Halloween is with us again, with trick-or-treaters, pumpkins, and the Houdini seance, held annually by a group of prominent magicians to honor the memory of the man regarded as the greatest magician of all time, although Houdini preferred to refer to himself as a "mystifier" or an "escapologist"

Houdini died on Halloween, 1926, at the age of 52, supposedly of peritonitis caused by being struck in the stomach by a college boy as a prank. This is the story that I have read, and believed, all my life. But how accurate is it really? Internationally-known forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden has pointed out a pair of oddities in Houdini's death certificate. The appendix in Houdini's body was listed as being on the left side of the body, rather than the right. Also, the diagnosis of peritonitis caused by a punch was "very unusual", according to Dr. Baden. Two other things to keep in mind are that there was no autopsy, and that Houdini was in remarkable physical condition. He trained constantly, dieting, exercising, and performing breathing exercises. Is it really likely that a man with such a heavily-muscled physique would die from a punch to the stomach?

Harry Houdini came from a Hungarian Jewish background. His family emigrated to the United States when he was four, in 1878, but like many Eastern European immigrants at the time, they found little welcome or success there. In 1893, determined to make something of himself, Houdini launched a career as a professional magician. At first he found little success until he began billing himself as  "The King of Handcuffs". He would issue challenges to police departments or members of the audience to bring in various pairs of handcuffs, which he would then free himself from. In each city where he toured, Houdini would challenge the local police to restrain him with shackles and lock him in one of their cells, stripped nude. He never failed to make his escape good. Audiences were fascinated and titillated, and Houdini's career as an "escapologist " was born.

Houdini never failed to amaze the public. His famous "Milk Can Escape", where a shackled Houdini broke free from a can filled with milk, or in one of the first advertising "tie-ins" a certain brand of beer, was superseded by his stupendous "Chinese Water Torture Cell" where Houdini was locked into a pair of stocks which confined his feet and suspended him upside down in a tank of water, from which he would make his escape. Houdini often would have himself hung upside down from tall buildings confined in a straitjacket, from which he would extricate himself in front of cheering crowds.

Houdini made many friends among his travels, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, well-known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. By the time Houdini met him, Conan Doyle was an embittered and unhappy man. His wife and son and nephews had died, the latter in the trenches in WWI, and he had fallen into a belief in Spiritualism. Spiritualism was a popular fad at the time, invented by the Fox sisters in upstate New York, who discovered that by cracking their toe-joints in Morse code they could dupe people into believing them to be "mediums" and giving them money during seances where they "spoke to the dead". Houdini did everything he could to wean his friend Conan Doyle away from the influences of such persons but the harder he tried the more Conan Doyle believed that Houdini was simply possessed of mediumistic powers himself. One time, in an attempt to prove to Conan Doyle how fake were the powers claimed by "mediums" Houdini removed his own thumb and ate it. Of course this was just common conjuring but Conan Doyle thought it proved Houdini's powers. It is sad to relate that the inventor of Sherlock Holmes spent over a quarter of a million pounds on spiritualists, and a pound was a pound in those days.

Eventually the inevitable happened and Conan Doyle broke with Houdini. Houdini's mother, whom he worshipped, died. Houdini then became obsessed with exposing fake mediums and destroying Spiritualism, which he regarded as total charlatanism. He attended many seances, many in disguise, and exposed the tricks of mediums. As a member of the investigative board of Scientific American, Houdini put many mediums to the test. He exposed all of them; none were shown to have any supernatural powers of any kind. It goes without saying that as Spiritualism was a popular fad at the time and these "mediums" charged huge fees that Houdini was making himself some very powerful enemies.

Among those enemies was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who in a letter written in 1924 stated, "Houdini... would get his just desserts very exactly meted out...I think there is a general payday coming soon" Of course, the question is, did certain well known mediums with the help of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle poison Houdini with arsenic? Wouldn't it be much more likely that a man in perfect health, who only a few months before had succeeded in remaining underwater in a sealed lead casket for one hour and fifteen minutes in response to a challenge to an Egyptian fakir died from poison rather than a punch to the stomach? As Houdini was always traveling and eating in trains and hotels it would not have been at all hard to poison him. Also, weren't the symptoms of Houdini's last illness more suggestive of arsenic poisoning than peritonitis as he was able to go on performing for two days after he became ill? Again, is peritonitis really caused by a punch in the stomach? If a doctor of the experience of Dr Baden, who assisted in the investigation of the Kennedy Assassination has never heard of such a thing why should we question his vast experience?

Unfortunately, we will never learn the truth as a planned exhumation of Houdini's body was blocked by members of his wife's family. Dr Baden planned to test the corpse for arsenic, which he assured that he could do even if there were only skeletal remains left. From what I have read of arsenic murders if Houdini really was poisoned with arsenic we would be surprised at how well-preserved he was.

