Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

In another forum, the claim has been made that when the body was seen on the USS Montauk, it looked so different from Booth because so much time had elapsed since he had died. This is an invalid argument. The man in the barn was shot at sunrise on April 26, i.e., around 5:20 AM. The body was taken aboard the Montauk for identification and autopsy less than 24 hours later--at right around 1:45 AM the next day, and the "identification" began almost immediately. Even in very warm weather, 20 hours is not enough time for a body to undergo such a radical change in appearance that it bears no resemblance to how the person looked in life.

Forensic sources tell us that a dead body does not even begin to noticeably bloat until about 72 hours after death. The internal organs don't start to decompose until about 24 hours after death. Just Google murder cases where the body was not discovered until 24-48 hours after death—you will find that friends and relatives had no problem identifying the body (except, of course, in cases where the face had not been blown away or badly damaged, etc.). So when Dr. May walked up to the body of the man in the barn, there was no reason that he should have said, "There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth. nor can I believe it to be him." Nor should May have said, "Never in a human had a greater change taken place . . . every vestige of resemblance to the living man had disappeared."

One might wonder how Dr. May could have identified the body as Booth given the above statements. He did so solely on the basis of the scar on the back of the corpse’s neck. But Dr. Robert Arnold, a former Navy surgeon and coroner, says a single scar cannot be used as the sole basis for an identification:

Quote:Dr. May was summoned to the Montauk. He ignored the first summons, but when Lafayette Baker personally called on May to identify the body, he “deemed it most prudent to obey.” Dr. May knew the reputation of Baker as a scheming bully who had locked up numerous citizens, guilty or not, and as habeas corpus had been suspended, they remained there as long as Baker desired. When May boarded the Montauk, the autopsy had been completed and the body covered with a tarpaulin. He approached the body, the tarpaulin was removed, and May instinctively blurted out, “There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be him.” This was not what Lafayette Baker wanted to hear. After some persistent insistence from Major Eckert, Dr. May agreed to have another look. This time, May asked Dr. Barnes about the presence of a scar, and Barnes said indeed there was one, that it looked like the scar of a burn and was located “three inches below the ear upon the large muscle on the neck.” May was asked if he recognized the body as Booth’s, and this time he replied, “I do, although it is much altered. It looks older, more freckled. I do not recall that he was freckled. Never in human history had a great change taken place; every vestige of resemblance to the living man had disappeared. But the mark of the scalpel during life remained indelible in death.” It is no surprise that Dr. May could not recall freckles, as Booth was not freckled.

Since the credibility of the identification of the body on the Montauk was based primarily on the testimony of one man who initially said it bore no resemblance to Booth but recanted because of the scar, a word about scars is pertinent here. Wounds that heal by granulation are characteristically wider than those that heal primarily, but wounds that heal by granulation are all similar. It is impossible to assign characteristics to a scar that would be unique to a certain individual. The idea that a corpse could be identified by a scar when “there is no resemblance to the living man” is totally without merit. (The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Louisville, KY: Windsaloft Publishing, 2016, pp. 258-259)

Dr. Arnold also points out that Dr. Barnes’ description of the bullet track and the type of bullet proves that Corbett could not have been the gunman who shot the man in the barn, that whoever shot him must have been “on the right side of the victim, above and in front of him,” and that the bullet entered at around a 25-degree downward angle (p. 264). Corbett said he used his pistol, and Corbett was standing on the ground when he supposedly fired his pistol at the man in the barn.

Dr. Arnold further notes that Barnes’ original description of the missile was “carbine bullet” but that he later changed it to “conoidal pistol bullet,” and that the original card attached to the spinal section “quoted his first description, but it was later changed to pistol ball there as well” (p. 265). The bullet type had to be changed because Corbett supposedly fired his pistol at the man in the barn.

Importantly, Dr. Arnold observes that photographs of the spinal section held by the Army prove that the bullet was a carbine bullet (i.e., rifle bullet), not a pistol bullet:

Quote:The picture of the specimen clearly demonstrates that the spinous processes of the vertebrae were completely blown away, the effects of a high-energy missile such as a rifle bullet, not a medium-energy missile such as a pistol ball.

High-energy missiles that traverse the spinal canal are especially damaging. The pulverized bone is blasted into the spinal canal, and a temporary cavity is caused by the secondary bone and neural tissue missiles, which may be as much as 25 times the frontal area of the bullet. The permanent track was at the C4-C5 (cervical vertebrae) level, and the temporary cavity would likely be about six inches in each direction. The proximal damage would have been to the nerve roots to the phrenic nerves, which supply the diaphragm. Death would have occurred in a few minutes. (p. 265)

So whoever shot the man in the barn used a rifle and was positioned on his right front and was high enough above him that the bullet entered him at a 25-degree downward angle.

Finally, just FYI, Dr. Arnold was not just any Navy surgeon. He was recognized highly enough by his peers and superiors in the Navy to be selected to train other Navy surgeons and was selected for advanced training at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In addition, he was selected for duty on a Fleet Surgical Team and became the commanding officer of Fleet Surgical Team 4. After he left the Navy (as a captain), he became an assistant coroner. His interest in the Lincoln assassination was peaked when he read the medical evidence relating to the alleged death of Booth and recognized that the medical evidence severely contradicted the official story about Booth’s supposed death.