Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

A few points:

* It is extremely unlikely that the new filling was small and unnoticeable. In fact, it is very unlikely that any fillings done in the 1860s were small and unnoticeable. For two reasons: One, electric-powered dental drills had not been invented yet. Two, since they had no x-ray machines yet, you did not know you had a cavity until your tooth started hurting, so you did not know about the cavity until it had grown large enough that it began to hurt.

* Reportedly, the witnesses at the 1869 viewing had a Booth dental chart. No one reported a tooth to be missing. Joseph Booth announced ahead of time that if the body was his brother's, it would have a single filled tooth. But he did not know that his brother had had a second filling done shortly before the assassination, and he was apparently unaware of the claim that Dr. Merrill had identified his two fillings in the body on the Montauk. All of this suggests that this viewing was not a genuine, serious identification of the body, and that the body they were viewing was not J.W. Booth.

* I find it very significant that Col. Clarence Cobb was turned away from viewing the body on the Montauk with the excuse that Dr. Merrill had identified two of his fillings in the mouth and that others had also already identified the body as Booth. Cobb had known Booth for many years. If Cobb had been allowed to view the body, he would have been the one and only Montauk witness who had known Booth for a substantial length of time.

* The fact that the body that Pegram saw in 1869 had hair that was nearly a foot longer than he remembered Booth's hair being is significant. Judging from all the photos of Booth, he never let his hair grow long. And all will agree that Pegram's explanation for the 10-12-inch increase in hair length--that it grew that much after death--is refuted by medical science.