CRIME: End of the Banana Case

To those who received his telegram that day in 1900, the news from Charles Jones, valet to the eccentric millionaire William Marsh Rice, was hardly a shock. After all, old Mr. Rice was 84, and it was therefore not surprising that he should have died of “old age, weak heart and delirium.” But when friends and family arrived at his home, they came in for a shock after all.

In the bleak but spacious Manhattan apartment that Rice had occupied with Charley Jones after the two moved up from Houston, the mourners found everything apparently in order. But some were a bit bewildered by the presence of a baldheaded, 35-year-old lawyer named Albert T. Patrick. Patrick claimed he had known Rice only a few months. Yet the old man, he insisted, had thought so much of him that he had put him in charge of his whole estate. When Jones and Patrick were asked about Mr. Rice’s last days, they both told the same story. His death, they said, had been brought on by baked bananas.

Just a Coincidence? As the days passed, the status of Lawyer Patrick became more and more bewildering. For one thing, officials at the Wall Street firm of S. M. Swenson & Sons were puzzled by a $25,000 check that Rice had made out to Patrick on the very day of his death. They were also puzzled when Patrick announced he had other checks that equaled Rice’s entire New York deposits. Meanwhile, a Texas firm reported that Rice had promised to lend it $250,000, but that amount had never come. Was it just a coincidence that the sum Rice had turned over to Patrick just before he died amounted to exactly $250,000?

Handwriting experts soon solved that part of the mystery. Valet Jones and Lawyer Patrick were arrested for forgery. But once in jail, Jones tried to cut his throat. When that failed, he spilled the whole story.

Unjust Will. According to Jones, he met Patrick a year before, and the two men began almost immediately to work out their scheme. The two men decided to rewrite the old man’s will, for Mr. Patrick thought it “unjust” that Rice wanted to leave most of his estate to found an educational institution in Texas. One day Rice walked in on the conspirators while they were going about their forgery in his apartment, but he did not know what they were doing. He apologized for disturbing them, left the room quietly.

Then, just as things were going so well, that Texas firm began asking Rice for the $250,000 loan. Rather than see the cash slip away, Patrick decided that the old man must go.

First they fed him nine baked bananas at a meal. Then they tried oxalic acid. Finally, Jones dipped a piece of sponge in some chloroform, formed a cone with a towel and stuck it on Rice’s nose.

Upshot of the case: Patrick was convicted of murder, only to be pardoned ten years later by New York Governor John Dix (he died in 1940). By turning state’s evidence, Jones got his freedom. In Houston, having opened with an endowment of some $10 million from the estate of William Marsh Rice, Rice Institute has continued to grow and flourish. Last week in Baytown, 40 miles from Rice Institute, an old recluse finished the deed he tried to do in jail 54 years ago. At 79, onetime Valet Charley Jones picked up a pistol and killed himself.