Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(12-28-2018 11:15 PM)tom82baur Wrote:  

(12-21-2018 09:26 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(12-21-2018 09:09 AM)tom82baur Wrote:  Since you claim that the body was Boyd and NOT Booth, and you further claim that there is no scientific precedent "in the history of forensic science where a body underwent just one of the impossible changes under conditions even halfway similar to Booth's flight", ('freckles' for example) and since the body on the Montauk had 'freckles', please show what evidence you have found that proves that Boyd was 'freckle-faced'.

If the body = Not Booth; and the body = Boyd; AND the body was 'freckled'; then Boyd = was 'freckled'. This is the necessary conclusion, following your logic. Please share your proof.

And, Mike, could you also please respond to wsanto's post. wsanto is a medical doctor who posted that ecchymosis would not develop if you broke the leg of a corpse. So if the remains on the Montauk were Boyd's, then no ecchymosis would have developed because his tibia was broken after he died (as reported by you). But considerable ecchymosis was indeed reported by Dr. Barnes during the post-mortem examination, and to me, this is definite evidence the body was Booth's, not Boyd's.

I just want to note that Mr. Griffith has so far failed to respond, or even acknowledge, the points raised above, despite repeated requests. Rather than respond, he has now changed the subject, as Laurie Verge has noted several times. Can we have an answer, Mr. Griffith, or are these questions too silly, or perhaps inconvenient for you? Pray tell.

I haven't been checking the forum much for the last week or so, with Christmas and all. Shall I repeat the numerous questions that I have asked that have gone unanswered? Anyway. . . .

One, there is no extant photograph of Boyd that is clear enough and zoomed in enough to enable one to determine if he had freckles. But we know that Booth did not have freckles, yet two witnesses noted that the body on the Montauk was heavily/very much freckled.

Two, ecchymosis? Yeah, uh, that's just a fancy word for bruising. Boyd could have bruised his ankle or bruised his leg just above the ankle. Also, Dr. May said the right leg was the broken leg and that it was very much blackened. We do know that Boyd had a broken leg or a leg injury because he was last seen using crutches.

Three, Boyd was 41, which would explain why Dr. May said the body on the Montauk looked "much older" than Booth looked the last time he'd seen him, which was just over a year earlier. When Rollins was shown a picture of Booth less than 48 hours before the barn shooting, he had no problem recognizing the picture as Booth, and the only difference he noted between the picture and how Booth looked when he saw him was that Booth had no mustache when he saw him. Rollins didn't say anything like "and, oh yeah, when I saw him, Booth looked a lot older than he does in the picture."

Four, you folks still need to explain the discrepancy in the dental evidence. The body examined in 1869 only had one filling. If you're going to speculate that the filling had fallen out, you need to explain why no one noted such a discrepancy with the dental chart that they had in hand. If the filling had fallen out, the teeth would not have matched the dental chart.

Five, speaking of dental evidence, where is Dr. Merrill's report on his viewing of the body on the Montauk? Why didn't Holt take a statement from Merrill like he did with all the other identification witnesses? Why wasn't Merrill listed as a witness? Isn't it self-evident that if Merrill had provided a solid identification, especially one based on dental evidence, Holt would have taken his statement and Merrill's presence on the Montauk would have been officially noted?

Six, you folks also need to explain why none of the witnesses, not even the doctors, noted a single one of the scars that Booth was known to have, some of which should have been rather obvious. I discuss this in "Vanishing Evidence: Three Problems with the Claim that John Wilkes Booth Was Killed in 1865."

Seven, you folks also need to explain how the body viewed in 1869 could have had hair that was nearly a foot longer than Booth's? You'll recall that William Pegram, who knew Booth and had seen him many times, said that the hair on the corpse's head "had grown probably nearly a foot in length." Back then people believed that your hair kept growing after you died, but we now know that hair and nails grow by only a fraction of an inch, if at all, after death. All of the photos of Booth show that he kept his hair at a consistent length. So obviously the body that Pegram saw had hair that was "nearly a foot" longer than he had ever seen Booth's hair to be.

Eight, you folks also need to explain why the body at the 1869 "identification" had noticeable damage on/just below the knee, when no such damage was noted on the body on the Montauk, and Booth was not known to have suffered any such damage.

You guys can keep ignoring the scientifically problematic aspects of the two so-called "identifications" of the body as Booth, but that won't make them go away.