Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

Someone noted that Dr. May never said the body was not Booth, that he always claimed to have identified the body as Booth, as if somehow this settles the matter. If that is the standard, then why does not the fact that Dr. Mudd always solemnly swore that he did not recognize Booth when Booth stayed at his house with a broken ankle settle the matter?

First off, in point of fact, Dr. May did not always identify the body as Booth. By Dr. May’s own admission in his 1887 article, when he first saw the body on the Montauk, he insisted that it bore no resemblance to Booth and that he could not believe it was Booth. Dr. May’s statement is supported by Lawrence Gardner, who said the following in his 1891 article:

On removing the tarpaulin from the body, we were all struck by the lack of any resemblance to Booth. We had a number of photographs [of Booth] with us and endeavored by comparison to find a likeness between the photographs and the body, but there was no resemblance.

Now this is very odd, because when Conger/Baker showed Rollins a photo of Booth less than 48 hours before the barn shooting, Rollins readily identified the man in the photo as the man he had seen on crutches, with the one qualification that the man on crutches had no mustache.

In any case, the point I want to make is that you just cannot take a witness’s word on a central claim and ignore contradictory and problematic elements in the rest of his testimony that refute that claim.

For example, suppose that Joe Blow testifies that he got a very good look at John Doe from only a few feet away while John Doe was waiting at a crosswalk to cross the street, but then Joe Blow gives a description of John Doe that does not match John Doe’s appearance in key ways. Suppose Joe Blow says John Doe had a clear complexion, but John Doe was known to be heavily freckled. Suppose Joe Blow says John Doe looked like he was in his mid-20s, but John Doe was actually in his early 40s. Suppose Joe Blow describes John Doe’s facial hair in a way that contradicts what several other witnesses said it looked like. Suppose Joe Blow says John Doe’s appearance had changed drastically from the last time he saw him, but then insists that he still recognized him from his “general appearance” and by a large scar on the back of his neck. Any sane jury would have grave doubts that Joe Blow had really seen John Doe; they would seriously doubt that the man Joe Blow had seen was really John Doe.

Theodore Roscoe, a highly regarded scholar in his day and the author of several widely acclaimed books on historical events, studied the original handwritten transcript of Dr. May’s April 27 testimony and noticed that the transcript indicates that Dr. May was stumbling over his words after Holt asked him if he was certain he could identify the body apart from its general appearance. In Dr. May’s short, one-paragraph response, there are three cases where words were crossed out and either written over or rewritten (The Web of Conspiracy, Prentice-Hall, 1959, p. 422). “The result,” notes Roscoe, “is a garbled paragraph, as though May is sputtering uncertainly” (p. 423).