Will the Real John Wilkes Booth Please Stand Up

2/19/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
It was the night of April 14, 1865, and only a few days before the Civil War had ended when Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. The actor John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the head, leaped from the theater box where the president had been seated and escaped into the night. On April 24, it was reported that Booth had been shot and killed outside a barn in Virginia. But is that version of the assassin's death the truth?

Left to right: Booth with brothers Edwin and Junius Jr. in Julius Caesar

Booth was born to Junius Brutus Booth and his mistress Mary Ann Holmes, both who were noted Shakespearean actors. They immigrated from England in 1821, and purchased a 150-acre farm near Bel Air, Maryland.

In 1851, Adelaide Delannoy, Junius Booth's legitimate wife was granted a divorce on grounds of adultery. Soon after Junius married Mary Ann. This same year Junius built Tudor Hall, the family's summer house. The family spent part of the year in Baltimore.

John Wilkes was born on the farm, the ninth of ten children. He was well-educated but had to leave school at the age of 14 when his father died. He later aspired to go into acting like his father and two brothers, Edwin and Junius Jr.

He made his stage debut when he was 17 years old. By the end of the 1850s, Booth was becoming wealthy as an actor, earning $20,000 a year (equivalent to $700,000 in 2023).

Booth was opposed to abolitionists and attended the execution of John Brown, an abolitionist leader who was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection, charges resulting from his raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

In February, 1865 Booth became secretly engaged to Lucy Lambert Hale, daughter of U.S. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire. She was unaware of his ant-Union sentiments. Prior to this Booth had developed a reputation as a womanizer. In April 1861, actress Henrietta Irving was jilted by him, and she attacked Booth with a knife and inflicted a gash on his arm.

Two months after his engagement he assassinated President Lincoln at Ford's Theater.

In a strange twist, just a few years before Lincoln's murder, his oldest son Robert Todd Lincoln was standing on a train station platform in New Jersey around 1863 or 1864. He was pushed against a train car by the crowd, and lost his footing. He fell between the car and the platform, then the train began to move. Suddenly someone grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to safety. His rescuer turned out to be Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's elder brother.

Depiction of Booth's death after refusing to surrender when trapped in a barn in Virginia

After the assassination Booth had a $100,000 bounty put on his head, and the story told was that he refused to surrender and was shot in the neck by a cavalry sergeant. He died three hours later.

In 1869 the body was turned over by the War Department to the Booth family and buried in the family plot in the Green Mount Cemetery at Baltimore. The body was identified by members of the family and by a dentist’s report. However there was always the whisper that the man killed that day was not Booth, but someone else.

In an effort to put these doubts to rest, in 2018 a group of researchers using facial recognition technology compared photographs of Booth to others that were believed to be him, and they were stunned with their findings. The comparison was made between three photographs: one was of John Wilkes Booth taken in 1865, a man called John St. Helen dated 1877 and the embalmed corpse of David E. George taken in 1903. The software took measurements such as the spaces between the eyes, the jawlines, the shapes of the cheekbones and noses. The conclusion was that it appeared that the three photographs were of the same man. Which means Booth died in 1903, age 64, using the alias of David E. George

John Wilkes Booth

Short of DNA comparison, the facial recognition test is very definitive and is widely used by law enforcement agencies and the results are considered reliable in a court of law. The comparison with John St. Helen was within the top 1% of those bearing similar features, and it was short just one pixel of having the same eye structure, thus making it almost a perfect match. Police examiners as a rule give special attention to results that come up at 5% or less.

The rumors that Booth had not been killed in 1865 circulated from the beginning when several people viewed what was supposed to be his body, and claimed it didn't look like him, however others confirmed that it was him and the government informed the public of Booth's death on that day.

In 1907, Finis L. Bates wrote Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth where he posited that a look-alike was killed at Garrett farm. According to him Booth escaped to Texas, and took on the name of John St. Helen.

In 1877 Booth fell deathly ill, and believing that he was going to die, confessed to his friend Finis Bates (grandfather of actress Kathy Bates) who was an attorney that his real name was John Wilkes Booth, along with details of how he had fled from Washington as part of the conspiracy to kill the president. When he recovered, the unwise confession prompted him to leave town quickly, and he faded into obscurity until 1903.

Mummy promoted as the Man Who Shot Lincoln

The rumor periodically revived, as in the 1920s when a corpse was exhibited on a national tour by a carnival promoter and advertised as the "Man Who Shot Lincoln". According to a 1938 article in the Saturday Evening Post, the exhibitor said that he obtained St. Helen's corpse from Bates' widow.

In 1995, a request was made to exhume Booth's remains from the family plot, however a judge turned down the request when it could not be determined where the body was buried. It was hoped that photographs could be superimposed over the skull, and verification could be made of Booth's recent injuries before death, which was a broken leg and a crushed thumb.

