and they obeyed.1
More evidence than answers.
Monday and Tuesday, Aug. 3-4, 1925. Mattoon, IL.
Cattle and crops can’t go untended, so it didn’t raise eyebrows when Anna and Thomas Seaman returned from Cincinnati immediately after Cora Stallman’s funeral. She was buried on Monday afternoon, Aug. 3; they were back in Mattoon that night.
Perhaps more unusual: Once they returned, Thomas took to his bed.1
Cora Stallman died on a farm, but she lived most of her life in the city.
Cora is a book I haven’t opened in years. She is a box with a dusty lid.
And yet, when I recently told a friend I was planning to write about Cora, she immediately answered: “Oh, I think about her a lot. I’m so glad she’s getting remembered.”
Cora stays with you.
For Cora, I pestered a medical examiner, and joined the historical society of a county I’ve never visited. I spent about two years of scattershot research on her. At the end of it, for a lot of reasons, I put her away. Maybe now it’s time to reopen the book, to blow off the dust.
Graveyard Snoop 