Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

Let’s go back to Occam’s Razor. The Booth-escaped theory does not require all the strained theoretical gymnastics that the traditional theory does. For example:

* The Garretts saw Boyd writing in a black diary two days after the last entry in Booth’s red diary because Boyd’s diary was not Booth’s diary and because Boyd was not Booth.

* The Garretts and Herold initially said the man in the barn was Boyd because he was Boyd.

* Booth used aliases at least twice during his flight from April 14 through April 24. The Booth-escaped theory does not require us to believe that by an amazing coincidence Booth chose as his last alias the name of a real person, a person who we know was on crutches, who was seen not very far from Port Royal a week or so earlier, and who never returned to his family even though he was anxious to do so.

* The James W. Boyd who stayed at the Garretts was relaxed and sociable because he was not running for his life and was in no particular rush, because he had not just assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

In contrast, we know that Booth was very impatient to complete his journey to safe territory. Thomas Jones twice had to persuade him not to continue his journey because of the danger of nearby federal troops. So with the Booth-escaped theory we don’t have to float the illogical, implausible speculation that Booth, fearing for his life and knowing that federal troops were pursuing him, suddenly decided to take two days off to lunge around the Garrett farm.

* When the man in the barn was dragged out of the barn and was still alive, he expressed surprise when he heard someone mention Booth’s name because he was not Booth. Boyd looked around with a surprised look on his face, as if he was looking for Booth after someone had mentioned Booth’s name. This is exactly what you would expect Boyd to do under the circumstances.

* Luther Baker did not take off with the man in the barn’s body for several hours for no reason. The Booth-escaped theory does not require us to ignore this bizarre, extremely suspicious event. Rather, we can plausibly theorize that Baker had a very important reason for taking off with the body: to change the clothing, to break the body’s left fibula near the ankle, to slightly burn the back of the body’s neck if necessary (unless the body happened to have a scar on the back of its neck), and possibly to write the initials JWB on one of the hands.

* The Booth-escaped theory enables us to understand why Luther Baker was never called on to explain under oath and/or for the record why he took off with the body for at least three hours. It also explains why Baker’s sworn statement was “lost” and why he was never asked to testify at the conspiracy trial.

* Any crime theory has to have motive, means, and opportunity. Conger and Luther Baker had all three. Stanton, Lafayette Baker, and Holt likewise had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to ensure that the body was falsely identified as Booth.

Conger and Luther Baker stood to make life-changing money if the body could be false identified as Booth. Lafayette Baker also stood to make a handsome penny if the troop detail that he sent out was the one that found “Booth.”

* Lafayette Baker specified that the officer who would lead the 25-man detail had to be an officer who was “discrete” because he knew that this officer would see things that would need to be kept secret. That officer, Doherty, got a handsome reward and an immediate promotion because he “kept his mouth shut,” as Lafayette Baker ordered him to do after he returned.

* The body on the Montauk “bore no resemblance” to Booth and “shocked” people by its lack of resemblance to Booth because it was not Booth.

* The body’s lineaments “bore no resemblance” to Booth’s because the body was not Booth.

* The body’s face was heavily freckled because the body was not Booth. We can accept the scientific fact that dead bodies do not magically grow freckles. We don’t have to reach and strain after far-fetched, unscientific, and wholly unsupported explanations for the presence of the freckles.

* The body looked “much older” than Booth because it was not Booth. Here, too, we don’t have to float unsupported, unscientific theories to try to explain how the body could have look “much older” than Booth when no one who saw Booth during his flight described him as suddenly looking much older than 26; nor did anyone describe him as having freckles.

* There is no record of Dr. Merrill’s alleged identification of the body on the Montauk because he came, saw the body, saw that it was not Booth, and was unwilling to give a sufficiently helpful statement or report.

* Either no autopsy photo was taken or one was taken and then suppressed because the body looked so unlike Booth, and it looked so unlike Booth because it was not Booth.

* Dr. May stumbled over his words and markedly contradicted himself in his April 27 deposition with Holt because he was falsely saying that the body was Booth when he could plainly see that it was not Booth.

* Dr. May came up with lame, implausible story that he identified the body by the “large ugly scar” on the back of the neck because it gave him an excuse to claim the body was Booth. Of course, a wound that had heals by granulation is going to look virtually identical to a similarly sized wound that heals by granulation. There would have been no “mark of the scalpel” that Dr. May could have recognized, since the line that he cut and then joined would have been obliterated after the wound was reopened and the granulation process occurred.

