The Valet Did It? 01:11:02

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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hi, Paul. Hey, Kate. This is our first show. Absolutely first show. Can you believe it? After all the planning? It took forever, it feels like, but I'm so excited finally to be here with you. This is so wonderful. It's going to be a lot of fun. So you and I were together at CrimeCon UK a while ago, and you and I sat down for a long time and chatted, and you and I were talking about

And over comes a waiter and he puts down this glass in front of you. And I look at it and you said, it's bourbon and said, have a sip. Because I had never really had bourbon. And I had a sip. I do not like bourbon. And I need to know if this is a deal breaker for you or not in this show. I think we will be just fine. I'm pretty tolerant of the fact that you don't like bourbon right now, but I'm going to work on you. Right now.

Well, in my head, I've decided that if I ever get bottles of bourbon, I'm going to ship them to Colorado. And if you get anything like hard cider, you could ship it to me in Texas. And that sounds like a deal.

And the other thing, UK CrimeCon will forever be cemented in my brain because you remember we were sitting there chatting and all of a sudden the worst fire alarm in the history of fire alarms went off at this hotel. And we walked outside and everybody had to evacuate, which has never happened to me before. So we all pile outside and all of these true crime fans who really love Paul come

They're surrounding you and everybody's looking to you for like, what the hell's going on? And you say, I love this because you say, well, listen, if this were a bombing, we would have seen even in the UK, we would have seen this tactical team and that tactical team. And I thought, man, am I in the right place with Paul Holstead?

Yeah, and we were literally talking about this show when the fire alarm goes off and the fire trucks are pulling up. So we really got off to quite the start on the concept of this thing. I felt very safe. This is definitely the person you want to be around with all hell is breaking loose. Thank goodness it was just sort of like a mechanical malfunction. And we had a lovely time at the rest of CrimeCon. And I think that'll be the start of a beautiful friendship.

So the show, let's talk a little bit about the show Buried Bones. What inspired you to say yes when I called you and said we need to do this? Where did that come from? Well, you know, you had reached out to me for your other podcast, Wicked Words, about doing historic crime. You know, and I've been doing cold cases that go all the way back into the 1960s, really, is the oldest ones that I would tackle.

But you work cases that are so much older. And so when I'm looking at my files, I only had one that I would characterize as being a historic crime. And that was Bessie Ferguson from 1924, which just was crazy that you had an actual chapter in your book about that crime. So it was meant to be, I think. And that was a wonderful episode on Wicked Words because you had some theories that I had not thought of with Bessie Ferguson. And I had done so much research on that case.

So that's when the little light bulb went off in my head. Ding, ding, Paul Holes is someone I should do a show with. So I'm forever grateful that you said yes. And I think, you know, from my perspective, you had so much information about the case I had never heard of. So now I'm weighing all these new details. And this is where now when we get to buried bones, I'm looking forward to hearing all the information you can provide on these cases and then be able to dissect them.

Well, and I'll tell you, I'm intimidated by some of the medical things that I run into. I run into terms like nervous prostration. What does that even mean? And you might not necessarily know what that means, but together we can figure out whether some of these cases that I bring to you were done well, done poorly, what would

we do now in the 21st century? What did they do then? So that's what makes this exciting. Yeah. And that's what's going to be my challenge is, you know, try to figure out what was being done back on these cases that are historical, both from investigative techniques as well as what the forensic science capabilities were and be able to address what they did then and then see, well, how could these cases be approached today, either investigatively or with modern technology?

Do you have a favorite time period in history? I ask people this all the time. Mine's the American Revolutionary War. I love that time period. Just reading about it. Yeah, I would agree. Going back into maybe the 1800s, it still seems like it's a relevant time frame that I can relate to when it gets older than that.

then it's now really getting to where it's just so far back in time. Things have changed so much since then that I don't relate to those older times as well. I'm going to make you relate to them, though. I'm going to introduce you to people. I promise. I'm going to introduce you to people and you're going to think, wow, these people really need justice or boy, the results in this case were not well done or the investigators did a wonderful job considering what they were given. So I'm excited to jump into this.

And I will be introducing you to the bourbon idea over and over and over again. How's that? That's a hard no over and over again. But you could keep trying for sure. Yes. Okay, let's set the scene for this story.

So this story takes place in 1900 in Houston, Texas, and you work cases in Texas, right? With the TV series. Yeah, you know, I've worked cases in Texas, both previously for the Oxygen Network, as well as currently with HLN and trying to see if I can help families get an answer on these cases. Some of them are older cases and some of them are recent cases. You know, people are fascinated with Texas as far as crime goes. It just seems like

everything in Texas happens bigger and it's so much more dramatic. And I know that coming to Texas can be interesting for investigators working with local law enforcement. You know, this state has, for better or for worse, such a deep history. And a big part of that history, of course, happens at the turn of the century. And one of the things that I want to talk about is when we set the scene in

In history, because I'm a big history writer, I love talking about where we are, what people are doing. And this is a story that actually splits between Texas and Manhattan. And in 1900, you just can't get any more different. We're in Gilded Age, New York.

where boss tweed with diamond pendants and a lot of corrupt politicians. And Texas was booming more with oil and with cattle. So the victim in this case, because I'll have a spoiler here, the victim is a man named William Marsh Rice.

And he would become the founder of one of the most renowned universities in the country, which is Rice University, which is in Houston. And the story of that is so fascinating because a lot of people don't know that Rice almost didn't happen because of the death of William Marsh Rice. And the big question that I need you to help me answer is,

was William Marsh Rice murdered or did he die naturally? Were people in prison rightfully or did he die of natural causes? So hopefully you can help me figure that out. We'll see what details you have. Okay, so I'll tell you a little bit about William Marsh Rice because I'm assuming when you jump into a case, the first thing you need to know about is the victim. Is that victimology? Sometimes I get mixed up with the terms.

Yeah, that is victimology to different people. It means different things. But for me, it's really understanding as much as I can about the victim, who the person was, their social circles, and ultimately anything within their life that could contribute to a motive for somebody to come and hurt them or kill them. Well, I can tell you straight away the motive here is money.

So William Marsh Rice was born in Massachusetts and he was born in poverty. And he started working at a grocery store when he was 15. And he had such incredible business sense that by the time he was 22, he owned the grocery store. And he went on to invest money.

in property, in land, in cattle. And he eventually accumulated millions and millions and millions of dollars in the 1900s, in late 1800s, early 1900s, which is pretty incredible. Now, is he doing that all in Massachusetts or Manhattan, or is this out in Texas? He decided to go down to Texas smartly because things were moving west, and he knew that he could buy up a lot of property. That was a good question. He could buy up a lot of property and

And he started investing in mills, on rivers, and in oil wells, and it just accumulated money very, very quickly. Yeah, and in Texas, black gold was everything at this timeframe, right? You're right. And so there was a lot of money to be had. He did not have a particularly lavish lifestyle, but like a lot of successful businessmen, he was pretty hard-nosed. He was no nonsense. And that created a lot of...

of acrimony between him and other business people. So you would think that's the way we're gonna go, right? That somebody was targeting him because of bad business dealings. That wouldn't be unusual, right? No, and that really goes towards victimology. Understanding him as a businessman, right?

and knowing that he could have pissed people off. And most certainly with the money that he has, some of those people could have come after him. So this now is like the first check that I have as, okay, here's a possible motive. So he gets married, they do not have children, and his first wife dies at age 31.

which seems young to me, but in the late 1800s, there were a lot of different reasons why somebody could die at that age. That's right. With the lack of antibiotics, various diseases, not being able to address some of the genetic issues that people are born with.

So for sure, you had a lot of people dying much younger then than today. So he kept a house in Houston, but he wanted to move to New York. He wanted that sort of image, Gilded Age New York. So he bought a apartment on Madison Avenue, which was a very wealthy area and still is. And it was a very huge place. And-

He accumulated a lot of staff, including a valet. So I'm going to quiz you. Do you know the difference between a butler and a valet? Because I didn't. No, you don't. When you said valet, of course, I'm thinking hotel valets who are responsible for parking or retrieving your vehicles at the hotel. So I'm going to assume that a valet, a personal valet,

is somebody that is responsible for driving. Well, I mean, we're talking 1900. So now this is somebody who's probably, it's horse and carriage with rice, right? This is before the Model T is coming out. Correct. Yeah. So a valet in the late 1800s, early 1900s would have been someone who was sort of the personal manservant for

the man of the house, someone who would dress him, would drive him everywhere, all of that. And a butler was someone who would supervise the entire staff of a house. I certainly did not understand the nuances between the two before I started with this story. I had no clue. For me, the butler is, in my mind, was what you just described as the job descriptions of the valet. The idea of needing somebody to dress you, that just doesn't sit right with me. You don't want that?

Not at all. Okay. So the valet becomes very important later on. What is also important later on is that William Marsh Rice absolutely declares that he lives in New York. He visits Texas, but his residence is in New York. He marries a second time after his wife dies. This is not a good marriage.

She is wealthy, but not as wealthy as he is. And as they progress in age, she's in her early 80s, he's in his mid 80s, and she starts to consult a divorce attorney without his knowing it. He is kind of a crotchety old man. He's a little Howard Hughes. He has peculiar tastes. He eats only eggs and bouillon, which actually sounds pretty good to me, but...

He's eccentric, I guess. Is that what you would say, eccentric? Yeah. You know, I'm surprised at his age. You're talking about somebody in 1900 is in their mid 80s. But top notch health care, right? He had the money to do whatever was available then. Sure. I don't think it's leeches, but you're right. That seems like a really advanced age. But he did have all the advantages of somebody who was affluent at that time period. And his wife was also that age. So...

She consults a divorce attorney. He has no idea. She changes her will. She's really mad at him, and she leaves all of her estate to her relatives. She's

She says, we live in Texas. Now, why does that matter? Because Texas was a common property state, right? So if they divorced, she would get half of everything they accrued, all of the land, all of the houses they accrued when they were married.

So if she died and it was proven that he lived in Texas at the time of her death, then her relatives would get 50% of his estate. Isn't that pretty cold hearted? That's a really interesting way to screw your husband over. Yeah.

But it's very significant. How long were they married at this point? Seven or eight years. Not very long. Never a good marriage, though. It sounded like she struggled with mental health issues and probably he did, too, I imagine. So it was very acrimonious from the beginning. And so he doesn't know any of this.

She dies of natural causes. This is not the victim here. He finds out and, of course, is infuriated and thus launches a huge lawsuit against her family, who is now saying, give me 50% of what you have accrued during this marriage, which was a significant amount.

During the marriage, he had double, triple, quadruple the amount of assets that he had. He had started investing in oil wells and even more, and he just had an incredible amount of money. I think it was the equivalent of $25 to $30 million today. Now, here's where William Marsh Rice, where things get complicated for him, what he had done and what his wife before she died had agreed to

was he was going to give a small amount of money to some of his family members. The wife was going to take much of it, but the majority of this also was going to go to an institute in his name that he wanted called the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science, and Art Institute.

And he had always dreamed about having a free institution of higher learning for people in Texas. He initially actually wanted to open up an orphanage and then decided for whatever reason that that was not going to happen. And so he wanted to open up a university that would be free of tuition and they would offer scholarships.

Okay, and this is his way of really setting his legacy. So after he's gone, his name will live on. So we have a caveat here that is pretty problematic. There's controversy over Rice because before he died, he wrote into his will that this university would be higher education for whites only, which is not surprising.

for the time period, but it's still horrible. And it's a thing that Rice University to this day has to reckon with, and they are. So this is sort of the imperfect victim in a way. This is someone who we know he's going to die. It's going to happen soon. And he's got somebody who's fallible, but...

Ultimately, as we move forward in the story, we see that there are a lot of things aligned against him. At least at this point right now, I'm hearing maybe second and third possible motives with the changing of the will, the wife's family now going after him. He's in turn suing the family. So you have a tit for tat going on.

Again, these are just little boxes next to these possible motives that I'm making a list on to see, okay, which one seems to be the most likely based on the circumstances as we move forward. Do wills often come into play in murder cases? I can't imagine they don't. They must.

Well, of course, there's plenty of cases out there in which during homicide investigations, financial assets are the core to the reason the person was killed. Wills are a part of it. I haven't had a case in which the will was specifically the reason why somebody was killed.

But there are more commonly cases, you know, life insurance, being a beneficiary of the life insurance. You know, that's what you see. Those are the easy things for people to set up and change names and beneficiaries. And those are frequently why in modern cases, why people are killed from a financial standpoint. Well, we now have to get some attorneys involved and...

And Rice decides to hire an attorney named Captain James Baker, who was a really well-known attorney and very, very bright. So Rice hires him to defend him in this case. Rice's wife's family hires a guy named Albert Patrick. Now, he is the key player. There's two of them. One is the valet and one is Albert Patrick.

Albert Patrick is sleazy. There's really no other way to describe it. He's very sleazy, and it doesn't start out to be sleazy, this whole thing. He was hired specifically to prove that Rice really did declare his residency in Texas so that this community property law could kick in and they could take half the money. He is insisting, and his will says, that he considers his home to be in New York.

So Albert Patrick is hired by the family to figure things out. Albert Patrick cannot prove anything as of now, even though he meets Rice, they have a discussion. I don't know, maybe you have some ideas. How would you go about this now? Would you find bills? Or I don't know how you would prove that a person spends more time in one state than another state. Well, this ends up really kicking in Investigation 101 in terms of, of course, the paper trail, property ownership paper trail,

But it's going to be somebody like Rice who has residents in two different states. It is now going to be tracking down witnesses. How often are you seeing Rice at this property? And if you get a preponderance of witnesses saying he's in New York versus Texas, those are statements that you can use to support that he is a resident of New York or he's a resident of Texas. Okay.

So Albert Patrick is running into a brick wall because he can't find. He's seen consistently that Rice is in New York and he's very rarely in Texas. He's only there every once in a while to check in on some of his property, but he really prefers to be in New York.

And so Albert Patrick, the attorney, decides that he wants to get close to someone who is close to Rice. And that would be a man named Charles Jones. And Charles was Rice's 23-year-old valet. He had been with him for three or four years. He was obviously physically close with Rice. And Rice seemed to really like

Jones. He paid for some of his education. So Albert Patrick targets him. Why would that happen? Yeah. First, is the valet Jones, is he traveling back and forth with Rice between New York and Texas? He is. Okay. So he's a consistent presence in Rice's life.

Now, Patrick targeting Jones because, I mean, as we talked about what the ballet's responsibilities are, I mean, this is almost at an intimate level. Jones is in the bedroom. He's helping probably serve food. He knows Rice's day-to-day activities.

So Patrick possibly could be trying to get dirt on Rice or is using a proxy in order to be able to have physical access to Rice.

And you know what's interesting is I want you to tell me why people choose certain personalities. So Albert Patrick was a smooth-talking attorney, and Charles Jones was soft-spoken and meek and quiet and subservient, essentially.

So my guess is that Albert Patrick picked up on that fairly quickly and thought maybe he could be manipulated. Does that sound right? Absolutely. You know, and this is where when you are trying to find somebody who's going to do what you want to do, you're not going to go to some hard-nosed person who's going to say no to you. You want to go to somebody who recognize, I mean, Jones is 23. Patrick is an established attorney with a lot of resources and

and probably has all the legalese speak and is able to basically sway this younger man and say, this is what I need. And the younger man feels trapped. He's working as a servant, if you will. So that is how he sees himself in the world. And so now when you have a more powerful older man coming to you, his natural instinct is to be

to that individual as well. And I agree with that. And I think that it just seemed like an easy mark in a way. And so Albert Patrick was very smart and we find out just how smart he was coming up.

So he goes through a series of events that never end up well. He thinks that it's too hard to prove definitively that Marsh Rice was actually preferring Texas. He preferred New York. So he convinces Jones by telling Jones, listen, he's not paying you enough. He's not giving you enough respect.

You need more money. If we can get money from his will, I will give you most of it. More manipulation, right? Yep. No, absolutely. And he's playing on Jones's insecurity. He's planting a seed. Now Jones is going, you're right. I do so much for him and I'm not getting enough pay. I could do so much better. And so he sees potentially how he could benefit his life by going towards Patrick, becoming more loyal.

And I think that Rice picks up on that. He starts snapping at Jones a little bit more. I also think Rice is not feeling well, and he's not feeling well because Albert Patrick has convinced Jones that if they make...

Rice just sick enough that because of his advanced age, 84, the rest of his body will give out, right? So it won't be murder, but it will be moving the process along. So they start giving him mercury in his milk. I mean, mercury as in thermometers that you're now not allowed to break mercury? Well, mercury comes in different forms. Mercury itself is a heavy metal and it

was used extensively and still is in some capacities, even within dental fillings today.

But it is something that is toxic to the person. Now, it all depends on how you ingest it. In this case, we have ingestion orally. So now the mercury is going into the body. And if it's in milk, which is a water-based product, that's telling me that it's probably a mercury salt. Salts are generally aqueous soluble or water soluble.

So now the mercury is able to be absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract and get into Rice's body. But if it's at a low enough level, you're not going to have the real classic acute poisoning symptoms. Flailing around and all that. Exactly. It builds up in the body and there would be symptoms starting to manifest themselves over time, you know, such as GI issues or kidney or liver issues.

And then eventually you might start to see, you know, the palsies that come in with the mercury poisoning. You know, those top hats, you know, everybody's heard of the Mad Hatter, right? Yeah. Yeah. And those top hats used to be treated with a mercury type compound.

What? I didn't know that.