Personally, I feel that if Houdini is there on "the other side" as the Spiritualists called it, he would be perfectly thrilled to still be in the news, eighty years later. And, if he was murdered by Conan Doyle and the Spiritualism movement, nothing would please him more than that the whole world should know, at last. 

 "Angel of Death" is a term used by the FBI and forensic psychologists to describe a medical worker, i.e. a doctor, nurse, or technician, who purposely murders or harms their patients, generally in a hospital setting. This is quite separate from euthanasia, as many of the patients harmed or killed in "Angels of Death" cases are not even particularly ill and have every hope of recovery. Most "Angels of Death" are females, employed as nurses or nurses' aides, although there have been some notable exceptions, such as Dr. Harold Shipman, who murdered over three hundred older women by injecting them with overdoses of morphine.

However, Shipman is the exception that proves the rule. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, "When a woman goes wrong, she is the first of criminals". Let's look at some notable cases.

1.Nurse Jane Toppan, Boston, Massachusetts - 100+ victims - medium: morphine and atropine

2.Nurse Genene Jones, Bexar County, Texas - 75+ victims - medium: heparin, insulin and succinylcholine

3.Nurse Kristin Gilbert, Northampton, Massachusetts - 12+ victims - medium: potassium injections

4.Three nurses in a "killing team" unnamed for legal reasons -  Vienna, Austria - 300+ victims - medium: water and manual strangulation

Why would nurses and doctors, who are trained to save lives and help people, want to harm their patients? Most of these criminals, when caught, generally claim to have started by euthanizing terminally ill patients who were suffering. They then claim that the urge to kill grows and grows and rapidly becomes what could be called a "God complex" For example, the nurses in Vienna would murder patients because they complained a lot or were incontinent. Those patients were inconvenient. They deserved to die.

In other cases the perpetrators of these crimes are what could only be called "losers". Dr Harold Shipman, who had once lost his medical license for being a morphine addict, used to murder on those days when he had had arguments with his wife. Genene Jones was so afraid of losing her job and becoming a "nothing" that she would make sure the wards were full of seriously ill children  who needed to be tended - children who had come into the hospital for tests or minor ailments who were injected by Jones with heparin, a blood-thinner, or with insulin.

The case of the "Benghazi Six", those heroes and heroines soon to be portrayed in a major Hollywood production which I for one shall miss, has always seemed to me a prima facie "Angels of Death" case. If you eliminate all the nonsense written about the case, most of it unfortunately by the Libyans themselves, about Mossad agents and other such idiocies and just look at the bare bones of the case itself, it is totally obvious that an individual or individuals was going about a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and injecting children with the AIDS virus.

We have all heard about the famous medical report issued by Professor Luc Montagnier which supposedly proves the innocence of these hospital workers. I believe it proves nothing of the kind. For example, we are all supposed to be floored by the fact that AIDS existed at the El-Fath hospital before the Bulgarians began working there and supposedly was spread by reusing needles and medical tubing. Well, I have some questions about this. For example, if AIDS was so rife in Benghazi during the time of the El-Fath epidemic, why did it exist at NO OTHER hospital or clinic in the entire region? Why were ONLY children at the El-Fath facility affected? In an actual iatrogenic epidemic everyone in a facility is affected, not just children and only children in one particular ward, the one where the Bulgarians worked. As far as the fact that yes, there was an AIDS patient at this particular hospital and that the strain found in the children was the same, well, if it were an "Angels of Death" case what would you expect to find? To me this absolutely proves guilt and not innocence. The guilty party took blood from the infected person and simply injected it into the children. The stuff about tubing and needles being "reused" was simply assumed by Montagnier in his report. There was no actual evidence that any tubing or needles were ever reused. This is where I feel the racism in this case rears its ugly head, although there was racism on both sides. Somehow the assumption by Montagnier that tubes and needles were being reused was reported as fact in the western media, and because the hospital was in Africa everyone believed it without question. I guess that we are also supposed to believe that these tubes and needles were taken from the adult ward where the AIDS patient was and only reused in one children's ward, and only reused by these Bulgarian nurses, whom one would assume had higher standards of hygiene than the other workers in the hospital, not lower.

Of course the case was horribly mishandled from the start. An expert in "Angels of Death" cases probably could have solved this case in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately in Libya they seem not to have ever had a case like this before and don't understand that there are medical personnel who kill and harm their patients for psychological reasons - hence the Mossad conspiracy nonsense which made the Libyans look like fools in the eyes of the world. Another interesting aspect of this case is that it shows how totally useless torture is as an investigative tool. I hope the Bush regime is taking heed.

All I can say in closing is that Nurse Jane Toppan has lost her crown as the worlds' single most successful "Angel of Death". There is someone walking around in Bulgaria or even possibly in Libya who will ultimately be responsible for the deaths of over four hundred children, and who got off scot-free. Horrible, horrible, horrible. 

To My Readers: I am sorry for the gap in publishing articles, but my computer was hacked into and ruined by a rival webmaster, who is unfortunately suffering from a form of dementia.