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Relative wants Houdini's corpse exhumed

Forensic pathologist James Starrs, left, works with Larry Sloman, co-author of The Secret Life of Houdini, at Houdini's gravesite on Thursday in the Queens borough of New York. PHOTO: 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, rumors 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 magician's body to determine if enemies poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.

"It needs to be looked at," George Hardeen said. "His death shocked the entire nation, if not the world. Now, maybe it's time to take a second look."

Houdini's family scheduled a news conference yesterday to give details on the plans. Prominent New York lawyer Joseph Tacopina is helping clear any legal hurdles.

A team of top forensic investigators would conduct new tests on Houdini's body, said Hardeen, whose grandfather was Houdini's brother.

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 -- brought by train from Detroit to Manhattan -- had already been buried in Queens, along with any evidence of a possible death plot. Within days, a newspaper headline wondered, "Was Houdini Murdered?"

A biography published last year, The Secret Life of Houdini, raised the issue again and convinced some that he might have been poisoned, including Hardeen, who lives in Arizona and is the chief spokesman for the president of the Navajo Nation.

The likeliest murder 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.

The movement's devotees included Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail a November 1924 letter in which 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.

The authors also suggest that Houdini might have been poisoned by "an experimental serum" injected by one of his doctors at Detroit's Grace Hospital.
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