That fact must surely have occurred to John Wilkes Booth in the days after he murdered Abraham Lincoln. He would have preferred being remembered as the greatest tragedian of his time, but he could be content with the enduring reputation as the Confederacy’s great avenger.

But how would he have felt if he knew he’d be remembered as a dark, leathery figure in a sideshow, exhibited to the general public for 25¢ (5¢ for children)?

The mummy, referred to as “John” by its owners, toured the country in the 1920s and ‘30s, oblivious to all the history books. As Alva Johnston reported in 1938,

Historians of the old school allege that John Wilkes Booth was killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after he assassinated Lincoln.

In 1869 the body was turned over by the War Department to the Booth family and buried in the Booth plot in the Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore. The body was identified by members of the family and by a dentist’s report.

But stories of Booth’s escape sprang to life from the moment of his death. Revisionists soon had two explanations of how Booth escaped from that barn.

Theory No. 1 is that Booth was warned and made his escape several hours before the barn was surrounded; No. 2 is that he escaped by an unwatched door after the barn was in flames.

For years afterward, people came forward with incredible stories of Booth’s escape.

John Wilkes Booth, before he lost his looks.

In April, 1898, American newspapers had carried reports that John Wilkes Booth had been seen in Brazil… This report brought two witnesses to light who testified that Booth had made his escape in 1865.

The first of these was Mrs. J. M. Christ [no relation]… In 1865, according to her story, she and her husband were on board the Mary Porter in Havana six weeks after the assassination when John Wilkes Booth came aboard and sailed with them to Nassau. She stated that, because Booth was still suffering from a broken leg, she gave up her cabin to him, and at the end of the voyage he rewarded her by giving her his ring with “J. W. B.” engraved inside. Having kept the secret for thirty-three years, Mrs. Christ now felt entitled to talk.

On the following day, Wilson D. Kenzie gave an interview to the same paper. He said that he had known Booth intimately at New Orleans and had been at the Garrett barn in Virginia when the man supposed to be Booth was killed. Kenzie said that the slain man was a sandy-headed fellow who bore no resemblance to Booth.

Then, in 1886, Finis L. Bates notified the War Department that he knew where they could get their hands on the real John Wilkes Booth. He was living in Texas under the name of John St. Helen. Bates had been nursing St. Helen through a long illness and, as Johnston wrote, “On what he apparently thought was his deathbed, St. Helen confessed himself to be John Wilkes Booth.”

The War Department expressed “no interest” in the matter, and Bates let the matter rest until St. Helen’s death in 1903.

The reward Finis Bates couldn't collect.

An undertaker at Enid embalmed the body in the expectation that the Booth family or the War Department would claim it. It remained unclaimed for years. Bates finally procured it.

This transfer was sanctioned by an Oklahoma judge, apparently on the theory that he would accord decent burial to his former client. Instead of this, Bates set out to commercialize his acquisition. He leased and rented his old friend… to showmen from time to time.… and wrote a book with the title The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, and the subtitle, “Written for the Correction of History.”

John St. Helen, it turned out, was actually a drifter named David George. Mummified and displayed as John Wilkes Booth, he proved to have none of his namesake’s box-office appeal.

The star's mobile dressing room enabled the owner, when necessary, to leave town quickly.

The post-mortem career of this John Wilkes Booth… has been marked by almost continual failure and disaster. He has scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is supposed to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited John has been ruined.

John … has had a strange knockabout existence. He has been bought and sold, leased, held under bond, kidnapped and seized for debt; has been repeatedly chased out of town by local authorities for not having a license or for violating other ordinances; has been threatened with hanging by indignant [Yankee] veterans. Up until 1937 he has been a consistent money loser.

At the Waco Cotton Palace about eighteen years ago, the mummy attracted the attention of William Evans, the Carnival King of the Southwest, who started John on his big-time career. Evans had intended to use John as the headliner of his carnival, but the new attraction was a disappointment from the start. John never paid expenses.

Bates died. His widow was disappointed in her first efforts to market the Booth chattel, but she finally sold it to the misguided Carnival King for $1000. It brought Evans nothing but bad luck. He suffered setback after setback in the carnival business, until he finally quit and retired to a small potato farm at Declo, Idaho.

Two owners later, “John” became part of the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show, which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

The spell of adversity which pursued John for many years was reversed last season, when the Harkins became connected with the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

In fact, Johnston told Post readers, it appeared that John Wilkes Booth had just completed his most successful season since 1865.

The mummy toured less frequently over the years, and was last seen in public in 1976, shortly before it became the property of a private collector.

Could the lonely drifter David George have been John Wilkes Booth? Even if Booth had escaped his death in a Virginia barn, would he have denied himself all the recognition and notoriety he’d gain by revealing his identity? As Johnston reflected,

In his days on the legitimate stage, John Wilkes Booth had been a great actor. Some of his contemporaries thought him greater than his father, Junius Brutus Booth, or his brother, Edwin Booth.

John Wilkes Booth was, however, an almost perfect ham. Vanity was his ruling motive. His assassination of Lincoln was an act of pure vanity. Booth had gone through the Civil War without fighting; he could not bear to have the war heroes towering over him; he killed Lincoln in the hope of stealing the show from the fighting men.

The poor ham broke into history, but it might have given him pause, back in 1865, if he could have looked forward to 1920 and could have seen what was left of him competing unsuccessfully with bulldog-faced cows and six-legged sheep.

