Posted on 02/19/2007 8:23:24 AM PST by Borges
SEWANEE, Tenn. — A signature in the Franklin County Courthouse and a mummy last seen in 1975 convinced two Tennessee men that John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, escaped capture, traveled South and lived into the 20th century.
Now one of those men is hoping to use DNA evidence to prove it.
The other man, Arthur Ben Chitty, a historiographer at the University of the South who died in 2002, spent 40 years amassing anecdotal evidence that Mr. Booth married a Sewanee woman and lived there for a time, said his daughter Em Turner Chitty.
And there was one piece of physical evidence: the signature of “Jno. W. Booth” and his bride, Louisa J. Payne, recorded Feb. 24, 1872, in the marriage license records office of the Franklin County Courthouse.
“What passes for history is good public relations — that’s my dad’s main thesis,” said Ms. Turner, an English teacher at Pellissippi State College in Knoxville. “The thing that got him most seriously interested (in Booth) was the signature.”
BLAME KEN BURNS
In Memphis, Ken Hawkes got hooked on the Booth mystery in the early 1990s, when everybody in his office was following Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War.
Mr. Hawkes was an autopsy technician for the Shelby County medical examiner’s office. He said that after the episode dealing with President Lincoln’s assassination, a coworker told him a mummy that was purported to be Mr. Booth was toted around the Midwest in carnivals during the 1930s.
“I thought it was nonsense,” Mr. Hawkes said last week. “Everybody knows Booth was killed in Virginia two weeks after the assassination.”
But then a doctor in the office showed him a story from a magazine about the Booth mummy.
The doctor said that using forensic medicine, “if we could find the remains, we could show one way or the other if it could be John Wilkes Booth,” he said.
Two weeks later, Mr. Hawkes said, he began to think maybe he ought to find the mummy and do DNA testing.
“I started looking for it and looked and looked and looked,” he said.
The history books state that Mr. Booth shot President Lincoln the day before Easter 1865 at Ford’s Theater. Mr. Booth and a group of conspirators escaped Washington, D.C., and were cornered in Richard Garrett’s barn in Bowling Green, Va., 12 days later.
The barn was set afire, and Mr. Booth was shot and died within hours. Several Union soldiers who were acquainted with him identified his body. He was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. SEWANEE CONNECTION
On the third floor in the back of the Jessie Ball duPont Library at the University of the South, archivist Annie Armour points to shelves filled with documents and books that Mr. Chitty, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the school, amassed related to Booth.
Opening a box of newspaper clippings, legal documents, letters and audio recordings of interviews, Ms. Armour said, “I don’t see anything that proves or disproves.”
But, she added, “There are a couple of people around here who swore that (Booth) lived here for a while.”
Ms. Chitty said that in 1956, her father met with a man named James. H. Rees. Mr. Rees told Mr. Chitty that when he was a boy he knew McCager Payne, the son of Louisa Payne and stepson of her husband, John St. Helen.
According to Mr. Chitty’s interviews with relatives, Louisa Payne learned after she married that “St. Helen” wasn’t her husband’s real name. Family lore says she insisted they remarry under his given name. That’s when the signature of “Jno. W. Booth” was made in Franklin County.
Mr. Chitty acquired Mr. Rees’ material on Mr. Booth in the 1980s. The trove included a 1926 interview with McCager Payne in the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, Ms. Chitty said.
Mr. Payne told the interviewer he had overheard his stepfather tell his mother about “knots on his left leg” and admit that he was Mr. Booth.
Mr. Payne said his stepfather saw the boy had overheard and said, “If you ever tell what you heard me say, I’ll rip your throat from ear to ear,” according to the Leaf-Chronicle.
Several months later the three went to Memphis where Mr. St. Helen/Booth left the boy and his mother and headed to Texas. He told them he would be back but never returned, Ms. Chitty said.
Ms. Chitty said her father’s archives show Louisa Payne and her son returned to Sewanee.
“The story goes that (Louisa) became pregnant only a few months after the marriage,” Ms. Chitty said. “She returned to Payne’s Cove and had the baby, (Laura) Ida Booth. Strangely enough, she became an actress.”
Ms. Chitty said she reviewed her father’s collection of Booth material in 1988.
“There was so much evidence that he gathered, eyewitness evidence, documentary evidence. This story, when you first heard it, was crazy,” Ms. Chitty said.
“But there was a lot of evidence,” she said.
THE MUMMY
Mr. Hawkes has been trying to find what he says may be Mr. Booth’s mummified remains.
In 1903, a dying, alcoholic house painter named David E. George told a minister in Enid, Okla., that he was John Wilkes Booth, Mr. Hawkes said.
