THE FIRST CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE STRANGE AFTERLIFE OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH
There are several places we could begin this story, including Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C, just after 10:30 on the night of April 14, 1865, as John Wilkes Booth shoots Abraham Lincoln in the head with a Derringer. A better place might be Enid, Oklahoma, where for several years in the 1870s a man lived, claiming to be Booth. Then there is the garage of a house in Memphis during the early 1920s, where the journalist William Shepherd was shown the mummified body of the man said to be Booth. Perhaps the beginning doesn’t matter: it’s a story rich in gothic detail but it is also important, first as an example of a conspiracy theory from an age before conspiracy theories became popular, and then as a model of how preposterous ideas can defy solid evidence and become entrenched, and how otherwise sensible people can believe them.
The escape from the theatre and death twelve days later of John Wilkes Booth is an episode in U.S history that has always been given close analysis, because it holds revelations about Booth’s motives and, more crucially, the conspiracy surrounding the assassination. Most people would have little reason to doubt the sequence of events that saw Booth and David Herold ride through the Maryland swamps to a barn on Richard Garrett’s farm, where they were surrounded on April 26th and where Sergeant Boston Corbett shot Booth in the back of the head as he tried escaping the burning building.
The Booth family quickly requested possession of the corpse and gave it a private burial, so perhaps creating a mystery as to where it lay, but this is not a story where the physical body was required to establish proof. Enough people were present at Garrett’s farm and made statements later to make us think any claims Booth escaped were spurious.
It helps however to keep in mind this story that appeared in American newspapers in August 1865. In Paris, the craze for collecting cartes de visite was at its height and portraits of foreign actors were sought after, and that month demand for cartes of Booth outstripped that for images Lincoln. He had a rock star’s charisma a century before the idea otherwise existed. People who’d never met the man grieved for him.
Go forward to Grandberry, Texas in the 1870s, and the encounter between a young lawyer named Finis Bates and a man claiming to be Booth. Bates came from southern aristocracy and we don’t need a precise breakdown of his politics to see how in the 1870s they were tempered by the War and Reconstruction, or how even if he’d considered himself moderate towards the North he could be seduced by the possibility that Booth had escaped from Garrett’s farm. In any case, throughout the rest of his life he believed he had met Booth, and more: he owned the assassin’s mummified body.
The man Bates met called himself John St. Helen. He had an elegant appearance, with long, well-kept silver hair and a theatrical manner. Bates described him as having powerful oratorical skills, which were useful because his financial position was often parlous and it helped if people were persuaded money was close at hand.
St. Helen drank heavily and it was after one bender, when the local doctor thought he was on the way out, that he confided in Bates as to who he really was. “I killed the best man who ever lived,” he said to the young attorney.
These deathbed confessions are always dramatic and highly suspect. The listener rarely wants to doubt them and may hold the very condition they were given in as some kind of proof. Why if you were about to meet your maker would you lie about something like that?
What ought to raise our misgivings was St. Helen/Booth’s statement that Lincoln was the best man who ever lived. Firstly, Lincoln had been assassinated only a decade before and during the 1870s the very ideals that Booth had proclaimed about freedom for the South were being ruthlessly tested by Washington. Officially the era is known as Reconstruction but for a lot of southerners it amounted to punishment. If this man was Booth, he had suddenly reversed his politics at a moment the South could argue it held the moral high ground.
Secondly, Lincoln’s reputation even among northerners was subject to query. Very few thought him a great leader in the way he became later. Today it is apparent from his published speeches that he did not fight this war to free slaves: he clearly did not believe Africans deserved liberty so much as the South had to join what a later President would call “a level playing field” on trade.
So the man claiming to be Booth either said what he did about Lincoln, suggesting he was delusional, or he didn’t, in which case it sounds like Bates put words into his mouth in order to absolve himself and Booth from criticisms about southern loyalties.
Go forward to 1901, and the town of El Reno, Oklahoma. A man calling himself David E. George is living out of a suitcase. The source of his income is uncertain but it fluctuates so that sometimes he lives off charity and other times makes great promises about making people beneficiaries in his will. He claims to be a house painter though shows no ability for that, nor as someone notes does he have the calloused hands of a house painter. Some people do believe he has been a great Shakespearean actor in the past. He certainly has the voice and the gestures, although as someone else later pointed out to Shepherd, the good people of El Reno would have no idea if the man was reciting Shakespeare; the Bible was about the only book most of them knew.
