Location of John Wilkes Booth’s remains is still a mystery

April 14 marks the 160th anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Everyone is certainly familiar with the story of actor John Wilkes Booth, who shot the President in the box seats at Ford’s Theatre, resulting in his death the following morning. But what happened afterward? That is a little more uncertain.

Yelling, “Sic semper tyrannis!” — Latin for “thus always to tyrants” — Booth jumped from Lincoln’s box and broke his leg upon landing. As attention was paid to the President, the assailant limped through the back door, mounted a horse and disappeared into the night.

Booth, suffering severe pain, arrived at the house of Samuel Mudd, a physician and fellow Southern sympathizer he knew who lived 25 miles south of Washington near Waldorf, Maryland. After Mudd set his leg to reduce the discomfort, Booth left wearing a splint to ride deeper into Southern territory.

He reached the farm of Richard Garratt just south of the Rappahannock River near Port Royal, Virginia, where Garratt’s son, John gave Booth and coconspirator David Herold permission to sleep in the tobacco barn behind the house.

Early the following morning on April 26, a company of troops from the 16th New York Cavalry questioned the older Garratt and were led to the barn. Herrold surrendered but Booth refused, so the barn was set on fire.

Despite exclusive orders not to shoot the suspect, Sergeant Boston Corbett fired his rifle as soon as he spotted a man stumbling out of the barn and the figure slumped to the ground covered in blood. This much, with documented witnesses, is known for certain. What happened next remains shrouded in mystery to this day.

The body recovered from outside the barn was wrapped in a saddle blanket that was stitched closed and given to an African-American former servant who was told to take it by horseback to a designated point on the river, where the blanket and its heavy contents were placed on a small riverboat that traveled toward Washington, D.C.

The blanket and contents next landed at Washington Naval Yard along the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers just south of the nation’s Capitol. Access was extremely limited, but the cargo was then carefully loaded onto the gunboat U.S.S. Montauk at 2:00 in the morning and an autopsy was conducted.

The body did not look familiar to the attending physician as it had no mustache and a physique not quite matching that of the famed actor. The face also sported a short beard, which Booth had never been known to maintain.

Certain that the actor must have been trying to disguise himself, the doctor checked for one more detail. It was widely known that Booth had etched his monogram on his wrist as a tattoo. The physician lifted the arm and found the initials “JWB” just below the palm and officially declared the body that of the suspected fugitive.

But shortly thereafter, while a crowd of curious spectators watched from outside the naval base, a body covered in muslin was thrown into a rowboat navigated by two attendants through the Anacostia River to the Potomac. Witnesses reported the long and narrow muslin-covered package was then dumped into the river with chains and an iron ball affixed.

At that point, no one from the War Department or anyone else would disclose publicly what had happened to the body they had been holding — or privately to members of the Booth family.

Four years later, after continuous pleas from the suspect’s brother, Edwin, the War Department claimed that the body had been secretly buried under the floorboards of a penitentiary across the river from the Naval Yard. The fabric-wrapped body, or what was left of it, was then turned over to the family and buried in an unmarked grave during a private committal at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore.

In Granbury, Texas in 1877, a man calling himself John St. Helen summoned his attorney, Finis Bates, and handed him a tintype photo. Saying he was gravely ill, he told the attorney in a deathbed confession that he was actually John Wilkes Booth and that he wanted the truth to be known.

The man recovered, however, and disappeared from the small community. A few weeks later, in Enid, Oklahoma, a drifter stating his name to be David E. George settled in the sprawling frontier town until 1903, when he died by suicide in his rented motel room after consuming strychnine.

Unable to find family members, the body was preserved at the funeral parlor and placed on display to be claimed, which Bates eventually did after seeing it pictured in a newspaper. Bates wrote a book telling the story and charged admission to see the body of John Wilkes Booth.

Bates died in 1923 and his wife sold the body to a circus owner who then promoted the same story, displaying the body on tour until it was purchased by a private collector in the 1950s. The body has remained in civilian ownership ever since.

This writer had the opportunity to visit all of the major (and minor) sites associated with the 16th President and enjoyed the privilege of meeting Richard Mudd, the grandson of Dr. Mudd who wrote a book professing the innocence of his ancestor.

I also had the occasion to meet with descendants of the extended Booth family when they publicly announced that they would submit DNA samples and consent to have the body at Greenmount exhumed for testing. A federal judge issued a court order blocking the exhumation and thus blocked the test.

Therefore, the mystery endures today and leads me to wonder about the site where the family claims John Wilkes Booth was buried, at which I once stood. Were the bones (or ashes or dust) of the actor who shot the President actually beneath my feet? The mystery still remains — 160 years after the death of one of our nation’s most beloved leaders.

David V. Wendell is a Marion historian, author and special events coordinator specializing in American history.