So in many ways, Patrick is convincing Jones, well, just give him a little bit of mercury here and there. And eventually this 84-year-old body is going to give out. It's still a homicide. You know, it's still poisoning. It's not that immediate like a stabbing or gunshot or strangulation. It's a homicide that could take weeks, if not months. Well, it's interesting because they're trying to evade detection, which we're going to hear about in a little bit.

was not so difficult to do with toxicology in the late 1800s and right at the turn of the century. Toxicology was just really moving then. And so there were some tools available, but there weren't some tools. You could detect arsenic, cyanide, some other things. But mercury, I don't know if they would pick that up in a blood test or not during that time period. And this is where I had to go back. I actually have a book written in 1892. What?

The Essentials of Forensic Medical Toxicology and Hygiene. Oh, that must be a fun read. Oh, yes. Believe me. But this is where, well, what could they do to detect a heavy metal like mercury? And really, it was just qualitative chemistry. They would take like the stomach contents. They could do a solvent extraction in order to get the mercury away from all the other contaminants from the stomach and

And then now they just do a chemical reaction where they're looking for a type of precipitate, something that will turn solid and be a certain color, certain shape, etc., where they go, okay, that tells us that mercury was in this stomach contents. But it's not definitive, nor does it tell you how much. So it was still in 1900s, even though toxicology is amazing what they could do with qualitative chemistry.

it still isn't very informative relative to what can be done today with the modern technology, the instrumental analysis going after blood samples, urine samples, et cetera. Because in the 1800s, in this case, 1900, they have to know what they're looking for, right? I mean, I've dealt with a lot of cases where they just never found it because they never suspected that there would be morphine when it looked like it was a kidney disease, right?

Well, and that's where they were so reliant upon those symptoms. The progression of chronic mercury exposure is different than chronic arsenic exposure or acute. If you drink a whole bunch of mercury all at once, those symptoms and the damage to the tissues and the esophagus, the stomach, etc., is different and visually looks different than if you, let's say, you were to take cyanide or arsenic.

So they relied so much on the doctors to be able to recognize that. But how often are these doctors seeing these types of things? You know, it's only going to be your forensic pathologists who get that concentration of, you know, they're doing an autopsy. And poisonings were much more common back then than they are today.

If you give them too much, it's going to be a red flag for a lot of doctors. If you don't give them enough, it doesn't kill them. And that's what happened. They didn't give him enough. He got indigestion. He got diarrhea. And that was about it from the various types of doses of mercury that they gave him. An 84-year-old man survived all that.

But I bet that indigestion and diarrhea from the exposure to mercury was not mild. My thinking is that Rice was suffering while he was trying to recover from that exposure for sure. The next thing they did while they tried to figure out how to kill him was they decided that they wanted to work up a new will. And of course, this is Albert Patrick supposedly doing all of this. And Charles Jones of LA is just kind of moving along as a lackey. So our

Patrick does something that I think is very smart. He works up a new will and they end up forging Rice's signature, just doing the old fashioned, what I would do as a kid, put a piece of paper on top of my mom's signature and trace it. And this is where I think Patrick was smart.

In this new will, William Marsh Rice had left a portion to relatives and the rest was going to go to the Rice Institute. In this new will, Albert Patrick wrote that this group of relatives...

who would be the ones to contest the will, he gave them more money in the forged will. So they didn't say anything. They wouldn't have said anything. They got more money. And the rest was in his name and Albert Patrick. So he just said, forget it. I'm just going to take all the money. And it would keep everybody else's mouth shut. So I thought that was very smart. So he's actually putting the majority of the money in his name? Yes, because he and Rice had done business long, long, long time ago. And so he could say as his legal consultant-

And most people would have said, okay, we understand that. Yeah. I mean, for me, I've got alarm bells dinging in my head as an investigator. If Rice was thought to be a victim of a homicide-

And I've got the attorney that's representing the dead wife's family in a very contentious divorce proceeding. And now this attorney is named as the primary beneficiary. Okay, there's some meat on that bone that needs to be dug into. Yep, I agree.

So while Albert Patrick is trying to sort out, is it now time to just kill the old man off? He is saying that his biggest concern is the autopsy. He thinks that there will be an autopsy on Rice's body because he's wealthy. And this is not an automatic, right? Not everybody gets an autopsy if it's not a suspicious death. Is that true? Well, if today, if somebody dies under autopsy,

medical care, the medical doctor can attribute the cause of death and the coroner or medical examiner's office may or may not decide that they are going to proceed with an autopsy. So there is still the possibility if there's something that the coroner or medical examiner feels is, whether it be suspicious or there's medical or public health safety concerns, they will say,

I don't care if that medical doctor is signing off. We are going to take a look at this body and see what's going on. But generally, anybody who dies outside the presence of direct medical care or die suspiciously or via an accident, yes, they are going to be autopsied. So Albert and Patrick actually did have something to be worried about. In this case, it sounds like there would likely be an autopsy.

You know, I don't know how they would have handled that back then if he was just found dead in his bed and there was no signs of violence or no signs of any type of illness that there would be health concerns, then it's possible that somebody would just attribute the natural death. He lived a long life and let's go ahead and get him to the funeral home. Well, I think that Albert Patrick had the same concern you did that

People were going to look at this new will and say, who is this guy and why would Rice have left 60 to 70 percent of his fortune to this guy instead of setting up this institute? So once they started formulating a plan on how to kill him, Albert Patrick asked Charles Jones, the valet, to forge another letter.

