Unwanted Facts: Facts that Most Books on the Lincoln Assassination Ignore

[Steve]

(12-19-2018 03:33 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(12-15-2018 08:13 AM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  Toward the end of the conspiracy trial, the defense obtained evidence that Weichmann had given false testimony because he had been threatened,

From what I can tell, assassination authors do not give a great deal of credence to Weichmann's 1902 deathbed statement. The statement has never been discovered, but his sisters apparently talked about it many years later. I do not have a date on this, but I think it was in the 1920s. Despite the controversy over the statement itself, I will mention what Lloyd Lewis wrote about it in Myths After Lincoln:

"Louis Weichmann died naturally enough to disappoint the superstitious, but for all that, he was old and broken far beyond his sixty years, when, on June 2, 1902, the end came. He knew that his soul was drifting out of the window where the night-air, fresh with fragrance of young corn, drifted in. He called for a paper, his two sisters brought it, he dictated a statement, signed it, they witnessed it. What he wanted written had nothing to do with property, nor with money — nevertheless it was a bequest, a bequest, as he phrased it, "to all truth-loving people."

He was testifying again about Mary E. Surratt as he lay by the open window. This time he was before a new Court, and what he had to tell, now, was of even greater weight than had been his testimony in May, 1865, for death-bed statements are better than sworn testimony, the legal men say, arguing that no man will send his soul climbing up through the stars to God weighted down with a lie.

He testified again and died. His sisters folded up the paper and put it away. Their brother had wanted silence for himself; let silence keep his last words, too. Time, however, eases hurts, and the other day, sitting in the room where he had died, out in the west end of Anderson, grown now to be a clanging city of factories, these two aged women told in a word what their brother's dying testimony had been:

"When he was dying he asked us to get a pen and paper and told us to write: 'June 2, 1902; THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT EVERY WORD I GAVE IN EVIDENCE AT THE ASSASSINATION TRIAL WAS ABSOLUTELY TRUE; AND NOW I AM ABOUT TO DIE AND WITH LOVE I RECOMMEND MYSELF TO ALL TRUTH-LOVING PEOPLE.

"Then he signed it 'Louis J. Weichmann' and died.

"The doctor when he filled out the death-certificate put down in the space after the word 'cause' just 'extreme nervousness' — that was all."

The sisters told author Lloyd Lewis about the note and he published a story about in Liberty Magazine, I'm going to say around Jan. 1928 (but I'm not totally sure about that date); Lewis then mentions the story about the note in his 1929 book:
https://books.google.com/books?id=F6HB7q...nn&f=false

By the way Lewis is wrong, the cause of death listed on Weichmann's death certificate was not "extreme nervousness", it was "cardiac asthma".