Houdini poisoned? Remains to be exhumed
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/houdini_exhumation

Houdini poisoned? Remains to be exhumed
By LARRY McSHANE, Associated Press Writer

Get ready for "CSI: Houdini." A team of forensic experts will pore over
the exhumed remains of renowned escape artist Harry Houdini to determine
whether he was murdered more than 80 years ago, the head of the
investigative team said Friday.

"Everything will be thoroughly analyzed," promised James Starrs, dean of
the disinterment dream team of pathologists, anthropologists,
toxicologists and radiologists. "We'll examine his hairs, his
fingernails, any bone fractures."

Legal paperwork necessary to dig up Houdini's body from a New York City
cemetery will be filed Monday to get the process started, said Joseph
Tacopina, an attorney representing Houdini's family. It could take
months before the body is exhumed, although the process should move
faster because the family and cemetery officials support the plan, he
said.

Houdini died at age 52 on Halloween 1926, days after the athletic
magician was repeatedly punched in the stomach by a college student
testing the performer's abdominal muscles.
His death certificate listed him as a victim of peritonitis from a
ruptured appendix. No autopsy was performed, though, and rumors that he
was murdered started almost immediately.

"The Secret Life of Houdini," a biography published last year, revisited
the rumors and detailed the injection of "an experimental serum" into
Houdini shortly before his death at Detroit's Grace Hospital.

The authors suggest the likeliest 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.

Houdini received an assortment of death threats from the Spiritualists
over his final years.

In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman
explore a November 1924 letter in which one of the movement's devotees,
Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, said Houdini would "get his
just desserts very exactly meted out ... I think there is a general
payday coming soon."

The exhumation plan received support from Anna Thurlow, the
great-granddaughter of "medium" Margery, whose husband Dr. Le Roi
Crandon was one of the Spiritualist movement's biggest proponents and
one of Houdini's enemies.

"At the very least, there was a group of people
who wished Houdini harm," said Thurlow, who was forced to consider that
her ancestors may have been murderers. "Whatever the answer is, it
(exhumation) will resolve this mystery."

Starrs, who presided over the exhumations of gunslinger Jesse James and
"Boston Strangler" Albert DeSalvo, said that if Houdini was poisoned
with heavy metals ? arsenic or mercury, for example ? there should
be evidence of that more than eight decades later.

"I wouldn't be involved if I simply thought this was bringing a rabbit
out of a hat," he said.