The Assassin’s Mummy; or, John Wilkes Booth’s Second Career The Saturday Evening Post

President Johnson requested a President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy within weeks of the shooting. Months later, the Commission presented its report which confirmed the official version offered by the Justice Department: A lone, crazed gunman, acting alone, killed the president.

America wasn’t buying it. Even before the Commission met for the first time, the majority of Americans no longer believed a lone shooter was responsible. A 1963 poll showed 52 percent of Americans believed a conspiracy was behind the assassination. Over the years, America’s faith in the Commission’s findings has fallen so low that a 1998 survey showed 90 percent of Americans believed a conspiracy was involved.

How wrong could the Commission be to earn such disregard? Was it incompetent, corrupt, or both?

In the Post article “The Kennedy Assassination” published in 1967, Richard J. Whalen addressed some of the reasons why the Report was so widely discounted.

First were the commissioners themselves: stolid, deliberate people—three senators, a congressman (Gerald Ford), a former head of the CIA, a former head of the World Bank, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It was a group unlikely to favor fantastic premises, or indulge their imaginations. According to Whalen, “The Chief Justice was understandably reluctant to assume the task forced on him by the President, for he was miscast. In a unique situation, demanding a supple and pragmatic, yet unswerving, truthseeker, he was a figure of granitic rectitude and decorum.”

Next was the questionable evidence. Medical records from the hospital disappeared, reappeared, then disappeared again. Some witnesses were ignored, others questioned at great length. Witnesses contradicted each other, and appeared inconsistent with what could be seen in the Zapruder film.

"The Kennedy Assassination"
by Richard J. Whalen
January 14, 1967

Then the Commission began to divide over the “single-bullet” theory, which asserted that a single bullet caused multiple wounds to Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally.

“The arguing within the commission over the single-bullet theory continued until the Report was in its final drafts. Sen. Russell, Sen. John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Hale Boggs remained unpersuaded, and were at most willing to call the evidence ‘credible.’ Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Congressman Gerald R. Ford believed the theory offered the most reasonable explanation: Ford, for one, wanted to describe the evidence as ‘compelling.’ The views of the Chief Justice are unknown. [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter, Norman Redlich and other members of the commission staff unsuccessfully opposed the attempt to straddle this crucial question. They realized only too well, being closer to the evidence and the dilemma it posed, that it was indeed essential for the commission to find that a single bullet had struck both victims if the single assassin conclusion was to be convincing. Finally McCloy suggested a compromise [in wording]—“very persuasive —and this fundamental difference of opinion was fuzzed up in the final language of the Report… The shaky evidence beneath the commission’s findings goes deeper than the hedged and flatly contradictory expert testimony on the single-bullet theory. The very foundation of the commission’s account is built on disputed ground, the autopsy performed on the President, the actual number and location of his wounds.”

Whalen’s conclusion echoes the frustration many Americans felt with the report.

“The mysteries left unresolved in the Warren Report are chiefly the result of the failure to ask obvious questions during the investigation. The single-bullet theory was left in limbo, never completely accepted or rejected, because the commission declined to confront the disturbing possibility that the strong case against Oswald might not be the only explanation. “The critics who allege a cover-up of the ‘true facts’ by the Warren Commission can as easily argue their case on the basis of the appearance of concealment as they can on the ground of actual conspiracy. The commission, all too often, permitted such an appearance to exist unnecessarily. “The autopsy documentation—or the lack of it—can be used to raise suspicions of a gigantic cover-up.

“The evidence against Oswald remains as ‘hard’ as it was when Ruby’s bullet killed him. Every piece of ‘soft’ evidence … tends to support the possibility of a second assassin. Why not, then, face in that direction and weigh every shred of evidence, old or new? The appropriate forum for such an airing of dissenting views might be a special joint committee of Congress, or perhaps a ‘citizens’ panel’ of independent investigators, with unlimited access to official records, to be appointed by the President without concern over how long it sat and when it issued a Report. The alternative is to remain imprisoned by the Warren Report, which was an interim account intended to meet an immediate need.”

It seems a modest, reasonable request. America only wants the truth. Give us the facts. But the facts in this case never seem to come together. Instead of yielding answers, questions only produced more questions. The cliché “Time will tell” doesn’t seem to work in this case. Time isn’t telling. In fact, time is saying less and trying to retract some of its earlier statements.

In 1979 the United House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted a new investigation of Kennedy’s death. It concluded a conspiracy might have existed, but said no more on the matter. Congress began releasing this Committee’s internal files to the public in 1992. Yet no revelations have appeared. We have uncovered new possibilities, but no further certainties.

The explanation the Warren Commission offered is fantastic: A lone gunmen seizes an opportunity to shoot the president, and succeeds, is arrested, but is killed by another lone gunman while in police custody. It hardly inspires faith. Yet the alternative explanations are even more fantastic.

Given the country’s emotional state at the time, the Warren Commission probably could not have succeeded. It was trying to answer the question “Who shot the president?” when the country wanted to know “How could this happen?”

The stubborn denial of the report and the endless spinning of new theories can be attributed to a nagging doubt: How could a government that was incapable of protecting its chief executive from murder at the hands of a solitary maniac ever hope to gather all the important evidence of his death into an explanation the country would believe?

Click here to read “The Kennedy Assassination” by Richard J. Whalen, January 14, 1967 (PDF).

The Unanswerable Question The Saturday Evening Post