John Wilkes Booth, an actor, shot the 16th President of the U.S. in the back of the head while he watched a performance of Our American Cousin at a theater in Washington on April 14 in 1865.
At the time of the assassination the American Civil War was drawing to a close and days earlier the Confederate general Robert E Lee had officially surrendered.
After the murder, Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, fled on horseback and went into hiding with fellow conspirator David Herold.
The fugitives were tracked down to a barn in northern Virginia by Union soldiers 12 days later. Booth was shot dead after refusing to surrender but Herold gave himself up. He was sentenced to death on July 6 and was hanged the very next day.
However, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the man shot in the barn was in fact Confederate soldier James William Boyd who looked like Booth.
And subsequent generations of the Booth family have told the tale of how the assassin escaped the barn and went on to live for nearly four decades in Texas and Oklahoma under assumed names.
Now Booth's descendants want to exhume the body of his brother Edwin, one of America's greatest Shakespearean actors, to compare his DNA with that of the body lying in an unmarked grave in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland, long believed to be Booth.
It is the second attempt by the remaining family of Booth to exhume his body. A request in 1995 was turned down by a judge who feared the graves of three young children beneath would be disturbed.
Joanne Hulme, 60, a Booth descendant and family historian, told the Philadelphia Inquirer: 'I'm absolutely in favor of exhuming Edwin. Let's have the truth and put this thing to rest.
'The first story my mother ever told me was the John Wilkes Booth was not killed in the barn.'
Booth,, a Confederate sympathizer, shot Lincoln on the night of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, days after hearing the news that Robert E. Lee had surrendered. He had already planned to kidnap the President after his landslide re-election the year before along with fellow conspirators David Herold, George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell.
He planned to derail the Union government by also targeting the Secretary of State William H. Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson, who were to be assassinated by Atzerodt and Powell.
Herold would help them escape to Virginia.
On the night, however, it was only Booth who pulled the trigger, killing the President at around 10pm. He then jumped from the Presidential box onto the stage, brandishing a knife and shouted: 'I have done it, the South is avenged!'
Powell only stabbed Seward, who survived, and Atzerodt lost his nerve and went drinking instead.
Booth and Herold are believed to have fled after the killing and hid in woodlands and outhouses for 12 days until they were surrounded in Garrett farm.
But contrary to the common belief that he was shot dead, many believe he escaped the barn and lived under the names John St Helen and David E George in Texas and Oklahoma.
George committed suicide in 1903 and is said to have confessed to his true identity while on his deathbed.
**********
It was a chance visit to Ford's Theater in Washington on April 14, 1865, that ultimately led to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, decided to collect his mail from the theater at around noon and overheard that Lincoln would be attending a performance of Our American Cousin that evening.
Booth, whose brother Edwin was one of America's greatest Shakespearean actors, knew the layout of the theater, having performed there several times.
He also knew the play very well and waited for a moment when there would be laughter to muffle the sound of a gunshot.
At the time of the killing he raced forward and shot the president in the back of the head.
Lincoln slumped over in his rocking chair, unconscious. His wife Mary reached out and caught him, then screamed.
Major Henry Rathbone, who was a guest of the president, tried to prevent Booth from escaping, but the assassin stabbed him in the arm before vaulting over the rail and down to the stage.
Booth landed awkwardly, fracturing his left foot. He is said to have shouted 'I have done it, the South is avenged!'. He then managed to run to the back door where a horse was waiting. Within half an hour he was riding into Maryland.
**********
Booth Descendants Agree to Brother's Body ID Tests
In life, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth were brothers, ambitious actors, and bitter rivals. They ruthlessly competed for the limelight on stages in Philadelphia and across the nation.
Edwin became one of America's greatest Shakespearean actors, while John Wilkes achieved infamy in another role - as the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, at Ford's Theater in Washington.
Now, for the first time, Booth descendants have agreed to exhume Edwin's body, adding drama to the family's story and delighting historians who have speculated that John Wilkes escaped capture 145 years ago.
By using DNA comparisons, relatives from the Philadelphia area, New Jersey, and Rhode Island hope to learn in the coming months whether the lore of John Wilkes Booth's flight is true.
Is Lincoln's assassin in an unmarked grave at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, as history records? Or did he elude justice, as descendants have been told for generations, to live 38 more years?
"I'm absolutely in favor of exhuming Edwin," said Joanne Hulme, 60, a resident of the Kensington section of the city who is the historian in the Booth family. "Let's have the truth and put this thing to rest."
"It's better to know," said her sister Suzanne Flaherty, 64, of Bordentown.
The sisters, with a third sibling, Virginia Kline of Warminster, have wondered about Booth stories that don't match accepted history, as did their late mother.
"John Wilkes Booth is probably loving this," added Lois Trebisacci, 60, of Westerly, R.I., whose grandfather was Edwin Booth's grandson. "Just being an actor, I'm sure he loves the controversy."
At 9 p.m. April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, son of theatrical parents, walked into Taltavull's Star Saloon next to Ford's Theatre and asked for a bottle of whiskey and some water.
"You'll never be the actor your father was," a customer reportedly told him.
"When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America," Booth fired back, according to accounts.
An hour and a half later, the dark-haired actor - a matinee idol of his time - shot Lincoln in the State Box at Ford's and dropped about 11 feet to the stage, breaking his left leg.