* There was so much massive confusion over the JWB initials because Dawson did not see them on the body on the Montauk but had seen them on Booth’s hand at the National Hotel, and he couldn’t remember exactly where he had seen them because he had seen them in passing. The two most reliable reports we have on the JWB initials indicate that they were between the thumb and the forefinger, not on the wrist or the arm. It’s not that the decades-belated witnesses who claimed they saw the initials forgot basic anatomy and could not distinguish between the area near the thumb and the wrist and the arm; it’s that they were lying about seeing the initials and randomly made up where they supposedly saw them.

* Holt and Baker made sure that no one who knew Booth well saw the body because they knew the body was not Booth and did not want to risk having to deal with a close friend or family member who saw that the body was not Booth.

* Barnes turned away Col. Cobb, a longtime friend of Booth’s who came to ID the body, because he did not want Cobb to see the body.

* Two of the crewmembers lied and said they had known Booth for six weeks because Holt and Baker needed witnesses who would say that the body was Booth. We don’t have to marvel at the amazing coincidence that two crewmembers on this ship of all the ships in the Union fleet just happened to both know Booth and just happened to have known him for the same amount of time. We can see that they were plainly lying.

* We don’t have to be baffled that most the Montauk witnesses said they identified the body “by its general appearance” when Dr. May said that the body bore no resemblance to Booth. There’s no mystery at all. The witnesses were lying. They couldn’t identify Booth by any of the numerous scars he was known to have because they didn’t know him.

* Speaking of all the scars that Booth was known to have, other than the neck scar, none of the witnesses mentioned seeing any of them, not even the two autopsy doctors, because those scars were not on the body because the body was not Booth.

* Dawson lied when he said he’d seen the neck scar when he viewed the corpse—Dr. May could not see the scar until the head and neck were lifted. Dawson had seen the neck scar when he saw Booth at the National Hotel while Booth leaned over the counter to sign room paperwork.

* Holt and Baker did not take the obvious step of having the Booth conspirators who were below deck come on deck to ID the body because they knew the body was not Booth.

* The body at the 1869 viewing had hair that was 10-12 inches longer than Booth’s hair because the body was not Booth, not because this one corpse defied all known science and magically grew 10-12 inches of hair and not because Pegram was legally blind and misjudged the hair length by about 400%.

* The body at the 1869 viewing had the wrong number of filings because it was not Booth. Booth had two fillings, but the body only had one, and there was no mention of a missing tooth, which would have contradicted the dental chart, not to mention the fact that it is rare for teeth to fall out after death because they usually fuse with the jaw bone and remain intact.

* The body at the 1869 viewing had visible damage to the knee, or to the area of bone just below the knee, because the body was not Booth. Booth had no such damage, and no such damage was noted on the body on the Montauk.

* The claims of the witnesses at the 1869 viewing are so contradictory, problematic, and in some cases utterly impossible because by that time there was no way anyone could identify the body by looking at it because the flesh was blackened and rotted. The family members did not want to raise questions about Booth’s fate, and the government certainly did not want to revisit the issue either. So the family lied and the government was only too happy to accept their lies.

* We don’t have to dismiss every single one of the post-April 27 sightings of Booth as hoaxes. We can accept the credible sightings as genuine.

* We don’t have to put ourselves in the odd position of justifying the strange refusal to allow any scientific testing of Booth’s remains or of the spinal section at the NMHM to definitively settle the issue once and for all.

When researchers and Booth descendants wanted to exhume Booth’s body to perform a well-known kind of scientific analysis of the skull face, “Lincoln assassination scholars” came out of the wood work and told the court that there was no need for science in this case, that this issue was already “settled,” etc., etc. In other words, faced with the chance to obtain scientific evidence that would positively identify the corpse as Booth, traditionalist scholars did all they could to prevent the scientific testing from being done.

When researchers and Booth descendants then wanted to do a DNA test on a very tiny, tiny, tiny piece of the spinal section at the NMHM to compare it with Edwin Booth’s DNA, the Army Medical Command refused, even though the test would have required the extraction of only 0.4 grams of the spine. 0.4 grams is only 0.014 ounces, or only 1.4% of 1 ounce. By way of comparison, a grain of salt weighs 0.0023 ounces. So we’re talking about a fragment of bone that would have been no more than 7 grains of salt combined.

The Army Medical Command said it denied the request because they wanted to preserve the specimen for future generations. For what? Why? What harm would be done by removing 0.4 grams of bone from the section?