The Murder(?) of William Marsh Rice

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have a friend who sends me like historical tidbits and clips from old newspapers that he digs up from time to time. Usually these are things that are simultaneously interesting and kind of weird. Uh, sometimes it's very weird. Earlier this year, though, he sent a message about a reported murder from more than a century ago, and just from the details that trickled through over these texts, I thought, Okay, that's got to go on the list. This is probably the most well known among people from Texas and people who are affiliated with Rice University in Houston, because it is the of the university's founder and namesake, William marsh Rice. Today we're going to talk about how William marsh Rice amassed a fortune big enough that he was basically able to establish an entire university by himself, and how that fortune also made him a target for murder. Although William marsh Rice's namesake university is of course in Texas, he was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March fourteenth eighteen sixteen. His parents were David and Patty hall Rice, and he was the third of their ten children, seven of whom survived infancy. William was named for the Reverend William Marsh, a Methodist circuit writer who established a Methodist Episcopal Society in that area in eighteen fifteen. David and Patty were its first two members. David worked at the Springfield Armory, which was the United States first federal arsenal. He also worked as a tax assessor and a tax collector and represent into Springfield in the General Court of Massachusetts. Later in William's life, he wrote a letter in which he described his parents as very hard working and devoted to their children, and said that his father in particular had such a quote firm reliance upon providence that nothing seemed to lay heavy on his mind. While William was still a boy, Massachusetts passed a law requiring any town with five hundred families or more to build a high school. William's father was on the committee that worked to build the school in Springfield, and the Rices were one of the families that financially contributed to its construction. So it seems like education was pretty important to them, and it would have made sense for William to have enrolled in the school when it opened, but there isn't any record of this, and the family lore is that at around age fifteen he actually left school to work at a store. Rice turned twenty one in eighteen thirty seven, and at that point he had saved enough money to buy a store of his own, but that same year, a combination of factors triggered the Panic of eighteen thirty seven. Rice's reasons for leaving Massachusetts after this aren't documented anywhere, but it's extremely likely that this business he'd started for himself suffered during this financial crisis, and at about the same time people in the United States, we're hearing about cheap land and new business opportunities that were available in the Republic of Texas, including through advertisements that were intentionally trying to attract more Anglos to the area. In eighteen thirty eight, Rice moved to Texas, sending a load of goods to Galveston by sea so that he could set up a store there. He traveled by rail and then by packet ships so that he could meet up with it. Rice's cargo did not make it to Galveston, though the ship that it was on was lost at sea, and this may have been a factor in his decision to move on from Galveston to Houston. Houston had been founded in eighteen thirty six and in eighteen thirty seven, and it had been named the capital of the Republic of Texas. At that point, it was barely getting started as a city, and there were more tense than permanent structures, but Houston had obvious potential to become a bustling trading center. It was situated on Buffalo Bayou, which connected to the Port of Galveston through Galveston Bay, so people from the surrounding area could send their goods overland to Houston, and from there it could be shipped out to the Port of Galveston by water. In February of eighteen thirty nine, the Harrisburg County Board of Commissioners granted Rice three and twenty acres of land in Houston, and then that April, Rice got a contract to both supply and serve liquor at the Milum Hotel. He was paid the cost of the alcohol plus three dollars a day, and his board. This job might conjure up an image of somebody who really enjoyed or at least cared about alcoholic beverages. But Rice himself seems to have been a teetotaler. It was his job, it was a good business opportunity, clearly that se he just seems to have been like, whatever I can put my hand in to get some money, go and it'll be good. Rice formed a series of business partnerships in the Houston area. One was with Barnabas Haskell in August of eighteen forty, but that partnership seems to have fizzled out pretty quickly. Not long after, he became partners with Charles W. Adams. Their joint ventures included a sugar plantation. Around eighteen forty four, Rice started an import export business with Ebeneezer B. Nichols, who had fought against Mexico and against Indigenous nations while serving in the army, and together they did business as Rice and Nichols Exporters, Importers and Wholesale Grocers of Houston. This business imported all kinds of stuff, basically anything that people living in Texas could want our need, but they exported mostly cotton, and this was true of Houston's other exporters as well. Houston's next biggest export at this point was hides, and once a sawmill was built in the eighteen forties, lumber joined cotton and hides, but both hides and lumber were way way behind the amount of cotton that