New Development in Booth Case Coming Soon

[mikegriffith1]

The Discovery Channel and the Philadelphia Inquirer's information on the facial recognition analysis of Booth and St. Helen is starting to get picked up by other news sources. Here's an interesting article on it from the UK newspaper The Daily Mail:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...iases.html

EXCERPT:

Quote:New evidence uncovered by facial recognition technology appears to show that Booth lived for decades under an assumed identity after he shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865.

The conventional historiography holds that Booth was shot dead by Union soldiers five days after the assassination inside a barn on a farm in Virginia.

But an investigator with the Discovery Channel series Mummies Unwrapped says that modern-day face recognition technology shows that Booth’s face matched with that of two other men - John St. Helen and David E. George. . . .

While Booth is purported to have died in 1865, the image of St. Helen was from 1877. The picture used of George was from 1902.

St. Helen was considered a near perfect match.

The facial recognition software analyzes features like the spaces between the eyes, jaw lines, and the shapes of the noses and cheek bones.

Just before St. Helen is purported to have died in 1877, he told Finis L. Bates, an acquaintance of his in Granbury, Texas: ‘I am dying. My name is John Wilkes Booth, and I am the assassin of President Lincoln.’

I was very skeptical about Bates's claims because he said Booth told him that Andrew Johnson was behind the plot and that Johnson wanted to have Lincoln killed in order to protect the South from being exploited in a harsh reconstruction. Of course, that's nonsense. Lincoln had no intention of imposing anything like Radical Reconstruction on the South--quite the opposite. So when I read this in Bates's book, I became very skeptical.

Lately, however, it has occurred to me that if Booth was a double-agent and was in league with the Radicals, it would make sense that he would spin a yarn to blame Johnson as the man behind the assassination. Or, Booth might have said this because he wanted to avoid provoking the Radicals and because he knew it would be politically acceptable to blame Johnson.