The man who killed Lincoln. (original) (raw)
One of my favorite towns in Texas is Granbury, the county seat of Hood County, forty miles south of Fort Worth.
And each time we visit, Doris and I always have lunch at a small restaurant on the Granbury town square.
Painted inside on one wall in the restaurant is a drawing of John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford�s Theater in 1865.
| I�ve often wondered why the drawing was there until I read a book, �Unsolved Mysteries of the Old West� by W.C. Jameson. In chapter 16, Jameson asks, �Did John Wilkes Booth Die in Oklahoma?� The assassination of Lincoln remains, even after the passage of 146 years, one of the most controversial events in American history. |
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In the early 1870s, a man who called himself John St. Helen went to Granburyattorney Finis L Bates to defend him against the charge of operating an illegal saloon in the nearby town of Glen Rose.
Several weeks later, St Helen moved to Granburyand began writing a book about the Lincoln assassination. St. Helen confessed to Bates that he was, indeed, Booth and gave Bates a tintype of Booth, saying �This is me.�
John Wilkes Booth
Library of Congress
Booth supposedly told Bates that Vice President Andrew Johnson was the principal instigator of Lincoln�s assassination, but Bates did not believe St. Helen.
Several months following St. Helen�s confession, Bates moved to Memphis and established a successful legal practice.
In his spare time, Bates read everything he could about the Lincoln murder and grew more convinced that St. Helen was, indeed, John Wilkes Booth.
St. Helen, meanwhile, moved to Enid, Oklahoma, and assumed the name of David E. George. In 1903 George died.
Bates read of George�s death in a newspaper and wondered if George might be the man he knew as St. Helen. He went to Enid, Oklahoma, and located the undertaker in charge of George�s funeral.
He held the old tintype of John St. Helen next to George�s face. It was the same man.
Other aspects of George�s body cinched the theory of him being Booth, including a ring worn by Booth and George and evidence of a broken leg on the body of each man.
The body of Booth/George eventually fell into the hands of a carnival owner, who went broke and placed the mummy in a chair on his front porch and charged his neighbors a dime to see �the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.�
The mummy eventually disappeared and, to this date, no one knows its whereabouts.
©
Bob Bowman November 7, 2011 Column
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