The Death of Old Man Rice: A True Story of Criminal Justice in America

Graham Adams, Jr., is a professor of American history at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

This book examines a trial described by the Houston Chronicle in 1912 as
“one of the most remarkable in all history.” On September 23, 1900,
millionaire businessman William Marsh Rice died in his New York City
apartment at the age of 84. In a will written in 1896, he had bestowed
various bequests upon family members and others, and the residue of his
fortune, estimated at more than $5 million, to an institute that
eventually became Rice University. Rice’s attorney in New York, Albert
T. Patrick, claimed that in 1900 the millionaire had signed another will
designating Patrick as the sole residual legatee of 90 percent of the
estate.

Lawyers who had long served Rice in Texas denounced the new will as a
product of fraud and forgery. In addition, Rice’s valet stunned
observers by claiming that, acting under Patrick’s direction, he had
murdered the millionaire by means of a chloroform-saturated towel. In
the trial that followed both sides produced medical and handwriting
experts who contradicted each other’s testimony. In 1902, the jury
found Patrick guilty of murder and the presiding judge sentenced him to
death by electrocution. Over the next several years, Patrick and his
well-paid attorneys pursued numerous legal maneuvres to reverse the
conviction. New York Governor Frank Higgins commuted Patrick’s
sentence to life imprisonment in 1906; in 1912, Governor John A. Dix
granted him a full pardon.

Martin Friedland is to be congratulated for rescuing this case from
obscurity. His book occasionally becomes mired in legal details, but it
nevertheless clearly demonstrates the significant and sometimes
questionable role of politics, wealth, the press, and paid experts in
the American criminal justice system.