moved from Houston to Galveston and then out to other parts of the world. The Texas Constitution outlawed the chartering of banks. That was something that would continue until after the US Civil War, so as Rice and his business partners became wealthy enough to do it, they started offering basic banking services in addition to their work as merchants and cotton brokers, things like offering loans and lines of credit. Businesses in Texas couldn't issue currency, though, so when people needed it, they relied on US, Spanish, and Mexican currency, even though it wasn't always clear what their actual value should be. Because of this lack of a centralized currency, people also paid their debts in other ways as well, so some of Rice's clients paid him in land, and that, of course added to his wealth. In eighteen forty five, Texas became a US state, entering the Union as a slave state. At this point, the United States was trying to maintain a balance between free enslave states in the Senate. That balance was tipped slightly in favor of slave states until eighteen forty eight, and that's when Wisconsin entered the Union as a free state. This was not just a political or theoretical issue for William marsh Rice. The cotton industry, which was such a central part of his business, was profitable because of its exploitation of enslaved labor, and Rice wasn't simply exporting cotton and selling imports to enslavers. He was also acting as a cotton factor, loaning money to landowners and cotton growers in the window between when they delivered their crop and when they were actually paid for it, and also just handling other business for them. William's brother, Frederick, also owned a cotton plantation with an enslaved workforce of at least thirty five people, and William both sold the cotton grown there and helped his brother to run that business. William was also more directly involved. He spent at least a year serving on a slave patrol, which worked to track down and return people who had liberated themselves from slavery. As part of this, he posted advertisements with physical descriptions of people who had escaped and offering rewards for their return. In addition to notices that he placed on other people's behalf, William's advertisements included ones for people who had escaped from him. William enslaved people for most of his time in Texas before the Civil War. Enslave schedules from the eighteen sixties censes he is listed as enslaving fifteen people. Some had been given to him as payment for debts and some had been part of land deals. He bought the land or took possession of the land as payment for a debt, and enslaved people who were made to work the land just came with it. He also purchased people directly, including a seventeen year old named Amanda, who he bought at a public auction for one thousand, fifty dollars. As another example, in eighteen forty eight, he and Ebenezer Nichols were together enslaving a seventeen year old named Ellen and Ellen's one year old daughter. William transferred his portion of their ownership over to Ebenezer's son, Frank Rice Nichols as a gift, even though Rice participated in and massively benefited from the institution of slavery. Some historians and biographers have concluded that he did not support the Southern States secession over the issue, which of course launched the Civil War. His business dealings suggested that he understood how much power and wealth was really focused in the Northern States and with the federal government. He also had a nephew who served with the thirty seventh Massachusetts Volunteers, who later suggested that one of the reasons Rice ultimately moved away from Texas was that he was suspected of having Northern sympathy. At the same time, though in the early years of the war, Rice and his wife worked to raise money for and to otherwise support Confederate soldiers and their widows, and any statements that Rice made after the war was over about supporting the Union or rejecting the Confederacy really can't just be taken at face value. Once the war was over, it was absolutely in his best interest personally and financially to try to establish the idea that he had been pro Union all along. I'm one of the good guys. We have gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. In the chronology of this discussion of William marsh Rice's history as an enslaver. So we are going to take a quick break, and then we're gonna rewind a few years before the Civil War started. On June twenty nine of eighteen fifty, thirty four year old William arsh Rice married eighteen year old Margaret C. Bremen, with newspapers describing their wedding at the Capitol Hotel as splendid. William bought them a house in Houston. This was actually one that his business partner, Ebeneezer Nichols had started building but not finished yet, before deciding to move to Galveston to manage their operations there. At some point around this time, William also started attending an Episcopalian shirts rather than a Methodist church, possibly because Margaret was Episcopalian and the Nichols family were Episcopalians as well. In eighteen fifty one, Rice helped establish the Houston and Galveston Navigation Company. After his brother Frederick moved to Texas, they established William Rice and Company. In eighteen fifty eight, William bought a brig he named the William M. Rice, which he used to import ice from Massachusetts. We are not sure whether this was connected to Frederick Tutor's ice business that we have covered on the show before, but he sold the ship at the start of the Civil War. Yeah. Unfortunately, the Frederick Tutor book that might have had that information went back to the library years ago. I actually worked on that