John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was killed in a Virginia barn on April 26, 1865, and buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. But conspiracy theorists claim Booth escaped and lived in Oklahoma as David E. George, who became more famous in death than life. George swallowed some arsenic 106 years ago this past week on Jan. 13, 1903. On his deathbed, he claimed to be Booth and died shortly after reportedly saying, “I killed the best man that ever lived.”
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Find a head’s-up Lincoln penny on the street and it’s your lucky day.
Come upon a handful of pennies on a tombstone in the Booth family plot at Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery — there were four glinting in the winter sun just the other day — and you’ll discover why no burial ground in the fabled boneyard receives more visitors than the relatives of John Wilkes Booth.
“Sic semper tyrannis!” shouted Booth after firing a single shot from a Philadelphia Derringer into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head on Good Friday 1865.
“Thus always to tyrants!” the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the last public words of the handsome Shakespearean actor, heavy drinker and ladies’ man who organized a conspiracy to also kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and members of the Lincoln Cabinet in the wake of the South’s defeat.
And this always: Booth, an avowed racist unable to accept that former slaves had become citizens, lies for eternity in an unmarked grave off the corner of North and Guilford avenues, surrounded on all sides not just by his closest relatives but the virtually all-black neighborhoods of inner-city Baltimore.
That is, unless you prefer the more thrilling — and highly discounted — story that Booth escaped his captors, fled to the Great American West, got rip-roaring drunk each year on the anniversary of Lincoln’s murder and lived out his days as David E. George in Enid, Okla.
George took strychnine 106 years ago last week, confessing to his role as the American Brutus while convulsing toward the next world like a poisoned dog.
There is not a grave for “the Enid Booth,” where people can leave pennies in honor of the 16th president. David George was mummified after a deathbed “confession” on Jan. 13, 1903, and sent on a carnival tour, the body last seen in public in the 1970s.
In Baltimore, Green Mount employees are constantly finding pennies at the Booth plot as well as the odd love letter to John Wilkes Booth and once a live wreath with the word “Hero.”
A theory concurrent with the David E. George story says that Booth made his way to Texas as John St. Helen and there haunts an opera house in Granbury.
And there are those who claim that David George, John St. Helen and John Wilkes Booth are all one in the same. Some on that bandwagon believe that Booth/George/St. Helen somehow made his way to Japan.
To which William C. Trimble Jr., with the decisive gavel of Maryland Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan ringing in his ears, declares: Hogwash!
“The only people who believe those stories also believe that John Wilkes Booth and Elvis are down at the mall having a soda,” Trimble said.
(Like the lingering “Long Live the King” buzz that spiked in 1988 with Gail Brewer-Giorgio’s “Is Elvis Alive?” provocation, the legend of John Wilkes Booth’s survival — known as his “post-mortem career” — kicked up steam in 1908 with the publication of “The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth” by Finis L. Bates. It sold more than 70,000 copies in five years.)
Looking at the pennies at the foot of the grave of Booth’s sister — Asia Booth Clarke (1835-1888) — Baltimore poet and noted biographer Daniel Mark Epstein recounted Asia’s tender feelings toward the sibling who forever tarred the family name.
“You must remember the little boy and the goodness in him,” said Epstein, quoting Asia just after Christmas on his first visit to the Booth plot.
Later this month, Epstein will publish “Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries,” a HarperCollins release and one of an estimated 60 Lincoln-related books to be released on the 200th anniversary of the martyred president’s birth — Feb. 12, 1809 — in Hardin County, Ky.
From 1979 until he stepped down in 2007, William Trimble served as president of the Board of Trustees of Green Mount Cemetery, where an ancestor, Confederate Gen. Isaac Ridgeway Trimble — who helped plan Pickett’s Charge at the Battle off Gettysburg — was buried in 1888.
The 73-year-old Owings Mills resident was at the Green Mount helm in 1995, when 22 descendants of the Booth clan petitioned to exhume the remains for DNA testing. Three of those relatives appeared before Baltimore Judge Kaplan during the three-day trial.
“To begin with, there is no evidence that Booth had any children,” said Kaplan, 72, and though retired, still working as a fill-in judge in Maryland where needed.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld Kaplan’s ruling — “nothing even beyond a reasonable doubt” that it is not John Wilkes Booth at Green Mount — during which the judge received calls from reporters around the world.
“I’ve been a judge for 32 years. I presided over the savings and loan [collapse] trials” in the 1980s, said Kaplan, who keeps a photo of the mummified George among his judicial memorabilia. “None of them got the publicity that this one did. This is one of my favorites.”
At the trial, a woman named Virginia Kline of Warminster, Pa., who said she was a first cousin to Booth — twice removed — said: “I want to get it settled and squared away for our family history and history in general.”
The controversy was squared away without having to dig up a 6-foot-deep rectangle, a grave, according to Kaplan, heavily damaged by a century-and-a-half of water seeping into the bottom of a decline in the lawn.
(Graves at Green Mount are still dug by hand. The 68-acre oasis is home to some 60,000 corpses, including Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt and a relative of former first lady Barbara Bush, but not, as often believed, Edgar Allan Poe or H. L. Mencken.)
“Booth is in Green Mount, in what condition I can’t tell you,” said Kaplan, noting that bones from the Booth autopsy are at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington but were preserved by boiling, thus rendering them unfit for a DNA-conclusive analysis.
Out at the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid, Okla., they get inquiries about David E. George’s claims as Lincoln’s assassin more than just about any other local notable.
And that nettles Museum Director Glen McIntyre because Enid was home to a host of far more worthy citizens — like two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Marquis James — than a mummified carnival freak.
“I’ve never believed George was Booth, but the local radio station has had a lot of fun with it over the years,” said McIntyre, 61, noting that the local archives rarely get visits from serious Lincoln scholars — “only conspiracy theorists.”
“The disc jockeys started a club here where to be a member you had to convincingly argue that George was Booth and argue that he wasn’t.”
As for those who believe Booth lived to see Teddy Roosevelt become president — upon the bullet of the anarchist who killed William McKinley — there will be no end to it.
William Trimble put it more bluntly. “The same way there will always be people who believe the Earth is flat,” he said.
