Feb. 27, 2004, 11:22AM
Doing right by doing wrong, Part Two:
When William Marsh Rice, the founding benefactor of what is now Rice University, expired in his spacious Manhattan apartment in 1900, his doctor wrote that he had died of old age. Rice was 84.
But after a Texas-born lawyer named Albert Patrick attempted to withdraw the then-extraordinary sum of $250,000 from Rice's bank account immediately after his death, suspicion of foul play blossomed.
When Patrick produced a recently minted will in which Rice switched his bequest of millions from the fledgling Rice Institute to none other than Patrick himself, Gotham's newspapers exploded into a riot of sensational stories.
Jumping the earliest train to New York was Capt. James A. Baker, who had drafted the 1896 will that gave virtually everything to the Rice Institute. Baker, who happened to chair the institute's board, was defending the will and the institute against claims by the heirs of Rice's late wife.
Amazingly, Patrick, the sleazy lawyer who now claimed to be Rice's sole heir, was part of the legal team representing the wife's heirs in their bitter dispute with Rice. Baker jumped into the task of defending Rice Institute's interests with vigor. Before he was finished, Patrick was charged not only with forging the will but with conspiring to murder William Rice.
At least partly through the efforts of Baker, Patrick was convicted and sentenced to hang.
The story is told in painstaking detail in a 1994 book by University of Toronto professor Martin L. Friedland and published by New York University Press.
The evidence against Patrick rested on two legs. The first was the testimony of his alleged co-conspirator, a Houston native named Charles Jones, who was Rice's longtime valet.
An early theory that Jones and Patrick poisoned Rice with mercury fell apart under medical evidence. Instead, after offering several other stories, Jones testified that at Patrick's urging he had soaked a towel with chloroform, rolled it into a cone and placed it on the face of the sleeping Rice.
Friedland admits that parts of the mystery will probably never be solved, but after reviewing the evidence, he concludes the chloroform story likely was planted in Jones' mind by Baker, eagerly taken up by Jones and willingly supported by the prosecution's experts.
Why would Jones willingly testify to a story in which he was the actual murderer? It could have something to do with the fact that while Patrick was sent to death row, Jones was released from prison without charge, fled back to Texas and was unavailable as various appeals and requests for pardon proceeded.
The other leg of the case against Patrick was testimony by experts that though no traces of chloroform were found in Rice's lungs during an autopsy, the chloroform may have caused congestion.
But during the lengthy and heavily publicized appeals process, a group of scientists studied the case and conducted experiments to determine whether the expert testimony was accurate.
They found that it was considerably more likely that the condition of Rice's lungs, as found in the autopsy, was caused by the method his embalmer used. Rice, they concluded, died of natural causes.
Friedland consulted with modern scientists, who agreed with this finding.
Public sentiment for Patrick grew, and he eventually received a gubernatorial pardon.
It amounted to rough justice, prison for the forgery but not death for murder.
If Baker did, indeed, influence Jones and the prosecutor to hype the case against Patrick, his witness tampering made possible what is now one of the nation's great universities.
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at
rick.casey@chron.com.
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