I remember seeing on unsolved mysteries how his doctor treated the man that said he was booth and the doctor said, john booth had a major scar on himthis man has no scar,John Booth was six feet something real tall,this man is six feet something really short, john booth had a huge ankle,this man has a small ankle,but this is defintely john booth.
He was obviously afraid for his life to come out and say the man they dfound and said was john booth was not him because he would be killed if he had so thats why he confirmed he was john wilkes booth but subtley and brilliantly dropping hints it was not him.
Many if not a majority of Americans at the time were skeptical of the government's claim that Booth had been killed, precisely because of the very shaky identification, the secret burial, etc. Many newspapers expressed doubt about the government's story, and that doubt remained strong and widespread for decades.
In 1866, Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky expressed the view of many Americans:
I have never seen myself any satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed. I would rather have better testimony of the fact. I want it proved that Booth was in that barn, why he was not taken alive and brought to this city alive. I have never seen anybody or the evidence of anybody that identified Booth after he is said to have been killed. Why so much secrecy about it? (The Congressional Globe, July 28, 1866, p. 4292)
The "identification" of Booth's body at the autopsy on the USS Montauk on April 27, 1865, was riddled with problems:
* Dr. John May, one of the autopsy doctors, admitted that the body looked nothing like Booth, and Dr. May knew Booth.
Those who accept the official story claim 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 to being the autopsy on the Montauk, there was no reason 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."
* When trying to explain the inexplicable failure to take a single autopsy photo of the body during the autopsy, at one point the government actually claimed that the Major Eckert, the officer in charge of the autopsy, did not want any photos taken of the body because the body bore so little resemblance to Booth!
Later, the War Department claimed that an autopsy photo had been taken but that it had been "lost."
* Dr. May and Lawrence Gardner (who assisted with the autopsy) said that the corpse’s face was heavily freckled (“very much freckled”), but Booth had no freckles.
Traditionalists have no credible, science-based explanation for how a dead body could have magically sprouted freckles on its face. Livor mortis does not cause freckling but rather causes dark discoloration of the skin in large patches or over large areas, and only in those areas that were closest to the ground when the discoloration occurred. There is no known case in the history of forensic science of livor mortis causing freckles to appear on a person’s face after death.
* The alleged Booth body examined at Weaver’s funeral home in 1869 only had one filled tooth, whereas Booth was known to have had two fillings. Also, the hair on the body’s head was 10-12 inches longer than Booth’s hair, which is important because hair only grows a fraction of an inch, if at all, after death.
H. C. Young of Cincinnati wrote to Secretary of War Ed Stanton before Booth had even been captured. Young explained that he was a loyal citizen, that he had known Booth for years, and that he was anxious to help identify the “villain Booth.” Young said that he was not sure which hand bore the initials JWB but that they were “near the thumb.” Young also mentioned seeing scars on Booth’s “arms and body” and a scar that was either on the side of his head or on his forehead near the hairline.
Yet, not one of the people who saw the alleged Booth body during the autopsy on the Montauk that night saw a tattooed cross or three-letter initials near the thumb or between the thumb and the forefinger.
Young’s reference to scars on Booth’s arms and body and on the side of his face is corroborated by numerous witnesses and is strong evidence against the claim that Booth’s body was the body examined on the Montauk. Booth did indeed have scars on his arms and body and a scar on his temple near his hairline, yet not one of these scars was mentioned by any of the people who saw the body on the Montauk. They should have at least seen one of the following scars, if the body had been Booth:
- As a child, Booth suffered “a large cut” on his head that had to be stitched (Terry Alford,
Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, p. 15).
- Booth once accidentally stabbed himself with a dagger on stage at Ford’s Theater while playing Romeo (Theodore Roscoe,
The Web of Conspiracy, pp. 417-418).
- Booth also stabbed himself severely under his right arm in Albany while playing Pescara (Alford, pp. 103-104; Roscoe, pp. 417-418). He did this when he accidentally fell on a dagger and “cut away the muscles for some three inches under his right arm,” and this wound was so severe that Booth could not perform for several days (Alford, pp. 103-104).
- In another stage mishap, a fellow actor “brought down his sword across Booth’s forehead, cutting one eyebrow cleanly through” (Alford, pp. 155-156).
- Booth also received a scar on the side of his face, near his hairline, when Henrietta Irving attacked him (Alford, p. 107; Roscoe, pp. 417-418). This scar should have been noticeable. Alford says that when Irving attacked Booth, she used “a dirk [dagger], cutting his face badly” (Alford, p. 107).
- On another occasion, Booth suffered a knife cut when he intervened in a fight (Alford, pp. 171-172).
Again, not one of the identification witnesses on the Montauk, including the three autopsy doctors, said anything about any of these scars, not even the scar on the side of the face or the one under the right arm.
These are just some of the problems with the official story that Booth was killed in Garrett's barn and that his body was autopsied on the USS Montauk.