A Conspiracy Theory to End All Conspiracy Theories: Did John Wilkes Booth Act Alone?
The infuriating thing about nut theories is there’s always that million-to-one shot that an irrefutable piece of evidence is out there somewhere, half-buried, as it were, just waiting for someone to stoop down and dig it up. Like the theory of the 18-year-old kid in Silver Spring, Maryland, who’s trying to prove that John Wilkes Booth died in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903. And that it was actually some miserable wretch of a farmhand who was shot in that burning barn 12 days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And that Booth escaped with the help of Andrew Johnson, who was in on the plot.
Sounds like a certifiable nut theory, all right, and so far the kid’s been dismissed by every right-thinking Lincoln expert in the country. But the kid is absolutely sure that the evidence is out there … somewhere … if only that, damn mummy would turn up.
The kid’s name is Nathaniel Orlowek, a history whiz and freshman at the University of Maryland. I first heard of his theory a few months back and was just about to dismiss it myself until I heard about the mummy. I decided to check it out. After all, it was a pretty grim story, but a whole lot less depressing than everything else going on in Washington.
I got hopelessly lost on the way to Silver Spring and arrived an hour late, but Nate Orlowek didn’t seem to mind. When he opened the door of his family’s white clapboard house, which looked like all the other houses on Loxford Terrace, he was clearly excited at the prospect of being interviewed. He had the look of a kid who has just won first prize for his science project and knows that he is going to go on to discover the cure for cancer. His friendly, baby-fat face was wreathed in muttonchop sideburns; he wore a blue, short-sleeved sports shirt, checked wool pants and Hush Puppies. Sitting on the crown of his head, like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, was a black yarmulke.
I had half expected to find a ouija board on the coffee table, or a little shrine with votive candles flickering in front of a death mask of Lincoln. So the yarmulke was infinitely reassuring. It betokened a good, kosher, rule-abiding, literate, suburban Orthodox Jewish household, a bastion of logic, rationalism, and progress through education, a place where nut theories would be anathema.
Such was the Orlowek household. Father Orlowek, a thin man with a kindly, owlish face who worked for the Social Security Administration, was watching a basketball game on the color TV in the den. He had once done graduate work in history at Columbia and encouraged his son’s interest in the subject. Mother Orlowek, a big woman dressed in a polkadot housecoat and with one curler still in her hair, was reading My Life by Golda Meir. She was not a doting mother but she was obviously proud of Nathaniel. He had been a minor prodigy, she said; at 12 he had read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover and stored much of it in his photographic memory. He always had a passion for history and a knack for impressing people with his amazing retention of historical fact.
Orlowek had dutifully invited over two friends — Marc and Howard — who had helped him with the research. We all sat down at the dining room table on cellophane-covered chairs. The two friends didn’t have much to say except that one of them, an allergic type, asked me not to smoke. Nate did all the talking. He had told his story dozens of times but he launched into it again with great enthusiasm and stinted no detail.
The whole thing began three years ago, he said, when he read The Web of Conspiracy by Theodore Roscoe, a mammoth study of the Lincoln assassination. Toward the end of this encyclopedic work, Roscoe mentioned The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, a book by a Memphis lawyer named Finis L. Bates, which was published in 1907 and sold 70,000 copies. Bates claimed to have known a Texas bartender named John St. Helen, who in 1877 suffered a bad attack of asthma, thought himself about to die and confessed to Bates that he was really John Wilkes Booth.
St. Helen recovered from his illness and several weeks later (according to Bates) spilled the whole incredible tale: how he had plotted with the secretly pro-Confederate Andrew Johnson to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and ransom him for Confederate prisoners of war; how that plan suddenly fell through when General Lee surrendered in the first days of April 1865; how Johnson then persuaded him to murder Lincoln, assured him that his escape would be arranged and sealed the deal with a cold, clammy handshake; how on the night of April 14th he escaped over the Navy Yard Bridge by giving the sentries a prearranged password (“T.B., T.B. Road”) and was later led across the Potomac River to Virginia by a mercenary farmhand; and finally how the farmhand was shot to death in a barn and mistakenly identified as Booth while the real Booth galloped toward safety in West Virginia.
Finis Bates and John St. Helen parted ways soon after this spectacular confession, but Bates spent a good part of the next 45 years trying to prove that St. Helen really was Booth. In 1898 he began to pester the War Department with claims to the $50,000 reward that had been offered in 1865 for information leading to the capture of Booth. In 1903 a house painter named David E. George poisoned himself in an Enid, Oklahoma, hotel room and announced with his dying breath that he was John Wilkes Booth. Bates hopped a train to Enid, presented himself at the undertaker’s and, 25 years after having last seen his old friend, triumphantly identified the corpse as that of John St. Helen. Later, Bates had the body mummified and shipped it back to his barn in Memphis to use as evidence. It was Bates’s claim that certain marks on the body (a fencing scar above the right eyebrow, a deformed right thumb) proved beyond a doubt that it was Booth. (After Bates died in 1923, his widow sold the mummy to a prohibitionist doctor, and eventually it found its way to a Midwestern sideshow entrepreneur.)
Historian Roscoe’s attitude toward Finis Bates was not kind. Laying out all the charges that reporters and historians had leveled against Bates — forgery of affidavits, doctoring of photographs, profiteering, wild exaggeration — Roscoe concluded that Bates was a fraud.