And this was a letter that said from William Marsh Rice, I do not want to be buried. I want to be cremated because embalming sounds like a terrible thing and I don't want that to happen to my body. So I would like to be cremated immediately. Experience the glamour and danger of the roaring 20s from the palm of your hand in

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So now you have a 23-year-old valet who's forging this letter supposedly from Rice. And so it's a handwritten letter

The will, by chance, was that typeset? I believe so. So then we got into typography too. And I think they talked about that in the trial. Okay. Yeah. Because if there's just a signature on the will that's been forged, at least today, credible document examiners, handwriting experts generally will say there isn't enough just within a signature for me to be able to detect a forgery unless it's

Very obvious. I mean, if they literally are doing a tracing, then yes, that becomes pretty obvious to an experienced expert. But they usually want to have more writing in order to be able to get a better sense of all the various permutations of the characteristics that we all have when we write. So now this handwritten letter becomes...

critical evidence towards what now is sounding like to me a conspiracy between Patrick and Jones. Even though Jones is just kind of following Patrick's lead, he's an adult male who's an active participant. He is committing a crime. And so detecting that forgery through that handwriting is something that could be done then and most certainly done now with the will, with the typeset. I'm sure Patrick didn't have access

to whatever typewriter was done to generate the original will for Rice. And so now there can be a comparison between the typewriters or whatever type of printing instrument was used in order to see, okay, this is something that Patrick had access to. And this is what is done today. It's so much easier to show, let's say, alterations to a document or tools that were used to produce the document that the forger used.

had access to, back in the day before everybody had computers, we would collect typewriters for this type of comparison. And you could pull the ribbons out of the typewriter and the ribbons, they scroll as you're typing. And you can literally take that ribbon and read what's been typed.

But you also, because of the variances within the construction of the typewriter, this is where now one typewriter with its keys and then all the sub-characteristics within each key, like the K may be formed slightly different or have an imperfection in it. You can do a physical comparison between the typed will and that typewriter.

and go, this typewriter produced this will. Is it as unique as striations on a bullet? Is it the same sort of concept? Well, in terms of the manufacturing defects, that's something like with firearms, that is very real. And yes, with the typewriter, anything that has got a manufacturing process, studies are done to show how different consecutive defects

objects that have flowed through the manufacturing process, how they have these microscopic differences, especially with the metals. And it really gets into the weeds when you start talking about the type of manufacturing process and what it produces. But when you have, I don't know how many keys are on a typewriter off the top of my head, but let's say you have roughly 50 keys.

Each one of those has a set of unique characteristics, and that can be transferred onto the typed page. And then you start taking a look at, well, do all the S's on this type page match the defects on the S on this typewriter? And then what about the A's and what about the D's? And then pretty soon you're going, this typewriter produced this piece of paper.

Well, I'll say that this I knew because this all comes up in the trial and you, Paul Holes, are a genius. And you are right along with the 1900 district attorney who prosecuted this case. I'll tell you more about that in a minute, though. So, yes, you are right on so far. I jumped the gun on you then. No, you were perfect. So now.

we have a sense of urgency and the sense of urgency comes with the great Galveston hurricane that

that wiped out the entire island in 1900, which was, I believe, still is America's worst natural disaster. Really? Yeah. It was Eric Larson, who's one of my favorite authors, wrote a book about it. And it's called Isaac's Storm. My family and I go to Galveston a lot. And it just wiped out the whole island, killed so many people. So Rice is in New York.

His refineries was right outside Galveston. One had some severe damage and the refineries manager got ahold of him and said, we need to rebuild. And Rice said, how much money do you need? And he said, a quarter of a million dollars.

So Jones hears this, reports back to Patrick. And of course, Patrick says, oh shit, there goes a portion of our money. We need to do this now. So they begin forging letters from Rice to put off the manager. Rice says, I want to rebuild, but it's not going to happen right now. They seem panicked to me. Okay. Yeah. Well, $250,000 back in 1900. It's a lot of money.

Yeah, it was a big chunk of his estate. It was. It was not the most, but it was something that if you're Albert Patrick and you're thinking you're going to get all this money and now for no good reason, you're going to be a quarter of a million dollars less rich. That would panic anybody. And he wants to move the timeline up of the murder, it sounds like.

This is just sheer greed at this point. Yep. So he is being poisoned slowly with mercury. It's not working. And finally, they make a decision that in September of 1900, it's time for William Marsh Rice to die.

Now, everybody in this case, there are, of course, differing accounts to what happens next. So what we have to do is take the valet's account because eventually, of course, this all unravels and that's why we know about this case at all. So Charles Jones says that Albert Patrick said, we need to kill him. And Charles Jones says, well, how are we going to do that? And Albert Patrick says, you're going to take a rag and you're going to put chloroform all over the rag and you're going to put it over his face.

and he's essentially going to have a heart attack and die. I did not know that it was possible to die from chloroform. So I looked it up and I asked you to look it up too. What did you find out? Did you know anything about chloroform to begin with? I actually did. I've used chloroform in the lab. It had to be familiar with its properties. It is a very common solvent that is used in scientific industry. Chloroform used to be used as an anesthetic for surgery.

That and diethyl ether were kind of the two very early anesthetic compounds. And so, yes, it is something that can render somebody unconscious or kill somebody. And it kills by respiratory depression, just like opiates, right? You overdose on an opiate.

Basically, your body no longer, it just can't breathe anymore. You're not able to inhale. Well, with the chloroform, it puts your body into a state to where it is no longer breathing and that's how you die. And that's with a very acute exposure. This is where now you're talking about large amounts of chloroform that are being administered.

Now, the interesting thing, everybody's seen in the movies, particularly in the older movies, the killer comes up with a chloroform-soaked handkerchief and puts it over somebody's mouth, and the person just immediately collapses. That's not what happens. This is a relatively small amount of chloroform that is being inhaled off of that rag. You would have to hold that rag over this person's mouth

for an extended period of time before they even lose consciousness. So now, under that circumstance, you imagine Jones going up to Rice and putting a rag of chloroform over his mouth. You think Rice is going to fight Jones.

Well, now you're going to have evidence of asphyxia. Now you're going to be seeing he's going to have to struggle. Jones is going to have to struggle with Rice. You're going to see the abrasions to the mouth and the nose, the teeth indentations in the gums. There may be physical combat. And I'm sure Jones probably could dominate Rice at their respective points in their lives physically. Yeah.

