Trial Room at McNair

[RJNorton]

(03-30-2013 03:54 PM)asobbingfilm Wrote:  Not sure if anyone has offered this for the gallows location but I show it as 38deg51'59.85"N and 77deg1'1.70"W. Anyone else show that?

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So the conspirators are facing west?

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Is the orientation correct?

Hi David. This morning I wrote Barry and John about this, and I just heard back from Barry. He's extremely busy today, but he gave me permission to post his email reply:

"I could tell him exactly where the scaffold is but unfortunately I am swamped with a full day of meetings today. Perhaps tomorrow I can have a look. I did go on quickly and he is looking at GPS coordinates if I’m not mistaken. I went through this with an author about a year ago. His name is Ron Franschell and his book is called “The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Washington DC”. I showed him exactly where the scaffold stood and he used GPS coordinates to indicate where to find it.

I’m not sure if his coordinates are correct as I never checked them myself. But if David George goes on Google Earth or Bing, he can locate the GPS coordinates by focusing on the northeast corner of the tennis courts above Court #4. Where the north and east fences meet. This is where the main platform of the scaffold stood (the stairs would have been on the east side of the fence). Unfortunately, I don’t have the time today to share how we came up with that exact location but I’m confident enough in it to dispute the recent findings of the Archaeological Survey folks hired by the Army Corp of Engineers to locate the walls of the penitentiary (among other structures) at Fort McNair. In their report, they claimed that the scaffold was much farther to the east then I believe it to be. They also guessed where the graves were located (but due to so much disturbance to the land since the burials they could find any hard evidence in their survey to make a realistic determination). To be fair to them, I do agree with their guess of where the graves were located. If not exact, they are pretty close.

Anyway, to determine the exact location of the scaffold, we used photographic analysis and triangulation of visual angles to make our determination. In March, 2012 (at the 2012 Surratt Conference), John and I presented this information forensically showing how we came up with our conclusions. The presentation scientifically showed how we did this. Although we have not published this work since then, we will be including this information in our book which we are hell bent to finish by the end of this year.

Please feel free to post this answer for David George if it helps. When time permits, I’ll pop on your site Roger and follow up.

Sorry I can’t react sooner.

Have a great day.

Barry