AP Features, March 23rd, 2007
A team of forensic experts will test the remains of the renowned escape artist Harry Houdini once his body is exhumed from a New York cemetery, searching for clues to his rumored murder, the head of the investigative team said Friday.
"Everything will be thoroughly analyzed," Prof. James Starrs promised Friday. "We'll examine his hairs, his fingernails, any bone fractures."
Houdini died at age 52 on Halloween 1926, listed on his death certificate as a victim of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix _ although no autopsy was performed. The athletic star was repeatedly punched in the stomach just days before his death, Houdini's response to a challenge the strength of his abdominal muscles.
Rumors that he was murdered started almost immediately, and have lingered into the new millennium.
Legal paperwork necessary to exhume Houdini's body from a cemetery in the Queens borough will be filed Monday to get the process started, said Joseph Tacopina, an attorney representing the Houdini family.
It could takes months before the body is exhumed, though the task will be easier since the Houdini family and cemetery officials support the plan, Tacopina said.
"The Secret Life of Houdini," a biography published last year, revisited the rumors and suggested Houdini was targeted by enemies who poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead. The book detailed the injection of "an experimental serum" into Houdini shortly before his death at Detroit's Grace Hospital.
Tacopina and Starrs were joined at a crowded press conference by biography co-authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman and a fifth guest, Anna Thurlow _ the great-granddaughter of a possible murder suspect, Houdini's archenemy Dr. Le Roi Crandon.
The doctor was a member of the Spiritualists, a group which became a frequent target of Houdini's ridicule in his final years. The performer devoted much of his time to exposing the group's fraudulent seances, infuriating believers like Crandon and Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle.
Crandon was married to a "medium," Margery, whose vast correspondence and scrapbooks were passed down to Thurlow. Some of the materials found there led Sloman and Kalush to theorize that Houdini was murdered.
"At the very least, there was a group of people who wished Houdini harm," said Thurlow, who was forced to consider that her ancestors might have been murderers. "Whatever the answer is, (an exhumation) will resolve this mystery."
Houdini received death threats from the Spiritualists during his final years.
Starrs, who presided over the exhumations of legendary outlaw gunslinger Jesse James and "Boston Strangler" Albert DeSalvo, said that if Houdini was poisoned with heavy metals _ arsenic or mercury, for example _ evidence would still be obtainable more than eight decades later.
The forensic team, made up of forensic pathologists, anthropologists, toxicologists and radiologists, is working for no fee, Starrs said. The veteran forensic investigator was optimistic that the long-standing questions would find answers once his team's work was done.
"I wouldn't be involved," he said, "if I simply thought this was bringing a rabbit out of a hat."