But Rice is still going to probably have old man strength and be able to get a blow in or scratch or something like that. I don't think I've heard of old man strength before. Oh, well, hey, it's real. Believe me, I'm an old man. I have some old man strength. But this is where, you know, there's that myth that is perpetuated in the movies that

about this rag. So this is where I'm going, well, if Jones is saying that that's how this happened, I want to know a little bit more. And this is where the autopsy, I think, comes in. So let me tell you what Charles Jones said, because this is the main source of what happened that night.

So Charles Jones says that, Albert Patrick says, this is the night to do it. We're not going to be able to get away with this much longer. He's going to want to send this check at some point for a quarter of a million dollars. We don't want him to send it. This is the night to do it. He hands him rags with a bottle of chloroform. And he says, wait till the old man's asleep on the couch, pour chloroform all over the rag, and then put it on his face.

and it'll knock him out and then he'll have a heart attack and he'll die. And Jones says he did that. He waited till the old man was asleep. Rice was asleep on the couch. He put the rag on. He didn't hold the rag on his face. He said he laid it on his face.

and eventually Rice stopped breathing. There was no fighting, no nothing. Does that sound logical to you? Some of the concerns that I had related to the use of a rag saturated with chloroform and how long it would take, there would be the signs of asphyxia. Under this scenario, he's avoiding a lot of the potential injuries that would be seen by investigators or pathologists to show that there had been an asphyxial act.

that occurred on rice. So under that circumstance, I'm a little bit more intrigued about the possibility that if this chloroform rag is over rice's nose and mouth for a longer period of time, would that be sufficient to cause respiratory depression? Yeah. I'm not absolutely convinced of that, but at least it puts it within the world of possibility where I'd be reaching out to an expert who

and saying, hey, what about this scenario? I think the big question for me and for some of the medical experts in 1900 was, if you are asleep, even if you're an older man who's lulled into a really deep sleep, if you smelled and felt something on your face, wouldn't your natural instinct would be just to knock it off?

if somebody's not holding it on your face, or would chloroform act quickly enough to disable him? You said it takes a lot, right? At least with what my research showed is that chloroform, with the amount that you would be inhaling off of a rag like this, it would take some time. So rice would be laying there sleeping for some time.

before any type of depression caused by the chloroform would truly kick in. I still question whether or not there would be sufficient exposure to the chloroform that could have caused rice to die from it under this scenario. The other aspect is chloroform is very strong smelling. It's got a kind of this sickly sweet smell. It is so distinctive.

And so if this is, even with Rice asleep and this rag is just laid on top of him, this would be something that I think would naturally wake somebody up. You've got this very strong smelling solvent that you're breathing in. So there may be something more going on than this scenario in my estimation at this point. So Rice is dead.

The doctor is called, the doctor says, natural causes. He was 84. He had indigestion. His death certificate said he died of old age and extreme nervousness, which I've seen on many death certificates pretty much only in the 1800s, though, which to me is heart attack or something to that effect. I mean, is that what you would think? Yeah, you know, that's such an odd thing.

term. That's where kind of getting into the medical parlance of the day to try to figure out what symptoms were being interpreted in the final days, final months of Rice's life that this doctor is saying extreme nervousness is a contributing factor. I'm not sure what that would be. If he got indigestion from mercury poisoning, it's possible that he did get enough

Mercury in his system where he's developed a level of the shakes in his hands. Generally, Mercury, when it starts affecting the nervous system, affects the upper extremities before the lower extremities. And so maybe that somebody is saying, you know, he's shaking all the time, you know, and here's your nervousness. Yeah.

The phrase that I had mentioned to you before is nervous prostration is what I've written about, which seems like extreme nervousness. Nervous prostration is interpreted as extreme exhaustion. So, yeah, the doctor is just basically saying he's 84. He just gave up. He just gave out, you know, in essence. That was it.

Okay, so Albert Patrick talks to the Undertaker because Albert Patrick's in the will. He talks to the Undertaker. He hands him a certificate and says, Rice wants to be cremated. And the Undertaker delivers some terrible news to Albert Patrick, which is it takes 24 hours to heat this thing up to cremate someone. And so now Albert Patrick is essentially freaking out. And he says...

embalm him, put the fluid in him right now. Don't even take it. Just put it in right now. He's trying to corrupt the blood, I think, is what's happening. Is that what you think? Well, he is most certainly trying to make alterations to the body to cover up these external toxins that have been put inside Rice's body.

But he's relatively naive about things, but he's thinking on his feet. And so now he's just trying to contaminate the body as much as possible before authorities decide, oh, we better check into this death a little bit more closely. So he's being naive slash smart. I'm not sure what kind of attorney that is. This is where you know just enough to get yourself in trouble. So along those lines, Jones and Patrick the next day spend much of the day forging checks.

forging Rice's signature on checks, backdating them, and trying to deposit them. Unfortunately, Jones is in charge of filling out many of the checks.

And on several of the checks that are supposed to be paid to the order of Albert Patrick, he misspells Albert's name. And that seems to be an issue because I guess William Marsh Rice was very meticulous. And his banker, when he received the check, noticed that he had spelled this name wrong and he starts to investigate. And because of this one banker, he says, I think something's wrong.

And then he finds out that William Marsh Rice was dead and he calls the investigators and this whole thing unravels for both of them, for the valet and for the attorney. Yeah, they were trying to do too much. That really is the bottom line is I think you use the term the panic set in.

And so now, well, we better start trying to get money flowing before the spigot gets turned off during an investigation. But then they're just leaving a paper trail that is becoming obvious to somebody who knows Rice well, going, nope, this isn't right. And now the investigation kicks off, I'm assuming. Correct. So they start putting all of this together. They bring in

Like, you're talking about forensic document experts who look at the signatures, who look at the typography, everything that's happening, and says none of this matches up. And they proceed to arrest both of them, Jones and Patrick. Jones says, I didn't do any of this. Patrick says, I didn't do anything. Nothing happened. The guy died of natural causes, and there's no way you can prove otherwise. Hmm.

