John Wilkes Booth Ring

[Sally]

I’ve read Sam Chester’s account of Booth repeatedly kissing a ring while they were drinking together in New York, and intimating to Chester that he had received the ring from a “lady”. But did Chester actually name Lucy Hale as the lady? I seem to recall he was circumspect about her identity in his statement, only saying that she was well-known and respectable and he did not wish to besmirch her name. The assumption is he was referring to Lucy, but is there any other evidence that the ring Booth was fawning over was a hair ring? I may be wrong, but I don’t think Chester specifically mentions it was a hair ring. Could it have been one of Lucy’s own rings that Booth asked for as a memento of her? (Didn’t Victorian-era swains do that sort of thing?)

As for the hair ring, I have a printout from fold3 of the receipt from Tiffany’s dated February 21, 1865 stating that a “braiding hair ring” was sold to J. Wilkes Booth for $150.00. And in “John Wilkes Booth: Day by Day”, Art Loux states “Despite being low on cash and having borrowed $1,000 from friends, Booth justified to himself spending $150 at Tiffany and Company for a braiding hair ring, presumably for Lucy Hale.” So it doesn’t seem that this hair ring was a gift from Lucy to Booth. If anything, it was vice versa.

As for what became of any ring Booth may have been wearing when he was shot, if it was connected in any way to Lucy Hale, is it possible her father may have used whatever little influence he still had in Washington to suppress it and keep a record of its existence out of the “official” documents? Maybe he even managed to get the ring back? It’s often pointed out that there is no evidence that Lucy or any member of her family were questioned after the assassination. This seems odd, since Stanton was determined to question anyone who had any connection at all to the conspirators. Given that Lucy’s alleged engagement to Booth was reported in the newspapers, and many of the people from The National Hotel who were interrogated might have mentioned that Booth and Miss Hale had been keeping company that winter, it seems unlikely that nobody in the Hale family was questioned. Could it be this mysterious ring might have been dealt with the same as whatever statements may have been made by the Hale family? I’m thinking maybe Stanton deemed them irrelevant to the investigation and had them expunged from the record as a courtesy to the new Minister to Spain?