Did whitehead really kill houdini

Answer 1

Is the following speculative scenario possible?

For over a decade, Houdini publicly exposed fraudulent spirit mediums who, in turn, finally decided to strike back at him in order to protect their business. They hired Whitehead to rough him up in order to get Houdini to leave them alone.

They did not intend to kill him yet the punches resulted in appendicitis. The appendicitis became acute and his appendix later burst, flooding Houdini's abdominal cavity with lethal streptococcus germs. The next day the ruptured appendix was removed but the poison was too much to overcome and Harry died six days later.

While I think that there is a reasonable chance that this is close to what actually happened, it is not provable by what is known at this time.

But the story may still interest you so let's look into it further.

Harry Houdini, the world famous escape artist and magician, died in 1926 at the age of 52 after suffering from complications of appendicitis nine days after four very severe blows to the stomach. He claimed he could take punches from anyone, yet this time, he was caught off guard and was not able to firm up his muscles.

While many people claim that trauma to the abdomen has never been known to cause appendicitis, here is what his attending physician, Dr. Kennedy, said: "It is the only case of traumatic appendicitis I had ever seen in my lifetime, but the logic of the thing seems to indicate that Mr. Houdini died of appendicitis, the direct result of the injury."

With this in mind, it is interesting to note that since the death was attributed to the blows, Mrs. Houdini received a $50,000 insurance payout rather than the $25,000 that the appendicitis on its own would have yielded. The insurance company looked closely into the matter and accepted the expert testimony of the attending physicians. No matter the cause of the appendicitis, if Houdini had received timely medical attention, his appendix could have been removed before it burst and he might have lived.

But is there more to the story?

I think that the punches were possibly an intentional assault and the resulting death was an accident. Whitehead, the young man who delivered the blows, might have been acting on his own or, perhaps, doing a job for a sinister group of fake mediums.