And I might be an attorney who tried to wiggle in a couple of places, but I'm not a killer. And he's right. He could be a sleazy attorney all he wants, but that doesn't make him a murderer. So it's a district attorney's job now to prove that Albert Patrick was the one who orchestrated this whole thing. And this seems like a daunting task to me. Does it to you?

Well, it could be, you know, but this is where if you have, you know, a good investigator on the case, I mean, this is a golden opportunity. You have two conspirators who are now turning on each other.

And this is where the interview becomes critical. It's okay. You either going down or he's going down. You better start talking about what actually happened and then playing them off of each other. So you can get so much information before this even gets into a trial. Who do you think flips? Because one of them does flip.

Jones is the weak link. 23-year-old subservient male and Patrick is the sophisticated attorney who's thinking he's smarter than anybody. So he's going to hold his mud while Jones is just going to sit there and chirp away. You did it. That was it. Yeah. Jones flipped on him. Jones was offered full immunity. Can you trust somebody who

who was offered full immunity on the stand? Well, you can. It all depends on who they are. And it really comes down to, does the jury trust this witness? And this is where Jones, by providing testimony, he has to be convincing or the jurors believe him. So there's two parts to this trial, really, I think. One is the medical testimony I'll tell you about in a second. The first part is Jones' testimony.

who is, to me, the definition of an unreliable witness. He talks about placing the rag over rice and rice doesn't move at all. Medical experts don't think that's likely. He talks about taking the rag after rice was dead and throwing it onto a stove and it catches on fire, right, and bursts into flames. Not just a rag that sort of kind of catches on fire, it's almost like an explosion. And then Albert Patrick's attorney said, this is BS. This

guy is lying about everything. If he lies about that one thing, how can we trust anything he says? And I think that's a line a lot of attorneys have used over the past hundred years. For sure. That's how you start chipping away at the veracity of a witness is you catch them in a single, and it may just be a minor detail that they got wrong, but then you blow it up.

And then you just taint anything else that they're saying from it. What stands out to me with the chloroform and taking a look at its physical properties, it is not excessively flammable. So it's something if it was thrown on the stove, you know, I do see where that rag with the chloroform on it, you may have it catch fire to a point.

But if he's saying it was explosive, I question if it was even chloroform. Maybe there's another solvent that was on this rag and it wasn't chloroform. Yeah. The thing I didn't tell you about Jones was that in the middle of all of this, he was jailed. Even though he was given immunity, he was jailed and he tried to take his own life in the middle of all of this. Oh, okay. I think it's clear that he had some mental health struggles. I think possibly even before this, but this certainly didn't help.

And Albert Patrick's attorney then turned to the medical testimony. And this is the interesting thing. So they did the autopsy because thank goodness William Marsh Rice did not get cremated.

They did the autopsy and the medical examiner said everything was actually, for an 84-year-old man, was in pretty good shape. And the only issue were his lungs. And the lungs were congested and they had sort of kind of a burned out look, as if they had been exposed to a gas or a severe irritant.

So the district attorney said, of course, this is what caused it. And what do you think he said? This was the cause of his death was the chloroform, right? Sure. Now, when you say his lungs had a burned out appearance, do you have any more details about that?

They said sort of like sores, almost like lesions, but the lungs were incredibly irritated. Like it just seemed like almost on the brink of like red marks everywhere and just really irritated is the only description I had. Any testimony about inside the mouth or down the esophagus? No. See, this is what stinks, Paul. You're going to learn when we do stories from the 1900s. I can't call it.

I can't call the medical exam. No, but this is part of... Okay, so the limitations at the time, the limitations of the autopsy. And when I hear lung congestion, of course, the natural thought is...

with the idea that chloroform was potentially used in this case, that the inhalation of chloroform is what the irritant is that caused the issue inside the lungs. However, chloroform and many other substances, when ingested orally, when it's absorbed into the body, you also can get pulmonary edema or lung congestion. And I found like a 1933 article talking about a guy that drank six ounces of chloroform and at autopsy, his lungs were congested.

So this is where now the idea of this rag being laid over rice's mouth for a period of time, I wonder more, is it possible that rice was given something to drink that contained chloroform? And we see this type of response today. I had a tragic case of a teenage boy who I rolled out on who was dead laying face up and he had ingested an entire bottle of cough syrup containing codeine.

And his lungs, you could see it, he was foaming at the mouth because of all the pulmonary edema that is now extruding. We see this in these overdose-type deaths. So the chloroform, absent the technology today to be able to identify chloroform in the body, I start questioning, well, if there was chloroform used...

Was it inhalation versus oral ingestion? And at autopsy, chloroform, because it has such a distinct odor, pathologists would often be able to smell that odor when they open up the body. So that's where I could, did this pathologist note that? Did he actually pay attention to the oral cavity? Did he pay attention to the esophagus and the stomach?

Like to see, is there the possibility that this was actually something that had been fed to rice, maybe in a liquid form versus this rag over his mouth? I just, the rag over the mouth, unless somebody with a lot of knowledge comes in and says, yes, it's a possibility under these circumstances. I'm just skeptical of that. Yeah, it seems odd. And Jones is just unreliable emotionally.

in general, I think now Albert Patrick had an attorney, but mostly he represented himself because he was that kind of an attorney. He wanted to represent himself.

And Albert Patrick said the congestion from the lungs is not chloroform because I never told Jones to do that. I had nothing to do with that. It was the embalming fluid. Okay. And at the time, the doctor said that is impossible. The heart valves would not allow embalming fluid through. But now people and medical experts today say it is possible the embalming fluid could have been in the lungs. What do you think about that? Well,

If you have the fluid, the embalming fluid, which formaldehyde, methanol, and some other chemicals, these of course are going to be chemicals that are not kind to the lungs. But this is where having a good pathologist, and we don't know because you can determine very rapidly, is this due to just the embalming process or

Or do I have vital reactions occurring because now you have living tissue as rice is succumbing to exposure to, let's say, chloroform. You have inflammation responses. They take tissue samples and look at them under the microscope to see what types of cells are flowing in to the alveoli and everything else to determine, am I dealing with something that is because the body was exposed to something or

Or am I dealing with a post-mortem artifact and these solvents, the embalming fluid, being able to pass through into the lungs? Right now, I couldn't answer that. But that would be my question today to a pathologist is, okay, did you do enough to be able to eliminate the fact that this could be something that happened after death? To me, the crux of this case is it is a little bit of a medical mystery.

