Let's Exhume a Mystery

By now, nearly two months after the fact, Anna Nicole Smith's death continues to rivet us all. The cover of this week's issue of InTouch magazine says, "Investigator's shocking claim, The Killer Is... Is Dannielynn in danger?" The editors lost their train of thought midway through that tagline there, but one thing reads loud and clear: the corpse of Anna Nicole is a first class ticket to Increasedreadershipville.

So many mysteries surround her tragic demise. How many pills did she take before she died? How long did it take for her to die? What did she do in the interim between taking those pills and finally dying? How exactly did she position her body just before death? Did she experience any pain in dying? Is she really dead? I don't think anyone will be satisfied until her body is autopsied at least four or five times.

Not to be outdone, the estate of another tragic and beautiful entertainer, Harry Houdini, has taken cues from our newsmagazines' relentless quest for truth and demanded the magician's body be exhumed and tested for traces of poison. Houdini's official cause of death was peritonitis caused by an appendix that ruptured after a young man punched him in the stomach in a test of abdominal strength. No autopsy was performed. That, of course, was 1926, and we've learned to treat our dead celebrities much differently since then.

What does the Houdini estate expect to do if they find that their relative was, in fact, murdered? "There will be an all-out witch hunt," says Brandon Houdini, great-grandson of the famous magician. "The name of the man or woman who killed my great-grandfather will be posthumously defamed and all of his or her titles will be stripped away, assuming he or she had any titles to be stripped of."

Harry Houdini's death raised suspicion immediately after it happened. In the final years of his life Houdini had received numerous death threats from members of a group called the Spiritualists, presumably because many of his stage shows included acts that exposed the group's fraudulent seances. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and a member of the group, said before the magician's death that Houdini would "get his just desserts very exactly meted out," and also, "the hour is nigh for this clever little weasel to make his date with the Mistress Arsenic."

What would it mean for fans of Sherlock Holmes to know that the author of their beloved detective could have conspired to kill the "Handcuff King"? Luckily for them, science has only advanced so far as to be able to verify how a long-dead person actually died. There's still no way to tell if Doyle had any hand in the killing. It seems no matter how many bodies we exhume, we'll never be able to answer the most important questions: not what, but who killed Houdini and Anna Nicole? It just goes to show that it doesn't matter how many mysteries you've buried, there are some things that science will not be able to posthumously determine. Never ever. Vindicated.