episode, uh, and I could not retrieve it again in the timeline for this episode. Anyway. Even though Rice doesn't seem to have had much formal education himself, he does seem to have been interested in the educational systems in the community where he was living. In eighteen fifty seven he became a board member of the Houston Education Society, and in eighteen fifty nine he became a trustee of the Ward Free School and of Texas Medical College. By this point he had a reputation for being a skilled and reliable businessman. He had an estimated fortune of about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which made him one of the richest men in Texas. He was probably second only to sugar planter John Hunter Herndon, whose wealth primarily came from his huge landholdings and the work force that he enslaved. Sometime before the start of the Civil war, Rice dissolved his partnership with Ebenezer Nichols. This seems to have been an amical division of their business, with Nichols doing business in Galveston while Rice focused largely on Houston. The U. S Civil War started, of course, in eighteen sixty one, and at first Rice continued to run his business from Houston. He didn't join the army. It sort of seems like it was kind of business as usual, sort of, except with the blockade and whatnot, at least at the beginning. But then his wife, Margaret died on August thirteenth of eighteen sixty three. After her death, William left Texas, where their home was used as a military hospital. He drew up a will, leaving everything to his brother, and then he went to matt to Borrow's Mexico. This had become a popular location for people who were trying to ship goods without having to use blackade runners to get through the Union blockade of Confederate ports. After the war, Rice claimed that he had never run the blockade. This leaves some unanswered questions, like he was able to essentially legally go around it from Mexico, but he was still in Houston. For a chunk of the war. So it's not totally clear whether he was being honest when he claimed never to have used blackade. Runners. Probably not sitting on his hands during that time, right, um, So regardless of that, as we said earlier, it wasn't his best interest to make it seem like he had been as law abiding by Union standards as possible. He stayed in Mexico until August of eighteen sixty five, and of course Rice faced some financial losses as a result of the war. Confederate currency and bonds were both worthless afterward. When applying for amnesty after the war, he claimed that he had been financially ruined, but really he managed to protect a lot of his investments. He had gotten his brother to sell out his stock in Houston, and he had tinued to trade in cotton and necessary goods from Mexico. He also had other investments besides the ones we've discussed, including plank roads and railroads. Rice went back to Houston, as we said, right after the war was over, but then not long after that he moved to New Jersey, where he worked as an agent for Houston and Texas Railroad. In addition to the Railroad. He kept a lot of business ties in Texas, including becoming a director of Houston Insurance Company in June of eighteen sixty six. On June eighteen sixty seven, Rice married Julia Elizabeth Baldwin Brown, known to family as Libby. She was the widowed sister of his brother Frederick's wife, and William had also acted as her late husband's agent. Although they got married in Houston, they went back east not long after the wedding, possibly because of a terrible yellow fever epidemic that struck Houston that summer. That epidemic killed nearly five hundred people. That was the worst yellow fever at to make ever to strike that city. For a lot of their marriage, William and Elizabeth lived primarily in New York and New Jersey. William bought a farm in Donnellen, New Jersey, and that eventually had an orchard, a dairy in a smoke house. They often spent winters in Houston, but there were years long stretches where they didn't go back to Texas at all. This didn't seem to suit his wife, though William really loved the farm, but Elizabeth wanted to have friends and social engagements and more amusements than were really available out in the country. Eventually, William got an apartment for them in Manhattan, and she seemed happier there, and from there she took on various charitable pursuits. In five Rice also bought the Capitol Hotel in Houston, where they stayed when they visited, eventually having a suite built and furnace just for their use. In eighteen eighty seven or eighteen eighty eight, Caesar Maurice Lombardi, who was president of the Houston School Board, came to Rice about funding a municipal high school. The city council was not really enthusiastic about the project. According to Lombardi, they thought high school was quote high falutin nonsense. But as we've discussed, Rice was already involved in various educational institutions. His parents had been as well. But after considering this proposal, he decided that funding the high school was really the city's job and he wanted to do something different. He decided to use his fortune to build the William M. Rice Institute of Literature, Science, and Art. Mis replaced an earlier idea that he had been working on to fund an orphanage that would have been not far from his farm in New Jersey. Rice established a board of trustees, and on May thirteenth, he provided a two hundred thousand dollar endowment, quote, devoted to the instruction and improvement of the white inhabitants of the City of Houston and State of Texas through and by the establishment and maintenance of a public library and Institute for the advancement of literature, science, and Art. Later