And with the fact that we've got all of these forgeries and this attorney who is obviously manipulative and with the intention of stealing, is that enough? If we take out the medical mystery of how he died, is that enough evidence to say Albert Patrick died?

should be executed because that's what would happen. He would be sent to Sing Sing to the electric chair. Is this enough if we aren't 100% sure that this is murder? That's the question the jury had. Yeah, the totality of the evidence, in my opinion, most certainly points at Patrick and Jones conspiring to kill Rice. And

And his death was caused at the hands of another. This was not a natural death. Now, the actual cause of death, maybe because of the frailty at 84 years old, everything that was being done to him by these two, he succumbed to just, you know, as the pathologist or the doc said, this, you know, nervous prostration due to exhaustion. But this was something that he wouldn't normally have been dealing with. Right. These two people were

giving him mercury, giving him chloroform, doing all this stuff. But I think the totality of the circumstances in my mind, you know, probably goes beyond reasonable doubt that they were responsible for his death.

And it's possible that with Jones' testimony saying, well, it was chloroform, and there is really, absent the introduction of the embalming fluid, there's nothing necessarily contradicting the fact that chloroform could have been used. So I think there's sufficient cause to convict. But of course, if the only option is to execute, that's where it kind of gets into where you see more of a stratification situation.

of the murder laws today. So the jury has an option going, okay, it doesn't rise to this. In this case, if they convict, there's no question, there's pre-planning, there's malice aforethought. So that's going to be one of those things that separates first from second murder, at least in California. What are the special circumstances that would kick it up into a death eligible case?

So from my perspective, I could see where the conundrum would be. Does the state execute somebody when we can't prove that either one of them actually utilized a chemical weapon? Yeah. To me, it comes down to had these men not been doing what they were doing, giving the mercury, had he just laid down that night and gone to sleep without chloroform on his face or anything else?

is it likely he would have woken up the next day? Probably, despite being 84. Because the medical examiner said the rest of his organs were in great shape for a man his age.

And Patrick and Jones had been worried that he was going to keep living for years because he was in good shape. I guess that's what bullion base and eggs will do for you. But the jury agreed with you that there was a sufficient amount of evidence that they were guilty. And Albert Patrick was sentenced to sing-sing to the electric chair. And Charles Jones walked. He had total immunity. He left.

He ended up about several decades later taking his own life. Again, I think struggles with mental illness or problems with this case. So flash forward 10 years, Albert Patrick spends 10 years in prison and he has a whole team of attorneys working this entire time. His sister-in-law,

very fortuitously married into a wealthy family who believed him. And they appeal after appeal after appeal. And finally, they won an appeal. And he was commuted from the death penalty from the electric chair to life in prison. And then a couple of years later, the governor of New York pardoned him. Oh, wow. And he walked out.

So the governor of New York said, and a lot of doctors did come forward and say, you cannot connect chloroform to the virus.

to this death. You cannot definitively say it. Yes, this guy is a terrible person and an unscrupulous attorney, but you cannot say definitively that he is a murderer. He should have never been sent to Sing Sing. So that's what the governor said. Now, of course, there's all sorts of rumors that I believe that the family paid off everybody they possibly could to get him out. But he got out and he ended up living a really quiet life in Oklahoma. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. Yeah.

That's the goal, Paul Holst. Well, I thought he went to the electric chair, so. No. He didn't get any of the money. So thank goodness, though, the silver lining on this whole case, and actually I wouldn't call that silver lining. I would just say the bright spot of any of this

is that the money ended up going where it was supposed to go. James Baker, the attorney, took the money, figured out the correct will, and used the money for what it was intended to, which is to build one of the most wonderful universities in the country in Houston, Texas.

So William Marsh Rice comes away from this. There is the legacy of, of course, racism and not wanting to have black students there. Ultimately, he is given back a school that is outstanding that almost never happened. It came so close to not happening. The richness of that is incredible.

Yeah, that history is just amazing. You know, in terms of, of course, I've heard of Rice University, but it's usually within the NCAA football setting than anything else. But to know that this homicide or this murder trial and all the shenanigans that happened

were going on really could have prevented that university from existing. That's just where it's so interesting and fun to dig into these old cases because you learn so much, you know, in terms of how things are existing today. Well, it's based on this type of backdrop. Well, I have to bet when you first sent me sort of just that three sentences of the overview of this case, I

It was like, okay, so we're dealing with a will and maybe chloroform. I wasn't exactly sure how this case was going to play out and not sure how much I could contribute to it. But it was like, oh, there's a lot of backstory that really is compelling about, well, this is what happened, you know, and I think the jury got it right. Well, I'm excited because I loved hearing all of your perspective on all this, because again, that

that was the whole point of doing this was, do we think they got it right? And do we think they got it wrong? And what would we have done differently? So that's exactly what I was hoping to get out of it. And my goal is I love twists and turns. I don't like boring, straight shot stories. I like surprising things.

And I like to have details and to have characters that we can really come to life. And William Marsh Rice was not the perfect character, but boy, his life was interesting and it was really fun retelling it. So thank you for that journey, Paul Holes. I can't wait for next week. So what I'm gathering is, is you're going to be surprising me each week with the story. Every week. Okay. You should be surprised if I don't surprise you is what I'm thinking.

what I'm talking about. I'm looking forward to it. This was great. Me too. Me too. This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashan and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our art

work is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod. Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind, is available for pre-order now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.