Almarin Cooley Richards

[John Fazio]

(07-28-2016 01:16 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  John, regarding whether or not Richards was prone to fabrication, what is your opinion of the Orlando Sentinel article? (We discussed it in another thread.) Also, do you feel Ed Steers is simply wrong when he writes, "Richards gave several statements in the forty years following the assassination, all filled with inconsistencies and errors."

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http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1987...kes-eustis

"Former Police Chief Richards provided more details about his involvement with the historic event during a 1900 talk at Clifford Hall, according to a letter written in 1958 by former Eustis resident M.B. Gault. The letter now is in the hands of the Lake County Historical Society.

Gault wrote: ''At one of the entertainments given by some group, a Col. Richards came on the stage and told how he had been posted behind the box in which President Lincoln sat when he was shot. He said he jumped through the front of the box to get Booth, who got away, but he found on the stage a Bowie knife that Booth was supposed to have lost. And he Richards showed us the knife.''

Roger:

I believe I commented on the Orlando Sentinel article some time ago. I did not save my comments, but I vaguely recall that there were so many retellings by so many people over such a lengthy period of time, that for this and other reasons, I felt the story could not be credited, or at least not most of it. Interestingly, though, the part about a couriered order to Booth to desist from the assassination accords well with my own belief of Booth's being at all times handled by the Confederate Secret Service.

As for Ed Steers's comment in The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia, I have never read his source (Gary R. Planck, The Lincoln Assassination's Forgotten Investigator), but I doubt that it would change my belief that the existence of inconsistencies and errors does not, by itself, reveal intentional falsehood. On the contrary, they are frequently evidence of truth, because identical accounts are often indicative of copying and a settled tale. Differences in perception, memory lapses, the opinions of others and the felt need to sometimes please one's listeners can and often do account for inconsistencies and errors. I am satisfied, based on his April 17, 1885, account (see Timothy S. Good, pp. 100-102), which, incidentally, establishes that he had not yet received word of Grant's change of plans, and his letter to Weichmann of May 16, 1898, that Richards was in Ford's on the 14th. I am also satisfied that the Fabricator in Chief is not Richards, but Stewart, who is elsewhere described as a "shady lawyer" and whose testimony is replete with indications of intentional falsehood.

Incidentally, if inconsistencies and errors always condemned an historical account, we should have to throw out all the evidence of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, because the Gospels are full of them.

John