New
York, AP: The circumstances surrounding
Harry Houdini’s sudden death were as murky as the rivers where he
often performed death-defying stunts. Despite a medical explanation, rumours that the escape artist was murdered have persisted for decades.
Eighty-one
years after Houdini died on Halloween 1926, his greatnephew wants to
exhume the magician’s body to determine if enemies poisoned him for
debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.
“His
death shocked the entire nation, if not the world. Now, maybe it’s
time to take a second look,” George Hardeen said. |
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The generally
accepted version of Houdini’s death held that the 52-year-old suffered a
ruptured appendix from a punch in the stomach, leading to peritonitis. But no
autopsy was performed.
When the death
certificate was filed on Nov 20,1926, Houdini’s body had already been buried.
Within days, a newspaper headline wondered, “Was Houdini murdered?”
A 2006
biography. The Secret Life of Houdini, raised the issue again
and convinced some that he might have been poisoned, including Hardeen.
The likelist
suspects were members of a group known as the spiritualists. The magician devoted large
portions of his stage show to exposing the group’s fraudulent seances.
In the Houdini biography authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail
a November 1924 letter in which one of the movement’s devotees, writer
Arthur Conan Doyle, said Houdini would
“get his just desserts very exactly meted out...I think there is a
general payday coming soon”.
Two
years later, Houdini, by all accounts a man in extraordinary physical
shape, was dead.
Modus
operandi
Kalush and solman
say that “the Spiritualist underworld’s
modus operandi in cases like this was often poisioning”- possibly
arsenic, which could be detected decades later.
The
authors also suggest Houdini might have been poisoned by
“an experimental serum” injected by one of his doctors. The team
working on the exhumation includes internationally known forensic pathologists
Dr.Michael Baden and James starrs.
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