1930 recording of an eyewitness

[Julianna]

Such a good point! Some recollections of what happened inside the theater seem to have changed in just the minutes after based on what they heard from people up above or down below - such as people who first thought they heard Booth saying one thing, then later believed they had heard something different - so can only imagine (even with the purest of intentions) much would be 'filled in' from outside sources over 6 decades that could seem like genuine personal memory.

(09-02-2022 05:01 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(09-02-2022 04:33 AM)AussieMick Wrote:  just one picky point from me ... did the man see Booth escape through an alley? Thats how it sounds .

He says that's how Booth escaped, but I don't hear him saying he literally saw Booth in the alley. Remember this account came in 1930, 65 years after the assassination. I think many of the later accounts from the eyewitnesses were actually a combination of what they saw and what they had read in the years after 1865. My guess is that Mr. Willis was an eyewitness to JWB running off the stage but added the part about the alley because he read or heard about Baptist Alley in the time after the assassination. It's also possible that Mr. Willis knew firsthand about the alley because he had used the "outhouses" located there during an intermission in the play. Ford's Theatre had no indoor restrooms at that time.