Drawing of Booth Body

[mikegriffith1]

(03-12-2014 03:03 AM)John E. Wrote:  Alexander Gardner never took a photograph of John Wilkes Booth and the mystery of the supposed photograph was put to rest by his son Lawrence in 1891. Lawrence worked as an assistant with his father and was present on the day of Booth's examination aboard the Montauk. Lawrence Gardner could not have been more clear when he stated, "Did we take a picture? No.". These weren't offhand remarks or an inference captured by a reporter. This was a first-person, direct quote from Gardner and was followed by a logical explanation.

The logical explanation being that the body looked nothing like Booth? How is that a logical reason not to have taken a single photo of the body? At the very least, photos should have been taken of the injuries and of any distinguishing marks.

Detective James Wardell said a photo was taken of the body and that he personally delivered it to Baker. Since Wardell was a friendly witness and even defended the War Department's suppression of the photo, why would he have fabricated his account?

L. Gardner, on the other hand, was probably trying to explain away the disappearance of the autopsy photo. Given how long Booth's fate had been a hot topic, it is very strange that no one else on the Montauk had ever said, "Oh, actually, we decided not to take a photo."

(03-12-2014 03:03 AM)John E. Wrote:  Alexander Gardner was tasked to take a photo of Booth's body but Maj. Thomas Eckert rescinded the order when it was evident Booth's day-old, "rapidly changing" corpse bore little resemblance to the handsome actor.

This is a medical impossibility. 24 hours is not enough time for a body to change so drastically in appearance that it "bears no resemblance" to the body in life. Not even close. One can Google a zillion cases of bodies being discovered 24-48 hours after death, outdoors, and of friends and family members still being able to positively ID them because their appearance was close or even essentially identical to their appearance in life.

Quote:Additionally, Booth's face had become freckled and discolored due to livor mortis.

Livor mortis is not going to cause a bunch of freckles to grow on a face. If you can find a single forensic or medical reference that says otherwise, I'd like to see it. I've checked over a dozen medical sources on livor mortis, and they all mention discoloration but say nothing about freckles.

Why didn't Barnes or Woodward mention the freckles, much less attribute them to livor mortis? Probably because they knew that freckles do not magically grow on corpses.

No one even knew that the face was heavily freckled until L. Gardner revealed this in his 1891 article, 26 years after the fact. But Gardner's article did not draw nearly as much attention as Dr. May's 1909 article, "The Mark of the Scalpel," which also revealed that the face was quite freckled.

The fact that none of the ID witnesses on the Montauk mentioned the freckles indicates that they were not being truthful or that they were told not to mention them. At least two of them had probably never seen Booth and thus did not know that he was not freckled.