Finis Bates, a Tennessee lawyer who decades before knew Mr. St. Helen/Booth, traveled to Oklahoma and determined that the body was that of the man he had known. Mr. Bates acquired the body and had it preserved, Mr. Hawkes said.
At some point, Mr. Bates’ widow sold it to a carnival where the mummy became a major attraction in shows like Jay Gould’s Million Dollar Spectacle, he said.
Mr. Hawkes said he contacted every carnival, sideshow and circus he could find searching for Mr. Booth’s mummy.
News accounts from a Life magazine article in 1931 show that six doctors in Chicago examined and X-rayed the mummy. They found it had a shorter left leg, a distorted right thumb and a scar on its neck, all consistent with physical characteristics of Booth.
Mr. Hawkes said the last documented sighting was in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. But he has a 1991 letter from a man who says he saw the mummy in Pennsylvania in 1975 at a carnival.
“The clincher for me was the man said X-rays were with the mummy that the doctors made in Chicago,” he said.
Mr. Hawkes said the Pennsylvania man told him that the carnival promoter was asking everyone who came in to look at the mummy if they wanted to buy it.
“I do believe the mummy still exists,” he said. “I think it’s in a private collection.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis
---here's a good reference, which discounts most of the conspiracies---
--http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Moon-Assassination-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/0813191513/sr=1-1/qid=1171904849/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2718909-5760120?ie=UTF8&s=books
That was one of Booth's many body doubles.
No no, it's the Priory of Sion that is in Scotland. The Knights are in France.
The Elders of Zion are in the back room of a kosher deli in West Palm Beach.
I noted the same thing. As I recall also, Mrs. Payne did indeed have a daughter.
Good point and I imagine anyone at that time with the name John W. Booth would have attracted alot of stares. Solution would be to change your name.
Interesting
It says that there was a daughter born shortly after the marriage. I would think they could try to test the DNA of one of her known descendants (if she has any), I assume they have some source from a Booth relative to test against.
Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't there someone who put Booth up for the night and tended his wounds/injuries not knowing he was being pursued for the assassination, and who was later tried and hanged?
IIRC news of Lincoln's assassination did not reach the countryside until many many days after the fact so people could not possibly know Booth was on the run for that crime. Yet people that aided him were imprisoned, hung or both.
Au contraire. Mudd was well-acquainted with Booth, and numerous witnesses placed the two of them together several times in the year prior to the assassination, as well as with John Surratt and other conspirators. Mudd lied to investigators, repeatedly, about what he knew of Booth, and was caught concealing evidence.
This isn't a new story - I have a 1967 copy here of "The Edge Of The Chair", from Harper & Row 67-22500; anthology of stories one of which containing William Shepherds' "Shattering the myth of John Wilkes Booth's escape" and goes into the story with great detail.
The story apparently surfaced in the November, 1924 issue of[i]Harper's Monthly Magazine[/i] There are not surprisingly at least two possible candidates for the "real" John Wilkes Booth. A man named "St. Helen", and the Enid, Oklahoma legend of David George - which in this article seems to refute. He died penniless in a hotel, although there is a cancelled check with his "D.E. George" signature, which presumably be compared to known examples of Booth.
There were attempts through the courts within the past 6-10 years, to have Booth's body exhumed for testing, to make sure he was actually buried in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. From what I recall, the Judge would not approve the exhumation due to the fact that Booth's body was actually buried beneath at least two other family members, and he would not allow those bodies to be disturbed in order to get to Booth's. I believe there are laws in Baltimore that prevent exhumation if other burials will be affected.
The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia has a piece of Booth, rather than him finding a piece of human jerky, perhaps they could simply run a test on the piece there, or maybe exhume the body from the Booth family plot(or sneek in at night and steal a piece hoping it will have valid DNA). Really the evidence is out there to exclude the story we all know, or prove it is already out there and easy to find just accessing it is a different story.
Re: your #25. He was an actor with a LARGE ego. He would not have existed without letting people know who he was, under any circumstance.
Dr. Mudd was imprisoned at Ft. Jefferson on Dry Tortugas.
Don't recall whether he died there or not. I'm thinking that he was released prior to his death.
I do recall Roger Mudd, newscaster, announcing that Dr. Mudd was pardoned, exonerated, something like.
The atmosphere surrounding the assasination was such that a rush to judgement occurred. 17 or 18 indiviuals were hung as consiprators but Mudd received a life sentence. In 1869 Andrew Johnson pardoned Mudd. What do you know that Johnson didn't?
Back in 1993, an anthropologist discovered Lewis Powell's skull in a drawer and it was returned to a family member for burial in Geneva, Florida.
A fellow researcher friend of mine, Mike Kauffman has been researching the Lincoln Assassination for over 30 years. In 2004 he published "American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies." I highly recommend it for those interested in the topic.
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