History says Booth was cornered 12 days later by detectives and Union soldiers in a tobacco barn at the Garrett farm in Port Royal, Va. Shortly after 2 a.m. on a cool and cloudy Wednesday, he was mortally wounded in the neck.
Or was he?
Efforts by descendants to open the Baltimore grave believed to be John Wilkes Booth's were thwarted in 1995 by a judge who concluded its location could not be conclusively determined. The remains were supposed to be in the family plot, but reports placed it at an undisclosed location.
The family had hoped to use the skull and photographic techniques, along with other identifying scars, to make an identification.
Their best option now is to compare DNA from Edwin Booth, buried in Cambridge, Mass., with a specimen from the man shot at the barn, who experts agree is buried in Baltimore. Three cervical vertebrae from that body are in the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington.
Philadelphia's Mutter Museum has cervical tissue from the man, but the DNA was degraded by formaldehyde and alcohol.
The Booth escape "is a story that never seems to die," said Jan Herman, chief historian for the Navy Medical Department and special assistant to the Navy surgeon general in Washington.
"I have always been disturbed by the opposition from recognized Civil War historians" to uncover the truth, he said. "We have the means, and it's certainly worth solving an age-old mystery. Why wouldn't you want to do that?"
The questions over Booth's possible escape also have attracted the scrutiny of the History channel program Brad Meltzer's Decoded, which will air a one-hour segment at 10 p.m. Thursday that explores the evidence.
"There are certain incidents in history that raise enough questions that they're worth looking at," said David McKillop, senior vice president of development and programming for History. Booth's possible escape "is a mystery."
Probably no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than Nate Orlowek, a Maryland educator and historian who since age 15 has doggedly pursued Booth through the yellowing pages of books and period documents.
"If the man who killed our greatest president got away and a giant hoax was perpetrated on the American people, then we should know about it," he said.
Orlowek, 53, has trailed Booth through the reports of witnesses who claimed another man was shot at the farm: James William Boyd or John William Boyd, who bore a striking resemblance to the assassin and by some accounts was sought for the murder of a Union captain.
He's followed the trail of carnivals that exhibited the mummified body of a man the barkers claimed was John Wilkes Booth. And he's sought clues from descendants and interviewed forensic pathologists, authors, and lawyers.
His conclusion? Booth escaped 145 years ago to live in Granbury, Texas, as John St. Helen, then changed his name to David E. George and moved to what is now Enid, Okla. He worked there as an itinerant painter before poisoning himself.
George's mummified remains were allegedly last seen at a carnival in New Hope in 1976.
"Society exists based on the knowledge of itself and the truth of its history," Orlowek said. "We believe in getting the truth no matter what it is. . . .
"If we are proven right," he said, "history will be set on its ear. This will teach us that just because something was blindly accepted in the past, that it is not necessarily true."
The Booth conundrum comes down to the DNA, say family members.
Once a sample is retrieved from Edwin Booth's body, the next obstacle would be obtaining a viable sample from a bone specimen believed to be John Wilkes Booth's, preserved in Lucite, at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
A panel judges such requests, based on their merits and social, legal, and ethical implications, officials said.
"We do not approve destructive testing on nonrenewable historical artifacts," said Timothy Clarke Jr., a spokesman for the museum.
Possible harm to the artifact must be weighed against the benefits of the testing, said Sharon A. Smith, president of the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia.
"It's a question of preserving the physical evidence of history and not putting it at risk," said Smith, who believes the accepted version of what happened at the Garrett farm.
"If the preponderance of evidence is that this is a myth, then should we be investing scarce historic resources?"
Historians such as Herman, though, say the test "wouldn't destroy the sample." A tiny drill could extract what's needed.
"If it compares favorably, that's the end of the controversy," Herman said. "That was Booth in the barn, end of case.
"If it doesn't match, you change American history," he said. "Booth would have a fine time making headlines in the newspapers again. Someone else was shot" at the Garrett farm in that case, he said.
Booth descendants "always refer to that man as the 'body in the barn,' never John Wilkes Booth," Hulme added. "If historians are so convinced they're right, let them prove it."
Sources:
news.blogs.cnn.com
www.dailymail.co.uk
www.philly.com
enidnews.com
www.upi.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
www.opposingviews.com
www.huliq.com
www.sacbee.com
Send us an email
New Items - Strickler's Celebrity Autographs
ANOMALIST BOOKS
Works on maverick science, unexplained mysteries, unorthodox theories, strange talents, and unexpected discoveries. Please check out their excellent and diverse catalog
The 'C' Influence
Actualizing Esoteric Discussion
"The latest news from beyond the mainstream"
Join Ben & Aaron for their weekly podcast!
Check out Mysterious Universe Plus+ all access format!
Spirit Rescue International
Providing no-cost professional spiritual help, personal support and guidance
Take the first step towards genuine peace of mind
Phantoms & Monsters Wiki
A NETWORK OF INVESTIGATORS, ENTHUSIASTS AND THOSE SEEKING THE TRUTH
THROUGH PARANORMAL EDUCATION AND DISCUSSION
Astral Perceptions - Discussion of interterrestrial and multidimensional phenomena including
conversations on the proficiency of remote viewing
SUPPLY BASE
Buy alternative supplies and gifts
CLICK HERE!
