New Search - HELP

[Pamela]

In answer to your last question, I find it very hard to imagine what it was like in police headquarters on that night. Maybe, in a single word-intense. In his letters to Weichmann, Richards deduced that there were 2 separate visits by police, the first of which Weichmann was unaware. In a later letter he said he had begun to recollect that McDevitt told him that he had seen Weichmann and that Weichmann would be coming in the next day. There is no proof as to how Clarvoe knew Mary was in, but if he heard the earlier visit mentioned at headquarters, he could have acted to do a more agressive visit based on incomplete information.

I was guessing about the stage issue before I found Richards' testimony in the John Surratt trial that he didn't follow the conspiracy trial or read any of the testimony. I'll take another guess that Richards had not been in the theater very long before the assassination and wasn' t following the play. Maybe he noticed Parker in the audience instead of doing his job. In any case, within seconds of the shot, Booth was on the stage and Hawk had run off, leaving the stage free of actors other than the killer.

There are many reasons to believe that Richards was in the theater, many of which John Fazio posted on the New search-HELP thread started by SSlater.

I re-read the three testimonies of Stewart. He never mentioned in court of being deposed by Judge Olin in the Peterson house on April 15. To Olin he mentioned two persons who he believed were in the "police corps", coming out of the theater door into the alley.

In the conspiracy trial he said (Volume 2, p.81) that night he went to police headquarters and "...gave my name, and the information I had, to Superintendent Richards, of the police, and upon his question , said to him that I believed I knew who it was that had committed the deed, that I believed it was Booth, and he said he believed so, too."

In the trial of John Surratt, Stewart said this (Volume 2, p.985): A. ..in compliance with a promise I had made to some police officers, I then walked down to the police headquarters....I remained in the neighborhood of the police office until the gentleman in charge there said I need not remain there any longer; that he would take my statement the next day."

Quite a lot of variations for a witness who testified in great detail about atmospheric conditions and the effects of moonlight and gaslight on Booth, pedestrians, buildings, etc. Also, Richards wrote to Weichmann that "I knew him and he knew me" and that if Stewart recognized Booth, he didn't share that information with him. Stewart had an enormous capacity to recall the details of moonlight, atmospheric haze and horse gyrations, but he was oddly inconsistent regarding police and Richards.

Speaking of courtesy, how gracious was it of you to respond to my discovery of Clarvoe's statement by re-writing court transcript to change what he said and create an entirely different meaning? And I always allow for human error, who doesn't?