that month, the institute was incorporated. Under its articles of incorporation, it was to be devoted to the quote establishment and maintenance of a thorough polytechnic school for males and females designed to give instructions on the application of science and art to the useful occupations of life. This document also specified that the quote library, reading room, scientific department, and polytechnic school, and the instruction, benefits and enjoyments to be derived from the institute to be free and open to all. It was also specified that the school would be built only after Rice's death. I read some speculation that this was because the Capitol Hotel had turned into kind of a money pit and like a maintenance nightmare, and that maybe he just didn't want to have to deal with something like that for his institute while he was alive. The Rice's return to New York later in eighteen ninety one, it was to a larger, nicer apartment. In eighty three, William drew up a will that left most of his fortune, which was estimated at about four million dollars, to the institute, with the rest divided up among various people, including provisions to make sure his wife had an income if she survived him. Elizabeth didn't outlive William, though she got sick in the winter of eighteen and in the spring of eighteen ninety six they went to Houston, hoping that the warmer weather would help her. After they got there, though she had what sounds like a stroke. Afterwards, she was paralyzed on her right side, and her cognitive abilities seemed to have been seriously affected as well. But then, in June of eighteen ninety six or in Thaddeus Holt drew up a new will for Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother and sister witnessed it, and Holt was named as executor. This will claimed that Elizabeth was a resident of Texas, which meant that under the state's community property laws, half of William's estate would be hers to bequeath even if William was still alive when she died. All of this was done without William's knowledge, and it is really not clear how involved Elizabeth was in the decision to do this or the terms of the will itself. But the terms of the will specified that the executor would receive ten percent of everything that he received and paid out. Under its terms, Elizabeth's bequeathals added up to about one point to five million dollars, or twice that much if it turned out William's estate was worth more than expected, so that meant that as executor of this estate or in Holt stood to make at least a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. All of this seems shady deeply. As the summer progressed in Houston, the heat seemed to make Elizabeth's condition worse, so the Rices went to a healing retreat in Waukasha, Wisconsin. Although Elizabeth did seem to fare a bit better in Wisconsin, the opposite was true for William. He went back to New York, something that he said was both ordered by a doctor and what his wife wanted. Elizabeth died on July eighteen ninety six, at which point Williams still knew nothing about the will that or in Holt had drawn up. When that will was admitted to probate in March of eighteen ninety seven, Rice filed suit arguing that although they had been in Texas when this will was created, they were residents of New York, so Texas's community property laws did not apply. Around this time, Rice met a man named Charles Jones, who was known as Charlie. Charlie had been told to look after a trunk that had been sent from Waukasha to Houston, which belonged to the late Mrs Rice. In the spring of eighteen seventy nine, when will and returned to New York after filing suit in Texas, he took Jones with him as his valet. We will talk more about this after another sponsor break. Legal action over Elizabeth Brice's will went on for years, and during this time William marsh Rice mostly stayed in New York. He became increasingly solitary, maybe a little eccentric. He spent most of his time reading journals, writing lots of letters, trying to look after his health. He had developed some chronic digestive problems and seems to have been very focused on trying to stay as healthy as possible. He had folks in Houston looking after his business interests there, and in New York, his only real companion was his ballet, Charlie Jones. Meanwhile, or In T Holt, who had drawn up Elizabeth Rice's contested will, was still trying to gather evidence to support his case that she should be considered a resident of Texas. This required investigations and interviews in Houston, New York, and New Jersey, and Holt realized that he just could not do it all by himself, so he hired another lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, to handle things in New York and New Jersey. Patrick's investigation naturally brought him into contact with Rice's valet, and Charlie Jones later testified that around the end of eighteen Patrick started convincing him that they should try to get some of Rice's fortune for themselves. In January of nineteen hundred, Walter Weatherby, who was a clerk at the bank that Rice used in New York, came to him and asked him for a loan. Jones eavesdropped on this conversation and later went to weather Be, describing Rice as quote old and dopey and claiming that he could get Rice to sign anything. Jones proposed that weather B dropped a new will for William marsh Rice, which Jones would get him to sign. Whether By did not take him up on this offer, but he also didn't tell anyone about it. Also, at early Charlie Jones got sick and Albert Patrick sent his doctor Walker Curry to treat him. Curry, who had served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army, prescribed a Mercury tonic. Rice decided to seek some