Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(10-13-2018 08:46 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  I would ask...if the body on the Montauk were not Booth's, why would it have a fracture of the fibula in the same spot as the real Booth did?

How do we know that Dr. May was not correct when he said that the injured leg was the right leg? When Dr. May's son, who was also a doctor, was asked about his father's statement that the the right leg was the injured leg, he said that if that was what his father said, then "that would undoubtedly mean that it was the right leg that was broken" (http://library.indstate.edu/rbsc/neff/PD...tion.pdf). Does it not seem odd that when Holt took Dr. May's statement on April 27, Holt did not ask him anything about the leg injury?

How do we know that Dr. Barnes did not intend to describe the right leg? How do we know that he did not commit the doctor's-left-patient's-right error that others here have suggested is both understandable and somewhat frequent? How do we know that Barnes, a senior figure in the government, did not purposely misreport which leg was injured?

Does the photo of the broken ankle show the foot so we can tell which leg it was? Oh, that's right: for some reason, not a single photo was taken of any of the injuries. In fact, according to some defenders of the traditional story, no photo was taken of the face either, nor even of the body in profile from a distance. Post-mortem photos were quite common by the mid-1800s. But, we're supposed to believe that in the crime of the century, in the most important case that the officials on that boat would ever be involved with, they did not allow a single photo to be taken of the body because the body looked so unlike Booth. Or, a photo was taken (which I believe is the case), but it soon disappeared (obviously, because the photo would have shown that the body was not Booth).

Finally, when Lt. Baker had the body for several hours, would it not have been a fairly simple matter to break the left ankle? We should keep in mind that Luther Baker was one of Lafayette Baker's two handpicked henchmen to accompany the search party, and that, as historian Allan Nevins noted, Lafayette Baker was "a notorious fabricator of evidence in trials" (The War for the Union, 1971, p. 334).