Oh, man ... did I ever go down a rabbit hole this morning. Today is the 126th anniversary of the murder of William Marsh Rice, namesake of Rice University in Houston. The story is a Hollywood movie waiting to be written. It has everything a Texas murder story needs: a millionaire, a forged will, slow poisoning, chloroform, a crooked lawyer, a murderous valet and a suspicious bank clerk. Hanging in the balance was the fortune that eventually created Rice University. Rice was 84 years old in 1900 and enormously wealthy. Born in Massachusetts, he came to Texas as a young man and made his fortune in Houston through cotton, real estate, railroads and other investments. In 1891 he chartered the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science, Art, Philosophy and Letters, intending that much of his estate eventually support the school. He was truly a self-made man. The trouble began after the death of Rice's second wife, Elizabeth, in 1896. A dispute over her estate brought New York attorney Albert T. Patrick (shown in the photo below) into the picture. Patrick became acquainted with Rice's valet and secretary, Charles F. Jones, and the two eventually entered into a conspiracy. Patrick prepared a forged will, dated June 30, 1900, supposedly signed by Rice. Under it, Patrick stood to receive the bulk of Rice's estate. Meanwhile, Jones later confessed that he had secretly been giving the elderly Rice mercury pills in an effort to hasten his death. There was only one hitch in their whole giddyup: Rice refused to die. Then the Galveston hurricane struck on September 8, 1900. One of Rice's Texas businesses, the Merchants and Planters Oil Company, was badly damaged and needed money for repairs. Rice intended to send funds to Texas, which threatened to reduce the cash Patrick hoped to steal. According to newspaper accounts, Patrick pressed Jones to use something faster than poison. On September 23, 1900, Jones saturated a cloth or sponge with chloroform and held it over Rice's face as the old man lay in his New York apartment. Marsh died. Patrick and Jones might have gotten away with it except for an almost absurdly small mistake. They immediately attempted to get at Rice's money using forged checks. One was made payable to Patrick, but his first name was misspelled: "Abert Patrick." The suspicious check caught the bank's attention. Officials tried to verify it and discovered that Rice had just died. They contacted Rice's longtime Houston attorney, Captain James A. Baker. When Patrick produced a supposed new will leaving him most of Rice's fortune, Baker knew something was badly wrong. Rice had never told him about replacing the 1896 will Baker knew to exist. An investigation followed. Handwriting comparisons exposed forged signatures, while an autopsy found evidence consistent with earlier poisoning. Then Charles Jones confessed. He described the poisoning, the forged documents and the chloroform killing, and agreed to testify against Patrick. Patrick was convicted of murder and forgery in 1902 and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Remarkably, he never did. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1912 New York Governor John A. Dix granted him a full pardon after years of controversy over the evidence used to convict him. Captain Baker and the trustees ultimately defeated Patrick's forged will and secured Rice's fortune for the institution Rice had intended to create --- now Rice University. And there is one final, almost cinematic detail. The Rice Institute opened to students on September 23, 1912, exactly twelve years to the day after William Marsh Rice was murdered. So one of America's great universities owes its existence to a remarkable chain of events: an old millionaire who refused to die quickly, the Galveston hurricane, a murderous valet, an alert bank clerk, a determined Texas attorney and a missing letter in the name "Albert." Charles Jones, the man who admitted actually killing Rice, was never prosecuted for the murder because of his cooperation against Patrick. He eventually returned to Texas and lived for decades. In 1954, at the age of 79, he died by suicide in Baytown. Shown here: Albert T. Patrick, center, leaves prison in 1913. How was THAT for a trace of Texas? Sheesh!