Once again he gets sick, and once again makes a confession, and just like in Grandberry he disappears, only this time he is traced to Enid, about eighty miles north, where, wracked with pain after years of heavy drinking, he takes poison and dies in a hotel room. In the days before, he had drawn attention to the fact he was drawing up a will and he would bequeath money and land to various people, even though he had neither.
As the embalmers were working on the body, a Reverend Harper, who had known George in El Reno, arrived at the morgue, saw the body and announced this was actually John Wilkes Booth.
Because of that, because there was the possibility this might be the case, the embalmers further preserved the body in order that investigators from Washington could examine it. Weeks later they had not arrived as expected but Finis Bates turned up and took possession of it.
Ever since his encounter with John St. Helen in the 1870s, Bates had been tracking down information on the assassination of Lincoln and the death of Booth, or, to put this more accurately, he had been searching for any evidence that St. John could be Booth.
What he discovered was that there were questionable circumstances surrounding the deaths of both men: procedures were not properly followed, people were not where they were supposed to be and evidence was not as clear cut as it ought to be.
As we know now, the assassination of Lincoln had begun as a plot to kidnap him but that had gone wrong. We also know that others besides Booth, Herold and a handful of zealots were involved, and some may have been close enough to the President to make the plotters’ job easier by taking soldiers off guard duty and removing checkpoints so the way in and out of Washington was made easier. What interested Bates more than any of this however was that possibility that he had met Booth in Grandberry. That was the issue he wanted resolved.
As a lawyer, he knew the value of evidence and also how to dissect a case and cast doubt on evidence. Like a good lawyer he sat down to challenge every dubious circumstance, but like a bad historian he had already determined what he would find. Any evidence that might challenge Bates’ belief that he had met John Wilkes Booth in Texas years after Boston Corbett was supposed to have shot him would be quietly ignored.
The title page of Bates’ 1907 book gives the reader no doubt what lies inside:
The escape and suicide
of
John Wilkes Booth:
or, The first true account of
Lincoln’s assassination
Containing
a complete confession by Booth
many years after the crime
giving in full detail the plans, plot and intrigue
of the conspirators, and the treachery
of Andrew Johnson,
then vice-president of the United States
Written for the Correction of History
By
Finis L. Bates
It is less a description of the contents so much as a warning to any sceptics that they can’t scoff at the paucity of evidence: a tactic purveyors of conspiracy theories today know well. Throw doubt back at the doubters so that any suspicions they have about the story can be turned into an admission they don’t have the full facts. How many people who dismiss the theories about Princess Diana’s death saw the accident with their own eyes?
You wonder what’s going on in the minds of people who claim the Sandy Hook massacre or the Holocaust didn’t happen: those require a special blend of ignorance and paranoia. In Bates’ case however it looks like he met a man who told him a story and for the rest of his life he wanted to believe it, no matter what. Some of the people who met St. Helen/George also wanted to believe that he was Booth (or perhaps they wanted to believe that Booth had survived Garrett’s farm). But they weren’t willing to pursue the story with Bates’ drive and intent, to the extent he took possession of the embalmed corpse from the undertakers in Enid and kept it at his home for more than twenty years.
So who was John St. Helen/David E. George? A common or garden grifter no doubt, possibly a fantasist or a sufferer of Munchausen’s or some other syndrome that distorts the ability to discriminate between the outside and the inner world. What’s telling about his story is firstly that he wasn’t successful: quite a few of his intended victims weren’t taken in, but also it’s apparent that those people would have helped him even if he had never claimed to be Booth. Except for Bates and one or two others, Booth was neither a heroic figure nor, it seems, an especially interesting one.
In the years after Bates died in 1923, the mummified body was sold to one carnival and then to another, where sometimes it was advertised as the man who shot Lincoln. An article in the Saturday Evening Post in February 1938 remarked that the mummy hadn’t done too badly in ticket receipts in the last year, nearly as well as the real John Wilkes Booth at the height of his career.
