Edwin Booth’s remains may testify to John Wilkes’
Descendants of renowned Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth want to exhume his body so that his DNA can be compared to the DNA from the remains of the man who died in the Garrett farm barn after being shot by federal troops chasing the assassins of President Abraham Lincoln. Why, you ask? To confirm that John Wilkes Booth is buried in John Wilkes Booth’s grave.
We know the man who died in a barn as John Wilkes Booth, presidential assassin, Edwin’s brother and a far less successful actor, but a conspiracy theory posits that John Wilkes Booth never died in the barn, that the man buried in Wilkes’ grave was someone else entirely who was just bringing Booth his papers only to get killed by federales in the Garrett barn. Wilkes, this theory has it, escaped West changing his name multiple times and ultimately dying by his own hand (he took strychnine) in Oklahoma in 1903.
One of Edwin Booth’s descendants, Joanne Hulme, was told by her mother that it was a family secret that Wilkes had escaped, but the main source of the story is a book published in 1907 by lawyer Finis Bates. In The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth : or, The First True Account of Lincoln’s Assassination, Containing a Complete Confession by Booth, Bates described meeting a man named John St. Helen in Texas in 1873. Although a tobacco merchant, St. Helen was adept at reciting Shakespeare, and one time when he thought he was going to die, he confessed his secret. Later he filled in all kinds of detail, like that the leader of the conspiracy was none other than Vice President Andrew Johnson himself.
St. Helen and Bates parted ways shortly thereafter, but when one David E. George died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903, papers on him asked that Finis Bates be notified. When he arrived, he recognized the arsenic-embalmed body as that of his old friend John St. Helen. (The corpse would go on to have a far more successful entertainment career on the sideshow circuit than John Wilkes had ever had in the theater.)
Bates says in the book that he didn’t believe St. Helen’s confession at first, but there is a record of him writing to the War Department in 1900 offering to deliver Lincoln’s assassin alive if they’d pay him the $100,000 reward they posted in 1865. Since that reward had already been paid to the men who trapped Booth in the barn, the War Department declined.
The book was roundly ridiculed when it was published, but various versions of the wrong body theory have continued to spread, including on shady History Channel “documentaries.” In 1995, another of Edwin Booth’s descendants Lois Trebisacci asked to exhume Wilkes’ body to put the question to rest once and for all.
In 1995, a judge in Baltimore denied her request to exhume the remains of the man believed to be John Wilkes Booth in an effort to confirm his identity, her attorney, Mark Zaid of Washington, said yesterday. He said the cemetery objected to an exhumation, even though he had secured permission from 26 living relatives.
“The family was as much interested in disproving [the escape] theory as they were in proving it,” he said by phone.
Since that avenue is closed off, the interested parties now want to go about it in a roundabout way: by exhuming Edwin Booth’s body and comparing the DNA to bone fragments from the barn assassin preserved at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
The family’s attorney Mark Zaid plans to file an exhumation request for Edwin’s body, interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, early this year.
Interesting, though I spent more time reading about the mummy than anything else. I wonder what happened to it, after the article you linked to (1937)? Wikipedia mentions the thing but not its fate.
Still, now I think of a story idea, the reanimated mummy of John Wilkes Booth flees across the United States, pursued by Lincoln’s vengeful ghost… A journey of self discovery and the living dead!
It would be a guaranteed best-seller. Very much on trend right now.
That would be amazing if Booth was not in that grave.
He was a good looking man, no doubt.
I’d like to know for sure who is buried in what graves myself, and I’m just a regular curious person. Here’s hoping the courts grant your family standing. Best of luck to you.
If this will really uncover such an age old mystery why in the would a country supposedly built-upon truth,& justice continue to allow its judicial system to be so enshrouded in mysticism, & continue to prepetuate such an obdviosly easily solvable enigma
The legal system in the US, like all non-dictatorial legal systems I’m familiar with, has certain standards. Among them is the question of standing, whether a party has the legal grounds to pursue a case. When there are many descendants who hold differing opinions on whether their shared ancestor should be exhumed, which family member has the right to chose the fate of the body?
It’s not a simple question that can be addressed with appeals to vague concepts of truth and justice. The law is more specific than that.
I was wondering if you could help me to ID a tintype that I have. It is a picture of a middle-aged woman. On the back of the tintype, it says “sister to Cora Logan, wife of Mr. Booth. First cousin to John W.
John Wilkes Booth’s sister in law. Owner of bone combs.”
Does any of this sound familiar? I found this tintype in an antique shop. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hello Joanne Hulme,
I’ve recently done some reading on Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. I wonder what John Wilkes Booth would have thought of the world one hundred years later, in the year of 1965 and what he would think of the world today?
Are you familiar with the author Izola Forrester and her 1937 Book “This one mad act”? Would you recommend someone to read Izola Forrester’s 1937 book? Thank you
I’ve recently done some reading on Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. I wonder what Edwin and John Wilkes Booth would think of the world one hundred years later in the year of 1965 and what the world is like today!
I’d like to find a copy of the book “This one mad act” by Izola Forrester,written in 1937.
Please let me know if the above book is worth reading.
The answer is, very simply, no. In the wake of JFK’s assassination Americans have become far more suspicious of their history than ever before, and tend to look under any available rock for something to get their knickers in a twist over. Modern Americans seriously underestimate how traumatic the assassination of an American president was in 1865, especially so soon after the end of the Civil War. The government, to put it very, very simply, would never have allowed John Wilkes Booth to escape. His body was identified by David Herold, John Frederick May, and Lucy Hale, and when it was returned to the Booth family in 1869 Joseph, Rosalie, and his mother Mary Ann all gave a positive identification.
While I don’t exactly see what harm exhuming Edwin could do at this point in time, I do feel that it is completely unnecessary. There are numerous locks of hair taken from the body floating all across the country, all one would have to do is compare the mitochondrial DNA found in the hair to that found in a modern Booth descendant. I have no doubt that in the end, history will have been vindicated, and all parties involved (along with Finis L. Bates, wherever he is) will be left with very red faces indeed.
The Forrester book is quite interesting and
I think she herself did not believe the book
mentioned though she is certain that Booth
escaped. She did an enormous amount of research and there is little that matched
the official accounts , most accounts were
taken from the head of secret service Lafayette Baker, not exactly a reliable character. It is a hard to find book, but
well worth the effort. Look up James Boyd,
the man who could have been shot in his place. Remember Booth was supposed to have been brought back alive when one strange
soldier shot a figure in the burning barn, later claiming he was told by God to do it.
Ms. Hulme: My maternal grandmother, Lillian (Williams) Farrell (1895 – 1989) of Philadelphia was the great-granddaughter of Jane Booth, and repeated the “family secret” to me when I was a boy in the 1960s. She said she was told by relatives that John Wilkes Booth sent a letter from South America many years after his reported death in 1865. She never saw the letter, but only heard about it. I’ve always wondered myself, though I remain convinced of the official version, if only because lying about it back in those days would have meant the death penalty.
How fascinating. Have you or anyone else in the family made a written record of your grandmother’s stories? It’s an important oral history, and even though it would have to be second-hand since she’s gone, I think it would be an extremely worthwhile project.
or his ghost anyway
From Jesse James to William Quantrill, there seems to be a conspiracy theory for almost every famous person who died during this era