treatment from Curry as well. At this point, Rice did not personally know Patrick, but he did know that Patrick was doing all of these investigations and relating to his wife's will. So Patrick told Curry that he had to keep their whole connection a secret from Rice. Meanwhile, Patrick was building a fake paper trail to make it look like he had an ongoing business relationship with Rice. Patrick pulled in Morris Myers and David Shore, who were a notary and a commissioner of deeds that he knew, and they reported back to Patrick when they signed and notarized documents for Rice so that he could date his forgeries. On the same day, Jones also mailed Patrick blank pieces of paper from Rice's apartment, and once Patrick received them, he replaced the blank paper with documents he had forged. He also started practicing Rice's signature. Jones typed up correspondence for Rice to sign, but he also brought some of those unsigned documents for Patrick to do. Then, in the summer of nine d Patrick drew up a new will for William marsh Rice, one that left most of Rice's fortune to him rather than to the William m Rice Institute of Literature, Science, and Art. So at this point, Rice was eighty four years old. He had chronic digestive trouble and some difficulty walking thanks to an old knee injury. He had actually jumped off of a moving train. After realizing that he had accidentally, he slept through his stop, and that was the source of that problem. Dr Curry described him as weak, with swelling in his hands and feet, a sluggish heartbeat, and some hearing loss. But Rice aspired to live to be as old as his grandfather, Josiah Hall, who had died at the age of a hundred and one Jones later testified that in about August of nine hundred, Patrick started suggesting that they try to speed things along with Rice, but this timeline might not really be accurate. Jones's brother back in Texas had also started buying chloroform and sending it to the men in New York back in July. Regardless of the details of this timeline, though, Jones testified that on Patrick's instructions, he had started giving Rice the mercury pills that Curry had prescribed to him earlier, and larger doses than were intended, eventually giving him so many of these pills that Patrick had to get some more. At first, Rice seems to have thought these pills that Jones was dosing him with were helping to improve his health. Then, on September eight, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas. This storm was catastrophic and deadly. It killed at least six thousand people and possibly even twice that number. It also caused enormous property damage, completely leveling much of Galveston, including buildings that William marsh Rice owned. This is sometimes described as the worst natural disaster in US history, and it is covered in our prior episode five historical storms. Rice still had business interests in Houston and in Galveston, and then, to make things worse, on September six, a fire broke out at the Merchants and Planters Oil Company, which was a cotton seed mill that Rice owned. Rice authorized manager Henry Oliver to draw up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from his accounts to pay for repairs. All of this was financially catastrophic for Rice, and all of the associated stress and trauma aggravated his already difficult digestion. After a friend stopped by and told him that bananas always helped her when her digestion was bad, he went way overboard and he ate nine bananas a day. That made him feel worse, and he took even more of those mercury pills that Jones had given him to try to fix it. We've talked on the show before that mercury was sometimes used as a medicine. Uh, not a great idea. He at this point had taken a lot of it. But Rice was still alive, and Patrick was apparently terrified that if he did not die soon, he would spend his entire fortune trying to rebuild in Texas, and that would make that forged will worthless. So, according to Jones's testimony, on Sunday, September twenty three, nine hundred, Patrick gave him some poison to Sir of to Rice in a t Rice actually found it too bitter and spit it out. By this point, Rice was pretty weak, and Jones carried him to ben Jones later testified that, following Patrick's instructions, he dosed Rice with two ounces of chloroform in a sponge wrapped in a towel that had been pinned in the shape of a cone. After about thirty minutes, he confirmed that Rice was dead, and he retrieved and burned the sponge and towel. Then Patrick came into the apartment posing as Rice's legitimate lawyer. He told the undertaker who arrived, that Rice wanted to be cremated and that the cremation should happen the next day. Jones had actually laid some of the groundwork for this, getting some pamphlets on cremation and staging them on Rice's desk. There was also a letter which was probably forged, in which Rice purportedly requested to be cremated. When the undertaker explained that it was not possible to start the cremation process, so quickly Patrick ordered Rice's body to be embalmed in the interim. By this point, Dr Curry had also arrived and he got a blank death certificate from the undertaker. He filled it out with the cause of death of old age and weak heart immediate cause indigestion, followed by cola coo to diarrhea with mental worry. That's not real, it's not a real word. Yet. I tried to figure out what what Curry meant by cola coo to diarrhea, which, because it's not even an order of letters that would work in English, I don't I don't really know. At first, Rice's death didn't really strike people as suspicious, given his age and his health. But the next day, David Short, that Commissioner of Deeds that Patrick had been working