A Conspiracy Theory to End All Conspiracy Theories: Did John Wilkes Booth Act Alone?

But Bates’s story intrigued Nate Orlowek. “On Columbus Day, 1973, my friend and I decided to look for the Bates book,” said Orlowek. “We discovered it was in no public libraries but we finally found it in the rare book room of the University of Maryland. We’ve since found that there are only two copies in the world.”

(I made a mental note: “Kid may have problem with exaggeration.” Even Orlowek later admitted that there were more than two copies of the book around.)

Having seen the Bates book, Orlowek nervously called up Theodore Roscoe — “Here I was, this 15-year-old kid talking to the great expert!” — and asked if he didn’t think the Bates theory warranted further investigation. Roscoe politely replied that the case was long since closed. Undaunted, Orlowek started visiting the Library of Congress. (The Library had a rule that high school students were forbidden to use the books, but Orlowek got Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland to get the ban lifted.)

“Every time we got a day off, we would go down there,” he said. “Mysteriously enough, new things started to appear — new affidavits, circulars, books and magazine articles. They’d been published 50, 60 years ago, but just that year — 1974 — they had started to come in. As we went along on our research, we got to know a lot of people, and we collected a lot of personal evidence that’s never been published before — pictures, affidavits, letters and so forth.” They began to discover facts that fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with the Bates version.

“All right, Nate,” I said. “This is what really interests me. What kind of corroboration did you find for Bates?”

Orlowek began rattling off dozens of fascinating facts. Some seemed to support the contention that Andrew Johnson (or somebody else) had prepared the way for Booth’s escape. On the night Lincoln was shot, for instance, the Army closed off seven of the eight escape routes leading out of Washington — every route but the one taken by Booth.

But the facts that impressed me most had to do with suspicions surrounding Booth’s death and burial. There were stories circulating at the time that Booth had not been killed at Garrett’s farm, and many more came later. The Kenzie affidavit, for instance. Kenzie was a private in the Union Army who claimed to have known Booth at the peak of his acting career; in the early morning hours of April 26th, 1865, he stumbled onto the scene at Garrett’s farm, took a good look at the dying man who everyone said was Booth and announced that the man bore no resemblance to the actor. The commanding officer of the squad that had captured Booth ordered Kenzie to keep his mouth shut, forever — or so Kenzie contended.

There was also Basil Moxley, the undertaker who had been the doorman at Baltimore’s Holliday Street Theatre and had seen Booth perform there. In 1903 Moxley told a Baltimore newspaper that he had viewed the body which the government had handed over to the Booth family for final burial in the family plot at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore; the corpse had reddish hair, said Moxley, and looked nothing like Booth, who was famous for his long, silken, jet-black locks.

All of this fit in very nicely with the Bates story: the body didn’t look like Booth because it was the body of some poor dumb Virginia farmhand who got caught on the wrong side of history.

Nate Orlowek was nothing if not enterprising in his research, and he even located a character witness to testify that Bates was no fraud, no profiteer, but a serene and gentle seeker-of-truth who stuck to his beliefs in the face of savage persecution that eventually drove him to his grave. That his character witness also happened to be Bates’s son did not seem to bother Orlowek. In fact, it was the testimony of the younger Bates that tipped the balance; Orlowek was so impressed that he started to become a believer.

In the early spring of 1974, Orlowek worked up a four-page brief of facts that supported the Bates theory and mailed it off to Roscoe. Orlowek’s training had taught him to respect his elders, and he was ready to hand over all his research to Roscoe if only the master could be persuaded to reopen the case. Roscoe wrote back, offering the opinion that the body buried at Greenmount probably was not Booth, but that the Bates theory still didn’t wash. Orlowek made a final phone call to Roscoe, asking if there were any point in going on with the research. “If it amuses you,” replied the 68-year-old Roscoe, and Orlowek resented what he thought was a patronizing tone.

The brushoff left him thoroughly disillusioned, for he had always thought of Roscoe as a man determined to uncover the truth; now Roscoe simply seemed to want to tear people down, to belittle the work of Finis L. Bates. Orlowek decided that he had no choice but to write a book himself; it was nothing less than a moral duty. He was shocked at the injustices perpetrated by the kangaroo military tribunal that tried Booth’s eight “coconspirators.” There was a distant possibility that one of the conspirators, Lewis Paine, was guilty. But the other seven, Orlowek believed, were simply innocent people who happened to know too much of the truth; Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had to get them out of the way. That was why Mary Surratt, David Herold and George Atzerodt had been hanged, and why Dr. Samuel Mudd, Sam Arnold, Mike O’Laughlin and Ned Spangler were sent to the fever-ridden Dry Tortugas Prison. Then Bates came along and placed the guilt where it belonged, with Johnson and Stanton. For his trouble, he was vilified; critics destroyed his good name.

Orlowek felt that he had to set the record straight as a matter of conscience. And his conscience was extremely active and highly trained — as an Orthodox Jew, he prayed in his room three times a day.

“If I were to turn my back on people who went through such terrible things — even though they’re mainly dead, although there is a son in Memphis — it would be very hard for me to pray and still do anything with a clear conscience. That’s probably taking it pretty far, but I guess that’s just the way I look at it.”

Orlowek set up his office in the family storeroom. Surrounded by baskets of laundry, an old Hoover and stacks of National Geographics, he began to grind out what would become a 300-page manuscript.