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.”
I want a grant!
ping
Mighty interesting.
and JFK's brain.
I too am skeptical ala the whole Jesse James situation. Still it will be interesting if they can find a way to do DNA testing.
My reasons for skepticism include that the real Booth likely would have gone overseas and been lionized by supporters rather than gone to Tn and later become a alcoholic house painter.
I also wonder where the claimed Booth was burried and why that body can not be tested too?
Not Mary Magdalene's ovaries, her skull. The teeth match marks on Christ's body imprinted on the Shroud of Turin.
He's probably dead now, unless he has lived to the ripe old age of 167.
The Knights keep it in Scotland, actually.
Keep up, now.
There were lots of Booths in the US in the 19th century and John is a common first name...so there were likely a number of John W. Booths around.
What about the grassy knoll across from Lincoln's seat?
Barack Hussein Obama runs as the second coming of Lincoln ... odd timing for a story like this. Things that make you go hmmmmm
What the Knight actually DID have was the skull of John the Baptist. Or at least what they and the muslims whom they killed to get it thought was his skull.
It was part of the big stink that got them accused of heresy. (That and the French loser king owed them a lot of money and the Pope of the day was pretty weak and located in Paris. But, hey, details.)
Actually, Wilkes' mummy was on the plane that supposedly hit the World Trade Center. Since the plane didn't actually hit the tower it is in hiding with the passengers of the flight. They're all in VP Cheney's bunker waiting for the PNAC to finish taking over the world and Halliburton rounding up all the DUmmies into concentration camps and...yada yada yada...
Everyone knows that the impregnable fortress of the Knights Templar is in Scotland. They've proven the Ark of the Covenent was a gigantic storage battery.
What's more amazing to me is how much power these guys have. The crackpots who think Jesse James faked his death actually managed to get the authority to dig up his grave and analyze the bones' DNA. And a few years ago, some harebrain came up with the theory that Zachary Taylor was secretly assassinated, and she got the authority to dig up his remains and perform an autopsy. A former president of the United States, dug up because of the fantasies of some lunatic! The serious attention this nonsense gets in our culture is an embarassment, IMHO.
Palamino?
No s#!+ ?
ML/NJ
Dr Mudd was convicted and sentenced to live as a conspirator to the crime but his only "sin" was providing a doctor's care to a person who he didn't even know let alone conspire with.
He was pardoned in 1869 by President Andrew Johnson but his name became a colloquialisn, "Mud" thereafter!
Don't spoil the plot of the Stephen Berry novel I'm reading!
Then just who did Corporal Corbett kill?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.