with, tried to cash a check for twenty five thousand dollars at S. M. S. Winson and Sons Bank, but the clerk at the bank thought something was a miss. Number one. Rice did not typically right checks that large number two. The check was made out to Albert's T. Patrick, but it was endorsed Albert T. Patrick, the clerk refused to process the check and Short left, returning a bit later with a check that had all of the names spelled correctly. The clerk still was not convinced and called Race's apartment at the Berkshire and got Jones on the phone. Jones was evasive, but eventually told the clerk that Rice was dead. Derreck Swinson, who was one of the sons and s w Swinson and sons went to an attorney and they sent word to Houston about Rice's death. Rice's Houston attorney, James A. Baker, contacted Rice's brother, Frederick, and the two of them left for New York. When they got there, Albert Patrick produced the will that he had written back on June thirty, which left Rice's institute only two fifty thousand dollars less any money it had received up to that amount thanks to Rice's earlier endowment and the interest that it had accrued. This will would have left the institute with nothing additional from Rice's estate, and instead left most of the estate to Albert Patrick. Patrick claimed that this was because Rice was quote tired of life and tired of business. Right sure, Rice's actual attorneys and his brother went to the district attorney who ordered an autopsy. This was carried out on September and Rice's body was cremated on the twenty five. At this point, there was all kinds of speculation in newspapers that Rice had been murdered for his money, and this coverage became increasingly sensationalized, especially as various members of Rice's extended family, including people that he had not spoken to in decades if ever, started giving statements to the press saying that they were penniless. On October four, Albert Patrick and Charlie Jones were both arrested for forgery, for that five thousand dollar check that was originally spelled wrong, for the forged will, and for various other forged checks, and then on the seven, the coroner's office issued its report. In Rice's autopsy, the coroner said that there was enough mercury and his organs to have caused his death, plus a lot of arsenic, although they attributed the arsenic to the embalming fluid UH. Later on, there were medical experts who talked about um the effect of chloroform on his lungs. It doesn't seem to have been part of the actual coroner's report. At this point, when the coroner's report came out, Charlie Jones told prosecutors he wanted to make a statement, and he gave a full confession to everything he and Patrick had done, although he said that Patrick was the one who had killed Rice with chloroform. Soon Morris Myers and David Short were arrested for their involvement as well. Before long, though, it became clear that Albert Patrick could not have been the one who gave Rice chloroform. He had eaten dinner that night at his boarding house, and then he had been in the parlor singing hymns with some of the other people who lived there before they all went to a religious meeting, basically had an alibi. After hearing this, Jones confessed that it was he, not Albert Patrick, who had chloroformed William marsh Rice. As all of this was happening, or in Holt settled the lawsuits related to Elizabeth Rice's will out of court. William Rice's murder had added a whole other layer of complication, and it had become clear that he could not build an airtight case that she should have been considered a resident of Texas. Albert T. Patrick was tried for murder and was found guilty. On March twenty six, nineteen o two, he was sentenced to death. The media spectacles surrounding all of this got another jolt a couple of days later when he announced his engagement to Mrs Addie Francis, who owned the boarding house where he lived. He made that announcement, of course, from prison. Two months later, when past podcast subject Hetty Green was granted a permit to carry a pistol, she told reporters that it was for her own protection, citing, among other things, the case of William marsh Rice. Do you suppose Valet Jones would have molested him if he knew Mr Rice had a pistol? Of course he would not have done so. I don't want evil disposed people to repeat that sort of thing on me. On April twenty nine, nineteen o four, all the legal and probate issues were settled surrounding William marsh Rice's will, and the Rice Institute trustees got four millions, six hundred thirty one thousand, two hundred fifty nine dollars and eight cents. But Albert Patrick's family and supporters maintained his inn since they brought in expert witnesses who testified that Charlie Jones's story just did not add up, among other things, if Rice had been chloroformed, as Jones described, the people who came into the apartment and examined the body would have been able to smell it. After years of ongoing legal proceedings, Patrick's sentence was commuted on December twenty, nineteen o six, and he was pardoned in nineteen twelve. He died in nineteen forty. Charlie Jones was not charged in Rice's murder. A lot of the statements that he gave to police contradicted one another or were implausible for various reasons, and at one point he had tried to take his own life while in custody. Ultimately, though he was released, he seems to have gone back to Texas with his brother, and he took his own life there in nineteen fifty four. Most accounts of all of this described Rice's death as a homicide, with Jones and Patrick both directly involved in it. But in The of Old Man Rice, which was published by New York University Press, in Martin L. Friedland describes being certain that Patrick was guilty before he started researching the book, but then becoming more doubtful as his work went on. Friedland consulted medical experts who raised doubts and pointed out inconsistencies between Jones's testimony and how chloroform actually works. Some of these were the exact same points that Patrick's defense team and expert witnesses had made back in the early nineteen hundreds. It is possible that marsh was already dead when Jones tried to chloroform him, or that his account of the chloroform was fabricated. The forgery is easier to substantiate at this point. Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that there was definitely a plot going on to take his money, maybe also to try to hasten him toward death with the mercury pills. The chloroform has some question marks around it, uh, and he was cremated. It will never conclusively be known at this point. The William marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science and Art now William Marsh Rice University, opened on September twenty three, nineteen twelve. A statue of William Marsh Rice, which is referred to around campus as Willie, was erected at the university in nineteen thirty, and Rice's ashes were placed under it. In more recent years, there has been a student led movement to remove this statue because of Rice's enslavement of other people and because he established the university specifically as a whites only institution. When Rice drew up his will, people generally framed the United States as having two races, black and white. So while the university did enroll other non black people of color earlier in its history, its specifically excluded black students for decades. It wasn't until nineteen sixty three, after years of advocacy by students and pressure from outside the university and things like Brown versus Board of Education, the university trustees started trying to find a way out of that white's only clause in Rice's will. This ultimately involved a court case, one that sought to overturn both the whites only clause and Rice's stipulation that the university would not charge tuition. That court case was ultimately successful, and the university's charter was also revised to reflect both of those changes. Although Rice had also specified that this institution would be devoted to quote the city of Houston and State of Texas. Out of state and international students had been admitted almost from the start. Rice University's first known black student was graduate student Raymond Johnson, who was admitted in nineteen sixty six and earned a PhD in mathematics in nineteen sixty nine. The first black underground du it's at Rice where Linda Fay Williams and Theodore Marshall Henderson. They both graduated in n And that is the murder kind of question mark, William marsh Rice, do you have listener mail that is not a question mark? I do. I mean it's still has question marks, though I picked a listener mail that has some question marks. This is from Liam uh and Liam wrote a note that said, hello ladies, I just listened to your Friday episode. Was the Friday episode behind the scenes where we talked about jin and you talked about the KLM houses. I'm very fortunate that pre COVID I flew to the US from the UK with work and KLEM were usually the second best choice of route but always cheaper, so often what I ended up on. So I have a small collection, and yes I have the app, and yes people go nuts. They bring them round on a little tray, and many people ask them to turn the tray round so they can see the numbers to check them off in their app Anyway, the point in writing Klem, we're taken to court over the houses. Once under Dutch log gifts are taxable, and the government argued that these were gifts to some passengers. Klem's defense was that, actually, know these aren't gifts because they are filled. It's actually a farewell drink served in a special container. If the passengers choose not to drink it and take it home, that's up to them. It was a successful defense, even though I've never seen anyone open their house, which Kaleb absolutely no. They sealed them in those fancy bags. If you're connecting so you can bring your liquids through. Some of them go on eBay for hundreds of dollars, but only if it's not been opened. And because I know you love kiddies, here's our three legged rescue Pogo. Um My printer attempted to print the picture of Pogo, but it's so big that it cannot work out. Uh. Liam says, thanks for all the many hours of lifelong learning. I love this story and I tried to go learn more about this, and it's little vague exactly what happened. Um with the legal questions about the delf Blue houses um that Kalem gives out two passengers. The most authoritative source I found was the Kalem blog um, which described this as being not so much about taxes, but but about the idea that airlines were not allowed to give passengers incentives and basically saying, is there some law that says that alcohol has to be served in a glass? Um to build a case for the idea that this is a this is a container and not a gift um, I found some sources that claimed that this was related to US airline deregulation in the nineteen seventies. I was not able to find like actual detail about it in the time allowed before recording today's episode. But regardless, even if this does turn out to be kind of like an apocryphal myth making story around the Hail Them houses, I still find it delightful. So thank you li Liam for this email and for the kiddie picture. If you'd like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. We are also all over social media at Misston History That is where we will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.