New Eyewitness Account?

[Steve]

I checked the date of the Charles Hamlin's paper according to the table of contents of the linked book is 07 March 1894, so just short of 30 years after the fact. Memory can get distorted over the decades. Did any other source claim that Mary had any blood on her clothes?

What do you think of Hamlin's identification of Flood as the man who climbed up to the box? If Hamlin's memory is accurate, then Flood approached him with his card the day after the assassination claiming to be the first into the box. According to Clara Harris's affidavit the first person into the box was a surgeon (Taft?, although Harris thought he was in the Navy) followed by a soldier (presumably Capt. Bedee) and Bedee's account said the man who preceded him in climbing into the box shouted to box that he was a physician. Were William Flood and Silas Owen going around with their accounts of being the first men into the box just a day after the assassination?