Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

As someone who is relatively new to the Lincoln assassination, when I see a story like Lawrence Gardner’s, a number of questions come to mind:

* If there was no autopsy photo taken, why didn’t Holt, or Baker, or Eckert, or Bingham, or Barnes, or May, not to mention A. Gardner himself, say so when this became an issue?

From April 27, 1865, until well into the 1900s, there was widespread doubt that the body examined on the Montauk that night was Booth. This doubt was expressed in numerous newspaper articles and books, and even on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Indeed, Gardner said in his article that he was coming forth with his story because there were still many “gossips” wondering if Booth had escaped.

* How in the world would the lack of resemblance between the corpse and the living person be an excuse not to take a single autopsy photo? This was the crime of the century. Barnes was an experienced doctor. He knew what an autopsy was supposed to include. Holt was the Judge Advocate General of the United States. He certainly understood the evidentiary value of autopsy photos.

* At the very least, why would Holt and Baker et al not have ordered the taking of photos of the initials “JWB” and of the injured left leg? The autopsy photographer could have taken a profile picture of the body from a distance, which would have obscured the lack of resemblance, and then taken photos of the initials and the left leg and made sure that a few of the photos included enough of the corpse to make it clear that initials and the left leg were part of that corpse.

It is rather amazing that they failed to take a single common-sense action that would have made the identification solid.

* Why did the corpse look so different from Booth after just 10 days? The claim that Booth’s appearance underwent a radical change in just 10 days is unbelievable and untenable. Booth had a steady supply of food and water during those 10 days. He spent at least three nights of those 10 days indoors. No one’s face is going to become unrecognizable after just 10 days in such conditions.

The heavy freckling alone casts severe doubt on the ID of the body as Booth. No one is going to magically become heavily freckled from limited exposure to the elements over a 10-day period. As I’ve mentioned, when I was in the Army, I went on multi-week training exercises in the Mojave Desert where my fellow soldiers and I were exposed to intense sunlight and heat for many hours each day, and I never saw anyone sprout freckles as a result.

And let us remember that Lafayette Baker let slip that the body looked “fairly preserved” when he saw it on the Montauk. So if the body was Booth, it should have looked like Booth and should not have caused Dr. May to proclaim that the body bore no resemblance to Booth and that he could not believe it was Booth.

To get some idea of how ludicrous it is to claim that Booth’s appearance changed so radically in only 10 days that his corpse did not look like him, go look at photos of Holocaust survivors taken right after they were liberated, or while they were prisoners, and then look at photos of those same persons taken before the war and years after the war. In many cases, we have are before, during, and after photos of survivors. Find me just one case where the survivor’s appearance changed so radically that the person was unrecognizable in photos taken of them when they were liberated or when they were still imprisoned. When you look at such photos, you can see that they obviously look much thinner and weakened in the imprisonment/liberation photos, but you can still identify them from pre-war and post-war photos—you can still see the resemblance between all three sets of photos.

Given the statements that the body did not resemble Booth, it is almost comical that so many of the identification witnesses claimed that they recognized the body as Booth from its “general appearance.”

* I can’t help but return again to the obvious question: If anyone who looked at the body that night had actually noticed the tattooed initials “JWB” on the body, would they not have immediately pointed out this significant evidence to everyone else? That would have been the natural reaction: “Hey, look at this! Here are Booth’s initials! Right here.”

* What about the obvious errors in Gardner's story?

For example, Garnder claimed that he saw the initials “JWB” on the left “forearm,” but Booth’s sister said the initials were on the hand. So did McPhail. There is a recognizable difference between a person’s hand and their forearm.

Gardner also said that the letters JWB were surrounded by “a wreath of stars,” a feature that no one else described. Dawson said nothing about the initials being surrounded by stars. Nor did McPhail.

Furthermore, Gardner claimed that the neck scar was found only after Dr. May described it to Dr. Barnes. Said Gardner,

“Dr. May described the appearance of this [the scar] to Surgeon-General Barnes, and when the garments were cut open the scar was found.”

But Dr. May said the exact opposite. He said that after he expressed disbelief that the body was Booth, he asked Dr. Barnes if there was a scar on the neck, and that Barnes said there was. So, according to Dr. May, Barnes had already seen the neck scar before he asked him about it.