In September 1917, at three in the morning, armed men stood watch around an open grave in a Wilmington, North Carolina cemetery. Four doctors lifted the richest woman in America out of the ground. She had been buried for seven weeks.
Her name was Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham. She had owned a 75-room marble palace, a Florida railway, and a fortune estimated at anywhere from $60 million to $130 million. Her second husband stood to collect $5 million of it under a handwritten codicil she signed in her final weeks, a document she reportedly told her lawyer to hide from her own brother.
The four doctors worked until dawn. They recorded their findings. Then the report went into a drawer, where it has remained sealed for more than a century.
Mary Lily was born in Duplin County, North Carolina, in June 1867, two years after the Civil War ended. Her father sold life insurance door to door. The Kenans were an old landholding family with a Revolutionary pedigree and a family seat called Liberty Hall, but they had no cash.
She was educated at the Tileston School in Wilmington and later at the Peace Institute in Raleigh, where she studied piano and voice. She was regarded as one of the most accomplished young women in the state.
Through the wealthy Pembroke Jones family of Wilmington, she was introduced to the highest circles of American society. At some point in the early 1890s, she met Henry Morrison Flagler. He was 61, one of the richest men in America, and a co-founder of Standard Oil. She was 23 or 24.
Flagler was married. His wife, Ida Alice Shrouds Flagler, was 43 and at the center of the social scene in St. Augustine. She had four years left before the doctors came for her.
For roughly a decade, Mary Lily traveled between New York and Palm Beach in Flagler’s private railway car as a guest of the family. She was 24 when it started and 34 when it ended. Her relatives grew suspicious of the arrangement and were quieted by the scale of what Flagler began to settle on her.
By 1899, the newspapers had noticed the arrangement. That same year, Flagler gave her jewelry valued at more than $1 million. He was still married.
Meanwhile, Ida Alice had begun consulting a Ouija board in the mid-1890s and talking openly about her husband’s infidelity. Flagler’s physician positioned himself near her in company to observe her, on account of what he called her glib tongue. In the autumn of 1895, two specialists in mental disorders were brought to the Flagler apartment to look at her without warning. She understood what they were and became frantic.
In November 1895, she was admitted to a private sanitarium in Pleasantville, New York. A doctor examined her and wrote the words that ended her life as a person with a signature: incurable, delusional insanity. He kept her from 1896 until his own death in 1926.
In 1899, a New York court declared Ida Alice legally insane and appointed a committee over her person and estate. Flagler’s own divorce lawyer took charge of her guardianship. That same year, Flagler changed his legal residence from New York to Florida.
In April 1901, the Florida legislature made incurable insanity a ground for divorce. It was reported that Flagler paid Florida lawmakers about $125,000 to move the bill. The statute served precisely one household. It was repealed in 1905.
On August 14, 1901, a Florida court dissolved the marriage of Henry Flagler and Ida Alice on the ground of her incurable insanity. Ten days later, he married Mary Lily Kenan at Liberty Hall, the Kenan family seat. She was 34. He was 71.
His wedding present was a check for $1 million and $3 million in bonds. A house had been under construction at Whitehall in Palm Beach since before the divorce was granted.
Whitehall was a white marble palace of 75 rooms. The entrance hall alone covered 4,800 square feet and used seven varieties of marble. A domed ceiling carried a painted mural of the Oracle of Delphi. There were guest bedrooms done in different historical styles, an organ of 1,249 pipes in the music room, and roughly 25 servants living in the house.
The New York Herald called it more wonderful than any palace in Europe. The Flaglers came down each season from 1902 until his death. The Palm Beach season formed around that house, with Mary Lily at the head of the table.
For more than a decade, she ran the winter season of American society. Not one sentence she spoke survives in the accessible record. Her papers exist in boxes in family collections in North Carolina, but they have never been digitized.
Henry Flagler died at Whitehall on May 20, 1913, of injuries from a fall down a flight of marble stairs inside his own house. He was 83. His estate was reckoned at about $170 million.
Mary Lily inherited somewhere between $60 million and $130 million. It was the largest fortune ever left to an American woman. She held the Florida East Coast Railway, the hotel company, the land company, the power company, and a steamship line.
She closed Whitehall and did not open it again for the season. She went back to it exactly once in 1917, as another man’s wife, a few months before she died.
Robert Worth Bingham was born in North Carolina in 1871. He had been a schoolmaster, a lawyer, and a judge in Louisville, Kentucky. His first wife, Elellanena Miller, came from a wealthy Louisville family and had been killed in a road accident.
After Henry Flagler died, Bingham reconnected with Mary Lily, whom he had known at college in the 1890s. He courted her, as did a number of other people. Her family thought his interest obvious.
Before the wedding, Bingham signed a prenuptial agreement waiving every claim he might ever have on her estate. The insistence came from her. They were married in New York in November 1916 at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones, in front of about 15 people. Her brother William Rand Kenan Jr. was among them.
Within weeks of the wedding, she began to complain of chest pains. Her husband sent for a dermatologist, an old friend named Michael Leo Ravitch. Ravitch moved into the household as a guest and began treating her. From early May 1917, he was giving her morphine daily.
