vanished, Le Prince was about to patent his 1889 projector in the UK and then leave Europe for his scheduled New York official exhibition. His widow assumed foul play though no concrete evidence has ever emerged and Rawlence prefers the suicide theory. In 1898, Le Prince's elder son Adolphe, who had assisted his father in many of his experiments, was called as a witness for the American Mutoscope Company in their litigation with Edison [Equity 6928]. By citing Le Prince's achievements, Mutoscope hoped to annul Edison's subsequent claims to have invented the moving-picture camera. Le Prince's widow Lizzie and Adolphe hoped that this would gain recognition for Le Prince's achievement, but when the case went against Mutoscope their hopes were dashed. Two years later Adolphe Le Prince was found dead on Fire Island near New York. Disappearance ordered by the family In 1966, Jacques Deslandes proposed a theory in Histoire comparée du cinéma (The Comparative History of Cinema), claiming that Le Prince voluntarily disappeared due to financial reasons and "familial conveniences". Journalist Léo Sauvage quotes a note shown to him by Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library, in 1977, that claimed Le Prince died in Chicago in 1898, having moved there at the family's request because he was homosexual; but he rejects that assertion. There is no evidence to suggest that Le Prince was gay. Fratricide, murder for money In 1967, Jean Mitry proposed, in Histoire du cinéma, that Le Prince was killed. Mitry notes that if Le Prince truly wanted to disappear, he could have done so at any time prior to that. Thus, he most likely never boarded the train in Dijon. He also wonders why, if his brother, who was confirmed as the last person to have seen Le Prince alive, knew Le Prince was suicidal, he didn't try to stop Le Prince, and why he didn't report Le Prince's mental state to the police before it was too late. Suicide by drowning A photograph of a drowned man pulled from the Seine in 1890, strongly resembling Le Prince, was discovered in 2003 during research in the Paris police archives. This somehow led to the conclusion that he must have failed to get his moving picture to work, had heavy debts, and thus chose to take his own life. It has been claimed that the found body was too short to be Le Prince. Patents