Houdini’s family want to exhume body for autopsy

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 great-nephew wants to exhume the 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.

Houdini’s family announced they would file papers on Monday asking that the body be exhumed.

Hardeen said a team of top forensic investigators would conduct new tests on Houdini’s body.

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, Houdini’s body — brought by train from Detroit to New York — had already been buried, along with any evidence of a possible death plot.

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 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.

In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail 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 ... I think there is a general payday coming soon.”

Two years later, Houdini, by all accounts a man in extraordinary physical shape, was dead.

The team working on the exhumation includes internationally known forensic pathologist Dr Michael Baden and professor James Starrs, a forensic pathologist who has studied the disinterred remains of gunslinger Jesse James and Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo.