Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(10-10-2018 10:55 PM)Christine Wrote:  Wading in. Well more like tip toeing. On the subject of scars: My daughter has a burn scar on her forehead. When exposed to sunlight, even after 30 years, what is normally not too obvious becomes angry and bright. As for not being able to use scars for identification: when I was 8 my bike broke while I was riding it, and a bolt ripped my calf open. Nearly 50 years later my husband could still use that scar for identification purposes. Concerning the changed look of the body: last year our granddaughter died shortly after birth. I was able to hold her about 15 minutes after she was born. When I again held her 10 hours later she had already begun to bruise and discolor. She was still beautiful to me but at her burial 5 days later (even after embalming and the gentle care of the funeral directors) she looked so different.

One, you're talking about a scar that your husband has seen for decades, which is a very different situation than the one under discussion. Dr. May only described seeing the re-opened scar one time--two years before he saw the body on the Montauk--and, as I have noted before, another doctor operated on Booth's neck after Dr. May did.

Two, we are not talking about the bodies of infants that die shortly after death. We're talking about adults who die. Again, you can Google a gazillion true-crime cases where friends and relatives were easily able to identify the victim even though their dead body was not discovered until 24-48 hours after death.

Someone mentioned Occam's Razor. As a longtime student of critical thinking, I am a big fan of Occam's Razor. So, for example, I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the fact that neither Barnes, Woodward, nor May mentioned seeing or hearing about any JWB initials in their reports and testimony is that they never saw or heard about the initials that night. I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the fact that May, L. Gardner, and, per Gardner, Eckert said that the body did not resemble Booth is that it was not Booth. I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the fact that the decades-belated witnesses who claimed that they saw JWB initials on the body gave such contradictory and mutually impeaching accounts is that they were lying. I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the War Department's bizarre, unprecedented handling of the dead body is that the body was not Booth. I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the fact that the only autopsy picture of the body vanished is that it showed the body of someone other than Booth. I think the simplest, most logical explanation of the failure to take a single photo of the crucial JWB initials--which, contrary to Steers' nonsense, they most certainly could have done, as numerous 19-century photos prove--is that the initials were not there or were of such a nature that they were problematic.

No, I do not believe I am misreading Conger's statement about the man in the barn's actions just before he was shot. Conger said that he heard something drop (which was apparently the crutch), that the man then "dropped his arm," "relaxed his muscles," and started walking toward the door, and that just a few seconds after that the shot rang out. That certainly sounds like someone who was surrendering.

Someone asked me about my basis for saying that the bullet entered the man in the barn's neck at about a markedly downward angle. I have discussed the evidence of this in two posts in this thread. One source was the AFIP forensic review of the vertebrae, and the other source was Dr. Robert Arnold's analysis of the vertebrae and the wound descriptions.