Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham was exhumed from her grave in a Wilmington, North Carolina, cemetery at three o’clock in the morning on September 18, 1917. Armed men stood guard with lamps while four of America’s foremost physicians examined her body. She had been buried for seven weeks. At the time of her death she was regarded as the richest woman in America, with an estate estimated at anywhere from $60 million to $130 million.
Her second husband, Robert Worth Bingham, stood to collect $5 million under a handwritten codicil she signed in her final weeks, a document she reportedly told her lawyer to keep hidden from her own brother. The doctors worked until dawn and recorded their findings. The report was then sealed, and no one has been permitted to read it in the 109 years since. Mary Lily was born on June 14, 1867, in Duplin County, North Carolina, to a father who sold life insurance door to door.
The Kenans were an old landholding family with a Revolutionary pedigree, but by the time Mary Lily was growing up, the name carried more social weight than financial security. The family later moved to Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina. Mary Lily was educated at Amy Bradley’s Tileston School and then at Peace Institute in Raleigh, where she studied piano and voice. She was described by one biographer as the reigning belle of North Carolina for her vivacity, beauty, and accomplishments.
Through wealthy family friends, the Pembroke Joneses, she was introduced to Henry Morrison Flagler. In 1891 Flagler was one of the richest men in America, a co-founder of Standard Oil who had built the Florida East Coast Railway and turned Florida into a winter destination for the wealthy. He was 61. Mary Lily was 23 or 24.
He was also married. Flagler’s wife, Ida Alice Shrouds Flagler, had been certified insane and confined to a sanitarium. In 1901, the Florida legislature passed a law making incurable insanity a ground for divorce, reportedly after Flagler paid lawmakers about $125,000 to move the bill. He was the only person who ever used it, and the law was repealed in 1905.
His divorce was granted on August 14, 1901. Ten days later, he married Mary Lily at the Kenan family seat, Liberty Hall, in Kinston, North Carolina. He was 71. She was 34.
His wedding gift was $1 million in cash and $3 million in bonds. In February 1902, the couple moved into Whitehall, a 75-room marble palace in Palm Beach that Flagler had commissioned before the divorce was finalized. The entrance hall alone covered 4,800 square feet. The house was furnished in the styles of Louis XIV through the Italian Renaissance, staffed by about 25 servants, and completed at a cost commonly given as $2.
5 million. For more than a decade, Mary Lily hosted the winter season of American society at Whitehall. Most accounts describe the marriage as comfortable and affectionate. The only documented friction was her desire to dance and fill the house while her older husband preferred a slower pace.
No verbatim sentence from Mary Lily survives in any accessible record. Her papers exist in family collections in North Carolina but have never been digitized. Henry Flagler died on May 20, 1913, after falling down the marble staircase at Whitehall. He was 83.
His estate was estimated at about $170 million, and Mary Lily became the richest woman in America. She inherited the Florida East Coast Railway, the Florida East Coast Hotel Company, land and power companies, and a steamship line. She closed Whitehall after his death and rarely returned to it. In November 1916, she married Robert Worth Bingham, a North Carolina-born lawyer and former judge from Louisville, Kentucky.
They had known each other in college. Bingham had been married before and had three children. Before the wedding, Mary Lily insisted he sign a prenuptial agreement waiving all claims on her estate. The wedding took place in the drawing room of the Pembroke Joneses in New York, the same family and the same room that had introduced her to Henry Flagler 25 years earlier.
She gave Bingham a certified check for $50,000. Within weeks of the marriage, she began complaining of chest pains. Bingham called in a dermatologist, Dr. Michael Leo Ravitch, an old friend from college.
For nearly seven months, Mary Lily’s medical care was conducted almost entirely by Bingham’s friends. No outside cardiologist or specialist was ever brought in. From early May 1917, she was given morphine daily. On July 12, a maid found her unconscious, slumped over the side of a bathtub during a heat wave in which temperatures reached 102 degrees.
The treating physicians were a skin specialist and a pediatrician. Two nurses who protested the size of the morphine doses were dismissed immediately. On July 27, 1917, Mary Lily died in Louisville at age 50. The cause of death listed on her certificate was edema of the brain and myocarditis.
Her body was returned to North Carolina in a private railroad car and buried in the Kenan family plot at Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington. About a month after her funeral, a handwritten codicil was filed with a Louisville court, leaving Bingham $5 million. Her family had never seen it. The Kenans hired William Burns, then the most famous private detective in America.
His investigators raised questions about the morphine, the choice of physicians, the fact that the couple stayed in Louisville’s summer heat while a cool waterfront estate belonging to Mary Lily stood empty, and the disappearance of a pearl necklace given to her by Flagler. The family obtained permission to open the grave. On the night of September 18, 1917, four eminent physicians worked by lamplight: Charles Norris, soon to become the first chief medical examiner of New York City; Alexander Gettler, regarded as the founder of American forensic toxicology; Ludvig Hektoen of Chicago; and William MacCallum, professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins. They found enormous quantities of morphine, evidence of adrenaline, and traces of heavy metals, including arsenic and possibly mercury.
Samples were sent to New York for full analysis. The results were never published. No inquest was held, and no charges were ever brought. The findings went into the possession of those who had commissioned them and have never been released.
The Kenans challenged the codicil in a Kentucky court, lost, filed an appeal, and then withdrew. Bingham collected the $5 million. In August 1918, the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal announced that the paper had changed ownership. Bingham had spent less than $1.
5 million for controlling interests in both the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. The newspapers eventually won six Pulitzer Prizes. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt nominated Bingham as ambassador to Great Britain. His nomination faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the circumstances of Mary Lily’s death and the codicil.
The story followed him for the rest of his life. His own great-granddaughter later recalled that even Roosevelt reportedly referred to Bingham as his favorite murderer. The committee confirmed him unanimously. Bingham died in December 1937 after surgery at Johns Hopkins.
He was 66. A memorial service was held for him at Westminster Abbey. Mary Lily’s estate left funds to her family and to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her endowment established the Kenan professorships. Her brother and sisters added to the fund, and her name is now on buildings and chairs across the state.
Whitehall was sold by her niece and operated as a hotel from 1926 to 1959. It was later rescued by Henry Flagler’s granddaughter and opened to the public as the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum on February 6, 1960—exactly 58 years after Mary Lily first walked through its bronze doors as a bride. Four explanations for her death have been advanced by serious researchers: cardiovascular syphilis contracted from Flagler, acute alcoholism, morphine administered negligently or worse, and an overdose of Salvarsan, an arsenic compound used to treat syphilis. Each theory has a professional historian behind it.
None has ever been settled. The autopsy report from that night has never been seen by the public. One later account said a New York pathologist concluded the cause of death was endocarditis, pointing to natural disease. The record is not complete enough to confirm it.
Mary Lily left behind a railway, a steamship line, a marble palace, and a fortune that funded journalism and university chairs for a century. She left no recorded words of her own. The one thing she was never given was a cause of death that anyone was allowed to read.