For a woman with chest pains and a heart complaint, Bingham did not send for a cardiologist. The medical care of the richest woman in America was conducted by two of her husband’s friends without a single outside physician of standing ever being brought into the room.
In the last weeks of her life, she wrote out a codicil by hand, leaving her husband $5 million to be absolutely his. The lawyer who oversaw the signing was another old friend of Bingham’s from college. She was receiving morphine daily at the time. She is reported to have told the lawyer that the existence of the codicil was to be kept from everyone, above all from her brother.
On July 12, 1917, a maid found her unconscious and slumped over the side of a bathtub. Louisville was in a heat wave, with temperatures reaching 102 degrees. The dermatologist examined her and concluded she had suffered a heart attack. He sent for a pediatrician, another friend of Bingham’s. They continued the morphine.
Two nurses attending her protested the size of the doses. Both were released from their duties immediately. Their names are not in any surviving record.
On the morning of July 27, 1917, she had a seizure. Convulsions followed. At 2:50 that afternoon, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham died in Louisville at the age of 50.
The attending physicians signed the certificate. Cause of death was listed as edema of the brain, contributing myocarditis. Her body went home to North Carolina in a private railroad car.
On July 31, they held the service at the house of her sister Sarah and buried her in the Kenan family plot at Oakdale Cemetery.
About a month after the funeral, a handwritten codicil was filed with a Louisville court. The Kenans discovered that a document none of them had ever seen gave $5 million to the man in whose house their sister had just died.
The family hired William Burns, the most famous private detective in America. His men came back with a list of questions. Why had a woman with a heart complaint been kept on daily morphine for three months? Why had a husband with unlimited money hired a dermatologist and a pediatrician rather than cardiac specialists? Why had the couple remained in a Louisville summer while a cool waterfront estate that belonged to her stood empty? And where were her pearls, the necklace Henry Flagler had given her?
Her brother-in-law applied for permission to open the grave. On September 18, 1917, the permission was granted.
They did it in the dark, under guard. Armed men were posted around the plot. Lamps were set up. At three in the morning, four men went to work.
The first was Charles Norris, who within a year would become the first chief medical examiner of New York City. The second was Alexander Gettler, regarded as the founder of forensic toxicology in the United States. The third was Ludvig Hektoen of Chicago. The fourth was William MacCallum, professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins.
They examined samples of her vital organs at the graveside. According to every account that has ever reported it, they found enormous quantities of morphine, evidence that she had been injected with adrenaline, and traces of heavy metals, of arsenic, and possibly of mercury.
Samples were packed and carried to New York for fuller analysis. The analysis was completed. Then nothing. No inquest, no publication, no statement, no charge. The findings went into the possession of the parties who had commissioned them. They have never been released.
The papers got hold of the story within days. Suspect murder of Mrs. Robert Bingham, said one headline. Foul play suspected, said another. The whole country knew there had been an autopsy. Nobody then or since has been permitted to know what it said.
The Kenans took the codicil to a Kentucky court, lost, filed an appeal, and then simply stopped. No charges were ever brought against anyone. The Burns report was never released. The autopsy and toxicology were never released. The family walked away, and Bingham took the $5 million.
On August 7, 1918, the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal carried an announcement about itself. The paper now belonged to Judge Bingham. He paid a little under $1.5 million for controlling interests in both Louisville dailies.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt nominated Bingham as ambassador to the United States. His enemies brought up the circumstances of Mary Lily’s death. The Senate confirmed him unanimously. He served in London until his health failed in 1937. He died three days after exploratory surgery at Johns Hopkins, at the age of 66.
The newspapers he bought with Mary Lily Kenan’s $5 million went on to win six Pulitzer Prizes.
Her will left a fortune to her niece in trust. The rest went to her family and to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the Kenan professorships still exist.
Whitehall had a stranger afterlife. Her niece sold it, and investors hired Carrère and Hastings, the same firm that had designed it, to bolt an 11-story hotel tower onto the back of the wedding present. It ran as a hotel from 1926 to 1959. In 1959, it was scheduled for demolition, and Henry Flagler’s granddaughter bought it back. Whitehall opened to the public as the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum on February 6, 1960, exactly 58 years to the day since Mary Lily first walked through the bronze doors as a bride.
Her portrait hangs inside. The hotel tower came down in 1963.
There are four explanations for how she died. The first is natural death from cardiovascular syphilis contracted years earlier. The second is acute alcoholism. The third is morphine administered through negligence or something worse by two physicians unqualified to treat her. The fourth, which arrived in 2015 from inside the family itself, is that a second autopsy report showed an overdose of Salvarsan, an arsenic compound and the standard treatment for syphilis in 1917, had killed her.
Four answers. No verdict. The report from that grave has never been read.
She owned a railway, a steamship line, a marble palace, and the winter capital of American society. She could not buy a cardiologist. She could not buy a second opinion. She could not buy one witness in that hot Louisville house who would still be standing there when the two nurses were sent home.
Everything she owned survived her magnificently in public. The only thing that did not survive was the answer.