The 1998 book The Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth contended that Booth had escaped, sought refuge in Japan, and eventually returned to the United States.

In 2010, descendants of Edwin Booth obtained permission to exhume John Wilkes Booth's body to obtain DNA samples. A spokesman from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge where Booth is buried denied the family had requested the exhumation. The family also hoped to obtain DNA from a vertebrae stored at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland. In 2013, a museum spokesperson announced the family's request had been rejected.

Nate Orlowek a historian who has been examining evidence for over 40 years believes that Booth fled to Granbury, Texas using the name of John St. Helen. There are some Booth descendants who believe this as well. Orlowek claims that if it was Booth who was killed in 1865, the government would have taken photos and displayed them to the public, instead he was secretly buried in the basement of the old Naval prison in Washington D.C.

The FBI kept a file on Booth from 1922 to 1977. Questions still lingered if Booth had escaped and what happened to 27 sheets from his diary which disappeared around 1867.

Capt. James Ward Boyd, who some believe was killed in place of Booth

When Booth’s diary was recovered by troops at the Garrett farm, it was delivered to Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who ripped out 18 pages that were not made available to later investigators. These pages were allegedly later found in the attic of one of Stanton’s descendants, Joseph Lynch, though nobody has actually seen them.

Many believe that Booth did not act as a lone assassin, but was part of a much wider conspiracy.

In Why Was Lincoln Murdered (1937), Otto Eisenschiml describes Stanton, a former lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio, as a man of "Machiavellian finesse," who deliberately prolonged the Civil War and may have plotted Lincoln’s downfall to gain more personal power. He aspired to become president, which he never did.

Some believe that a cabal of international bankers provided money for the conspiracy. The cabal was led by the Rothschilds who wanted Lincoln out of the way since he opposed a Central Bank.

Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase pushed a bill through Congress in 1863. It was the National Bank Act which created a central bank that could issue U.S. bank notes backed by debt that were loaned to the government at interest.

By 1865, Lincoln was making head way in getting rid of the Act, which he opposed.

Other events point to a conspiracy. Booth was given information that was not publicly known, which was that Lincoln would be attending a play at Ford's Theater. He also became privy of the knowledge that Lincoln had a substitute bodyguard, and not the regular man that guarded him.

The President’s box at Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

Stanton called away General Ulysses S. Grant who was supposed to attend the play with the president, thus allowing the assassination to take place.

At the same moment Booth had put his plan into action, Lewis Powell (aka Lewis Paine) broke into Secretary of State William Seward's house, and wounded him and four guests.

Another who it was thought was part of the conspiracy was Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Mary Todd Lincoln wrote in a letter: "…that miserable inebriate Johnson….He never wrote me a line of condolence and behaved in the most brutal way…As sure as you and I live, Johnson had some hand in all this."

In the book The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) the authors claim the person killed in Booth's stead was James Ward Boyd, a former captain in the Tennessee Volunteers of the Confederate Army and Rebel Secret Service, who had been released from prison in February 1865 by Stanton.

The embalmed remains of David Elihu George who confessed after taking strychnine that he was John Wilkes Booth

In the alternate story of Booth's ending, it took place in 1903 in the Grand Avenue Hotel, Room No. 4 in Enid, Oklahoma.

David Elihu George lay on his deathbed after taking a dose of strychnine. The body was sent to W.P. Penniman's Undertakers, where stories were told that before George succumbed to his suicide attempt he confessed to being John St. Helen, who in turn was really John Wilkes Booth.

So many people heard the story, that Penniman had the corpse embalmed, tied it in a sitting position to a chair and displayed it at a window for the public to view.

Finis L. Bates came to Enid from Memphis, Tennessee, and confirmed that George was John St. Helen. He even showed Penniman a picture he had of St. Helen given to him years before. He also found that George's leg had a fracture of the shinbone above the ankle, and he had high thumb joint on the right hand. Both of these traits were like Booth.

Bates was not sentimental about his friend's death, since he lectured at the Enid Opera House about John St. Helen at the cost of 25 to 50 cents for entry.

Supposedly Mr. George's remains were shipped to the Booth family in Baltimore, however Bates had other plans and rented the body out to carnivals and state fairs as the corpse of John Wilkes Booth.

When Bates died in 1923 his wife sold the mummy to William Evans, the "Carnival King of the Southwest."

Later it became part of Jay Gould's Million Dollar Circus. In 1931, while touring in Chicago, six doctors took an x-ray of the mummy which showed a healed ankle fracture, a deformed right thumb, and a ring with the letter "B" inside the stomach.

The last known viewing of the mummy was in the 1970s in New Hope, Pennsylvania.